The Family (20 page)

Like his brother, Prescott, James Smith Bush had seemed blessed by fate. He followed his brother to Yale, where he, too, was Skull and Bones. Upon graduation Jim embarked on a career in investment banking. He married Caroline Patterson of Dayton, Ohio, became a managing partner in G. H. Walker and Company, and served in World War II as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Corps, winning a Bronze Star. During home leave in 1945, he was driving on Long Island with his wife and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Henrietta, when a truck struck their car. His daughter was killed instantly, and he was seriously injured. The driver of the truck was charged with recklessness. A year later Jim Bush, who began drinking heavily after the accident, lost his job as vice president of the First National Bank of St. Louis.

Despite problems with alcohol, Bush belonged to the society set in St. Louis, where he was “well and fondly thought of by people in my parents’ social circle,” said Stuart Symington Jr.

As president of the Yale Club of St. Louis, Bush was active in the community and appointed to various boards, including the board of curators of the University of Missouri, an appointment he received from the governor. “I remember when Jim was the Veiled Prophet at the Veiled Prophet Ball,” said Serena Stewart. “That was as high society as society ever got in St. Louis.”

Bush had married Serena’s mother, Janet, a month after he divorced his first wife in 1948. He became Janet Stewart’s third husband, which for Prescott and Dorothy was two husbands too many. Prescott did not speak to his brother again until Janet divorced Jim in 1952.

By the time he married his third wife, Lois Kieffer Niedringhaus, in 1953, and six years later when he received his presidential appointment to the Export-Import Bank, Jim had returned to the good graces of Prescott and Dorothy, who spent time with the couple and their three children in later years. Prescott, despite his own periodic bouts of heavy drinking, had no tolerance for his brother’s alcoholism. In 1970 Jim told Lois, the mother of three of his five children, that he was leaving her for another woman. On the day of their divorce, December 4, 1970, he married a woman named Gloria Hodsoll Galbusera, and they left for Italy. They stayed in Milan for six months until he left her, taking her money and fleeing to the Philippines. He died there in 1978, blind, drunk, and broke.

No one in the family has ever explained what happened to the misappropriated $750,000, and Jim Bush’s offense never became public. Several pages of his FBI files have been redacted, and his State Department files have been destroyed. The two embassy officials who dealt with Bush in his last months confirmed that there had “been some sort of scandal” but did not know exact details. As director of the CIA, George Bush was able to keep his uncle’s crime and his squalid last years in the Philippines a secret from everyone, including his children. Prescott disinherited Jim with a codicil to his will in 1971, a year before he died. In place of a bequest to his brother, Prescott left three thousand dollars apiece to his brother’s three children with Lois Kieffer Niedringhaus. George directed the State Department to send his uncle’s remains to the Bush family plot in Greenwich.

The last Bush to be buried in Prescott’s plot would be his widow. Her modest granite stone looks very unassuming alongside her husband’s large imposing stone and strongly suggests that this pile-driving woman lived in her husband’s huge shadow. Dorothy Walker Bush had basked in Prescott’s reflected glory and even in death did all she could to burnish his image. She left instructions upon her death that she be laid to rest next to him the way she had lived. So her marker simply reads:

HIS ADORING WIFE

DOROTHY WALKER BUSH

1901–1992

Following Robin’s memorial service in Greenwich, the Bushes raced back to Midland to tell their son Georgie about his sister. He was in the second grade at Sam Houston Elementary School, and he saw his parents drive up to the school in their green Oldsmobile. He scampered outside to greet them, fully expecting to see Robin.

“I remember looking in the car and thinking I saw Robin in the back,” George W. Bush told
The Washington Post Magazine
in 1989. “I thought I saw her, but she wasn’t there.”

He had known she was sick, but he had no idea she was dying. When they told him in the car that she was gone, he couldn’t understand why they had kept it a secret from him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked them. He repeated the question for many years. As his mother later said, “You have to remember that children grieve . . . [and] he felt cheated.”

When George H.W.’s youngest brother, Bucky, sixteen, visited Midland, he was surprised by young George W.’s reaction to his sister’s death. “He was really struck with it,” said Bucky Bush. “He was hurt by it, almost as if somebody had taken something away from him that he had cherished very, very dearly . . . he was that young and had that kind of an adult reaction to losing a sibling.”

At this point, Prescott Bush could have stepped in to play a comforting role in George W.’s life because Prescott also had lost a sibling when he was Georgie’s age, but, unfortunately, there was no closeness between grandfather and grandson, and Texas was too far away from Connecticut for regular visits.

“It [the death of his sister] certainly had an impact on him,” recalled Randall Roden, a childhood friend of George W.’s from Midland. “I know that he suffered as a result of it in trying to sort those things out.”

