A Tale of Two Students--From LUTD

[Dr Ron]

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=1031

While John Kerry and George Bush may have had similar grades as undergraduates, the differences between the two became clear by graduation. Kerry's freshman grades were hardly predictive of his ultimate success. While Bush's academic record remained one lacking in distinction, the Boston Globe reports that, "Kerry received a high honor at Yale despite his mediocre grades: He was chosen to deliver his senior class oration, a testament to his reputation as a public speaker. . . Despite his slow start, he went on to be a top student at Naval Candidate School."

We are well aware of the differences of the two following school. Today's review of the military records shows once again that John Kerry was undisputably a true war hero, while George Bush avoided his duties in the National Guard. After the war, Kerry had a distinguished career, while Bush had a series of business failures which his father's friends repeatedly bailed him out of. John Kerry has had a brilliant Senate career, while George Bush has become one of the worst Presidents in American history, undermining our national security, seriously harming our reputation in the world, and doing long term damage to the economy.

The difference between the two predictable while George Bush was in Harvard Business School, as is seen in this account in the Harvard Crimson from last July. Yoshihiro Tsurumi, a visiting associate professor of international business at Harvard Business School between 1972 and 1976, and now a professor of international business at Baruch College in the City University of New York, said he remembers the future president as scoring in the bottom 10 percent of students in the class. The article goes on to report:

Thirty years after teaching the class, Tsurumi said the twenty-something Bush’s statements and behavior—“always very shallow”—still stand out in his mind.

“Whenever just bumped into me, he had some flippant statement to make,” said Tsurumi when reached at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. “The comments he made were revealing of his prejudice.”

The White House did not reply to requests for comment on Bush’s time at HBS.

Tsurumi said he particularly recalls Bush’s right-wing extremism at the time, which he said was reflected in off-hand comments equating the New Deal of the 1930s with socialism and the corporation-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission with “an enemy of capitalism.”

“I vividly remember that he made a comment saying that people are poor because they’re lazy,” Tsurumi said.

Tsurumi also said Bush displayed a sense of arrogance about his prominent family, including his father, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush.

“ didn’t stand out as the most promising student, but...he made it sure we understood how well he was connected,” Tsurumi said. “He wasn’t bashful about how he was being pushed upward by Dad’s connections.”

Tsurumi said that the younger Bush boasted that his father’s political string-pulling had gotten him to the top of the waiting list for the Texas National Guard instead of serving in Vietnam. When other students were frantically scrambling for summer jobs, Tsurumi said, Bush explained that he was planning instead for a visit to his father in Beijing, where the senior Bush was serving at the time as the special U.S. envoy to China.

In addition, Tsurumi is still sore about what he recalls as Bush’s slight to his cinematic taste. When he arranged for students to view the film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath during their study of the Great Depression, Tsurumi said, Bush derided the film as “corny.”

At the time, Tsurumi said his worries about his student extended no further than the boardroom.

“All Harvard Business School students want to become president of a company one day,” Tsurumi said. “I remember saying, if you become president of a company some day, may God help your customers and employees.”

When he discovered that his former pupil was vying for the presidency in 2000, Tsurumi said he tried to inform the public about his experience with the then-Texas governor at HBS—but got few results beyond hate mail.

“Last election time, if you recall, the American mass media did a shameful job of vetting ,” Tsurumi said.

As another November approaches, Tsurumi is trying again to air his criticisms of the man he once taught and his actions as president.

“This time it seems to be getting around a bit more widely,” he said. “After three years of dismal record, people seem more inclined to believe that all his failed leadership was apparent during the Harvard Business School years.”

In a July 2 speech to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo, Tsurumi repeated the broadside he has launched repeatedly in the past.

“I always remember two groups of students,” Tsurumi said then, according to published reports. “One is the really good students, not only intelligent, but with leadership qualities, courage. The other is the total opposite, unfortunately to which George belonged.”

[JI7]

1. it says a lot about Kerry and to his credit

that people are surprised that he didn't do better.

but reading why he didn't do so well is understandable. it's because he was focused on things other than his classes. and those things he did focus on he did very well in. and it shows he learned that he does have to do better as he did at naval college and in law school later on.

[JohnKleeb]

2. Thanks

Its what they did despite those grades that matters more than anything.

[TayTay]

3. The other extremely notable difference is in attitude

John Kerry has never forgotten that not everyone had the advantages he was born with and he has acted consistently throughout his public life to help those who are left by life's wayside. John Kerry had the connections, the service record and the ability to go into an extremely lucrative career in finance, law or banking. Instead he chose to go into public service and for most of his public life this meant pay that was far, far less than he could have earned in the private sector. (Look at Senator Kerry's classmates and friends, one founded FedEx, another heads a major law firm, and so forth. That world could have so easily been his. Instead he chose public service.)

If I may be deadly serious in one post, I am extremely proud of my Senator for his consistent and outspoken belief that America is best when it works for all it's citizens, not just it's well-off and well-connected citizens. That is a major difference between Kerry and Bush. Whereas a George Bush and his Republican friends at Enron laughed about screwing Grandma out of her money in an energy scheme that caused real pain to the working people of California, John Kerry worked hard to make funds available for working families so they could pay their energy bills and still keep their homes. There are real, fundamental differences between Kerry and Bush that are soul-deep and go to the notion of valuing the least among us, even when they don't have the money that comes from a trust fund or a corporate checkbook.

Never forget, George Bush called his base, "the haves, and the have mores." John Kerry knows and has always known that his base is the hard working people of this country who need an advocate in the Senate for their concerns and to watch out for their interests. This was shown in the recent vote on the Bankruptcy Bill. I know who stood up for the poor, the working poor and the middle class in that debate, and it was not Bush, it was my Senator, John Kerry and I am very grateful to him for doing so.