Recently I finished reading William Cohan’s non-fiction account called Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short. My motivation for choosing to read this book was simple. The author, his eponymous four friends, and I have something in common: we all graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. But you definitely don’t need that connection in order to enjoy, appreciate, and learn a lot from this book.

A further bit of context: you surely haven’t heard of three of the four friends. But you’ve definitely heard of the fourth. All four were in the class of 1977. That was twelve years after I graduated; when compared to 1965, the school was a different place when they graduated. So was the world. For reference, compare the two photos here. Then you can read my fairly detailed personal essay on my experiences at Andover.

OK, I don’t want to keep you in suspense any longer. You already know that the book’s subtitle is Promising Lives Cut Short, so you may realize that all four friends died young, and therefore you may have guessed the fourth name, the one that you definitely have heard of. Here are all four, along with their age at death:

• Jack Berman, 36
• Will Daniel, 41
• Harry Bull, 39
• John F. Kennedy, Jr, 38

Cohan has organized the book in a straightforward way: one chapter about Phillips Academy in general (focusing on the author’s time there), followed by four chapters, one on each of the four subjects.

Cohan’s time there (and therefore Berman’s, Daniel’s, Bull’s, and JFK Jr’s) was marked by an astonishing amount of drug use. Well maybe it’s not astonishing, since it was the ’70s. But there must also have been plenty of drugs in the first half of the ’60s, when I was at Andover, though I was too naive to notice. It was completely out of my purview. As far as I could tell, there was zero drug use. Later there was a famous cartoon in the Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, showing one Andover student explaining to a new classmate that there was no drug problem at Andover: “We can get anything we want, no problem.”

A few other interesting changes from 1965 to 1977:

• By 1977 there was a lot more acceptance of Jewish students, in both senses of the word “accept.” But even 1965 was dramatically different from 30 years earlier in that regard. For instance, two quotes from Headmaster Claude Fuess in 1935:

It’s just too bad about the little Jewish boy, but I can’t very well blame Dean Lynde for trying to keep our school as predominantly Aryan as possible.

If Andover did not have a policy limiting the Jews on campus to around two percent of the school population…then they would overrun the place, given their penchant for scholarly aptitude.

• Girls were admitted! The toxic male atmosphere of Andover in the ’60s and earlier was pushed aside.
• Education was considered progressive there in the ’70s. It certainly wasn’t in the ’60s.

Anyway, the picture you will get of the “four friends” makes this non-fiction account more like a novel in four parts. So even if you’re not interested in Phillips Academy, you’ll find plenty to occupy your attention.

Categories: Books