by Kitty Kelley
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.
Someone said that when he returned home recently, General Ike “slammed the door wide open.” Maybe so. But my guess is that through the door must come a more compelling call to duty than he has ever had. If so, he will heed it.
Obviously, I asked no embarrassing or leading questions respecting the General’s intentions. The conclusions I have drawn are all my own.
When Prescott returned home, he resumed his speech making. He decided to spend every weekend up to the Republican convention in May stumping the state. His zeal to get the 1952 Senate nomination finally trumped his reluctance to criticize a Yale man, and now he pounded Dean Acheson for being soft on Communism. In each town, Bush addressed breathless Republicans, who were praying for Eisenhower to accept their nomination.
“When I talked to the General in France,” Prescott said, “he told me about his political affiliation. ‘Of course I’m a Republican. Everybody knows that.’” Even though those words contradict his printed letter, he used them at every stop to receive a standing ovation.
In 1950, Prescott mastered the first lesson in politics: name recognition. In 1952, he felt all he had to do was show the delegates how well known and worthy he was and the nomination would be his. Unfortunately, he hadn’t read the part in the political playbook about the boys in the back room.
The Republican governor of the state, John Davis Lodge, decided that Prescott was not dynamic enough to win, so Lodge threw his support to William A. Purtell, a gregarious Catholic from Hartford whose region and religion were major assets in Connecticut.
“In state politics the governor commands an enormous amount of influence because he controls the patronage,” said Prescott Bush Jr., “and as a result he was able to swing enough votes to Purtell to defeat my father . . . At that point [my father] said, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ve given it two chances and the party thinks somebody else can do it better. So I’m through.’”
The convention loss was a humbling experience for a proud man, and Prescott limped home thoroughly demoralized. He’d run and lost twice and didn’t want to do it again. In mid-June 1952, he went back to work at Brown Brothers. In July, he threw his support behind Purtell, and even held a reception for him in Greenwich.
That summer the rising star of Connecticut politics was the state’s senior senator, Brien McMahon, a dazzlingly articulate Irish Catholic who had graduated from Yale Law School. He had announced his candidacy for President with the campaign slogan “The Man Is McMahon.” His platform sought to ensure world peace through the fear of atomic weapons. His promising campaign capsized when he was diagnosed with cancer. He withdrew his candidacy, but the Connecticut delegates to the Democratic National Convention still nominated him as their choice for President on July 27, 1952. The following morning Senator McMahon fell into a coma. The next day he died.
His death became national political news because suddenly the control of the U.S. Senate pivoted on the two seats from Connecticut. Governor Lodge appointed William Purtell to hold the McMahon seat until Connecticut’s Republicans could nominate a candidate. With Purtell’s temporary appointment, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate now had forty-eight votes, bringing them to a tie with the Democrats.
Party leaders believed the GOP’s best chances of wresting Senate control from the Democrats turned on the two seats in Connecticut, which had the best chance of going Republican with Eisenhower at the top of the ticket.
Prescott was licking his wounds at his vacation home on Fishers Island when the GOP delegation arrived. “About seven of them,” he recalled. “They [came] to beg me to stand for nomination. I said, ‘Listen fellows, I’ve had it. I’ve destroyed all my files. I’m not going around that state again with my hat in my hand.’”
As he wrote to his friend Sam Bemiss on August 5, 1952: “It is not my intention to make any effort for the . . . nomination . . . but if [it] should come to me I believe I should accept and work very hard for a victory which looks possible in Connecticut this time.”
Prescott junior remembers the state chairman telling his father, “We’ll do everything we can to make sure you win.”
“My father said, ‘Look fellows, I went flat out to get the nomination at the last convention and was rejected.’ He said, ‘I felt I was owed that after the 1950 race when I was a novice. But if you will deliver the nomination—I’m not going to work for the nomination—but if you deliver the nomination then I will be glad to run and I’ll work as hard as I know how . . . I don’t know what’s different between me now and in May, nothing is changed, I’m the same person.’”
The national committeeman patiently explained that events had changed, not people, and with Eisenhower as the nominee the Republicans could sweep the state in 1952, and four years later, when Prescott would be running again. “You’re lucky you didn’t get it in 1950,” Meade Alcorn said. Out of earshot he muttered, “The stupid bastard can’t lose this one unless, of course, he shits in his damn straw hat.”
Some party leaders had grown tired of Prescott’s plodding speeches and his barbershop-quartet gigs. As The Bridgeport Telegram noted, “Republicans don’t think of him as a world-beater in the field of oratory and . . . he might not be as strong a campaigner as another . . . he’s more like an old comfortable shoe.”
Prescott considered what the party leaders had to offer. “I thought it over pretty carefully, and all of the old thoughts came back to me, do you see, resurgence of interest, and I suddenly realized: well, my God, maybe I will be a U.S. Senator yet.”
