The Ruling Class

The football jock from Wyoming. The prom king--an observant Jew. The silver-spoon legacy kid. Could one Ivy League institution have hosted three more different men?

As students, about all Richard Cheney, Joseph I. Lieberman and George W. Bush had in common was Yale University, where all three studied in the 1960s. Now the trio and their boola-boola background dominate the Republican and Democratic presidential tickets--thought to be the first time three candidates have come from any single institution of higher learning.

Presidents Taft and Bush went to Yale, and the school also likes to lay claim to Presidents Ford and Clinton, both graduates of Yale Law School. Six U.S. presidents, meanwhile, may have gone to Harvard College, but in this election, Harvard alum Al Gore is the academic oddball.

Whether weird, unprecedented coincidence or, as Yale president Richard Levin quipped, “the natural and expected course of events,” the phenomenon reflects a sense present for almost 300 years at this Gothic-towered campus that a Yale diploma is a passport to stewardship. The rhetoric of leadership flows through the air and water here. Its flip side is a powerful streak of entitlement, and no small measure of elitism, despite an increasingly heterogeneous student population. If Yalies past and present have been leaders, they’ll tell you it’s because they were meant to be.

Levin himself calls the institution “a laboratory for future leaders.” Before the school went coed in 1969, one of Levin’s recent predecessors, the late Kingman Brewster, made a habit of reminding his flock that his job was to create “1,000 male leaders.”

Over the centuries, Yale students have learned to think big. Senior Eliza Park, 21, said she knows six people on campus who plan to be president of the United States, and one who expects a seat on the Supreme Court. Park herself intends to become surgeon general.

“People here have a feeling that they can run the world with their Yale degree,” agreed sophomore Molly Lindsay, 19. “I feel like you get told that when you come to school here, like you’re going to be a kingpin of power.”

Much the same mandate was at work in 1959, when Natrona County High School football star Richard Cheney packed up his scholarship and headed to Yale. New Haven and Yale were worlds away from Casper, Wyo., and by all accounts he was miserably homesick and pined for his girlfriend.

The school won’t release Cheney’s academic records, and Levin purports to know nothing more about the Republican vice presidential candidate’s tenure at Yale than “what I’ve read in the papers.” Levin presumably is referring to media accounts that Cheney was out of his academic league, that he left Yale once, then returned, then withdrew a second, final time in 1960.

Cheney ultimately finished at the University of Wyoming. But cheering briefly for the Bulldogs is apparently almost as good as graduating, and even without a diploma, Cheney has been known to show up at Yale alumni functions.

Lieberman, by contrast, arrived from a large public high school in nearby Stamford, Conn., in 1960, when Yale still enforced a quota on Jewish students. A big man at his own big-city high school, Lieberman unpacked his bags at a university where about half the student body came from prep schools, already a badge of elitism. Students wore coats and ties to class, and the school was so blindingly WASP, said Boston public radio host Christopher Lydon (Yale ‘62) that although there were no quotas for his creed, as a Catholic, he felt like a token, too.

Yale had a definite ladder of class distinctions, Lydon said. “The top of the Yale class system was all tied up in the word ‘Shoe,’ ” he said. “It was code for white shoe. We’d say, That’s a really Shoe guy, a really Shoe way to dress, a Shoe way to carry yourself. More than we wanted to admit, there was the ideal of being Shoe.”

Shoe or not, Lieberman swept into prominence, earning what was then Yale’s most coveted elected position, chair--or editor--of the daily newspaper. He wrote editorials railing against boxing as barbaric on the one hand, and favoring the admission of women to the all-male university, on another. His political aspirations were so unconcealed that one friend, Al Sharp, took to calling him “Senator.”

One day, Lieberman approached him, said Sharp, who now lives in Chicago. “You’re not wrong,” Lieberman told Sharp. “But not so loud.”

After distinguishing himself as head cheerleader at the exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., George W. Bush entered the college of his forefathers in 1964, where he was well-known as a prankster and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Reborn now as a man of the people, Bush seldom dwells publicly on his days at this elite institution. Yet Yale classmates number among his closest friends.

In his book, “First Son,” Dallas Morning News reporter Bill Minutaglio quotes Bush speaking of his time at Yale years after graduation: “What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous. They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us. These are the ones who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life.”

In 1964, the late Mario Savio stood on a police car in Sproul Plaza to launch the free speech movement at UC Berkeley. Soon protests over civil rights, free speech and Vietnam were rattling many other universities. With sit-ins and love-ins, it was a turbulent time at many campuses. But at the Yale of George W. Bush, the ‘60s barely showed up before he graduated in 1968. The cultural revolution of the mid-’60s, Levin observed, “didn’t really hit Yale.”

William Sloane Coffin was Yale’s chaplain from 1958 through 1976. At Coffin’s urging, Lieberman organized a small group of Yale students who traveled to Mississippi to do civil rights work. But as the decade wore on, Coffin expressed despair over a sense of complacency on campus.

“The social concerns of the minority were very great in the ‘60s,” Coffin recalled. “Lieberman was in the minority. George W. Bush was in the majority.”

