The Family (15 page)

Like George, she wanted to get away from their families. “George’s mother was a formidable and strong woman, and so was my mother,” she told the writer Peggy Noonan, “and we wanted to get out from under the parental gaze, be on our own.” Barely communicating with her own mother at the time, Barbara was allowing her take-charge mother-in-law to run her life. She didn’t even try to object. “How could I? Dorothy Bush was the most competitive human being on the face of the earth.” While Barbara was intimidated by George’s mother, she was terrified of his father and did not understand his stern sense of humor. Once, while visiting her in-laws in Greenwich, Barbara said she had to leave to visit her parents in Rye. Without smiling, Prescott joked: “Did we give you permission to visit those strangers?” Barbara burst into tears.

When she heard her father-in-law yell at her son, young Georgie, for pulling the dog’s tail, Barbara hid. “I backed in my room and thought, ‘The kid is on his own.’”

“His father was scary,” she said many years later. “He was six feet four, very successful businessman. At the time we met, he was just becoming a little famous ’cause he was the first head of the USO. But I remember sitting in a house . . . and he said to me, ‘Did I ever tell you you could smoke?’ And I was so taken aback by that, and I said, ‘Well, did I marry you?’ And he burst out laughing, and we were friends from then on.”

The few trips that Barbara did make to Rye to see her parents were just as difficult for George as they were for her. “Once when George and I were visiting after we were married, Mother asked him not to go to the bathroom at night because he woke her up when he flushed the toilet. George, already inventive at the age of twenty-something, went out the window!”

Barbara, who emulated Dorothy Walker Bush as the model of motherhood, was determined to make her own large family. “All our children were planned,” she told the writer Gail Sheehy. “By me!” Shortly after George graduated from Yale, she became pregnant again, but miscarried, and grew quite despondent. George wrote to his mother: “I know that her disappointment over this miscarriage was large. As I told you before we are both sort of hoping that we will have another child before too long. She thinks about it a lot. And foolishly worries too much. I don’t like to have her upset.”

George headed to Odessa the day after he returned from the College World Series in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He sent Barbara and Georgie to Kennebunkport for two months until he found them a place to live. He said the first apartment was “on the wrong side of the tracks,” requiring them to move three times in the next four months. Eventually they found an apartment where they did not have to share a bathroom with strangers. George had called Barbara in August, and after flying twelve hours in a prop plane, she and George had arrived in Odessa, where it was hot, dry, and gritty with sand. The town was segregated by Jim Crow—blacks on one side, whites on the other. Oil was life in this boom-or-bust town, which boomed from fifteen thousand people to over forty-two thousand during the decade from 1940 to 1950. The flares of unwanted natural gas being burned off the rigs lit up the night skies above Odessa. The first time Barbara smelled the gaseous fumes she evacuated their two-room apartment in the middle of the night. “When I was young and went to Texas,” she admitted many years later, “I thought Texans were barbarians.”

George’s parents visited the couple in January 1949, when Prescott flew to Texas on a Dresser inspection trip and Dotty joined him on the company plane. They all posed for a picture in front of the plane, and that photo captures a fleeting but telling moment. Prescott looks like the prosperous investment banker he was in a suit, tie, white shirt, pocket handkerchief, and black homburg. Tall, distinguished, and commanding, he has one hand in his pocket and the other entwined through his wife’s arm—one unit indivisible. George, looking boyish in a flannel shirt and windbreaker, stands on the other side of his mother, affectionately close, holding his two-and-a-half-year-old son, Georgie, who is wearing his first pair of cowboy boots. There is no physical space between any of them. Barbara, who is off to the side of George, is tethered to the group only by holding on to her son’s little hand. There is physical space between her and her husband’s family, as if she’s strangely disembodied and separate from their intimate grouping, not yet a part of the unit.

When George and Barbara finally moved away, they tried to stay away. They were transferred from Odessa in April 1949 to Huntington Park, California, where George went to work as a laborer on an assembly line for Pacific Pumps, a Dresser subsidiary. He elected to join the United Steelworkers of America and, as he wrote to a friend, became “a dues paying CIO steelworker.” Barbara was again pregnant when they received word on September 23, 1949, that her fifty-three-year-old mother had been killed in a freak car accident. The story was reported on the front page of
The New York Times
:

AUTO CRASH KILLS PUBLISHER’S WIFE
AS HE REACHES FOR SPILLING CUP

Marvin Pierce was driving to the Rye railroad station when Pauline placed a cup of coffee on the seat between them. He saw it tipping and reached over to stop the hot liquid from spilling on his wife; the car swerved, hit the shoulder of the road, plunged one hundred feet down an embankment, and crashed into a tree and a stone wall. Striking the windshield, Pauline fractured her skull and was killed instantly.

