How did Bush ever get a degree at Yale?

Cheney's record of mistakes begins in 1959, when Tom Stroock, a Republican politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. "Dick was the all-American boy, in the top ten percent of his class," Stroock says. "He seemed a natural." But instead of triumphing, Cheney failed. "He spent his time partying with guys who loved football but weren't varsity quality," recalls Stephen Billings, an Episcopalian minister who roomed with him during Cheney's freshman (and only full) year at Yale. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material," says his other roommate, Jacob Plotkin. "He passed one psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that. But there are some things you can't bluff, and Dick reached a point where you couldn't recover."

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One atypical point about Casper was that it was an oil town. It attracted people who wanted to make a lot of money; some were scions of respectable Eastern families who had an adventurous streak. In that sense, Casper was like Midland, Texas, where George W. Bush grew up in a small colony of preppie expats. The Casper version of George H. W. Bush was a man named Thomas Stroock, whose great-great-uncle helped found the venerable New York law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and who operated an independent oil company called Alpha Exploration. In fact, Tom Stroock was (and still is) a friend of George Bush's—they were both Yale '48—and, like Bush, spent his spare time on Republican politics.

Lynne Vincent, as a high-school student, got a part-time secretarial job in Stroock's office. She introduced him to her boyfriend, Dick Cheney, who played halfback and outside linebacker and was senior-class president at Natrona County High, and Stroock liked the cut of Cheney's jib. "In those days, you could do things you can't do now," Stroock told me, "so I called Yale and told 'em to take this guy," along with Natrona County High's all-state quarterback from the class of '59, Tom Fake. Yale offered Cheney and Fake full scholarships; in the yearbook there is a picture of the two Stroock-anointed boys, crewcut and grinning, with a caption that says, "Ivy League bound Tom Fake and Dick Cheney show their happiness upon receiving notice of their acceptance by Yale University."

This personnel system, halfway between modern meritocracy and a Horatio Alger novel in which plucky lads get started by caddying for the wealthy, was also responsible for sending that year's student-body president, Dave Nicholas, to Harvard, through the patronage of another émigré alumnus. Both Cheney and Fake flunked out. (Nicholas finally graduated from Harvard in 1967.) In Cheney's case, he decided after three semesters that he should take some time off. He spent a year and a half working as a power lineman and saving up money, returned to Yale, and left again because of poor grades, this time for good, after another semester. What happened? I asked Dave Nicholas, now a lawyer in Laramie, Wyoming, and he said, "I can only extrapolate. They were smart enough, but they hadn't been prepped like the guys from the academies. Going from where we were, that solid, pragmatic background, to the less concrete, more abstract, more theoretical—we needed the bread and butter first. And the social milieu, which I liked, was like 'Animal House,' and when I went to Yale to visit those guys it was like that. It wasn't what you'd expect. It wasn't the most rigorous learning environment." The Casper boys, all of whom had grown up without want, suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar world of ease, wealth, and connections, in which your mistakes might be forgiven if you had been born into it but not if you hadn't. That's a lesson that sticks with you.

During my interview with Cheney, I asked him how he had gone from flunking out of Yale to becoming, as he did within a few years, the epitome of a super-responsible young man. "Hmm. Well, I'm sure for my family it didn't seem like it happened all that fast," he said, cracking his crooked smile. "No, I got out of high school. I hadn't really given that much thought to what I was going to do. I was recruited to go to Yale." He mentioned the Thomas Stroock connection. "I did it primarily because he invited me to do it. I was admitted, and given a full-ride financial package, 'cause my family couldn't afford to send me to Yale. I spent a total of four semesters there, but I was not a diligent student. Really wasn't. Hadn't given it any thought. Wasn't gonna go to college and buckle down. Big transition going from small-town Wyoming to New Haven, Connecticut."

As Cheney got into the story, his language drifted into that terse John Wayne rhythm. "And by the summer of 1963 I was working in Rock Springs, Wyoming, building a power line from there down to Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Wyoming-Utah border. For six years, from the summer I got out of high school, 1959, to the year after Lynne and I got married, when I wasn't in school, I was working on the power lines. Carried a ticket in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers." He continued, "When I should have been graduating from Yale, one of the world's finer universities, with a first-rate education, all paid for by the university, I found myself in Rock Springs"—Wyoming's blue-collar, union, Democratic town—"working, building power lines, having been in a couple of scrapes with the law. Arrested twice within a year for driving under the influence, once in Cheyenne, once in Rock Springs. And it was a sobering"—Cheney chuckled. "I'm not sure that's the right word. Sobering moment. Sit down and think about where I was and where I was headed. I was headed down a bad road, if I continued on that course.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040906fr_archive06