“I remember my Yale roommate, Bob Gow, who ran Zapata for a while, telling me how Dad would call George all the time, and George would hold the phone away from his ear so he wouldn’t have to listen to Dad drone on and on and on. He’d just say, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ But that’s the kind of guy George is. He’s ingratiating and likable . . . It’s impossible not to like him . . . but he’s definitely a yes-man. Dad loved that.”
Herbie Walker realized that George’s principal role as a partner in Zapata was to be a pipeline to capital, so the investment banker raised $1.3 million for his nephew to start up his new venture. That sum included investments from the Rockefellers and the Astors. Uncle Herbie, who also made money from these transactions, would continue to be George’s golden goose throughout his business career. In 1990,
The New Republic
placed the cumulative amount he had raised for George’s various oil ventures over the years at $7 million.
The Liedtkes had their own access to big money through their father, who was chief counsel to Gulf Oil. George’s original partner, John Overbey, unfortunately did not have a money spout in his family, so he was eased out of the partnership when George and his uncle created an entity called Walker-Bush Corporation, which became the owner of Bush-Overbey.
Zapata Petroleum plunged $850,000 of the original investment into a single oil field, and to everyone’s amazement the gamble paid off. The oil came gushing in. As Bill Liedtke told the
Houston Business Journal
in 1999: “We drilled 130 wells and never had a dry hole.”
During their daughter’s illness, while George was flying back and forth from Texas to New York on the private planes of his rich oil friends, Barbara became a maternal martinet, laying down the law to her children, her husband, her friends, her relatives, and even her formidable mother-in-law. “I wouldn’t let George junior play with Robin because she bruised so easily,” Barbara said. “In fact, I kept the kids apart almost that whole time. We didn’t tell Georgie, because we thought he was too young to know [that his sister was dying]. Actually, I was afraid he would tell Robin and I didn’t want her to know. I was very firm at the time and, I suspect, rather tough. I made up my mind that she was going to be happy. If anybody cried in Robin’s hospital room, I’d ask them gently to please leave the room. Poor George. It just killed him. I’d have to say, ‘If you cry, you can’t stay.’” She said that her husband and his mother were the worst offenders. “They were just too softhearted.”
Barbara was forced many times to reexamine her decision not to tell her oldest son about his sister’s terminal illness. “I don’t know if that was right or wrong,” she told
The Washington Post
in 1999. “I mean I really don’t but I know he [Georgie] said to me several times, ‘You know, why didn’t you tell me?’ Well, it wouldn’t have made a difference . . . [And besides] we thought he was too young to cope with it.”
Barbara was implacably strong during Robin’s illness, whereas George was emotionally fragile. So much so that his good friend Lud Ashley stepped in as a kind of surrogate to support Barbara, visiting Robin on a regular basis and looking in on the little girl at night when Barbara had returned to the Walkers’ penthouse to sleep.
Raising money for his new oil venture brought George to New York frequently, and he always joined Barbara at the hospital, but the pitiful sight of his little daughter enveloped in tubes and so weak she could not even lift her hand to wipe her runny nose was sometimes more than he could bear. Despite his best intentions, George frequently broke down when he walked into his daughter’s room, and Barbara would make him leave until he could pull himself together.
“Poor George had the most dreadful time and could hardly stand to see her get a blood transfusion,” Barbara wrote in her memoir. “He would say that he had to go to the men’s room. We used to laugh and wonder if Robin thought he had the weakest bladder in the world. Not true. He just had the most tender heart.”
Only twenty-eight years old, Barbara had no one to turn to during this time. Her husband was traveling constantly for his new business venture. Her mother, from whom she had been estranged, was dead. Her father, now president of McCall Corporation, had remarried and was immersed in his new life. Many of her Texas friends had withdrawn from her, fearing, as many people do, such close proximity to cancer and death. She was not close to either of her brothers, and her older sister, Martha Rafferty, who frequently donated blood used for Robin’s many transfusions, was busy raising her own large family. Barbara found her greatest comfort in the company of the distressed and ailing who were all around her, and she bonded with other mothers in the hospital who were also overseeing the last days of their dying children.
