Dubya and me

Walt Harrington, writing for The American Scholar, recounts his intimate experiences as a journalist with one of the most admired – and later reviled – presidents in history. One of the more notable features of the essay is in highlighting George Bush's fascination with history.

In high school, at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Bush had an American history teacher, Tom Lyons, who brought the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression to life. “He made history so interesting and exciting,” recalls Bush, who was no star pupil, either at Andover or at Yale, where he majored in history. One of his favorite professors at Yale, Wolfgang Leonhard, had fled Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, only to see his mother arrested under Stalin. Leonhard defected and ended up teaching the young Bush about the horrors of Soviet-era oppression. Professors such as Leonhard created in Bush, even if he was a C+ student, a lasting impression: “what it was like to live under a society in which a few made the decisions for everybody.”

“When I became more sober about life”—and Bush chuckles here—“a philosophy, a kind of clarity began to take hold. … I think, as I matured, the seeds that had been planted during college began to take hold. In other words, the lessons I’d learned, which fascinated me at the time, actually became part of a philosophical foundation.” Bush would eventually come to describe this foundation, starkly and simply, as “the struggle between tyranny and freedom.”