Dean Traveled Tangled Road to Self-Discovery

For a lost soul like young Howard Dean in the early 1970s, this fabled ski town seemed the ideal place to drop out.

He had just graduated from Yale with ordinary marks, and like many in his class left school troubled over the war in Vietnam and the uncertainties of how to find his way in life. He had skirted the draft because of a bad back, and had no desire to follow his well-heeled father onto Wall Street.

All Howard Brush Dean III wanted to do was ski. The idea was to lose himself on the slopes of Aspen, far from his father’s conservative tutelage -- although with the help of a trust fund set up by his grandmother.

Bad back and all, Dean skied 80 days that winter, by his own count. He got around town in a blue Chevy Malibu and washed celebrities’ dishes at the Golden Horn restaurant. He partied so hard that he later told friends he was “lucky to get out of it in one piece.”

Aspen was the first stop on a years-long journey of self-discovery and experimentation that took the young Dean to Wall Street, medical school and finally Burlington, Vt., where he would edge into politics. In Dean’s youthful aimlessness and his efforts to distinguish himself from his prominent father, there are parallels with the young George W. Bush, who traveled his own tangled road toward maturity.

Dean’s family and friends, and the candidate himself, say the odyssey grounded him in a world beyond his privileged boyhood. He worked construction, volunteered at an emergency room and later treated low-income patients as a medical student in the Bronx.

More importantly, as he emerged to become the leading Democratic candidate for president, they say it taught him that nothing of value comes easily.

Dean says he spent some of those wilderness years running from the man known as “Big Howard”: his father. In his autobiography, “Winning Back America,” Dean said his father’s long shadow dogged him from Yale to politics.

Big Howard was sometimes glum and moody, and could fall into long silent spells when something did not go as he wished. But, Dean wrote, “he had the wisdom to let me make my own way, and he had the self-discipline to allow me to take the chance that I would fail. He knew I had to make my own mistakes.”

Dean was the first of four boys, a scion of Park Avenue and the son expected to uphold family tradition and carry on his father’s gilded name.

Big Howard was a staunch Republican and financier, a man who “loved institutions,” recalled another son, Bill Dean, an investment banker in Boston. He served as a school board trustee, helped run the American Stock Exchange and was involved in philanthropic endeavors.

“What he really did like to do was put his shoulder to the wheel of things,” Bill Dean said. “And while he didn’t come right out and give us the speech, you got the idea what he expected of you. He was demanding about some things, like honesty, and that pretty well got imprinted on us.”

Raised in the family’s 11th-floor Park Avenue apartment, Little Howard was shipped off to prep school at St. George’s in Newport, R.I., an exclusive seaside campus where he ran track and led the academy’s wrestling team. He studied in Europe and traveled in Mexico and California before going to college.

He chose Yale because his father had gone there. But soon he wondered: Even though he shared the old man’s name, must he become him too?

His years at Yale were unremarkable. At the end of his freshman year he wanted to leave. His father insisted he stick it out, so he slogged on. He dabbled in student government, took some political science courses.

His sophomore year produced just passing grades. By his own admission, he smoked pot and drank a lot of beer. He later called this period “disastrous.” His grades eventually improved somewhat.

“Part of what was going on at that time was that Howard was getting more freedom in going off to school, just as we all were, and Howard was enjoying that,” said Ralph Dawson, Dean’s roommate at Yale and now a New York lawyer.

Peter Brooks, a Yale associate professor who years later was advising Columbia University on whether to admit Dean to night classes there, said, “Howard Dean clearly does not present a strong undergraduate academic record.... These years were for him a time of somewhat undirected personal experimentation, the trying-out of various commitments and ways of life ... but without too much sense of what it all meant.”

Dean had been troubled by student unrest over the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia, as well as the Black Panther trials nearby in New Haven, Conn. Unlike many students, Dean did not get personally involved.

Dawson said Dean “was antiwar but he wasn’t out demonstrating.” Taylor Pyne, another old friend, said Dean embraced dissent but also tried to understand the war from his father’s perspective. Dean, he said, “was in the middle.”

His Yale years were later investigated by the admissions committee at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Dr. Russell Anderson Jr. recalled how Dean “described some of the arguments which he had with his father and as to how he rebelled, to the extent of letting his hair grow to shoulder length and growing a long mustache and beard. He was too busy being fashionable that his studies suffered.”

Dean graduated from Yale in 1971. Immediately, Anderson said, Dean felt pressured to pursue a career in “high finance.” But to him the job offered “no real humanitarianism.”

“At this crossroad of confusion,” Anderson said, “he took off to Colorado to think and ski and think some more. What money did he live on at that time, since he wasn’t working? He lived on money from a trust fund his grandmother set up for him.”

But before Colorado he had to deal with Uncle Sam. His years at Yale had given him a student deferment from the military. Now, with the war still raging, his number was up.

Carrying X-rays from a New York orthopedist, he showed up at the draft board with evidence of a back condition called spondylolysis that he said he picked up in youth sports. The government reclassified him as qualified for duty “only in time of war or national emergency.” Two years later it knocked him down to 4-F, “not qualified for military service.”

Dean has acknowledged he could have fought in the war, that his condition was not debilitating. But he also has said that the diagnosis was legitimate and that it saved him from a war he opposed. He adds that the condition does not bother him much today. Dean addressed his draft status in a recent debate with other Democratic presidential candidates. “I told the truth,” he said. “I fulfilled my obligation. I took a physical. I failed the physical.”

So it was off to Aspen. Bill Dean said his oldest brother “probably didn’t know what he wanted to do. You work your tail off for umpteen years, and this might be your only opportunity.”

