If Sessions Is A Racist My Father Was A Racist. Overhaul State! More Known About Bannon In A Few Weeks Than Obama In 8 Years.
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If there is any government department that needs a total overhaul it is State. Our Diplomats have been consistently on the wrong side of history, operate as a tenured fraternity that protects those who are in agreement with the ones above them and has an Arabist tilt that has helped to perpetuate policies which have kept us energy dependent on Sheikdoms that will eventually collapse.
Lifson believes he knows why Trump is courting Romney. Perhaps Romney would be more effective than Bolton, who would be my choice. As for Rudy, I would appoint him to The Supreme Court to fill Scalia's seat. (See 1 below.)
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Newt has been there, been successful and offers some sound advice.
While I lived in Atlanta, I got to know Newt. He loves Peter Drucker and referred to him time and again. Newt is correct in the advice he is giving. Focus, focus, focus on a few critical matters and build upon successes that are doable.
There are two scenarios that could evolve.
First, if Republicans fail to support Trump by engaging in intra-party warfare and thereby blow the opportunity for meaningful and long overdue change they will rue the day.
Second, should the Demwits become obstructionists, Republicans must rise, challenge the gauntlet and "slay" the Schumer/Pelosi led Demwits. They must not buckle or they will also rue the day. (See 1a below.)
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There really is no reason for the Federal Government to intrude itself in education and one would hope Ms. DeVos would slowly gut the department but I doubt she will. Therefore, at least she appears to be a proponent of charter schools and focusing on students being educated rather than protecting unions who have shown little interest in doing so. We have allowed PC'ism to take over course curriculae and this must stop (See 2 below.)
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As I have said on enumerable instances, Liberals engage in discrimination, smear- trashing tactics and politics of personality. If Sen. Sessions is a racist then my father and Hugo Black were racists. (See 3 below.)
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This worthwhile article was referred to me by a neighbor. It provides another side of Steve Bannon and confirms what I have heard and read from others.
What I find interesting is more has been written about Bannon, in a few weeks and we have learned who knew him at Harvard etc. than what we know and/or have learned about Obama after 8 years. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1).Why Trump is courting Romney for the State Department
By Thomas Lifson
All the brouhaha over the alleged rifts within the Trump transition over Mitt Romney misses the point. I think it is theatre, a distraction by the same man who was able to direct media attention where he wanted it all throughout the campaign.
Donald Trump has a plan that eludes his critics, who can't help thinking about politics the way it has always been played and still do not grasp his thinking nor the range of new tools he brings to the presidency.
The Department of State is badly broken and desperately needs to be fixed. State requires fundamental restructuring as well as the departure of many entrenched figures whose goals and beliefs are antagonistic to realistic confrontation with Islamic jihad and the generations-long efforts of Muslim states to "wipe Israel off the map." The State Department is full of people called "Arabists," who instinctively blame Israel when it is attacked and defends itself and who presume that the U.S. should attend to the prejudices of hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims because they are so populous, and because they have oil and have funded an amazing number of sinecures for retired bureaucrats with generous compensation and few demands (other than reflexive support whenever an issue arises).
This is just a start on enumerating the problems, for the Middle East is not the only problem ahead, merely the oldest. There are serious issues with Russia, China, North Korea, and Venezuela, among major problems for U.S. diplomacy.
Arnold Cusmariu today makes the case that John Bolton is the man to reform the State Department while implementing President-Elect Trump's policies. I am a great admirer of Bolton and would be happy if he were to get the job. But even though I am much closer to Bolton's politics than Mitt Romney's, the former governor's skill set seems ideal for the job ahead.
First of all, my assumption is that when he assumes the presidency, Donald Trump will largely make foreign policy from the White House, a move with much precedent. He would do this by using the National Security Council staff, who do not require Senate confirmation, and who can operate quicker and more flexibly than the barnacle-encrusted State Department protocols allow.
