To LIBERAL CRITICS, President George W. Bush is the face of legacy preference. They note that although he opposes affirmative action, he benefited from admissions breaks largely reserved for rich whites. Grandson of a Connecticut senator, son of a future president already prospering in the oil industry, the third-generation legacy was admitted to Yale despite coasting through prep school with mediocre grades, a 566 verbal SAT score, and few noteworthy athletic or extracurricular achievements.

  His Yale record was equally undistinguished. “To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, ‘Well done,”” he joked in his 2001 commencement address. “And to the C students, I say you too can be president of the United States.”

  But concentrating on one individual misses the larger picture. The president is part of Washington's legacy establishment—the bipartisan array of powerful insiders in the executive branch, Congress, and the judiciary who sent their children to their old schools or who are themselves legacies. There are also, to be sure, legacy establishments in other sectors of American society, from Wall Street to the media: one study found that 42 percent of corporate leaders graduated from twelve elite universities and 10 percent attended one of thirty-three exclusive prep schools, while “most of the media elite enjoyed socially privileged upbringings.”

  For Washington's power brokers, few tools have been more vital than legacy preference in catapulting forward political careers or consolidating a family's social status across generations. Political dynasties such as the Bushes (Yale) and Kennedys (Harvard) are built on legacy preference, ensuring their future generations continued access to elite higher education. Whatever their ideological bent, few members of the legacy establishment are eager to abolish the admissions edge that perpetuates their wealth and power—or even, I found, to be interviewed about it.

  All three of the major-party candidates in the last two presidential elections are personally acquainted with legacy preference. Like President Bush, Massachusetts senator John Kerry was a Yale legacy with a C average in college, including four D's in his freshman year. “I always told my dad that D stood for distinction,” Kerry told the Boston Globe in 2005.

  Both Kerry and Bush belonged to Yale's Skull and Bones society, forging contacts that would help them in later life. Kerry is also, like the president, a Yale parent; his daughter, Vanessa, played varsity lacrosse there and graduated with highest honors in 1999. While his 2004 running mate, North Carolina senator John Edwards, a state university graduate who was the first member of his family to go to college, criticized alumni child preference, Kerry was noticeably silent on the subject.

  Former vice president Albert Gore Jr., the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000, is a Harvard alumnus and ex-member of the university's board of overseers. He is not a legacy—his father attended a state teachers” college before becoming elected to the Senate—but appears bent on being patriarch of a Harvard clan. Although Harvard accepts only one in ten applicants, all four of Vice President Gore's children enrolled there. The first three, Karenna, Kristin, and Sarah, attended the National Cathedral School, an elite Washington private school for girls. All were outstanding students, although Sarah was cited by police as a sixteen-year-old high school junior for underage alcohol possession. She was “very up front” with Harvard about the incident, one person familiar with the situation told me. “She acknowledged she had been immature. There had been a number of huge issues that had to do with her father's public life and the pressure on the kids.”

  In addition to being legacies, Kristin and Sarah received athletic preference as lacrosse players. “They weren't top recruits, but they were certainly on a list that I submitted to the admissions office,” recalled Carole Kleinfelder, former Harvard women's lacrosse coach. “On that second tier, you're not going to get anybody in who needs academic help. It's going to be somebody with legacy, somebody that's already got their foot in the door. It's another push.” Sarah, whom Kleinfelder considered the stronger recruit, never played at Harvard, while Kristin was on the team for two years.

  All three Gore daughters graduated with high honors from Harvard. Karenna subsequently attended Columbia Law School and gave a speech seconding her father's nomination for president at the 2000 Democratic convention. Kristin, who worked on the Harvard Lampoon, became a television comedy writer and also published a novel.

  For their younger brother, Albert Gore III, the legacy edge apparently offset concerns about both his behavior and his academic record. As noted earlier, he was an average student. After St. Albans suspended him for smoking marijuana, he transferred to Sidwell Friends, and was later cited for driving nearly 100 miles per hour. While in college, he was ticketed for driving under the influence and charged with marijuana possession.

  Gore's running mate in 2000 started a family tradition at Harvard's archrival. Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman received undergraduate and law degrees from Yale, as did his son, Matthew. Counting Lieberman and Kerry, fifteen U.S. senators are legacies and/or alumni parents. The preferences start at the top, with majority leader William Frist's three sons.

  Senator Frist, a Republican member of the education committee, joined the Bush administration in opposing affirmative action at the University of Michigan, but his sons have enjoyed preferences of a different kind. As noted in the introduction, Dr. Frist has close ties to Princeton as a graduate, ex-trustee, and donor. His eldest son, Harrison, enrolled at Princeton in 2002, although he had not been in the top fifth of his St. Albans class. Princeton's admissions office, which evaluates candidates on a 1-5 academic scale, with 1 being the best, ranked him a 5, normally a near-certain rejection. But Princeton president Shirley Tilghman, who considered him one of her highest admissions priorities for the year, prevailed on the staff to accept him. As a Princeton sophomore, Harrison pleaded guilty to drunk-driving charges. A history major, he graduated without honors in 2006.

