ONLY ONE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL has produced two presidents of the United States: Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, known simply as Andover. It was no surprise, really, that people emerged from Andover thinking they could do, or be, anything they wanted. That idea that we really were “la crème de la crème de la jeunesse américaine,” as we were told regularly, or that we were part of some kind of young and invincible Delta Force, was intoxicating. The message seeped into our DNA whether we realized it or not.
Just like George H. W. Bush (Class of 1942) and George W. Bush (Class of 1964) before him, my Andover classmate Bruce MacWilliams (Class of 1977) wanted to be president of the United States. Bruce was tall, handsome, and outgoing. He was an athlete—he was on the varsity cross-country team, the cross-country ski team, and the lacrosse team—and was a fine photographer. He had fair skin, long wavy hair parted down the middle, and a vague aura of constantly being in a drug-induced state whether true or not. You know the type: All the Andover boys wanted to be like him and all the Andover girls wanted to sleep with him. “He was pretty cocky,” remembered Hugh Jones, a friend of Bruce’s from Cornell. “Bruce was pretty much the man and he pretty much was sure of that.” Of course, this being Andover, Bruce had some serious competition on campus on the Big Dick Energy front. The late 1970s was when John F. Kennedy Jr.—the glamorous future “Sexiest Man Alive” with unassailable presidential DNA—was also a student at Andover.
MacWilliams’s Andover pedigree went back to his great-grandfather Mabie Crouse Klock (Class of 1899). Mabie Crouse Klock came from wealth and made more. He was an avid yachtsman and once owned a steamer that caught the attention of a young John Jacob Astor, who promptly bought the boat from him. Klock was also one of the early financial benefactors of what became the Crouse-Irving Hospital, in his native Syracuse, New York. “My great-grandfather was like the Great Gatsby of Syracuse,” Bruce remembered.
Klock’s grandson—Bruce’s father—John J. MacWilliams also went to Andover (Class of 1947). He later joined the Aetna Life and Casualty Company, in Hartford, where Bruce and his three siblings spent part of their childhood. In 1968, when Bruce was in fourth grade, his father was offered the opportunity to run the Colonial Penn Group, a floundering life insurance company based in Philadelphia. Colonial Penn was about to go bankrupt. MacWilliams took the job. “My dad said, ‘What the hell, I’m gonna give it a shot,’ and went down there and turned the company around,” Bruce said. “Within like six, seven years, he made it a Fortune 500 company. He was on the cover of all the magazines, and he was kind of a darling for a while because he made a lot of money.” There were private planes, fancy country clubs, soirees with Republican politicians, and lofty dreams.
It was the late Mad Men era, and the MacWilliamses took to it. “They would put on their designer suits, and they would look really great,” Bruce explained. And they loved to drink. “Our parents were all getting bombed at lunch, and having martini lunches, and my dad was a CEO,” he continued. “He was a successful guy, and he looked fantastic. My mom looked fantastic, too. But they would go out to parties and they would have cocktail hour, and they would drink a lot. It was the way they grew up, and they inherited it from their parents.” As had generations of MacWilliamses before him, Bruce said he inherited from his parents the notion of drinking as a glamorous activity. In the years before Bruce alighted at Andover, his father would encourage the family to have wine with dinner, just as he found his business acquaintances did with their families in Italy, where John MacWilliams often traveled. “He expressed that that was a way to grow up fast, and to learn how to drink responsibly,” Bruce said.
Andover was a family tradition. Two of Bruce’s three siblings attended the school. At Andover, Bruce and I were in Nathan Hale House together, and I remember him well: his hair, his infectious demeanor, the time he spent palling around with the other hipster guys, Jamie Clark from Texas and two guys from New York City, Will Iselin, a descendant of John Jay, and Will Daniel, whose grandfather was Harry Truman. They were all my dorm mates, it’s true, but we traveled in different circles. Nathan Hale West was part of Rabbit Pond cluster, one of six clusters comprising various student dorms and historic homes (where students also lived) that made it easier for Andover to feel like it was a manageable size, even with its twelve hundred students. Each cluster had a dean, responsible for administering discipline, among other duties. John “Jack” Richards II was the Rabbit Pond cluster dean. Richards, a history teacher, epitomized the WASPy Andover administrator. We referred to him, mostly affectionately, as “Jack Dick.”