One night not long after Robin’s death, little George was allowed to spend the night with his friend at the Rodens’ home, but he kept waking up with nightmares. Finally Barbara arrived to take her son home, and explained to his confused friend about Robin’s death.

“It was a profound and formative experience,” Roden recalled. “I don’t remember having a conversation about it—what does it feel like that your sister died? But I certainly remember the event, and I remember the period afterward and that there was enormous sorrow and there was this sense in the aftermath of something bad having happened.”

Seeing his mother racked with grief every day propelled young George into trying to make her happy, to do anything to alleviate her pain. His father was still traveling constantly, working to build his new business, and that left his mother alone at home for days on end with her children. Of the two boys, only Georgie was old enough to truly understand what had happened.

“Mother’s reaction was to envelop herself totally around me,” he later told friends. “She kind of smothered me and then recognized that it was the wrong thing to do.”

He became, according to his mother, “my little man.” He told jokes to make her laugh, constantly performed stunts to distract her from her sadness. His cousin Elsie Walker Kilbourne, who lost one of her own sisters, said, “You look around and see your parents suffering so deeply and try to be cheerful and funny, and you end up becoming a bit of a clown.”

Barbara later admitted that she had leaned too heavily on her young son. She didn’t realize what she was doing to him until she heard him one day tell a friend that he couldn’t come out because he had to stay inside and play with his mother, who was lonely. “I was thinking, ‘Well, I’m being there for him,’” she said. “But the truth was he was being there for me.”

Having given up some of his carefree childhood to his emotionally needy parents, especially his grieving mother, young George would overcompensate years later. Forsaking his role as the responsible firstborn son, he would chase his adolescence well into adulthood. Yet at the age of forty, he would put the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. For George W., his sister’s death would remain a defining experience, not just establishing the powerful bond with his mother, but also affecting how he dealt with the world. Life would become a party, full of humor, driven by chance, shaded by fatalism. Even as a teenager, young George told his friends, “You think your life is so good and everything is perfect; then something like this happens and nothing is the same.”

CHAPTER NINE

H
ollywood could not have cast a more impressive-looking U.S. senator than Prescott S. Bush. Tall and elegant in pinstripes, monogrammed shirts, and silk pocket squares, he looked like Jay Gatsby had dressed him. In autumn, he favored glen-plaid suits; in summer, two-tone shoes. For black tie, patent-leather slippers and a paisley silk cummerbund.

“I remember him wearing green linen slacks at the Chevy Chase Club,” said Nancy “Bitsy” Folger, whose father, Neil H. McElroy, was Secretary of Defense under Eisenhower.

“I remember spectator shoes, gold cuff links, silk hankies—the works,” said Marian Javits, wife of New York’s Senator Jacob Javits.

“Today he’d probably be on the cover of
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
,” said Ellen Proxmire, wife of Wisconsin’s Senator William Proxmire.

With his year-round country-club tan, Prescott Bush looked as dashing as Clark Gable in
Gone With the Wind
. Aswim in a sea of shiny blue polyester suits, white Dacron shirts, and string ties, Prescott stood out in “the world’s most exclusive club” like a Rolls-Royce in a Studebaker showroom.

No one looked more like he belonged in the Senate than this very lucky investment banker from the Nutmeg State. Upon his arrival in Washington in November 1952, Prescott assumed the role of the senior senator from his state because he was filling Senator McMahon’s unexpired term. His committee assignments included Banking and Currency as well as Public Works.

As sure-footed as he appeared on the surface, Prescott took a pratfall in January 1953, when he signed on as one of sixty-three co-sponsors of the Bricker Amendment. The legislation, introduced to curtail the treaty-making powers of the President, appealed to conservatives who were still haunted by Roosevelt’s deal making at the 1945 Yalta conference. They believed that a sick and doddering FDR had carved up the world with Stalin while Winston Churchill, bloated with brandy, nodded off. Bricker’s ardent supporters included the Liberty League, Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Medical Association, the Committee for Constitutional Government, the
Chicago Tribune
—all of whom presented petitions signed by over a half-million Americans.

As a son of the establishment, Prescott Bush didn’t think twice about co-sponsoring the amendment, especially when he saw the opposition: the League of Women Voters, the Americans for Democratic Action,
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, the American Bar Association’s Section on International and Comparative Law, the American Association for the United Nations, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Anything that Mrs. Roosevelt was for, Prescott was against, until he found out that Eisenhower was also opposed.

“I’m so sick of this I could scream,” the President was quoted as telling his cabinet. “The whole damn thing is senseless and plain damaging to the prestige of the United States. We talk about the French not being able to govern themselves—and we sit here wrestling with a Bricker amendment.”