Her relationship with Barbara, always fractious, had not improved after Barbara’s marriage to George. “I think my mother thought Barbara was still nineteen years old and living in the house,” said Barbara’s brother Scott in 2001. “The truth of the matter is my mother died so soon thereafter that there was no resolution of that.”

Barbara decided not to go home for her mother’s funeral, although her brother Jim and his wife, who had just been married, interrupted their honeymoon to come home for the service. Barbara implied later that she could not afford the expense of traveling to Rye. “Contrary to popular belief,” she said, “it would have been an enormous [financial] strain. My father would have had to pay for my trip.” Yet the week before she had traveled to Cleveland for her brother Jimmy’s wedding. Years later a Bush niece was asked to explain why Barbara would not go to her mother’s funeral. Elsie Walker responded carefully: “I don’t think she had the easiest of relationships with her mother.”

George, too, was strangely casual about the catastrophe. On October 21, 1949, he wrote to his friend Gerry Bemiss, but only toward the end of the letter did he offhandedly mention his mother-in-law’s death, incorrectly describing the accident:

Did you know Bar’s mother was killed in an auto accident 3 weeks ago while driving Mr. Pierce to the station?

Our life here is socially non-existent but we are happy, very much so. Best to you and drop me a line—Pop.

When Barbara gave birth three months later, she and George named their little girl after Barbara’s mother, Pauline Robinson, and called her Robin. Blessedly, they did not know that within three years this blond, blue-eyed baby would bring them to their darkest days.

CHAPTER SEVEN

O
n October 26, 1946, Prescott and Dorothy gathered all the Bushes and Walkers together for the wedding of their only daughter, Nancy (the “necker”), and Alexander “Sandy” Ellis Jr. at St. Paul’s of Glenville, a Catholic church in Greenwich.

Many people observed that in marrying the tall, dark, and handsome Ellis, Nancy had chosen a man much like her father, except that Ellis was Catholic. Yale class of 1944, he had served in Europe during World War II from February 1943 to January 1946 and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. At Yale, he was a member of George Bush’s fraternity, DKE, and Skull and Bones. For ushers at his wedding Ellis, a progressive Republican in the mold of his future father-in-law, chose, besides George “Poppy” Bush, John Lindsay, who met his future wife at the wedding and who later was mayor of New York City (1966–73); James Buckley, who became senator from New York (1971–77) before he was appointed by Reagan to the federal bench in 1985; and John Chafee, who became Secretary of the Navy under Nixon (1969–72) and then senator from Rhode Island (1976–99).

Prescott and Dorothy were now in their fifties with two children still to raise. In high school when his sister married, Jonathan Bush, fourteen, had entered Hotchkiss in 1945. His father frequently drove up to the school in Lakeville, Connecticut, to watch him play baseball and perform in school plays. Still at home in Greenwich was William Henry Trotter Bush, known as Bucky, who was born in 1938, when Dotty was thirty-seven years old. Bucky did not start Hotchkiss until 1952. With sixteen years separating their first child from their last, Prescott and Dotty practically raised Bucky as an only child.

“Dotty and Pres seemed to love being parents,” recalled Bob DeVecchi, who graduated from Yale a year after Jonathan Bush. “I remember when I was married to Flossie Sloan from Greenwich and we were in Washington while I was in the Foreign Service sometime around 1957. We lived in a tiny little house in Georgetown and had just had our first child. We met Prescott and Dorothy Bush, who lived in the neighborhood, and on several occasions Dotty would call us and say, ‘Now, why don’t you children go out and have a nice quiet dinner or go to a movie and have an evening to yourselves. We’re home alone tonight and we have no children or grandchildren around so we’d love to babysit for you’ . . . We would take our little girl, Maggie, or Chopsie, as we called her, over in a baby carriage, and she would spend the evening with the Bushes, who were then in their sixties.”

As his children were growing up in Greenwich, Prescott Bush became involved in local politics and built his reputation over seventeen years as moderator of the Representative Town Meeting. By 1950, he had established himself as a pillar of the community, and when Greenwich was suggested as a possible site for the newly created United Nations, he knew exactly what to do.

Prescott had already declared himself on the issue, but people wanted to see how he would handle the raging factions. As moderator of the RTM, he had usually managed to get his way, including the 1937 resolution he had passed protesting FDR’s proposed packing of the Supreme Court. But the UN issue had roiled the town into a fury and become a matter of national interest.

