The Family (16 page)

“But he was just as green as a pepper then,” recalled Raymond K. Price (Yale 1950). “I was in my senior year when Bert Walker [son of George Herbert “Herbie” Walker] asked me to help out in the campaign. I was very involved in the Yale Political Union, and I was a natural to recruit for a Republican. I then recruited six other classmates, and for two or three days a week we each worked for Prescott during the last six weeks of the campaign, doing what I call ‘Bushing.’ We traveled with the candidate throughout the state and helped beat the bushes for Bush.

“He was a delight and quite a gentleman, but I do remember when he was taken in to visit a voter in a mobile home, he was at a loss for words. He looked around the little trailer and said, ‘Well, no matter how humble there’s no place like home.’ He meant it as a compliment, but the voter was quite offended.”

“I always thought Pres did a very good job of mingling with the ordinary guy,” said John Alsop, a former member of the Connecticut House of Representatives whose family pedigree reached back to President James Monroe, “but he really didn’t understand them very well. He’d just never been one.”

Even his son Prescott junior agreed. “My father . . . had been a little stiff and a little awkward in [that] campaign . . . [H]e didn’t quite relate to people as warmly as he could.”

Hoping to attract voters from the opposition party, Prescott campaigned in Democratic strongholds. In one he was harangued by his RTM nemesis.

“Now all of a sudden you’re a lover of labor,” bellowed Josephine Evaristo. “Mr. Bush, I’m just talking about the members of my family that caddied for you. You never even paid them on time, and you never gave them a tip. So since when now have you become a lover of labor?” She recalled that “the house near came down with claps” after her outburst. “I never forgot when my brothers were caddy kids and he never paid them right away and he never tipped them. And the kids hated him. They really did . . . because he was cheap.”

“I’m not a millionaire,” Prescott told reporters. “I have a high earning power, but I never did have any capital.” He estimated that if he were elected to the Senate, which paid $12,500 a year, plus a $2,500 tax-free retirement fund, he would suffer a 75 percent cut in his income of $60,000, the equivalent of $463,690 in 2004. He said his principles demanded that he make the economic sacrifice. “Why should I continue to lead a business life when I know that there are much more important things than that?”

Prescott had received a strategy briefing from U.S. Senator Ralph O. Brewster, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, who told the political neophyte that the GOP policy was to concentrate all fire on Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. Acheson was to be blamed for the undeclared war in Korea and, according to the political columnist Marquis Childs, “for practically everything unpleasant that has happened since V-J day.”

Bush bristled because he and Acheson (Yale 1915) served on the Yale Corporation together.

“I don’t think you can make that sort of case,” he told Brewster. “How do you know that Acheson is entirely to blame? What proof do you have?”

“We have all the proof we need,” Brewster said.

Prescott eagerly adopted the issues of “Korea, communism, confusion and corruption.” He enthusiastically charged the Truman administration with “shameful bungling,” saying that American soldiers were dying in Korea because of the President’s “policy of no policy that got us into an unnecessary bloody and costly war in the Far East.” He personally savaged the President for leaving the United States “defenseless,” and said, “None of us should shirk in the slightest way the terrible responsibility of helping provide whatever is necessary to maintain and support American troops.” But he couldn’t bring himself to criticize a Yale man.

Instead of citing Acheson by name, he demanded that Washington officials “tell us the full facts as to the seriousness of the war situation. I am afraid we are not yet being told how serious is the danger of what America may expect.”

Everywhere Prescott went, he handed out pictures of his family, including his wife, his five children, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law, and three of his six grandchildren. On the back of each photo, he had written: “Because I want to work for my family’s future happiness and yours—I ask you to vote for me on November 7.” By the end of the campaign, he had distributed eight thousand of these photographs at political rallies, filling stations, and hot-dog stands.

In 1950 there was one television station in Connecticut, WNHC-TV in New Haven, and only 90,000 sets in a state of 570,409 households. But Prescott, who was a director of the Columbia Broadcasting System, understood the penetrating power of the new medium. William S. Paley, the president and chairman of CBS, had convinced Prescott that televisions would rule the future, so he purchased as much television ad time as his campaign could afford, and programmed his spots to run before and after football games and during the World Series. His opponent, a former advertising executive at Benton and Bowles, also ran campaign commercials on TV and set up small kiosks with rear-projection screens in shopping centers and on street corners to continuously play those ads.

