The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  Raising money for his new oil venture brought George to New York frequently, and he always joined Barbara at the hospital, but the pitiful sight of his little daughter enveloped in tubes and so weak she could not even lift her hand to wipe her runny nose was sometimes more than he could bear. Despite his best intentions, George frequently broke down when he walked into his daughter’s room, and Barbara would make him leave until he could pull himself together.

  “Poor George had the most dreadful time and could hardly stand to see her get a blood transfusion,” Barbara wrote in her memoir. “He would say that he had to go to the men’s room. We used to laugh and wonder if Robin thought he had the weakest bladder in the world. Not true. He just had the most tender heart.”

  Only twenty-eight years old, Barbara had no one to turn to during this time. Her husband was traveling constantly for his new business venture. Her mother, from whom she had been estranged, was dead. Her father, now president of McCall Corporation, had remarried and was immersed in his new life. Many of her Texas friends had withdrawn from her, fearing, as many people do, such close proximity to cancer and death. She was not close to either of her brothers, and her older sister, Martha Rafferty, who frequently donated blood used for Robin’s many transfusions, was busy raising her own large family. Barbara found her greatest comfort in the company of the distressed and ailing who were all around her, and she bonded with other mothers in the hospital who were also overseeing the last days of their dying children.

  The prickly part of her personality softened in the hospital. The raw toughness that could ruffle country-club sensibilities came through as firm resolve to the no-nonsense nurses. Barbara related well to the medical staff and placed all her confidence in their recommendations. When they suggested a risky operation to arrest the internal bleeding caused by the drugs Robin had been given, Barbara, who could not reach her husband, made the decision to go ahead, despite Dr. Walker’s advice to the contrary. She was hoping against hope that the surgery would buy Robin more time, but the little girl never came out of the operation. “One minute she was there, and the next she was gone,” Barbara wrote in her memoir. “I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body . . . [and never] felt the presence of God more strongly than at that moment.”

  On the evening of October 11, 1953, George was en route to Manhattan when his daughter fell into a coma. Two months shy of her fourth birthday, she slipped away shortly after he arrived at the hospital. The next day he and Barbara went to Rye to play golf with her father.

  “It was the first day we’d been out,” said Barbara. “We just got up and went out. Played golf. Didn’t tell anyone. I later thought that if people had seen us, they would have said, ‘Why are those people doing that?’ We just wanted to get away.”

  That day Greenwich Time carried Robin’s obituary and said a private memorial service would be held at Christ Church Chapel. There was no funeral because the Bushes decided to leave their daughter’s organs to the scientists at Sloan-Kettering. Dorothy Bush and Lud Ashley later buried her in the Bush family plot in Greenwich, Connecticut, but George and Barbara did not attend.

  Yet, from the day Robin died, she remained a part of the family. Barbara put her portrait, a gift commissioned by Dorothy Walker Bush, above the living-room mantel, and whenever she was asked how many children she had, she always included Robin in the count. This unnerved some of her friends, who didn’t know what to say or how to react in the face of such a tragedy. Barbara said she resented people for not mentioning Robin or for acting as if she had never existed. She vowed to have another daughter as soon as she could, and she kept getting pregnant until she did. Neil was born in 1955; Marvin in 1956. Finally, in 1959, after a miscarriage, Dorothy Walker Bush arrived, and Barbara, thirty-four, stopped having children.

  It was many years before she or George could talk about their little girl’s death without crying, but the day finally came when Barbara could say, “I now look back at Robin as a blessing.”

  During the long months of Robin’s hospitalization, Barbara’s strength emerged as never before, as did George’s frailty. But after their daughter died, the marital dynamic changed. Stripped to the emotional bone, Barbara fell to pieces. She cried constantly and tried to retreat into solitary sadness. George, who now functioned better than he had during his daughter’s excruciating illness, rallied his wife. It was his turn to carry them through the worst ordeal parents can endure, and he continually distracted her with friends and activities. Still, Barbara’s hair turned white, she ground her teeth at night, and she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. A heavy, mourning matron took possession of the large-boned body where once had lived an athletic young woman.

  “He wouldn’t let me be alone,” she recalled many years later. “He held me in his arms, and he made me share it, and accept that his sorrow was as great as my own. He simply wouldn’t allow my grief to divide us . . . push us apart, which is what happens so often where there is a loss like that.”

  Barbara frequently spoke of “other people who could not survive such a trauma without a divorce.” The truth is that no matter what marital strain she would endure as George’s wife, she never had to worry about the dissolution of her marriage. She had married a mommy’s man who was constitutionally incapable of doing anything that would dishonor his mother, and to Dorothy and Prescott Bush the one abomination that even God could not forgive was divorce.

  Divorce was so repugnant to them that they actually shunned Prescott’s brother, James, when he left his first wife, Caroline Patterson, after nineteen years of marriage. They had three children, one of whom was killed in 1945 in the car James was driving.

