The Family (21 page)

Gore immediately apologized, saying it was his first Senate speech after a long career in the House and that he had lapsed inadvertently. He assured the Senate that while he considered Prescott a gentleman, he also regarded him as a distinguished senator. Prescott accepted his apology with a forgiving smile. Such civility was not evident forty-seven years later when Prescott’s grandson battled Gore’s son for the presidency.

Nor was Lyndon Johnson so courteous. The Texas senator once interrupted Prescott on the floor of the Senate in a debate over trade. Prescott tried to assert his right to continue talking when Johnson insisted he stop his “bush league” debate so he could proceed with Senate business. Harry McPherson, who worked for Johnson at the time, recalled the incident as coming close to violating the Senate rules of civility. “I remember I was sitting in the well of the Senate and my head snapping back as Johnson said that. You know you’re not supposed to speak directly about another member that way. Prescott Bush continued gamely to make his point, but I think he was trying to call attention to the inappropriateness of what Johnson had said.”

On another occasion Louisiana’s Democratic Senator Russell Long took vigorous exception to something Prescott said on the floor of the Senate. “They frequently disagreed,” recalled Hamilton Richardson, Long’s legislative assistant, “and I think Senator Long got a little carried away in his comments about Senator Bush, although I don’t remember the exact issue . . . What I do remember is Senator Bush getting up and saying that Senator Long’s conduct reminded him of the Roman Emperor who made his horse Consul of Rome. ‘Only in that case, unlike with Senator Long, the Emperor appointed the whole horse.’”

Many Senate aides remember Prescott Bush as a formidable man of patrician carriage who fawned over his betters, charmed his peers, and was utterly unapproachable to underlings.

“During the 1950s there were no restaurants on the Hill, so you’d see everyone eating in the cafeteria,” said Bobby Wood, an aide to Alabama’s Democratic Senator Lister Hill. “Most senators ate there with their staffs while a few, only a few, preferred eating in the senators’ private dining room in the Capitol. Prescott Bush was one of the few who never ate in the cafeteria with the help. In fact, he didn’t even like being on the same elevator with us. He’d always take the ‘Senators Only’ elevator.”

“I remember him as a dark and scowling man,” said Frank Valeo, a former staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “but exceptionally well dressed.”

“He looked more like a senator than any senator I’ve ever met,” said William Hildenbrand, the former secretary of the Senate. “He would never come on the Senate floor unless looking impeccable. He was the kind of guy who probably put out the garbage in pressed pajamas, or wore black tie to bed. He carried himself with all the confidence of an aristocrat.”

“God, he was a stickler for the details of etiquette and doing things just so,” recalled Pat Holt, former chief of staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I remember meeting up with him on a foreign trip in Guatemala at a social function one night. He was an enthusiastic golfer and had asked the attaché to arrange a golf game. The attaché apparently invited five people to play. Bush took him aside and said, ‘I used to be president of the U.S. Golf Association, and I must tell you that serious golfers do not play in parties of five. We play only in foursomes.’”

During the floor debate on pay raises, Dotty watched intently from the gallery as the Senate defeated her husband’s amendment and then, over his objections, passed the pay increase he opposed that gave senators $22,500 a year. “I knew Pres was going to speak against such a substantial raise,” she wrote in her column. “His point of view was not popular in the Senate, but when the final vote came there were 24 others who voted with him. I suffer with him, but am always just especially a little more proud of him when he takes an unpopular stand, because, in his heart, he feels that that is best for the country.”

Temperamentally, the Bushes were in perfect harmony with the Eisenhower era of Republican grandees—moderate men with an international perspective who believed in human rights. They didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the final evolutionary turn of the Republican Party to the right, and soon their kind of politics would be doomed. Within the next two decades the liberal Republicanism of Jacob Javits (New York), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts), John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky), George Aiken (Vermont), Thomas Kuchel (California), and Margaret Chase Smith (Maine) would be extinct. By the time the grandsons of Prescott Bush—George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—ran for public office, they would be practicing an extreme brand of Republican politics that bore no resemblance to the moderate views of their grandfather.

“I’m so glad Pres is gone and doesn’t have to bear the shame of his right-wing grandson’s lies to the country,” said Betsy Trippe DeVecchi in July 2003. “Prescott was such an honorable man he never would’ve lied or been unprincipled the way George W. Bush has been in dragging us to war in Iraq.”

The only daughter of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, Betsy Trippe DeVecchi grew up in Greenwich with the Bush children in the 1940s and was a close friend of Jonathan Bush, who was called Johnny Jim. “Prescott taught me to play tennis on the Rockefellers’ indoor court,” she said. “He was a lovely man, and his wife, Dotty, was so warm and gracious. Once they drove me up to Hotchkiss to see Johnny Jim in a play . . . Pres sat on the board of my father’s company. They shared the same Republican politics. Both were big friends of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and, of course, President Eisenhower.”

Prescott was the type of man Dwight Eisenhower admired: a wealthy investment banker who had married above himself. In addition, Prescott played expert golf, which is why he was occasionally called by the White House to join the President’s foursome at Burning Tree Club in Maryland. As the former president of the U.S. Golf Association, Prescott saw to it that they installed a putting green on the White House grounds because, as he told the Greenwich Rotary Club, Ike needed the practice.

“Many of you might get some comfort to know that the President also struggles with his game, particularly his putting,” Prescott said. “An uncomfortable nervousness reaches him and this reaction happens on two-foot putts. I recently said to him, ‘I know what the matter is with your putting, Mr. President. It is simply terror.’”

Ike then told Prescott that he had tried twenty-two different putters in eight months to improve his game. As Prescott told the story, he grinned, knowing he was the better golfer. “The President,” he said, “still has something to gain in the putting department.”