In November the polls showed Bush and Benton running neck and neck. But that changed on the Sunday night before the Tuesday election, when Drew Pearson broadcast his election predictions on his influential national radio show:

In Connecticut, some very unfair Communist charges have been made against Senator Brien McMahon and William Benton, despite which they have not retaliated. In fact, they have not even mentioned that Benton’s opponent, Prescott Bush, who is Finance Chairman of the Birth Control League, and I predict that fair campaigning will pay dividends, and Senators McMahon and Benton will be elected.

Pearson had just dropped a megaton bomb. Prescott was living—and running for office—in a predominantly Catholic state where birth control was still illegal. Connecticut’s draconian law, established in 1879, stated that any person who used any drug to prevent conception could be fined no less than fifty dollars and imprisoned for no fewer than sixty days. Anyone “who assists, abets, councils, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principal offender.”

Pearson’s allegation presented Prescott with a politician’s worst dilemma: to tell the truth and lose, or to lie and tough it out. Sidestepping a profile in courage, Prescott grabbed the lie. He denied that he was ever a part of the Birth Control League, which had merged with similar organizations in 1942 to become Planned Parenthood. His wife, already proficient at denying reality, staunchly supported him.

The telephones in Connecticut started ringing like rattlebones. “No, no, it’s not true,” said Dorothy Bush. “Of course, it’s not true. He’s never been on the Birth Control League at all.”

Recalling the incident sixteen years later, both Bushes clung firmly to their original denials. “The cards were handed out at noon in [Catholic] churches saying ‘Listen to the broadcast tonight at 6,’” recalled Dorothy Bush. “It was Sunday night . . . if it had happened the week before so you could do anything about it—but it was just that very day, 6 o’clock.”

“I’d forgotten the exact sequence but that was it,” said her husband. “The state then . . . [was] probably about 55 percent Catholic population with all the Italian derivation people, and Polish is very heavy, and the Catholic Church is very dominant here, and the archbishop was death on this birth control thing. They fought repeal every time it came up in the legislature and we never did get rid of that prohibition until [1965].”

Despite their vehement and righteous denials, Dorothy and Prescott had in fact been early and active supporters of Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American birth-control movement, and they joined their friends Nancy Carnegie Rockefeller and Elizabeth Hyde Brownell in supporting the goals of family planning. Drew Pearson had a copy of the letter Mrs. Sanger had sent to thousands of friends and supporters on January 8, 1947, announcing Planned Parenthood’s first national fund-raising effort. The goal was to raise $2 million and integrate Planned Parenthood into the health and welfare services of the country. Margaret Sanger had signed the letter as honorary chairman. Listed at the top of her letterhead as treasurer: Prescott S. Bush.

Pearson had pierced the bull’s-eye with his 1950 predictions for Connecticut. Prescott lost to William Benton in an agonizingly close race by one-tenth of 1 percent, and he never forgave Drew Pearson: “His smear actually cost me the election in the opinion of every politician in the state of Connecticut because I only lost by 1,000 votes when they cast 862,000.”

Thirty years later Dorothy Bush was still claiming that the columnist had lied. “Pres lost that race purely through a dirty trick,” she told Alexander Cockburn for
Rolling Stone
.

The vote was so close in 1950 that the Republicans called for a statewide recount but were forced to drop their petition a week later because of “insufficient evidence” of voter irregularities. The seat was crucial to the control of the U.S. Senate: with Benton the winner, the Democrats had a 49–47 advantage.

George felt guilty for not helping his father campaign. In a letter to Gerry Bemiss he wrote: “The only thing I feel real badly about is that I did nothing, absolutely nothing, towards helping Dad in his campaign. We felt terribly about the outcome after the way Dad worked at it. I do feel that he made a lot of friends though and I think he will be hard to beat if he runs again in 1952.”

