The Family (27 page)

Eisenhower’s response had to leave Prescott feeling slightly whipsawed. Nine months before the scheduled event, Ike said he was “uncertain” about his plans:

May we leave the whole matter in abeyance for the time being (and will you go ahead with your own plans as though I could not be present). When I get back East, I shall have a talk with Bill Miller to determine exactly what he wants me to do in the campaign, and what I can, without the expenditure of too much time and energy (and opposition from Mamie) do to accommodate his suggestions.

On his sixty-seventh birthday, May 15, 1962, a few weeks before the GOP convention in Connecticut, Prescott made a momentous decision. After conferring with his wife and his doctor, he called party leaders together in Hartford the next day and announced in a choking voice that he would not be a candidate for reelection.

“The vigorous seven-day work week of the past few months has convinced me that I do not have the strength and vigor needed to do full justice to the duties of the campaign ahead nor to the responsibilities involved in serving six years in the Senate, most of which would be in my seventies,” he said. “The advice of my physician has strongly reinforced my decision.”

The announcement shocked the political press corps in the state and eased the way for Ribicoff’s election. Despite early polls showing Ribicoff’s lead, most Connecticut newspapers had given Prescott an even chance of winning reelection, but no one thought it would be an easy campaign, especially without Eisenhower’s coattails.

“A lot of people felt Bush bowed out rather than get beaten by Ribicoff,” said Herman Wolf many years later, “but I honestly think Bush would’ve won that election. The people of Connecticut were not all that happy with Abe for leaving them in 1960 to join JFK’s cabinet.”

In her first column after her husband’s surprise announcement, Dorothy Bush wrote that she was grateful for his decision to retire: “Dizzy spells at the end of days spent on the road followed by sleep-destroying nervous pains in the stomach from worry over whether or not he would have the physical strength necessary to get through the six months and six years ahead, was the warning.”

What she didn’t write about was her concern that the pressure of running for reelection would trigger Prescott’s drinking, which Dotty never admitted was alcoholism. To her, alcoholism was not a disease but a moral failing, and that was not something she could accept in the husband she adored.

“We both knew that once the convention had taken place, the Senator would have to keep going, even if he died in his tracks,” she wrote. “After these warnings, suppose he collapsed in the middle of the campaign? What a weapon to hand an opponent!”

“No,” she concluded. “The chance must be given to nominate a younger, more vigorous candidate whose strength is not in question.”

Prescott always regretted his decision. “As I look back on it,” he said four years later, “I think it was a mistake. The information we had at that time, about the prospects for the election, were very favorable . . . A public opinion poll which we had showed that I probably would beat anybody they [the Democrats] could put up. So as I look back, having not been happy in retirement for four years, or nearly four years now, and watching the scene down there with great interest . . . I often wish I had gone to a hospital and rested up for about 4 or 5 days or a week, and I’ve often wished my doctor had said to me, ‘Now, listen—don’t make any decision now. You’re in a terrible state of mind. Go over to the Greenwich Hospital and rest for a week, and then I’ll talk to you.’ But no, she said, ‘You’d be a fool if you ran.’ I remember her language. But I was in a state of exhaustion, frankly, and that’s no time to make an important decision. So I do regret it . . . I’ve been awfully sorry, many times, that I made that decision.”

Prescott’s consolation prize came in June 1962, when he received an honorary degree from his beloved Yale along with the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and President John F. Kennedy. The President, Harvard class of 1940, rocked the house when he underscored Harvard’s scholarship and Yale’s social status. “It could be said that now I have the best of both worlds,” said Kennedy, “a Harvard education and a Yale degree.”