The Bushes felt comfortable with the sixty-two-year-old President and the political philosophy he had borrowed from Abraham Lincoln:

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.

In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

Prescott and Dotty admired Eisenhower’s political moderation, although others described Ike’s agenda as nothing more than a list of steps he refrained from taking. Perhaps, as suggested by
The New Republic
, that was the key to his overwhelming popularity: “The public loves Ike. The less he does the more they love him. That, probably, is the secret. Here is a man who doesn’t rock the boat.”

During the early part of his administration, Eisenhower’s reluctance to “rock the boat” nearly capsized the ship of state. Throughout his political career, he refused to take a public stand against Senator Joe McCarthy and his rampaging anti-Communist campaign. A famous Herblock cartoon in
The Washington Post
depicts a confrontation between the two men in the Oval Office: Grinning fiendishly, an apelike McCarthy stands with a blood-covered meat cleaver in his hand while Eisenhower draws a feather sword. Like a bewigged fop in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Eisenhower protests, “Have a care, Sir.”

Even Herblock’s punishing ridicule could not move Eisenhower to oppose the Wisconsin senator, who had been whipping up the nation’s fears about Communists creeping into the government. In the wake of the USSR’s exploding the hydrogen bomb, the investigation into Hollywood’s writers, actors, and directors by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the spy trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, McCarthy’s Red-baiting fulminations had thrown the country into a frenzy. He had called President Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, “the Pied Pipers of the Politburo.” He even accused the revered former secretary of state George C. Marshall of being “a man steeped in falsehood.” Still, Eisenhower would not speak up. When his advisers pleaded with him to oppose McCarthy, Ike refused. “I just will not,” he said. “I refuse to get into the gutter with that guy.”

Heedlessly, McCarthy continued swinging his meat cleaver at the military, the State Department, and the CIA. He threatened the Voice of America for filling its libraries with the works of “Red” writers. He terrorized academia, the media, and the federal bureaucracy. He thundered about “security risks,” “subversives,” “fifth columnists,” and the “Red menace.” He fomented opposition to Eisenhower’s appointments of some of the most respected men in the country, including Harvard’s president James B. Conant to be High Commissioner in Germany and U.S. Army General Walter Bedell Smith to be Undersecretary of State. He even went so far as to accuse the President himself of sending “perfumed notes” to friendly powers who were profiting from “blood trade” with Red China. Still, Eisenhower said nothing.

McCarthy’s polls soared so high that few people had the courage to oppose him. One who did step forward was the freshman senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, who made her “Declaration of Conscience” in 1950 after McCarthy’s reckless speech in West Virginia in which he ferociously attacked “205 card carrying” Communists in the State Department. Without mentioning him by name, she said that the deliberative body of the U.S. Senate had “been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.” She concluded her fifteen-minute address by saying, “I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”

McCarthy scornfully denounced her and the six senators who supported her declaration as “Snow White and her Six Dwarfs.” Another Senate critic was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, whom McCarthy ridiculed so often as “Senator Half Bright” that bushels of mail so addressed were delivered regularly to Fulbright’s office.

After the Eisenhower landslide swept Republicans to victory in both houses of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. When it came time to vote on a $214,000 appropriation for his committee—a defeat would have disbanded the committee and effectively ended McCarthy’s reign of terror—the Senate caved. Even its most resolute members rolled over for McCarthy, including John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Warren Magnuson of Washington, Richard Russell of Georgia, Herbert Lehman of New York, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Following suit was Prescott Bush. Only Fulbright of Arkansas had the courage to vote against the appropriation. As he wrote to his Oxford tutor:

I fear for the future. McCarthy is an unscrupulous demagogue with many of the characteristics of Hitler . . . He has come upon the scene just as television is becoming a powerful medium, and we do not know how to evaluate his influence. To me he is completely revolting from every point of view, but I cannot deny that he seems to have a very substantial following.

Once his committee was funded, McCarthy launched an investigation into Communism in the U.S. military. He held hearings and hectored witnesses, brandishing doctored photographs and forged letters to “prove” that the Army had promoted Communists. When he savaged a decorated Army general and declared him unfit to wear the uniform, even Eisenhower was outraged, although not enough to go public. Instead, the President secretly gave the Army the go-ahead to draw up a list of countercharges against McCarthy, who had been blackmailing the military to get preferential treatment for one of his aides who had been drafted. The televised hearings became known as the Army-McCarthy smearings, a muddy slugfest that riveted 30 million viewers in May 1954.

Under camera lights for thirty-six days McCarthy’s outrageous conduct so embarrassed the Senate that within weeks a member of his own party introduced a resolution to censure him “for conduct unbecoming a member of the United States Senate.”

Prescott, who had once decried McCarthy’s tactics, now worried about his own reelection chances in a predominantly Catholic state that was a bastion of McCarthy support. To dodge the bullet of a censure vote, Prescott proposed a twenty-three-point code of fair practices for committee proceedings, claiming that if such a code had been in place the “unpleasant spectacle” of the Army-McCarthy hearings could have been avoided. He received some positive press coverage in Connecticut for his proposal to restore congressional fair play, but one paper,
The Bridgeport Post
, took notice of his “reluctance to tangle personally with Senator McCarthy.” In Washington, D.C., Prescott’s proposed code was as ineffectual as Eisenhower’s feather sword.

Traveling the state, Prescott canvassed his political advisers about what he should do, especially after his Senate colleague William Purtell announced that he would vote for McCarthy. When reporters asked Prescott how he would vote, he deliberated:

I will limit myself to saying this: Senator McCarthy’s stated objective is to fight Communism. I share that objective, as do all good Americans. But, in the past I have frequently expressed reservations about the methods he has employed. Nothing in the hearings to date has caused me to dismiss those reservations. On the contrary, they have been reinforced.