Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Clif Daniel told me the cab company ended up paying Will’s medical bills—of about $50,000—as part of the settlement. In the end, Will’s brother felt it wasn’t Dawoud’s fault. “He wasn’t grossly negligent,” Clif said. “He wasn’t speeding. He was going about thirty miles an hour. It was just a horrible accident.”

  Margaret Truman Daniel died on January 29, 2008, in Chicago, where she was in the process of relocating to be near her oldest son, Clif. Her ashes, and those of her husband, are interred in her parents’ burial plot at the Truman Library, in Independence, Missouri.

  Harry

  HARRY CALVIN BULL WAS BORN in La Grange, Illinois, in 1960. He was named after his step-grandfather, Harry Calvin. Calvin was a lifelong army guy. He was referred to in the Bull family as The Colonel. “He had a collection of shotguns in the house and he’d put on John Philip Sousa music and we’d march around in my grandmother’s house having a great time,” Karna Bull, Harry’s oldest sister, remembered.

  Harry’s father, Richard Bull Jr., was a 1944 graduate of Andover, two years after George H. W. Bush. He had finished Andover a semester early, at seventeen, and like Bush he joined the navy. But Richard Bull detested the navy. “Oh God, he hated it,” Karna said. He didn’t like being bossed around. He didn’t like the rainy, dreary weather in Seattle, where the navy sent him. And he had pretty much decided that war never accomplished much good. “Even back to the Revolutionary War,” she remembered her father used to say, “were we any better off than the Canadians?” He made it through the war unscathed and graduated from Yale and then Yale Law School. His first job was back in his hometown of Chicago, in the legal department of Swift & Co., the meat processing company made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle. He didn’t join the family business, Bradner Smith & Co., until 1960, but within a few years he was chairman and CEO. Bradner Smith, founded in 1852, was one of the biggest paper manufacturers west of the Mississippi and a big deal in and around Chicago for generations. John Bradner Smith, a founder, was Harry Bull’s great-great-grandfather. The Bulls of Illinois were, of course, not the Kennedys of Massachusetts or the Trumans of Missouri, but, in their way, they were a shining example of midwestern American rectitude and values, and Bradner Smith, for a long time, was one of Chicago’s most important companies. It once had the largest paper warehouse in the world.

  Harry’s father would serve as CEO until he retired in 1991. He was an old-school Republican, steeped in conservative views, family values, charity, and modesty. He loved his clubs—he was a member of sixteen at one point, including the fictitious Khyble Bay Yacht Club, which was a family joke but also a testament to the Bulls’ longtime love of sailing—and he loved serving on boards, lots of boards. He was not prone to ostentatious displays of wealth, despite the family’s status in the Chicago area. The Bulls, and their children, moved to Hinsdale, where Harry grew up, a well-to-do suburb west of Chicago. The Bulls eventually had five children, of which Harry was the second youngest. Their father would give them a minimal allowance each week. “My father was pretty careful to keep us, at least the older ones—and I’m not sure about Harry—humble and regular and here’s your allowance and don’t ask for more,” said Karna. Added Rick Bull, Harry’s brother, “We all started getting allowance as soon as we learned arithmetic. I can remember I was given a nickel a week. One penny went to savings, one penny went to charity, and I was given three cents to operate with as I saw fit.”

  Thanks to Richard Bull’s firebrand Republicanism, the children had been raised to “kill and steal from the next village,” Rick said. “Fierce individualism if you will.… It doesn’t take a village, get your ass out of bed and go to work.” The kids would get GOP lapel pins during elections.

  It was an interesting time in wealthy enclaves such as Hinsdale, as the gauzy Ozzie and Harriet childhood gave way to the cultural revolution of 1960s. Rick remembered how around 1970 during his counterculture period he told his father he was going to add his father’s name to “the death list” when the revolution happened because of his status as a CEO oppressor. “He chuckled politely,” Rick remembered, “and said ‘Do what you like. Would you like another hamburger?’”

