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Someone just forwarded me this by email... Interested to know if it is genuine or not... plus whether it has received much play yet...
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Bush's Harvard prof speaks out YOSHI TSURUMI SPEAKS OUT
His former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not
just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological
liar. 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 exposZ "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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