Candidates Strive to Overcome Privilege

He is a scion of American aristocracy whose path through life has been strewn with privilege.

Born to a family with deep roots on the Eastern Seaboard and a powerful place in U.S. history, he was pushed out of the nest into a boarding school where he often felt out of place. But that school -- and his name -- would help pave the way into an Ivy League college.

At Yale, he was tapped for an exclusive secret society. The first-born son of a father who was a World War II pilot, he too learned to fly and served his country during wartime.

His first run at political office was a disaster. Accused of carpetbagging, he was badly thumped. But he dusted himself off and went to work. Years later, he would again try his hand at politics. This time he would succeed, and spectacularly.

Now he is running for president of the United States. And that’s the curious thing: While this thumbnail biography describes President Bush to a T, it also describes his presumed Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

Indeed, the lives of both candidates, in broad strokes, paint a classic portrait of American privilege. “These people are definitely in the American hereditary upper class,” said Gary Boyd Roberts, a Boston genealogist who has traced Bush’s and Kerry’s lineages and discovered they are distantly related. (Branches of their family trees cross eight times, said Roberts; at the closest point, they are ninth cousins). They are also descended from medieval kings.

How has privilege played out in their lives? Very differently, as it turns out.

Bush, a true social and political aristocrat, has spent much of his life publicly distancing himself from his patrician roots, while quietly availing himself of family connections. “Privilege completely and utterly defines George Bush,” said his biographer, Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio. “I don’t think it’s pejorative to point that out.”

Kerry, whose family glory lies in an illustrious and historic past, has worked energetically to secure his place in the upper reaches of American society, and twice married heiresses. “His parents came from modest wealth,” said his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley. “He was always a little cash-poor for the milieu he was running around in. He’s like the F. Scott Fitzgerald figure looking into that world with one foot in and one foot out.”

The novelist Christopher Buckley, an acerbic social observer who wrote speeches for Bush’s father when he was vice president, said of the two political rivals: “Bush set out to distance himself from the world of Eastern establishmentarian privilege.... The funny thing is that Kerry sort of looks more like the guy who was born with the silver spoon, but economically, his circumstances were far less golden. That’s the paradox.”

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The Bush family, which prizes loyalty, has a nearly genetic aversion to being portrayed as privileged or highfalutin. The president’s grandmother, Dorothy Walker Bush, so disapproved of displays of what she called the “la-di-das” that her son George Herbert Walker Bush took to leaving the first-person pronoun out of sentences. That led, some think, to his famously tortured syntax.

The Bushes are deeply sensitive to any portrayal that implies their success is not due to hard work. But their triumphs -- on Wall Street, in the oil business, in real estate -- have gone hand in hand with long-standing social and financial connections that have been nurtured and handed down in the family with the sort of loving care that other families take with precious heirlooms.

The Bushes are famous for making friends -- and for keeping them and calling upon them when launching businesses and political campaigns. In their new book, “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty,” Peter and Rochelle Schweizer call this phenomenon “the amazing Bush family money machine.”

Although George W. Bush has striven mightily to purge traces of the patrician from his bearing -- at Harvard Business School, where he earned a master’s of business administration, he chewed tobacco, eschewed opera for country music and wore cowboy boots -- his family’s illustrious history is an inescapable fact. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut; his father, of course, was the 41st U.S. president. His younger brother, Jeb, is governor of Florida. At least three recent Bush biographies contain the word “dynasty.”

“I know they have a stated aversion to what I think they call the D-word,” said Buckley. “It’s a becoming modesty, but as a practical matter ... if it walks like a dynasty, talks like a dynasty and quacks like a dynasty, it seems to me it’s a dynasty.”

“Dynasty, schmynasty,” Jeb once snapped.

Still, the perquisites of growing up in a family named Bush are considerable. George Bush was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and though a mediocre student, he was accepted to Yale as an undergraduate, where his grandfather and great-uncle were on the board of trustees. When he applied to law school at the University of Texas and, according to biographers, no family strings were pulled, he did not get in. In 1973, however, he was accepted by Harvard.

