George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray, Jr., was also a Naval Intelligence officer, known
around Washington as the `` founder of operational intelligence. '' Gordon Gray became a
close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son,
George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy.
But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was, constituted an obstacle to the covert
warriors. An insular Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution, he
remained skeptical about secret service activities that reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo.
So, `` covert operations '' could not fully take off without a change of the Washington
regime. And it was with the Republican Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics in 1950, as his partners took
control of the levers of governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers
Harriman, he ran against Connecticut's William Benton for a seat in the U.S. Senate. (The
race was for a two-year unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous Senator.)
In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was making a circuslike
crusade against communist influence in Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and
leftists, State Department personnel, politicians and Hollywood figures. He generally left
unscathed the Wall Street and London strategists who donated Eastern Europe and China
to communist dictatorship--like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left and right.
Prescott Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe McCarthy, and appeared to be
neutral about his crusade. But the Wisconsin Senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came
into Connecticut three times that year to campaign for Bush and against the Democrats.
Bush himself made charges of `` Korea, Communism and Corruption '' into a slick
campaign phrase against Benton, which then turned up as a national Republican slogan.
The response was disappointing. Only small crowds turned out to hear Joe McCarthy,
and Benton was not hurt. McCarthy's pro-Bush rally in New Haven, in a hall that seated
6,000, drew only 376 people. Benton joked on the radio that `` 200 of them were my
spies. ''
Prescott Bush resigned from the Yale Board of Fellows for his campaign, and the board
published a statement to the effect that the `` Yale vote '' should support Bush--despite the
fact that William Benton was a Yale man, and in many ways identical in outlook to Bush.
Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared regularly for Prescott's campaign. None of this was
particularly effective, however, with the voting population.@s1@s0
Then Prescott Bush ran into a completely unexpected problem. At that time, the old
Harriman eugenics movement was centered at Yale University. Prescott Bush was a Yale
trustee, and his former Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence Tighe, was Yale's
treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the truth about the Bush-Harriman firm's
Nazi activities now made its way into the campaign.