From Boys To Men
In a year that rocked America, two scions of famous families came of age
"Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. No religion too. . . . You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us, and the world will live as one."
-"Imagine" by John Lennon, 1971
"You're built like a car. You got a hubcap diamond-star halo. You're built like a car, oh yeah. . . . Get it on. Bang a gong. Get it on."
-"Bang a Gong (Get It On)," by T. Rex, 1971
Few years in recent American history were as tumultuous as 1971. It was a period of political ferment and deep cultural schisms. The divides weren't just between young and old or black and white, but between dreamers and realists, between buttoned-down reformers and jaded young men and women who just wanted to be left alone. The fissures were reflected in the culture. For every socially conscious "Imagine," there was a headlong hedonistic romp like "Bang a Gong (Get It On)." Television reflected the zeitgeist in different ways, from All in the Family to Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In . In Washington, Richard Nixon was still aggressively pursuing the war in Vietnam--with an average of 200 American deaths a month--generating a ferocious antiwar movement and a backlash that tore America at the seams.
For two sons of privilege from storied American families, it was a year of testing, a formative time of change and challenge. George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry were both graduates of Yale, members of the elite and secretive Skull and Bones society, with Establishment credentials and family histories of public service.
Each man was searching for himself, but each dealt with his circumstances and the times in different ways. At 27, Kerry had already served in Vietnam, winning medals for valor and three Purple Hearts, but he had also already turned, very publicly, against the war. Married, serious beyond his years, he had begun actively assessing a future in politics. Bush, who turned 25 that July, supported the war in Vietnam but had doubts about the way Nixon's Pentagon was fighting it. The liberal counterculture, in his eyes, was elitist and hypocritical, a drain on the nation. But he didn't waste much time worrying about it. A fighter jock in the Air National Guard, he was a fun-loving party guy who bounced from job to job.
Kerry remembers the year well. "I think [1971] was formative for our generation," Kerry told U.S. News . "Most of the people that I know from our generation were deeply involved one way or the other--many of them, obviously, feeling deeply opposed to what was going on by 1971, and there was a great social consciousness. . . . There was a tremendous sense of being able to . . . affect the world around you."
President Bush declined to be interviewed for this story, but many of his associates from that time say he had little interest in taking the kind of leadership role that Kerry embraced. To some extent, both Bush and Kerry are still reliving those days and trying to justify the choices they made so long ago.
"The Speech." On April 22, 1971, a tall, handsome young man with shoulder-length hair turned up a bit late at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John Kerry was the panel's featured witness. He wore green military fatigues over a white T-shirt and a handful of combat ribbons. Striding confidently to the front of the room, he shook hands with the committee chairman, J. William Fulbright. Then he delivered what friends and family still call "The Speech," an indictment of the conduct of the war that riled many prowar advocates and rattled the Nixon White House. To the rapt audience, Kerry seemed sober beyond his years, cerebral, with a penchant for methodical analysis and a delivery that commanded attention. About his service in Vietnam, where he spent four months commanding a river-running "swift boat" and time on a frigate, Kerry expressed anger and dismay. The war, he said flatly, was a tragic mistake.
The message resonates to this day, thanks in some small way to Kerry's pounding it so hard back in 1971. In his recent appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Kerry was thrown on the defensive when he was asked about another Meet the Press appearance, in 1971. The clip, for which the Kerry campaign had searched unsuccessfully, showed Kerry calling U.S. leaders "war criminals," then admitting that he had committed "the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers." In his latest appearance on the show, Kerry said he regretted his phrasing of those comments, labeling them "a little bit excessive." Friends say that Kerry, in 1971, was talking about the U.S. policy of free-fire zones--killing anything that moved within a specific area--and saying that he believed the policy was immoral. In the recent Meet the Press appearance, Kerry was also asked about a 1971 interview in which he said U.S. troops should be sent into action "only at the directive of the United Nations." That, Kerry now admits, was "stupid."
