What It Takes (19 page)

In Pres she found the apotheosis of midwestern virtue. Prescott Bush spent the bulk of his adult life in the monied sanctum of the Harrimans themselves: he was a managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, private bankers to the owning class. He belonged to the clubs of New York’s forever-monied. He lived among them in Greenwich (his daily commuting pal was a Rockefeller). But Pres was forever Not Like That. Couldn’t care less for anything ritzy. One time he got roped into a cruise with Averell Harriman and Pops Walker on their new boat,
The Pawnee
, a hundred-fifty-foot miracle of shining brass and mahogany, fireplace in the salon, crew of a score or so ... the best of everything afloat. Pres was bored to death, couldn’t wait to get off. He never could stand a lot of fussy feeding and primping. What was the fun in that?

Of course, once Pres brought Dottie back from the Midwest, where he started his career, and took up his post in New York with the Harrimans and his father-in-law, there was help in the Bush house, too: a woman who cooked, and her husband, who drove the kids to Greenwich Country Day School, and then, too, an Irish maid. But the Bushes didn’t talk about their “chauffeur,” their “housekeeper.” It was Alex and Antonina, or, to strangers, “lovely people ... the couple who live with us ...” The point was, it was Not Like That. They were ... like family! Lizzie Larkin, the maid, just adored Pres, jumped up aflutter in the mornings, delighted to help him on with his coat. Late afternoons, just before train time, she’d burst into the library, to plump up the pillows and make right for Mr. Bush, shooing the kids away in her brogue: “Y’chidren slouchin’ around here, and yer fath’r workin’ all day hard. Ah! None of you’ll be the gentleman yer fath’r is. Now, get out, and let me tidy here! He’ll be home in a minute now!” The message was constant, day by day: their father was a man of important work. Someday, perhaps, they’d earn their own crowns. Meanwhile, the Bush house held no princes of the realm.

Sure enough, when Alex brought Mr. Bush home from the station, Pres would go straight to the library, where he’d listen to the radio news, and then to his favorite bandleader, Fred Waring. Then, it was supper, and off to another important meeting, number three-hundred-something for the year. Or back to the telephone closet for important calls: father was not to be disturbed. Seldom would Dottie and Pres spend two nights in a row out at dinners. Though their friends, the Harrimans, the Lovetts, Ellery James, invited them always, they eschewed the constant round of parties, the evening-dress-Park-Avenue scene. Occasionally, Pres and Dottie hosted a dinner of their own, and the children were sent to the upper floor, while the flowers were arranged and the drinks table set up. But the family recalled these as stiff affairs. The real parties were Sunday afternoons, when Pres’s pals from the Midwest would show: Neil Mallon from Cleveland, the Hurds from Chicago, Henry Isham from Chicago ... or sometimes, the Howard brothers, Yale men, who could play four hands on one piano, and after spaghetti, there’d be singing on the porch. Pres loved to sing.

Practice with his quartet, or with the choir—now there was an evening of fun! He brought to the practice of singing the same talent and serious craft he required of himself on a golf course: he was not in it just to hack around. He’d sit on the morning train to New York, singing to himself, then writing down the notes, scoring a new harmony for his quartet to try later that week. When he and Dottie got their house in Florida, on the private Jupiter Island preserve, Pres abandoned the island’s proper Episcopal church, and sang with the Presbyterian choir in Hobe Sound, on the mainland, with the tradesmen and their wives, who really loved to sing. But it wasn’t just the singing: there was a statement in it, too. To be a Bush was to be unimpressed by money and its splendors; it was to be
not
a Mellon, or a Reed, and certainly not their acolyte; it was to be, pointedly, Not Like That.

The Ping-Pong table in the front hall in Greenwich was more than a statement about games: it was an explicit rejection of the lives (“Do lower your voice, dear. The servants will hear!”) around them. Pres used to joke about the “economic royalists,” and at the table, the children would hear his arch report to Dottie:

“The So-and-So’s have a terrible problem. They’ve lost their
caretaker
in Bar Harbor! What’s
worse
is the caretaker on Long Island won’t go
up
to Bar Harbor! ... What
ever
are they to do?”

Even the economic royalists at Walker’s Point got to Pres, with their exclusive Sunday lobster suppers, and the pews at St. Ann’s Church, up front, on the right, where no one but Walkers would presume to sit. For a few years, he summered instead at Fishers Island, in Long Island Sound, where things were Not That Way.

