Doug Buck encouraged his brother to move to Seattle to live with him. He had a decent business buying, renovating, and selling homes as well as developing other buildings in and around Seattle, which was booming. David lived with his brother, who was still single, in a run-down house he bought in the Highlands, an exclusive gated neighborhood favored by some of Seattle’s richest and most powerful families.
At first, David sold government-guaranteed investment contracts for Marsh & McLennan, the big insurance company. “But he didn’t like being a salesman cold-calling,” his brother said. They decided to fix up the house in the Highlands and then sell it. Their house had “great bones” and was big, another friend from Cornell, Beau Poor, recalled, and it was in a beautiful neighborhood. But they had little furniture. Hugh Jones thought David must have used some of the money he received from the MacWilliamses to fix up the house with his brother. “We were driving around,” Jones said, “and I remember seeing like big freaking buildings, like a fifteen-story apartment building, and Bucky said, ‘Yeah, we own that.’ … These were not small buildings and there wasn’t just one. And they’re like, ‘Yeah, we own that. We own that.’ And it’s like, jeez, okay.” Jones was impressed that the brothers’ business seemed to be going so well but was also wondering just what role David was actually playing in it, given his ongoing medical difficulties. Jones visited their house in the Highlands, and remembered driving through the gate into the enclave. “It was like a Bel Air mansion,” he said.
David was also working at Boeing. Doug Buck explained that he worked in what was known as the offset program, which was a way for Boeing to sell its military aircraft to foreign countries. He worked closely with the Israeli military, which required David to get into the office early every day to speak with the Israelis during their working hours. But given that he was often out late drinking, he would show up late for work the next day or still a little drunk, or both. This behavior did not please his superiors at Boeing. Jones did not understand why Bucky was working at Boeing in the first place given how well it seemed the real estate business was going. “The real estate had gone so well … you know, buying up all these big buildings in Seattle in the 1980s,” he said. Jones thought the Boeing program might be a special one. “I remember being really surprised when he told me that he was working for Boeing,” he said. “I was wondering—I didn’t say it—but I was kind of wondering if maybe Boeing had some program to help handicapped or disadvantaged people or people that had health problems or something that helped him get the job.”
Jones was passing through Seattle with his fiancée. They had chartered a sailboat for a week out of the San Juan Islands, and David invited them to stay the night with him and his brother at their house in the Highlands. They all made dinner together that night and there was lots of drinking, of course. “Then something weird happened,” Jones remembered, “which was that as we were leaving the next morning, my fiancée told me that Bucky was like hitting on her the night before and trying to basically, you know … We were having a good time and the next morning we’re driving to the airport and Amy is sitting there like, ‘He hit on me last night. I thought he was your friend.’” Understandably, that angered Jones. “It was a situation with Bucky where it was kind of hard to get pissed at Bucky about that, but yet I was like, ‘You asshole. I’ve made a real effort to try to stay connected with you and this is the thanks I get.’ I never looked him up after that.”
Another friend of ours from Andover, Bill Van Deventer, whose nickname was BVD, ran into David in Seattle, at the Henry Art Gallery. Van Deventer had moved to Seattle after graduating from UVA and the Yale School of Architecture to try his hand at architecture. He had become the architect that David could not. BVD didn’t know David had moved to Seattle, nor vice versa. They coincidentally met at the Henry, which was showing an exhibit of photographs from Andover’s Addison Gallery collection. That’s how BVD learned that David had been working at Boeing. They met up another time at the Seattle Art Museum, to which the Buck brothers had made a sizable donation. They had dinner a few times after that, drank a lot, and had a nice time. But during a brief serendipitous conversation they’d had years before at the San Juan airport, BVD had come to realize that the car accident had affected Dave far more than he was first able to discern. He learned that his friend had problems with both his short-term and long-term memory and that his job at Boeing, as Hugh Jones suspected, was designed for those with handicaps. “His personality was completely different from what I had ever remembered,” he said. The last time he saw David was when he asked if he could borrow BVD’s parallel-line ruler, an architect’s tool.
