President George Herbert Walker Bush seemed always to exemplify the image of New England gentry. The son of a successful investment banker and U.S. senator from Connecticut, Bush was a student at the exclusive Phillips Academy and then Yale. His enlistment in the Navy in 1942, at age eighteen, and his fifty-eight missions against the Japanese as the Navy’s youngest commissioned pilot were usually overlooked.

In his political campaigns, Bush would take pains to show people that he was a “regular guy.” Newspaper articles described Bush smiling, his arms waving, chatting with customers in a luncheonette, telling jokes to workers in overalls, and slapping them on the back, trying to appear to be a “regular guy.”