In Aspen, no one saw any hint of a bad back when Dean skied, bused tables and washed dishes at night or, during construction season, poured concrete. He lived in a small cabin with the name “Trout” above the door, at the site of a closed-out silver mine called Ashcroft. He had orange Spaulding skis. He read Hermann Hesse.

“Howard was a free spirit back then. Anybody would probably tell you that,” said Greg Wylde, a fellow Yalie who roomed with him in the cabin. “He was doing what he wanted to do. He was skiing, having a good time, and making his own way. Which Howard was pretty accustomed to doing.”

Former classmate Pyne, who shared weekends on the Aspen slopes with him, said, “We were all somewhat childish back then.”

Aspen then was notorious not only for celebrities, like the Kennedy family, but for drugs and the counterculture. It was nicknamed the “coke capital of the country,” where trust-fund babies tried to blend in, and the local joke had it that your dinner waiter was richer than you and skied past you during the day.

Like President Bush, Dean has admitted to an “exuberant youth.” But like any smart politician, he has declined to elaborate, only obliquely confessing that “we did some heavy-duty partying,” and that “I dabbled in a little of this and a little of that.”

He would later describe his ski-bum period to friends in Vermont.

“In his younger years, he indulged in alcohol and marijuana,” said Tom Hudspeth, who worked on local politics with Dean. “He would talk about getting hammered, and being so lucky to get out of it in one piece.”

Dean worked at the Golden Horn, a well-known Aspen restaurant, recalled Trudy Erhard, who ran the place then. “He was a good kid, but a lost kid,” she said.

“Everybody did” pot in Aspen, including all of her young employees, Erhard said. “He told us about it too. But he never ever called in sick. I used to drive him nuts because he couldn’t put on tablecloths [properly], but he never called in sick, about a bad back or anything else.”

When members of the Kennedy family came to the Golden Horn, Dean appeared smitten, Erhard said. “Perhaps that’s where he got his inspiration,” she said.

After a year, as Big Howard had hoped, Dean gave up his skis for the stodginess of Wall Street, where he toiled for two years advising clients on their investments. But he hated the work, and during his off hours volunteered at a hospital emergency room in New York.

It was during this period that Dean’s idealistic brother Charles, who was backpacking through Laos, was kidnapped by Communist Laotian forces. Some months later, in 1975, the family learned that he had probably been killed. By all accounts, this event profoundly affected the oldest son. Friends say he became more serious and pragmatic. He secretly sought out an uncle, Dr. Bill Felch, about a career in medicine.

“He was restless,” Felch recalled. “He had the problem that his grandfather and his father were both Wall Streeters, and he was not too sure about how to go about breaking those bonds.”

With his uncle’s encouragement, Dean applied for night school at Columbia to pick up the science courses needed for medical school. He persuaded Felch not to tell his parents, but Dean family lore has him walking into the admissions office at Columbia only to find his mother doing volunteer work there.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“Well, what are you doing here?” she responded.

They laughed. He confessed his intentions and begged her not to tell Dad. When he later wanted to move back home to save money, he arranged another restaurant meeting in Manhattan, this time with his father. He told him of his plans for medical school. His father supported his plans, Dean said. But years later, he said, “my father told me he thought I was nuts.”

He was admitted to the Einstein medical school. In his application, he said he was impressed by doctors and nurses working together to help patients, and that “at 50, I would like to look back at a career which had provided, and would continue to provide, that kind of service to others.”

Anderson at Einstein strongly recommended him to the program. “Howard B. Dean no longer represents a lost soul,” he said in the recommendation. “He has indeed come home.”

Dean took an accelerated program and graduated in three years rather than four. He met a classmate, his future wife, Judith Steinberg, when they worked crossword puzzles together between classes. He kept his pedigree low-key; few at the school realized he was a trust-funder.

“He was very frugal, and his clothes were worn,” recalled classmate Joyce Davis, now a dermatologist. “He used to tape his shoes together with duct tape. Maybe he just didn’t have time to get to a shoemaker.”

Lee Kaplan, now a Massachusetts physician, remembered that Dean “loved medicine” but equally enjoyed talking politics into the night. Together, they worked on student government affairs and helped put out a new student handbook.

After graduation in 1978, Vermont was almost an accident. Dean applied for three residency programs, and when the first two fell through, he took the third -- at the University of Vermont School of Medicine. Judith joined him a year later. They married and opened a family practice. There was one more twist to come: his move into politics. Already, Aspen was ancient history, Bill Dean said. The family knew no son of Big Howard could hide in the mountains forever.

“Leaving Aspen, it was time to get serious,” Bill Dean said. “You can only do that for so long. If you’re working in a restaurant or pouring concrete, that’s one thing. You can keep that kind of a lifestyle up for a while. But sooner or later there are serious things to do in life.”

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The education of Howard Dean

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean’s path to self-discovery was a winding one that took him to Wall Street, medical school and finally Burlington, Vt., where he would begin his career in politics:

Nov. 17, 1948: Howard Brush Dean III is born in East Hampton, N.Y.

June 14, 1971: Graduates from Yale University with a bachelor of arts in political science.

June 1971: Receives a medical deferment from the draft for spondylolysis, a back condition.

1971-1972: Lives in Aspen, Colo., and waits tables, pours concrete and skis.

1972-1974: Works as financial advisor on Wall Street.

1975: Begins school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y.

1978: Graduates from medical school and begins residency at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

1981: Marries medical school classmate Judith Steinberg. They open a family practice together.

1982: Elected to the Vermont Legislature.

1986: Elected lieutenant governor.

1991: Becomes governor following the death of Gov. Richard A. Snelling.