The Family (9 page)

There was an extra reason to be scared of Prescott Bush’s temper—although his children never acknowledged, even as adults, their father’s drinking problem.

Their mother denied his alcoholic binges when they occurred, and told the children that they didn’t actually see what they knew they saw. “It was like that phrase—What are you going to believe: What I tell you or your lying eyes?” said Charles Kelly, an investment counsel, who graduated from Yale Law School and was acquainted with the family. No warlord was more dictatorial than Dorothy Walker Bush in denying reality. She told her children that their father was simply “not feeling well,” and that was that. No further discussion—ever. When Prescott was drunk or hungover, she shooed them off, saying, “Your father has been working hard and needs a little peace and quiet.”

“Their father wasn’t crazy about the children,” said Mary Carter Walker, Dotty’s childhood friend from St. Louis who had married Dotty’s brother Herbie Walker. “So Dotty would sneak them up the back steps so they wouldn’t bother him.”

“Prescott was a handsome man who had the admiration and respect of his contemporaries,” said Charles Kelly, “but it was well known that he was a major-league alcoholic.”

Prescott’s brother, James, was also an alcoholic. FBI files show that he was forced to resign as vice president of the First National Bank of St. Louis due to excessive drinking. He never drank on the job, but, according to the FBI files, he would miss work for several days at a time because of his secret benders. He was married four times and divorced three times, and his second wife, Janet Newbold Rhinelander Stewart, gave the FBI a sworn statement about his alcoholism. She also told her daughter that James had beaten her when drunk.

Like his brother, Prescott usually confined his drinking binges to his country clubs or places like the Hartford Club, an exclusive men’s club in Connecticut.

“I was a bellboy at the Hartford Club,” said Earl Balfour, “which meant we ran the elevator, the switchboard, and the hat check. Those were our main sources of income. Prescott Bush was a cheap guy who never tipped. He’d come in, go upstairs, and send down for cigars and booze. He never tipped any of the waiters or the bellboys. This went on for weeks. Finally we figured out how to exact revenge. Whenever he came in drunk and wanted to go upstairs, we’d take him in the elevator and stop about three inches from his floor. He’d step out and fall flat on his face. Just as he was going down, we’d say: ‘Watch your step, sir.’”

Prescott’s secret binges were considered a shameful moral failing in those unenlightened days. The genetic predisposition to alcoholism would wreak havoc with all of his children in years to come, forcing each to cope with the problem in some way. Nancy Bush married a man who became an alcoholic, and some of their children suffered severe problems of substance abuse. So did the children of George H.W. Bush. The legacy of Prescott’s alcoholism became as destructive to the dynasty as denying its existence was to his immediate family. But denial was the only way Dorothy Bush could cope with this one flaw in what to her was an otherwise-perfect husband.

This secret—never mentioned or discussed within the family, let alone with outsiders—caused George to grow up with a pathological fear of personal examination, a fear that carried over into his public life. As an adult, he ran from anything that might expose the pain he had buried as a child. He was so threatened by any kind of analysis that interviewers were forewarned not to lay him on the couch with their questions.

“Is he going to get on all this psychobabble bullshit?” George asked about an interview with David Frost.

“So, this is gonna be a deal on where I’m coming from, a psychiatric layout?” George asked Gail Sheehy.

“Is it a psychoanalytical piece?” he asked Maureen Dowd, yet again revealing his obsessive desire to keep secrets and avoid self-analysis.

George learned from his mother to use perpetual motion to avoid personal scrutiny. Having inherited her father’s rampaging play-to-the-death competitiveness, Dotty raised her brood to believe in the hard-charging religion of sports. The first commandment: excel as an athlete. Absolutely fearless, she pushed herself and her children to the edge of physical endurance, sometimes quite recklessly.