“Being the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, right there, that is helpful,” Nathaniel Butler, a Harvard classmate, told Minutaglio.

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Kerry and his family are far less familiar to Americans than the Bushes. On his mother’s side, Kerry is descended from two important early American families, the Winthrops and the Forbeses.

Pilgrim leader John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Forbeses made a fortune in shipping. Kerry’s grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was a successful international businessman with a vacation home in Brittany, which is still in the family.

By the early 20th century, much of the wealth had dissipated, but some vestiges remained. Naushon Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, is owned by a Forbes family trust. Kerry also receives a modest amount of money from three family trusts.

Kerry’s father, Richard, was the son of a Czech immigrant who changed his name from Kohn to Kerry and converted from Judaism to Catholicism before immigrating to the U.S., as the Boston Globe discovered and revealed to Kerry. The Globe also discovered that Kerry’s grandfather, a successful businessman, killed himself in a restroom in Boston in 1921, when Kerry’s father was 6.

The family was left with enough money that Kerry’s father was able to attend boarding school at Andover, Yale as an undergraduate and law school at Harvard before he embarked on a career in the foreign service.

John Kerry, one of four children, attended prep schools (in Switzerland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire), lived with his family in Berlin and Oslo and spent holidays at the 300-acre Massachusetts estate of his uncle and aunt. A great-aunt, Clara Winthrop, paid Kerry’s tuition. At St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where Kerry finished 12th grade, he was surrounded by very rich classmates.

“We were comfortable,” Kerry told Brinkley. “But by St. Paul’s standards, I would never have called myself rich.”

“The Bushes have real wealth,” said Brinkley. “The Kerrys never saw a million dollars in their life.”

But Kerry palled around with millionaires. The summer before college, he dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half sister, Janet Auchincloss, and was invited sailing with President Kennedy, the boyhood idol whose initials he shares. During summers, Kerry sold encyclopedias and loaded trucks, jobs he says he found for himself.

Bush’s summer jobs were procured by his father -- including work on an oil rig and in an inner-city mentoring program.

Like their fathers, Kerry and Bush would go to Yale.

Bush did not love Yale, as his father and grandfather and many uncles had. He has blamed his disaffection on the intellectual arrogance he perceived on the campus. He was caught between worlds in some sense, graduating in 1968, a time when his well-known father was closely allied with the Nixon administration and the antiwar movement was gaining steam on campus. At Yale, he encountered liberal guilt, which he found offensive.

He was turned off, he told the Dallas Morning News in 1994, by “people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering, or people who felt guilty because they happened to inherit a whole bunch of money and they hadn’t done a dang thing to deserve it.”

While Bush spent a good deal of his time at boarding school and college socializing, Kerry was more of a striver, wearing his ambition on his sleeve, even when it was uncool to do so.

“To be fully accepted at St. Paul’s,” wrote Brinkley, “you were supposed to be slightly cynical, laid-back, condescending and arch.... Such raw ambition rubbed classmates the wrong way. The sentiment was that anybody who excelled at everything he tried had to be a phony.”

At Yale, Kerry led the debate team, became president of the Political Union and was tapped, as Bush would be two years later, for Skull and Bones. Many of his friends understood that he wanted to become president.

“I have always found it very curious that some people hold Kerry’s ambition against him,” Brinkley said in an interview. “It’s what [historian] Richard Hofstadter called ‘the anti-intellectual strain in American politics’ ... You are supposed to become an accidental president.”

Indeed, some speculate that this is the secret to Bush’s success. No one expected him to be president; Jeb was supposed to run, according to family lore. George W. Bush, as many have noted, was a case study in the power of lowered expectations. His protracted boyhood did not truly end until he turned 40, stopped drinking and became a born-again Christian.

