Professor Jonathan Earle reports:
It’s hard to come up with a more dynastic political family in the Ocean State than the Chafees. After helping to found the colonial town of Higham, Massachusetts, the earliest American Chafees moved to Rhode Island, where they became one of the state’s leading families. Linc Chafee’s great-great grandfather, Henry Lippitt, was elected governor in 1874. And, of course, Chafee’s father John Lester Hubbard Chafee was a long-serving U.S. Senator, Governor, and Secretary of the Navy under Nixon. Before leaving Yale to fight in World War II, John Chafee was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity and the super-secret Order of Skull and Bones.It's a small world at the top.
John Chafee graduated from Yale in 1947—one year ahead of another young World War II veteran, DKE, Bonesman, and scion of a New England political family named George Herbert Walker Bush. But while John Chafee returned to Rhode Island after law school to enter politics there, Bush moved his family to west Texas to become an oil man. The George H. W. Bush who represented a portion of Houston in the House of Representatives was quite a bit more conservative than Chafee and earlier Bushes—except on the issue of family planning, of which he remained an eloquent champion.
The two political scions that arrived on the bucolic campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts for high school must have seemed to others cut from identical cloth. Jeb Bush arrived having completed ninth grade in Houston, his hair long, and according to friends and acquaintances he chafed at the school’s 30-page book of rules and regulations for students, complete with an intricate system of demerits and punishments for wrongdoing. Linc Chafee, who lived with Bush in a three-story brick dormitory for 10th graders called Pemberton Cottage, was less well known for rule-breaking than Bush, who got into trouble for grades, pot-smoking, and bullying.
