The Yale administration proved more conciliatory to the student protesters than their colleagues elsewhere. In Bush's senior year, the dress code was abolished and Yale moved to a pass-fail grading system. For the first time, public high school graduates outnumbered prep school graduates at Yale. And University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin publicly denounced the Vietnam War in debates with William F. Buckley Jr.

For Bush, whose father was then a member of Congress who supported the war, the culture of protest was not one he could consider joining.

"You still had a group of students who were here under the old terms, and they didn't see their membership at Yale as a platform to change society," Chauncey says.

Indeed, after Bush's father lost a Senate bid to an anti-war Democrat, Coffin allegedly told the young undergraduate that his father had been "beaten by a better man."

"A lot of people on the left had a certain arrogance about them at that time and George took the heat," says Deeter, who is a registered Democrat.

Coffin, who has since apologized for the remark but says he does not remember making it, admits the campus was largely inhospitable to young men like Bush by the time he was a senior.

"You had to be pretty courageous to speak out in favor of the Vietnam War on campus because the prevailing mood on the faculty and among the students was very anti-war," Coffin says.