When Pres spoke well of a man, his admiration likely had to do with service rendered to society or its institutions. He didn’t have much good to say about those for whom money was the goal. Of course, one wanted to have enough, as did he, to provide for the family. But after that, what was the point? His own father was a man of important service: founder of the Community Chest in Columbus, O. To be a Bush was to be of benefit: that was the legacy.

Pres came of age with the notion that he might become a lawyer, and somehow go into politics. But the Great War intervened, and when he came back from his captaincy in France (which was “quite exciting and, of course, a wonderful experience”), he hadn’t time or temperament for three more years of law school. Anyway, he was to be a family man, so he started his career in business. But even as he worked his way to partner in the banking firm run by his father-in-law and Averell Harriman, he had the idea that service was the measure of a man. Even in the worst of the stock market slump, after all, when business was toughest, and the Harriman interests were being merged with the older firm of Brown Brothers & Co., Averell Harriman lent most of his time and talent to Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and to the New Deal’s boards and commissions. Pres was not yet asked to serve at that Harrimanesque altitude. But as soon as Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co. dug out from the crash (and the partners got their accounts out of the red), Pres got elected to the Greenwich Town Meeting, where he served as Moderator for most of the next two decades.

He cut a fine figure there, too. He knew enough of Robert’s Rules to keep order, but he wasn’t a stickler for parliamentary niceties. He was never afraid to take the meeting in hand and guide it simply by his own sense of where it ought to go. “A good, firm show” was what he liked to run, and after all, who’d brook him? He was six-foot-four, with a full head of hair, deep-set blue-gray eyes, a man of great stature and athletic grace, with his beautiful Whiffenpoof bass voice, and a Cesar Romero thousand-candlepower smile that was devastating to women. He was imposing enough to keep the meeting on track without ever raising his voice; he never cut anyone short, always took a lively interest and large view of the town’s affairs. The great thing about Mr. Bush, other members of the meeting used to say, was that
a man like that
would listen to everybody’s point of view. Most of the town services he could well afford to do without. But that wasn’t the point: he was giving something back, serving, as a man ought. So night after night, he was there at the meetings; Pres knew as much as anyone about the sewers and the sidewalks, and the public schools that his children would never attend.

Where were White and Delaney? Did they bail out over the island? Why didn’t they wait? Did they think he wasn’t gonna make the water? Delaney had to know. They
did
a water landing,
did it before
. ... The TBM was spewing oil when they took off. Bush set it down on the water, gentle as a mother’s kiss. They paddled away, all three in a raft, paddling for their lives as the plane went down and the bombs went off under the sea, and they all three—twenty years old and alive, Dear God, Alive!—whaled away at the water while they started to sing, Nadeau started to sing ...
Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main
... till a destroyer fished them out, singing, alive. ... Hah! ... Nadeau’ll remember. Nadeau’ll tell them, Bush was good.

What did it matter? They weren’t coming back. They had orders, heading south. They were leaving, they were gone. Half the pilots in the squadron were gone—forever. Now he knew what happened to them. They were good, too. But it
didn’t matter
. It wasn’t about
him
. That was the point ... what was the point now? What did it matter?

There was his service. He was good. No water. So he died.

Dear God ...

Pres Bush chose Andover for Pressie and George because he thought it the most democratic school. Pres himself had put in a few years at a public school in Columbus, with German children, Italians, Irish, Negroes. He always thought that a benefit, especially in politics. But his boys had known only the privileged preserve of Greenwich Country Day. Pres chose a school that would be “broadening.” In those days, Andover made a nice point of taking some scholarship boys who were “different.” Andover styled itself not a standard boys prep, in the Eton-English mold, like Groton, or St. Paul’s, safe green islands for the forever-rich to come of age in proper company and style. It was not like Choate, where they took you in for your name, and thereafter, by whatever means, helped you get through. No, on its own terms, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., old P.A., proudly, was Not That Way.

P.A. declared that its business was making the leaders of tomorrow. The place reeked of promise: great doings to come. The motto of the academy was
Finis origine pendet
, The End Depends upon the Beginning. Even thirteen-year-olds like Poppy Bush were encouraged to keep their sights on that end, that life of virtue and purpose.

