The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  “Naturally, I was interested in the Senator, but the matter of Senator Bush arose from George Bush . . . He initiated it, and there would be no reason for it otherwise.”

  Prescott listened to the lawyer his son had sent, but Paxton Howard did not change the senator’s mind. George refused to give up. He flew to Washington, where he told his father that he had been threatened. He claimed he was being hit with severe pressure to turn his father around. “Calls were then made to my former boss, Neil Mallon, at the Dresser Company,” said George. “The head of Phillips Petroleum, K. S. (Boots) Adams, told Neil that ‘if Prescott Bush doesn’t vote for this bill, you can forget selling any more Dresser equipment to Phillips, and you can tell George Bush to forget his offshore drilling business.’”

  George told his father: “I think you ought to know about these things.”

  Prescott brushed the words aside. “Don’t you believe them. They’ll never put you out of business. They wouldn’t dare, because this would be the worst possible mistake they could make. This will not affect you at all. I’m going to vote against the bill because on the whole I think that’s in the best interest of my state as well as the United States to vote against this bill. But don’t you worry about it, and if there’s any after effects from it, just tell me about them, and we’ll take care of that.”

  By coincidence, Prescott was scheduled to play golf with the President later in the week. He told Eisenhower everything that George had told him. Eisenhower wrote in his diary on February 11, 1956, that he had heard the head of a big oil company who had once supported Prescott “announced that never again would he support such a fellow and referred to him in indecent language.”

  By this time, two other senators had stepped forward to report they had been offered bribes from the oil industry in an attempt to influence their votes. That led to the Senate committee investigation. But despite the controversy, the Harris-Fulbright Bill passed the Senate and was sent to the President for his signature. Although Eisenhower had initially favored the legislation, he now hesitated. Cabinet minutes from February 13, 1956, indicate his concern about signing the contentious bill into law:

  The President asked whether any President had ever signed a bill while the Senate was investigating its passage. He thought that any good bill ought to be passed without having a terrible stench connected with it . . . He then cited a story he had heard of oil industry people blatantly bragging of how they had fixed Sen. Bush, because of his opposition, by taking a tremendous amount of business away from his son. The President then noted how the American people, even though erroneously, hold the President responsible for everything.

  In the end, Eisenhower realized that most voters live in large urban areas and if he signed a bill tainted by charges of bribery, the Democrats would exploit the issue during the campaign. So he vetoed the Harris-Fulbright Bill, and there was not enough support in the Senate to override the presidential veto.

  On this issue, Prescott voted principle over purse. The negative effect on a member of his own family did not change his decision. Unfortunately, the father’s political template would never become the son’s. When George Bush entered politics eight years later, he showed he was influenced much more by his mother’s upbringing than by his father’s: his only priority was to win. Unlike his father, George needed to be liked by everyone rather than respected. That left no room for taking an unpopular stand, even if it meant doing the right thing for his constituents.

  Not everyone considered Prescott Bush a man of principle. In fact, his 1956 opponent for reelection, Thomas J. Dodd, called him a “liar.” Dodd, a two-term congressman from West Hartford, was a man of stature in his own right. After graduating from Yale Law School, he became an FBI agent, then a federal attorney. He served as chief of counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, for which he received a presidential citation, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and the Czechoslovakian Order of the White Lion.

  During the 1956 campaign, he became exasperated hearing Prescott rattle off his legislative accomplishments on behalf of flood control, a crucial issue for the state, as well as veterans’ benefits. Prescott pompously named each one of the bills after himself—“the Bush-McCormack Amendment,” “the Bush-Long Amendment,” “the Bush-Lehman Amendment,” “the Bush-Pastore Bill.”

  Dodd was further aggravated by the Bush campaign brochure that featured a photo of Prescott sitting next to the President, so close their shoulders touched, and watching Eisenhower sign a piece of paper. The headline: “President Eisenhower Signs a Senator Bush Bill.”

  During their first debate in Canaan, Connecticut, Dodd exploded when Prescott referred to a flood-prevention act as “the Bush-McCormack Act.”