  Princeton also admitted the senator's youngest son Bryan, who applied to its early decision program and was expected to enter in fall 2006. At St. Albans, Bryan was a “class leader and a very good student,” said Sher-rie McKenna, former director of college counseling. However, Bryan Frist did not make Cum Laude Society at St. Albans.

  The senator's middle son Jonathan was arrested for drunk driving at the age of seventeen while still in high school. Because he was legally a minor, the disposition of his case is private. Like Harrison and Bryan, Jonathan did not rank in the top 20 percent of his class at St. Albans as signified by Cum Laude Society membership. Nonetheless, he enrolled in 2005 at highly ranked Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where nearly 80 percent of freshmen were in the top tenth of their high school class. A person familiar with his high school record said that he was “admissible” by Vanderbilt standards but “not in the top range by any means.” Jonathan's father was not only Vanderbilt's home-state senator but also a former faculty member; Dr. Frist founded its organ transplant center in 1989.

  One of Dr. Frist's likely rivals for the 2008 Republican nomination, Arizona senator John McCain, saw his legacy status as not a boon but a burden. “There were times in my life when I harbored a secret resentment that my life's course seemed so preordained,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers. No doubt he was thinking partly of his college choice; he followed his father and grandfather, both admirals, to the U.S. Naval Academy. “When that baby was born, I assumed he was going to go to the Naval Academy,” his mother told the New Yorker. Bowing to his parents” wishes, McCain reluctantly accepted what he later called his “unavoidable appointment.” Displaying the independence that was itself a family tradition, the third-generation plebe rebelled against what he considered the academy's petty discipline and bullying upperclassmen and caroused through college, graduating fifth from the bottom of his class.

  Even in the Senate, sometimes called a millionaires” club, several members with legacy connections stand out for their great wealth, which makes their children doubly attractive to college development and admissions offices. Three such senators belong to families on Forbes magazine's list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans: Senator Frist through his brother, health care magnate Thomas Frist Jr. (net worth $1.7 billion in 2005), and Senator Kerry through his wife, heiress Teresa Heinz (net worth $750 million in 2004; she dropped off the list in 2005). Minnesota Democrat and Yale graduate Mark Dayton is linked to two billionaire families: the Dayton retailing family (with an estimated net worth in 1998 of $1.3 billion) and, through ex-wife Alida, the Rockefellers. Their son, Andrew Rockefeller Dayton, attended Breck School in Golden Valley, Minnesota, before entering Yale as a third-generation legacy in 2002. Senator Dayton said that his son was admitted on merit and that Yale has never asked him for legislative help.

  One senatorial son took a roundabout route to legacy status. John Bingaman, son of New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman, believed his record at Sidwell Friends fell short of Ivy League standards and enrolled at New York University. “I felt I needed to spend a year elsewhere to prove myself,” he told me. He then applied for transfers to Harvard, his father's alma mater, and Stanford, where his mother received her undergraduate degree and his father attended law school. Both universities give an edge to alumni children in the transfer process, and both accepted him. “Legacy could have played a role, but I'd like to think I was qualified to get into Harvard,” John told me. “I did very well at NYU.” He graduated from Harvard in 2002 with high honors in economics and now works in finance.

  New York senator Charles Schumer also went to Harvard. His daughter Jessica matriculated there in 2002 and joined the Harvard Crimson as a photographer and writer. In a 2004 article, she recalled writing her college application essay about her “love affair” with the New York Yankees and lamented, “My job this summer in investment banking doesn't give me much time to follow the Yankees.”

  Since alumni children constitute nearly one-fourth of Notre Dame's student body, it's not surprising to find a legacy from that university ensconced on Capitol Hill. Daniel Lungren, a conservative Republican representative from California, comes from a classic Notre Dame family. His father, the late John C. Lungren, was president of Notre Dame's alumni association and President Nixon's personal physician. Daniel Lungren, two of his brothers, and his son graduated from Notre Dame, as did three of his nieces, while three of his sisters attended St. Mary's College across the street, and a fourth enrolled at Notre Dame for a year before transferring.

  In a prior stint in Congress from 1979 to 1989, he said, he watched Fighting Irish football games and worked closely on legislation with other Notre Dame graduates on both sides of the aisle, such as former Kentucky congressman Romano Mazzoli, a Democrat and past president of the Notre Dame alumni club of Kentucky. “I've always felt that Notre Dame alums have a natural affinity and work together very well,” said Lungren, who returned to Congress in 2004. “It used to be, you'd find members active and attending in the Notre Dame Club of Washington.”

  Congressman Lungren, who said he was “lucky enough” to be named alumnus of the year by the club, is a staunch defender of legacy preference. “I've recommended people, children of Domers, who had outstanding records and weren't accepted,” he said. “But they do set aside a certain percentage [of slots for alumni children]. Look, it's a private institution. It can make the rules it wishes, so long as it's not discriminating on race, which it doesn't do.

  “A university should stand for something. Notre Dame does stand for being a Catholic institution, and part of making sure that occurs is maintaining connections with graduates. One way of maintaining connections is considering legacy as part of their admissions policy.”

