Background and career
Howard Brush Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American physician and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009. Dean was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election. Afterward, he became a political commentator and consultant to McKenna Long & Aldridge, a law and lobbying firm. Before entering politics, Dean earned his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1978. Dean served as a member of the Vermont House of Representatives from 1983 to 1986 and as the 77th lieutenant governor of Vermont from 1987 to 1991. Both were part-time positions that enabled him to continue practicing medicine. In 1991, Dean became governor of Vermont, subsequently winning five two-year terms and serving until 2003. Dean also oversaw the expansion of the "Dr. Dynasaur" program, which ensures universal health care for children and pregnant women in the state. Dean denounced the 2003 invasion of Iraq and called on Democrats to oppose the George W. Bush Administration. In the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, Dean finished third in the Iowa caucus, and his campaign suffered after negative reactions in the media to a hoarse shout that he gave during a speech; Dean ended up losing the nomination to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. He was later elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in February 2005. As chairman of the party, Dean created and employed the fifty-state strategy that attempted to make Democrats competitive in normally conservative states often dismissed in the past as "solid red". Dean was named chairman emeritus of the DNC upon his retirement in January 2009. Since retiring from the DNC chairman position, Dean has held neither elected office nor an official position in the Democratic Party and, as of 2015, was working for global law firm Dentons as part of the firm's public policy and regulation practice. In 2013, Dean expressed interest in running for the presidency in 2016, but instead supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's run for president.
Dean was born in East Hampton, New York, to Andrée Belden (née Maitland), an art appraiser, and Howard Brush Dean Jr., an executive in the financial industry. Dean is the eldest of four brothers, including Jim Dean, Chair of Democracy for America, and Charles Dean, who was captured by the Pathet Lao and executed by the North Vietnamese while traveling through Southeast Asia in 1974. Howard's father worked at the stock brokerage firm of Dean Witter. The family was quite wealthy, Republican, and belonged to the exclusive Maidstone Golf Club and Devon Yacht Club in East Hampton. As a child, he spent much of his time growing up in East Hampton; the family built a house on Hook Pond there in the mid-1950s. While in New York, the family had a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side along Park Avenue. Howard attended the Browning School in Manhattan until he was 13, and then went to St. George's School, a preparatory school in Middletown, Rhode Island. In September 1966, he attended Felsted School, UK, for one school year after winning an English Speaking Union scholarship. UPI quoted one of Dean's friends in his youth as saying, "By Hamptons standards, the Deans were not rich. No safaris in Africa or chalets in Switzerland. Howard's father went to work every day. He didn't own a company, or have a father or grandfather who founded one, as mine did." Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that:
he doesn't seem like a WASP. I know it's not nice to deal in stereotypes, but there seems very little Thurston Howell, III, or George Bush, the elder, for that matter, in Mr. Dean. ... He seems unpolished, doesn't hide his aggression, is proudly pugnacious. He doesn't look or act the part of the WASP ... It will be harder for Republicans to tag Mr. Dean as Son of the Maidstone Club than it was for Democrats to tag Bush One as Heir to Greenwich Country Day. He just doesn't act the part.
Dean graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1971. As a freshman, he specifically asked to room with an African American. The university housing office complied, and Dean roomed with two Southern black students and one white student from Pennsylvania. One of Dean's roommates was Ralph Dawson, the son of a sheet metal worker in Charleston, South Carolina, and today a New York City labor lawyer. Dawson said of Dean:
Unless you operated from a stereotypic understanding of the Yale white boy as rich, you wouldn't know that about Howard. ... When it came to race—and I don't know whether this was a function of intent or just came naturally—Howard was not patronizing in any way. He was willing to confront in discussion what a lot of white students weren't. He would hold his ground. He would respect that I knew forty-two million times more about being black than he did. But that didn't mean he couldn't hold a view on something relating to civil rights that would be as valid as mine. There were lots of well-meaning people at Yale who wanted you to understand that they understood your plight; you'd get into a conversation and they would yield too soon, so we didn't get the full benefit of the exchange. Howard very much thought he was capable of working an issue through. He was inquisitive. And when he came to a conclusion he would be as strong as anybody else. I don't think he's stubborn. He's a guy who's always been comfortable in his own skin. That's something you still see in him today, and it gets him into some degree of controversy. Though eventually eligible to be drafted into the military, he received a medical deferment because of an unfused vertebra. In response to Tim Russert asking on Meet the Press whether Dean could have served in the military had he not mentioned his back condition during his draft physical, Dean replied "I guess that's probably true. I mean, I was in no hurry to get into the military." He briefly tried a career as a stockbroker before deciding on a career in medicine, completing pre-medicine classes at Columbia University. In 1974, Dean's younger brother Charlie, who had been traveling through southeast Asia at the time, was captured and killed by Laotian guerrillas, a tragedy widely reported to have an enormous influence in Dean's life; for many years he has worn his brother's belt nearly every day as a memento.
Dean received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1978 and began a medical residency at the University of Vermont.
