by Kitty Kelley
During the floor debate on pay raises, Dotty watched intently from the gallery as the Senate defeated her husband’s amendment and then, over his objections, passed the pay increase he opposed that gave senators $22,500 a year. “I knew Pres was going to speak against such a substantial raise,” she wrote in her column. “His point of view was not popular in the Senate, but when the final vote came there were 24 others who voted with him. I suffer with him, but am always just especially a little more proud of him when he takes an unpopular stand, because, in his heart, he feels that that is best for the country.”
Temperamentally, the Bushes were in perfect harmony with the Eisenhower era of Republican grandees—moderate men with an international perspective who believed in human rights. They didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the final evolutionary turn of the Republican Party to the right, and soon their kind of politics would be doomed. Within the next two decades the liberal Republicanism of Jacob Javits (New York), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts), John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky), George Aiken (Vermont), Thomas Kuchel (California), and Margaret Chase Smith (Maine) would be extinct. By the time the grandsons of Prescott Bush—George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—ran for public office, they would be practicing an extreme brand of Republican politics that bore no resemblance to the moderate views of their grandfather.
“I’m so glad Pres is gone and doesn’t have to bear the shame of his right-wing grandson’s lies to the country,” said Betsy Trippe DeVecchi in July 2003. “Prescott was such an honorable man he never would’ve lied or been unprincipled the way George W. Bush has been in dragging us to war in Iraq.”
The only daughter of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, Betsy Trippe DeVecchi grew up in Greenwich with the Bush children in the 1940s and was a close friend of Jonathan Bush, who was called Johnny Jim. “Prescott taught me to play tennis on the Rockefellers’ indoor court,” she said. “He was a lovely man, and his wife, Dotty, was so warm and gracious. Once they drove me up to Hotchkiss to see Johnny Jim in a play . . . Pres sat on the board of my father’s company. They shared the same Republican politics. Both were big friends of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and, of course, President Eisenhower.”
Prescott was the type of man Dwight Eisenhower admired: a wealthy investment banker who had married above himself. In addition, Prescott played expert golf, which is why he was occasionally called by the White House to join the President’s foursome at Burning Tree Club in Maryland. As the former president of the U.S. Golf Association, Prescott saw to it that they installed a putting green on the White House grounds because, as he told the Greenwich Rotary Club, Ike needed the practice.
“Many of you might get some comfort to know that the President also struggles with his game, particularly his putting,” Prescott said. “An uncomfortable nervousness reaches him and this reaction happens on two-foot putts. I recently said to him, ‘I know what the matter is with your putting, Mr. President. It is simply terror.’”
Ike then told Prescott that he had tried twenty-two different putters in eight months to improve his game. As Prescott told the story, he grinned, knowing he was the better golfer. “The President,” he said, “still has something to gain in the putting department.”
The Bushes felt comfortable with the sixty-two-year-old President and the political philosophy he had borrowed from Abraham Lincoln:
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.
In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
Prescott and Dotty admired Eisenhower’s political moderation, although others described Ike’s agenda as nothing more than a list of steps he refrained from taking. Perhaps, as suggested by The New Republic, that was the key to his overwhelming popularity: “The public loves Ike. The less he does the more they love him. That, probably, is the secret. Here is a man who doesn’t rock the boat.”
During the early part of his administration, Eisenhower’s reluctance to “rock the boat” nearly capsized the ship of state. Throughout his political career, he refused to take a public stand against Senator Joe McCarthy and his rampaging anti-Communist campaign. A famous Herblock cartoon in The Washington Post depicts a confrontation between the two men in the Oval Office: Grinning fiendishly, an apelike McCarthy stands with a blood-covered meat cleaver in his hand while Eisenhower draws a feather sword. Like a bewigged fop in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Eisenhower protests, “Have a care, Sir.”
Even Herblock’s punishing ridicule could not move Eisenhower to oppose the Wisconsin senator, who had been whipping up the nation’s fears about Communists creeping into the government. In the wake of the USSR’s exploding the hydrogen bomb, the investigation into Hollywood’s writers, actors, and directors by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the spy trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, McCarthy’s Red-baiting fulminations had thrown the country into a frenzy. He had called President Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, “the Pied Pipers of the Politburo.” He even accused the revered former secretary of state George C. Marshall of being “a man steeped in falsehood.” Still, Eisenhower would not speak up. When his advisers pleaded with him to oppose McCarthy, Ike refused. “I just will not,” he said. “I refuse to get into the gutter with that guy.”
