The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  This secret—never mentioned or discussed within the family, let alone with outsiders—caused George to grow up with a pathological fear of personal examination, a fear that carried over into his public life. As an adult, he ran from anything that might expose the pain he had buried as a child. He was so threatened by any kind of analysis that interviewers were forewarned not to lay him on the couch with their questions.

  “Is he going to get on all this psychobabble bullshit?” George asked about an interview with David Frost.

  “So, this is gonna be a deal on where I’m coming from, a psychiatric layout?” George asked Gail Sheehy.

  “Is it a psychoanalytical piece?” he asked Maureen Dowd, yet again revealing his obsessive desire to keep secrets and avoid self-analysis.

  George learned from his mother to use perpetual motion to avoid personal scrutiny. Having inherited her father’s rampaging play-to-the-death competitiveness, Dotty raised her brood to believe in the hard-charging religion of sports. The first commandment: excel as an athlete. Absolutely fearless, she pushed herself and her children to the edge of physical endurance, sometimes quite recklessly.

  “We had lots of trees around our house in Greenwich, and somehow we knew she wanted us to climb every one of them,” said George. “Some neighbor would see us and come to warn Mother. ‘They’ll be fine,’ she would say. And we would hear her, and our own apprehensions would vanish. Of course, there would be scrapes and bruises . . . but it didn’t seem to faze Mother or her confidence in us.”

  Dotty forced George, who was left-handed, to play tennis with his right hand. As a consequence, he developed a crab-like serve but became ambidextrous, which allowed him to make astonishing retrieval shots. Dotty also forced him to play golf with his right hand, which eventually made his wrists stiff and impeded his game. In baseball, he threw left-handed but batted from the right side. He admitted that if he had hit lefty, he might’ve been better, since his left was the controlling eye. But he didn’t have the nerve to defy his commanding mother.

  “Mrs. Bush had power over her children,” said their friend Fitzhugh Green. “Perhaps in this matter she used it unwisely.”

  One day in late August at Kennebunkport, Dotty and young Pressy took their small sailboat, Shooting Star, into the stormy seas off the Maine coast. Even nature’s whims could not dim her competitive drive. A neighbor onshore saw them taking on water and summoned Prescott senior. He and George sped off in the family motorboat, Tom Boy, to rescue mother and son before they capsized. Prescott junior remembers his father’s fury.

  “How could you, Dotty? How could you!”

  Barely chastened, Dotty maintained her blind drive to win, which set the standard of excellence within the family.

  “Mrs. Bush was pretty fierce about competition,” recalled Jack Greenway, one of George’s Andover classmates. “I think that competing with her was a rite of passage within the family . . . When it came Nancy’s turn to play her [in tennis], they played so many sets at Round Hill Club in Greenwich that Mrs. Bush was taken directly to the hospital in Greenwich to be rehydrated.”

  More than fifty years later George recalled his mother’s combative style. “I can vividly remember the bottom of my mother’s feet. Yes, she played a much younger woman named Peaches Peltz in tennis back in 1935 or so. Peaches was smooth. Mum was tenacious. Mother literally wore the skin off the bottom of her feet.”

  The family enjoys telling the story of Dotty nine months into her first pregnancy and playing baseball at Kennebunkport. “Her last time up she hit a home run,” said George, “and without missing a base (I’m told) continued right off the field to the hospital to deliver Pres.”

  “I had to decide early on as a daughter-in-law that you can’t beat her, you have to sit back and enjoy her,” said George’s wife, Barbara Bush. “When I was a new bride, she beat me in paddle tennis with her right hand, then with her left.”

