"The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room": Drugs, bullying, Vietnam and the best revelations about Bush's lost high school years

A bizarre bullying episode, getting high to "Magic Carpet Ride" and more from Jeb Bush's fancy prep school years

Published February 1, 2015 1:55PM (EST)

Jeb Bush                                        (AP/Matt Rourke)
Jeb Bush (AP/Matt Rourke)

The Boston Globe won the race to one of the most obvious campaign profiles: the candidate's high school years, in which he admits to being a miscreant and scamp of sorts. The candidate -- Jeb Bush in this case -- cooperates, and gets the awkward stuff about teenage drug use and lousy grades out of the way, so the campaign can then dismiss all subsequent questions on those topics as old news. The reporter gets a head start -- maybe even a sample chapter for the proposal -- on a quickie campaign biography.

It's part of a predictable dance, yes, but there are still fun nuggets in this sketch of the GOP establishment's favorite pick for 2016. Here they are:

Jeb Bush had good drugs and a fancy stereo

“The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room,” Tibbetts (a classmate) said. “He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me.” As the rock group’s signature song, “Magic Carpet Ride,’’ blared from the speakers, Tibbetts said he smoked hash with Bush.

He said he once bought hashish from Bush but stressed, in a follow-up e-mail, “Please bear in mind that I was seeking the hash. It wasn’t as if he was a dealer, though he did suggest I take up cigarettes so that I could hold my hits better, after that first joint.”

Vietnam? Whatever. Jeb Bush didn't really care

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.”

Jeb Bush may have bullied in a really strange way

Tibbetts, who was eventually forced to leave Andover in the spring of 1970 after school officials accused him of using drugs, said his one regret about his relationship with Bush is that he agreed to participate with him in the bullying of a student in the dormitory.

Their target was a short classmate whom they taunted, and then sewed his pajama bottoms so that they were impossible to put on. The act was particularly embarrassing, said Tibbetts, who said he felt remorse for joining in with “kids being cruel.”

Bush said in the interview that he has no recollection of this or other bullying incidents raised by classmates. He said he never viewed himself as a bully. “I don’t believe that is true,” he said, referring to classmates’ recollections of specific incidents.

Here's the whole piece.


By Salon Staff

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