The Harvard-Yale-Columbia clique

Submitted by Michael S, May 14, 2017 at 19:07

Hi, Jay

I see you like to dip into the archives. My title, of course, was,

"Trump's only sin, is that he didn't graduate Harvard or Yale."

Yes, there are other Ivy League schools; but the two above have a definite elite culture about them, especially with Law graduates. Donald Trump was a Business School graduate at U Penn, the only President ever tohave graduated from that school. If you like, I will list some important Harvard and Yale alumni:

US Presidents:

Barack Obama Harvard, plus undergrad at Columbia
George W. Bush Harvard, plus undergrad at Yale
Bill Clinton Yale, plus undergrad degree at Oxford (England)
George H. W. Bush attended Yale

(That's 28 years straight, with leaders from those two schools)

Gerald Ford Yale, plus undergrad degree from Michigan
John Kennedy undergrad degree at Harvard
Franklin Roosevelt Columbia, plus undergrad at Harvard
William Taft U of Cincinnati, plus undergrad at Yale
Theodore Roosevelt undergrad at Harvard
John Quincy Adams Harvard
John Adams Harvard

Note that among those listed are three presidential dynasties: Bush, Adams and Roosevelt (Mrs. F. Roosevelt was T. Roosevelt's niece). The only other dynasty was William H. and Benjamin Harrisson (grandfather & grandson). The elder Harrison attended U of Penn for a short time, but did not graduate.
Jeb was part of the Bush dynasty, but not an Ivy League graduate. Hillary would have been part of a Clinton dynasty, and was a Yale graduate.

Besides US Presidents, Yale, Harvard and Columbia have spawned all our US Supreme Court justices:

"...every single current member of the Supreme Court attended law school at Harvard or Yale — though Ruth Bader Ginsburg ultimately got her degree from Columbia Law School after transferring from Harvard Law."

-- http://www.businessinsider.com/every-supreme-court-justice-went-to-harvard-or-yale-law-school-heres-where-they-went-for-undergrad-2016-2

That article was from when Scalia was still alive. Harvard graduate Neil Gorsuch was subsequently appointed by President Trump.

That certainly represents an insider's club. Trump was on the margins of this clique. The First Son-in-law, Jared Kushner, did undergrad work at Harvard, and got his grad. degree at NYU.

Ronald Reagan was our last President from an ordinary background, preceded by more regular guys Jimmy Carter, Dick Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman. I didn't like Carter's politics, but admired the fact that he climbed ladders and swung a hammer with commoners to build homes for Habitat for Humanity.

Trump also understood construction, and had personal contact with his subcontracted workers, which helped me to like the brash Easterner. As a President, he's been so-so. He's neither the savior nor the disaster various people predicted.

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