“That was a famous meeting,” recalled John F. Sullivan in his oral history for the Greenwich Public Library. “They called it ‘When they were bringing the camels to Greenwich.’ That was the argument about the United Nations.”

Big cities like Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Chicago, and San Francisco and even the Black Hills of South Dakota were competing furiously with New York City for the privilege of providing the United Nations with a tax-free home. But Prescott Bush was encouraging the small town of Greenwich (population fifty-five thousand) to decline the honor.

“It was probably the most well attended meeting we ever had,” said Sullivan. “Everyone turned out. The room was so packed people had to sit on the floor.”

Prescott gaveled the meeting to order, and, adhering to Robert’s Rules of Order, he listened politely to all divergent points of view, provided he was properly addressed as “Mr. Chairman.” Then Josephine Evaristo jumped up and demanded the floor. Barely five feet tall, the feisty little Democrat, who represented the working-class area of Chickahominy, acted as if she were as tall and commanding as the patrician moderator himself. Unlike everyone else around Prescott, including his own family, she was not intimidated by him.

He smiled patronizingly as she began blasting the snooty Republicans in town who objected to bringing foreigners into their midst.

“Why are you against the UN coming here, you woodchucks?” she bellowed. “You let us have the incinerator.”

The roly-poly firebrand knew how to raise the hackles of the predominantly Republican town meeting. She never stopped hammering on the issue of the town incinerator, although it had been ten years since Prescott had “recommended” it be placed in her district. At the time she had objected strenuously and encouraged her constituency to sue. Even after losing the case in court, she continued ranting about the injustice of Greenwich’s rich toward the poor. “The Republicans can do anything they want in this town,” she fumed. Every winter she grumbled loudly about the snow being removed on Grove Lane, where Bush lived, days before the Italians and Hungarians and Poles in Chickahominy ever saw a snowplow.

At that time there was a divisive gap between the rich Protestants of Greenwich, who lived in “the backcountry,” and the working-class Catholics, who lived “in town.” Mrs. Evaristo, who worked three jobs to support her large family and taught English at night to the immigrant Italians, frequently rolled into the weekly RTM meetings in dungarees and a baseball cap. She was from “the town” and was not a friend of Prescott’s.

When she launched into her bombast about the incinerator, he quickly gaveled her out of order, called for the question, and marshaled a voice vote on whether Greenwich should be home to the United Nations. The resolution, which he had favored, passed by a 2-to-1 margin—110 votes for, 55 against. That evening, Prescott sent a telegram to Clare Boothe Luce, the congresswoman from Greenwich:

Resolved, that it is the sense of the meeting that, while the residents of Greenwich are desirous of obtaining world peace through the United Nations Organization, the Town of Greenwich should oppose the placing of the capitol of the United Nations Organization in or adjacent to Greenwich.

By 1950, Prescott had mastered the intricacies of parliamentary procedure, and, as he recalled in his oral history, he had learned a great deal about local government. “All during those years, I was an active practicing Republican. I worked hard for [Alf] Landon in 1936, when he got clobbered so badly [by FDR]. I used to raise money for Bob Taft when he was running in Ohio. I did the same for Tom Dewey when he was a nominee in ’44 [he lost to FDR] and ’48 [he lost to Harry Truman]. And in 1947 I was asked by the state chairman of our party if I would become chairman of the Connecticut Republican Finance Committee, whose duty it was to finance the party in the state of Connecticut, and I did.”

In the summer of 1949, Connecticut Republicans were scrambling around for a gubernatorial candidate to contest the statehouse as well as someone to run against U.S. Senator William Benton, who had been named to succeed Senator Raymond Baldwin upon Baldwin’s resignation to accept a Connecticut judgeship. The term for Benton’s seat expired in 1953, so whoever won it would have to run again two years later. During a dinner of the state central committee, Harold Mitchell, state chairman of the Republican Party, asked Prescott if he had ever considered running for public office.

He said that he had not. “I live in the wrong part of the state,” Prescott recalled saying. “Greenwich is known upstate as a commuter town. It would be hard for them to swallow a Greenwichite at the state level for Governor or Senator. I’m a commuter. I’m an international banker.”

Prescott had also been approached about running for Congress in 1946, when Clare Boothe Luce retired from the House of Representatives, but his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman discouraged him.

“Look, if this was the Senate we’d back you,” said Roland Harriman, “but we need you more here than the House needs you.”

Prescott didn’t argue. He later said, “I was not financially independent enough to be comfortable about my family’s future.” Prescott noted that his children’s schools were very expensive and that they and Dotty would have had to make great sacrifices if he’d run. “We would have eaten all right. But I felt it would have been quite a sacrifice . . . It would have been a big come-down for me, financially, at that time.”

