by Kitty Kelley
By 1960, the NAACP had begun portraying itself as the anti-Communist alternative on civil rights. However, at times since its founding in 1909, the organization had been allied with American Communists on racial issues—hence the “everybody knows” tone of the FBI memo. Saul Alinsky was not a Communist but a labor liberal involved in organizing poor black neighborhoods in Chicago around issues of education, housing, and employment. The Progress Development Corporation in Princeton was involved in building desegregated housing in Illinois.
The record shows that on the crucial matters of his day—civil rights and McCarthyism—Prescott Bush was a man of principle who came down on the morally right side. Unlike his son George Herbert Walker Bush, and later his grandson George Walker Bush, Prescott did not sell out on principle for political gain. He recollected in his oral history that he paid a price: “Herbert Brownell, who had been in the [Eisenhower] Cabinet as Attorney General, . . . said, ‘Well you know, Pres, some of those fellows didn’t want you to be re-elected. They didn’t think you were the kind of Republican that they wanted.’”
Prescott told Brownell how Senate Minority Leader William F. Knowland, a Republican from California, had come to Connecticut to campaign in 1956. Knowland, a conservative who was constantly at odds with Eisenhower, made two speeches in the state. “In both cases, I introduced him,” said Prescott, “but he never mentioned my name during his speeches and I was the candidate for re-election and the one introducing him. He mentioned the congressman in each of those districts who was running for reelection but never mentioned my name.”
“Well, that’s further evidence of just what I’m saying,” said Brownell. “I don’t think they really wanted you to win.”
Prescott finally understood that he was not conservative enough for the Republican Party, then swinging to the right. Yet The Milford Citizen thought so highly of Prescott that the paper ran an editorial suggesting he replace Richard Nixon as Eisenhower’s running mate in 1956: “We believe the Republican Party has no man in its ranks better qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States than Sen. Bush, and we hope a vigorous effort will be made to have him nominated for that potential vital position.”
Prescott lived long enough to see his former opponent go down in ignominy. Targeted by Drew Pearson for senatorial malfeasance, Thomas Dodd took a daily pounding from the columnist in 1966 after four members of his Senate staff had leaked personal letters about his financial dealings. The relentless publicity forced the Senate to investigate the matter, and in 1967 Dodd was censured for using political funds for his personal benefit. The 92–5 vote was an overwhelming rebuke by his colleagues. He was defeated for reelection in 1970 and died at the age of sixty-three in 1971, a year before Prescott.
Dodd’s financial misconduct led the Senate to enact laws governing the use of political funds for private use, which, fortunately for Richard Nixon and Prescott Bush, had not existed during their slush-fund years.
Publicly, Prescott managed to show restraint over Dodd’s disgrace, perhaps mindful of the saying “There but for the grace of God go I.” However, his son George, who was in the House of Representatives at the time, showed no such decorum. He gleefully denounced his father’s opponent to colleagues. In a letter dated April 8, 1967, almost three months before the Senate censure of Dodd, George Bush, then a congressman, wrote to a friend, defending political fund-raisers:
As to the Dirksen Banquet—a party needs money to run: it’s that simple—no thing for Dirksen, just dough for the party . . . I don’t agree that fundraising dinners are corrupt—directly or indirectly. If you Tom Dodd it and add on to the house or send the kids somewhere on the proceeds—that is a horse of a different shade.
Years later George Bush published his letter without a care toward the unseemly comment deriding Tom Dodd. By then, George had achieved his life’s dream and established himself in political circles as “the world’s nicest guy.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
All of the Bush children relished their father’s position as a United States senator. They each basked in the reflected prestige and took on a bit of his luster as their own. Some did so more than others.
Prescott junior, the firstborn, who returned home from Brazil in 1948, became his father’s unpaid political consultant and trusted confidant. Pressy, or P2, as the family also called him, drove his father, P1, to speaking engagements around the state on the weekends, when they would discuss issues and plan strategy. Sometimes they were joined by Prescott junior’s young son, Prescott III, a.k.a. P3.
At one point, Prescott junior seemed headed for his own career in politics. An insurance broker with Johnson and Higgins in New York City, P2 commuted to and from Greenwich every day exactly as his father had done. He was elected to the Republican Town Committee and represented his district at the Representative Town Meeting, which his father had moderated for seventeen years. He headed the Red Cross Flood Relief Drive in 1955 and was reelected the next year as chairman of the Greenwich chapter of the American Red Cross. Active in Christ Church like his father, P2 became chairman of the Greenwich Boy Scout Camp and Conservation Fund Drive. At the age of thirty-five, he was nominated Man of the Year by the Greenwich Junior Chamber of Commerce. He also succeeded his father as president of the Greenwich Country Club.
Everything seemed in place for a political ascension, but it never happened.
“If you’re from out of town and you visit P2 in Greenwich,” said a Bush family friend, “he and his wife will drag you to the country club to see his oil portrait, which is prominently featured on the wall with other presidents of the Greenwich Country Club, including P1 . . . It’s kind of sad, really, that Prescott junior never got beyond that country-club mentality.”
