the Progressive Southerner | George W. Bush's Lost Year in 1972 Alabama

the Progressive Southerner | George W. Bush's Lost Year in 1972 Alabama: "    They also remember Bush's stories about how the New Haven, Connecticut police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him 'all the time' for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the late 1960s. Bush told this story to others working in the campaign 'what seemed like a hundred times,' says Red Blount's nephew C. Murphy Archibald, now an attorney in Charlotte, N.C., who also worked on the Blount campaign and said he had 'vivid memories' of that time.

    'He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn't know,' Archibald said. 'He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn't operating by the same rules.'

    During this period Bush often socialized with the young ladies of Huntington College, located in the Old Cloverdale historic neighborhood where he stayed. Bush even dated Nixon's daughter Tricia in the early 1970s, according to newspaper accounts. Bush was described as 'young and personable' by the Montgomery Independent society columnist, and seen dancing at the Whitley Hotel on election night November 7 with 'the blonde, pretty Emily Marks.'

    During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe named Marks as one of Bush's former girlfriends. But she and several other women who dated him during that time refused to say anything bad on the record about Bush, now a sitting president.

    Many of those who came into close contact with Bush say he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fist-fulls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill. They also say he liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the head for a line of cocaine. The newspapers that year are full of stories about the scourges of cocaine and heroin making their way into the U.S. from abroad in the early days of the so-called 'war on drugs.'
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