“We had lots of trees around our house in Greenwich, and somehow we knew she wanted us to climb every one of them,” said George. “Some neighbor would see us and come to warn Mother. ‘They’ll be fine,’ she would say. And we would hear her, and our own apprehensions would vanish. Of course, there would be scrapes and bruises . . . but it didn’t seem to faze Mother or her confidence in us.”

Dotty forced George, who was left-handed, to play tennis with his right hand. As a consequence, he developed a crab-like serve but became ambidextrous, which allowed him to make astonishing retrieval shots. Dotty also forced him to play golf with his right hand, which eventually made his wrists stiff and impeded his game. In baseball, he threw left-handed but batted from the right side. He admitted that if he had hit lefty, he might’ve been better, since his left was the controlling eye. But he didn’t have the nerve to defy his commanding mother.

“Mrs. Bush had power over her children,” said their friend Fitzhugh Green. “Perhaps in this matter she used it unwisely.”

One day in late August at Kennebunkport, Dotty and young Pressy took their small sailboat,
Shooting Star
, into the stormy seas off the Maine coast. Even nature’s whims could not dim her competitive drive. A neighbor onshore saw them taking on water and summoned Prescott senior. He and George sped off in the family motorboat,
Tom Boy
, to rescue mother and son before they capsized. Prescott junior remembers his father’s fury.

“How could you, Dotty? How could you!”

Barely chastened, Dotty maintained her blind drive to win, which set the standard of excellence within the family.

“Mrs. Bush was pretty fierce about competition,” recalled Jack Greenway, one of George’s Andover classmates. “I think that competing with her was a rite of passage within the family . . . When it came Nancy’s turn to play her [in tennis], they played so many sets at Round Hill Club in Greenwich that Mrs. Bush was taken directly to the hospital in Greenwich to be rehydrated.”

More than fifty years later George recalled his mother’s combative style. “I can vividly remember the bottom of my mother’s feet. Yes, she played a much younger woman named Peaches Peltz in tennis back in 1935 or so. Peaches was smooth. Mum was tenacious. Mother literally wore the skin off the bottom of her feet.”

The family enjoys telling the story of Dotty nine months into her first pregnancy and playing baseball at Kennebunkport. “Her last time up she hit a home run,” said George, “and without missing a base (I’m told) continued right off the field to the hospital to deliver Pres.”

“I had to decide early on as a daughter-in-law that you can’t beat her, you have to sit back and enjoy her,” said George’s wife, Barbara Bush. “When I was a new bride, she beat me in paddle tennis with her right hand, then with her left.”

Even in her seventies, Dotty kept up her strenuous pace. “I remember playing gin rummy with her in Greenwich when she was recuperating from a broken leg,” recalled a close family friend. “She told me she suffered a fracture during the U.S. Open. Her family was watching on television, but it was a gorgeous day and she wanted to go for a walk. She couldn’t get anyone to budge from the TV. So she went out by herself. She tripped and fell while climbing over a branch and broke her leg. She lay in the leaves for a couple of hours, unable to move, until a little boy came along on his bicycle. He said, ‘Mrs. Bush, what are you doing lying on the ground?’ She told him what had happened, and he offered to go get her family. She said, ‘Oh, no. They would be very, very angry if you did that because they’re watching the U.S. Open.’ God forbid we should disturb anyone watching sports.”

Jonathan Bush recalled the day his mother offered five dollars to any of her sons who could beat her at tennis. George, who was sixteen at the time, accepted the challenge. The children rooted for George.

“Everyone wanted him to win, and he finally did. She was at the top of her form. It was a brutal match, both of them wringing wet when they finished.”

Dotty set up intrafamily competitions and graded everyone on his or her excellence in swimming, tennis, touch football, knee football, softball, tiddledywinks, checkers, fishing, golf, and indoor putting. She even set up a Ping-Pong table in the foyer of the Greenwich home, and anyone who passed through the front door was challenged.