By 1950, though, Prescott had received an inheritance of $55,779 ($393,500 in 2004) from his father’s estate. When Samuel P. Bush died at his home, Ealy Farms, in Blacklick, Ohio, on February 8, 1948, the news was reported on the front page of the
Ohio State Journal
with a large photograph above the fold, a newspaper’s most prominent placement:

S. P. BUSH, RETIRED BUSINESS,
CIVIL LEADER, SUCCUMBS AT 84

With his inheritance, plus the blessing of his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott was ready to run.

“What should I do?” he asked Harold Mitchell.

“You’ve got to get around the state and make yourself known, especially to groups that are apt to be convention delegates. The convention is 680 members, and these are the town political leaders and legislators in the state legislature. You’ve got to get around and meet these people. I think I can help you with some speaking engagements, but I can’t promise you anything definite.”

Prescott consulted his Yale classmate Harry Luce, the editor and founder of
Time
, who indicated that he, too, might like to go for the GOP nomination. “Harry, I guess, like myself, had always had sort of a hankering for this thing, and so I said, ‘My gosh, Harry, you’d be a much better man for this than I, and I’ll back you.’”

Prescott arranged for Harry Luce to sit down with the state Republican chairman, who told the illustrious editor that although he lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he was more identified with New York City. He needed to spend more time in Connecticut and less at
Time
magazine. Luce bolted. He called Prescott the next day. “I can’t divorce myself from
Time
to that extent, not possibly.” So the field was open.

The next day Ted Yudain, the editor of
Greenwich Time
, wrote a front-page story saying that Prescott was not a declared candidate but “may be available” for the nomination. A few weeks later Yudain wrote another front-page story: “Bush to Toss Hat in Ring for Senate Early Next Week.”

“Ted Yudain was a powerhouse in Connecticut, and he ‘made’ Prescott Bush by convincing the upstate GOP that the moderator of the RTM in Greenwich was a big deal,” said Lowell Weicker, who served as Connecticut’s governor (1991–95), U.S. senator (1971–89), and member of the House of Representatives (1969–71). “Check the record and you’ll see that Ted practically drop-kicked Prescott over the goalposts with his press coverage.”

The record proves Weicker to be right. The editor of
Greenwich Time
became Prescott’s unofficial campaign manager and major political adviser. He traveled with him throughout the state in advance of the June convention in 1950 to introduce him to political leaders. He then reported those travels in his newspaper—glowingly:

“Bush, until recently GOP State Finance Chairman, started from scratch with little support. Campaigning all over the state since early April, he has become one of the strongest candidates in the field.” (May 22, 1950)

“Party leaders here reported enthusiastic state-wide response to Bush’s pre-convention campaign and it was evident that many leaders feel Bush will be one of the best campaigners and strongest candidates on the GOP ticket this summer.” (June 9, 1950)

Then Vivien Kellems stepped forward to oppose Prescott. She had first opposed Clare Boothe Luce for the GOP nomination to Congress in 1942 because, she said, she didn’t want a “penthouse liberal” carrying the party’s banner. One of Luce’s biographers described Kellems, a wealthy industrialist whose company manufactured grips to pull cables through conduits, as “a lady of reactionary opinions . . . [who] was the darling of the National Association of Manufacturers.” Prescott Bush described her in his oral history as “a wicked little woman” and “just the meanest.” He later edited his comments for public consumption; he substituted “difficult” for “wicked” and drew a line through his characterization of her as “just the meanest.”

For several uncomfortable weeks she drew Prescott into a bitter intra-party struggle, but Ted Yudain encouraged him to forge ahead, saying that the GOP delegates would never give the nomination to someone as controversial as Kellems. Close to the convention
Greenwich Time
ran a banner headline across the front page: “Bush Seen Certain for GOP Senatorial Nomination; Will Stand Against Sen. Benton.”

Prescott appeared at the Republican state convention on June 15, 1950, in a straw hat and performed with his singing group, the Silver Dollar Quartet.

The barbershop quartet, all former presidents of the Yale Glee Club, had been formed in 1922. Their song “Silver Dollar” was published in 1939, and they sang it every time they performed:

You can roll a silver dollar down a line in the ground, and it’ll roll because it is round.

A woman never knows what a good man she’s got until she turns him down.

Picking up his guitar at that GOP convention, Prescott also sang in a booming bass: “I’m Going to Raise the Deuce When I Get Loose in Town.” At fifty-five, he was still as hammy as a twelve-dollar Smithfield, but the delegates applauded his corny songs. Cheering wildly, they gave him the GOP nomination. Prescott, tall and tan, was now ready to run.