George had flown to New Haven to watch his father be honored by his alma mater. As usual, he had left Barbara and the children behind in Texas. During those years of their marriage he traveled at will while Barbara stayed home. He frequently went to New York City on business, and then stayed to play. He flew to St. Louis so often that he became a member of the St. Louis Country Club, and he regularly visited his parents in Washington, D.C., whereas his housebound wife once went for four years without seeing her in-laws. Nor did George ever miss a summer in Kennebunkport, if only to fly in for a few days to see his Uncle Herbie. Barbara and the children only made it to Maine every other year because, she claimed, they couldn’t afford the expense of the trip as a family. When they could, she drove the children in the family car and George flew.

From the very beginning, the Bushes’ marriage was run to accommodate George. Part of that equation was the mentality of Barbara’s generation, which believed that wives should stay home, raise children, and keep house. The other part of the dynamic was Barbara herself. “In a marriage where one is so willing to take on responsibility and the other is so willing to keep the bathrooms clean, that’s the way you get treated,” she said.

She knew that she had married a man who wanted a wife exactly like his mother, so she tried to emulate her mother-in-law at every turn. “Barbara worshipped Dotty, and she said she tried to pattern her life on her,” said Mary Carter Walker, who was married to Uncle Herbie.

Barbara dyed her white hair for many years because her mother-in-law asked her to. Dotty thought Barbara would look better for George, but every time Barbara went swimming, her brown hair turned green. Then one day she stopped trying to make herself look better. “George Bush never noticed,” she said almost bitterly. “So why had I gone through those years of agony?”

George needed his wife to be as adoring as his mother had been, and he let Barbara know whenever she missed the mark. “I remember George said to me once when we were first married, ‘You know, you ridiculed me in public, Bar, and I wish you wouldn’t do that,’” she recalled. “Well, it was just a dumb thing, but he was dead right, and I never did it again.” (Years later, when he called her “a blimp” on television, she absorbed the insult with a smile and told reporters that her husband had a wonderful sense of humor. Proving the power of parental example, George W. Bush made a similar remark to reporters years later, describing his wife, Laura, as “a lump.”)

Barbara was a great mother for boys—tough, athletic, and disciplined—but while she shared the same unyielding grit as her mother-in-law, she lacked Dorothy’s soft touch. “My grandmother [was] an unbelievable person,” said George W. Bush, “one of the most gentle, kind souls I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t necessarily describe Mother . . . as a gentle soul.”

With her husband gone most of the time, Barbara had to take her pleasure in her children. As Donnie Radcliffe noted, “She was highly organized. Her cupboards were stocked, her children’s scrapbooks up-to-date, her thank-you notes always in the mail. She methodically sewed nametags in her children’s clothes and cooked commendable spaghetti. She never missed a meeting with the teachers and never played bridge. Her housekeeping matched her mind: no clutter.”

“She always made me feel like a slob,” said her Texas friend Marion Chambers.

Still, it wasn’t easy for Barbara, as she admitted years later. “I had moments where I was jealous of attractive young women, out in a man’s world. I would think, well, George is off on a trip doing all these exciting things and I’m sitting home with these absolutely brilliant children, who say one thing a week of interest.”

Barbara longed to have more of her husband’s time and attention. When she broached the subject of needing some verbal demonstration of tenderness, George brushed her off. “You shouldn’t have to tell that. You see it. You know it.”

By the time they moved to Houston, Barbara knew that her husband was steering their life in another direction. She had seen him sprawled on the floor watching the 1960 political conventions on television. “I’m going to be up there one of these days,” he told her. “Just wait.”

Barbara didn’t doubt him for a minute, and she soon shared her confidence with the rest of the family. “I remember when we were sitting in Nancy Walker’s house in Kennebunkport,” recalled Mary Carter Walker. “There were about five ladies and they said, ‘How would you ever like to be First Lady?’ And we went around . . . And then we came to Barbara and she said, ‘I’d like it, because, you know, I’m going to be First Lady sometime.’”

