The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  On the same day George wrote about his Yale classmate New York Mayor John Lindsay: “John seems so darned arrogant and removed. It’s almost as if he were competitive or living on stage . . . it seems very peculiar . . . He is a very difficult, funny guy . . . very hard for me to read.”

  George wrote the same thing about Ross Perot when he came to plead for prisoners of war: “Ross Perot is a difficult fellow to figure out. He has always been very friendly to me . . . but he is a very complicated man.”

  In his diary from April 5, 1971, George described Secretary-General U Thant: “He sat there friendly but impassive. He is a difficult fellow to read—always tremendously polite to me, always very friendly, but showing lots of reserve.”

  On April 19, 1971, George wrote: “Kissinger is a warm guy with a good sense of humor. He keeps telling me, ‘You are the President’s man.’ He is much more communicative with me than Bill Rogers [Secretary of State].”

  On June 12, 1971, he blasted Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts:

  Teddy Kennedy made a speech on the floor of the Senate . . . in which he said that Nixon wanted to prolong the end of the war until 1972 for political purposes to help get re-elected. To me this was one of the crassest, cruelest statements I had ever heard. When I gave a speech to the Andover Chamber of Commerce with a good press conference beforehand, I denounced the statement as cruel and mean. I can understand debate on the war, but I cannot understand somebody making a statement like that and yet the press let Teddy get away with it. They simply don’t jump him out as they would somebody else. It was irresponsibility at its worst, and yet he wasn’t damaged a bit by it, I am sure.

  He complained about the social whirl:

  We are going to have to cut down on some of these useless evenings. Tonight it was the Stuttgart Ballet. Actually, it was great fun, but it didn’t help the job any, it didn’t help the President any, and it didn’t help my ulcers any. I am very tired. I have never seen a job where there is such constant activity. There are so many things to do. There is one appointment after the other.

  George could not bear to miss a party, even if he had to arrive late and improperly dressed. “I saw a bit of him at the UN when the last Taiwanese representative would invite George to dinner—that was during the days the Republicans were being good to us [the Taiwanese],” said Gene Young. “George tore into the dinner in his sailing clothes—rain gear and Top-Siders—and spent the whole night talking . . . he sounded like a Yale sophomore—yak, yak, yak . . . He wouldn’t stop talking . . . It was just yak, yak, yak . . . saying the most vapid things.”

  George and Barbara entertained constantly. They hosted big ceremonial parties at least once a week and seated dinners almost every other night. They took diplomats to Greenwich for tea parties with George’s parents in their new home on Pheasant Lane. Others they took to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play, always sitting in his Uncle Herbie’s box. As one of three principal owners of the baseball team, Herbie had access to the choicest seats.

  One issue that George frequently mentioned in his diary was relocating the UN outside of New York City. When his father was moderator of the Representative Town Meeting in Greenwich in 1946, Prescott had maneuvered to keep the UN out of Connecticut and establish its headquarters in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan. In 1971, George wrote:

  New York, it seems to me, is the absolute “worst” place where it could be in the United States. The press gives a distorted view of America, the problems of the city give a distorted picture of America, and all in all if one were starting from scratch, it should not be here . . .

  The Host Country problems are beginning to bug me . . . The crazy JDL [Jewish Defense League] let loose a bunch of frogs and mice which terrified the people in the building. Today the South African Consulate was bombed by black extremists. New York is a miserable place to have the UN. This is heretical to say in the Mission, but it is true.

  On October 25, 1971, the UN voted to recognize Red China and give the People’s Republic of China the seat occupied by Taiwan, or Nationalist China. George had vowed in his Senate campaigns if that were to happen, he would advocate U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. Now, as Nixon’s Ambassador, he had to argue for “dual representation” and plead for two seats: one in the Security Council, for Communist China, and one in the General Assembly for Taiwan. He had lobbied hard among the 129 missions for support and had thought he had enough delegates committed to the U.S. policy. But on the final count, he lost 59–55, with 15 countries abstaining. He took the defeat as a personal rebuke and said he was disgusted by the anti-American sentiments. “For some delegates—who literally danced in the aisles when the vote was announced—Taiwan wasn’t really the issue,” George said. “Kicking Uncle Sam was.”

  When the Taiwanese Ambassador, Liu Chiegh, walked out of the hall with his delegation for the last time, George leaped up and caught him before he reached the door. Putting an arm around the man’s shoulder, George apologized for what had happened. Ambassador Chiegh said he felt betrayed by the organization his country had helped found and supported over the years. He also said he felt let down by the U.S. government. So did George, who had been barred from all foreign policy deliberations by the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department. He was especially embarrassed on the occasion of the UN vote because Kissinger was in Beijing making arrangements for Nixon’s trip to China.