Sports became a metaphor of life for Dotty, who judged people’s characters by how they played tennis. “She had some good shots” meant she was a terrible player and a mediocre person. “He can’t keep score” meant he’ll never amount to much in life. “He plays the net” was high praise and marked a man for success.

Her sons, who competed for her attention, absorbed these judgments and pushed themselves to please her. She challenged them constantly—swimming matches, footraces, bridge games—and played to win at everything, never holding back.

“She loved games and thought that competition taught courage, fair play, and—I think most importantly—teamwork,” said George Bush. “She taught games to us endlessly.”

The “fair play” part of competition was not always observed by the children. Sometimes their desire to win trumped good sportsmanship, especially in George, who never outgrew his need to triumph, whether to please his mother or impress his father. “I hate losing,” he said. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

During their childhood summers at Kennebunkport, George met his match in an equally competitive youngster named Bill Truesdale, who was the best sailor in the eleven-foot class of boats known as catboats, which had two sides, a bottom, a mast, and a centerboard. Bill Truesdale was the perennial winner, summer after summer, in an annual competition. One night before a big race George went down and tied a bucket to Truesdale’s centerboard. The next day the boats, about fifteen of them, were towed up the Kennebunk River to the starting line offshore. The warning gun went off, and everyone put up his sail.

“There was a light breeze and Truesdale’s boat barely moved,” recalled Jonathan Bush. “At first he thought something was wrong with the boat, and in frustration he began to beat it with a paddle. Whack! Whack! When he got ashore he found out what George had done. He chased him for days. George would be sitting on the porch, and we’d hear ‘Here comes Truesdale!’ and off he’d go. That was a shout we heard all summer: ‘Here comes Truesdale!’”

To the Bushes, the anecdote illustrates George’s love of practical jokes. Others might see the story of sabotaging a friend’s boat to deprive him of victory as something more than an adolescent caper (and, as a way of dealing with competition, something that came to fruition in George’s later political campaigns). But no one would deny that the children learned from their parents to play to win.

The competitive atmosphere between the Bushes and the Walkers at Kennebunkport was often tense, sometimes terrifying. “I can remember some very earnest rock throwing up there,” said Louise Mead Walker, who married John Walker, George Herbert Walker Jr.’s son. “At my own family’s Sunday dinner in Dayton, whenever the men came in from golf, the question always was, ‘Did you have a good game?’ At Kennebunkport, the question always is, ‘Did you win?’”

When George was older, his youngest brother, Bucky, was given a new ball-in-a-labyrinth game and beat George easily. Bucky went to bed proud of besting his older brother, who had been to war, married, and become a father himself. The next day George casually suggested a rematch. George won with a perfect score. Family members, in on the joke, howled with laughter. George had stayed up late perfecting his game to ambush his baby brother, who was fourteen years younger.

“My mother and father were both fierce competitors,” said Prescott junior, “and it was extremely important that you compete and do the best you could [but] that you learn to be a good loser . . . In other words, to lose with dignity, even though you hated it . . . even though it made you mad as the devil, you had to maintain your composure and not throw your racket . . . or if you’re in tiddledywinks, and you miss the shot that cost you the game, you couldn’t throw the bowl.”

And if you did?

“Well, we’d get the strap or we would spend a lot of time sitting in our rooms or something like that.”

Prescott and Dotty also forbade cursing and bragging. As Mrs. Bush told an interviewer: “I just couldn’t bear braggadocio.”

The hell-bent prideful pursuit of winning had to always be accompanied by gracious modesty. “You could never come home and say you played well in a game,” said Jonathan Bush. “You just didn’t talk about yourself. Bad taste.”

George Bush remembered being slapped down for arrogance when he was eight years old. He had said he thought he was off his game. “Mother jumped all over me. ‘You are just learning—you don’t have a game! Work harder and maybe some day you will.’”