She had to start at the bottom of the political ladder. A few years after her last child was born, her husband announced that he was going to run for chairman of the Republican Party of Harris County. Given the number of Republicans in Houston who did not belong to the John Birch Society at the time, George Bush might just as well have announced that he was going to shoot polar bear in the Gulf of Mexico.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
exans say the difference between Midland and Houston is the difference between no riches and nouveaux riches. Midland is where you go to strike oil, and Houston is where you go after the first gusher. In Midland, the Bushes were Presbyterians. In Houston, they became Episcopalians, considered by some a step up the liturgical ladder. Moving from Midland to Houston also meant a brand-new house with seven bedrooms, a third-floor sauna, an exercise room, a swimming pool, and a long driveway, plus live-in help for Barbara and private schooling (the Kinkaid School) for Georgie, which put him on the fast track to Andover. For big George, the move meant a bigger political playground—meaner and muddier.

By 1959, Houston, like Dallas, had become a hotbed of extremism. The nation’s sixth-largest city had become a stronghold of the John Birch Society, a rabid anti-Communist right-wing organization founded by Robert Welch and bankrolled by the Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who sponsored the vitriolic radio program
Lifeline
that aired in forty-two states. Over the next ten years, the John Birch objectives were to abolish the graduated income tax, repeal Social Security, end busing for the purpose of school integration, dissolve U.S. membership in the United Nations, and nullify the treaty that gave the Panama Canal to Panama.

The Birchers publicly castigated President Eisenhower, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren as “dedicated conscious agents of the Communist conspiracy.” They contended that the Council on Foreign Relations, for many years led by David Rockefeller, was an elite international cabal that sought to establish world tyranny. In Dallas, Birchers spat on Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and heckled Vice President Lyndon Johnson. In Houston, they tried to take over the Republican Party of Harris County, until GOP locals sent up a flare. The locals wanted someone sensible who could expand the party and still keep it safe for the conservative senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, to be the standard-bearer in 1964. George Bush felt he was the right man for the job. “I am a 100 percent Goldwater man,” he said.

He wrote to his friend and fellow Bonesman Representative Lud Ashley, an Adlai Stevenson Democrat from Ohio, that he was running for the unexpired term (one year) of chairman of the Harris County GOP.

“I think I’ll win,” he wrote. His friend would come to realize that George was never paralyzed by the difference between certitude and certainty. “I’m not used to losing,” Bush told reporters in 1964.

George was so unknown in Houston then that the newspaper ran someone else’s picture over his name when he announced his candidacy. George called the editor to complain and sent him a personal photograph, which the paper published after he won an overwhelming victory—by default. He became the Republican chairman of Harris County in 1962 when his opponent Russell Pryor withdrew. As county chairman, he immediately launched an aggressive lawsuit to force legislative reapportionment in Texas to get a winnable district for the Republicans.

For the first time since Reconstruction, the Texas GOP felt emboldened to make such a demand and challenge Democratic dominance. The historic comeback of the Texas Republican Party had begun in the fall of 1960, when the people of the state were given the chance—legitimately—to vote twice in the same election for Lyndon Johnson, who appeared on the ballot both as John F. Kennedy’s running mate and, for added insurance, as a candidate for reelection to the U.S. Senate. This maddened Republicans. Dorothy Bush, who was campaigning vigorously in Greenwich for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, fumed that “Senator Johnson is the forgotten man . . . so unsure of the election he had a special law passed so he could run for senator again as well as vice president just in case he should lose.”

LBJ won his Senate seat by defeating John G. Tower, a pint-size professor of political science from Southern Methodist University. Johnson also won the vice presidency and carried the state for Kennedy. When LBJ resigned from the Senate, Tower jumped back in the race. This was the only good news to come out of the 1960 election as far as Prescott Bush was concerned. As he wrote to Tower: “I am . . . delighted to hear that you are once more in the race. I can think of nothing more beneficial to Texas than your victory. I have a strong feeling that you will make an excellent United States Senator. I admire your courage and your whole approach to politics.”