Vietnam, clearly, will be a presence throughout the current campaign. Last week, Kerry came under pressure to release his military records, including performance evaluations by his Navy superiors. After balking initially, Kerry released the records, and they turned out to be mostly laudatory. But the flap demonstrated that Kerry will be unable to escape his past. That's due in large measure to the fact that he was such a compelling public figure three decades ago. Says historian Douglas Brinkley, the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War , "In January 1971, he was another soldier in the crowd. . . . By December of 1971 he was a megastar of the antiwar movement."
During those 12 months, his fame grew--with an appearance on the Dick Cavett talk show and a profile on CBS's 60 Minutes . Kerry hung out with antiwar celebrities like John Lennon and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary. He appeared at a highly charged rally with Jane Fonda. Kerry, a friend says, couldn't walk down the street in a college town or big city without someone asking for his autograph, hugging him, or, alternatively, berating him as a traitor.
Kerry, critics said, used the antiwar movement to propel his political career. "The war didn't change [Kerry]. I think he was a guy driven tremendously by ambition," John O'Neill, a hawkish Vietnam veteran who debated Kerry on the war in 1971, recently told the Boston Globe . But many who knew Kerry disagree. "He was a very in-depth thinker," Yarrow tells U.S. News . "He was not a knee-jerk anything. . . . He took seriously his service to the country, to family, and to the world. . . . He had risked his life for the country, and I could tell by the way he talked, he was deeply hurt."
Vietnam had become Kerry's horse, and he rode it hard. His book The New Soldier was published in late 1971 and featured a controversial cover photograph of an upside-down American flag. Condemning Vietnam as a "degrading and immoral war," Kerry wrote: "We were sent to Vietnam to kill communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children."
Still, Kerry knew, his message couldn't be entirely negative. "I still want to serve my country," he said in the book. "I am still willing to pick up arms and defend it--die for it, if necessary. Now, however, I will not go blindly because my government says that I must go. . . . I will not go unless the threat is a real one and we all know it to be so."
Reviewing that period, Kerry told U.S. News: "You've got to be willing to move in a direction you believe in, and you've got to lay yourself out there, and you've got to take some risks in doing that. That's what I did in opposing the war. . . . I knew it wasn't going to be popular with some of my friends or popular with everybody in the military. But I felt that by conscience it was the right thing to do."
The young veteran had weighty things on his mind, but he didn't allow himself to be consumed by them. He enjoyed folk music and sang with Yarrow at parties and gatherings. Sometimes Kerry played guitar. The future senator particularly enjoyed spending time on Naushon Island, his family's retreat off the coast of Massachusetts. He relaxed in that wild, pristine environment, sunning himself on the beach, riding horses, windsailing, or fishing. Evenings, he liked to cook his catch for family and friends. Among friends, he became known for doing a passable impression of Father Guido Sarducci, a character on Saturday Night Live . Every so often, he smoked a little pot.
Occasionally, Kerry departed from his controlled public persona. In April 1971, he and other veterans threw their military ribbons and medals into a trash heap on the steps of the Capitol. Kerry, it later turned out, discarded someone else's medals and only his own ribbons. Still, the moment was deeply emotional, and he broke down in tears for a half-hour.
Such was Kerry's newfound prominence that even Nixon took notice. The beleaguered president privately endorsed an aide's characterization of Kerry as a "phony" because he had stayed at the home of a rich Georgetown family while other protesters camped out on the Washington Mall. And he had served only four months in Vietnam, the aide argued, even though Kerry had earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star during that time.
Nixon's aides tried to find ways to discredit Kerry but never succeeded. Kerry and other leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War were shadowed by FBI agents. Some of his friends say they believed "agents provocateurs" were planted in antiwar rallies to infiltrate the movement and make it appear that the leaders were all interested in revolution (which some were).
