What's the difference between Kerry and Bush, if there is one? They both come from these families that are entranced with the idea of public service. They both come from old Yale families. They've both been interested in politics, I think, from an early age. How are they different from each other?

Richard Kerry and Rosemary weren't interested in making money. The Bushes were. The Bush family moved to Florida and Texas to get into the oil business, which was where the riches were. They've suddenly made the connection of the Eastern establishment to the Houston petroleum club.

Richard Kerry and Rosemary are not doing that. Richard Kerry is comfortable with his civil servant pay, writing one memoir in the Star Spangled Mirror about his time in the diplomatic corps. John's mother Rosemary's biggest concern in life was the Audubon Society and how to keep the natural beauty of Cape Cod pristine. They are not looking to find new ways to make money in a booming American post-war economy the way the Bush family was.'


George W. though, and John Kerry -- how are they different from each other?

I think they're completely different people in these ways. George W. Bush was not interested in Kierkegaard and Heidegger and reading all these books. He was not interested in the European tradition of education that you would show off by how you could recite your Rudyard Kipling the way Kerry would, or that you knew Yates, or that you spoke foreign languages.

When you talk to people that were with them both at Yale, Bush's feeling of inferiority in intellectual conversation turned him to Texas, where being an intellectual was frowned upon. You just had to wear cowboy boots and talk straight, talk hard, buy into the myths or reality of the Alamo and Sam Houston and San Jacinto and some of these kind of American stories. You didn't have to go learn your Portuguese. You didn't have to show off that you out-debate somebody for two hours.

So Kerry is much more of a trans-Atlantic person. He believes in this Atlantic alliance. Kerry thought that was a sign of success, that you could stay up all night and debate David Hume with somebody. George W. Bush learned that "Well, all I need to do is get along with the guys." There's a great populist streak in George W. Bush, in the American grain of it, that you get along with the working-class people. In that way, Midland, Texas, is the intellectual home of George W. Bush.

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Excerpted from an interview at www.pbs.org.

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