In the special election required by Texas law, Tower won the LBJ seat and became the first Republican since Reconstruction sent to the Senate from a southern state. His election marked an epic turn in Texas politics that would lead to Republican supremacy within forty years.

The one big city that Richard Nixon carried in 1960 was Houston, a fact not lost on the ambitious new chairman of the Harris County GOP. Within three months of his election to his minor post, George Bush started talking about becoming the next Republican senator from Texas. He felt he was the best man to take on the venerable Ralph Yarborough, whom George considered “far too liberal.”

George was encouraged in this fantasy by his family and friends, who believed, as he did, that anyone who met him would vote for him. “If you can get enough exposure,” Lud Ashley wrote, “if enough people get to know you personally or via television—you’ll get elected.”

Almost forty, George had reached peak handsomeness, a fact frequently mentioned in the state’s small-town newspapers. “He could very well be cast into a movie role of his true life story,” said the
Austin American-Statesman
. “He looks like a U.S. Senator,” said
The Kingsville Record
. “The candidate is a handsome man, handsome in a way that appeals to men as well as women,” said the
Refugio County Press
.

In addition to his good looks, George was blessed with indefatigable energy, inexhaustible financial resources, and an efficient campaign organization. “He is by all odds the classiest Republican ever to flash on the Texas scene,” wrote the political columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

After George conferred with his father and friends, he decided in 1962 to announce a run for the Senate the next year. He was convinced he would win in 1964 on the coattails of Barry Goldwater, whom he admired as much as his father had admired Eisenhower. “Goldwater is the best chance we have,” George said. He gave a copy of Goldwater’s manifesto,
The Conscience of a Conservative
, to his son Georgie, a student at Andover.

Georgie’s roommate, John Kidde, was surprised to see the book lying on Bush’s desk. “What the hell is this?” he said. “We didn’t have any time to read anything extracurricular. If we did, you would read a novel. But George seemed honestly interested in the book. He said his parents had asked him to read it. I remember him telling me what Goldwater stood for.”

At the time George Herbert Walker Bush decided to run for the Senate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had divorced his wife in 1961, was the leading GOP contender for President. He was far ahead of everyone else in the polls, including Goldwater, until May 4, 1963, when the governor announced that he was going to remarry. The press then reported that he had been having an affair with his new wife, Margaretta Fitler “Happy” Murphy, when both were married to others. She gave up custody of her four children to marry Rockefeller, and the scandal whip-lashed the country.

The Hudson River Presbytery immediately censured the prelate who had married Governor Rockefeller and Mrs. Murphy as a “disturber of the peace,” and in Chicago the Young Adults for Rockefeller for President quickly disbanded. The following month Prescott Bush, who had previously supported Rockefeller for national office and urged Nixon to pick him as his running mate in 1960 over Henry Cabot Lodge, now assailed the governor in a speech to the graduating class of Rosemary Hall, an all-girls high school in Greenwich and the sister school of Choate.

“Have we come to the point in our life as a nation when the governor of a great state—one who perhaps aspires to be nominated for President of the United States—can desert a good wife, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?

“Have we come to the point where one of the two great political parties will confer upon such a one its highest honor and greatest responsibility? I venture to hope not.

“What would Abraham Lincoln think of such a chain of events? Have our standards shifted so much that the American people will approve such a chain of events? I venture to hope not.”

Prescott said that whether Rockefeller’s actions were appropriate would depend on educators, opinion makers, and religious leaders. Then he added: “It will depend on whether our people are ready to say ‘phooey’ to the sanctity of the American home and the American family.

“Are we ready to say goodbye to the solemn pledge ‘to have and to hold until death do us part’? Young ladies, I hope not, for your sake.”

The next day Prescott elaborated on his fulmination by telling reporters that Rockefeller should “publicly withdraw” from presidential contention. “The Governor’s actions are a matter of great disappointment, for I have always been for Mr. Rockefeller, and consider him a very able, versatile man, one I have always respected and held in high esteem. But we can’t overlook this chain of events and I think people should speak out honestly on the question.”

