“George got into it right away,” recalled Bartlett. “The next day he called the White House and went in to make his pitch. After the President offered him some insignificant position, George said he’d rather have the UN because he felt that he could make friends for Nixon in a way that no one else could. At the same time, his unswerving loyalty would enable him to represent U.S. foreign policy the way Nixon wanted it represented. The President listened, and asked him to step outside for forty-five minutes. Nixon then summoned Haldeman and called Henry Kissinger [National Security Adviser] . . . and . . . forty-five minutes later he gave George the UN.”
It was a masterstroke on the part of Bartlett and Bailey because that appointment eventually led to a series of other appointments that elevated George Bush on to the national scene. At the time, though, the appointment was considered a blatant payoff for a political loser.
The New York Times
howled about putting someone with no qualifications into such a “highly important position” that had once been held by such illustrious people as Edward Stettinius, Henry Cabot Lodge, Adlai Stevenson, and Arthur J. Goldberg. The
Washington Star
lamented that a forty-seven-year-old “lame duck congressman with little experience in foreign affairs and less in diplomacy” would be given the nation’s highest ambassadorial post. The newspaper speculated that the only possible reason for such folly could be Nixon’s hope to blow life into Bush’s political future: “He could be trying to fill in the blanks in the handsome young Texan’s qualifications for national office with a crash education in foreign affairs and by providing the national exposure that will make the name George Bush a household word by 1972.”
Privately, the Secretary of State was horrified. “He’s a lightweight,” said William P. Rogers. Henry Kissinger agreed. He dismissed George as “soft,” “not sophisticated,” and “rather weak.” Of course, this made him ideal for the end run that Kissinger and Nixon had in mind for recognizing Red China. But even George’s closest friends were flabbergasted by his appointment.
“What the fuck do you know about foreign policy?” exclaimed Lud Ashley.
“Ask me that in 10 days,” said George, who had regained his breezy self-confidence. He said he would “cram” for whatever he needed to know to pass his Senate confirmation hearings and then emerge as an instant Foreign Service officer who was, in his flyboy slang, “good to go.”
The UN appointment had revived George’s moribund career. In addition, he acquired the title of Ambassador, plus a seat in Nixon’s cabinet; a salary of $42,500; a wonderful new residence in New York City (a nine-bedroom apartment in the Waldorf Towers that cost $55,000 a year); a staff of one hundred and eleven people, including a chauffeur, a chef, hotel maids and housekeepers, and full catering services; and an entertainment budget of $30,000 to do what he did best—give parties. Even Bush’s official biographer, Herbert Parmet, acknowledged that “his self-proclaimed credentials for taking on the UN job came down to loyalty, personality and the ability to mingle in the right circles.”
Unfortunately, George never mastered the foreign policy requirements of the job.
“He was an embarrassment,” said Sydney M. “Terry” Cone III, counsel to Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, and Hamilton, and the director of New York Law School. “I’m a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and I had lunch with him when he was the UN Ambassador. I was appalled. The man knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was my opinion that he had no concept of the world; no understanding of foreign policy. He was obviously a political appointee that Nixon had to do something for . . . I was ashamed that such a man was representing our country in the United Nations at a time when we needed someone of intelligence and stature. George Bush was only a meeter and a greeter.”
In his own diary, George appeared more preoccupied with personalities than policies. On March 20, 1971, he wrote that he had attended the funeral of Thomas Dewey with New York’s Senator Jacob Javits:
Javits is amazingly selfish. He handed a big envelope to the driver and told him while we were in the church to take the envelope to the Westbury Hotel. The driver looked slightly panicked, recognizing that in this long motorcade he couldn’t possibly do that and get back into line. When he explained this to Javits, he was slightly perturbed. This is very much like the time Javits raised hell with the people handling the baggage in Mexico when we were there on an antiparliamentary trip. He was pushy and not very pleasant.