Mitt Romney as secretary of state would focus not on policy, but on doing to the State Department what he has done to poorly performing companies: close down entire segments of the organization and reorganize what the survivors do around re-thought goals and procedures. This is a formidable art, and one that Romney is an acknowledged master of, thanks to his many years at Bain Capital, buying companies and turning them around. He has deep experience in refocusing on what matters most and the most effective ways to accomplish the redefined priorities.
It helps a lot to be a total stranger if you are making ruthless cuts. Bolton's experience at the State Department could be a plus in many ways, but also his human relationships could be an obstacle for sweeping change. He would be only a phone call away from Romney, were the latter to need his advice. The portrait of Romney painted by the Obama campaign in 2012 could be turned to advantage if State Department employees started sending out their résumés in anticipation of Mitt the Knife forcing them out.
Donald Trump has endured a certain amount of mockery for saying that Romney "looks like" a secretary of state, but I take the remark as an indication that he intends to make unprecedented use of the media in his foreign policy (and everywhere else in his administration). Remember that he understands reality television's appeal better than anyone else in politics. And for better or worse, a sizable chunk – probably a majority – of the public apprehends politics at the level of TV drama, with heroes and villains, and especially with victims.
Donald Trump is spending a lot of time with Mitt Romney, and the two are to dine together. I think this suggests that the president-elect is using his formidable persuasion powers to explain to Mitt what the job he has in mind will look like and solicit Romney's formidable intelligence and experience in the task ahead.
The master showman is also a master persuader (hat tip: Scott Adams). I think he has big plans for big changes at State, and he thinks Romney is the guy to do it.
There are three fundamental challenges to any effort to transform Washington.
I learned these principles from working with President Reagan on dramatic change in the 1980s and then leading the Contract with America with its deep changes (first GOP majority in 40 years, welfare reform, the only four balanced budgets in your lifetime, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, etc.)
The principles I learned working with Reagan and applied as Speaker seem to be universal for those who would enact deep, profound changes. They are:
1. The "normal" will try to convince the leader to be "reasonable".
2. Solving symptoms feels satisfying and is an easy substitute for solving the real, underlying problems.
3. The urgent drives out the important.
Let me explain each.
First, the "normal" will try to convince the leader to be reasonable. I remember on election night of 1994 when we had won the House for the first time since 1952. At about 2:00 AM, our key supporters--people who had spent years of their life working for a Republican majority--sat around discussing the historic victory. Their number one fear was that I would go to Washington and be talked into behaving "normally." They knew that the lobbyists, the news media, the socialites, the bureaucracy and the old order would gather together to "tame" the revolutionary reform effort of the American people.
That Friday, three days after the election, I spoke at The Heritage Foundation and shocked the Washington media by declaring, “I will cooperate but I will not compromise.” This formula was a direct attack on the Washington assumption that campaign promises are cynically made to win votes but after the election "responsible" people forget those words and get back to governing as insiders.
If we had listened to the Washington establishment, we would never have reformed welfare, balanced the budget or cut capital gains taxes.
President-elect Trump should get up every day and begin by looking at his own campaign promises. He owes his presidency to the people who believed in him, not to the courtiers and schmoozers who had contempt for him as candidate but adore him now that he is going to be president.
“Reasonableness” will be the death of Trumpism. The very essence of the Trump candidacy was a willingness to set out new policies, new goals, and new toughness that was “unreasonable” to Washington but made perfect sense to millions of Americans. President Trump should “unreasonably” insist on draining the swamp and changing policies. This is why he was elected.
Second, there will be so many symptoms of problems that a president could satisfyingly spend every day focusing on little problems that require little solutions. While that approach will yield many small satisfactions, however, it will not produce the profound changes that are needed. Peter Drucker warned of this tendency to allow surface symptoms to attract our attention. In The Effective Executive (a book every Trump appointee should be required to read), Drucker wrote that great leaders look below the symptom to find the real problem. Getting rid of one bad bureaucrat may be satisfying, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. Other bad bureaucrats will show up. Overhauling the bureaucracy so that it quits producing bad bureaucrats and starts producing good civil servants is a reform that could last a lifetime.
President-elect Trump and his senior team have to acquire the habit of asking of every situation “Is this a symptom, or a problem?” If it is symptom, they must take some time to look for the real underlying problem. When they solve that problem they will have solved orders of magnitude more symptoms.
Third, Washington is a city in which the urgent drives out the important. Senator Jesse Helms first taught me this. He saw me on the street one day early in my career and said, “Young man, remember that this is a city in which the urgent drives out the important. Your job is to get up every morning, place the important at the center of your desk, and work on it until the urgent overwhelms it.”
As I thought about Helms’s rule and watched President Reagan, I realized he had developed an antelope-and-chipmunk theory of leading.
Lions know that they cannot afford to hunt chipmunks because even if they capture them, they will starve to death.
Lions have to hunt antelopes and zebras.
President Reagan was a lion. He wanted to accomplish big things. He knew that meant he could not get bogged down by tiny problems (chipmunks).
President Reagan got up every morning and reminded himself of his three antelopes: defeat the Soviet Union, grow the American economy, and renew American civic culture so we would be proud to be American again.
When President Reagan entered the oval office, chipmunks would come running in. Some federal chipmunks can be $10 billion or more. Reagan would listen patiently and say "You are a fine chipmunk! Have you met my chief of staff?" Jim Baker became the largest chipmunk collector in the world.
President-elect Trump has to pick between three and five antelope he wants to hunt. He should focus on them relentlessly.
He should work out with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior strategist Steve Bannon how they are going to divide up the chipmunks.
Only with a system like this can the new president avoid having the urgent and the trivial overwhelm his ability to focus on the essential changes that will make his presidency historic.
Developing Trumpism as a governing system is going to be an enormous job.
Moving America from decay to dynamic growth is going to be an enormous job.
Draining the swamp in Washington is going to be an enormous job.
Betsy DeVos favors school choice and helped pass Michigan’s first charter-school bill.
ByJASON L. RILEY
Ms. DeVos is chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, an organization dedicated to helping parents choose the best school for their kids. Ms. Weingarten leads the American Federation of Teachers, which is focused on what’s best for the adults.
Detractors say Ms. DeVos is opposed to public education. But she told an interviewer in 2013 that her definition of educational choice includes schools of all kinds. “What we are trying to do is tear down the mindset that assigns students to a school based solely on the zip code of their family’s home,” she said. “We think of the educational choice movement as involving many parts: vouchers and tax credits, certainly, but also virtual schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, and charter schools.” In the early 1990s, Ms. DeVos and her husband, a former president of Amway, were involved in passing Michigan’s first charter-school bill.
Ms. Weingarten brings a different set of priorities to the education debate. She has fought to keep persistently failing schools open because they still provide jobs for her dues-paying members. She has fought to ensure that government officials, rather than parents, decide where a child attends school. Union influence over education policy in the U.S. is unrivaled, and Ms. Weingarten prefers it that way. Her top concern is better pay and working conditions for her members. Students don’t pay union dues.
That doesn’t make her a bad person, but it should cast doubt on claims, too often swallowed whole by education reporters, that union interests are perfectly aligned with those of students and families. A union-negotiated work rule that says teachers can’t be evaluated by how much their students learn is a job-protection measure, but it obviously harms kids and school quality.
Education philanthropists often work to accommodate the teachers unions. Ms. DeVos chose to fight them head on by backing political candidates who support school choice, the same way unions support candidates who don’t.
Michael Petrilli, a veteran of George W. Bush’s Education Department who now runs the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, wrote last week that the DeVos pick shows Mr. Trump’s seriousness. “She was one of the first people in ed-reform to understand that we weren’t going to beat the teachers unions with op-eds and policy papers,” he wrote. “She pushed the private school choice movement to invest in serious political giving much earlier than the mainstream reform groups did, and, so far, with far greater success.” In the 2016 election, the American Federation for Children invested in 121 races in 12 states and won 89% of them.
Mr. Trump clearly has tapped a fighter, and education reformers are thrilled. The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., that President Obama has spent two terms working to shut down—at the urging of the unions, natch—is likely to flourish under the new administration. Mr. Obama and his Education Department supported charter schools but not vouchers. Ms. DeVos embraces school choice writ large, and states interested in expanding educational options for low-income families will proceed knowing that Washington has their back.
Mr. Obama tended to regulate what he couldn’t legislate, and education policy was no exception. The administration imposed its will from Washington in areas traditionally left to the states—from Common Core curriculum standards, to bathroom rules for transgender students, to race-based school discipline policies. With any luck Ms. DeVos will promptly end this meddling.
Reformers are also hoping that the Trump administration learns from the past. To the dismay of many conservatives, George W. Bush greatly expanded the role of the federal government in K-12 schooling through the No Child Left Behind Act. Insisting that school districts break down test results by subgroup—low income, special education, racial minorities—increased transparency. But rewarding and punishing school districts based on yearly progress was overreach that even some who supported the law now regret. It legitimized a more muscular role in education for the feds.
Mr. Trump has proposed a $20 billion federal voucher program that students could use to attend public or private schools. But this idea presents similar hazards. Federal dollars will bring federal regulations, and reform-minded individuals like Betsy DeVos won’t forever be in charge of implementing them. Better to let the states lead on school choice. Now that Republicans control 33 governorships and both legislative chambers in 32 states, what’s stopping them?
Trump’s pick for attorney general spent a decade trying to fix disparities in drug sentencing.
ByQUIN HILLYER
The accusations stem from Mr. Sessions’s unsuccessful nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted down that nomination after hearing testimony about remarks Mr. Sessions had purportedly made in the early 1980s that were deemed racially insensitive. Throughout three intervening decades of public life, Mr. Sessions hasn’t evinced an iota of racial animus. Yet Democrats are clucking that the now-ancient incidents—disputed even then as taken wholly out of context—should disqualify Mr. Sessions from being attorney general.
What should be far more relevant is a conversation Mr. Sessions had, and a legislative course he pursued, after being elected to the Senate in 1996. My small part of that story begins two years later on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
In 1998 I arrived in Mobile, Ala., to write editorials for the daily Register newspaper—and I held my own private doubts about Sen. Sessions. As a self-styled “Jack KempRepublican” determined to expel vestigial racism from the conservative movement, I had been a founding board member of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. That was a group formed in 1989 to end the then-ascendant political career of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. I was thus naturally wary of Sen. Sessions, who supposedly had told a joke making light of the Klan’s evils.
On my first reporting trip for the Register to Washington, D.C., I requested interviews with both of Alabama’s senators. The timing was bad—lawmakers were in session—but Mr. Sessions’s press aide said the senator was eager to talk. I was instructed to meet him, between votes, on the Capitol steps.
Long story short, Sen. Sessions was on a mission. He wanted somebody, anybody, to write about the importance of American policy toward Colombia. That U.S. ally was at risk of being toppled by the narco-financed, communist guerrillas known by the acronym FARC.
It was a subject far from my interests. But Mr. Sessions put the stakes in memorable context. The senator can be a discursive speaker, but he kept returning to a central contention: FARC-allied drug lords were responsible for much of the cocaine that polluted the American streets. As a former federal prosecutor, he was concerned about the violent crime accompanying the cocaine scourge.
He spoke about addicts and criminals not with vilification, but with compassion. “You’ve got these poor guys in the inner city,” I remember him saying. “Nobody provided them much of an education; they can’t find a job; and somebody tells them they can get high for relatively cheap by smoking these crack rocks. They get addicted and they do something terrible and end up in jail and their lives get ruined. We’ve gotta help our Colombian allies defeat these drug lords at the source, where they grow this stuff. It’s just ruining all these lives.”
It was this same train of thought—compassion for the users of crack cocaine—that led Sen. Sessions to introduce the Drug Sentencing Reform Act in 2001. The law at the time punished crack cocaine 100 times more harshly than powdered cocaine. Mr. Sessions specifically argued that this created unfair racial disparities, since crack was the drug of poor inner cities, while powder was favored by white Wall Streeters. Such compassion for black addicts is far from a hallmark of someone motivated by racial animus.
Early on, advancing the bill was slow going. It was too easy for sentencing reform to be mischaracterized as soft-on-crime leniency, a political death knell. But Sen. Sessions, with mostly Democratic allies initially, kept pushing. As my intermittent conversations with him over the next nine years demonstrated, it was a passion of his. Mr. Sessions was tough on crime, but he seemed troubled to the core by the thought of sentencing injustice, especially with a racial component.
Finally, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, reducing the disparity. Mr. Sessions was one of the bill’s three lead authors—a testament to his doggedness in the pursuit of equal justice.
In 18 years of closely covering Sen. Sessions (including numerous off-the-record conversations), I’ve never heard a mean word from his lips or seen a single sign that raised my Kempian hackles. Mr. Sessions has now served 20 years in the Senate. No racist could keep bigotry closeted for so long. And none, surely, would work so hard, risking political capital, to fix sentencing laws that had proved in application to be racially discriminatory.
From the very first day, Steve Bannon made an impression.
In a Harvard Business School classroom of about 90 people in 1983, he took a seat in the “skydeck” — a spot at the top giving him a view of the entire class. The marketing professor pointed up at Bannon, calling on him — without warning — and asking that he present the case study they were supposed to have read before coming to class.
The case was on Fieldcrest blankets, the acrylic bedding available at most department stores.
“This,” Bannon began, “is a sleepy industry.”
The tense classroom cracked up, and Bannon went on to deliver an impromptu presentation that many of his classmates remember today as so succinct and on point that some have joked that the professor must have told him he was going to get called on.
He continued impressing classmates the next day, too, breaking down another case study.
“He was quite gutsy and pretty much blew the class away with an incredible performance,” said Cornelia Tilney, one of the classmates. “I remember thinking after watching him, ‘I am definitely flunking this class if this is where the bar is set!’ ”
The man who has become one of the most controversial figures of the nascent Donald Trump administration — a man who built his reputation as a rabble-rousing figure who promotes views that many view as racist and anti-Semitic — was then once just another high achiever.
There was a class full of them at HBS, the finishing school for the nation’s traditional corridors of power and especially its buttoned-down financial establishment.
He, like they, was gunning for a top Wall Street job, and wanted to make a lot of money in a hurry. And yet, as classmates recall, something set him apart early on. Brash even by Harvard standards, intellectually dominant but also easy company.
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL 1984 YEARBOOK
Steve Bannon, second from right.
What most can’t find in their recollections is the harshly divisive Steve Bannon they read about today.
For two years, Bannon was educated by the top business professors in the country. In stadium-style rooms, he learned how to lead, how to market, and how to spot a business opportunity that could appeal to the masses.
He has used some of those skills to help oversee a website, Breitbart News, that speaks to the angry edges of society, and to help elect Trump as president. He has helped upend the definition of a Republican in a way that few on that campus — one with many conservatives, but of the Reaganomics brand — could have envisioned.
Interviews with more than two dozen of his former classmates illustrate that many view him as a brilliant thinker, even if they don’t always agree with his politics.
He was gregarious. He was preppy, often dressed in a favorite yellow sweater. As one classmate put it, “He didn’t strike me as out of the mainstream.” Minorities in the class said he didn’t make them feel uncomfortable. A Jewish classmate said he never heard him say anything anti-Semitic.
“I don’t think there’s a racist bone in his body,” said Thomas Meredith, who sat with Bannon in the skydeck.
But there are also those who say that he had a controlling side that could take over the class, that he was high-strung — and could come across as abrasive to some of the women in the class.
