The Family (23 page)

For all this he drew approving editorials from various newspapers.
The Hartford Courant
pronounced him a man far different from (and better than) the one elected four years earlier:

When Senator Bush first appeared on the scene he was dismissed as an agreeable outsider who, after a prosperous career in business, wished to dabble in politics. Since he has been in the Senate he has grown visibly on the job, until he has taken on a stature that already ranks him high in the world’s most powerful legislative chamber.

Just when Prescott thought he might have seen the last of Drew Pearson, the muckraking columnist targeted him again. This time the issue was the Harris-Fulbright Bill to deregulate the gas industry. Pearson predicted that Prescott Bush would vote in favor of the bill in order to enrich his son George.

George, like all Texas oilmen, supported the scheme. When oil lobbyists started pressuring him to secure his father’s vote, he called Prescott to discuss the legislation. George claimed that deregulation would encourage more independent producers to explore for natural gas, which would increase the supply and thus ultimately lower prices. Prescott, who maintained that prices would skyrocket with deregulation, was unimpressed by his son’s argument. He told George that the majority of people in his state lived in large urban centers and could not afford to pay the high prices that would result from deregulation.

Senator Paul Douglas, the liberal Democrat from Illinois, charged that the bill was nothing less than a conspiracy by big oil and gas companies to reap obscene profits at the expense of the nation’s urban masses, many of whom were absolutely dependent on natural gas for heating and cooking. Prescott agreed.

When George couldn’t convince his father, he sought out his friend Paxton Howard to make the case. Howard, an attorney for Shell Oil Company in Midland, Texas, and an unregistered lobbyist, agreed to visit Hobe Sound during Prescott’s vacation and talk to him.

Howard was later subpoenaed to testify before the Senate special committee investigating lobbying efforts in support of Harris-Fulbright. Under oath, he admitted he had received a five-thousand-dollar bonus from Shell for trying to get Prescott and two other senators to change their votes.

“Senator Bush’s son, George, lives in Midland, and he is a friend of mine,” Howard testified. “George was very much for the gas bill—George wanted his father to get the facts on this bill—George was particularly anxious that I contact the Senator and lay the case before him. So I told him that I would be happy to do it if he would just arrange for the time. So he did, and I talked to the Senator about an hour.”

“Was it not just the reverse,” one senator asked, “that George was not so interested in trying to have his father influenced as you were?”

“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 had 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.”