  For George the most enjoyable part of being U.S. Ambassador to the UN was talking with his father as a peer rather than a pupil. They discussed Vietnam, civil unrest, and the turbulence on campuses, especially at Yale. Although Prescott was opposed to expanding the war in Southeast Asia and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, he became exercised when Yale’s Calhoun College extended an invitation to Daniel Ellsberg to meet with students. Ellsberg had been accused of theft and conspiracy in disclosing to The New York Times the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret Department of Defense history of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971. Prescott did not approve of lending Yale’s prestige to a man who, he felt, had broken the law by making public classified information. “I can hardly think of anyone who is less deserving of such an honor,” Prescott wrote to Calhoun Master R.W.B. Lewis. In protest, Prescott resigned as associate fellow of Calhoun College, a position he had held for twenty-eight years.

  By that time the former senator was battling the ravages of pipe smoking and binge drinking, which had finally compromised his health at the age of seventy-seven. For months he had been plagued with a racking cough that, in the spring, was diagnosed as lung cancer.

  “It was during this time that he called me,” Joyce Clifford Burland remembered. “He said, ‘I want to see you for lunch.’ We met in New York City and talked about how much we loved singing. My former husband [Richard Barrett] and I and Wesley Oler had been part of the Kensington Four, a singing group that Pres assembled in Washington when his other singing partners had died. He was desolate when he lost them. We met every month to sing and share our passion for music. We did this for years. We even traveled to Hobe Sound when he was there in the winter. Pres taught us all the songs and arrangements he had used with the Silver Dollar Quartet. I was the only woman he had ever sung with, and I felt so proud that he thought I was good enough to be included. Although he was thirty years older than we were, there was no generational difference. When you were singing with Prescott, you were connected to his core . . . I absolutely adored the man . . . I would have laid down in traffic for him.

  “After our lunch, we were walking down the street and he said that he had brought me something. ‘I want you to have my Whiffenpoof medallion,’ he said, placing it in my hands.

  “I protested that something that precious belonged to his son Johnny Bush or someone else in his family. But Pres insisted. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to have it.’ Six months later he was dead. I realize now that he was saying good-bye and at the same time sparing me the sad bu
rden of knowing he was dying. That’s the kind of man he was. Edwardian in the best sense of the word. He observed certain proprieties, and one was courage in the face of adversity.”

  Several months before he died, Prescott altered his will with a few codicils. He left intact his $20,000 bequest to Yale for the Alumni Fund, but he reduced his bequest to Skull and Bones (RTA Incorporated) from $2,500 to $1,000. He also reduced his bequest to the Episcopal Church Foundation of New York City from $10,000 to $2,500. He remembered his private secretary in the U.S. Senate, Margaret Pace Harvey, and his administrative aide, David S. Clarke, with $5,000 each. But he was so angry at his brother James Smith Bush for divorcing his third wife, Lois Kieffer Niedringhaus, and running off with another woman that he disinherited him. Instead, Prescott left $3,000 apiece to the three children Jim had had with Niedringhaus. He left $140,000 to each of his own children, and the rest of his $3.5 million estate to his wife, Dorothy, with investments “to provide adequately for her maintenance, support, welfare and comfort.”

  Prescott appointed two of his sons, Prescott junior and Jonathan James, to be his executors and stipulated that they serve “without fee or compensation.” He stated that they must employ the investment services of Brown Brothers Harriman and Company for the first five years after his death.

  Lest George feel slighted, Prescott stated that he had appointed his second son an alternate executor, “soley because of his remote residence and in order to simplify the administration of my estate and of the trust.”

  In the fall of 1972 Prescott entered Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital for tests. “I have deep worry about him,” George wrote in his diary. “He seems instantly old, unlike his old self in many ways.”

  Dorothy Bush moved into the Ambassador’s residence at the Waldorf-Astoria and spent every day at her husband’s bedside. After he complained of several restless nights, she told his doctors she longed to spend a night with him because she felt he would rest better. They agreed and she slept in his room. The next day, October 8, 1972, he died peacefully. He was seventy-seven years old.

  Flags throughout Connecticut were lowered to half-staff on the day of his funeral, and wires poured in from the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Dorothy instructed her family not to wear black. “Bright colors only,” she said. “This is to be a joyous celebration of your father’s life.” She told them they were not to sit with her in Christ Church. “I want everyone to see you sitting with your lovely families because that is a public tribute to your father.” She insisted that the grandsons be pallbearers and join her in the front pew. She asked the Westminster Choir College of New Jersey to come to Connecticut to sing. She informed the Reverend Bradford Hastings that he was to read the eulogy she had written.

  The governor of Connecticut arrived with Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker and Representative Stewart B. McKinney, New York City’s Mayor John Lindsay, Yale’s President Kingman Brewster, Averell Harriman, and all the partners of Brown Brothers Harriman. Everyone crowded into the small Episcopal church in Greenwich to hear “a tribute to Prescott Bush from the one who knew him best and loved him the most.”

  Dotty’s eulogy, lovingly sentimental, enshrined her husband and extolled their marriage: “When he stood at the altar 51 years ago and promised to ‘Keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live,’ he was making a pledge to God that he never for one moment forgot, and gave his wife the most joyous life that any woman could experience.”

  Prescott Sheldon Bush was laid to rest in Putnam Cemetery, where a small American flag adorned his tombstone.

  That evening George wrote in his diary: “My father, my mentor, my hero died.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well-placed . . . managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units . . . Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal.”

