11.His Former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not
just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological liar.

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By Mary Jacoby
Sept. 16, 2004

For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi,
one of George W. Bush's professors at Harvard
Business School, was content with his green-card
status as a permanent legal resident of the
United  States. But Bush's ascension to the
presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native
to secure his  American citizenship. The reason:
to be able to speak out with the full authority
of citizenship about  why he believes Bush lacks
the character and intellect to lead the world's
oldest and most powerful democracy.

"I don't remember all the students in detail
unless I'm prompted by something," Tsurumi said
in a  telephone interview Wednesday. "But I
always remember two types of students. One is the
very  excellent student, the type as a professor
you feel honored to be working with. Someone with
strong  social values, compassion and intellect
-- the very rare person you never forget. And
then you  remember students like George Bush,
those who are totally the opposite."

The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA
students in Tsurumi's macroeconomic policies and
international business class in the fall of 1973
and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting
associate professor at Harvard Business School
from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a
professor of international business at Baruch
College in New York.

Trading as usual on his father's connections,
Bush entered Harvard in 1973 for a two-year
program.  He'd just come off what George H.W.
Bush had once called his eldest son's "nomadic
years" --  partying, drifting from job to job,
working on political campaigns in Florida and
Alabama and, most famously, apparently not
showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.

Harvard Business School's rigorous teaching
methods, in which the professor interacts
aggressively  with students, and students are
encouraged to challenge each other sharply,
offered important  insights into Bush, Tsurumi
said. In observing students' in-class
performances, "you develop pretty  good ideas
about what are their weaknesses and strengths in
terms of thinking, analysis, their  prejudices,
their backgrounds and other things that students
reveal," he said.

One of Tsurumi's standout students was Rep. Chris
Cox, R-Calif., now the seventh-ranking member  of
the House Republican leadership. "I typed him as
a conservative Republican with a conscience,"
Tsurumi said. "He never confused his own ideology
with economics, and he didn't try to hide his
ignorance of a subject in mumbo jumbo. He was
what I call a principled conservative." (Though
clearly a partisan one. On Wednesday, Cox called
for a congressional investigation of the validity
of  documents that CBS News obtained for a story
questioning Bush's attendance at Guard duty in
Alabama.

Bush, by contrast, "was totally the opposite of
Chris Cox," Tsurumi said. "He showed pathological
lying habits and was in denial when challenged on
his prejudices and biases. He would even deny
saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He
was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I
challenged him." When asked to explain a
particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would
respond,  "Oh, I never said that." A White House
spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking
comment.

In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged,
Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government
should  assist retirees and other people on fixed
incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled,
"made this ridiculous statement and when I asked
him to explain, he said, 'The government doesn't
have to help poor people -- because they are
lazy.' I said, 'Well, could you explain that
assumption?' Not only could he not explain it, he
started backtracking on it, saying, 'No, I didn't
say that.'"

If Cox had been in the same class, Tsurumi said,
"I could have asked him to challenge that and he
would have demolished it. Not personally or
emotionally, but intellectually."

Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film
"The Grapes of Wrath," based on John  Steinbeck's
novel of the Depression. "We were in a discussion
of the New Deal, and he called  Franklin
Roosevelt's policies 'socialism.' He denounced
labor unions, the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name
it. He denounced the civil rights movement as
socialism. To him, socialism and communism were
the same thing. And when challenged to explain
his prejudice, he could not defend his argument,
either ideologically, polemically or
academically."

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in
class would then become the subject of a
whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In
class, he couldn't challenge them. But after
class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway
and started bad-mouthing those students who had
challenged him. He would complain that someone
was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies.
So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his
smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and
vengeful guy."

Many of Tsurumi's students came from
well-connected or wealthy families, but good
manners  prevented them from boasting about it,
the professor said. But Bush seemed unabashed
about the connections that had brought him to
Harvard. "The other children of the rich and
famous were at least well bred to the point of
realizing universal values and standards of
behavior," Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came
late to class and often sat in the back row of
the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber
jacket from the Texas Air National Guard and
spitting chewing tobacco into a cup.

"At first, I wondered, 'Who is this George Bush?'
It's a very common name and I didn't know his
background. And he was such a bad student that I
asked him once how he got in. He said, 'My dad
has good friends.'" Bush scored in the lowest 10
percent of the class.

The Vietnam War was still roiling campuses and
Harvard was no exception. Bush expressed strong
support for the war but admitted to Tsurumi that
he'd gotten a coveted spot in the Texas Air
National Guard through his father's connections.

"I used to chat up a number of students when we
were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here
was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket,
and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days.
And I said, 'George, what did you do with the
draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air
National Guard.'  And I said, 'Lucky you. I
understand there is a long waiting list for it.
How'd you get in?' When he told  me, he didn't
seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was
entitled to all kinds of privileges  and special
deals. He was not the only one trying to twist
all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But
then, he was fanatically for the war."

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a
draft while supporting a war in which others were
dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was
caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."

Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his
detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up,
with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.

In recent days, Tsurumi has told his story to
various print and television outlets and appears
in Kitty Kelley's exposé "The Family: The Real
Story of the Bush Dynasty." He said other
professors and students at the business school
from that time share his recollections but are
afraid to come forward, fearing ostracism or
retribution. And why is Tsurumi speaking up now?
Because with the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq and
Osama bin Laden still on the loose -- not to
mention a federal deficit ballooning out of
control -- the stakes are too high to remain
silent. "Obviously, I don't think he is the best
person" to be running the country, he said. "I
wanted to explain why."

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About the writer
Mary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent.