The Establishment Man

The day after George Bush and Michael Dukakis first met to debate which of them was better qualified to go to the White House, I went to look at their houses.

Governor Dukakis’s house in Brookline, the one whose garage contains the famous snow-blower, is only thirty minutes from Logan Airport by car, so I went there first. Brookline was the location of America’s first country club —which is to say, the first place rich WASPs built to flee the advance of social-climbing ethnics—in this case, the Irish. When an English golf writer made a humorous reference to this fact in a piece on the 1988 U.S. Open, which was played in Brookline, Boston’s Mayor Flynn went ballistic. (Even now, the ethnic resentments of Boston make New York look like the Peaceable Kingdom.) The Irish soon found the way to Brookline, however, along with, as the world now knows, some Greeks.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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George H. W. Bush

Presidential Election

The day after George Bush and Michael Dukakis first met to debate which of them was better qualified to go to the White House, I went to look at their houses.

Governor Dukakis’s house in Brookline, the one whose garage contains the famous snow-blower, is only thirty minutes from Logan Airport by car, so I went there first. Brookline was the location of America’s first country club —which is to say, the first place rich WASPs built to flee the advance of social-climbing ethnics—in this case, the Irish. When an English golf writer made a humorous reference to this fact in a piece on the 1988 U.S. Open, which was played in Brookline, Boston’s Mayor Flynn went ballistic. (Even now, the ethnic resentments of Boston make New York look like the Peaceable Kingdom.) The Irish soon found the way to Brookline, however, along with, as the world now knows, some Greeks.