without a shirt and Beardsley scowls from behind sunglasses. Certainly the real monarch
of George Bush's Andover secret society, and George's sponsor, was this Rocky's father,
Godfrey S. Rockefeller.
The latter gentleman had been on the staff of the Yale University establishment in China
in 1921-22. Yale and the Rockefellers were breeding a grotesque communist insurgency
with British Empire ideology; another Yale staffer there was Mao Zedong, later the
communist dictator and mass murderer. While he was over in China, Papa Godfrey's
cousin Isabel had been the bridesmaid at the wedding of George Bush's parents. His
Uncle Percy had co-founded the Harriman bank with George Walker, and backed George
Bush's father in several Nazi German enterprises. His grandfather had been the founding
treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, and had made the Harrimans (and thus,
ultimately, George Bush) rich.
Faculty adviser to A.U.V. in those days was Norwood Penrose Hallowell; his father by
the same name was chairman of Lee, Higginson & Co. private bankers, the chief
financiers of Boston's extreme racialist political movements. The elder Hallowell was
based in London throughout the 1930s, on intimate terms with Montagu Norman and his
pro-Hitler American banking friends.
But this kind of backing, by it, cannot ensure that a person will rise to the top, to
authentic `` big-shot '' status. You have to want it very, very badly.
One of Poppy Bush's teachers at Andover, now in retirement, offered to an interviewer
for this book, a striking picture of his former pupil. How was the President as a student?
`` He never said a word in class. He was bored to death. And other teachers told me Bush
was the worst English student ever in the school. ''
But was this teenager simply slow, or dull? On the contrary.
`He was the classicBMOC' (Big Man On Campus). A great glad-hander. Always
smiling. ''
Leaving academic studies aside, George Bush was the most insistent self-promoter on the
campus. He was able to pursue this career, being fortunately spared from the more
mundane chores some other students had to do. For example, he mailed his dirty laundry
home each week, to be done by the servants. It was mailed back to him clean and folded.
Student records show a massive list of offices and titles for Poppy, perhaps more than for
any other student:
A.U.V.
President of Senior Class (1 term)
Secretary of Student Council (1 term)