The striving wasn’t about scholarship: most of the study was rote. (In fact, classes were called “recitations.”) And although the tweedy, absentminded headmaster, Dr. Claude M. Feuss, urged them over and over to read, to ponder “the great books, the deeper classics,” the fact was, with sports and clubs, meals, chapel, recitations ... there just wasn’t time. Andover men (they were always
men
) were joiners, doers, men of action. Philosophic or political talk was all very well for “dicking” (bull sessions) at night in some fellow’s room. But all the best fellows were “sound” in their beliefs—in other words, they thought pretty much what everybody ought to.

In fact, their politics weren’t much different from those of their fathers in their mansions and boardrooms. The student newspaper, the
Phillipian
, hammered at Roosevelt’s New Deal as “anti-democratic centralized government ... anti-business ... fuzzy headed theoretical nonsense.” The problem with the New Dealers, of course, was they just weren’t
sound
. As the paper opined, endorsing Landon over Roosevelt, the year before Poppy arrived, Roosevelt offered a government “... bent on browbeating free enterprise and regimenting personal initiative. ... Many youths have been kept on the dole, because the government persisted in shackling business and free enterprise. ... In some respects, we think the New Dealers do not know their own minds. While they mean good, they do harm. ...”

What was the point of fiddling with the great institutions and traditions of a system that had floated their forebears (and now, them) so surely, buoyantly, to the shores of well-being? No, the Andover man was preparing to serve those institutions, to stand at the helm for another generation, lest the great ship lose its way! In fact, the icon of Andover Hill was not the bald and befuddled academic, Dr. Feuss ... but instead, the chairman of the academy’s board, Henry L. Stimson. Now
there
was a life for the Andover man: Secretary of War under President Taft, Battalion Commander of Artillery during the Great War, Wall Street lawyer in the twenties, Governor General in the Philippines under Coolidge, Secretary of State to Hoover, and then, despite lifelong loyalty to the Republican Party, Secretary of War again in the Cabinet of FDR. ... Stimson was, said the student who introduced him for a speech to Poppy and his classmates, “a living and vital representative of our ways and of our type of existence, who is out setting an example to the whole nation, ... living proof that the Andover Way is the way of men who guide the fortunes of nations.”

What a bracing prospect was the rest of life, surveyed from the crest of Andover Hill! It was a glad and glorious path that led away from Phillips Hall, first to Yale (where P.A.’s best and brightest went to college), and thence to the boardrooms, the corridors of power, the Cabinet table.

Of course, their place at the helm was
not a birthright
—Andover was Not Like That. It was by merit that the Andover Man belonged. But what a Great and Good stroke of fortune for Poppy Bush: the Andover Way required of a man precisely the qualities he brought from home!

“The basic Andover code,” said the student
Phillipian
, “assumes every student is first and foremost a gentleman.” Honesty, loyalty, generosity, sportsmanship, and throughout, a becoming modesty (a bulwark for the years of triumph to come) ... these were the qualities one needed, to belong.

He was only thirteen when he arrived, and had to struggle at first to fit in with his classmates, who were all at least a year older. (When Pressie had gone off to school at age five, little Poppy couldn’t stand being alone in the house, so he’d started Greenwich Country Day a year early.) He was still awfully small, in the fall of ’37, and hardly seemed marked for stardom—not at all.

But then, strangely, a great stroke of fortune: in his third year at P.A., Poppy got sick, an infection in his shoulder that threatened to spread. There were no antibiotics at the time. Pres and Dottie were worried half to death. It took a month, with the best of care at Massachusetts General, the finest hospital in the country, and then, some specialists in New York, before all the doctors were sure that the boy would recover without ill effect.

The upshot was that Poppy repeated his third year at Andover, in the fall of ’40. And when he came back, of course, he’d done all the schoolwork before, and that gave him more time for sports, where he showed what a year of growth and health could do for a young man, and where he was just as big as any boy, and felt himself, in fact, older and more mature than they, having been, in a sense, through all this before, and so, better able to help them out, to lead, as captain of the junior teams, on which he starred and swelled anew in the increasing approbation of his classmates and the older fellows, who noticed for the first time: here was a fellow who could play the game, and play it well! ... And, of course, that meant he was tapped for the best club, and then as president of the Greeks, and then elected to the student council, and secretary of the student council, and treasurer of the student council, and then a student deacon. Society of Inquiry president, editorial board of the
Phillipian
, business board of the yearbook, Tea Dance committee, Senior Prom committee, president of the senior class ... and captain of the soccer team, captain of the baseball team, and manager of the basketball team (until the coach saw him shoot one day and made him suit up as a player). ... He became, in the Andover man’s argot, an all-rounder. Wasn’t it great how it worked out?