“There was some anger there. He was wound really tightly,” said one former classmate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’ve lost sleep around the fact that he’s so close to the president of the United States. . . . The women in my section have as well.”
Working-class roots
Bannon grew up in a working-class family living in Richmond. While home from Virginia Tech during summer breaks, he would spend long hours working at a local junkyard.
“He would come home looking like a coal miner,” said his younger brother, Chris. “Mom would make him strip down to his boxers and spray him off with a hose before he could come in.”
After graduating from college, he joined the Navy, where he served on ships abroad before working at the Pentagon. While there, he earned a master’s degree in national security studies from Georgetown University.
His path to Cambridge doesn’t look like a traditional one, but in some ways it very much was.
“There’s a seed of Boston planted not only with us but in every Irish Catholic kid,” said Chris Bannon. “We were Kennedy freaks. My dad knocked on doors for Kennedy. Every Irish kid thinks he wants to be Jack Kennedy, right? At least back then.’’
But by the time he arrived on campus, Steve Bannon was more inspired by Ronald Reagan than Camelot, and ready to take advantage of an economy that was making life good for investment bankers.
Bannon was 29, much older than his classmates who entered Harvard after brief stints at banks or consulting firms.
Unlike many, he was married: Several years earlier a Catholic priest had married Bannon and Cathleen “Susie” Houff,a young woman who, like him, was from Richmond and had attended Virginia Tech. They were still childless — a daughter would come several years later — and the marriage would end in divorce, the first of three for Bannon.
Building relationships
A large tent was spread out on the leafy Harvard Business School campus, with its ionic columns and brick buildings. It was 1983 and the school was celebrating its 75th anniversary. A day or two before classes started, students began showing up by the tent to meet their fellow incoming classmates.
Scot Vorse, a flip-flop-wearing Californian who had never traveled east of Denver, was wandering around, feeling a little out of place. Listening to new classmates — talking about McKinsey this and consulting firm that — only further alienated him.
Then, Bannon approached. He seemed to have a knack for looking after those who were younger, those who weren’t sure they belonged.
Not long after introductions, Bannon asked Vorse to be in his study group, the beginning of a crucial relationship. The two men would grow extremely close, later working together at Goldman Sachs, forming their own financial firm, and joining forces at Breitbart. On election night, Vorse was one of those Bannon called.
JEFFREY BEIR
Steve Bannon during his Harvard years.
“Our relationship went from little brother-big brother, to equal brother,” Vorse said.
It was heady times on campus, with a Wall Street boom that made almost every business student on campus desirable to corporate recruiters. Few had trouble finding a job.
The business school distributes first-year students into a number of sections that are about 90 students each. They stay in the same classroom for about eight hours every day, so those in Section H with Bannon grew to know him intimately.
Grades are determined based on how well people perform against one another, which can foster intense competition. About half the grade comes from class participation, putting further pressure on an already driven crop of classmates.
Early on, Bannon was elected the representative from the class to be the liaison between the faculty and those in the section on the verge of flunking out. It was one of the most powerful positions in the section, since the program was set up to fail some 7 percent of the class as a way to foster competition.
It was up to Bannon to argue for someone to be saved — or not.
Fit into Ivy League
He was fit and trim, always clean-shaven, and naturally tan. His posture was ramrod straight, and his handshake firm. He was almost always in khakis, a pressed shirt, and a sweater.
He reminded some classmates of Robert Redford.
And while he may have grown up middle class, and lacked an Ivy League pedigree, Bannon seemed to fit right in.
He was an easy presence at weekend parties at a classmate’s home in Somerville, or hanging out on Friday afternoons in a business school pub, which is housed in Gallatin Hall, a Georgian Revival-style building and one of seven HBS buildings named for secretaries of the US Treasury.
“He was not a rebel looking for a cause,” Vorse said. “You don’t go to Harvard Business School to be a rebel and cause problems. You go to Harvard Business School because it was the most prestigious school to get in at the time.”
