eorge W. Bush was sitting in the back row of his class at Harvard Business School in 1973 when a professor took up an unusual case study of how paperwork is managed in a US Senate office. Some students objected: What does this have to do with running a business?
''You never know,'' the professor responded. ''Don't count politics out. One of you could be president one day.''
At that, a classmate recalls, most of the 80 students in the amphitheater-style classroom looked to the place where Bush was seated. The eldest son of the Republican National Committee chairman smiled as if to say, ''Who, me?'' and then, impersonating Richard Nixon, shot his arms into the air, his fingers in the ''V'' for victory signal.
While few classmates say they actually thought of Bush as having presidential timber, it was clear to many that he was a leader. Though a middling student, he was intense about everything, from late-night study groups to captaining intramural teams to the way he delighted classmates with his irreverence.
While most classmates seemed rather buttoned-down, Bush would chew tobacco, wear cowboy boots, and play a larger-than-life role at the school, fairly shouting ''Texas!''
From Bush's easygoing style to his vision of ''entrepreneurial heaven,'' the hallmarks of Bush's presidential campaign show up clearly in accounts of his days strolling the halls of Harvard Business School. Bush's 25th reunion might as well be held in Austin: his classmates include many contributors, fund-raisers and advisers.
Yet Bush's two years here are perhaps the most unexamined chapter of his life, and that is the way he wanted it - until recently.
For more than two decades, Bush rarely mentioned his Harvard ties or his MBA, bitterly remembering how the experience was used against him when he ran for the US House of Representatives from Texas in 1978. He lost in large part because his opponent branded him a Harvard elitist. Bush's just-published autobiography, ''A Charge to Keep,'' glosses over the period in a couple of pages that mention no details about what he learned at the school.
But with Bush's intellectual heft in question after some poor debate performances in recent weeks, the governor is finding new value in talking about his Harvard days, when his habits of mind and character were on early display in a challenging setting.
For some, the memories of him remain vivid. One of Bush's former professors, Howard Stevenson, recalled Bush as a student who ''wrote a decent essay,'' and ''didn't bust his tail'' trying to be a top scholar, but who did show genuine leadership potential. Former classmate Bill Strong, who photographed Bush for the Harvard yearbook, added tellingly, ''I marvel 25 years later; the charisma was there.'' By all accounts, Bush was a middle-of-the-pack student who, far from being casual about classwork, had to work extra hard to keep up with the assemblage of the best and the brightest who got into the B-school.
`Want to help?
...Go make money'
Still, it was here, amid the stacks of the Baker Library and in the red brick buildings along the banks of the Charles River, that Bush set his course in life. He went to Harvard partly to establish an identity separate from his famous father's. By the time he left, he decided he wanted to be just like dad, going into the oil business and, later, politics.
It began as something of a lark. After attending two of New England's elite educational institutions, Phillips Academy in Andover and Yale University, Bush had joined the Texas Air National Guard. He became engaged to a Texas woman, but the two later decided not to marry. At 26, he told friends, he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Then one day, a friend suggested that Bush apply to Harvard Business School. As Bush recalled it, the friend urged him to follow his entrepreneurial instincts: ''You really want to help folks? Go and make money.''
Bush's chances of being accepted seemed slim. He was a `C' student at Yale. At one point, he decided he wanted to be a lawyer, but his application to his home-state University of Texas law school was rejected, apparently due to mediocre grades. To get into the 800-student class at Harvard Business School, he would need to present his grades, a board exam, and a written application. More than 3,300 people applied, many of them with better grades than Bush's. Bush didn't even tell his parents that he was applying, not wanting to disappoint them if he failed to be accepted. Having followed his father's path of Andover, Yale, and as an aviator, he felt he needed to strike out for someplace new, to discover his own identity.
Bush was accepted to the school largely on the strength of his written application, which Bush and the school declined to release. School officials said that while grades are important, they do not wish to fill classes only with students who receive top scores on board exams. ''You could fill a whole class with people who scored 800'' on their board exam, said Stevenson, who still teaches at the school. ''But you are also looking for evidence that they would be leaders.''
On that score, Bush was in.
''I didn't really think much of it when I applied,'' Bush said in an interview. He was somewhat surprised when the admissions office offered him a slot. ''I gladly accepted. All I knew was it was going to change my horizon.''
It was a tense time at Harvard. While many undergraduates were making headlines with protests, Bush could often be spotted wearing his bomber jacket from the Texas Air National Guard, which had given him an early release to attend. There was a significant anticorporate mood among many young people at the time, and Harvard Business School was ''not that popular...and not as competitive as it is now,'' as one Bush classmate recalled.
''The Harvard Business School could hardly be described as a hotbed of protest against the war,'' said Bush classmate Nathaniel Butler, a Vietnam veteran who now works for a Massachusetts Medicaid program.
Leo Corbett, another classmate, said he was stunned by the lack of interest in politics at the business school in 1973, at least compared to the atmosphere at Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1970.
''I had come from the college, where many of my classmates and I expected to be president of the United States,'' Corbett said. ''Everything was politics from '66 to '70, the whole focus, the whole dinner conversation, was politics and public policy and civil rights, and business was just hardly ever discussed.''
But when Corbett finished a Peace Corps stint and arrived at Harvard Business School with Bush in 1973, the discussion of politics ''had diminished by 90 percent.'' The students ''had become very serious and didn't want to be distracted by these outside issues.'' Bush, despite being the son of the Republican National Committee chairman, didn't discuss politics.
''I wasn't political then,'' Bush said, and many classmates confirm they barely knew that Bush's father was running the Republican National Committee at the height of the Watergate scandal. Only later, when Bush's father was mentioned as a possible vice president under President Gerald Ford and then became US envoy to China, did the Bush name become well-known. There were plenty of students who initially were much better known, including the sons and daughters of various corporate chieftains.