  MISSOURI SENATOR Christopher “Kit” Bond, who graduated from Princeton in 1960, was well positioned to help his alma mater. As chairman of a Senate appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over independent agencies, he wielded enormous influence over the National Science Foundation budget. In 1999, when NSF started a grant program for graduate students who taught in elementary and secondary schools, Princeton became concerned that the agency's existing graduate fellowship program, which had provided research funds for several of its Nobel laureates, would be neglected. The university lobbied Senator Bond, who successfully pushed to raise the stipends for the traditional fellowships to the same level as the new grants.

  Princeton has been equally considerate of the senator. The same year Senator Bond bailed out the fellowship program, his son graduated from St. Albans, where he was not in the top fifth of his class, and enrolled at Princeton. According to a person familiar with his record, Sam was a “middle-of-the-pack” candidate. Due to legacy preference and perhaps his father's pivotal role in science funding, Sam was one of the priority cases recommended for admission that year by Princeton's then-president, Harold Shapiro. Sam, who graduated from Princeton without honors in 2003, became a second lieutenant in the Marines. (About 45 percent of Princeton seniors graduate with honors, high honors, or highest honors.)

  Shana Stribling, the senator's deputy press secretary, acknowledged that Princeton is “near and dear to his heart” and lobbied him on the fellowships: “This was a pretty big program for them.” But she said he has long supported funding for science and math research and that his advocacy for fellowships was unrelated to his son's admission. “Legacy always helps, but I don't think Sam would have had trouble getting in anywhere he was trying to go,” she said.

  “Senator Bond understood how important these fellowships were,” recalled Nan Wells, then director of Princeton's office of government affairs in Washington. “What he saw especially was the need for native-born scientists. The chairman of our research board at Princeton talked to him.”

  If Princeton attracts more than its share of political offspring—some more academically outstanding than others—that's not entirely an accident. Its aggressive lobbying operation in Washington, D.C., which Wells headed from its founding in 1981 until 2002, keeps tabs on Washington power brokers with children applying to Princeton, and passes word back to the central administration. The president's office, in turn, includes these students on the list of priority applicants that it sends to admissions.

  “If you know someone, you'll make the university aware that their application is coming in,” Wells said. But, she emphasized, “there's never any trade-off with admissions. Some universities do that sort of thing. We didn't.”

  One applicant Wells was aware of was Louisine Frelinghuysen, daughter of Rodney Frelinghuysen, a Republican congressman from New Jersey. Although Louisine was not a legacy—Princeton had rejected her father, who graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, New York—she was descended from one of the university's oldest families. There was a Frelinghuysen in Princeton's very first graduating class, and dozens of family members had gone there over the centuries, including two senators. Congressman Frelinghuysen's father (also a congressman), two brothers, and two nephews were all Princeton graduates.

  Of equal significance to Princeton was that Rodney Frelinghuysen bore no grudge for his admissions rebuff. Although he did not represent Princeton's district, the congressman—New Jersey's senior representative on the House appropriations committee—reaped millions of dollars in government funding for the university's science research. In 1998, he sponsored an amendment that increased the NSF budget by $70 million. From his seat on the energy and water development subcommittee, he took good care of Princeton's research into nuclear fusion.

  In April 2001, when Louisine was a junior at Groton, Princeton presented her father with the university's Champion of Science award, calling him “instrumental in securing funding… for fusion research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In this year's budget, he worked with the White House and the secretary of energy to include $248.5 million in the energy budget for the fusion sciences program.”

  Louisine, who applied in 2002, was a stellar candidate: “exceptionally well qualified,” Wells says. The congressman told me, “I married a woman who's very good at math and science. My daughter won one of the major science projects in high school with some other young man. She got in on her own steam, I assure you, I keep hands off.” Still, Princeton accepts only about one in nine applicants and rejects many excellent students. In case Louisine needed a tip, the family ties and fusion funding supplied it.

  Congressman Frelinghuysen favors legacy preference. “It's always good to have in the mix some of the sons and daughters of prior graduates,” he said. “It often assists in their charitable giving.”

  Louisine Frelinghuysen isn't the only Groton-educated daughter of a member of Congress to go to Princeton. Christina Maloney had an SAT score of 1330 and ranked 46th out of 79 graduates of Groton in 1998—the same class that included Henry Park. She was rejected by Brown and Dartmouth and wait-listed by Bates and Davidson colleges. But she got into Princeton, where three-quarters of students have SAT scores of 1380 or above. Her father and grandfather attended Princeton, while her mother, Carolyn Maloney, is a Democratic member of Congress from New York City. Congresswoman Maloney told me that her daughter graduated from Princeton in 2002 with high honors in sociology. She added, “Every child at Groton could do the work at any college in America” because the school is so rigorous.

  Politically connected Princeton legacies also include 2000 graduate Mary Bonner Baker, an actress and daughter of former Secretary of State James Baker III, a former Princeton trustee (and himself a legacy). Among the ranks of nonlegacy Princetonians are both daughters of Iowa senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa State University alumnus and a member of the Senate education committee. Amy Harkin graduated in 1998 and Jennifer Harkin in 2004, both without honors.