新世纪研究生公共英语教材阅读（B）Unit.docVIP

Unit?7 Text A Son’s Restless Journey (excerpt) ? Evan Thomas and Martha Brant 1. Bush today insists that he had a great time at Yale and doesn’t recall any unpleasantness. But somewhere along the way he developed a sizable chip on his shoulder. He would later carp about the “self-righteousness” and “intellectual superiority” of the East Coast liberal establishment that took over institutions like Yale in the ‘60s. As early as 1964, he had a run-in with one of the avatars of the new order, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain who had turned on his own Andover-and-Skull-and-Bones past to become a fiery radical, advising students to resist the draft. Bush bitterly recalled Coffin’s telling him, after his father had lost the 1964 Senate race in Texas to Ralph Yarborough, “I knew your father, and he lost to a better man.” To Bush, Coffin embodied the “heaviness” and “guilt” of the liberal East. 2. At a time when Yale students agonized endlessly over what to do about the draft, Bush does not appear to have talked much about his own choice. To volunteer for Vietnam would have required an act of boldness and outright defiance. Seeking battle was almost unheard of among undergraduates: it was said that more Yale students were dying in motorcycle accidents than in combat in 1969. At the same time, according to his Yale friend Roland Betts, Bush did not want to politically embarrass his father. Bush Jr. took a respectable but easy way out, joining the Texas National Guard. 3. Bush seems to have been somewhat bored and restless after college, finding only limited meaning in learning how to fly obsolete jets (F-102s) for the Texas Guard. He tangled with his father one night after driving, drunk, into some garbage cans outside their house in Washington. “ Want to go mano a mano? “ Bush challenged his dad. The father did not need to fight his son. The mere utterance of the words “I’m disappointed” was chilling to the younger Bush, who s