The Bushes raised their children to win and assume their superiority as winners but to mask the assumption at all times. Enforced humility, like keeping secrets, was considered the epitome of good breeding. Chances are the Bushes might not have appreciated the perceptiveness of Mark Twain, who said, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves—and how little we think of the other person.”

CHAPTER FOUR

B
y the 1930s the nation’s railroads had become tangled in bankruptcies, unrelated to the Depression, and the U.S. Senate wanted to know why. So the Interstate Commerce Commission started holding hearings to investigate the complicated financial schemes that enriched the bankers and brokers while simultaneously looting the railroads.

Leading the charge was the newly elected senator from Missouri, a failed haberdasher named Harry S. Truman. A New Dealer from the moment of his election, Senator Truman supported all of President Roosevelt’s programs to pull the country out of the Depression—the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Rural Electrification Administration. Now he was determined to expose financial mismanagement of the railroads and reform the national transportation system.

A small part of the larger problem involved the reorganization of the Missouri Pacific system and the subsequent financing that led to its bankruptcy. This fiscal plunder, the Enron scandal of its day, fleeced employees and left directors and stockholders destitute while the wealthy financiers and their corporate lawyers skipped out with their pockets full of boodle. Playing a leading role in the pillage was George Herbert Walker, who was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Truman on November 17, 1937.

Bert walked into the Senate hearing room in Washington, D.C., with his lawyers from Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine, and Wood. Even in a suit and tie, he looked like a burly boxer with a trainer and a handler on either side, ready to remove his mouthpiece after every round and ram it back when the bell clanged. As a former amateur heavyweight champion in St. Louis, he was accustomed to pummeling brutes; the little senator in the wire-rim glasses hardly looked like a worthy adversary.

With a few polite questions, Senator Truman established that George Herbert Walker had been chairman of the board of Gulf Coast Lines when the Missouri Pacific acquired control of that company in 1925. At the time, Bert was also president of W. A. Harriman and Company, bankers for the railroad, and senior partner of G. H. Walker and Company, the brokerage firm that later sold the railroad. Bert admitted he had informed his board that the sales profit was going to W. A. Harriman and Company, but he neglected to tell them that the banking house was only a temporary receptacle for his own personal benefit.

Bert Walker testified that of the sale’s $518,680.80 ($5,519,620 in 2004) net profit, he personally received $173,387.57 ($1,845,130 in 2004). An additional $72,244.84 ($768,804 in 2004) went to his brokerage firm, G. H. Walker and Company, and more moneys, in the amount of $43,346.90 ($461,283 in 2004), went to W. A. Harriman and Company, of which he was president.

The Interstate Commerce Commission characterized his various fees as “excessive compensation,” but Bert’s defense was that he had worked on the deal, “a protracted negotiation,” for ten years without pay. “I never charged the railroad a penny of compensation,” he said. “I never even charged them most of the time for my out-of-pocket expenses.” Instead of taking a salary for his services, he said, he insisted on working free until it came time to sell the railroad to a big system. “I wanted the right to sell it and make the commission then.”

Bert showed no shame for his stupendous profits, which, his lawyers asserted, were perfectly legal. Nor was he embarrassed when the Senate committee counsel pointed out that the gross compensation totaled more than the salaries and expenses of all the railroad’s employees. Bert shrugged as if to say, “Business is business.”

One month later Senator Truman stood up in the Senate to passionately attack Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship—all that George Herbert Walker represented. Truman blasted the “court and lawyer situation” in the gigantic receiverships and reorganizations that had destroyed the railroads. He specifically named Walker’s law firm, “the highest of the high hats in the legal profession [who] resort to tricks that would make an ambulance chaser in a coroner’s court blush with shame,” and he blamed the railroads’ collapse on wild rampaging greed:

We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor . . . Wild greed along the lines I have been describing brought on the Depression. When investment bankers, so-called, continually load great transportation companies with debt in order to sell securities to savings banks and insurance companies so they can make a commission, the well finally runs dry.