As a politico, P2 was strictly a behind-the-scenes player. He became his father’s henchman, particularly when P1 wanted to prevent Albert Morano from returning to the House of Representatives. Morano was a Republican and part of Connecticut’s delegation, but his brashness irritated Prescott. When the Democrats swept Connecticut in 1958, Morano lost his seat. He attempted to run again but claimed that the Bushes stepped in to stop him. There is some evidence to suggest he may not have been hallucinating.
“My father had said to me, ‘If Morano ever takes his foot off the base, let’s make sure he never gets back on,’” Prescott junior revealed in his oral history for the Greenwich Library.
P2 was always eager to do his father’s bidding, and his father felt the Italian-American congressman had gotten “above himself” on many occasions, but none more so than the time Morano had asked Prescott to help his son, Anthony, get into Andover.
Neither man ever forgot the confrontation, and Morano never forgave. “I don’t know whether his name was originally B-U-S-C-H, but his demeanor was German. Blustery,” Morano said many years later. “He [Prescott] always walked around town with a walking . . . you know, with a stick that the generals use . . . Baton . . . He walked around Greenwich with a baton and leggings and all that stuff . . . And his wife used to go around campaigning. I used to feel sorry for her because he’d yell at her, ‘Where is my coat?’ and ‘Get my coat.’ And swear at her, too. A lot of people heard that, so his disposition was mean. He had no charm, no nothing.”
Morano, in a three-way race for the primary to recapture his seat, felt he could win because the other two candidates were “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” and “those two would have split the vote . . . I would have won easily.”
Instead, Morano lost after one of his opponents, Frederick Pope Jr., withdrew and the Bushes threw their support to the other man, Abner W. Sibal. Morano blamed Prescott for his defeat, accusing the senator of offering to recommend Pope for a federal judgeship so he would withdraw from the race. Morano also insisted that money had been paid to the Bridgeport delegation to vote for the Bush candidate. Morano went public with his accusations. “I had it all printed in the paper,” he said, “and they [the Bushes] never challenged me.”
&n
bsp; Bernie Yudain, a columnist for Greenwich Time, covered the race and knew all the principals. “I never saw a dollar change hands,” he said, “but it is fair to say that that [buying off the Bridgeport delegation] was certainly the perception in political circles at that time . . . I don’t think many people got that delegation for free.”
“It’s hearsay, but it’s what my father believed and what he told us,” recalled Anthony Morano many years later. “He lost and Bush blocked [him]. I don’t know exactly how Bush did it . . . Prescott Bush did not like my father.”
The same man who championed civil rights as a political concept in the U.S. Senate turned on his Italian American colleague in Connecticut with all the meanness and spite of class discrimination. Prescott’s admirable stand for equality shattered when put to the test of treating Albert Morano as a peer. But Morano refused to be intimidated by his so-called betters. In 1960, when Prescott announced that he would seek reelection in 1962, Morano announced that he would challenge Prescott for the nomination. He said, “The Republican party in Connecticut has as its top official a U.S. Senator who projects a reactionary image of a party seemingly indifferent to the aspirations and hopes of the people.”
One of Morano’s major supporters was Lowell Weicker, who later represented Connecticut in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and was elected the state’s governor. Weicker recognized the conflict between Bush and Morano as a classic struggle between the haves and the have-nots.
“Morano got screwed,” said Weicker. “He was a good man, and he didn’t deserve the treatment he got . . . The Bush family did not think that he was—quote—‘representative’—unquote—of Fairfield County, and Fairfield County is the gold coast of Connecticut . . . I had supported Morano, and this did not enhance my standing with the Bush family. Matter of fact, my own political ambitions had to be put on the back burner for a while because of my support for Morano.”
In that campaign, the Bushes acted as a family, with Prescott junior following his father’s lead. Whatever values they espoused were not consistent with their political maneuverings. They went out of their way to vanquish an opponent whose major failing, in their eyes, was that he was upwardly mobile.
By 1958 the state of Connecticut had gone Democratic; it was almost impossible for any Republican to get elected for quite a while. Prescott junior did not attempt to run for public office until many years later, in 1982, when he tried to take the Republican Senate nomination away from the incumbent, Lowell Weicker. At that point, Pressy’s brother George was Vice President under Ronald Reagan, and George did to his brother what P1 and P2 had done to Morano—poleaxed him. Behind the scenes George forced Prescott junior to withdraw his candidacy after six months and support the Republican incumbent rather than divide the party further. George sledgehammered his brother exactly as his father had once done—without fingerprints—but George didn’t act in time to save the Bushes from the embarrassment of one of their own.
Before George had managed to remove his brother from the political battle, Prescott junior had been asked a question at a meeting of the Greenwich Republican Women’s Club about the influx of illegal immigrants into the community. He said, “I’m sure there are people in Greenwich who are glad [the immigrants] are here, because they wouldn’t have someone to help in the house without them.”