Insulated and Isolated

An hour and a half’s train ride from New York, Yale nonetheless seemed both insulated and isolated at that time, graduates say. As it is today, New Haven was a gritty city, and Yale an island of privilege within it. The school was so white that when Sharp, Lieberman’s successor as chair of the Yale Daily News, sent his staff out to do a story on “Negroes at Yale,” he could decree, “Go out and interview all six of them.” Such a comment seems ridiculous today on a campus where 30% of the students identify themselves as belonging to a minority.

Clearly, said Boston pediatrician Eli Newberger, Yale ‘62, “It was a very narrow band of citizens. It was a place where the elite sent their sons, ultimately for positions in the leadership class.”

Amid the stone towers and courtyards, between the seminars and the master’s teas, Yale also was fond of a good party. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll may have taken awhile to hit the campus, but fraternities and other campus clubs did their best to make up for the loss.

Several years before Bush proudly assumed the post, John Adams was president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the national fraternity known as Deke. “We had our wild and crazy parties--yes, we did,” said Adams, now a businessman in Raleigh, N.C.

Of course, the most important organizations of all at Yale always have been the secret senior societies, clubs that rely on tradition to “tap” their members. Lieberman joined Elihu, not the most famous, but a club then considered the thinking man’s secret society. Bush followed his father, grandfather, uncle and cousins by joining Skull and Bones, the most mythic of them all.

Though it inspired the movie “Skulls,” the organization is known to cognoscenti as “Bones.” It occupies a dark, dingy “tomb” dead in the center of campus. When tapped, Bones members receive secret names. Usually they are assigned, but Bush was allowed to choose his own. Until he could come up with one, he was known as Temporary. He never bothered to change it, so Temporary is what Bonesmen call him still.

The New Millennium

Imagine more than 200 years of male-only tradition at Yale. Bonesmen of generations past must be spinning in their own tombs to think of new-millennium members such as 20-year-old Sarah Maserati of Palo Alto. Fiercely conservative, Maserati is an active debater with Yale’s feisty political union, the only organization of its kind at any Ivy League school. A top student, Maserati arrived at Yale with plans to become Secretary of State.

Maserati makes a firm distinction between today’s campus and the old Yale, “a bunch of men, a bunch of WASP men, who got there because they were rich.” When they visit today’s more diverse, more meritocratic campus, she said, old Yalies say, “Wow, you guys do so much work!”

They also do their share of political analysis. At the Yale Daily News, former editorials editor Milan Milenkovic said the presence of three presidential and vice presidential candidates from his alma mater was a subject of great pride.

“The men of Yale such as Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush were the kind of men Yale strived to produce to lead and better this country,” said Milenkovic, a senior majoring in political science. “In our time we will see Yale and other Ivy League schools produce a new breed of leaders to head corporations, the U.S. Congress and perhaps the White House.”

Yale, said Maserati, retains mystique. “Everyone knows that intellectually, Harvard is the best,” she said. “But there is a kind of cachet about Yale. Yale is where the cool people go.”

Gaddis Smith, a Yale history professor emeritus who is at work on a history of the school, said a further distinction between Harvard and Yale is that “for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the emphasis at Yale was on working together in groups. There was the ideal of an undefeated football team, a charity drive, the junior prom committee--a huge emphasis on leadership in groups. Harvard’s spirit was much more conducive to the individual intellectual achievement. You could be a hermit and hide in the library.”

Smith said that the changing demography of the last 30 years has brought less unity to the campus. With so many organizations, “today you have people identifying themselves in groups, and each group has an agenda,” Smith said.

With tuition, room and board now costing nearly $33,000 per year, and 40% of students receiving some financial aid, Smith said he also sees rising careerism among Yalies. Before he retired in July, Smith said he received more and more complaints about grades. “It wasn’t complaints about Cs,” he said. “It was about A-minuses that weren’t A’s.”

But Alexandra Robbins (Yale, 1998) found that many young Yalies are still thinking about politics when she wrote two major magazine articles about her school, in the Atlantic and the New Yorker. One talked about George W. Bush’s mediocre academic record, and one was about Skull and Bones.

Robbins, who works in the New Yorker magazine’s Washington office, was deluged with letters, e-mails and calls from Yalies. “What they said was, ‘When I run for office, I hope no one digs into my past like you did.’ They didn’t say if, they said when.” Robbins said.

The reaction, she said, reflects the aura of entitlement that penetrates the environment at Yale. “It’s in the air,” Robbins said. “You feel it in your interactions with other students, you hear it in class and you see it in the grandiose plans of the organizations. It just permeates the atmosphere.”

One of the 5,000 students inhaling that atmosphere this fall is Barbara Bush of Austin, Tex. Yale has 12 residential colleges, and as a freshman, the Republican presidential candidate’s daughter has taken up residence in Davenport, her father’s college. Along with Ms. Bush came two male security guards, disguised to look like college boys. Normally, fellow Davenporters say, she introduces herself only as “Barbara.”

But by no means is she Yale’s resident celebrity. At the Yale Women’s Center, a chorus supplied that name:

“CLAIRE DANES!!!”