Once the President’s opposition became known, Prescott reevaluated his stand. In those days either a senator was an Eisenhower man or he wasn’t, and when Connecticut newspapers started tweaking Bush for disloyalty to the President who had gotten him elected, he quickly reversed himself. Just as quickly the White House rewarded him with a seat on the President’s Commission on Foreign Economic Policy, which meant frequent trips abroad to research policies of international trade, at taxpayers’ expense. When the showdown on the Bricker Amendment came on February 26, 1954, Prescott was safely back in the fold to help the administration win a tough battle by one scant vote.

By then, the Bushes had settled into their new life in Washington. Prescott had never been happier, and Dotty thrived on being able to share her husband’s work. She visited his office frequently, and on occasion helped out with the mail. She became a daily visitor to the Senate gallery and mastered legislative issues, particularly those pertaining to Connecticut. She wrote her children long newsy letters about her exciting life in the nation’s capital. “It’s wonderful with a Republican in the White House for the first time in twenty years,” she wrote. She quoted her father in her relief to be rid of “those awful Roosevelts” and “that Terrible Truman.” She made Washington sound like a little Paris on the Potomac, an international gathering place for the good and the great. She confided chatty personal details of the famous people she and the senator met at embassy balls, Georgetown dinners, garden parties, congressional teas, lectures, gallery openings, and White House receptions:

I went to play badminton at Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss’s with Martha Krock, wife of Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
, and several other girls. Mrs. Auchincloss is the mother of “Jackie” Kennedy, wife of the nice young Senator from Massachusetts, who has been laid up so long with a bad back. I was delighted to hear from her that after this last operation, in which they removed a great deal of pin from his spine, that he seems to be recovering rapidly.

Her husband’s political mentor, Ted Yudain, asked her to write a similar letter that he could publish in
Greenwich Time
and distribute as a weekly column to other newspapers throughout the state. “I agreed only because he said it would help Pres,” Dotty recalled years later. And help Pres it did, greatly warming up his frosty image for his constituents. Her column, signed Mrs. Prescott Bush, appeared regularly as a society-page feature titled “Washington Life as Seen by a Senator’s Wife.”

Ordinarily, she wrote with a honey gloss, especially about her husband (“Every personal contact with that man increases my respect for him, if such a thing is possible”) and her grandchildren (“The feel of those little pairs of arms around my neck meant more to me than any diamond necklace ever could”). A devout, even adamant Christian who grew up going to Presbyterian church three times every Sunday, Dotty infused her columns with her religiosity. She frequently quoted from the Bible as well as the prayers and incantations she liked best from the many church services and spiritual lectures she attended: “When I saw John Foster Dulles, our Secretary of State, just named ‘Man of the Year’ by
Time
magazine, with his truly modest bearing, passing the bread and wine, I was reminded of Christ’s words: ‘He that would be great among you, let him become your servant.’”

Believing that everyone should pray at least twice a day, Dotty was incensed when the Supreme Court ruled that school prayer was unconstitutional:

The six judges who concurred in that decision seem to completely ignore the fact that we are a nation founded under God. The first thing the Pilgrim Fathers did when they landed on the bleak Massachusetts coast was to kneel and give thanks to God.

This country was founded so that its citizens could be free to practice religion—freedom of, not from religion.

Are we going to weaken our country by denying our children their rightful heritage?

She was equally forthright about her strong partisan views. In one column she dismissed the Soviet General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, as “a double-dealer” and demanded to know: “How do the leaders of a law-revering nation, with high moral standards, deal with the Russian leaders who have no regard at all for the truth?”

She also voiced her dismay at “the official support given to the exchange of Cuban rebels when nothing is being done for American citizens imprisoned in China.”

In another column, she chastised the Senate for taking too long to confirm President Eisenhower’s appointments:

When our boys were little, one item on their report card read, “Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention,” abbreviated in our family to “claims no more.” Well, the Senate Committees have certainly been getting a good fat minus in “claims no more,” especially where Presidential appointments have been concerned.

She adored Eisenhower and wrote emotionally when he appeared at the Republican Women’s National Convention after suffering a heart attack:

Television makes him look so pale, that it was a joy to see him in the flesh, and see for ourselves how ruddy and vigorous he looks.

It was a very moving moment. All the women clapped and screamed and waved, but the really touching thing was that after he had spoken, there was hardly a dry eye around me, and I’m not ashamed to say that my handkerchief was in use, too. There is just something so big and fine and noble about that man.

