The Family (14 page)

When George’s turn came to give his “LH,” he climbed into the coffin and related the most searing experience of his life, sobbing as he told the Bonesmen about getting shot down over Chichi-Jima and losing his crew, especially his friend Ted White, who had also been a Bonesman, class of 1942.

“It tore him up, real anguish,” said Lud Ashley. “It was so fresh in his mind. He had a real friendship with this man . . . [He] was heartbroken. He had gone over it in his mind a hundred thousand times and concluded he couldn’t have done anything . . . He didn’t feel guilty about anything that happened on the plane . . . But the incident was a source of real grief to him.”

The men who had fought in the war understood the two things an officer must do to lead men—care for their welfare and show physical courage. They agonized for George, who in bailing out that day felt that he had done neither. “[W]hat really anguished him was the fact that it was either he gets out or he goes in, you know, with whatever’s left behind him,” Ashley told the writer David Robb in an unpublished interview. “[T]hat was really a matter that still hurt him greatly at that time. He couldn’t really talk about it for any length of time without choking up. The thing that just drove him to distraction was the fact that he was the only one that got out.

“It was good for him to be able to talk to people who reassured him . . . but he did come back to it. But it was an absolutely impossible situation. He knew that but he kept saying, ‘I keep wondering if there wasn’t something I could have done.’”

More than fifty years later some Bonesmen still recalled the details of George’s harrowing flight. “He took it to heart when he was shot down,” said Frank O’Brien in 2003. “I don’t think he ever got over it. Well, of course he’s over it, but I don’t think it’s ever far from his thoughts, even today.”

An aura of mystery surrounds Skull and Bones, even for those who ridicule its gothic rituals and morbid arcana, including the society’s mantra: “The Hangman equals Death / the Devil equals Death / Death equals Death.” The society’s secret rituals take place in the inner sanctum of the tomb, which is referred to as “T” or “322.” The society took that number as its symbol because the Greek orator Demosthenes died in 322
B
.
C
., and, according to legend, Eulogia, the goddess of eloquence, ascended into heaven and did not return until 1832, when she took up residence with Skull and Bones.

Each Knight is given a cryptonym, which the society will call him for the rest of his life. Some receive traditional Skull and Bones code names like “Magog” (for the Knight who is the most sexually experienced); “Gog” (for the least sexually experienced); “Long Devil” (for the tallest man); and “Little Devil” (for the shortest).

George embraced the Skull and Bones concept of being the best of the best, and later let that elitism influence some of his political decisions. To his detriment he used membership in the secret society as a validation of being a “good man” and made several of his political appointments based on nothing more than a Yale degree and membership in Skull and Bones. To George H.W. Bush’s way of thinking, all Bonesmen were superior to other men. As President, when he sought a mentor for making military decisions, especially about using force in the Gulf War, he emulated a master Bonesman, Henry Lewis Stimson, who was Secretary of War under Roosevelt and head of Andover when George was a student.

Unlike his father, George never became a huge or looming presence at Yale, but he clung to Skull and Bones for the rest of his life. He never let a year pass after graduation without sending a check to the RTA. Until 1966, those checks (he always sent ten dollars) were written to the Russell Trust Association. In June 1966, the “King” of each class (last man tapped) received a “Personal and Confidential” letter from “Pat” (Patriarch) M. Malcolm Baldridge, president of RTA, announcing that Skull and Bones “was most fortunate to recently receive a favorable decision from the Internal Revenue Service exempting from income tax all gifts, and donations made to RTA, Inc.”

As the “King” of his class, George was to personally contact his club mates, “inform them fully of this favorable development, and in this manner hopefully raise the entire level of giving to RTA.”

Baldridge spelled out why Skull and Bones needed more funds:

1. Expenses of running and maintaining the “T” have been constantly increasing.

2. With more scholarship knights, RTA has found it necessary to relieve the incoming club of certain expenses formerly assumed, such as meals and operating expenses of the “T.”