The comment was reported in Greenwich Time, which contacted Prescott junior’s campaign manager, who jumped in to do damage control. “That just doesn’t sound like Pres Bush—it sounds like somebody who’s not in touch,” said Jack Murphy. “I just don’t think he would’ve said that.”
Prescott junior admitted being totally out of touch. “I made the statement,” he said, “but it was a joke, really, with a bunch of these ladies. I was just kidding them. One of these gals asked about the thing, and I said it jokingly . . . There are a lot of these Mexicans, Colombians working in just about every community around the state . . . the illegal immigrants . . . it’s a serious problem. I’m very concerned with it, I really am.”
Democrats and Republicans jumped on Prescott junior with both feet. They stomped him for the initial gaffe and again for his strained explanation. “If Mr. Bush’s comments are accurate,” said his Democratic opponent’s campaign manager, Jeffrey Lichtman, “they’re just another indication that Republican millionaires have a different view of the world. Their ancestors got off the boats so long ago that they’ve forgotten the reasons that brought all those Pilgrims here in the first place.” Prescott junior bowed out of the race several weeks later.
During her father’s eleven years in the Senate, Nancy Bush Ellis lived in Massachusetts with her husband and their four children. But Nancy frequently visited her parents in Washington and acted as their hostess for dinner parties at the F Street Club. To be the offspring of a U.S. senator in those Eisenhower days of white gloves and brass spittoons was to experience certain deference, and, according to one of her Vassar classmates, “no one enjoyed being deferred to more than Nan Bush.”
Nan came to Washington to meet the first American astronaut, Commander Alan B. Shepard, to attend Gridiron shows, to lunch at the Sulgrave Club, to mingle at White House receptions. She socialized with senators and ambassadors and Supreme Court justices. Politically, though, she was a liberal Democrat, more influenced by the politics of her lover, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., than those of her father. For many years, she admits, “I was out in what George calls ‘deep left.’”
“Nan is the political maverick in the family, if there is one,” said her brother Prescott junior.
Her intimacy with Schlesinger led to a close friendship with John F. Kennedy. When Nan’s daughter, Nandy, visited Prescott and Dorothy in Washington, the little girl was excited to learn that her grandparents had been invited to the Kennedy White House.
“Oh, Gampy,” she said, “please dance with Jackie.”
The next morning at breakfast Prescott reported to his granddaughter that he had done exactly as she had instructed.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Nancy Bush Ellis supported Eleanor Roosevelt’s suggestion to send something to Cuba as an apology for U.S. policy. Her father, still in the Senate, blamed President Kennedy for the “fiasco” and blasted his “left-wing advisers.” Her brothers agreed, and could not believe their sister had aligned herself with Eleanor Roosevelt, whom the entire Bush family despised. Nancy recalled that during a family visit to Connecticut, her brothers “jumped all over me . . . And Dad said, ‘If your sister has driven all the way down here for this, the least you can do is not pick on her.’ I was almost trembling in tears. I was right on for Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Prescott expressed himself on the Bay of Pigs in a letter to Mrs. Allen Dulles shortly after her husband died:
I recall in the summer of 1961, after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, you were away and we called Allen [CIA director] to come for supper, and he accepted. That afternoon he called and asked if he could bring a friend and he brought John McCone, whom we had known well but had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen’s. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said, in good spirit, that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came the next day.
We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.
A political activist, Nancy Bush Ellis served as the co-chair of the New England section of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and did volunteer work with the Boston United South End Settlement House, the New England Medical Center, the Boston Symphony, and the Massachusetts Audubon Society. She continued in this vein even after her brother George became a Republican congressman. A 1968 memo in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library from the President’s press secretary states: “Bush’s sister, incidentally, is a Democrat. She said she was for th
e President [LBJ] and wished her brother, George, had become a Democrat when he moved to Texas.”
Once George entered national politics, Nancy pared down her Democratic involvements. She continued raising money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, but she became stridently supportive of her brother, which baffled her liberal friends, her Democratic neighbors, and even some of her more moderate relatives. “I’ve learned over the years to stay off the subject of Big George and his hard-right politics,” said a cousin, “and never ever to mention the dismaying policies of Little George.”
Of all of Prescott’s children, Jonathan was the one who most loved to perform. This would have been a definite asset in politics, but like Prescott Bush Jr., he had a tin ear for political sensitivities and was not much given to compromise. After his father had championed the civil rights bill of 1957, Jonathan made the front page of Variety with plans for an off-Broadway production that was perceived as racist. The headline in the show-business trade daily read: “Jonathan Bush Would Revive Minstrel Era.”
After mentioning that his father was Senator Prescott Bush, the story reported Jonathan’s intention to produce an “authentic” period show that would include “some Negro talent along with the blackface components.”
The story concluded:
Minstrel shows fell out of vogue because of their datedness and hateful racial stereotypes of “Mr. Bones” but even when latter-day Elks, Moose and kindred groups assay amateur minstrelsy there has cropped up periodic objection from the NAACP for reasons of “stereotype,” “Uncle Tomism,” and the like.