  “Senator Bush is not telling the truth to this audience. There is no such thing as the Bush-McCormack Act. There’s just no such thing.”

  Dodd’s charge—although not true—threw Prescott into a swivet. He maintained control but admitted later how difficult it was for him. “Our campaign in Connecticut was a pretty rough and tough . . . I’m not disposed to get into personalities in campaigns, and have always tried to avoid them but Dodd was a very difficult opponent, and made it very difficult for me to hold my temper and keep my equilibrium.”

  Dodd kept charging that Prescott overstated his importance. “There has been a deliberate misrepresentation of the record in efforts to convince the voters that Sen. Bush co-authored popular legislation when the true record shows all too clearly that he had little or nothing to do with it,” said the congressman.

  Prescott felt that his honor had been besmirched, so he bought television time to prove that the Bush-McCormack Act was not the fraud that Dodd had claimed. He went on the air with statements from half a dozen prominent Democrats, including Senators Herbert Lehman and John F. Kennedy, to verify that he had worked on legislation dealing with flood insurance and hurricane protection. “We made this all very clear,” said Prescott later, “and it put Mr. Dodd in quite a bad hole. But to me this illustrates the rashness of this man. He’s willing to make very reckless charges and very reckless statements, and I formed the opinion then, which I haven’t changed since, that he’s a very unreliable sort of person . . . It was a ruthless, stupid thing for him to do, when he knew damn well, really, that there was a Bush-McCormack Act.”

  Dodd had blasted Prescott for naming four acts of legislation after himself. He had been right about three of the so-called Bush acts. Prescott took issue with the fourth, the only one that legitimately belonged under his name. The Connecticut race attracted national attention in 1956 because the seat was crucial to whether Republicans would take back control of the Senate. The Democrats presented Dodd as “the Man from Main Street, not Wall Street,” and the Republicans presented Bush as “the President’s Man.” As Prescott recalled, each of them jockeyed to be the common man:

  Dodd would make a remark like this . . . “Well, of course, Senator Bush seems to have a lot of time to play golf. I can’t afford to play golf” . . . which would by inference say that Bush is a wealthy fellow that hasn’t got much to do, whereas I’m the poor struggling fellow that has to work all the time . . . Somebody asked him what his hobby was and he said, “Horseback riding.” So when I got up I said, “Well, I congratulate my opponent. I’ve never been able to afford a horse.”

  Dodd was the only Democrat in Connecticut’s congressional delegation. Even then he did not enjoy the full support of his colleagues in the House of Representatives. Representative Lud Ashley, a Democrat from Ohio overlooking Prescott’s own struggle with alcohol, wrote to his good friend George Bush: “I’ve got my fingers crossed for your Dad. Dodd is a real phony—which I’ve known ever since he got drunk on a New England–bound train. He was a disgrace, and I hope that he gets the beating he deserves.”

  Polls predicted a close Senate race. After Labor Day, Prescott rented an apartment in Hartford, where he and Dotty lived for two months so they could campaign easily around the state. She h
ad taken elocution lessons in Washington, and a class in public speaking to prepare herself. She memorized her speeches about “peace, prosperity and progress” until she could stand up and talk for twenty minutes without notes and sound extemporaneously fresh. The campaign provided her with a car, a driver, and her own hectic schedule. While her husband covered the big cities, she handled ladies’ teas and small-town luncheons. They both made hand-shaking tours in every county in Connecticut. In fact, with the exception of George and Barbara, the entire Bush family—aunts, uncles, in-laws, children, grandchildren—turned out in full force to campaign.

  This time around, Prescott left his straw hat at home: no banjos, no barbershop quartets. As the New York Journal American noted, “No more gimmicks and stunts.”

  He stood tall on civil rights and lambasted the southern Democrats in the Senate, particularly the senior senator from Mississippi, James Eastland. He charged that Democrats talk one way in the North and another way in the South. He accused the Democratic standard-bearer of “hollow promises” and “deceptive words” on racial relations.

