Begin at the beginning, or close enough: the 93 acres of Georgetown Prep, a Beltway school where Kavanaugh’s education was in the hand of the Jesuits, and where academics were rigorous, sports were king, fealty to school and fellows was absolute, and a culture of heavy drinking fit right in with that of the other private academies. In his 12th-grade yearbook, Kavanaugh described himself as the treasurer of the “Keg City Club—100 Kegs or Bust.” These schools were known, then and now, for a parent-sponsored, seven-day bender called “Beach Week” that has made more than one six-figure head of school bash his or her head against the wall. Kavanaugh seems to have reveled in it: According to his yearbook, he also belonged to “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Rehoboth Police Fan Club.” (What kindness did the officers extend to club members? And were they as generous with town visitors who were not the white sons and daughters of wealthy men? Unspecified.)

Georgetown Prep’s president defends its culture, without mentioning Kavanaugh

There was also—as there always is in top Catholic schools that wish to be considered on the same intellectual and social plane as the great Protestant schools—a constant, grinding, and not misplaced sense of inferiority among many of the students. I emailed a friend—close to my age and to Kavanaugh’s—who grew up in a posh D.C. family and attended the unremittingly soigné National Cathedral School, and asked her to tell me about the reputation of the Georgetown Prep of her youth. In seconds, she fired back the words: “always bad—frat boys, catholic, republican golf Bethesda.” The judgment, so immolating that even the commas had burned up by the end of it, is the chip on the shoulder of the Georgetown Prep boy. A friend who was a teacher at a top D.C. prep school at the time offered a more forensically crushing assessment of the institution: “St. Albans Lite. Upper-Classy Catholic kids, but most of the Kennedys and Shrivers and such preferred St. Albans.” These slight humiliations make the boys fiercer on the playing field, more eager to succeed, and—let my Catholic-school girlhood and memories of my own “brother school” inform this sentiment—determined to cultivate a certain toughness in the face of it. A Catholic-school prep boy might not be a menacing character in the mean corridors of a D.C. public school, but put him against a St. Alban’s boy, and my money’s on the Catholic.

Let the committee now be introduced to the person and character of Mark Judge, a close pal of the high-school Kavanaugh, who grew up to be a successful conservative writer and filmmaker, who has struggled mightily with alcoholism and other addictions, and who was, to young Brett Kavanaugh, a Rabelaisian figure, the soul of all merriment and the devotee of vomitous excess. On his 12th-grade yearbook page, Judge included a quotation: “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.”* If you want to get a sense of the tenor of a boys’ school in the mid-1980s, look no further than the fact that no one—no Jesuit priest or yearbook adviser or teacher—thought this was an inappropriate thing to have printed in a book published by the school. This may be an example of the freedom of expression that made the pre-PC days so halcyon, but it is definitely an example of the fact that in a boys’ school in the ’80s, sexual frustration was combined with a casual misogyny—if not of deed then of word—that the authorities were in no way concerned about. Judge grew up to write a roman à clef about his wild days at Georgetown Prep, in which he revealed himself to be a stone-cold partier and a horrible creator of pseudonyms: We encounter one “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who has puked and passed out in a car, the victim of heavy drinking.