Feeling Dean’s Pain
His straight talk and blunt, suffer-no-fools style have helped make him the Democrat to watch in 2004. What makes Howard Dean tick?
msnbc.com
By Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK
July 21 issue — Charlie Dean died 30 years ago in the jungles of Laos at the age of 23. But all these years later his older brother, Howard, remains angry and unsettled about the event—and the unanswered questions that surround it. He has had psychological counseling for what he calls his “survivor’s guilt,” and has journeyed to Laos seeking “closure.” Yet Dean still cries about the loss, and is doing so now, slumped in a folding chair at his presidential-campaign headquarters up in Burlington, Vt. “I know what it is like to sit at home, waiting,” he says to NEWSWEEK, his voice trailing off. His features collapse, his eyes and his face turn red. He raises a hand to his brow as tears stream down his cheeks and he sobs quietly. “Sorry,” he says, then brightens as, ever the doctor, he examines, almost clinically, his own reaction. “It’s amazing after 30 years, isn’t it?”
YES, IT IS. Howard Dean is a simmering teakettle of emotion, aspiration and edge. In these wrought-up times, it’s a persona that has considerable appeal to the grass roots of the Democratic Party, if not, as yet, to the nation at large. It’s made him a celebrity on the Internet, where his Web-based efforts are changing the face of campaigning. As governor of Vermont, he was known for his chesty confrontations. As an early foe of war in Iraq, he made acerbic comments that now look prescient. But Dean’s aura of disdain can cause him problems, too. His attacks on Democratic presidential rivals are delivered with all the grace and humor of a fedora-wearing hit man. And goading him isn’t hard. The man from AP did it last week, pressing a series of “what if” questions that caused Dean to snap: “What if, what if. I have two teenage sons who ask ‘what ifs’ all the time. I don’t play ‘what if’.” Expect his rivals and their allies to push harder in the months to come.
So what makes Howard Dean tick tick tick? Where does the sense of entitlement, the touch of imperiousness, the sense of permanent, low-grade combat come from?
Ironically, the roots and rising of one Howard Brush Dean III bear an eerie similarity to those of one George Walker Bush: Mayflowering family trees, early industrial- era money, family compounds near Atlantic waters, prep schools and a party-hearty life at Yale (Bush ’68, Dean ’71). The birthright of such an upbringing is confidence in social position and a sense of license to say anything to anyone at any time—without warning, restraint or evident regret. Dean insists that “everyone in —our family is totally unpretentious,” and so they were, and are. But he is brusque by nature, and if he can seem bumptious to the press at times, why not? The Deans (or, more specifically, the Hunting clan, descended of whaling captains) took up residence in Sag Harbor—now a pricey reach of eastern Long Island—three centuries before media elites began networking there.
The Deans were hard chargers by nature. The pace was set by the candidate’s late father, Howard Brush Dean Jr. He compensated for his short stature (a trait he bequeathed to his eldest son) by referring to himself as the “Short Me.” He compensated for his lack of World War II military action (he was disqualified because of childhood diphtheria) by running Allied supply lines in exotic places such as the Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, India and China. After the war he came home to replenish the family treasury, heading to Wall Street as his father and grandfather had done.
His four obstreperous sons (Howard is the eldest) worshiped him—and feared him. “He was our role model,” says Howard. “He was also a micromanager.” That meant raising hell in defiance of Dad whenever possible and making up for any deficiency by marching through life straight ahead. So “Howie” Dean pumped iron furiously at St. George’s Episcopal School in Newport, R.I., playing guard and linebacker on the football team—positions normally reserved for bigger boys. He was wrestling captain in his senior year, a master of the quick pin. At Yale he trod the path of his father, who flunked out twice and bragged about his social exploits when he showed his son around the campus. Howie was a hard drinker and partier, too. “But it was harder to flunk out in my time,” he says. Like George W. Bush, Dean quit drinking cold turkey. He did so in 1981, when he was 32, one week after marrying Judith Steinberg in a Manhattan hotel. “I didn’t like the way I behaved when I drank,” he says.
