He learned to be a class clown and a bad sport. He threw his baseball bat and kicked up dirt when he struck out in Little League games. His behavior turned cruel: He tortured frogs by exploding them with firecrackers and shot off his BB gun at animals around other people's homes, directly violating laws against animal cruelty, disturbing the peace, and shooting off firearms in residential areas. When caught, Bush inevitably pointed the finger at others.

     "I remember him as a spoiled kid who tried to control the playground and was in trouble often," recalled one classmate in an email to the author. "You wouldn't call him the school bully because he wasn't tough enough for that. He was more a control freak."

     In third grade at Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland, his teacher, Austine Crosby, told the class to stay in because it was raining. Bush defiantly threw a football through a classroom window. He also sometimes stole sample cloth bags full of fossilized remains of mammoths, sloths, and other ancient animals that oil workers would find while digging and bring to geologists to study to see if any were museum quality, according to author Bill Minutaglio. One of these finds resulted in the oldest skeleton in North America, "Midland Minnie." Bush stole the bags - which could have contained important historical discoveries - from the porches of the geologists and used them as make-believe bombs against other neighborhood kids. 1

     Bush the boy learned to win or else. If he couldn't win, he simply changed the rules of the game until he came out on top. He chose friends who were easy to manipulate.

     Having a hyper-competitive grandmother - Dorothy Bush would rank the kids based on athletic prowess - and a father who was a good student, captain of the Yale baseball team, combat veteran, congressman, U.N. ambassador, vice president, and president who didn't mind breaking the rules for personal gain were factors that made it easy for Bush to take the short cut early in life. And it led to much frustration. After they moved to Houston, Barbara Bush regularly took young George and a friend, Doug Hannah, to play golf. As a 13-year-old, Hannah remembers Bush usually yelling "Fuck this!" in front of everyone by the third or fourth hole after he had done poorly.

     "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," Hannah told writer Gail Sheehy. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called 'Bush Effort:' If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." 2

     Breaking rules in Andover

     Upon moving to Houston, the Bush family pulled strings to get him into Kincaid, a stylish private school, even though there was a waiting list. At the age of 15, Bush was sent to a prestigious New England prep school, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he earned the reputation as a popular athlete and party animal who broke rules against minors drinking. He was more interested in telling others what to do and clowning around than he was in studying.

     George H.W. Bush was on the Phillips board of directors during most of the years his sons went there. When they broke the rules and faced expulsion, Dad was able to keep them from being suspended, helping to teach them how relatively easy it was for the privileged few to get around society's laws. Jeb and Marvin Bush, two of George W. Bush's brothers, were caught red-handed drinking and abusing drugs, respectively, but they were not even suspended, unlike some other students caught doing similar actions. Jeb even once described himself in his youth as a "cynical little turd" who "smoked pot and inhaled." 3

     George W. deemed himself "high commissioner of stickball" and devised fake IDs at Phillips so his classmates could purchase liquor. Bush signed his name on the forged documents, making the ID at least halfway appear official.

     He also started the demeaning practice of giving people nicknames and worked his class like a politician. Bush was in with the "cool" kids who would exclude others in their activities. "He was more interested in social standing than what grades he had to get in order to get into Yale," Bob Marshall, a Phillips classmate, told Minutaglio. "He wasn't a scholar, he wasn't a leader, he wasn't a good athlete. He would call people names, derogatory nicknames. Other people would use them behind people's backs, but he was more open about it." 4

     While some say Bush cheated to get his C's in school, the hard evidence of him doing so is difficult to unearth. One would think if Bush cheated on grades, he would at least do it enough to get B's. It's possible Bush got a fraternity brother to write term papers or obtain copies of tests - acts that are common in college frats and dormitories - but finding someone to admit to doing that is another matter. Still, there are plenty of other on-the-record instances of how Bush cheated or broke the rules in his school days. 5

     Yale exploits

     Even though Bush had so-so grades that should not have allowed him to get accepted to Yale, his father's and grandfather's standings at that Ivy League institution were all he needed. The dean at Phillips even point-blank told Bush he would not get into Yale. But with help from his family, especially his U.S. senator grandfather, Prescott, Bush was allowed to attend Yale. Friends said Bush was "shocked" to get in there. 6

     Rather than try to improve his grades and prove he belonged, Bush lobbied to become president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he conceived the illegal idea to actually brand pledges. Forming the Greek letter "Delta" from a coat hanger, Bush would heat the wire and then burn the backsides of pledges during their initiation rituals.