En route to the convention in September, the “old comfortable shoe” nearly tripped on the sharp stiletto of Clare Boothe Luce, who swooped in at the last minute and decided she would like to be nominated for Brien McMahon’s seat. The former congresswoman and playwright was a bombastic, colorful speaker who roused Republicans when she called Truman’s Democrats “lynch-loving Bourbons, economic spoonies, political bubble-heads and wampum and boodle boys.” Now with a flip of her elegant wrist, she dismissed Prescott as “Wall Street Bush,” saying, “He’s a good loser, and he’s getting better at it all the time.”
“Clare was just determined that she wanted to be the senator,” said Prescott Bush Jr., “and so she and her husband, Harry Luce, launched her campaign to defeat my father.”
Recalled Prescott senior, “She hired a big ballroom at the Bond Hotel [in Hartford] the night before the convention and held open house for all the delegates. They all went and ate her food and drank her beverages and had a gay old time. And I didn’t have a
ny headquarters. I stood out in the lobby of the Bond Hotel and shook hands with everybody that came and went and talked with them. But I was not concerned because I felt that . . . we were going to get it on the first ballot.”
Prescott enjoyed a close friendship with Harry Luce, but he was wary of Harry’s wife. “I’ve always been a little frightened of Clare, because I don’t deal easily with women who are severe or terribly determined . . . I’ve always been afraid of women who are pithy and sharp and sarcastic at times and that sort of thing . . . I’ve always been trained, and trained myself, to be deferential to them, and I don’t know how to deal with them when they respond differently.” (As a senator, Prescott opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, which was approved by the U.S. Senate in 1953, barring laws discriminating against women because of their sex. “I am for preferred rights for women, always have been and always will be,” he said.)
As the party leaders had promised, Prescott got the nomination for the remainder of McMahon’s four-year term. His opponent was the popular congressman from Hartford, Abraham A. Ribicoff, described by Time magazine as “the best Democratic vote-getter in the state.” When Averell Harriman came to Connecticut to endorse Ribicoff, Prescott became incensed.
“I regard him [Harriman] as unqualified for public service because of his surrender to the left wing of the Democratic party,” he said of his former business partner. “His political thinking and judgement have changed completely since he ceased active participation in our firm years ago to enter government.”
Prescott junior and his wife, Betty Lou, who had moved to Greenwich in 1950, spent their weekends campaigning, while George H. Walker Jr., “Uncle Herbie,” served as his brother-in-law’s major fund-raiser. From Texas, George sent a fifty-dollar check with a note to his Uncle Herbie: “Your efforts on Dad’s behalf are terrific . . . I am attaching a small donation—its size in no way reflects my interest, for I find myself thinking all the time about things up there in Conn.—Dad just has to win this time.”
Nancy Bush Ellis, who lived in Boston, came to Connecticut with her daughter, Nandy, and posed for a campaign picture holding a sign: “Win with Bush!” From his dormitory at Yale, Jonathan called frequently to compare figures on the statewide polls. At Hotchkiss, Bucky was too young to understand the importance of this race to his father.
The first thing Prescott did for his third attempt at public office was to hire an Irish Catholic campaign manager named Elmer Ryan.
“Do you think that my being a Protestant and not a Catholic is apt to affect me in this 1952 election?” he asked.
“Oh, no, Pres, don’t worry about that,” said Ryan. “We just look upon a Protestant as a Catholic who flunked his Latin.”
Driving around the state with the Bushes, the campaign manager noticed the billboards that said: “You’re Better Off with Ribicoff.”
“I wish we could develop something to offset that slogan: ‘You’re better off with Ribicoff.’ That’s pretty good.”
Dotty spoke up from the front seat: “You’re in a jam with Abraham.” Ryan laughed, and the next day Prescott used the phrase. “Don’t believe that sign that says you’re better off with Ribicoff,” he said in a speech. “The fact is you’ll be in a jam with Abraham.”
As he recalled the “unhappy” incident years later, some people misinterpreted his remarks. “So I was faced with the charge of being anti-Semitic right away. I remember the editor of my paper [Ted Yudain] and his brother [Bernie Yudain], both of whom were of Jewish persuasion, came to see me at the house as soon as this all appeared in the papers, and they had telephone calls from Hartford, ‘What about Bush, is he anti-Semitic?’
“. . . I told them exactly what had happened . . . They were perfectly satisfied with it. Well, it was one of those things that was here today and gone tomorrow because it was obviously not designed to be anti-Semitic. If I’d wanted to be anti-Semitic I’d have attacked it in a mighty different way than that . . . There wasn’t any thought of anti-Semitism in it. None at all. I would be too stupid to do a thing like that.”
The morning after his “jam with Abraham” remark, Prescott delivered a fighting-mad breakfast speech to 180 people, and Ted Yudain gave him the front page of Greenwich Time to defend himself by accusing the Democrats of “smears that make me anti-Semitic.” He then said that Ribicoff liked to pose for pictures with servicemen because he “sat out World War II in Hartford.” Prescott’s campaign brochures carried a picture of him standing with his son George in his naval uniform, under which was written: “In World War I Pres Bush served under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and rose from private to Captain of Artillery. Here he is with son George, World War II Navy pilot who survived being shot down twice in the Pacific.”