Prescott stopped short of endorsing Barry Goldwater to help his son’s campaign in Texas, but the political impact of his blast was not lost on the Republican National Committee’s George Hinman, a close political associate of Rockefeller’s. Hinman knew that George Bush could not survive politically in Texas if his father, already perceived by conservatives as far too liberal, had supported Rockefeller in any way. In this instance, Prescott was able to combine a little politics with a lot of outrage over divorce. Hinman was not convinced.

“I always have some question about people who pass harsh moral judgments on other people’s lives and situations they know nothing about,” said Hinman. “In former Senator Bush’s case it’s clear that the motivation is a good deal more political than moral. It’s too bad the young ladies before whom he defamed the Governor could not have been aware of the political motivation behind this intemperate attack.”

Prescott said he had been inundated with telegrams and letters showing “overwhelming approval” of his criticism. George, too, received letters commending his father, including one from Rockefeller’s foe William F. Buckley Jr., editor in chief of
National Review
: “I wrote your father, by the way, to congratulate him on his courage in making the statement about Governor Rockefeller . . . I hope he hasn’t suffered from it.”

Several months later Texas newspapers would report that Prescott Bush, former U.S. senator from Connecticut and father of the GOP candidate for Senate, had been named as a defense adviser to Barry Goldwater’s Peace Through Preparedness Committee.

Prescott might not have been so censorious about Governor Rockefeller’s marriage and divorce had he known what a New York attorney says he knew about Prescott’s son George’s extramarital dalliances.

According to the attorney, at the time Prescott was preaching Bush family values to New York’s governor, George Bush was having an affair with an Italian beauty named Rosemarie [last name deleted for privacy reasons], whom he had met on one of his numerous business trips. Rosemarie told the attorney that the couple shared an apartment in New York City and that George promised to get a divorce and marry her. He changed his mind in the fall of 1964 and broke off the relationship, but he agreed to pay the last three months of the year lease on their apartment. Rosemarie sought legal counsel, thinking she might have recourse for breach of promise.

“According to my records, she came to see me at 11 a.m. on September 21, 1964, at our law firm in the Chrysler Building,” recalled the attorney, then a junior partner with Upham and Meeker. “She was quite upset, very emotional . . . I’d never heard of George Bush at that time, but being a New Yorker I certainly knew who his father, Prescott Bush, was.

“As I recall, Rosemarie said she was from a noble Italian family—Rome, I think—and that she would never have entered into an adulterous relationship if George had not promised to leave his wife and marry her. She said she could not return home because of the shame. She was very emotional . . . I got the impression that she and Bush not only lived together in Manhattan when he was here but that he squired her around to social events and they were very much a couple in public around the city. She told me he even put his name on the apartment directory which made her think she might have grounds for a common law marriage . . . You’ve got to remember that this was in 1964 when only the most affluent people were flying. Planes were luxury travel then . . . So it would’ve been fairly easy for George Bush to have lived two lives then—one as a married man in Houston and quite another one in New York City . . . He was not the only married businessman to have such an arrangement.

The attorney was impressed by the lovely Rosemarie and believed her story. “I still remember Rosemarie’s dark hair and dark eyes,” he said many years later. “She was extremely attractive, lively and volatile. She had met one of the senior partners of my law firm at a party and in a weak moment when she said she needed a lawyer, he suggested she consult with me. Even if we had handled that kind of work, which we didn’t, she did not have a legal case and I had to tell her so . . . I felt bad because she was so emotionally distraught . . . I never saw her again.”

According to plan, George announced his candidacy for the Senate in September 1963, and by the end of the next month he and his family had begun to feel confident about his impending success. His father wrote to his good friend Samuel Bemiss in Richmond, Virginia: “Poppy looks to be fairly sure of the Republican nomination in Texas and Senator Tower told me . . . he thought he would win the election.”