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Edited on Sun Jul-13-03 07:56 PM by hedda_foil
It's long and really smears him by a series of semantic juxtapositions and innuendoes. He's got Dean crying openly about his brother and smears him about that, implying that he loses it too easily and is a victim of ongoing surivor's guilt, while at the same time acknowledging that he had grief counseling at the time. Then he tries to smear Dean for that. Snidely implies that he's got psych problems. Beats up on his father for being really tough (4 boys -- hello?), hits him on temper with no evidence for anything out of the ordinary.
And then there's this. Notice how Fineman juxtaposes a really vicious statement about Dean's father's flunking out of school and being a virtual alcoholic with Dean himself ... intentionally trying to conflate the two men. Charming. Really charming. This fries my fish!
<snip>
EERIE SIMILARITIES
Ironically, the roots and rising of one Howard Brush Dean III bear an eerie similarity to those of one George Walker Bush: Mayflowering family trees, early industrial-era money, family compounds near Atlantic waters, prep schools and a party-hearty life at Yale (Bush ’68, Dean ’71). The birthright of such an upbringing is confidence in social position and a sense of license to say anything to anyone at any time—without warning, restraint or evident regret. Dean insists that “everyone in our family is totally unpretentious,” and so they were, and are. But he is brusque by nature, and if he can seem bumptious to the press at times, why not? The Deans (or, more specifically, the Hunting clan, descended of whaling captains) took up residence in Sag Harbor—now a pricey reach of eastern Long Island—three centuries before media elites began networking there.
His four obstreperous sons (Howard is the eldest) worshiped him—and feared him. “He was our role model,” says Howard. “He was also a micromanager.” That meant raising hell in defiance of Dad whenever possible and making up for any deficiency by marching through life straight ahead. So “Howie” Dean pumped iron furiously at St. George’s Episcopal School in Newport, R.I., playing guard and linebacker on the football team—positions normally reserved for bigger boys. He was wrestling captain in his senior year, a master of the quick pin. At Yale he trod the path of his father, who flunked out twice and bragged about his social exploits when he showed his son around the campus. Howie was a hard drinker and partier, too. “But it was harder to flunk out in my time,” he says. Like George W. Bush, Dean quit drinking cold turkey. He did so in 1981, when he was 32, one week after marrying Judith Steinberg in a Manhattan hotel. “I didn’t like the way I behaved when I drank,” he says.
PERSONAL POWER
Dean wasn’t deeply interested in politics per se, but rather, it seems, in power of a personal kind. He was a senior prefect at St. George’s. At Yale, he thought about teaching or medicine, which put the fate of others in the practitioner’s hands. “I have always wanted to change the world in some way,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s very deep.” Indeed, it took a while for it to surface. After a post-college year skiing in Aspen, Dean returned to New York in 1972 to become the next (fourth) Dean—stretching back to Herbert Hollingshead Dean, a founder of Smith Barney—to be an investment banker.
He hated it. Business was bad. (There was an Arab oil embargo on.) Dean missed the country life of hockey on the pond and duck on the table that he’d grown up with (at least on weekends) in the big house in eastern Long Island. “I took my father to dinner, fed him three martinis and told him I wanted to go to medical school,” Dean recalls. He was 25—too late for the “micromanager” to protest. He
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