Three years ago, a White House photographer snapped Bush 43 welcoming fellow Yalie Louis Auchincloss to something of a family day celebrating the National Medal of the Arts awarded the doyen of American novelists and former naval intelligence officer , who told London's Financial Times :
' He has received an enormous amount of grief from friends over the picture. As befits a lawyer, his defence is a touch legalistic: “I didn’t accept a prize from George W Bush, I accepted a prize from the President of the United States. Who am I to turn that down? The grandchildren had a lovely time!”
Asked if the Bush family chronicle "at the very centre of American politics is the great dynastic... story of our time...the grist for a great society novel? " the man often compared to Edith Wharton said:
“I used to say to my father, ‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems, and the irony of my life is that they did...
they all got behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good, virtuous..the finest men you could find. It was the most disillusioning thing that happened in my life...The officers all sort of expected it; and they all went to private schools...One learns to be commanded by idiots in the private school system...
I just think the Bushes are a big family of sh***, they might have existed anywhere."
Auchincloss' bill of attainder , whose uncivil ecomium I think unfair to several generations may be read here. If his opposite number in the Death By Anecdote game is to be believed, Henry Kissinger told Arthur Schlesinger (over lunch at the Century Association in 1977) that, pursuing his own ambitions, Rumsfeld persuaded Ford to make 41 head of the CIA, in order to keep Bush off the vice presidential short list in 1976.That's public ordure of a higher order.
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