President Bush yesterday brushed the dust of Texas off his cowboy boots to reclaim his New England elite and intellectual heritage.
Mr Bush, a Yale and Harvard graduate, who has not returned to Yale since 1968, yesterday accepted an honorary degree from his alma mater and joked in his speech about his somewhat chequered student days.
The Yale Daily News yesterday described them euphemistically as "extremely gregarious and athletic but not particularly academically or politically minded". Mr Bush acknowledged as much, admitting he often slept in the library and empathising with those who "like me" found it difficult "to remember everything you did here. That can be a good thing".
Mr Bush attributed his occasional difficulties with the English language to the Yale course in the Japanese Haiku form of poetry that he had studied. "They're not gaffes," he said, "but speaking in perfect forms of the ancient Haiku."
Complimenting the college's graduates, he added: "To the C students, you, too, could be presidents of the US". Mr Bush's reconciliation with Yale has been much commented upon.
In part his distancing himself until recently from the Ivy League college was a deliberate attempt to remould himself as a genuine Texan who despised the Eastern WASP elite from which he is in fact drawn. He had also complained that the university "dissed" his father by taking until his third year in office to bestow an honorary degree.
But Mr Bush's daughter, Barbara, has just completed her first year in the highly selective private university founded in 1701. Yale has about 11,000 students split roughly half and half between its undergraduate and graduate programmes. Undergraduate fees will total $34,030 next year for tuition, room and board.
Mr Bush is the fourth US president this century to be a Yale graduate. Each of them has been similarly honoured except Mr Bill Clinton. But the college's enthusiasm for Mr Bush was not overwhelming. Some 171 academics signed a petition saying they were boycotting yesterday's ceremony in protest against the award of an honorary degree to a man, they said, who had yet to demonstrate substantial achievement.