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After Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966, despite trepidations about the war in Vietnam, he enlisted in the Navy. He spent four months on a swift boat commanding a crew that was considerably less affluent and well-connected than the people he had known at Yale. When he returned, he became deeply involved in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and gained national attention as its spokesman. Some admired him; others criticized him as an opportunist.

In the early 1970s, Bush spent his military stint during the Vietnam War stateside, service that in his political life would spark controversy. He gained admission into a unit of the Texas Air National Guard that was dubbed the “Champagne Unit” because its members included the scions of other well-connected Texas political families.

Bush’s first full-time job was as an executive trainee for a large agricultural concern called Stratford of Texas. In a typical example of the web of Bush family ties, Stratford was owned by Robert Gow, who had come to Texas to head up George H.W. Bush’s oil exploration company, Zapata Offshore. Gow had roomed at Yale with a Bush cousin, Ray Walker. “It was turnabout that George came and worked for me,” Gow told Minutaglio.

When Bush launched his oil exploration company, Arbusto Energy, he had little trouble raising money. “I introduced him to clients. I marketed his firm,” his uncle, New York financier Jonathan Bush, told Minutaglio in 1999.

Bush would never hit it big with Arbusto. But when he was offered a chance to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, during his father’s presidency, he turned to family and friends to raise money. At the time, Bush was candid about his advantageous position: “Being the president’s son puts you in the limelight,” he told a reporter. “While in the limelight, you might as well sell tickets.”

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During their careers, Kerry and Bush have had to fight accusations that they are privileged snobs.

In 1978, after Bush’s entry into politics was marked by losing his race for a House seat in Texas, he said of his opponent, “He out-countried me. He created a doubt in people’s minds about my authenticity.”

When he rekindled his political career with his successful gubernatorial run in 1994, Bush’s stewardship of the Rangers had bestowed on him the kind of home-state credibility he had lacked.

Kerry, too, lost his first race, a 1972 bid for a House seat in Massachusetts. In a largely working-class district, many saw him as a carpetbagger using his national stature as a war protester.

He went into a funk, then to law school, and became a prosecutor before winning his Senate seat in 1984.

When Kerry was still a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Garry Trudeau lampooned him in the comic strip “Doonesbury,” showing him in front of a microphone with a thought bubble over his head: “You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie.”

Around that time, a newspaper headline on a story that compared Kerry’s antiwar testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with that of a veteran who supported the war described the pair this way: “2 vets with medals, 1 with silver spoon.”

And while Kerry may not have been born with a silver spoon, he has married into substantial wealth. His first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne, is an heiress who once described her upbringing as “palaces, princesses and privilege.” Kerry’s second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, inherited part of the Heinz food company fortune. Money from both wives has helped Kerry propel his political career.

“Think left, marry right,” joked Buckley.

In contrast, Bush’s wife, Laura, was a product of West Texas’ middle class. Their marriage has survived at least one rocky period, caused by his drinking.

His subsequent sobriety and his devotion to Christ is the story that Bush has used to define himself to voters -- a narrative that has helped him neutralize the role that privilege has played in his life, according to Evan Cornog, whose book “The Power and the Story” examines how presidents craft their personal stories and how voters respond.

“If you look at his life story ... a guy trading off privilege and taking advantage of his father’s connections, a wild and not very responsible person, his central story is the renunciation of alcohol,” said Cornog. “Sin and redemption. And he’s made amazing use of that story.”

While Bush has avoided references to his privileged life, Kerry seems to have embraced it -- though in the context of reminding voters that he volunteered to serve his country in wartime. “I thought it was important,” he says in a recent TV commercial, “when you had a lot of privileges as I had had, to go to a great university like Yale -- to give something back to your country.”

Emphasizing his Vietnam service, said Cornog, “does for Kerry what the turn-away from alcohol did for Bush: It distances him from that upbringing of privilege.”

Ultimately, Cornog added, most voters have seemed to care little whether a presidential contender has come from modest circumstances or great wealth. Instead, he said, “We look at them and say, ‘Is this person comfortable in their skin?’ ”