On the same day George wrote about his Yale classmate New York Mayor John Lindsay: “John seems so darned arrogant and removed. It’s almost as if he were competitive or living on stage . . . it seems very peculiar . . . He is a very difficult, funny guy . . . very hard for me to read.”
George wrote the same thing about Ross Perot when he came to plead for prisoners of war: “Ross Perot is a difficult fellow to figure out. He has always been very friendly to me . . . but he is a very complicated man.”
In his diary from April 5, 1971, George described Secretary-General U Thant: “He sat there friendly but impassive. He is a difficult fellow to read—always tremendously polite to me, always very friendly, but showing lots of reserve.”
On April 19, 1971, George wrote: “Kissinger is a warm guy with a good sense of humor. He keeps telling me, ‘You are the President’s man.’ He is much more communicative with me than Bill Rogers [Secretary of State].”
On June 12, 1971, he blasted Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts:
Teddy Kennedy made a speech on the floor of the Senate . . . in which he said that Nixon wanted to prolong the end of the war until 1972 for political purposes to help get re-elected. To me this was one of the crassest, cruelest statements I had ever heard. When I gave a speech to the Andover Chamber of Commerce with a good press conference beforehand, I denounced the statement as cruel and mean. I can understand debate on the war, but I cannot understand somebody making a statement like that and yet the press let Teddy get away with it. They simply don’t jump him out as they would somebody else. It was irresponsibility at its worst, and yet he wasn’t damaged a bit by it, I am sure.
He complained about the social whirl:
We are going to have to cut down on some of these useless evenings. Tonight it was the Stuttgart Ballet. Actually, it was great fun, but it didn’t help the job any, it didn’t help the President any, and it didn’t help my ulcers any. I am very tired. I have never seen a job where there is such constant activity. There are so many things to do. There is one appointment after the other.
George could not bear to miss a party, even if he had to arrive late and improperly dressed. “I saw a bit of him at the UN when the last Taiwanese representative would invite George to dinner—that was during the days the Republicans were being good to us [the Taiwanese],” said Gene Young. “George tore into the dinner in his sailing clothes—rain gear and Top-Siders—and spent the whole night talking . . . he sounded like a Yale sophomore—yak, yak, yak . . . He wouldn’t stop talking . . . It was just yak, yak, yak . . . saying the most vapid things.”
George and Barbara entertained constantly. They hosted big ceremonial parties at least once a week and seated dinners almost every other night. They took diplomats to Greenwich for tea parties with George’s parents in their new home on Pheasant Lane. Others they took to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play, always sitting in his Uncle Herbie’s box. As one of three principal owners of the baseball team, Herbie had access to the choicest seats.
One issue that George frequently mentioned in his diary was relocating the UN outside of New York City. When his father was moderator of the Representative Town Meeting in Greenwich in 1946, Prescott had maneuvered to keep the UN out of Connecticut and establish its headquarters in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan. In 1971, George wrote:
New York, it seems to me, is the absolute “worst” place where it could be in the United States. The press gives a distorted view of America, the problems of the city give a distorted picture of America, and all in all if one were starting from scratch, it should not be here . . .
The Host Country problems are beginning to bug me . . . The crazy JDL [Jewish Defense League] let loose a bunch of frogs and mice which terrified the people in the building. Today the South African Consulate was bombed by black extremists. New York is a miserable place to have the UN. This is heretical to say in the Mission, but it is true.
On October 25, 1971, the UN voted to recognize Red China and give the People’s Republic of China the seat occupied by Taiwan, or Nationalist China. George had vowed in his Senate campaigns if that were to happen, he would advocate U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations. Now, as Nixon’s Ambassador, he had to argue for “dual representation” and plead for two seats: one in the Security Council, for Communist China, and one in the General Assembly for Taiwan. He had lobbied hard among the 129 missions for support and had thought he had enough delegates committed to the U.S. policy. But on the final count, he lost 59–55, with 15 countries abstaining. He took the defeat as a personal rebuke and said he was disgusted by the anti-American sentiments. “For some delegates—who literally danced in the aisles when the vote was announced—Taiwan wasn’t really the issue,” George said. “Kicking Uncle Sam was.”