  * * *

  RICK WAS FIVE YEARS OLDER than Harry and remembers him well as an extremely precocious toddler. When he and his friends weren’t beating up on Harry—in typical sibling fashion—they would often find him “in a soggy diaper” visiting a neighbor and talking about “the finer points of washing an automobile” or “mowing a lawn.” Harry, his brother said, was “just extremely curious about the world around him and was never one to hold back.” By around second or third grade at the Elm Elementary School, it was increasingly clear that Harry had a special intellect and an IQ, at 146, that was in the genius range. Traditional schools could barely contain him. One of the toughest moments of Harry’s life, he later recalled, was when the teachers at Elm told him to take his books and move out of the second-grade classroom, into the third-grade classroom. Then they asked him to move again to the fourth-grade classroom.

  That’s when the Bulls decided to move Harry to a private school with a more rigorous program. There, he completed fourth-grade work in one semester. By the time he was in eighth grade, and twelve years old, Harry wanted to go to his father’s high school, Andover, as a ninth-grader, but Andover decided he would have been too young. And so Harry instead spent his ninth grade year at the private Williston Northampton School, also in Massachusetts.

  He was a faithful correspondent, and it is clear in his letters that Williston was only a temporary stop. “I have reviewed the Andover magazine,” he wrote his father in October 1973, a month or so into his year at Williston. “I am gung ho and looking forward to going to Andover next year.”

  In January 1974, Harry applied to Andover. In answer to an admittedly odd application question, he selected The Exorcist as the movie that had “strongly impressed” him in recent years. “After see [sic] this movie I was, and still am, wondering about the possibilities and consequences of being possessed,” he wrote. “This feeling was left in me not only by an excellent plot, but also by a number of special effects.” In a longer essay, Harry tackled the question about what his generation could do to overcome the problems in society. He was concerned about the problem of “corrupt politics” and the “infamous Watergate incident” that had left “many Americans dumbfounded.” He urged his contemporaries to take fewer vacations, engage in fewer “recreational activities,” to buy fewer plastics and nylon, and to reduce the use of televisions and stereos.

  While not exactly Profiles in Courage, Harry’s application, and his impressive academic accomplishments, not to mention his legacy status, ensured him admittance to Andover. He began as a Lower in September 1974. Like so many others, Harry had a rough start academically. He also did not pass the so-called Competence exam—few did—that attempted to determine who could avoid taking a course in the rudimentary skills of clear and concise writing. “The reason he did not pass was that his style became awkward and priggish when he tried to comment upon the waste problem in the U.S.,” wrote his English teacher Frank Bellizia. “His analysis of structural problems in the short paragraphs was also too thin.”

  Outside the classroom there was trouble, too, about “parietals,” the euphemism used for Andover’s odd set of rules about when members of the opposite sex could visit your dorm room. Harry wasted little time in breaking these rules. On October 11, at 8:45 p.m., he invited two female classmates to his room, where they stayed for an hour, along with two other boys. “This, of course, was in violation of the room visiting rule,” Clem Morell, the cluster dean, wrote Harry’s parents, “even though it was a social gathering and they were listening to records.” At the disciplinary meeting, three days later, “Harry had no real excuse for his action,” Morell continued. Harry got probation, plus a restriction on “room visiting,” until the end of December.

  By the time he returned home for Thanksgiving, his o
lder brother could tell Harry had changed, and that he had settled in to life at Andover. “He immediately came back smarter then everyone,” Rick Bull said. “He had turned into Socrates. He was in the saddle when he came home. He’d learned more in seven weeks than the combined knowledge of everyone at the Thanksgiving table.… Then of course by Christmas, he had realized that perhaps he wasn’t Aristotle after all. We had knocked him down to Einstein.”

