Smirk from the past

"Reject!" I answered. Nothing happened. The Banker stared at me as if I'd misread the script.

"Reject!" I yelled, louder this time. The Banker turned around and ran, apparently now focused on assaulting the next candidate on his list. My Elihu friend straightened himself out, took a deep breath, and, smiling, asked me to join Elihu. I never did find out the Banker's identity, but the next day his face was on the New York Times' second front page, in an action shot capturing him as he struck my shoulder while blocking his rival with his hip. "Skull was first," the caption read, "but he chose Elihu."

Bush, on the other hand, joined Bones. Bill Minutaglio reported in "First Son," a George W. Bush biography, that Bush considered joining the evocatively named "Gin and Tonic," but was swayed when his father, then a congressman, conducted the tapping ritual himself. The elder Bush's membership in Bones probably was the sole reason George W. was chosen, since W.'s only distinction at Yale was that he was president of the Yale chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the jock fraternity where the beer on the floor was an inch thick on Saturday nights. It was in that capacity that Bush presided over the coat-hanger brandings of 40 new frat brothers, and publicly defended the resulting half-inch-wide wounds as "only a cigarette burn." Even discounting Bush, however, Skull and Bones apparently endured a lackluster year: The place was so unpopular that it allegedly tapped 60 or 70 classmates to secure its allotted 15 members.

Just as Skull and Bones reflected the declining fortunes of Yale's traditional elite on an institutional level, Bush embodied the phenomenon in personal terms. His SAT scores (published in the New Yorker in November) were substantially below the class median; he unquestionably gained admittance simply because his father and grandfather were prominent Yalies. Yet '68 was Yale's first class with more public school than prep school graduates; the notion of developing "well-rounded" men of property and power, which had guided Yale's admissions policy for generations, was being supplanted by a preference for the intellectually skilled. Bush was outnumbered. I doubt I ever exchanged more than a few words with him, but I remember the smirk: to me it bespoke a kind of complacency, a smug confidence that he belonged at Yale because of his family and prep school background.

Yale was a fascinating place, bursting with turmoil and innovation, yet Bush wasn't interested. Astoundingly, last year he even told a Washington Post reporter that he was unaware of antiwar activity during his undergraduate years at Yale.

In his presidential campaign, Bush has argued that his behavior before his conversion to born-again Christianity is irrelevant, as if the over-40 Bush bears no relationship to the younger one. It's an odd presumption, particularly in a campaign preoccupied with "character." But more to the point, it's mistaken. In his complacency and sense of entitlement, Bush strikes me as unchanged. At Yale, he drank and played intramural sports; now he has religion and plays intramural politics. He has run his campaign as if it were an afterthought, its result already having been decided by Republican kingpins and corporate donors.

What's missing is the sense that Bush has overcome adversity or learned from experience. Until he became Texas governor on the strength of his modest charm, he was borne from one tottering business venture to another by investors who saw value in his name; his numerous setbacks carried no consequences. Now, not too surprisingly, his political maneuvering seems mechanical, unguided by conviction. Indeed, one reason John McCain's biography strikes so many people as outsized is that Bush has no biography at all.

As Bush careens from "compassionate conservative" to "reformer with results" to defender of right-wing values, from embracing Bob Jones University (before the South Carolina primary) to saying "I didn't mean it" (afterwards), he may be finding biography a more useful and elusive attribute than he'd assumed. But biographies, it turns out, aren't inherited, and don't come with membership in Skull and Bones.

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