The senator’s charges of stock juggling and other deceptions by lawyers, brokers, and bankers made the front page of
The New York Times
. The following year Truman introduced a bill to reorganize the railroads and place them under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The bill, known as the Wheeler-Truman Act, was signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1940. Inadvertently, George Herbert Walker had helped contribute to another success for the New Deal, which he despised almost as much as the New Deal President.

“Oh, Pop hated Roosevelt,” recalled his daughter Dotty. “Hated him. Roosevelt just made him see red.”

That was one of many sentiments Bert Walker shared with his son-in-law. Prescott also reviled FDR and said many years after Roosevelt’s death, “The only man I truly hated lies buried in Hyde Park.”

“In the early days of the New Deal, the financial community was not enamored of it at all,” said Prescott, “and the fact that Averell was didn’t help us a damn bit at Brown Brothers Harriman. In fact, it was a little bit of a hurdle you had to take from time to time. Some big corporate client would say, ‘What the hell is your partner doing down there with this red bunch of Communists and socialists? What do you mean by this?’ We would laugh it off and say, ‘Well, Averell feels he wants to devote some time to the national interest . . . he’s become interested in trying to do something for his country, and if the President wants to use him to be Ambassador to Russia, why, fine, he’s going to do it.’ And he was a good Ambassador to Russia . . . He was at the very highest levels there with the Roosevelt administration.”

By that time, the only Democrat left in the Bush family was Prescott’s father, Samuel, who had remarried a few years after his wife’s death. He advised Herbert Hoover on employment conditions in Ohio and reported to the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief. By then Samuel had sold the house he and Flora had built and moved with his new wife, Martha, to a country estate in Blacklick, Ohio. He wrote his sons a letter on May 14, 1940, and proudly shared a note he had received from the vice president of the Pennsylvania Lines West asking him to become general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Lines West of Pittsburgh:

[It is] the only case where an officer who has left the company has been invited to return. This I have always treasured for the reason that after the departure of Mr. L. F. Loree, who was rather hostile to me because I would not yield to practices that I felt where [
sic
] neither honorable nor wise, is evidence of appreciation of my worth by all other officers.

Unlike Prescott’s father, George Herbert Walker cared little for practices that were either honorable or wise. A prime example is his involvement in a plan to extract the last measure of profit from his investment in Silesian-American Corporation, an American company partially owned by the Harrimans that operated mines in Poland.

The investment in Silesian-American was made in 1926, seven years before Hitler was declared dictator of Germany. The acquisition became a moral problem in 1935, when Hitler instituted the Nuremberg Laws that deprived German Jews of their rights to citizenship. Untroubled by morality, Silesian-American investors kept their shares. When the Nazis invaded Poland in October 1939, they seized control of the Silesian-American mines. The American company, unable to pay its bondholders because of the Nazi takeover, declared bankruptcy. Rather than absorb the $2.4 million loss of their investment, Bert Walker and Brown Brothers Harriman decided to do business with Nazi Germany.

Since the United States allowed no direct commerce with the Nazis, Bert devised a scheme for a Swiss bank, fronting for the German owners of Silesian-American, to buy the shares of the American owners and pay off the bondholders. Unfortunately, the Swiss payment would come from ores mined in Poland with cooperation of the Nazis. Still, Bert and Brown Brothers Harriman hoped their convoluted plan would appear benign enough to get U.S. approval.

In a confidential memo, Ray Morris of Brown Brothers Harriman wrote to Roland Harriman: “We had the Silesian-American and Silesian Holding company meetings this morning, and Bert Walker came through all right, so that there was a unanimous vote in favor of accepting the proposition from the Swiss company and taking the necessary steps to put it into effect.”

The U.S. government blocked the plan under Roosevelt’s executive orders banning foreign transactions that might aid the Nazis. The pile-driving deal maker reconfigured the scheme for resubmission, but again it was rejected. Undeterred, Bert tried a third, and final, time; the U.S. Treasury once more slammed the door. It was against U.S. policy for companies to have any dealing with Hitler’s Germany after the invasion of Poland.

