Who said Bush wasn't a cowboy?
by Bidabunch
Thu Jul 15th, 2004 at 03:54:29 EDT
This story first surfaced in 1999 and will again this week in The Rolling Stone. Apparently Garry Trudeau was a Yale classmate of Bush and the DKE's got in trouble for branding their members with the Greek Delta letter. The New York Times ran a story on it and quoted Bush as a president of DKE back in 1967. The story is below with him saying it was no more than a cigarette burn.
The Yale Daily News' weekly magazine at the time, ran a lengthy article about the practice called DISGRACE ON THE ROW with a front-page photo of an initiate's rear. Trudeau, back in 1999, ran a Doonesbury based on this http://dke.org/doonesbury.html with the picture of the brand shown in the Yale paper back in '67. For seven days, Trudeau featured his character Roland Hedley, "chief portal correspondent" for yap.com, pursuing the Texas governor to find out whether Bush had "suffered what he was dishing out."
Trudeau talks about it in Rolling Stone which comes out this Friday. Trudeau, in the article describes his former classmate as "just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries."
From the AP Story:
"Even then he had clearly awesome social skills," Trudeau said. "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable ... He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."
Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.
The article in the campus paper prompted The New York Times to interview Bush, who was a senior that year. Trudeau recalled that Bush told the Times "it was just a coat hanger, and ... it didn't hurt any more than a cigarette burn."
"It does put one in mind of what his views on torture might be today," Trudeau said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto.../bush_trudeau_2
Here's the actual NY Times story
NYT Nov 8, 1967
Branding Rite Laid to Yale Fraternity
Special to the New York Times
New Haven, Nov. 7 - A Yale fraternity accused by the student newspaper of burning its initiates with a brand will have its fate decided Friday by student fraternity leaders.
The fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, could face the temporary closure of its house and a $1,000 fine resulting from alleged violations of rules previously passed by the Interfraternity Council, which consists of Yale's five fraternity presidents.
The charges against Delta Kappa Epsilon were made last Friday in a Yale Daily News article that accused campus fraternities of carrying on "sadistic and obscene" initiation procedures.
The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied on "hot branding iron" to the small of the back of its 40 new members in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half inch wide, appeared with the article.
A former president of Delta that [sic] the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is "only a cigarette burn." |