In September 1991, at the Tokoriki Island Resort in Fiji, Doug Buck married a divorcée three years his senior whose father was a respected lawyer in Palm Beach. They were in the midst of a lengthy sailing adventure. “I was no longer able to interact with David on a daily basis,” Doug explained.
Eventually, Boeing fired Dave and he put together his résumé. He bought a condominium in a plush, modernist high rise at 2201 3rd Avenue, in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. His apartment was on the eighteenth floor, giving him expansive views of the Seattle waterfront, west toward Bainbridge Island. “He was really on his own,” his brother said. In 1998, David called his old Andover friend Marty Koffman, the secretary of our Andover class, who had the unenviable task of writing notes about the comings and goings of our classmates on a semiannual basis. (I’d had the job for years before ceding it to Marty.) “I got a message from David Buck, to which I responded but I got no answer,” Koffman reported to us all that summer. “David please call back. I must have a wrong number.” The following spring David emailed Koffman. “David Buck blinked into my email and let me know he is alive and kicking in Seattle,” Koffman wrote in the class notes that appeared that fall.
But alas, that was no longer true. David Buck died on August 10, 1998, most likely in his new apartment. The King County associate medical examiner pronounced him dead three days later. The immediate cause: “Alcoholic cirrhosis.” His death certificate listed his occupation as an economist in the financial industry, but that seems misleading at best.
The consensus seemed to be that David Buck had drunk himself to death, although no one much wants to discuss what happened, especially since both his father and his paternal grandmother had been teetotalers. On August 19, he was buried next to his father in the Furnace Village Cemetery, in Easton, Massachusetts. He was thirty-nine years old, having outlived his father by seven years.
* * *
ONE MINUTE YOU THINK YOU ARE on a path to become the president of the United States. Or a great architect. Or you’re just wondering how you will get through another day in your senior year of high school. But in another moment, that life can be over, or irredeemably altered beyond any recognition.
We all know people who died young and tragically. Occasionally, for reasons we often don’t know, we think about them, wondering where they’d be now, if only. Sometimes I think about Brad Morrison, who was two classes ahead of me in grammar school, the tiny, private Shepherd Knapp School in central Massachusetts. His hobby was collecting glass insulators from the tops of telephone poles; the insulators attached the electrical wires to the pole. Nowadays these insulators are made of ceramic, painted an ugly brown. But back then, they were made of glass—mostly a translucent green, but other sublime colors, too—and they were made in a variety of different shapes and sizes and designs. They became collectibles. There were catalogs filled with the different kinds of glass insulators listing how much each was worth in the market. They were difficult to obtain, obviously. My friend Bobby Miller and I would study the catalogs for hours.
One morning at Shepherd Knapp we were informed that Brad had died after climbing up a telephone pole to try to get a glass insulator, only to have fallen off, breaking electrical wires along the way. It was never really clear to me whether he died from his fall or from being electrocuted. But it didn’t really matte
r. Brad Morrison was gone, his life snuffed out in an instant, a victim of appallingly bad judgment.
Everyone has a version of a Brad Morrison story. These deaths loom so large that we are left only with stupefying bewilderment when, for instance, we stop to consider what might have been for the ten people at Santa Fe High School in Texas, the seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the twenty-eight deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the thirteen at Columbine High School, the fifty-eight people killed at the country music concert in Las Vegas, the forty-nine who died at the nightclub in Orlando, the fourteen people who died during the attack in San Bernardino, California, or the eleven worshippers gunned down on a Sabbath morning at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. And on and on.