Prescott was exonerated from the charges of anti-Semitism by his hometown paper, Greenwich Time, as well as by The Harvard Crimson. Reporting the charges on November 1, 1952, Michael J. Halberstam wrote: “Ribicoff’s backers are incensed because of what they term Bush’s anti-Semitic innuendos; he constantly refers to his opponent as ‘Abraham’ or ‘Abe Ribicoff.’ The charge is at best a tenuous one.”
Emboldened by editorial endorsements from The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, Prescott accused President Truman of “dropping the match that lit the fires of war in Korea.” After refusing to release his personal-income figures, he lashed the members of the administration for misusing taxpayers’ money and described them as an “evil gang of left wingers.” He made a major speech calling for “a spiritual and moral reawakening.” All of these elements would surface fifty years later in the political campaigns of his grandson George W. Bush.
Prescott knew that his biggest campaign asset was the beloved Dwight D. Eisenhower. So when the general came to Connecticut, Prescott made sure he accompanied Eisenhower to New Haven and introduced him at Yale. More than six thousand people braved an unseasonable snowstorm that day to hear Ike denounce his rival, Adlai Stevenson. The Yale Daily News reported a few boos as Prescott stepped forward in his raccoon coat, waving his arms and acting as the general’s cheerleader. On Election Day, New Haven, which had not gone Republican since 1924, gave its heart to Stevenson by more than six thousand votes.
Shortly before the election, Senator Joe McCarthy, the red-meat Republican from Wisconsin, arrived in Connecticut to campaign for the GOP ticket. The bellicose solon’s crusade against Communists packed the Kline Memorial Hall in Bridgeport, where he held up a beefy hand claiming to have the names of one hundred Communists in the State Department. Prescott had wanted to boycott the rally, but the state’s Republican leaders insisted that he and Senator Purtell attend.
“I never saw such a wild bunch of monkeys in any meeting that I’ve ever attended,” Prescott recalled. “We were seated on the stage, both Purtell and myself, and also two or three others who were invited to speak before McCarthy spoke.
The national committeeman and the Connecticut state chairman welcomed McCarthy warmly. Then it was Prescott’s turn to speak.
“I went out on the stage with my knees shaking considerably and I said that I was very glad to welcome a Republican Senator to our state and that we had many reasons to admire Joe McCarthy. In some ways he was a very unusual man. At least he had done one very unusual thing—he had created a new word in the English language, which is ‘McCarthyism.’ With that everybody screamed with delight.
“Then I said, ‘But I must in all candor say that some of us, while we admire his objectives in his fight against Communism, we have very considerable reservations sometimes concerning the methods which he employs.’ With that the roof went off with boos and hisses and catcalls and ‘Throw him out.’ But I finished my remarks with one or two innocuous sentences and sat down. They booed and screamed at me. Joe McCarthy got up from across the stage and walked over and shook hands with me. I was taken aback by this very friendly gesture in view of all the booing going on . . . He said, ‘I want you to have dinner with me after this show’s over’ . . . I said
, ‘Fine, Senator, I’ll be delighted.’”
The national committeeman James C. Shannon publicly rebuked Bush for his “reservations,” and The Hartford Courant reported the story with the headline “GOPs Boo Bush’s Anti-smear Stand.” Vivien Kellems, who also attended the McCarthy rally, declared Prescott’s behavior outrageously stupid. She said, “Mr. Prescott Bush rather pathetically committed political suicide and erased himself from the political scene.” However, The Manchester Herald commended Prescott’s courage and said, whether it was foolhardy or not, “Bush has reserved a corner of Bush he knows he can live with. And in our observation of the political game, that kind of thing has never really turned out to be weakness.”
The Eisenhower landslide swept Bush and Purtell to victory in November, giving Connecticut its first two Republican senators in twenty years. Bush defeated Ribicoff by 28,960 votes, but Ribicoff pulled more votes than his party’s presidential contender, which laid the foundation for his political future as governor, cabinet member, and U.S. senator. Although Bush trailed Eisenhower by 51,547 votes, he had won the unexpired term of Brien McMahon, which meant that he became a senator as soon as his election was certified, making him the state’s senior senator. Purtell, who beat Senator Benton, became the junior senator, and could not be seated until January 3, when the new Congress convened.
Before leaving for Washington, D.C., Prescott convened the Representative Town Meeting to turn over his gavel. “I feel like a small boy who had asked for a small toy at Christmas, and came down stairs and found a Cadillac,” he said. “It is not my privilege to own a [real] Cadillac but . . . I hope to drive my political Cadillac well.”
That evening, in a letter to Whitney Griswold, the president of Yale University, Prescott confided his fear of the future: “I find myself now rather trembling with apprehension as I face this new life. Maybe, however, it will be like a ballgame, the nervousness wearing off after the first few plays. Believe me I welcome your prayers and your hopes for me. If I fail, it will not be for lack of trying hard.”