  Even in her seventies, Dotty kept up her strenuous pace. “I remember playing gin rummy with her in Greenwich when she was recuperating from a broken leg,” recalled a close family friend. “She told me she suffered a fracture during the U.S. Open. Her family was watching on television, but it was a gorgeous day and she wanted to go for a walk. She couldn’t get anyone to budge from the TV. So she went out by herself. She tripped and fell while climbing over a branch and broke her leg. She lay in the leaves for a couple of hours, unable to move, until a little boy came along on his bicycle. He said, ‘Mrs. Bush, what are you doing lying on the ground?’ She told him what had happened, and he offered to go get her family. She said, ‘Oh, no. They would be very, very angry if you did that because they’re watching the U.S. Open.’ God forbid we should disturb anyone watching sports.”

  Jonathan Bush recalled the day his mother offered five dollars to any of her sons who could beat her at tennis. George, who was sixteen at the time, accepted the challenge. The children rooted for George.

  “Everyone wanted him to win, and he finally did. She was at the top of her form. It was a brutal match, both of them wringing wet when they finished.”

  Dotty set up intrafamily competitions and graded everyone on his or her excellence in swimming, tennis, touch football, knee football, softball, tiddledywinks, checkers, fishing, golf, and indoor putting. She even set up a Ping-Pong table in the foyer of the Greenwich home, and anyone who passed through the front door was challenged.

  Sports became a metaphor of life for Dotty, who judged people’s characters by how they played tennis. “She had some good shots” meant she was a terrible player and a mediocre person. “He can’t keep score” meant he’ll never amount to much in life. “He plays the net” was high praise and marked a man for success.

  Her sons, who competed for her attention, absorbed these judgments and pushed themselves to please her. She challenged them constantly—swimming matches, footraces, bridge games—and played to win at everything, never holding back.

  “She loved games and thought that competition taught courage, fair play, and—I think most importantly—teamwork,” said George Bush. “She taught games to us endlessly.”

  The “fair play” part of competition was not always observed by the children. Sometimes their desire to win trumped good sportsmanship, especially in George, who never outgrew his need to triumph, whether to please his mother or impress his father. “I hate losing,” he said. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

  During their childhood summers at Kennebunkport, George met his match in an equally competitive youngster named Bill Truesdale, who was the best sailor in the eleven-foot class of boats known as catboats, which had two sides, a bottom, a mast, and a centerboard. Bill Truesdale was the perennial winner, summer after summer, in an annual competition. One night before a big race George went down and tied a bucket to Truesdale’s centerboard. The next day the boats, about fifteen of them, were towed up the Kennebunk River to the starting line offshore. The warning gun went off, and everyone put up his sail.

  “There was a light breeze and Truesdale’s boat barely moved,” recalled Jonathan Bush. “At first he thought something was wrong with the boat, and in frustration he began to beat it with a paddle. Whack! Whack! When he got ashore he found out what George had done. He chased him for days. George would be sitting on the porch, and we’d hear ‘Here comes Truesdale!’ and off he’d go. That was a shout we heard all summer: ‘Here comes Truesdale!’”

  To the Bushes, the anecdote illustrates George’s love of practical jokes. Others might see the story of sabotaging a friend’s boat to deprive him of victory as something more than an adolescent caper (and, as a way of dealing with competition, something that came to fruition in George’s later political campaigns). But no one would deny that the children learned from their parents to play to win.

  The competitive atmosphere between the Bushes and the Walkers at Kennebunkport was often tense, sometimes terrifying. “I can remember some very earnest rock throwing up there,” said Louise Me
ad Walker, who married John Walker, George Herbert Walker Jr.’s son. “At my own family’s Sunday dinner in Dayton, whenever the men came in from golf, the question always was, ‘Did you have a good game?’ At Kennebunkport, the question always is, ‘Did you win?’”

  When George was older, his youngest brother, Bucky, was given a new ball-in-a-labyrinth game and beat George easily. Bucky went to bed proud of besting his older brother, who had been to war, married, and become a father himself. The next day George casually suggested a rematch. George won with a perfect score. Family members, in on the joke, howled with laughter. George had stayed up late perfecting his game to ambush his baby brother, who was fourteen years younger.