But it was the slow, tragic death of David Buck following the sudden accident in which he was a drunken passenger that got me thinking about how the trajectory of one’s life can change in an instant. You may think you are going about your business—supervising a deposition in San Francisco, crossing the street after coming home late from a party in Brooklyn, going for a weekend sail with your kids on Lake Michigan, or making your way to a wedding on Cape Cod—when suddenly you are confronted with the terrifying prospect of your own death, maybe even before you realize it. Not every one of these tragedies unfolded as did David Buck’s, slowly but inexorably. And few of those responsible for them get the kind of redemption that Bruce MacWilliams was fortunate to receive. Such moments of grace can’t be counted on. But when it happens, those left behind can’t help but stop, even for a moment, and reflect upon the fragility of life.
Andover is a place where very big dreams are formed, nurtured, and encouraged without the slightest bit of irony. When they get snuffed out, whether in an instant or over time, the damage to the rest of the Delta Force can be substantial, if only because it reveals the stark truth that no one is exempt from the one unavoidable aspect of life: death. Not even those who have every privilege that life offers, right from the start, can escape the inevitable. It’s one thing when death strikes at a ripe old age or after a long illness or when it seems better than the alternative. But when lives are taken suddenly, with little warning, or changed in an instant at the end of one’s sophomore year in college, it just doesn’t seem fair, or right, or make a whole lot of sense. Even the religious begin questioning their faith at such moments, and rightly so.
In the years after David Buck’s tragic death, which I first discovered only by reading Marty Koffman’s class notes, I began thinking about my other Andover classmates and friends whose lives—once filled with nearly infinite promise—had similarly been extinguished far too early. There was Jack Berman, dead at age thirty-six; Will Daniel, dead at age forty-one; Harry Bull, like David Buck dead at thirty-nine; and John F. Kennedy Jr., once perhaps the most famous man alive—and my dorm mate in Stearns House West and close friend—who died on a hot August night at age thirty-eight, along with his wife and sister-in-law, after he piloted his own plane into the Atlantic Ocean, right off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
The stories of these four friends of mine from Andover are not just the stories of their deaths. There’s nothing much to that alone other than morose facts. Rather, as I became further and further immersed in the rich details of their short lives, I became increasingly fascinated the more I learned about how they happened to get to Andover, what they did afterward, and how they grew into husbands, fathers, and men of the world—and then, yes, how their lives ended just as they were getting going.
We had mostly lost touch, of course; this was the era before social media made keeping track of friends an easy click away. That made for a little sadness if only because we had all been pretty close for a few years before going our separate ways as our lives came into greater focus. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly a shock, either. In those days, before cell phones, the only way to keep in touch was by somehow getting the pay-phone number to a college dorm. Which wasn’t likely. And let’s face it, guys rarely write letters to other guys. So the inevitable separation that followed the Andover graduation, along with the losing touch, seemed like just another step on the path to achieving the goal of greatness that the school had thrust upon us.
To be sure, telling their stories was a reporting challenge, not just because they were not around to be interviewed but also because with one exception they were not famous or particularly well known. I relied—and am thankful for—the recollections of friends, relatives, wives, and children. In these pages, I’ve tried to report my friends’ stories as honestly and responsibly as I’ve previously told the stories of Lazard, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and the Duke lacrosse scandal. I decided early on that the greatest gift I could give my old friends was sharing with others the truths of their lives, at least as best I could figure them, for as long as they were with us.
The End Depends upon the Beginning
ANDOVER IS AS OLD AS AMERICA ITSELF, and has always been an unlikely combination of elite and ecumenical. Founded in April 1778 by a trio of austere Calvinist men from a wealthy New England family, Andover has long gone out of its way not only to nurture America’s best and brightest but also to find “youth from every quarter”—young men and women who might likely benefit from an Andover education but who probably had never heard of the place, let alone considered paying for it. For more than 240 years, this academic and social alchemy has made Andover a bouillabaisse of rich and poor, of entitled and ambitious, of privileged and disadvantaged. But of course, there was no getting around the fact that Andover was started for the sole purpose of manufacturing, and nurturing, the future leaders of the country—as long as they were white, male, and Protestant.