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL 1984 YEARBOOK
Steve Bannon.
A sports fanatic, Bannon made sure to get to a few Red Sox games and he played intramural basketball and football. He and Vorse drove up to Maine to visit Bannon’s brother, in an old car with a heating system that barely worked. They went on trips to look at fall foliage.
Bannon put together a large study group of about seven people. Some within the section began referring to Bannon and his group as “the pack.” Bannon was “the leader of the pack.”
The group got together almost every night, Sunday through Thursday, alternating who would host, and spending hours debating and going over the case studies they were supposed to be familiar with for the next day’s class.
“Most of the time, there is not a right answer,” Vorse said. “These are cases where part of succeeding in business is figuring out what’s important and what’s not.”
“Steve is as good as anybody at getting through the noise, deciphering the issue, and deciding what’s relevant,” he added.
Bannon’s study group proved adept at teaming up during classroom discussions. Among those in the group was Matthew Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram distillery company and one of the country’s top Jewish philanthropists (Bronfman did not respond to requests for comment).
“As a result of its size and makeup, the group was very effective in supporting its members’ class participation, critical to survival,” said Paolo Pellegrini, one of Bannon’s former classmates.
Still, Bannon would hang back at times, quite literally. Hisseat in the back suggested he wasn’t overeager like those in the front row. Nor was he simply trying to blend in and avoid being called on, like those in the middle.
The professor rarely made it up to the top row. Students could pass notes, newspapers, or cartoons around without being easily spotted.
Some of those in the back had a name for those in the front: “Tire biters.”
“Ultra eager folks, trying too hard to contribute,” said David Allen, a classmate who sat in the back with Bannon.
“In my view, Steve was certainly top three in intellectual horsepower in our class — perhaps the smartest,” Allen said. “But he combined horsepower with logical, well-structured arguments. Whenever Steve spoke, my advice was to ‘listen for understanding.’ That is what I am doing today.”
During the first year at business school, most students covet jobs during the summer that will put their careers on a glidepath. And few jobs were as sought after as a summer associate at Goldman Sachs. Hundreds of students would vie for what often amounted to about 20 slots from Harvard.
Entree to Goldman Sachs
Bannon, who declined requests for an interview, recounted last year to Bloomberg Businessweek that his age and Navy background made it difficult to get many places interested. But he was invited by a Goldman Sachs representative to a campus recruiting party.
“I get there, and there’s like 700 people jammed into this tent,” he said. “I said, ‘F--- it. There’s no chance.’ So I stood off on the side with a drink and these two other schmendricks standing next to me. And I talk to these guys.’’
“We have the greatest conversation about baseball, and I find out after half an hour it was John Weinberg Jr., whose dad runs the firm, and a guy named Rob Kaplan, who became a senior partner,” Bannon recalled.
Bannon told the magazine that Goldman executives gathered that night to discuss prospects, and one of the recruiters later told him how the conversation went.
“They said, ‘Well, Bannon, I guess we’re gonna reject him. He’s too old for a summer job,’ ” Bannon said. “And these guys say, ‘Oh no, we talked to him. He’s terrific.’ Literally, a complete crapshoot. But I got a job.”
After the summer job, Bannon came back during his second year as an on-campus recruiter for Goldman Sachs. It was through those connections that he helped Vorse also get a job at the prized firm.
Democratic family
Bannon grew up in a Democratic household, and he has recounted how he began questioning the party during the Carter administration. During his years as a naval officer, he was in the north Arabian Sea amid the Iranian hostage crisis and he lost all faith in Carter.
“You could tell it was going to be a goat [expletive],” Bannon told Businessweek.
By the time he arrived at Harvard, his conservatism was blossoming.
Most of the lessons were done by Socratic method, with intense discussion on a range of issues. Almost from the beginning, classmates noticed two things about Bannon: a rigidity that was formed from his years in the military, and his deeply held political beliefs.
“Steve’s comments in class were peppered with political history references and quotes — everybody thought he would make money for a while and then run for the US Senate,” Pellegrini said.
