HISTORY

The MIP (Most Interesting President)

In Friday’s column, I recounted the time USC President John Hubbard went and ate dinner at a dorm with the students.

So I thought this is a good time to mention how colorful a life he lived, according to his memoir.

  • On a graduation trip (from UT, 1938) to Europe, he and his friend stumbled onto one of the Nuremberg Rallies and heard Hitler speak.
  • He witnessed the Hiroshima atomic explosion from the air while flying a reconnissiance mission that they thought was just a routine bombing raid.
  • He attended the 1952 Helsinki Olympics as a reporter for Harper’s magazine. But that was a cover. He working as a CIA agent and directly assisted in the defection of a Romanian shooter.
  • A few days after the Nuremburg rally,  he was later he was carousing with Luftwaffe pilots (returning from the Spanish Civil War) in a beer hall along the Rhine (this was particularly interesting to me because I visited the same little village, Bacharach, in 2008).
  • His first job out of college was an assistant at a government agency for one of Franklin Roosevelt’s close advisors. He rented a room in Virginia from the personal secretary to House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
  • He was commissioned as a WWII Naval pilot with ill-fated eldest Kennedy brother Joe, in a private ceremony attended by the whole Kennedy clan.
  •  His air squadron was among the first to rotate into Iwo Jima after the U.S. Invasion.

 

11 thoughts on “The MIP (Most Interesting President)”

  1. John Hubbard was a man….M-A-N. Not perfect —but always rose to the occasion.

    Thanks for the memories, Scott. Nice to recall a time when “interesting” people served as our University Presidents — unlike the parade of jackasses we’ve seen lately.

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  3. DONNY JUST SAID IF YOU’RE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE PRICE OF GAS YOU NEED TO DRIVE LESS OR WALK……WOW!!!!!!!!!

    MILLIONS REGRET VOTING FOR HIM…..

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