The willingness of George Herbert Walker and Brown Brothers Harriman to do business with Germany was not unique in those times. Like BBH, quite a few American firms had opened offices in Berlin after World War I and were reluctant to terminate the stream of income. Others, like Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York City law firm of John Foster Dulles, who later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower, took a stand on principle.

Some time after 1935, when the Nazi persecution of Jews could no longer be denied, Dulles was confronted with a partners’ revolt. As Townsend Hoopes reported in his book
The Devil and John Foster Dulles
, Dulles’s law partners informed him they were prepared to resign en bloc rather than continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany. Dulles protested vigorously, citing the huge loss of profits that would be incurred by giving up German transactions. The partners remained adamant. Dulles finally capitulated “in tears.”

No such tearful meeting ever occurred at Brown Brothers Harriman, where Knight Woolley and Prescott Bush were the managing partners. In fact, their involvement in Union Banking Corporation from 1924 to 1942 makes them vulnerable to charges of dealing with the enemy.

Union Banking Corporation existed solely for the benefit of Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist who had inherited an empire of steel factories, coal mines, and banks. He met Averell Harriman, the scion of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, during the 1920s when both were traveling in Europe. Thyssen told Harriman he was starting a bank in New York to look after his American financial interests, and he asked Harriman to serve on the board. Harriman turned the matter over to his brother, Roland, who agreed to join the directorate with a few of his partners. Thyssen’s U.S. bank, a subsidiary of his Dutch bank in Rotterdam, was founded in 1924 and operated out of the Brown Brothers Harriman offices at 39 Broadway in New York City. The bank, UBC, opened an investment account with Brown Brothers Harriman, which Prescott managed, and Thyssen’s bank paid investment fees to BBH. All of this was perfectly legal and quite profitable for both Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman for a decade. The issue became morally freighted in the 1930s when Hitler rose to power and Thyssen, an early supporter of the Third Reich, became known as “Hitler’s Angel.”

Still, Roland Harriman was not confronted by outraged partners. No one at Brown Brothers Harriman expressed concern that Thyssen’s bank might be a Nazi front. No questions were raised about the ethics of continuing to accept fees from the man whose memoir was titled
I Paid Hitler
.

As German troops swept across Europe, absorbing Austria, bludgeoning Czechoslovakia, raping Poland, swallowing Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, grabbing Luxembourg and Belgium, invading France, and bombarding the British Isles, no one at Brown Brothers Harriman stepped forward to decry their continuing business ties with Germany.

The remunerative relationship between Fritz Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman continued for sixteen years. BBH’s investment fees suddenly stopped coming in May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. On Roosevelt’s executive orders, all Dutch assets in the United States were frozen, including those of UBC, Thyssen’s Dutch holding company.

President Roosevelt had made no secret of his desire to bring his country into the war. In his fifteenth fireside chat to the nation, on January 6, 1941, he said, “Never before . . . has our American civilization been in such danger.” He warned that the Nazis wanted “to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.” He concluded: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

Even the most obtuse partners of Brown Brothers Harriman had to see that it was only a matter of time before the United States would take up arms against Germany. One key partner, Averell Harriman, was living in London as minister plenipotentiary to England to expedite lend-lease aid to the British. With this in mind, and the UBC assets frozen by executive order, Knight Woolley finally wrote a letter on January 14, 1941, to the superintendent of banks of New York, expressing concern about the association of Brown Brothers Harriman with Fritz Thyssen’s Union Banking Corporation:

My partners have been giving serious consideration to withdrawing from the board. Should the United States enter the war, they feel they might be under some embarrassment because of their connection with the bank, even though we have no financial interest in the Union Banking Corporation, nor do we participate in its earnings. They act as directors merely as a matter of business courtesy.