  “My mother and father were both fierce competitors,” said Prescott junior, “and it was extremely important that you compete and do the best you could [but] that you learn to be a good loser . . . In other words, to lose with dignity, even though you hated it . . . even though it made you mad as the devil, you had to maintain your composure and not throw your racket . . . or if you’re in tiddledywinks, and you miss the shot that cost you the game, you couldn’t throw the bowl.”

  And if you did?

  “Well, we’d get the strap or we would spend a lot of time sitting in our rooms or something like that.”

  Prescott and Dotty also forbade cursing and bragging. As Mrs. Bush told an interviewer: “I just couldn’t bear braggadocio.”

  The hell-bent prideful pursuit of winning had to always be accompanied by gracious modesty. “You could never come home and say you played well in a game,” said Jonathan Bush. “You just didn’t talk about yourself. Bad taste.”

  George Bush remembered being slapped down for arrogance when he was eight years old. He had said he thought he was off his game. “Mother jumped all over me. ‘You are just learning—you don’t have a game! Work harder and maybe some day you will.’”

  The Bushes raised their children to win and assume their superiority as winners but to mask the assumption at all times. Enforced humility, like keeping secrets, was considered the epitome of good breeding. Chances are the Bushes might not have appreciated the perceptiveness of Mark Twain, who said, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves—and how little we think of the other person.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the 1930s the nation’s railroads had become tangled in bankruptcies, unrelated to the Depression, and the U.S. Senate wanted to know why. So the Interstate Commerce Commission started holding hearings to investigate the complicated financial schemes that enriched the bankers and brokers while simultaneously looting the railroads.

  Leading the charge was the newly elected senator from Missouri, a failed haberdasher named Harry S. Truman. A New Dealer from the moment of his election, Senator Truman supported all of President Roosevelt’s programs to pull the country out of the Depression—the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Rural Electrification Administration. Now he was determined to expose financial mismanagement of the railroads and reform the national transportation system.

  A small part of the larger problem involved the reorganization of the Missouri Pacific system and the subsequent financing that led to its bankruptcy. This fiscal plunder, the Enron scandal of its day, fleeced employees and left directors and stockholders destitute while the wealthy financiers and their corporate lawyers skipped out with their pockets full of boodle. Playing a leading role in the pillage was George Herbert Walker, who was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Truman on November 17, 1937.

  Bert walked into the Senate hearing room in Washington, D.C., with his lawyers from Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine, and Wood. Even in a suit and tie, he looked like a burly boxer with a trainer and a handler on either side, ready to remove his mouthpiece after every round and ram it back when the bell clanged. As a former amateur heavyweight champion in St. Louis, he was accustomed to pummeling brutes; the little senator in the wire-rim glasses hardly looked like a worthy adversary.

  With a few polite questions, Senator Truman established that George Herbert Walker had been chairman of the board of Gulf Coast Lines when the Missouri Pacific acquired control of that company in 1925. At the time, Bert was also president of W. A. Harriman and Company, bankers for the railroad, and senior partner of G. H. Walker and Company, the brokerage firm that later sold the railroad. Bert admitted he had informed his board that the sales profit was going to W. A. Harriman and Company, but he neglected to tell them that the banking house was only a temporary receptacle for his own personal benefit.

  Bert Walker testified that of the sale’s $518,680.80 ($5,519,620 in 2004) net profit, he personally received $173,387.57 ($1,845,130 in 2004). An additional $72,244.84 ($768,804 in 2004) went to his brokerage firm, G. H. Walker and Company, and more moneys, in the amount of $43,346.90 ($461,283 in 2004), went to W. A. Harriman and Company, of which he was president.

  The Interstate Commerce Commission characterized his various fees as “excessive compensation,” but Bert’s defense was that he had worked on the deal, “a protracted negotiation,” for ten years without pay. “I never charged the railroad a penny of compensation,” he said. “I never even charged them most of the time for my out-of-pocket expenses.” Instead of taking a salary for his services, he said, he insisted on working free until it came time to sell the railroad to a big system. “I wanted the right to sell it and make the commission then.”