To this day, some Kerry opponents say he was associating with people who aimed to destroy the system with violence, but Kerry says he never believed in such tactics. David Thorne, a lifelong friend, supports him on this. "We were always trying to sort out what was responsible," Thorne told U.S. News . "He was a serious student of political science at Yale, not a bomb thrower." Still, not even his fame could propel him into elective office. Derided as a carpetbagger and an opportunist, Kerry would lose a bid for a Massachusetts congressional seat a year later. But he was on his way to bigger things. Says Thorne: "John always had an aura of destiny about him."
The drifter. That's not something friends of George Bush were saying about him. In 1971, Bush's mission seemed much more simple: to have a good time. His father had lost a Senate run in Texas the previous autumn, and his parents had just moved to New York--where George H. W. Bush had been appointed United Nations ambassador--leaving young George W. Bush behind in Houston. "His jumping around at this time was no doubt a reflection of his general attitude toward life," write Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, authors of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty . "George W. would spend those five years after Yale [he graduated in 1968] drifting. He had seven apartments in three different states, held three different jobs, and had many girlfriends." For his part, Bush once said, "there are some people who, the minute they get out of college, know exactly what they want to do. I did not. And it didn't bother me."
Being at loose ends, at the time, seemed to suit Bush just fine. His application to the University of Texas School of Law had been rejected, and he wasn't particularly thrilled with his new job, as a trainee at an agriculture conglomerate called Stratford of Texas. The company's founder, Robert Gow, had been an executive at the elder Bush's oil company. "Bush was wrestling in his mind with how he could get ahead in life," says Gow. "He had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. He was confused."
He wasn't lazy, though. He showed up for work each morning at 8 o'clock sharp in a Brooks Brothers suit and cheerfully completed his assignments on time. Not that the work was taxing. Bush had to fly around the country and go down to Central America to inspect plant nurseries Stratford was looking to buy. The young man occasionally would knock on Gow's office door wanting to talk about his future, unsure whether it was business, politics, or what Gow calls the "do-gooder-type stuff," like working with disadvantaged youth. Gow, who had been president of the elder Bush's Zapata oil company, noticed that the younger Bush shared some of his father's qualities, like a knack for remembering names. But there were differences, too. The younger Bush, Gow recalls, "wasn't one of those people who you said, `Boy, whatever he does, he's going to be a big success.' "
Bush seemed sunny and carefree, but "there was an underlying intensity about him, like he'd got a lot of pressure to live up to the family," says a friend from the time. "He was casting about, trying to figure out how to do it." While Bush may have dreamed of striking out on his own, as his father had done, he leaned hard on the elder Bush's friends and former associates, although Gow says he hired young George because both were members of Skull and Bones, Yale's elite secret society. But even Bush's Bones membership was traceable to his father, who had been inducted decades earlier, as had his father. And the Texas Air National Guard's 147th Fighter Group, which Bush had joined upon graduating from Yale in 1968, was populated largely by other sons of privilege. The "champagne unit" included Lloyd Bentsen III (whose father had defeated the elder Bush in the 1970 Senate race) and John Connally III (son of the former Texas governor).
Despite the pressure on the younger Bush to live up to the family name, friends knew him as a wisecracking jock who'd rather talk baseball than discuss his "stupid coat-and-tie job." Until the beginning of 1971, Bush had been living at the Chateaux Dijon, a new apartment complex for well-to-do singles in Houston's fashionable West End. "The scene around the pool was awe inspiring," says Jim Bath, a friend who visited Bush there. "Lots and lots of great-looking girls and people barbecuing and drinking beers."
Regular guy. Bush struck his neighbors as almost defiantly unpretentious. He wore a T-shirt and jeans as if they were a uniform, sat on the floor at parties, and used his couch as a guest bed for an endless stream of visiting Yale buddies. He gave up his convertible blue Chevy Caprice for a clunky Oldsmobile Cutlass. "He wasn't remotely close to being what you'd call hip," says a girlfriend from the time. "He was not cutting edge on anything. He was right square in the middle." And his only real interest seemed to be sports.
