 Howard Dean |
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Park Avenue building where Howard Dean grew up has a neurologist's office
on the ground floor and a church just behind. His mother, Andree Maitland Dean,
is eager to emphasize that the family's three-bedroom apartment there is not
luxurious.
"Look around," she said in a recent interview, gesturing at the quarters
where her boys grew up. "Howard didn't have the least bit of a glamorous
upbringing."
Explaining that every time she had a baby, the dining room would serve as a
bedroom for the newborn and his nurse, she concluded, "I don't think we
could even keep up with the Bushes."
Like her son, Andree Maitland Dean chafes at the notion that the family lived
the kind of privileged existence that many associate with America's current
first family.
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Profiles Age: 55 |
"I don't hide who I am," Howard Dean said. "I am not in the least
bit embarrassed about how I grew up. But, now, it wasn't quite as opulent as
everybody might think."
After a post-high-school year in England in 1966, Dean shrugged off many trappings
of his background, including the Republicanism that his father preached at home.
He grew his hair long, experimented with marijuana, played guitar and harmonica,
switched from khaki to denim, cut his hair short again and emerged liberal,
anti-war and resolutely Democratic.
His life also took a critical turn away from the Wall Street career that his
father had desired for him. In deciding to study medicine, he says, he was inspired
by a zeal to help others that grew out of the political ferment of the era and
was fueled by the mysterious disappearance of his brother Charlie in the jungles
of Laos.
Hays Rockwell, a former Episcopal bishop of St. Louis who was Dean's wrestling
coach at St. George's prep school in Rhode Island, attributed his shift toward
liberalism and medicine mainly to the times, saying, "It was just what
was going on in the '60s."
Ralph Dawson, a roommate at Yale, echoed that opinion, saying: "Howard
was moving leftward and rebelling. We were all rebelling from the straitjacket
that society had us in in those days."
Dean's brother Jim senses the added influence of losing Charlie. "We didn't
talk about it," he said, "but I think that after that, he understood
better than I did that life is not infinite."
Two different images
The image that has formed of Dean since he exploded onto the national scene
last spring is of a passionate bulldog, an anti-war liberal who has almost magically
tapped into the angry heart of a Democratic Party tired of feeling disenfranchised.
The truth is more complicated.
Dean opposed the war in Iraq, but he had otherwise been quite supportive of
President Bush's anti-terrorism initiatives. And his liberal credentials are
belied by a long-standing predilection for political moderation and fiscal conservatism
in Vermont.
The image of Dean as a Park Avenue patrician is also unlike his image in Vermont
as an unpretentious, penny-pinching homebody. But there is little doubt that
his family's wealth and position have played a significant role in his life.
His blunt style, which has endeared him to legions of supporters eager for a
Democratic version of the Washington-bashing anti-politician who has proved
so successful for Republicans, can be misread as a lack of political sophistication.
"He's very matter-of-fact," said Peter Welch, a Vermont state senator
and longtime ally. "He's very unadorned, very quick. He's not particularly
reflective, so he comes across as less studied than he is. But he has great
political instincts, good at sizing up people and situations. Howard was always
two or three moves ahead on the chessboard."
Lessons learned at home
Dean's transformation from a bright, somewhat feckless son of privilege into
a goal-driven family man began, his mother believes, in the year he spent in
England after graduation from St. George's.
Dean says his mother may be right, though he remembers the biggest change coming
after he entered the politically charged atmosphere of Yale.
When he entered Yale in the fall of 1967, he asked to be paired with black roommates.
One of them, Ralph Dawson, was a scholarship student from South Carolina. He
says he remembers a very organized, nice guy, but saw no hint of a budding politician.
"At some point, I forget how, we found out about his background,"
Dawson said. "We'd work him over a little bit about it."
Years later, Dean remembers, his parents were immediately accepting of his decision
to marry Judith Steinberg, even though it was highly unusual for someone from
his family background to marry a Jew.
In fact, his mother said, she and his father discussed Steinberg's heritage,
but decided they really liked her and felt she would have a calming effect on
their determined but sometimes scattered son.
After Yale, having received a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft because
of a long-standing back ailment, Dean meandered and resisted Wall Street's pull.
He spent 10 months skiing and working odd jobs in Aspen, Colo. When the spring
snows melted in 1972, he returned to New York.
He began as a stockbroker's assistant and, two years later, was helping manage
a small mutual fund. "He was damn good at it," Andree Maitland Dean
said. "But I don't think it ever gave him any satisfaction."
Dean decided to become a doctor after working at a Denver hospital and then
volunteering in the emergency room at St. Vincent's in New York. His disappointed
father took the news well.
He was studying, falling in love - he met Steinberg at Albert Einstein College
of Medicine in the Bronx, where they attended medical school - and finding direction.
Dean and Steinberg opened their joint practice in an old creamery in Shelburne,
Vt., south of Burlington. They had two children: Annie, now at Yale; and Paul,
in his senior year of public high school.
Always a few steps ahead
Still in the midst of his residency at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont,
Dean was spotted by a local Democratic leader, Esther Sorrell, and brought into
the party fringes.
In 1980, he worked on Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign. Later, he helped
to revitalize Burlington's waterfront.
Sorrell persuaded Dean to become the party's county chairman. In 1983, Dean
was elected to the state Legislature. He became lieutenant governor two years
later, and governor in 1991.
Even Republicans in Vermont acknowledge that on many issues - certainly fiscal
ones - the Howard Dean of recent national fame is not the political animal they
remember from his 11 years as governor.
"Mostly, voters here saw Howard as in the center of his party, perhaps
even somewhere between his party and the Republican Party," said John Bloomer,
Republican minority leader in the Vermont Senate.
Dean did not give up his medical practice until the death of Gov. Richard Snelling
in 1991 ended his tenure as Vermont's lieutenant governor, a part-time post
he had held for six years.
Dean's reputation as governor was as a bridge between the state's political
wings. In style, though, he was blunt and outspoken.
The crisis that nearly cost Dean his governor's seat in 2000 - an uprising by
conservatives and independents over his signing of a law legalizing gay civil
unions - sorely tested his political skills.
"In a no-nonsense way, he made the tough decision," said Bob Rogan,
who was Dean's deputy chief of staff at the time and now a top official in his
presidential campaign. "And he didn't look back."
Then there are the questions about whether a man whose chief political experience
has been running a governor's office has the skills to run the federal government.
"The governor's staff was maybe five or six people, plus clerical help,
and only two or three of those are really close to you," said Dick Mazza,
a Vermont state senator and an ally. "You have, what, one state police
officer assigned to you? It's a lot different from being president of the United
States."