c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)-One was an apple-polishing rah-rah, a joiner who ran for class president, served on committees and belonged to a fraternity. The other was a hell-raiser who liked to party, had few extracurriculars and got kicked out of school for fighting with police.

Next fall, the big man on campus could face off against the angry college rabble-rouser as their respective party nominees for president.

The campus of Georgetown University is one of the few pieces of common ground shared by President Clinton, the one-time BMOC, and Patrick J. Buchanan, the former hellion who is locked in a three-way battle for the Republic nomination with Robert Dole and Steve Forbes.

But while they attended the prestigious Jesuit university within a decade of each other-Buchanan graduated in 1961, Clinton in 1968-the two were no more alike during their college days than they are today.

In fact, the only obvious thing the two had in common during their college years is that both were excellent students. They both graduated with honors and went on to top graduate schools: Clinton to Yale Law School, Buchanan to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“Pat was really from the old, old school. Clinton was much more of a free thinker,” said the Rev. Robert Drinan, a long-time professor of constitutional law and legal ethics at Georgetown and a former Democratic Massachusetts congressman.

“Of course, both had their politics pretty well formed when they came to Georgetown. I don’t think there was ever a time when they had much in common,” said Drinan, who knows both Clinton and Buchanan from their days at Georgetown.

The Georgetown Buchanan attended, with its strict 1950s Catholic school traditions, was a vastly different place from Clinton’s Georgetown, where tradition had given way to the academic freedom and social activism of the 1960s.

Clinton and Buchanan came to Georgetown from widely divergent backgrounds: the president from a Southern Baptist tradition in Arkansas, the Republican from a strict Catholic high school in Washington.

Buchanan, who grew up in the nation’s capital and attended Washington’s Gonzaga High School, was a Georgetown “dayhop,” a student who lived at home and had little after-class involvement at the school. Clinton was a boarder whose college life, both academic and social, was centered around the Georgetown campus.

When Clinton arrived in 1964, Buchanan was long gone as were many of the school’s 1950s conservative traditions. The liberal reforms of Catholicism that came with the 1962 Vatican II conference had left their mark on Georgetown.

“It was an old-style Catholic college until the early 1960s,” said the Rev. William McFadden, a professor of theology at Georgetown. “The ’60s were not really there yet until just before Clinton arrived. After that there was the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement and Vietnam.”

“By the late ’60s, Georgetown was one of the lead campuses in the country in the resistance to the Vietnam war,” said the Rev. Richard McSorley, Georgetown’s leading peace activist of the 1960s who introduced Clinton to world peace groups in Europe after Clinton’s graduation.

“There were some conservative students there at the time, but it wasn’t really about being a Democrat or a Republican, it was all focused on the war,” McSorley said.

Clinton earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Buchanan’s degree was in English from Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences.

While Clinton was the president of his freshman and sophomore classes, Buchanan’s only bid for elective office was an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of a social club with a reputation for hosting the wildest parties and attracting the prettiest young women.

Clinton and his college pals were considered prim and proper by 1960s standards, while Buchanan acknowledges running with a wilder bunch. He was suspended for the 1960 academic year after he was involved in a brawl with a pair of policemen who had attempted to issue him a ticket.

Buchanan was a student-soldier in the ROTC. Clinton, like many of his classmates, was consumed with the Vietnam War and worried about being drafted.

A fact sheet on Clinton’s Georgetown days lists a raft of activities: freshman class president, sophomore class president, student athletics commission chairman, dean’s list, band member, and so on.

While the school would not release information on Buchanan, he acknowledges in his 1990 book “Right From the Beginning” that he had little interest in Georgetown outside of his education.

“I always felt that I `went’ to Georgetown; I did not belong there as I did at Gonzaga. And, after I left, I never went back,” Buchanan wrote.

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