     The Yale Daily News called the frat-house brandings "sadistic and obscene." Despite photographic evidence in the paper to the contrary, Bush, who never had himself branded, told The New York Times that the scarring was "only a cigarette burn." 7

     Several of his victims who were branded said otherwise. One pledge told the Yale newspaper that he was beaten, and the branding was almost a relief. "By that time, my body was so numb that the iron felt good - like a match being held close to my body," he said. "Despite Yale's Ivy sophistication, pledging a fraternity at Yale is often a degrading, sadistic and obscene process." 8

     The 1967 article detailed how pledges had to sit with their heads between their legs for two to five hours and were kicked if they as much as moved or even coughed. The Yale fraternity board fined Bush's frat, and the brandings stopped. In a Yale article in 2005, Albert Evans, president of the Inter-Fraternity Council in 1967 and Bush acquaintance, admitted what Bush did was illegal. "What DKE was doing was clearly outside the rules, and they were sanctioned for that," Evans said. 9

     Bush also lobbied hard to get into the Skull and Bones Society, a secret elite club that practiced weird initiation rituals that included being forced to sit naked in a tomb and reveal sexual histories. Bush received the name "Magog" in the Skull and Bones cult because he had the most extensive sexual experience of all the initiates. Many in the moralistic crowd Bush would later solicit votes from considered premarital sex to be "cheating against God."

     On the athletic field, Bush could not live up to his father's prowess. So he apparently took a few shortcuts there, as well. A photo published in a Yale yearbook shows Bush on the rugby field sucker-punching an opponent, as well as illegally tackling above the shoulders and leaving his feet. The caption says, "George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying, right hook to opposing ball carrier." 10

     At Yale, Bush was actually arrested for violating certain laws. In 1966, police nabbed him for stealing a Christmas decoration from a store display that he hung on his frat house. Police booked Bush on a misdemeanor charge but later dropped it after one his father's friends intervened - a familiar pattern in Bush's life. 11

     The following year, Bush was arrested by campus police for pulling down the goal posts at Princeton while celebrating a Yale football win. The campus police let him and others involved go after telling them to leave town.

     He also tried to get some frat brothers to help him steal the United Way sign in New Haven, though they did not follow through on that theft. "He was the best at egging other people into schemes, like Tom Sawyer," Robert Beebe, a DKE brother who compared Bush to the John Belushi character in Animal House, told Minutaglio. 12

     Several former Yale students told Kitty Kelley and Erica Jong that they did more than drink with Bush - they sold cocaine or snorted it with Bush back then. One said he did not feel right about "blowing George's cover because I was doing the same thing." 13

     Rove cheats in high school debates after being beaten by a girl

     As Bush was sowing his oats on an Ivy League campus, Karl Rove was honing his dirty tricks in the College Republicans organization. While Bush came from a rich and politically-connected family that wasn't above cheating to get ahead, Rove's family was arguably more dysfunctional. Rove never knew his biological father, his stepfather divorced his mother when he was in college, and his mother later killed herself.

     In published reports, Rove said he knew he was a Republican at the young age of nine when he supported Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. He paid for that support - by being beat up by a girl. "There was a little girl across the street who was Catholic and found out I was for Nixon, and she was avidly for Kennedy," Rove was quoted as saying in one report. "She put me down on the pavement and whaled on me and gave me a bloody nose. I lost my first political battle." 14

     Rove started his dirty tricks on his debate team at Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. Before key debates, he would get some aides to carry in numerous boxes of index cards to intimidate the other side. On all but 20 or 30, nothing would be written on the cards. "It was all psychological," Emil Langeland, a fellow Rove debate team member, told authors James Moore and Wayne Slater. 15

     At the University of Utah, Rove became president of the College Republicans chapter but never graduated from college as he worked his way up the national organization's ladder. In 1968, he worked on Utah Republican Sen. Wallace Bennett's re-election campaign. In 1970, Rove worked on the campaign of Sen. Ralph Smith in Illinois. He also did more behind-the-scenes work for the Illinois Republican Party.