Dean wasn’t deeply interested in politics per se, but rather, it seems, in power of a personal kind. He was a senior prefect at St. George’s. At Yale, he thought about teaching or medicine, which put the fate of others in the practitioner’s hands. “I have always wanted to change the world in some way,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s very deep.” Indeed, it took a while for it to surface. After a post-college year skiing in Aspen, Dean returned to New York in 1972 to become the next (fourth) Dean—stretching back to Herbert Hollingshead Dean, a founder of Smith Barney—to be an investment banker.
He hated it. Business was bad. (There was an Arab oil embargo on.) Dean missed the country life of hockey on the pond and duck on the table that he’d grown up with (at least on weekends) in the big house in eastern Long Island. “I took my father to dinner, fed him three martinis and told him I wanted to go to medical school,” Dean recalls. He was 25—too late for the “micromanager” to protest. He moved back into his parents’ Park Avenue apartment and began taking science classes.
That’s when the defining crisis arrived. Charlie turned up missing. Younger by 16 months (they’d shared a bunk bed as boys), he was the more idealistic. “Charlie was the more community-minded, the more focused on politics,” says third brother Jim Dean. In 1968 Charlie enrolled at Chapel Hill, a font of civil-rights activism. In 1972 he plunged into the anti-Vietnam War campaign of Sen. George McGovern, only to see him crushed in 49 of 50 states by Richard Nixon. “Charlie was very disillusioned,” says Jim. “That is when he decided he needed to leave the country.”
Pieced together in later years, many of the —whys and wherefores of Charlie’s journey remain a mystery: a freighter from Seattle to Japan, then Bali, then Australia, then to Laos, where his dad knew a man in USAID. Why Laos? Perhaps Charlie was just on the hippie circuit, and saw it as a way station to Nepal. Perhaps he wanted the thrill of seeing the flickering flame of the Indochina war he had wanted to help try to end. Later, his parents thought that perhaps he had become a spy—a theory fueled by the fact that the Army listed this civilian as a POW/MIA. “I don’t happen to believe it, but for all I know he was in the CIA,” says Howard Dean.
All Dean does know is that Charlie and a friend took a ferry on the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand. They were taken into custody by Laotian communists. After three months at a local camp, Dean thinks, Charlie wanted some answers. “So he figured—and this would be typical Dean, not just Charlie but any of us—’All right, let’s get some action here. Let’s go to the top of the food chain’.” Dean speculates that they were on their way to a North Vietnamese military base camp—or on the way back—when they died. “We think that the North Vietnamese basically ordered them killed,” Dean says.
Charlie’s death focused his older brother, and gave him a sense of mission he carries with him to this day. “I think Howard began to look at things more seriously,” says Jim Dean. “It made him wonder, what do I want to do with my life?” Dean was already into medicine, but within a few years was running for state legislator in his adopted state of Vermont. It may be an accident—or not—that he has risen to prominence as the kind of antiwar candidate Charlie would have admired.
The grief, meanwhile, has been hard to overcome. “I never understood it and had survivor’s guilt and anger about it for a long time,” Dean says. “I figured, ‘How could you do this?’ I was angry at him because of all we had to go through. That’s what happens when you lose somebody you’re so close to at a young age.” To deal with the emotions, Dean sought professional help in the early ’80s, though he won’t discuss the details. “I did have grief counseling for a while,” he says. “It was here in Vermont. I was not hospitalized or any of that crap. I never missed a day of work. It was for a reasonably short period of time.” Going to Laos last year—talking to locals, seeing the site where his brother may have been buried—gave him “huge insight” and “some closure.” But perhaps not enough. “There is a story there,” he says. “I don’t know what it is.” Not knowing everything is a form of powerlessness Howard Dean cannot stand.
With T. Trent Gegax in New Hampshire
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc. |