A couple weeks later John Alsop wrote to a Margaret Sanger supporter saying that the word in Connecticut’s Republican circles was that Prescott Bush “was beaten on account of his activities with” Planned Parenthood and that “it will probably have a frightening effect on other Republican politicians.”

Still, the party regulars encouraged Prescott to capitalize on his new name recognition so he would be in position to run again in 1952. Having taken a leave from Brown Brothers Harriman to campaign, he now returned to his job and resumed his role as moderator of the RTM. But he traveled throughout Connecticut on the weekends to make speeches and attend political rallies. “During the interim he worked hard building support around the state for renomination,” said Prescott junior.

In his speeches, Prescott bashed the Truman administration for “the mess in Washington,” and anytime he could pillory FDR he reached a full-throated rant. He called for the abolition of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a program Roosevelt had expanded to provide government loans for construction projects.

“It’s a feeding station for political vultures,” Prescott thundered to the Women’s Republican Club of Hartford, Connecticut. “Formed during a world-wide depression to meet a national emergency, the RFC served a useful purpose in the reconstruction of a badly shaken economy. But in recent years, it has been used to reconstruct . . . businesses that might bring profit to those with access to the White House . . . Undeserving borrowers, grafters and corrupt politicians have been able to get the use of our money to finance bowling alleys, beauty parlors, racetracks, resort hotels and liquor companies. In return for this generosity with the people’s money, stenographers get mink coats, presidential aides vacation in luxurious resort hotels, and clerks who know the ropes suddenly become corporation executives at high salaries.”

Prescott on the stump rivaled Elmer Gantry at the pulpit, and Ted Yudain reported every thunderous statement. On November 9, 1951,
Greenwich Time
carried a small item headlined “Prescott Bush Off for Europe; To Visit ‘Ike.’”

The Bushes had been planning a monthlong vacation in Europe to visit England, France, and Germany with their Greenwich friends Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Meek. Since they would be in Paris for several days, Prescott decided he should meet General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander of Europe in charge of NATO. Throughout the summer and fall of 1951, GOP grandees had been making pilgrimages to Eisenhower’s headquarters to try to persuade him to run for President in 1952. Prescott, who had been a strong Taft supporter, switched allegiance and jumped into the long line of Ike supplicants that included Thomas Dewey, Herbert Brownell, Lucius Clay, John Foster Dulles, and Henry Cabot Lodge, all pleading with the general to be their standard-bearer. Prescott asked William S. Paley to provide an introduction, so the CBS president wrote to Eisenhower on November 9, 1951, and mentioned Bush’s hopes to visit him at his headquarters.

The two men met on November 20, and on December 3 Eisenhower wrote to Paley: “I have already seen Prescott Bush. We had a very nice chat about ten days ago. I liked him very much.” By then Prescott’s letter to Ted Yudain had become the basis for yet another front-page story in
Greenwich Time
: “Bush Believes Gen. Ike Available for ’52; Call Must Be Compelling.”

Yudain quoted Prescott’s letter in full:

It is my firm opinion that the General is a Republican and always has been. It is equally clear in my mind that he is a man with a tremendous sense of duty and that he will have to feel compelled by that sense very strongly if he is to consider the acceptance of the Republican nomination. I am convinced he would accept no other. Still the “call” will have to be unmistakably clear.

I had a very interesting talk alone with General Eisenhower at SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. More than anything else, I was impressed with his humility and modesty. He is, of course, fully absorbed with his immediate responsibilities and consumed with the thought that his work in Western Europe is of paramount importance. He discussed this briefly but concisely and clearly.

His register of callers, which I signed and glanced through in the waiting room, was full of familiar names of prominent political figures from America. He is aware of the clamor for him.

I suggested that perhaps the sorry condition of our government at home might be even a more important challenge than the defense of Western Europe, since the latter was heavily dependent upon a strong, clean and wholesome administration of our domestic affairs, and that corruption from within had been proven over the centuries as great a danger as aggression from without. And I felt that the long tenure of power by the Democrats, with the resultant decline in morality, had caused a loss of respect for government on federal, state and local levels.