     For instance, Rove posed as a supporter of Alan Dixon, a Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois, and stole stationary from the campaign. He then created a flier that lied about offering free beer, food and women at Dixon's campaign opening event on the official stationary and distributed thousands of copies to homeless centers and similar places. Hundreds of the homeless showed up, effectively disrupting the event. Dixon, who went on to win that election, later said of Rove's stunt: "It was a little upsetting." Rove never apologized. 16

     With such a record, Rove became executive director of the College Republicans by 1971 and maintained an office at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Republican National Committee, which happened to be headed by none other that George H.W. Bush. Rove organized conferences on college campuses that instructed young Republicans how to do dirty tricks. At one in Kentucky in 1972, Rove recalled the Dixon trick with "considerable delight." That was a mere two months after the Watergate burglary. 17

     In these seminars, Rove would bring up the Watergate break-in only as a reminder of not to get caught. Rove's dirty tricks at that time were substantial enough to attract the interest of Richard Davis, an assistant in the Watergate special prosecutor’s office. John Dean, a Nixon aide, said he first heard of Rove from Davis, who was investigating sleazy tactics related to campaign ads. Davis "had Rove on his radar" and "suggested that Rove was a political operator who played at the edge of the rules, if not beyond them," Dean wrote. 18

     At the same time, Rove worked with notorious Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti, who was responsible for planting false stories in a New Hampshire newspaper that accused Democratic prestidential candidate Edmund Muskie's wife of being a heavy drinker and using profanity, while Muskie supposedly said a slur against French Canadians. Segretti similarly smeared other Democrats, including George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm, and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Sen. Tom Eagleton. Rove lapped it all up. 19

     When Dean asked a former colleague what Rove was like, he said Rove was "Haldeman and Ehrlichman, all in one." But Dean shied away from calling Rove Bush's "brain," saying that only "flatters Rove while getting Bush off the hook for the hardball dirty campaigns he runs." 20

     In the early 1970s, Rove befriended another prominent dirty trickster, Lee Atwater, who was president of his South Carolina college's Republican chapter. In 1973, they teamed up, with Rove chairman of the College Republicans National Committee and Atwater executive director.

     Rove's campaign to become chairman was filled with more dirty tricks. When the election came down to Rove and Robert Edgeworth of Michigan, Rove and Atwater convinced the election certification committee to throw out votes similar to how Rove and other Republicans got votes discarded in 2000 in Florida. Edgeworth charged that the committee threw out votes "often on the flimsiest of reasons." Both candidates claimed victory and made acceptance speeches. 21

     With the decision coming down to H.W. Bush as RNC chairman, who Rove had already met, Bush announced his choice of Rove through a letter rather than face to face. Edgewater wrote Bush asking why, and Bush responded by accusing Edgewater of being disloyal to the party and leaking information to the media, which Edgewater said he did not do. 22

     A few months later after saying he would organize a special committee to investigate Rove, Bush instead appointed Rove as a special assistant at the RNC. That's where Rove met George W., beginning a devious alliance that would rock the world. Atwater would eventually apologize for his misdeeds too late on his deathbed. Rove and Bush have never apologized, even when they were caught red-handed.

     Cheney sucks on federal government teat

     In another of the seemingly endless string of Republican hypocrises, Dick Cheney Jr. – who spent much of his political career railing against supposed government excess and environmental regulations - grew up sucking on the federal government conservation-wing teat. His father, Dick Sr., was a soil conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not to mention a Democrat.

     Among the many aspects of Cheney's life that were underhanded was his link with Wyoming, which Cheney tried to claim was his home most of his life. In reality, Cheney was born and raised for much of his younger years in Nebraska and did not move to Wyoming until he was a teenager. Following high school, Cheney attended Yale University, but he cheated his chance at an Ivy League education, reportedly flunking out twice after failing grades in part due to drinking. He later shaped up enough to obtain bachelor's and master's degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.