  Peter Begley lived across the hall from Harry during his first year at Andover. Begley, a class ahead, and Harry became fast friends. “He was wildly precocious in most things,” Begley said. “He looked like a little choirboy, sort of very baby-faced. But at the same time, he knew all sorts of stuff and was well ahead of himself.” He remembered that Harry loved the blues and was always playing jazz guitar. He also recalled that Harry had an older girlfriend who would come to visit him, without, apparently, the knowledge of the Andover authorities. “A lady would show up from time to time,” he said. Harry would tell him, “‘Oh, yeah. That’s my woman.’ It was crazy. It was well beyond parietals.” Harry was fourteen and the youngest member of the Class of 1977. (I was the second youngest.)

  Begley invited Harry to New York City to stay at the apartment of his father, the writer Louis Begley. “There’s a distinct memory of Harry with a snifter of brandy and a big fat cigar,” he said. “It was absurd. But he pulled it off effortlessly. And in retrospect, you had a feeling that Harry was heading toward the wall somehow or other, and that he couldn’t keep up that rhythm.”

  The rest of Harry’s first year at Andover continued academically in much the same vein that it had begun—some of his teachers found him captivating, others couldn’t figure him out. “Harry is full of it,” English teacher Paul Kalkstein wrote about him in March 1975. “But what a man! What a pen!” But Vincent Pascucci, a legendary Latin teacher, wasn’t buying Harry’s shtick. He complained of his absences from class, and how he started off the course well—but then, with considerable understatement, he wrote, “the regularity of his application gave way while the material gained in sophistication and difficulty.” He then added, “Seems like a nice boy. Should demand more of himself.” Hale Sturges, his house counselor, was of two minds about him. “Harry is intellectually alive,” he wrote, “socially poised and thus a seemingly mature man with unlimited potential. To date, however, this potential rests largely unrealized.” For the first time in his life, it was becoming clear, Harry was faced with an academic challenge he was not meeting with ease, and he seemed not sure exactly how to proceed. The problem for him was that the numbers don’t lie, and they indicated his brilliance, which he was not achieving.

  Harry was precocious to say the least. At around this same time, he wanted to hitchhike to California, as his older cousins had done. His parents said no. But what they did allow him to do was to take a Greyhound bus to Mackinac Island, in northern Michigan, and get a job washing dishes. He then joined a sailboat crew, sailing the 330 miles or so from Mackinac to Chicago. Given the distance and the fact that Lake Michigan is not dissimilar to an ocean, the event can be dangerous. People have died. “The weather can turn very quickly, and it’s a long way to go,” a family friend recalled. “If he was sailing down, that’s not an insignificant sail.”

  When Harry returned to Andover for his Upper year, he roomed with Peter Begley, against the counsel of Sturges, who worried, correctly, that they would not be good influences on each other. Will Zogbaum, who had also become imprinted on Will Daniel, lived near Harry and Peter, in Fuess. They became close. He remembered the odd configuration they had in their room, which reminded him of a harem. “They had their room all done up like a seraglio with those Indian prints,” he said. The walls had been covered with hanging tapestries. There were tapestries hanging at weird angles. It was, Zogbaum said, as if a tent had been created inside their dorm room. “It was like walking into a different world,” he said. There was an armchair in the corner of the room, where Harry held court. “He was like the prince at his feast in there,” Zogbaum remembered. “It was a really happy role for him because he was a good entertainer and he was good at drawing people out and telling stories and getting a conversation going.” And there was a bong kept behind the armchair. When you walked into the room, it was impossible not to experience the sweet smell of marijuana. “Those things definitely were absorbent,” he said of the Indian prints. “You couldn’t help mask the activities that were going on there. But it gave a great atmosphere.” They all had radio shows at WPAA, the campus radio station. Harry had a big record collection and they were just “spinning records” at WPAA. He said they tried to be “mavericks” at Andover by not conforming to the traditional norms of the place. “For someone who was partying as much as he was, it was kind of sometimes a little surprising that he was so lucid,” Zogbaum said.

