In the fall of 1967, when a 14-year-old Texan named John Ellis Bush
arrived on the bucolic campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, great
expectations preceded him.

Jeb, as he was known, should have been an easy fit in that elite and
ivied world. His much-accomplished father and his older brother had both
gone to Andover; no one was surprised that Jeb had followed suit.

But this Bush almost ran aground in those first, formative prep school
days. He bore little resemblance to his father, a star on many fronts at
Andover, and might have been an even worse student than brother George.
Classmates said he smoked a notable amount of pot — as many did — and
sometimes bullied smaller students.

Resolutely apolitical despite his lineage, he refused to join the
Progressive Andover Republicans club and often declined even to
participate in informal bull sessions with classmates. In a tumultuous
season in American life, he seemed to his peers strangely detached and
indifferent.

“He was just in a bit of a different world,” said Phil Sylvester, who
said he was a Bush roommate. While other students “were constantly
arguing about politics and particularly Vietnam, he just wasn’t
interested, he didn’t participate, he didn’t care.”
Meanwhile, his grades were so poor that he was in danger of being
expelled, which would have been a huge embarrassment to his father, a
member of Congress and of the school’s board of trustees.

If the school’s motto proved true — that “The End Depends on the
Beginning” — then things weren’t beginning well for Jeb Bush; certainly
it wasn’t the path one would expect of a future GOP presidential
candidate, as he seems increasingly likely to be.

It would take four years on the campus 24 miles north of Boston for Bush
to straighten out. Indeed, for Bush, the story of Andover is how it
ended — and it ended very well. But that hardly seemed possible when he
traveled to Massachusetts in the fall of 1967.

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"These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s
founding fathers" (Ronald Reagan introducing the Mujahideen leaders, 1985).