When the Taiwanese Ambassador, Liu Chiegh, walked out of the hall with his delegation for the last time, George leaped up and caught him before he reached the door. Putting an arm around the man’s shoulder, George apologized for what had happened. Ambassador Chiegh said he felt betrayed by the organization his country had helped found and supported over the years. He also said he felt let down by the U.S. government. So did George, who had been barred from all foreign policy deliberations by the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department. He was especially embarrassed on the occasion of the UN vote because Kissinger was in Beijing making arrangements for Nixon’s trip to China.
For George the most enjoyable part of being U.S. Ambassador to the UN was talking with his father as a peer rather than a pupil. They discussed Vietnam, civil unrest, and the turbulence on campuses, especially at Yale. Although Prescott was opposed to expanding the war in Southeast Asia and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, he became exercised when Yale’s Calhoun College extended an invitation to Daniel Ellsberg to meet with students. Ellsberg had been accused of theft and conspiracy in disclosing to
The New York Times
the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret Department of Defense history of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971. Prescott did not approve of lending Yale’s prestige to a man who, he felt, had broken the law by making public classified information. “I can hardly think of anyone who is less deserving of such an honor,” Prescott wrote to Calhoun Master R.W.B. Lewis. In protest, Prescott resigned as associate fellow of Calhoun College, a position he had held for twenty-eight years.
By that time the former senator was battling the ravages of pipe smoking and binge drinking, which had finally compromised his health at the age of seventy-seven. For months he had been plagued with a racking cough that, in the spring, was diagnosed as lung cancer.
“It was during this time that he called me,” Joyce Clifford Burland remembered. “He said, ‘I want to see you for lunch.’ We met in New York City and talked about how much we loved singing. My former husband [Richard Barrett] and I and Wesley Oler had been part of the Kensington Four, a singing group that Pres assembled in Washington when his other singing partners had died. He was desolate when he lost them. We met every month to sing and share our passion for music. We did this for years. We even traveled to Hobe Sound when he was there in the winter. Pres taught us all the songs and arrangements he had used with the Silver Dollar Quartet. I was the only woman he had ever sung with, and I felt so proud that he thought I was good enough to be included. Although he was thirty years older than we were, there was no generational difference. When you were singing with Prescott, you were connected to his core . . . I absolutely adored the man . . . I would have laid down in traffic for him.
“After our lunch, we were walking down the street and he said that he had brought me something. ‘I want you to have my Whiffenpoof medallion,’ he said, placing it in my hands.
“I protested that something that precious belonged to his son Johnny Bush or someone else in his family. But Pres insisted. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to have it.’ Six months later he was dead. I realize now that he was saying good-bye and at the same time sparing me the sad burden of knowing he was dying. That’s the kind of man he was. Edwardian in the best sense of the word. He observed certain proprieties, and one was courage in the face of adversity.”
Several months before he died, Prescott altered his will with a few codicils. He left intact his $20,000 bequest to Yale for the Alumni Fund, but he reduced his bequest to Skull and Bones (RTA Incorporated) from $2,500 to $1,000. He also reduced his bequest to the Episcopal Church Foundation of New York City from $10,000 to $2,500. He remembered his private secretary in the U.S. Senate, Margaret Pace Harvey, and his administrative aide, David S. Clarke, with $5,000 each. But he was so angry at his brother James Smith Bush for divorcing his third wife, Lois Kieffer Niedringhaus, and running off with another woman that he disinherited him. Instead, Prescott left $3,000 apiece to the three children Jim had had with Niedringhaus. He left $140,000 to each of his own children, and the rest of his $3.5 million estate to his wife, Dorothy, with investments “to provide adequately for her maintenance, support, welfare and comfort.”
Prescott appointed two of his sons, Prescott junior and Jonathan James, to be his executors and stipulated that they serve “without fee or compensation.” He stated that they must employ the investment services of Brown Brothers Harriman and Company for the first five years after his death.