  Bert showed no shame for his stupendous profits, which, his lawyers asserted, were perfectly legal. Nor was he embarrassed when the Senate committee counsel pointed out that the gross compensation totaled more than the salaries and expenses of all the railroad’s employees. Bert shrugged as if to say, “Business is business.”

  One month later Senator Truman stood up in the Senate to passionately attack Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship—all that George Herbert Walker represented. Truman blasted the “court and lawyer situation” in the gigantic receiverships and reorganizations that had destroyed the railroads. He specifically named Walker’s law firm, “the highest of the high hats in the legal profession [who] resort to tricks that would make an ambulance chaser in a coroner’s court blush with shame,” and he blamed the railroads’ collapse on wild rampaging greed:

  We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor . . . Wild greed along the lines I have been describing brought on the Depression. When investment bankers, so-called, continually load great transportation companies with debt in order to sell securities to savings banks and insurance companies so they can make a commission, the well finally runs dry.

  The senator’s charges of stock juggling and other deceptions by lawyers, brokers, and bankers made the front page of The New York Times. The following year Truman introduced a bill to reorganize the railroads and place them under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The bill, known as the Wheeler-Truman Act, was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1940. Inadvertently, George Herbert Walker had helped contribute to another success for the New Deal, which he despised almost as much as the New Deal President.

  “Oh, Pop hated Roosevelt,” recalled his daughter Dotty. “Hated him. Roosevelt just made him see red.”

  That was one of many sentiments Bert Walker shared with his son-in-law. Prescott also reviled FDR and said many years after Roosevelt’s death, “The only man I truly hated lies buried in Hyde Park.”

  “In the early days of the New Deal, the financial community was not enamored of it at all,” said Prescott, “and the fact that Averell was didn’t help us a damn bit at Brown Brothers Harriman. In fact, it was a little bit of a hurdle you had to take from time to time. Some big corporate client would say, ‘What the hell is your partner do
ing down there with this red bunch of Communists and socialists? What do you mean by this?’ We would laugh it off and say, ‘Well, Averell feels he wants to devote some time to the national interest . . . he’s become interested in trying to do something for his country, and if the President wants to use him to be Ambassador to Russia, why, fine, he’s going to do it.’ And he was a good Ambassador to Russia . . . He was at the very highest levels there with the Roosevelt administration.”

  By that time, the only Democrat left in the Bush family was Prescott’s father, Samuel, who had remarried a few years after his wife’s death. He advised Herbert Hoover on employment conditions in Ohio and reported to the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief. By then Samuel had sold the house he and Flora had built and moved with his new wife, Martha, to a country estate in Blacklick, Ohio. He wrote his sons a letter on May 14, 1940, and proudly shared a note he had received from the vice president of the Pennsylvania Lines West asking him to become general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Lines West of Pittsburgh:

  [It is] the only case where an officer who has left the company has been invited to return. This I have always treasured for the reason that after the departure of Mr. L. F. Loree, who was rather hostile to me because I would not yield to practices that I felt where [sic] neither honorable nor wise, is evidence of appreciation of my worth by all other officers.

  Unlike Prescott’s father, George Herbert Walker cared little for practices that were either honorable or wise. A prime example is his involvement in a plan to extract the last measure of profit from his investment in Silesian-American Corporation, an American company partially owned by the Harrimans that operated mines in Poland.

  The investment in Silesian-American was made in 1926, seven years before Hitler was declared dictator of Germany. The acquisition became a moral problem in 1935, when Hitler instituted the Nuremberg Laws that deprived German Jews of their rights to citizenship. Untroubled by morality, Silesian-American investors kept their shares. When the Nazis invaded Poland in October 1939, they seized control of the Silesian-American mines. The American company, unable to pay its bondholders because of the Nazi takeover, declared bankruptcy. Rather than absorb the $2.4 million loss of their investment, Bert Walker and Brown Brothers Harriman decided to do business with Nazi Germany.