Samuel Phillips Jr. was only twenty-six, and seven years out of Harvard, when he founded Andover, which was backed financially and philosophically by his wealthy father, who lived in town, and by his wealthy uncle, John, who lived nearly twenty-five miles away from Andover in Exeter, New Hampshire. (John Phillips started Phillips Exeter Academy three years later; the two schools have been friendly rivals ever since.) Samuel Junior was raised essentially as an only child—all his other brothers and sisters had died—and much was expected of him. When he was at Harvard, his father wrote him letters admonishing him to keep to the straight-and-narrow path of the teachings of their Calvinist Church. “Beware of Bold Company,” he wrote his son. “Spread up your Bead [Bed] as soon as you are up. Two mornings I found it very much like a pig’s nest. Find some place for your Tea Kettle out of sight.”
After Harvard, newly married Samuel Junior moved back to Andover. He started buying land and became one of the area’s most respected farmers. He was selected to represent Andover in the Provincial Congress, in 1775, after the Revolutionary War had started. He was an impassioned speaker at the congress, and was later asked to undertake the Herculean task of moving the books in the Harvard library to Andover for safekeeping during the conflict. According to Fritz Allis’s exhaustive history of Andover, Youth from Every Quarter, one of the main reasons the Phillips family chose to start Andover, Allis believed, was to try to preserve a way of life they thought might be quickly slipping away from them. Paradoxically, while the Phillips men were advocates for some relief from British oppression, they were not big supporters of the war, or of the radical changes that a victory might portend for their very comfortable lives and lifestyle. The school was founded “as a bulwark against change,” Allis wrote, “an agency for maintaining the virtues of the past.”
The short Andover “Constitution,” written in April 1778 by Samuel Junior and signed by his father and uncle, captured Samuel Junior’s concern about the changes that he feared the American Revolution would unleash. Despite their revolutionary proclivities, he and his family had prospered under British rule. He wrote about “the prevalence of ignorance and vice, disorder and wickedness” afoot in the land. He and his family were starting the school, he continued, “for the purpose of instructing YOUTH not only in English and Latin gramm
ar, writing, arithmetic, and those sciences, wherein they are commonly taught; but more especially to learn them the GREAT END AND REAL BUSINESS OF LIVING.”
The first Andover class, in 1778, had about fifty students, a mixture of Abbots, Baldwins, Lowells, Lovejoys, Walkers, and Wards. No less a revolutionary figure than Paul Revere designed and engraved the Andover seal. Made of pure silver and embossed to a copper plate, the seal depicts a rather disproportionately large beehive, atop a pedestal, surrounded by a group of industrious buzzing bees. You get the picture. There are two Latin phrases on the seal. The first, NON SIBI, means “not for oneself.” The other, FINIS ORIGINE PENDET, is translated into English as “the end depends upon the beginning.”
Within five years, Andover had expanded its reach beyond the Massachusetts elite to those sons (and much, much later, daughters) of the burgeoning nation as a whole. George Washington’s nephew and eight grandnephews attended Phillips Academy in its early years. In fact, in 1783, Howell Lewis, a Virginian and Washington’s nephew, became one of the first students from outside New England to attend the school. In 1795, Washington used his pull to get his nephew’s two sons into Andover. Andover graduated Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the doctor, poet, and father of the future Supreme Court justice; the very famous Henry Stimson; and Jack Lemmon, the movie star. Another movie star, Humphrey Bogart, did not graduate—in fact, he was expelled for throwing the headmaster into Rabbit Pond—yet managed to find some success in life nonetheless. President Andrew Jackson spent a night at the school in July 1833 and addressed the students the next morning on horseback. In 1913, President Theodore Roosevelt attended the graduation ceremony of his son Archibald. In 1921, former president William Howard Taft, then a professor at Yale Law School and soon to be a Supreme Court justice, was an honored guest and speaker. (His father was an Andover graduate.) In 1928, on the occasion of the school’s 150th anniversary, President Calvin Coolidge addressed the students.
Four Friends Page 3