The prickly part of her personality softened in the hospital. The raw toughness that could ruffle country-club sensibilities came through as firm resolve to the no-nonsense nurses. Barbara related well to the medical staff and placed all her confidence in their recommendations. When they suggested a risky operation to arrest the internal bleeding caused by the drugs Robin had been given, Barbara, who could not reach her husband, made the decision to go ahead, despite Dr. Walker’s advice to the contrary. She was hoping against hope that the surgery would buy Robin more time, but the little girl never came out of the operation. “One minute she was there, and the next she was gone,” Barbara wrote in her memoir. “I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body . . . [and never] felt the presence of God more strongly than at that moment.”
On the evening of October 11, 1953, George was en route to Manhattan when his daughter fell into a coma. Two months shy of her fourth birthday, she slipped away shortly after he arrived at the hospital. The next day he and Barbara went to Rye to play golf with her father.
“It was the first day we’d been out,” said Barbara. “We just got up and went out. Played golf. Didn’t tell anyone. I later thought that if people had seen us, they would have said, ‘Why are those people doing that?’ We just wanted to get away.”
That day
Greenwich Time
carried Robin’s obituary and said a private memorial service would be held at Christ Church Chapel. There was no funeral because the Bushes decided to leave their daughter’s organs to the scientists at Sloan-Kettering. Dorothy Bush and Lud Ashley later buried her in the Bush family plot in Greenwich, Connecticut, but George and Barbara did not attend.
Yet, from the day Robin died, she remained a part of the family. Barbara put her portrait, a gift commissioned by Dorothy Walker Bush, above the living-room mantel, and whenever she was asked how many children she had, she always included Robin in the count. This unnerved some of her friends, who didn’t know what to say or how to react in the face of such a tragedy. Barbara said she resented people for not mentioning Robin or for acting as if she had never existed. She vowed to have another daughter as soon as she could, and she kept getting pregnant until she did. Neil was born in 1955; Marvin in 1956. Finally, in 1959, after a miscarriage, Dorothy Walker Bush arrived, and Barbara, thirty-four, stopped having children.
It was many years before she or George could talk about their little girl’s death without crying, but the day finally came when Barbara could say, “I now look back at Robin as a blessing.”
During the long months of Robin’s hospitalization, Barbara’s strength emerged as never before, as did George’s frailty. But after their daughter died, the marital dynamic changed. Stripped to the emotional bone, Barbara fell to pieces. She cried constantly and tried to retreat into solitary sadness. George, who now functioned better than he had during his daughter’s excruciating illness, rallied his wife. It was his turn to carry them through the worst ordeal parents can endure, and he continually distracted her with friends and activities. Still, Barbara’s hair turned white, she ground her teeth at night, and she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. A heavy, mourning matron took possession of the large-boned body where once had lived an athletic young woman.
“He wouldn’t let me be alone,” she recalled many years later. “He held me in his arms, and he made me share it, and accept that his sorrow was as great as my own. He simply wouldn’t allow my grief to divide us . . . push us apart, which is what happens so often where there is a loss like that.”
Barbara frequently spoke of “other people who could not survive such a trauma without a divorce.” The truth is that no matter what marital strain she would endure as George’s wife, she never had to worry about the dissolution of her marriage. She had married a mommy’s man who was constitutionally incapable of doing anything that would dishonor his mother, and to Dorothy and Prescott Bush the one abomination that even God could not forgive was divorce.
Divorce was so repugnant to them that they actually shunned Prescott’s brother, James, when he left his first wife, Caroline Patterson, after nineteen years of marriage. They had three children, one of whom was killed in 1945 in the car James was driving.
James Bush left his first family to marry an elegant New York socialite named Janet Newbold Rhinelander Stewart, who had two children by two previous marriages. Exquisitely beautiful, Mrs. Stewart was on the same “Ten Best-Dressed Women” list as the Duchess of Windsor, and she wore pearls the size of eggs. She, too, came from a moneyed background but was far too glamorous for the midwestern likes of Prescott and Dorothy Bush. Rigorous in their rectitude, they refused to accept her as James’s legitimate wife. They never forgave him for leaving a woman whose “good family” was distantly related to the National Cash Register fortune. Divorce left no room for redemption with Prescott and Dorothy, and their children grew up very much aware that their parents had barred their uncle from their home because of his marital mistake. “They never spoke to him,” recalled Nancy Bush Ellis.
