(3 of 8)
Howard Dean is the firstborn son of the aforementioned Andree (who can trace her family back to Richard Maitland, born in Scotland circa 1234) and Howard Brush Dean Jr. Like his own father and grandfather, Dean's dad made a living--a very, very good living--on Wall Street, retiring as a top executive of Dean Witter Reynolds. His four sons grew up mostly in East Hampton, where in the mid-'50s the family built a house on Hook Pond, among the oldest-money addresses in the nation. The Deans--who were, of course, Republicans--belonged to the superexclusive Maidstone golf club, which for decades had no minority or Jewish members.
Howard III was born in 1948. He and his three younger brothers spent a great deal of time outdoors, which would later help Dean connect to voters in a rural state. (Today Dean's gubernatorial portrait in the Montpelier statehouse shows him clutching a canoe paddle--a rustic pose even for Vermont.) For a while, the boys shuttled among the big house in East Hampton, the Browning School in New York City and an apartment on Park Avenue, where Dean still stays when in New York City. But the parents felt that the boys needed even more time outside, so they sent them to St. George's in Middletown, R.I., a boarding school that today costs $30,000 a year and maintains its own 69-ft. sloop for student boating.
Earlier this year Dean told the Nation that his favorite novel is Sometimes a Great Notion, by countercultural guru Ken Kesey. Dean now has a more politically genial list of favorites, including All the King's Men and Truman, but his fondness for the Kesey book is revealing, since one of its central relationships pits an outsize father against the son trying to live up to him.
Dean calls his father "a Gargantuan figure. As we say in politics, he took all the oxygen out of the room." Because he had had diphtheria, Howard Dean Jr. couldn't serve in World War II when he was in his 20s. But he wasn't content to stay home. So he worked for Pan Am Airways in Africa and then, in 1943, joined the China National Aviation Corp. CNAC flew some of the most crucial supply routes for Chinese and U.S. forces in Asia. Dean, an operations man, didn't fly, but he "was the best manager we ever had," says pilot Fletcher Hanks.
Three decades later, Dean's second-born son Charles also sought adventure in Asia. In 1974 Charlie was traveling with a friend and ended up in Laos. He had worked for the McGovern campaign two years before, and the Laos trip may have been a way for him to connect antiwar politics with the real lives of Southeast Asians. Or he may have been working for the CIA. (The agency won't discuss the rumor, and family members say they aren't sure.) Whatever the case, Charlie was killed around December 1974 by members of the Pathet Lao, the communist group that won a long civil war to control Laos. The family was devastated; Andree Dean says her husband "just would never discuss it." But her boys rallied around one another. To this day, Dean wears his brother's belt, a hippie-ish job with large metal eyelets that looks strange against Dean's usual pinstripes.