Even after moving to quieter digs later in 1971, Bush continued to frequent the Houston YMCA's basketball and racquetball courts, hitting the country club circuit for jogs and tennis. A solid but unspectacular athlete, Bush was relentlessly competitive. "The game wasn't over," says Doug Hannah, a friend and tennis partner, "until he was ahead."
His future still uncertain, Bush relished his success at Ellington Air Force Base, where he spent one weekend and a handful of weeknights a month as a part-time pilot. Bush's squadron, the 111th, flew the Delta Dagger F-102 fighter on training missions and on patrols over the Gulf of Mexico. He may have benefited from family connections in landing an officer's spot in the unit, but he excelled as a first lieutenant. "Lt. Bush is a natural leader . . . and should be promoted well ahead of his contemporaries," reads his May 1971 evaluation, which commends his "eagerness to participate in the unit's activities and his ability to work harmoniously with others."
The Delta Dagger could reach speeds of 650 miles per hour. Bush's unit sometimes flew in formation, wing tips just a few feet apart. The duty was dangerous. The Texas Guard suffered a handful of pilot fatalities in the 1970s. "Being a single-engine fighter pilot was prestigious--if your engine blew out, you'd have to bail. Other planes had two engines, and we looked down our noses at that," says Richard Mayo, a pilot in the 111th. "There was a sense that we were the top of the pyramid." The jocks of the 111th had "a real swagger, a real cockiness," observed Hannah, Bush's friend.
After evening flights, Bush sometimes stopped by the officers' club, where NASA crews stationed at Ellington had begun a tradition of Thursday night "splashdown" parties to celebrate successful astronaut missions. The nights featured live music, cheap beer, and lots of slim young ladies from Houston. Friends say Bush was not a heavy drinker, but he held his own in a drinking game called Dead Bug. When someone shouted "dead bug!" everyone had to drop to the floor, belly up, twitching their arms and legs. The last man down bought the next round. Recalls Bath: "It alarmed the hell out of visiting officers and their wives."
Serving stateside. Though its pilots flew frequently to maintain proficiency, and the flights were hardly risk free, the 111th was a relatively comfortable place to serve in the final years of the Vietnam War. Bush asked about volunteering for "Palace Alert," a program that rotated Guard pilots into Vietnam, but he had too few flying hours to qualify. And since the Air Force was phasing out the F-102s, there was virtually no chance he'd be activated. Bush has denied his decision to join the Guard was an attempt to avoid Vietnam. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment," he told a Texas newspaper in 1990. "Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
Bush has also denied personally tapping connections to get into the Guard, though his flight instructor, Maury Udell, tells U.S. News he recommended Bush to the 147th Fighter Group's commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, only after learning that George H. W. Bush was the youngest commissioned officer in the Navy during World War II and had been shot down and rescued by a submarine. "It was almost like saying one of your family members had been killed in the war--they'd give you a break," says Udell. "It gave him a leg up."
While Bush generally stood by the U.S. government in the Vietnam War, he was hardly outspoken. "He wasn't sure it was so great we were in the war but thought since we were in there, we ought to see it through," says a friend from the time.
More broadly, Bush was gradually developing an interest in politics. Later in 1971, he flirted with running for the Texas Legislature but was discouraged by his father, who thought he needed to establish himself in business and grass-roots politics first. So, Bush again looked to a well-placed family friend: a Texan who was managing Republican Winton "Red" Blount's Senate campaign in Alabama; Bush arrived there in spring 1972 to lend a hand. The year would later become the focus of allegations about a lapse in Bush's Guard service (when critics say he was AWOL--a charge Bush denies) and would end with his acceptance to Harvard Business School.
Bush kept the application secret until he was accepted. He wanted to spare himself any embarrassment in case he was turned down. In the end, it wasn't necessary. Bush would go on to Harvard, earn his M.B.A., and eventually do all right for himself.
With Nancy L. Bentrup
This story appears in the May 3, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.