  James Bush left his first family to marry an elegant New York socialite named Janet Newbold Rhinelander Stewart, who had two children by two previous marriages. Exquisitely beautiful, Mrs. Stewart was on the same “Ten Best-Dressed Women” list as the Duchess of Windsor, and she wore pearls the size of eggs. She, too, came from a moneyed background but was far too glamorous for the midwestern likes of Prescott and Dorothy Bush. Rigorous in their rectitude, they refused to accept her as James’s legitimate wife. They never forgave him for leaving a woman whose “good family” was distantly related to the National Cash Register fortune. Divorce left no room for redemption with Prescott and Dorothy, and their children grew up very much aware that their parents had barred their uncle from their home because of his marital mistake. “They never spoke to him,” recalled Nancy Bush Ellis.

  “It’s true,” said Serena Stewart, James Bush’s stepdaughter, who lived with him and her mother in St. Louis for the duration of their four-year marriage. “We never saw Prescott and his wife during that time. They never visited or called or wrote. Nothing.”

  The cold shunning of their uncle was a powerful example for the five Bush children. While some of them, particularly Nancy and George, would eventually embark on long, serious extramarital affairs of their own—Nancy with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and George with his secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald—they would never sever their marriages. By the time George entered politics, he had developed the compartmentalized mentality of a Mafia don who keeps home and hearth separate from work and play. He infused that Mafia mind-set with a touch of Molière, who said, “It is public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.” George and Barbara understood and respected each other’s boundaries. Hers was home, where she reigned as the mother of his children; his was work, where he did what he did without threatening his wife’s security or social standing. Although George was not referring to sexual dalliances when he wrote to his friend Paul Dorsey in 1967, he did indicate how he segmented his personal and professional lives: “Because I keep my business and politics separate from my home life—usually that is. She [Barbara] is not informed on issues and intrigue—perhaps this is selfish on my part but we have a close, close relationship with the kids, et al, and I just want to have that oasis of privacy.”

  In the fall of 195
3, as Robin’s days were drawing to an end, Prescott Bush asked Barbara to accompany him to the Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich to see the small family plot he had purchased on a shady hillside. Next to a freshly planted dogwood tree he had had erected a modest granite headstone that said “BUSH.” As Barbara and her father-in-law paced off the site, she was genuinely touched. “That darling man bought that lot so Robin would have a place to rest.”

  Barbara remembered the fifty-eight-year-old senator looking disapprovingly at some of the elaborate death mansions on top of the hill.

  “I knew old so-and-so,” he said. “He certainly thought highly of himself, didn’t he, Bar?”

  Prescott had no way of knowing then that his own tombstone would one day draw the same kind of unflattering observation, for he would be laid to rest nineteen years later under a pile of the most grandiose nouns his widow could bestow. After selecting a black-onyx gravestone rimmed with never-tarnish bronze, Dorothy, the family’s mythmaker, directed the following be inscribed in large raised never-tarnish bronze letters:

  PRESCOTT S. BUSH

  1895–1972

  UNITED STATES SENATOR 1952–1963

  LEADER, ATHLETE, SINGER, SOLDIER, BANKER, STATESMAN,

  CHURCHMAN, COMPANION, FRIEND, FATHER,

  HUSBAND EXTRAORDINARY.

  After Robin’s burial in 1953, the Bush family plot would welcome Prescott (1972), Dorothy (1992), and Prescott’s brother, James (1978), who by then had left his third wife for another woman and alienated himself from almost everyone in the Bush family. His granite stone is shoved toward the bottom of the plot, barely noticeable in the grass, which is how the family treated him during his disgraceful last years. His death was “a great relief to all of us,” George admitted to the State Department official who shipped James Bush’s body home from the Philippines, where he died destitute in a veterans hospital. His uncle’s alcoholism, plus his many marriages and divorces, had embarrassed George and the family for years.

  There was more than just embarrassment to George’s disdain. He wanted to keep hidden that his Uncle Jim, late in life, had embezzled $750,000; such a revelation could be politically damaging to George’s aspirations for high office. “No one in the family knew all the details of what happened,” Serena Stewart said. “I talked to Jim’s daughter, Shelley Bush Jansing, about it and she confirmed the embezzlement—we both knew the amount—but we didn’t know—and still don’t—how he did it and how he got away with it . . . Only George knows all those details and he would never tell anyone, not even Shelley . . . My mother, Jim Bush’s second wife, knew that he had embezzled three-quarters of a million dollars after the end of his third marriage [1970] and fled the country . . . By then he had been in banking for years and had been a director of the Export-Import Bank [1959–63] . . . so I guess he knew how to move money around.” A friend of Jim’s fourth and final wife said: “The money that Jim ran off with supposedly was Rockefeller money from accounts that Jim was handling as an investment manager.”

  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 Geo
rgie’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.”