Word: du
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twenty years later, Pete du Pont's ambitions are again being met with incredulity. Surely, when the former Republican Governor of Delaware called a press conference last September in the Hotel du Pont and announced that he was running for President, he had to be kidding. When even the urbane Robert Dole contrasts his plebeian Kansas roots with the preppie background of the front runner, George Bush, a du Pont of Delaware hasn't got a chance. What skeptics do not understand is that, in his own mind, Pete du Pont is a self-made man, one who rebelled against...
...Du Pont, 52, insists that his heavyweight name has no real bearing on his campaign. It is an irresistible angle for journalists, he admits, and the patrician roman numeral provides an easy stereotype. Du Pont is astute enough to ban reporters from his elegant home near Wilmington and his sprawling summer house in Maine, but he knows he cannot really bury his privileged background. "I am what I am. I can't change it, so I don't worry about...
...political climate in which most candidates are searching their souls for a persona that voters can trust, du Pont stands apart. He considers the obsession with "character" and the media's ceaseless quest for revealing personal anecdotes slightly silly. To his closest aides, du Pont's unapologetic approach is not mysterious. "He doesn't need this," says his longtime aide Glenn Kenton, campaign chairman. "He knows he could do a good job as President, but he can live without...
...Pete du Pont hopes to distinguish himself as an iconoclast, a free-market conservative boldly willing to question sacrosanct social programs that his better-known rivals fear to address. He wants his ideas to speak for themselves, and loudly enough to drown out the murmurs about his patrimony. He has selected five issues that he believes can excite the electorate. It took the methodical du Pont two years to research and hone his message, and he has now compressed it neatly onto a single 3-in. by 5-in. card that he keeps in his breast pocket. Dispensing with...
Planning to follow family tradition, du Pont majored in engineering at Princeton and there met his future wife Elise, a finely chiseled Bryn Mawr student and Philadelphia heiress with bloodlines as imposing as his own. Du Pont retains fond memories of the cutthroat competition of Harvard Law School but only dim memories of what he calls his "very conventional" life before then. While at Princeton, he had a blind date with Vassar Student Jane Fonda but cannot remember what they...