“It’s true,” said Serena Stewart, James Bush’s stepdaughter, who lived with him and her mother in St. Louis for the duration of their four-year marriage. “We never saw Prescott and his wife during that time. They never visited or called or wrote. Nothing.”
The cold shunning of their uncle was a powerful example for the five Bush children. While some of them, particularly Nancy and George, would eventually embark on long, serious extramarital affairs of their own—Nancy with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and George with his secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald—they would never sever their marriages. By the time George entered politics, he had developed the compartmentalized mentality of a Mafia don who keeps home and hearth separate from work and play. He infused that Mafia mind-set with a touch of Molière, who said, “It is public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.” George and Barbara understood and respected each other’s boundaries. Hers was home, where she reigned as the mother of his children; his was work, where he did what he did without threatening his wife’s security or social standing. Although George was not referring to sexual dalliances when he wrote to his friend Paul Dorsey in 1967, he did indicate how he segmented his personal and professional lives: “Because I keep my business and politics separate from my home life—usually that is. She [Barbara] is not informed on issues and intrigue—perhaps this is selfish on my part but we have a close, close relationship with the kids, et al, and I just want to have that oasis of privacy.”
In the fall of 1953, as Robin’s days were drawing to an end, Prescott Bush asked Barbara to accompany him to the Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich to see the small family plot he had purchased on a shady hillside. Next to a freshly planted dogwood tree he had had erected a modest granite headstone that said “BUSH.” As Barbara and her father-in-law paced off the site, she was genuinely touched. “That darling man bought that lot so Robin would have a place to rest.”
Barbara remembered the fifty-eight-year-old senator looking disapprovingly at some of the elaborate death mansions on top of the hill.
“I knew old so-and-so,” he said. “He certainly thought highly of himself, didn’t he, Bar?”
Prescott had no way of knowing then that his own tombstone would one day draw the same kind of unflattering observation, for he would be laid to rest nineteen years later under a pile of the most grandiose nouns his widow could bestow. After selecting a black-onyx gravestone rimmed with never-tarnish bronze, Dorothy, the family’s mythmaker, directed the following be inscribed in large raised never-tarnish bronze letters:
PRESCOTT S. BUSH
1895–1972
UNITED STATES SENATOR 1952–1963
LEADER, ATHLETE, SINGER, SOLDIER, BANKER, STATESMAN,
CHURCHMAN, COMPANION, FRIEND, FATHER,
HUSBAND EXTRAORDINARY.
After Robin’s burial in 1953, the Bush family plot would welcome Prescott (1972), Dorothy (1992), and Prescott’s brother, James (1978), who by then had left his third wife for another woman and alienated himself from almost everyone in the Bush family. His granite stone is shoved toward the bottom of the plot, barely noticeable in the grass, which is how the family treated him during his disgraceful last years. His death was “a great relief to all of us,” George admitted to the State Department official who shipped James Bush’s body home from the Philippines, where he died destitute in a veterans hospital. His uncle’s alcoholism, plus his many marriages and divorces, had embarrassed George and the family for years.
There was more than just embarrassment to George’s disdain. He wanted to keep hidden that his Uncle Jim, late in life, had embezzled $750,000; such a revelation could be politically damaging to George’s aspirations for high office. “No one in the family knew all the details of what happened,” Serena Stewart said. “I talked to Jim’s daughter, Shelley Bush Jansing, about it and she confirmed the embezzlement—we both knew the amount—but we didn’t know—and still don’t—how he did it and how he got away with it . . . Only George knows all those details and he would never tell anyone, not even Shelley . . . My mother, Jim Bush’s second wife, knew that he had embezzled three-quarters of a million dollars after the end of his third marriage [1970] and fled the country . . . By then he had been in banking for years and had been a director of the Export-Import Bank [1959–63] . . . so I guess he knew how to move money around.” A friend of Jim’s fourth and final wife said: “The money that Jim ran off with supposedly was Rockefeller money from accounts that Jim was handling as an investment manager.”