  —COLIN L. POWELL,

  My American Journey, 1995

  George Herbert Walker Bush vigorously supported sending other men’s sons to Vietnam, but not his own. In 1968 he made sure his firstborn would not be drafted. He did this with one telephone call to Sidney Adger, a Houston businessman and Bush family friend. Adger called Ben Barnes, the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and Barnes called the head of the Texas National Guard, Brigadier General James Rose. Rose called the commanding officer of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Buck Staudt.

  In February 1968 young George, a senior at Yale, took an Air Force officers test. “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment,” he said. “Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” He scored the lowest possible passing grade on pilot aptitude. Yet, because of his father’s influence, he was accepted into the Air National Guard. “They took me because they could sense I would be one of the great pilots of all time,” he told The Houston Chronicle. He also said he “just happened” to get the coveted slot twelve days before he was eligible to be drafted. “I think they needed pilots.”

  “That is so disingenuous,” said Mark Soler. “You didn’t just happen into the Guard in those days or fall upon a slot in the Reserves. You had to sign up early because it took months and months to get in; then you had to wait until there was an opening. At that time there was a national waiting list of 100,000. The waiting was agony. Unless, of course, you had someone to pull strings for you . . . I didn’t have that kind of pull. I had to wait to get into the Reserves, which is how I ended up not being drafted. I never considered that I served in the military in any way that was especially patriotic . . . I had to go weekends for six years, but it was a way of not being drafted. To say otherwise is willful denial. When we graduated from Yale in 1968, if you didn’t get into the Reserve or the Guard, or get a deferment, or become a conscientious objector, or go to Canada, then you were headed for downtown Da Nang.”

  George enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968, and became a member of the 147th Fighter Group, known as “the Champagne Unit,” because it included the sons of Lloyd Bentsen, John Connally, and several Dallas Cowboys. George pledged to perform two years of active service, plus four years of reserve duty, which meant he was obligated to fly one weekend a month and spend two weeks at military camp every summer.

  The unsettling parts of this scenario begin with his father’s lie that he did not use his influence to get his son a berth in the National Guard, followed by his son’s claim that he did not join simply to avoid the draft. “Hell, no,” George W. told Texas Monthly in 1994. “Do you think I’m going to admit that . . . I just wanted to fly jets.” He admitted he had no desire “to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam.” But he denied trying to avoid combat. “One could argue that I was trying to avoid being an infantryman,” he told The New York Times in 1999, “but my attitude was I’m taking the first opportunity to become a pilot and jumped on that and did my time.”

  The Bush family lies, sometimes called “misstatements” by Bush family spokesmen, made aspects of George W. Bush’s military record open to question later on, particularly the last two years, when he flew sporadically. According to one set of records, he was all but unaccounted for. Those documents, released in 2000, showed no record by any National Guard unit that George W. Bush ever showed up between May 1972 and May 1973 for scheduled weekend flights, summer military training, or the periodic drills required of part-time Guardsmen. Four years later, in February 2004, after a spate of criticism, the White House released a document indicating the Guard had given George credit for sufficient hours to fulfill his duty during the questionable period of May 27, 1972, to May 26, 1973. The 2004 document raised questions about the previously released record, which showed no Guard credit for May 1972 through May 1973. Equally puzzling, if George did fly all his required hours, is why his superiors in Texas did not fill o
ut a required evaluation form. They maintained they had not seen him on base and thought he was still in Alabama.

  Retired First Lieutenant Robert A. Rogers, an eleven-year veteran of the Air National Guard, said the document released in 2004 showing George W.’s intermittent Guard service from October 1972 through May 1973 is not a National Guard document. Rather, the document is an “ARF [Air Reserve Force] Statement of Points Earned.” The 2004 document released by the White House is like the document released in 2000 by the Bush campaign that supposedly showed George W. had performed duty from the end of May through July 1973. These two documents show Air Reserve Force credits, which are not given for active service and were not accepted by the Texas Air National Guard.

  “The lack of punishment for his misconduct represents the crowning achievement of a military career distinguished only by favoritism,” said Rogers. “Bush had a solid record up to April 17, 1972. In fact, he was a poster boy for the Texas National Guard because of who his father was. But then he disappeared. He did not attend any unit he was supposed to from April 17, 1972, through May 28, 1974. He just walked away. As a result, he got ‘ARFed,’ which is what we call the penalty applied by the Air Reserve Force for nonattendance. Bush was subjected to disciplinary action and slapped with six additional months in which he was eligible to be called up to active duty in the Army . . . That’s a big thing in time of war. As a result of that disciplinary action, he did not receive his honorable discharge from the Air Reserve Force until November 1974. Had he not been delinquent, he would have been honorably discharged in May 1974, six years after his enlistment.”

  George W. was finally released from the Reserves in November 1974, six years and six months after he had joined the National Guard. His six-month penalty was never reported by the press, but no one realized then that he would one day be sending American forces into combat to do what he would not do: become cannon fodder. By the time he was in line to run for national office, his medical records from the military had been sealed for privacy reasons, and the Bush family lies had hardened enough to provide the rock of credibility he needed to send U.S. troops into war.