The class wasn’t exactly diverse, and only about one-fifth of his section was women. But few recognize the harsh portrait they read of Bannon now.
“As a woman, minority [Asian], an immigrant, and as onetime supporter of Hillary Clinton, I believe I can be objective in my assessment of Steve Bannon,” Thai Lee said in an e-mail. “The Steve I knew in 1980’s was a very smart, studious, and polite young man. I have never heard Steve speak ill of women, minorities, or others.”
During one class discussion, a student from China disagreed with a point made by another classmate, a West Point graduate.
Bannon, apparently troubled, approached the Chinese student. The student, Chinghua Tang, recalled telling Bannon that he did have high regard for the US military. He added that he wished the United States had prevailed in the Korean War, and that he wished Vietnam had turned out differently.
“Steve said he was happy to hear what I said and it was quite different from what he had assumed,” Tang said.
But some detected another side to him. One female classmate described Bannon as an “alpha male” with a bearing and attitude that made some women uncomfortable in class.
Vorse denied that his friend had any such qualities, then or now. “This garbage never, ever came up” in class or later in their business career.
“Our clients were women, were Jewish, were Muslim, were Asian, were African-American, were Hispanic. My God. If they had a business that we could represent and do something — purple, I don’t care. He didn’t care.”
In preparation for the 25th reunion of Bannon’s HBS class in 2010, the attendees submitted updates about what was going on in their lives.
Bannon wrote about how, after more than 20 years in the financial industry, his new focus was as a filmmaker. He noted his recent film, “Generation Zero,” about the financial meltdown had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. His upcoming film, starring Michele Bachmann, was “a frontal assault on the progressive movement trying to destroy our country. I currently have another half dozen or so films on various right-wing topics getting ready for production and am having a hell of a lot of fun.”
After expressing pride over his three daughters, he turned back to politics.
EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE
Steve Bannon left Trump Tower in New York on Nov. 11.
Right-wing activities
“Looking forward to catching up with everyone at the reunion and signing folks up for the populist rebellion we call the Tea Party movement.”
Classmates remember him wearing his conservative beliefs like a badge: He would carry it into almost any discussion.
Several of his fellow students are shocked at the comments they now see attributed to Bannon, and those that come out on Breitbart, the conservative website that he runs. A May 2016 article called Bill Kristol, a longtime Republican and Weekly Standard editor, a “renegade Jew.” In July, an article said that if women did not want to be harassed online, they should log off.
Women, the article said, are “screwing up the Internet for men by invading every space we have online and ruining it with attention-seeking and a needy, demanding, touchy-feely form of modern feminism.”
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” Bannon told The Washington Post in January. “We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”
It’s the kind of language that was virtually unheard of in his Harvard days, from Bannon or anyone else. And some of those who got to know Bannon back then say they don’t think he believes some of those things, even now.
Instead, they believe he is simply doing what he was taught more than three decades ago: exploiting a business opportunity, this time in the furious, neglected legions of the white middle class. He saw a market in their sense of alienation, and Trump’s election suggests that his forecast was truer than most.
“If you were asking me about some of the articles published and things clearly intended to be lightning rod, I’m not sure Steve subscribes to those beliefs,” said one former classmate, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But there’s a strong argument to be made that he was doing whatever any good business leader would do, which is serving his customers and providing a product.”
In that sense, the classmate said, they see Bannon now as the same brash and driven striver they saw 32 years ago when he joined their class.
“A lot of people give him credit for being the brains behind this political revolution, almost as if it’s coming out of nowhere,” the classmate said. “That’s very consistent in the behavior I saw from Steve in the HBS environment.
“In a way, he would surprise people with his insights and the extent of his understanding of a complex situation. But doing it from the fringe. And the fringe in that case was skydeck.”
The perch Bannon will soon occupy as Trump’s chief counselor and strategist is no longer the fringe of the classroom, or the fringe of anywhere. It’s the Oval Office.
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