     "He didn't dig in and study like the rest of us," Jacob Plotkin, a college roommate of Cheney’s told the Yale Daily News. "He was in with the freshman football players, whose major activity was playing cards and horsing around and talking a lot....And at night, he would go out and fool around with the freshman football players, play cards. He got by a lot on just native intelligence because he didn't go to classes." 23

     Somehow, Cheney passed a multiple-choice psychology exam without attending classes, raising questions how he could do that without some underhanded help. Cheney was more interested in water balloon fights, even attracting a visit from campus police due to his hoard of water balloons in his bedroom. 24

     In his early 20s, Cheney was twice convicted of driving while intoxicated in Wyoming. He did not serve any jail time, but his license was suspended for 30 days. He told The New Yorker that the arrests made him "think about where I was and where I was headed. I was headed down a bad road, if I continued on that course." 25

     Cheney did not gain high marks for his interest in his fellow humans. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," John Perry Barlow, a former supporter, told a Rolling Stone writer. Steve Billings, another former Yale roommate, summed it up thusly, "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic." 26

     Other Republicans, Bushes caught cheating

     The Republican Party and the Bush family have a long history of committing dirty tricks and downright illegal acts to help get ahead politically and financially. The Democrats and families like the Kennedys have their own such history, but it is not as lengthy or brazen. And not nearly as many Democrats as Republicans have bragged in public about being so moral as they hypocritically prove otherwise when they think no one is looking.

     An example that came back to haunt Democrats in 2000 occurred in 1876, when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the national popular vote by some 250,000 and needed just one more electoral vote to defeat Republican Rutherford Hayes. Disputes raged in several states, including Florida, and leaders agreed that a 15-member commission of five senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices would decide the presidency. Seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent were named to the commission. But the independent - a justice - was elected to the Senate from Illinois and removed himself from the commission. The only justices left were Republicans, and Republicans reportedly made some underhanded deals to get the commission to vote along party lines, 8-7, to give all of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.

     In a further twist of irony, many historians conclude that Tilden actually won the vote in Florida. The commission refused to examine the actual Florida votes and to consider irregularities in the Florida voting.

     Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush's father and George W. Bush's grandfather who became a U.S. senator, was known as an alcoholic who reportedly helped steal the remains of Geronimo for his Yale Skull and Bones initiation. He also made some underhanded business deals, including with key Nazi Germany businessmen as late as 1942. The deals violated "the letter and the spirit of the federal Trading with the Enemy Act," wrote Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and author Justin A. Frank. 27

     Prescott's brother, James, broke his marriage vows three times, with his second wife claiming he beat her. 28

     George H.W.'s competitive nature during sailing competitions at Kennebunkport, Maine, in his younger days included an instance in which he cheated by tying a bucket to a competitor's center board right before a big race. In his later years, he accepted illegal campaign contributions from none other than Richard Nixon for his 1970 failed U.S. Senate campaign. At least $55,000 of the $106,000 contribution from a secret campaign slush fund called "Operation Townhouse" was in cash and not reported as required by law. Henry Ford II also sent the Bush campaign $9,500, and Bush only reported $2,500 of it. 29

     During Watergate, H.W. headed the Republican National Committee and did everything he could to keep that scandal quiet. In 1973, Bush even came up with a phony plan to divert attention by accusing the late Carmine Bellino, a committee investigator for the U.S. Senate committee investigating Watergate, of trying to bug the hotel where Nixon stayed preparing for the 1960 debates with JFK. The investigation into that lie and dirty trick went on for more than two months, causing delays in the Watergate committee's proceedings. Sam Dash, the chief counsel to the Watergate committee, called the Bush act a "dirty trick," while Bellino accused H.W. of slander and defamation, saying it "was a terrible thing that George Bush did. His charges were absolutely false. Bush was doing the bidding of the White House." 30

     Bellino was eventually cleared, of course, but not before Bush almost helped destroy the Watergate investigation. He might have succeeded had people like former No. 2 G-man W. Mark Felt not been there to blow the whistle.