  Harry was a gleeful participant in pranks, including one involving an obnoxious jock who enjoyed tormenting his fellow dorm mates. They figured out a way to lock him out of his room while he was in the shower. The timing of the prank was such that Sturges, the dorm master, was not home. Harry’s friend Giles McNamee said: “So he had to go to Mrs. Sturges, who was basically always in the bag by about 11 a.m., wearing nothing but his towel, dripping wet, and having Mrs. Sturges, who I think definitely wanted to jump his bones, unlock his door.” Only Harry and Giles were even cleverer than that. They had devised an ingenious system whereby they could control whether the door could actually be unlocked, key or no key, by drilling a hole in the top of a beer can, running a string through it, and tossing the string out the window, where they could grab it and pull the can top away from the lock at a time of their own choosing. The consequence of the prank was that when Mrs. Sturges went to open the guy’s room door, she couldn’t do it with the master key. “After Mrs. Sturges failed to get the door open, there’s this guy sitting in his towel in her living room waiting for Mr. Sturges to come home. Of course, by then we had pulled the can top off and Hale said it looked like he had been trying to pick up Mrs. Sturges.”

  Harry’s studies suffered amid the fun. He wrote his parents in January 1976 that his History 35 teacher, Gil Sewall, “was shocked that I went from being an Honors (5) student to a (3).” Sewall told him he would have done just fine on the final had he had a good night’s sleep. “He is probably correct,” Harry told his parents. Despite his academic struggles, Harry’s letters home were alive with details of the books he was reading and thoughts he was having about subjects as diverse as the Civil War—“I find the whole war pathetic, an atrocity,” he wrote, and yet “It is amazing to realize that many of my previous conceptions of the war are utterly wrong”—and the poet Emily Dickinson. His favorite course was photography. “I really love it,” he wrote his parents in February, “and I hope I can pursue photography as a hobby forever.”

  Despite failing the History 35 exam, Sewall rightly saw considerable potential in Harry and recommended him for the school’s prestigious Washington Intern Program, in which a group of Uppers spend the third trimester of the year working for a congressman in Washington. Harry was accepted into the program—an honor—and Sturges wanted to make sure Harry knew that since he would not have any grades during his springtime in DC, the upcoming winter term was one that “colleges look at carefully.” But unlike almost everyone else, Harry seemed to have few worries about where he would end up after Andover.

  In Washington, Harry worked for Illinois congressman Philip M. Crane, one of the leading conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives. Crane, who represented a district in the wealthy northwest suburbs of Chicago, had won a special election, in 1969, for the seat vacated by Donald Rumsfeld, who was joining the Nixon administration. Harry and Representative Crane got along famously. Another Andover classmate, Benjy Swett, shared a room with Harry in Washington. It was in a decrepit hotel, the Bellevue, where one window faced Union Station and the other window faced the Capitol. Swett was working for Congressman Mo Udall. “It was j
ust unbelievable to think that we got to do this,” Swett said. “We just were sent off junior year to cavort in the Capitol basically unsupervised.” Harry, like his father, was a Republican. “And the rest of us were Democrats,” Swett said. “Harry just seemed to be very amused and not at all afraid in defending his Republican positions against us and telling us we were full of hogwash and here’s why.”

  The days in Washington were fairly structured but there was also lots of unsupervised freedom. Each week of the program, which also included students from Exeter, featured seminars with various Washington insider briefings at the State Department and a “law enforcement day” at the drug enforcement division at the Justice Department. Richard Riker, who shared a suite with Harry and Swett, remembered the visit to the drug agency particularly. One of the agents was passing around a sample of crack cocaine. As the rock was being passed around, another Andover classmate in the Washington Intern Program broke off a piece and shoved it into his pocket. “These guys went back to where we were staying and they smoked it, which they got from the DEA,” Riker said. “Isn’t that fucking amazing?… He actually broke that thing off … They didn’t realize what kind of little fucking animals that we were.”