3. We would like to set up a revolving loan fund for members of RTA who need help in pursuing graduate studies. These loans would be interest-free with the stipulation that the loan would be repaid as rapidly as possible, once the individual develops earning power as a result of his graduate training. We have had numerous requests for such loans that we are now not able to satisfy.

He closed by saying, “If you have any questions our Treasurer, Herbie Walker, will be glad to hear from you.”

George dutifully contacted all his Bonesmen and sent them a copy of Baldridge’s letter “to encourage you in your affluence to do what you can for RTA.” He wrote:

The letter explains better than I could the new tax-exempt set up and I can only add my sacred words of encouragement that you participate to the fullest.

Send them stocks, bonds, or even cash; but the big thing is, send something in so D-146 will be second to none.

He signed the letter, “Yours in 322, GB.”

Later some of those same Bonesmen wrote to George asking for contributions to their Yale class reunion, but George would not contribute. He cared less about Yale than he did about Skull and Bones.

In 1970 William F. Buckley Jr. (class of 1946) asked George if he would agree to run with him for the Yale Corporation. “George said no on the grounds that he had lost interest in Yale,” Buckley told Geoffrey Kabaservice. “He said that when the students were revolting in 1970 he was giving a speech at a college in which most of the students were indigent and were grateful for the education they received and that he considered that the behavior of undergraduates at Yale resulted in the forfeiture of primary alumni interest.”

Even when Lud Ashley, one of his closest friends, asked him in June 1970 to contribute to their class-reunion gift, George refused. Their class had hoped to raise $1 million for Yale but turned in only $475,000. Afterward George wrote to Ashley: “The figures aren’t as bad as U thot—thus I’ll still do nothing for a while yet. RTA. Si!! ’48 or 45W, No.” (“W,” for “war,” indicated those classes that entered Yale on the accelerated program.)

Shortly before he graduated, George wrote to Gerry Bemiss about his future: “My mind is in a turmoil. I want to do something of value and yet I have to and want to make money . . . So where does that leave me . . .”

He knew that the family’s financial mother lode was his to be mined if he wanted:

I could work for Herby Walker in St. Louis—G. H. Walker & Co. investments etc. . . . but the people I’d be doing business with in the investment business, I know to some degree now. I am not sure I want to capitalize completely on the benefits I received at birth—that is on the benefits of my social position . . . doing well merely because I have had the opportunity to attend the same debut parties as some of my customers does not appeal to me.

George didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but, as he wrote to his friend, he knew what he didn’t want to do, and that was to be “a straphanger” like his father, commuting to a job in the city every morning and returning home to the suburbs every night. “I was looking for a different kind of life, something challenging, outside the established mold. I couldn’t see myself being happy commuting into work, then back home, five days a week.” He later admitted he had to get out of Greenwich. “I didn’t want to live in the suburbs and be ‘Pres Bush’s boy.’”

Making money was crucial to George. As he wrote to his friend Gerry Bemiss, he had gone through Yale on the GI Bill, was married, and had one child. “After Georgie goes through 3 squares every day, one’s wallet becomes thin and worn.” Assumptions to the contrary, George Herbert Walker Bush did not come from extraordinary wealth. Comfortably prosperous, his family was not of unlimited means and could not subsidize him. As young marrieds, George and Barbara rented apartments in which they had to share bathrooms with other renters as well as refrigerator space. Unlike some of his friends, George had no trust fund to sustain his financial future. He certainly had rich relatives on his mother’s side of the family, but his father had only recently recovered from years of indebtedness to Brown Brothers Harriman. Although Prescott served on several corporate boards—Columbia Broadcasting System, Procter & Gamble, Pennsylvania Water and Power Company, the Prudential Insurance Company of America, Simmons Company, United States Guarantee Company, Vanadium Corporation of America—directors did not collect large fees in those days. Prescott told his children he was in no financial position to subsidize them beyond their college educations. Upon graduation, they were on their own.