She lambasted Senator Wayne Morse, the Republican turned Democrat from Oregon, for opposing Clare Boothe Luce to be Ambassador to Brazil. As the senior senator from her state, Prescott had escorted Mrs. Luce into the hearing and made a robust statement of support for her in front of the Foreign Relations Committee. Immediately, Senator Morse objected to her 1944 campaign statement charging that President Roosevelt was “the only American President that ever lied us into war.” Lighting cigarette after cigarette, Mrs. Luce conceded that her language had been “most intemperate.” Morse maintained that such language disqualified her from diplomacy. She fingered the fur piece on her lap and kept taking her glasses on and off. After several hours of wrangling, she departed for New York. She was overwhelmingly confirmed days later, with only eleven Democrats voting against her.

Responding to reporters’ queries, she said she was delighted to be the new Ambassador. Then she added: “My difficulty, of course, goes some years back and begins when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was kicked in the head by a horse.”

Within the hour, Morse claimed the floor of the Senate for a point of personal privilege. “Not so soon did I expect that those of us who voted against Clare Boothe Luce would be proven so right,” he said. “I am not surprised that this slanderer that the Senate confirmed just a few minutes ago would make this kind of statement . . . I will pray for God’s guidance for this lady so she will be more stable in the performance of her duties than she was when she issued that statement this afternoon.”

The Senate listened tensely as several members who had voted for her confirmation now expressed regret for having done so. Three days later Mrs. Luce went to Washington to meet with President Eisenhower, who accepted her decision to quit.

Prescott Bush issued a statement saying he deeply regretted the necessity for her resignation, but Dotty Bush was not so politic:

[T]he appointment of Mrs. Luce would have been so acceptable to the Brazilians and it seems a pity that her talents cannot be used because of one man’s vindictiveness. Last week’s performance by Senator Morse in his attack on Mrs. Luce did a real disservice to his country as I feel sure Clare Boothe Luce would have done a marvelous job for us in Rio. Oh my! Washington! Why we don’t all have ulcers, as we seem to leap from one fight into another.

Dotty considered wasting time a sin, which is how she described the “inordinate number” of congressional committee hearings that cabinet members have to endure:

They place an unbearable burden upon the departmental heads of government. Why couldn’t a new system be worked out? Why couldn’t every Representative and every Senator on every committee on the Hill having to do with defense, send his questions in writing, and then the Secretary could appear for as many days as necessary to answer all the questions? In this way, all the duplications would at least be done away with.

When Congress proposed a 50 percent pay raise for itself, her husband objected. “I don’t think that anybody who wants to make money ought to be a Senator or a Congressman,” Prescott said. “I look upon this job as a service job like the ministry, like teaching; and, if you want to make money, if you want to be in business for profit, then don’t be a Senator or a Congressman.”

Prescott, who made $12,500 as a senator, had given up his seven paid directorships in publicly owned companies when he took office. He continued to receive a handsome partnership income from Brown Brothers Harriman, which was allowed in those days. Other senators received income from their law firms or their businesses back home.

Prescott did support a pay increase for federal judges because they had to give up all outside income, but he tried to block the raise for members of Congress. His Connecticut colleague, William Purtell, objected. Purtell asked Bush if one of the tests in Congress should be acquired or inherited wealth, both of which Prescott had by that time, and whether members of Congress with growing families should be required to choose between “providing for their loved ones” and “serving their constituents.”

Prescott retorted that many in Congress never had it so good and many were not worth what they were currently getting paid. “The mere fact that one man says he can’t make ends meet doesn’t indicate we should raise the pay 50 percent,” he said.

Revering the Senate as a public trust, he genuinely felt that the office should be above mere money, but he did not recognize, or at least acknowledge, that such high-mindedness was much easier to maintain with a continuing flow of cash from Brown Brothers Harriman, plus the large inheritance that his wife received (put in trust for her children) upon the 1953 death of her father.

Prescott enjoyed every bit of decorum that accompanied his position, and demanded the perquisites of his high office. He insisted that his grandchildren call him “Senator,” according to the recollections of Jeb Bush. Prescott’s sister Margie Clement, who lived in New Haven, was encouraged to fly the American flag whenever he visited. “I lived a couple of houses down on Bishop Road,” said Michael Lynch, the registrar of vital statistics in New Haven, “and everybody always knew when Mrs. Clement was expecting company. She would put out a small American flag—I don’t think it was even three by five—when Prescott arrived. They didn’t put out the flag on any other occasion.”

Prescott expected the same kind of respect from his Senate colleagues. During a 1953 debate on interest rates for government bonds, Senator Albert Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, caught himself calling Senator Bush “the gentleman from Connecticut,” which is the way House members address each other. In the Senate, the rules call for members to address each other as “the distinguished Senator.”