Heedlessly, McCarthy continued swinging his meat cleaver at the military, the State Department, and the CIA. He threatened the Voice of America for filling its libraries with the works of “Red” writers. He terrorized academia, the media, and the federal bureaucracy. He thundered about “security risks,” “subversives,” “fifth columnists,” and the “Red menace.” He fomented opposition to Eisenhower’s appointments of some of the most respected men in the country, including Harvard’s president James B. Conant to be High Commissioner in Germany and U.S. Army General Walter Bedell Smith to be Undersecretary of State. He even went so far as to accuse the President himself of sending “perfumed notes” to friendly powers who were profiting from “blood trade” with Red China. Still, Eisenhower said nothing.
McCarthy’s polls soared so high that few people had the courage to oppose him. One who did step forward was the freshman senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, who made her “Declaration of Conscience” in 1950 after McCarthy’s reckless speech in West Virginia in which he ferociously attacked “205 card carrying” Communists in the State Department. Without mentioning him by name, she said that the deliberative body of the U.S. Senate had “been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.” She concluded her fifteen-minute address by saying, “I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”
McCarthy scornfully denounced her and the six senators who supported her declaration as “Snow White and her Six Dwarfs.” Another Senate critic was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, whom McCarthy ridiculed so often as “Senator Half Bright” that bushels of mail so addressed were delivered regularly to Fulbright’s office.
After the Eisenhower landslide swept Republicans to victory in both houses of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. When it came time to vote on a $214,000 appropriation for his committee—a defeat would have disbanded the committee and effectively ended McCarthy’s reign of terror—the Senate caved. Even its most resolute members rolled over for McCarthy, including John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Warren Magnuson of Washington, Richard Russell of Georgia, Herbert Lehman of New York, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Following suit was Prescott Bush. Only Fulbright of Arkansas
had the courage to vote against the appropriation. As he wrote to his Oxford tutor:
I fear for the future. McCarthy is an unscrupulous demagogue with many of the characteristics of Hitler . . . He has come upon the scene just as television is becoming a powerful medium, and we do not know how to evaluate his influence. To me he is completely revolting from every point of view, but I cannot deny that he seems to have a very substantial following.
Once his committee was funded, McCarthy launched an investigation into Communism in the U.S. military. He held hearings and hectored witnesses, brandishing doctored photographs and forged letters to “prove” that the Army had promoted Communists. When he savaged a decorated Army general and declared him unfit to wear the uniform, even Eisenhower was outraged, although not enough to go public. Instead, the President secretly gave the Army the go-ahead to draw up a list of countercharges against McCarthy, who had been blackmailing the military to get preferential treatment for one of his aides who had been drafted. The televised hearings became known as the Army-McCarthy smearings, a muddy slugfest that riveted 30 million viewers in May 1954.
Under camera lights for thirty-six days McCarthy’s outrageous conduct so embarrassed the Senate that within weeks a member of his own party introduced a resolution to censure him “for conduct unbecoming a member of the United States Senate.”
Prescott, who had once decried McCarthy’s tactics, now worried about his own reelection chances in a predominantly Catholic state that was a bastion of McCarthy support. To dodge the bullet of a censure vote, Prescott proposed a twenty-three-point code of fair practices for committee proceedings, claiming that if such a code had been in place the “unpleasant spectacle” of the Army-McCarthy hearings could have been avoided. He received some positive press coverage in Connecticut for his proposal to restore congressional fair play, but one paper, The Bridgeport Post, took notice of his “reluctance to tangle personally with Senator McCarthy.” In Washington, D.C., Prescott’s proposed code was as ineffectual as Eisenhower’s feather sword.
Traveling the state, Prescott canvassed his political advisers about what he should do, especially after his Senate colleague William Purtell announced that he would vote for McCarthy. When reporters asked Prescott how he would vote, he deliberated:
I will limit myself to saying this: Senator McCarthy’s stated objective is to fight Communism. I share that objective, as do all good Americans. But, in the past I have frequently expressed reservations about the methods he has employed. Nothing in the hearings to date has caused me to dismiss those reservations. On the contrary, they have been reinforced.
In the weeks leading up to the censure vote, McCarthy mounted his own defense by lashing out at the Senate as a “lynch party” hell-bent on destroying his anti-Communist campaign. One of his biggest supporters was the conservative writer and Bonesman William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote, “McCarthyism . . . is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” Prescott, who sought to be included in such ranks, reworked his code of fair practices and offered it again as an alternative to avoid censure. The next day’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported his proposal under the headline “Watered-Down Substitute for M’Carthy Censure Move Offered in Senate.”
After burying Prescott’s proposal in committee, the Senate moved to reconvene after the November elections to consider the motion for censure. Dotty returned to her perch in the gallery to watch the proceedings and reported the palpable strain that gripped everyone:
To me this whole session seems very sad. There is a certain suspicion and caution amongst the wives in the Gallery which never existed before, some not even speaking to others. I do hope by the time January comes along all this will have blown over, or our Senate Ladies’ Day will be ruined . . . Perhaps I am unduly sensitive to tenseness, but to me all week the atmosphere in the gallery was most unpleasant.