  “Adlai [Stevenson] and the Democrats in the North, including my own opponent, know in their hearts their promises [on civil rights] don’t ring true as long as the Senior Senator from Mississippi must be their party’s choice as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee . . . A vote against me is a vote for Jim Eastland. Nothing will happen on civil rights in the way of necessary legislation if the Republicans do not control Congress.” He added that the Democrats offered nothing but a return to the New Deal, which “was a complete failure.”

  Prescott went to New York to campaign for the attorney general, Jacob Javits, telling crowds: “We need men like Jack Javits in the Senate to help the Eisenhower Republicans like [New York] Senator [Irving] Ives and myself who have been working for civil rights legislation and the removal of harsh and discriminating provisions of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.”

  Prescott was stalwart on civil rights. “He was one of the few who was with us on the crucial votes in 1956,” said Howard Shuman, former administrative assistant to Senator Paul Douglas. “Prescott was a progressive Republican, far and away better than his son George or his grandson George W.”

  There is no question that Prescott stood up on the cutting issue of his day, something George would never do. When George ran for the U.S. Senate from Texas, he opposed the civil rights bill of 1964. He also supported restrictive covenants and tried to scuttle the fair-housing bill in 1968 before he voted for it. The rest of his political career reflected only the most opportunistic stands on racial matters, so unlike his father.

  During the 1956 campaign, the Republicans sent their heaviest artillery into Connecticut to help Prescott: Vice President Richard Nixon, House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, former Governor Thomas Dewey, and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey all visited the state. In October, the Democrats, who had sent no one to help Tom Dodd, practically conceded the state.

  On Election Day, Prescott and Dotty returned to Greenwich to vote, and that evening they awaited the returns in the newspaper offices of Greenwich Time. In 1956, the owner of the paper, Constance Johnson Beech, had sold the paper to a group of seven local investors, which included Prescott and some of his slush-fund contributors. That same year, not too surprisingly, Greenwich Time endorsed one of its owners as a “senator of stature” who “deserves a full, six-year term of his own.”

  On election night Bush and his family watched as a campaign worker, chalk in one hand and a much-used cloth in the other, stood on a chair in front of a big blackboard, rapidly writing the figures shouted from newsmen on the telephones, keeping a vigil on the voting machines around the state.

  Within an hour of the polls closing in Connecticut, it became apparent that the Republicans were winning the U.S. Senate seat, all seats in the House of Representatives, plus most of the seats in the state’s House. John M. Bailey, the Democrats’ Connecticut state chairman, was stunned. “President Eisenhower has broader coattails than we thought he had,” he said. By 9:00 p.m., the Eisenhower landslide had become a political avalanche that buried almost all of Connecticut’s Democrats, including Tom Dodd. Prescott had more than quadrupled his 1952 plurality, racking up a 131,000 margin of victory and winning seven out of eight counties. By 9:50 p.m., Dodd had conceded. He sent a telegram to Bush at his home in Greenwich: “Congratulations on your victory. My very best wishes for a happy and successful term in the United States Senate.”

  Tom Dodd would run again for the Senate two years later against William Purtell and win. He served with Prescott in the U.S. Senate until Prescott’s retirement in 1963. During those years that they represented the state together, neither man could put aside the 1956 campaign long enough to become friends. Their relationship remained civil, but barely so.

  The man from Wall Street never forgot being called a “liar” by the man from Main Street, and he retaliated ten years later in his oral history by characterizing Dodd as someone who had “assumed the likeness of Joe McCarthy in his speeches.” Prescott claimed that the Connecticut intelligentsia didn’t like Dodd and that they feared him. “They felt that he represented something that was spiritually offensive to them, that he was a threat to intellectual freedom, and so I’m satisfied in that election, 1956, the intellectual community, the universities, went rather heavily for me.”

