Read Online Short Century by David Burr Gerrard - Free Book Online
Authors: David Burr Gerrard
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chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, and it was his hatred of Coffin that led Bush to befriend me in the first place.
Because of my family, Coffin recognized me on sight, so we happened to strike up a brief conversation one day when we passed each other on campus. As soon as Coffin walked away, I felt a tug at my collar that reminded me of Paul.
âArthur Huntington, right?â asked a dark-haired kid. We had met in a large group a few months earlier, and I was surprised that he remembered my name; it wasnât until decades later that I learned that he possessed an unsettlingly acute gift for remembering names. Once I had checked that my tie was unmolestedâwhenever Iâm invited to speak at my alma mater, I can count on a few laughs by recalling that in my day, Yale men wore ties, and were called âYale menââI responded that yes, I was and always would be Arthur Huntington. (Amazingly, he recalled this line when I was invited to dinner at the White House, and he ribbed me about it.)
âWhy were you talking to Coffin?â he asked, and didnât give me a chance to respond before he launched into a story that, in later years, he loved to recount to reporters (Coffin wrote Bush a note saying he had no recollection of the incident; Bush responded that he was quite certain it had occurred). Bushâs father had just lost the race for Texas Senate, and he sought out Coffin for consolation. Coffin said: âI know your father. Frankly, he lost to a better man.â This crystallized for Bush what he hated most about the wealthy: lack of loyalty. Everyone else is loyal to the small group of his or her birth; why do the wealthy think they have the right to be different?
This basically tribal approach to the world was much on my mind in the run-up to the Iraq War, an endeavor as far from tribal as any in recorded history. The major purpose of that war was to liberate people who were nothing like us. (If you go back and read what I and other war supporters wrote about the war in 2002 and 2003, and compare that to what the so-called âanti-war activistsâ wrote, I think youâll find that they and not we were the racists. I make this point at greater length in a post I wrote in 2004 for a symposium Slate hosted in which âliberal hawksâ were supposed to beat our heads in anguish over how wrong we were about the war.)
At Yale, I always told Bush I agreed with him about class loyalty and so forth, and I told myself that by doing so I was making fun of him. What I really thought is difficult for me to gauge. Almost everyone at school had been paying a great deal of attention to Coffin, and I was no exception. There he was, the obvious model for how someone from my background could be a positive force in the world. The fact that Bush hated him only made him more attractive to me, or should haveâit did not take any particular insight to discover that Bush was smarmy. I was under no illusion that Bush was anything other than a belligerent buffoon. I was also under no illusion that Bush and Paul would have been best friends; Paul would probably have been contemptuous of Bushâs lack of intellect, but on the issues of our class privilege they would have been in lockstep agreement. Which means that, given my desire to disagree with Paul whenever the opportunity presented itself, I should have told Bush to go to hell.
Instead, I found myself agreeing with our future president more than I was comfortable with. Through my sophomore year, as the sixties were just starting to become The Sixties, I found myself worrying about what would happen to Emily if there were ever any kind of revolutionary conflagration. If there were ever some kind of Jacobin-style violent purge of the rich, she could be in serious trouble. Iâm not proud of this, but I spent much of the summer of 1967 daydreaming about what I would do if a bunch of hippies attempted to rape or kill Emily. Basically I
Because of my family, Coffin recognized me on sight, so we happened to strike up a brief conversation one day when we passed each other on campus. As soon as Coffin walked away, I felt a tug at my collar that reminded me of Paul.
âArthur Huntington, right?â asked a dark-haired kid. We had met in a large group a few months earlier, and I was surprised that he remembered my name; it wasnât until decades later that I learned that he possessed an unsettlingly acute gift for remembering names. Once I had checked that my tie was unmolestedâwhenever Iâm invited to speak at my alma mater, I can count on a few laughs by recalling that in my day, Yale men wore ties, and were called âYale menââI responded that yes, I was and always would be Arthur Huntington. (Amazingly, he recalled this line when I was invited to dinner at the White House, and he ribbed me about it.)
âWhy were you talking to Coffin?â he asked, and didnât give me a chance to respond before he launched into a story that, in later years, he loved to recount to reporters (Coffin wrote Bush a note saying he had no recollection of the incident; Bush responded that he was quite certain it had occurred). Bushâs father had just lost the race for Texas Senate, and he sought out Coffin for consolation. Coffin said: âI know your father. Frankly, he lost to a better man.â This crystallized for Bush what he hated most about the wealthy: lack of loyalty. Everyone else is loyal to the small group of his or her birth; why do the wealthy think they have the right to be different?
This basically tribal approach to the world was much on my mind in the run-up to the Iraq War, an endeavor as far from tribal as any in recorded history. The major purpose of that war was to liberate people who were nothing like us. (If you go back and read what I and other war supporters wrote about the war in 2002 and 2003, and compare that to what the so-called âanti-war activistsâ wrote, I think youâll find that they and not we were the racists. I make this point at greater length in a post I wrote in 2004 for a symposium Slate hosted in which âliberal hawksâ were supposed to beat our heads in anguish over how wrong we were about the war.)
At Yale, I always told Bush I agreed with him about class loyalty and so forth, and I told myself that by doing so I was making fun of him. What I really thought is difficult for me to gauge. Almost everyone at school had been paying a great deal of attention to Coffin, and I was no exception. There he was, the obvious model for how someone from my background could be a positive force in the world. The fact that Bush hated him only made him more attractive to me, or should haveâit did not take any particular insight to discover that Bush was smarmy. I was under no illusion that Bush was anything other than a belligerent buffoon. I was also under no illusion that Bush and Paul would have been best friends; Paul would probably have been contemptuous of Bushâs lack of intellect, but on the issues of our class privilege they would have been in lockstep agreement. Which means that, given my desire to disagree with Paul whenever the opportunity presented itself, I should have told Bush to go to hell.
Instead, I found myself agreeing with our future president more than I was comfortable with. Through my sophomore year, as the sixties were just starting to become The Sixties, I found myself worrying about what would happen to Emily if there were ever any kind of revolutionary conflagration. If there were ever some kind of Jacobin-style violent purge of the rich, she could be in serious trouble. Iâm not proud of this, but I spent much of the summer of 1967 daydreaming about what I would do if a bunch of hippies attempted to rape or kill Emily. Basically I
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