To some, the political star at Harvard Business at the time was not Bush, but Mitt Romney, the son of the former Michigan governor and presidential candidate who went on to run unsuccessfully for the US Senate from Massachusetts in 1994 against Senator Edward Kennedy. It was Romney, who was simultaneously pursuing a Harvard Law School degree and a master's degree in business administration, who some believed would run for president one day.
Weekday bookworm,
weekend partier
Bush knew he couldn't survive at Harvard if he reverted to his tendency to put socializing above studying, which happened at Yale when he became president of his fraternity.
So, instead of living on the Harvard Business School campus, as many students did in their first year, Bush lived alone in a three-story walk-up in Cambridge's Central Square. Furnishings were not a priority. He threw a mattress on the floor. Two sawhorses and a piece of plywood made a desk. Bush's favorite meal was the three-for-99-cents pork special on Tuesdays at a Cambridge restaurant.
''I was there to learn, and that's exactly what I did,'' Bush wrote in his autobiography.
Still, like many students, he partied heartily on many weekends, often at the Hillbilly Ranch, once a bastion of country music in downtown Boston.
But unlike most students, Bush also escaped often to a more privileged life, at his aunt Nancy Ellis's house in Lincoln and at his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine. As one of Bush's relatives put it, the Texan enjoyed Cambridge but needed to escape what he considered ''the loony bin.''
''I'd go to Maine as often as I could,'' Bush said.
If Bush went to Harvard partly to establish an identity separate from his father's, the time he spent there also renewed his love for his father. Bush's close friend, Thomas Riley, recalls that Bush invited him to his apartment one day.
''I want you to listen to something,'' Bush said, popping a tape into a player. It was a long, humorous speech by Bush's father. ''I remember thinking that he didn't think it was `uncool' to bring over his buddy and play a tape of his Dad,'' said Riley, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is one of numerous former classmates helping to raise money for Bush.
On another occasion, Bush woke up Riley with an 11:30 p.m. phone call.
''Riley, it's George. Get a pen,'' Bush said.
''What?''
''Write this down. You're going to make a million dollars. Write this down: automatic dog feeder.''
''What?''
''It's a little wheel. It keeps the dog food and dispenses it one day at a time when you're on a trip. Write it down. You're going to make a ton of money.''
But Riley found other ways to make money.
The class of 800 students was divided into 10 sections of 80 students each, with Bush landing in Section C. Classmates say that if Bush had been lazy or unintelligent, he could never have survived the brutal hours and demands of the business school. By all accounts, Bush threw himself into his work, preparing three case studies a night and delivering oral reports the next day about how he would solve an array of business problems.
''I can remember taking an accounting course that was really interesting,'' Bush said. ''I began to see the tools of capitalism.''
Bush said his grades were ''in the middle'' and believes he got ''high honors'' in some classes, but he would not release his records. Certainly, Bush's class standing was helped by the school's grading system, which emphasized strength of class participation over performance on written exams.
Classmate Peter Gebhard remembers what may have been the origin of Bush's campaign slogan of ''compassionate conservatism.'' Gebhard recalls that Bush was upset about the way some people at a company were treated in a case study, the particulars of which Gebhard could not remember. Bush emerged from the class enraged, saying over and over: ''That's not fair, how those people were treated, that's not fair.''
Barbara Casey, who also was in Section C, recalls working on several projects with Bush. Casey, who today is chief operating officer of WorldClinic Inc., of Burlington, remembers case studies involving Eastern Airlines and Corning Glass. Bush, she recalls, was given the assignment of finding stores that carried Corning Glass products. He enthusiastically checked the shelves of nearby hardware stores.
''He was a lot of fun,'' Casey said. ''We laughed a lot. As I recall it, you got a short amount of time. You get the case at 4 in the afternoon, then do a presentation the next day. It was very intense and his humor was appreciated.''
Making connections,
gaining experience
Once, while Bush was waiting in line at The Galley, a campus hamburger joint, he leaned into the cooking area so hard he knocked over a heater, causing his jacket to burst into flames. After putting out the fire, Bush found some duct tape to patch the holes on the jacket, which he continued to wear around campus for the remainder of the term.
The school bred a certain culture that many graduates still rely upon in their business life. As some graduates recall it, the education they received about the importance of establishing social and business contacts has proved far more important than the details of how to tally a balance sheet.
Romney, in an interview, said Bush picked up a style and education that is evident in the Texan's presidential campaign.
''Some students go to the school to get good grades and others to develop judgment, and perspectives and to make personal associations,'' said Romney, who didn't know Bush at Harvard Business School but became well acquainted with him afterward. ''George W. Bush was not the bookworm type. He went to learn from the experience. So my guess is that if business school helped him at all, it was not a series of financial formulas as much it was getting an assessment of the free enterprise system.''
Bush's campaign has also profited from his Harvard connections. Most of the classmates interviewed for this story said they had given Bush the maximum $1,000 and a number said they have made calls to other friends in search of contributions. One classmate, Al Hubbard, is in charge of assembling Bush's team of top campaign advisers.
After graduating from the business school, Bush discovered that he wanted to do exactly what his father had done. He plunged into the oil business in Midland, Texas, and eventually went into politics. Bush got rich on his oil and baseball businesses, in large part due to his networking of wealthy friends, not necessarily his financial acumen.
As a presidential candidate, Bush has applied many lessons from Harvard Business School: forming a team of top people, and creating a ''business'' plan for a campaign that appeals to the broadest group of people.
''Harvard Business school is a very analytical environment,'' Bush said, referring to the school's Socratic method of teaching by oral discussion. ''You are taught to analyze where there is no right answer.''
But then, analyzing aloud, he added, ''I'm not so sure that is the case in politics.''