     Many people also erroneously believe Watergate was only about a relatively minor burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It was not. For one thing, the Nixon "plumbers" burglarized numerous offices, including that of the psychiatrist of California doctor Daniel Ellsberg, who opposed the Vietnam War, and the Brookings Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank.

     But the criminal actions and dirty tricks of the Nixon administration went way beyond burglary to Nixon misusing $10 million in public tax money on his private homes; planning to physically attack Ellsberg at an anti-war rally; misusing almost $1 million in tax money for an array of dirty tricks against Democrats that included planting lies in the media, forging letters, and stealing documents; accepting millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions from Gulf Oil Corp., American Airlines, ITT, and other corporations; trying to bribe the "plumbers" into silence by paying them $450,000; illegally wiretapping scores of private telephones; and obstruction of justice by erasing tapes and "losing" other evidence; to name but a few. Nixon even cheated on his income taxes, to boot, taking an illegal $576,000 tax deduction for some of his papers. 31

     Nixon even ordered campaign literature from his 1972 Democratic opponent, George McGovern, to be planted in the apartment of Arthur Bremer, who shot independent candidate George Wallace in May 1972, in an attempt to implicate the Democrats. 32

     As CIA director later in the 1970s, H.W. Bush directed the agency to plant a phony story saying that the bombing of a former Chilean ambassador and a colleague was executed by "leftists looking to create a martyr for their cause" to cover up CIA mistakes in the case. He even cheated on his taxes in 1981 by not paying taxes on a $596,101 profit from selling a Houston home. Bush tried to say his home in Kennebunkport was his main home. He eventually had to admit he cheated and pay about $200,000 in back taxes, penalties and interest. 33

     Footnotes

1. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times Books, 1999, pp. 49-50.
2. Gail Sheehy. "The Accidental Candidate," Vanity Fair, Oct. 2000.
3. Rupert Cornwell, "The Bush clan, The family that plays to win." The Independent, London, Nov. 7, 1998.
4. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times Books, 1999, p. 66.
5. Wilson Ray, "Our Cheating President." Southern Daily News, Oct. 10, 2004. 6. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 30.
7. "Branding Rite Laid to Fraternity." The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1967.
8. Kimberly Chow and Jack Mirkinson, "Cartoon on Bush recalls Yale frat hazing.’ Yale Daily News, Dec. 1, 2005, Nov. 3, 1967.
9. Ibid.
10. Tom Tomorrow, "George W. Bush sucker-punches a rugby opponent at Yale." This Modern World blog, Aug. 10, 2004.
11. J.H. Hatfield. Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001, p. 34.
12. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty. New York: Times Books, 1999, p. 95.
13. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 266.
14. Lee Davidson, "Triumph of the underdog," Deseret News, Dec. 8, 2002.
15. James Moore and Wayne Slater. Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 119.
16. "GOP Probes Official as Teacher of 'Tricks,'" The Washington Post, Aug. 10, 1973.
17. James Moore and Wayne Slater. Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 130.
18. John Dean. Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004, p. 4.
19. Wayne Madsen. "Exposing Karl Rove." CounterPunch, Nov. 1, 2002.
20. John Dean. Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004, p. 11.
21. James Moore and Wayne Slater. Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 134.
22. Ibid., p. 135.
23. Charles Forelle, "Dick Cheney and Yale: an ill-suited match." Yale Daily News, Sept. 9, 2000.
24. Ibid.
25. The New Yorker, May 7, 1991.
26. T.D. Allman, "The Curse of Dick Cheney." Rolling Stone, Aug. 25, 2004.
27. Justin A. Frank, M.D. Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. New York: ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2004, p. 80.
28. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 49.
29. Ibid., p. 281.
30. Ibid., p. 317.
31. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, pp. 531-32.
32. Joshua Shenk. "What Do We Know and Why Do We Know It?" U.S. News & World Report, June 23, 1997.
33. Kitty Kelley. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 383.


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