“Dad believed in the old Ben Franklin copybook maxims when it came to earning, saving and spending . . . [M]y brothers Pres, John and Buck, my sister Nancy, and I—all grew up understanding that life isn’t an open-ended checking account,” George wrote in his memoir
Looking Forward
. “From an early age we knew that if an illness or something really serious occurred, our folks would be there to help, but once we left home, we’d make it on our own, in business or whatever we entered in later life.”

What Prescott Bush did provide, though, were the golden cords of his invaluable personal connections, and on these he did not stint. Prescott junior had been the first to benefit from his father’s advantageous friendships when he was given a job with Pan American Airways in South America. That employment opportunity came thanks to his father’s close relationship with Juan Trippe, Pan American’s founder and chairman, and with Samuel F. Pryor Jr., a Republican Party official who lived in Greenwich and served on the Pan Am board with Prescott senior. Besides sharing the same politics, the three men frequently played golf together.

When George needed to find a job, his father set up an interview with Procter & Gamble, but they turned George down. “No soap,” he reported to his father. So Prescott suggested he contact H. Neil Mallon, who was Skull and Bones with Prescott at Yale (class of 1917). Having never married until the age of sixty-nine, Mallon had lavished enough time on the Bush children to become their beloved “Uncle Neil.” They looked forward to his visits from Ohio because he always brought out the best in their father, who was not gruff and dour around him. For George especially, Neil Mallon became a surrogate father who was warm and outgoing and gave George the attention he craved. “He taught me everything I knew in life,” George wrote to the Mallon family after Neil died, “including how to throw a baseball.” The family found the part about the baseball particularly poignant because it was not Neil Mallon who played varsity baseball at Yale but Prescott Bush.

In 1929, Prescott had brought Neil Mallon to the attention of Bert Walker when W. A. Harriman and Company purchased the Dresser Company, based in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and needed to find a president to run it.

“Neil was the bright young man of our class at that time,” Prescott recalled in his oral history. “He’d made tremendous headway as vice-president of U.S. Can Co. twelve years out of college . . . so we brought Neil in . . . and he was made president of the company. I went on the board of the Dresser Co. at that time and remained on it for 25 years.

“During those years we developed the Dresser Co. [into Dresser Industries] by acquiring other properties . . . I was Neil Mallon’s chief advisor and consultant in connection with every move that he made with that business during that period.”

So when George called “Uncle Neil” for job advice, Mallon sat down and shared his visions of the future: he told George that because of the growing need for energy in the United States, oil and gas exploration would become the twentieth century’s new frontier. He explained that since the war, Dresser had been diversifying into products like oil derricks, blowers, drill bits, and refractories, and was exploring new oil and gas markets around the globe. At the time, Dresser was the largest oil-equipment company in the world.

“What you need to do is head out to Texas and those oil fields,” Neil Mallon said. “That’s the place for ambitious young people these days.”

He then offered George an opportunity to learn the business from the bottom up as a trainee for IDECO (International Derrick and Equipment Company), a Dresser subsidiary in Odessa, Texas, at three hundred dollars a month. According to George’s recollection in his autobiography, Mallon said, “There’s not much salary, but if you want to learn the oil business, it’s a start.” George neglected to mention the pot of gold that “Uncle Neil” had promised him at the end of the rainbow.

According to his brother Prescott junior, Neil Mallon had told George before he started at Dresser: “You’ll have a chance to run the company someday.”

So it was off to the black oil fields of West Texas for George Bush, who drove the new red Studebaker his parents had given him as a graduation present. The money they had saved on his tuition, thanks to the GI Bill, almost covered the cost of the $1,525.50 car.

“There wasn’t anything subtle or complicated about [our move to Texas],” George admitted at the time. “We . . . just wanted to make a lot of money quick.” Later he would portray the move away from home as a great act of independence. Some people, such as the historian Garry Wills, saw it as nothing more than George relocating “to work for his father.”

Barbara had been elated when George told her they would be moving to Texas. “You know, George never asks anything . . . He makes up
our
mind . . . but I was excited about a whole new world. I’d never left—the farthest—well, I went to Ohio, I guess. We just didn’t travel much in my family. So I’d never met a Texan.”