“Prescott had worried about that censure vote for weeks,” recalled Bernie Yudain, a former editor of Greenwich Time and the brother of Ted Yudain, the newspaperman who was Prescott’s political mentor. “He knew that he could be signing his political death warrant if he voted to censure McCarthy. I was in Washington at the time, and he called me up and asked me to come to his office. He opened a cupboard jammed from floor to ceiling with mail. Thousands of letters from McCarthy supporters in Connecticut, all threatening him if he voted against their man.
“Pres talked about how much he loved being a senator, and how it had enlarged his life. He said he would never have gotten to know Portuguese workers and Italian stonemasons in Chickahominy or the Irish Catholics in Brack City, if he had not been Connecticut’s senator. He wanted to keep his position, but he also wanted to do the right thing and vote his conscience.”
By December 1, 1954, Prescott had finally made up his mind. He arrived at the Senate and stood to make a floor speech, his voice shaking with emotion:
Mr. President, all my life I have looked upon membership in the United States Senate as the greatest office to which one could aspire. Even as a schoolboy, I acquired a respect for the Senate that has stayed with me through the years . . .
Like other Senators, I had necessarily observed the junior Senator from Wisconsin, and had more than once expressed reservations concerning his methods, while endorsing always his stated objectives of combating communism at home and abroad.
He said he had to vote to censure because the honor of the Senate was at stake, and failure to rebuke McCarthy would be a victory for Communism. “For he has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude,” said Prescott, “and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly; not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions; or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line.”
Prescott Bush Jr. remembered that when his father finally made his decision, he was told that his political career was over. “[The] then Republican county chairman Bill Brennan warned that it would cost him the election in 1956.”
The senator later said he deeply regretted the necessity of incurring the acute dislike of so many of his constituents but he had reached his conviction after careful analysis of the issues and could not be persuaded to alter it.
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67–22 to censure Joe McCarthy, and the next day Prescott received a note from J. William Fulbright, his best friend in the Senate, congratulating him on his stand. “This morning I read your speech in the Congressional Record and I think it was excellent,” Fulbright wrote. “I can well appreciate that, under the circumstances in Connecticut and especially with your colleague voting the other way, you were in a very difficult spot. It took a lot of courage and you deserve full credit for adopting such a statesman-like position.”
Prescott was so thrilled by the positive reactions he received that he decided to announce his plans to seek reelection. “He was insufferable about that vote and bragged constantly about his great opposition to McCarthy, which, as I recall, was a long time coming,” said Dotty’s nephew Dr. Ray Walker. “I can still hear him going on and on about how great he was standing up to ‘all those Catholics in Bridgeport.’”
In a burst of bonhomie Prescott invited all the state’s political reporters to a private lunch at the Hartford Club. He told them he was in the city to pay his respects to the new governor, Abe Ribicoff:
I wrote the governor-elect shortly after the election congratulating him on his victory and inviting him to feel free to call upon me for any assistance which he considers I may give in state problems in Washington. I also suggested that if it were the governor-elect’s pleasure that he invite me to visit with him when next I had an opportunity to be in Hartford. I received a most gracious reply and it is in response to his cordial invitation that we are meeting at his home on Bloomfield Avenue.
It was
fitting that Prescott visit Governor-elect Ribicoff at his home rather than invite him to the Hartford Club. “That was a very exclusive club in those days, and very, very anti-Semitic,” said the governor’s son, Peter Ribicoff. “No Jewish person ever set foot in that club until my father was elected governor. The inaugural luncheon for the incoming and outgoing governors was always held there.
“My father went in 1954, but when he was reelected governor in 1958, he told the Hartford Club that he was aware of their restrictive policies, and since he hadn’t heard of any Jewish person being inside the club since he was last there, he thought it best that the inaugural luncheon be held in one of the local hotels.”
Sensitivity to restrictive covenants eluded Prescott Bush, who, like many of his generation, belonged to private clubs that admitted whites only and discriminated against Jews, women, and people of color. He also owned houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Hobe Sound, Florida, towns that carried restrictive covenants (contracts stated that homes could not be sold to black people). His dear friend Samuel Merrifield Bemiss believed in segregation, as did his best friend in the Senate, J. William Fulbright, who voted against every civil rights bill without apology. So Prescott seemed an unlikely choice to lead the charge for the Republicans on civil rights, but as chairman of the platform committee for the 1956 GOP convention, he pushed for a stronger plank than the Democrats. He supported federal fair-employment practices that outlawed discrimination; he proposed ending the filibuster; he declared himself against the poll tax; he urged the party to publicly applaud the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education barring racial segregation in public schools.
