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Talk story about the writer’s discovery
of Republican Presidential front-runner George W. Bush’s confidential
school records when he attended Yale... all the fuss in New Haven may
be an overreaction, to judge from a copy of the academic file that not
long ago found its way here. Bush, after all, has never claimed Phi Beta
Kappa membership or an internship at Partisan Review. He told the
Washington Post’s Lois Romano that if he ever dared to call himself “an
intellectual” his friends would immediately “start laughing” at him. The
college records merely confirm what Bush has already conceded.
According to the Yale document, Bush was a C student... In the end,
George W. may be marked for the White House because of, rather than in
spite of, his mediocre grades. Historically, there is no correlation
between academic achievement and success in the Oval Office. Some of the
nation’s most fiercely intelligent presidents, including Herbert
Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, ran troubled administrations;
two of the century’s most influential presidents were also among the
least academically distinguished—Ronald Reagan did just well enough at
Eureka College to keep his football scholarship, and Franklin Roosevelt
coasted through Harvard with gentleman’s C’s. So it’s hard to know if
the student is really father to the president...
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