  Prescott recorded those words, knowing they would not be published during his lifetime but would become part of the historical record that would live long after all the principals had died. His oral history also suggests that his condemnation of Dodd was based on nothing more than Prescott’s friendship with Whitney Griswold, the president of Yale.

  “In 1952, he [Griswold] told me he’d voted against me,” said Prescott, “but in 1956, he voted for me, and enthusiastically.” Prescott surmised that Griswold’s enthusiasm sprang from Prescott’s censure of Joe McCarthy, plus Prescott’s opposition to loyalty oaths for college professors. He believed that those two stands swung the intellectual community over to his side.

  Prescott accused Tom Dodd of being “distinctly pro-McCarthy,” although the public record shows that Dodd campaigned vigorously on behalf of Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon against Joe McCarthy’s efforts to unseat him in 1950. Despite Dodd’s ardent anti-Communism, he resisted the overly zealous Red-baiting of the Cold War epitomized by the thuggish tactics of Joe McCarthy. Prescott’s indictment of him as a McCarthyite seems unjust, suggesting the lingering resentment of a tough political campaign. Prescott’s “how dare he” attitude might have clouded his judgment because the record indicates that Bush’s anti-Communism was just as ferocious as Dodd’s. In fact, the two men held similar views. Both took strong positions on defending freedom in West Berlin; both signed a petition opposing the seating of Communist China in the United Nations. Both spoke out against Communism in Latin America, and Fidel Castro in Cuba. In fact, Prescott predicted in 1961 that the Cuban dictator would be overthrown “within six months.”

  Both men were anti-Communist in their foreign policy views, but neither believed, like some in the 1950s, that Communism was a domestic threat within the United States.

  In February 1960, according to FBI documents, Prescott denounced the U.S. Air Force for suggesting in its manual that Communists had infiltrated the National Council of Churches. “The claim is outrageous,” he said, “and the Secretary of Defense [Thomas S. Gates] should be criticized for his irresponsibility.”

  The day after Prescott’s denunciation of Gates he began receiving letters and telegrams of protest. His secretary quickly called the FBI and asked for information to substantiate his position. Documents show that she was told the FBI files were confidential and that she should check with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or the House Un-American Activities Committee. A memo of the call was sent to the director, J. Edgar Hoover, who penned a note of approval: “Right. The Senator got himself into this position and will have to get himself out.”
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br />   Hoover later received a letter from the mustachioed movie star Adolphe Menjou, one of the bureau’s “special correspondents” (that is, informants):

  I was astounded to read that Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut had attacked the writer of the Air Force Manual with regard to Subversion in the Clergy. I wrote to the Senator enclosing material clearly showing that the Communists had not overlooked the Clergy in their efforts to hoodwink the American public. I could not believe that a United States Senator in 1960 could have been so naïve.

  Hoover responded to “Dear Adolphe”:

  With regard to your inquiry, Senator Bush has not spoken to me personally about this matter but has written me just recently about getting together. I am unable to make satisfactory arrangements to do so at this time because of out of town commitments.

  Hoover’s response to “Dear Adolphe” basically told the actor that the FBI would not be of any help to Prescott Bush. At that time the National Council of Churches was a target of the rabid right in part because the NCC was active in the civil rights movement in the South. In 1947, Menjou had named names of alleged Communists in Hollywood before HUAC and, in 1958, he joined the John Birch Society.

  Two months after Hoover’s letter, Prescott’s office called the FBI again to obtain information concerning the Communist connections, if any, of three organizations: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Industrial Areas Foundation, whose director was Saul Alinsky; and the Progress Development Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey.

  According to the FBI documents, Bush’s office “wondered if any of these organizations had been cited by the Attorney General. He said he had checked a list of cited organizations dated 1954 and did not note these organizations as being listed. He said that, in addition, he desired any information which we could make available concerning the organizations.”

  The FBI obviously considered Prescott too liberal to be worth helping and rudely suggested again that he consult the records of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. On the memorandum is a note wondering “why the Senator’s office would make this kind of inquiry concerning the NAACP, in view of the fact it [Communist infiltration] is so well known.”