Like so many of the Andover students at the time, Bruce smoked a lot of marijuana. There was a famous cartoon in the Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, about how one Andover student was explaining to another that there was no drug problem at Andover: “We can get anything we want.” Bruce and his Nathan Hale friends spent a lot of time together smoking pot. Two of his friends were expelled. “They caught them and threw them out, but they didn’t catch me,” MacWilliams recalled, “and Jack Richards brought me in and read me the riot act, said, ‘Hey, listen, we haven’t caught you yet, but we know you’re doing it, and if we catch you, you’re out, so shape up.’” After Richards spared MacWilliams, he claimed to have reformed his behavior.
In his senior year at Andover, MacWilliams served as the president of Rabbit Pond cluster (defeating me in the election) and ended up working closely with Richards. All these years later, I still remember the contours of the race between us. Alan Cantor, one of my closest friends at Andover, was the incumbent cluster president; he not only encouraged me to run for the position but also did his best imitation of making an inchoate political endorsement of my candidacy. By then, Bruce was living with his buddies in one of the small stately homes around the periphery of Rabbit Pond cluster, doing whatever cool guys did back then. We had little interaction with each other by that point in our Andover careers but we were always friendly enough when we bumped into each other on the campus pathways. Like almost everyone at Andover, I liked the guy. I was then living in the west side of Alfred E. Stearns House (named after a former headmaster), a late-1950s brick structure with an oddly Soviet countenance. We always thought Stearns was the locus of power in Rabbit Pond cluster given both its central location and the fact that many of the school leaders lived in the dorm. With my friend Alan’s endorsement and a modest amount of retail campaigning on my part, I thought for sure I would win the election. Although the vote was close, I had miscalculated the appeal of Bruce’s magnetic personality and his abundant charm.
Bruce found Andover to be seminal. “I absolutely loved Andover,” he said. “I thought it was the best. It was like a party mixed up with friends, and I was learning a lot, and I became proud of myself because I was going to the best secondary school in the country. There was just so much that was really fantastic about it. I felt so lucky to be there, and to be given that opportunity, and to be able to turn it into something.”
One thing Bruce hoped might come from his Andover experience was a political career. It was not a crazy thought. Andover had produced Henry Stimson (Class of 1883), Roosevelt’s secretary of war, who held many other cabinet positions over the years. JFK’s son was a fellow student, as was Harry Truman’s grandson. George H. W. Bush was, at that time, both an Andover trustee and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If you thought about it, the MacWilliamses of Gladwyne were not terribly unlike the Bushes of Kennebunkport or even the Kennedys of Hyannis Port. And Bruce was not particularly shy about sharing the thought that if things had turned out a little differently, his father might also have been president of the United States, instead of the CEO of a somewhat predatory insurance company. He had the looks. He had the brains. He had the money, and he had the connections. (He also thought his older brother, John, a former Wall Street banker, should have been Obama’s secretary of state or chief of staff. “He’s a guy you want behind you when you go out into battle,” he said.)
When Bruce ran for Rabbit Pond cluster president, and won, he began to think the dream might be possible. “I even got sucked into that whole thing because I found out how easy it was,” he said. “It’s like, Oh wow, you just need to show up and say a few kind words and get voted in, and you got a job.” One minor hiccup for him came with the election of Andover school president, a school-wide ballot comprising the six cluster presidents. Bruce slept through the assembly where the candidates made their pitches. He still came in second.
The ambition persisted. When Bruce told his father he wanted to be president of the United States, he wasn’t joking. “I said, ‘Look at Andover. I’ve just been hanging out with John Kennedy, man.’ I had tea with Jacqueline Onassis and John Kennedy at the Andover Inn. And Jacqueline Onassis leaned over and said, ‘Oh, John, you know who your friend Bruce reminds me of? He reminds me of your father.’ And I almost fell out of my chair.”
He had come by his friendship with John Kennedy Jr. through his role as cluster president. For some odd reason, part of the role was to represent fellow students who lived in your cluster through a disciplinary procedure. The Secret Service decided that John Kennedy Jr. should be placed in Stearns House West (my dorm for my third and fourth years at Andover) because it was right next to the Andover Inn. John was an Upper when Bruce was a senior and the cluster president. John always liked to push the disciplinary envelope at Andover, if in a charming way. He didn’t intentionally flout the rules as much as sort of pretend they never really existed in the first place, since it was pretty clear from his own experiences in life that the rules of the road would never apply to him anyway. Whether it was staying out on campus beyond the 10 p.m. curfew, or getting high, or having girls in his room outside regular parietal hours, John brought a sly, infectious attitude toward his nocturnal activities. Who wouldn’t want to be part of them, if invited?
Copyright © 2019 by William D. Cohan
