The Family Read online

  On September 18, 2001, I filed a FOIA request for information on James Smith Bush (1901–78), the black-sheep uncle of George Herbert Walker Bush. The FBI said there were no files. I appealed, knowing that James had undergone FBI clearance for his appointment to the Export-Import Bank in 1959 and for his reappointment in 1961. Four months later, on January 14, 2002, the Justice Department lawyers referred my request back to the FBI, which then managed to find the records they initially claimed not to have. Six months later, on July 24, 2002, I was informed that the files had to be processed and sent to the FBI’s Office of Public and Congressional Affairs for a “high visibility memo” to be prepared. This was explained as an administrative procedure by which public figures—President Bush (41) and President Bush (43)—were warned about the release of material. Six more months passed as the FBI returned none of my phone calls requesting information. Finally, on February 19, 2003, I hired a lawyer to appeal the delay. After receiving the lawyer’s letter, the FBI released the information. By then, it had taken me two years, seventeen letters, forty-two phone calls, and one lawyer to shake loose information on a man who had been dead for twenty-five years. The Bush family has been able to hold tight to its secrets because they have been aided in many cases by Bush-appointed bureaucrats.

  Not every piece of information was as hard fought, but the example illustrates the resistance I encountered in trying to fit together various pieces of the family puzzle. The Bushes are so invested in protecting their public image that they have airbrushed their family tree. Any unpleasant fact that detracts from the family’s wholesome appeal or reflects negatively on their values has been deleted. Historians cannot rely on the Bush-Walker family records released by the George Bush Presidential Library. There are simply too many errors and omissions, some of which appear to be intentional. The official family tree provided by the Bush archivists does not include the two mentally retarded daughters of John M. Walker, and lists only two of James Smith Bush’s wives, not all four of them; one of Ray Walker’s two wives is omitted, and George Herbert Walker III is listed with only two, instead of three, wives. These might seem like trivial details until you realize that in the Bush family, divorce, particularly more than one, is considered anathema.

  Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil Bush, brought this home when she asked if I would have lunch with her in New York City. We agreed to meet on April 1, 2003, at a quiet restaurant. When I arrived, the Chelsea Bistro on West Twenty-third Street was empty. Minutes later Sharon scampered in, a tiny blonde in a big mink coat and high-heeled mules. She hugged her fur coat.

  “My mother-in-law hates for me to wear this. She says it will make people think we’re rich.”

  “God forbid,” I said, laughing.

  Sharon was accompanied by Lou Colasuonno, a partner in Westhill Partners. A former journalist, this expert publicist was determined to help a client in distress. Sharon said that the Bush family had disowned her and few lawyers in Houston would handle her divorce. She was threatening to go public with the family secrets. Over a long lunch that afternoon and on the telephone later and again the next day, Sharon poured out her anguish about “being forced” to divorce the third son of George and Barbara Bush. Sharon later acknowledged that she had married the runt of the litter.

  “Neil informed me by e-mail that he was leaving me,” she said. “By e-mail! After twenty-three years of marriage and three children! He’s been having an affair with a woman who worked for Bar . . . The Bushes knew about the affair before I did. They even entertained the woman in their home . . . They encouraged their own son’s adultery . . . What kind of family values is that?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve tried everything to keep my marriage together. I’ve begged Bar to tell Neil to come back home to us. I’ve broken down in front of her. ‘Can’t you tell him to come back to us. Please. We need him. We’re a family. Please help me.’ Bar has been ice-cold. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Sharon. There is nothing I can do. This is between you and Neilsie.’ That’s what she and George call him. Neilsie. He would come back to us if she told him to. He’d do whatever she wanted. Bar runs the show. She’s much stronger than my father-in-law. Much. He’s really a very weak guy . . . But Bar won’t help me . . .

  “You’d think after all the infidelity she’s had to put up with in her own marriage she’d be more sympathetic to me, but she isn’t . . . She hates me because I let my daughter Lauren be a model. Bar was furious at me. She did not think that was right. She said it didn’t look good. It was too glitzy—too glamorous—for the image of the family values that the Bushes were supposed to represent.”

  Sharon unfolded a sordid tale of the men in the Bush family and the unfortunate women who married them: her husband’s use of prostitutes during his trips to Asia, his sexually transmitted disease, the extramarital affairs of Jeb Bush, and the drug use of her other brothers-in-law, including the President of the United States. She said about George W.: “He and Marvin did coke at Camp David when their father was President and not just once, either. This is a family of alcoholism, drug addiction, and even schizophrenia.”

  She returned again and again to the role of her rich and powerful in-laws, who, she felt, were forcing her to beg for her life. “I know you think the Bushes are such a good family, that they believe in God and all his teachings . . . I used to believe that about them, too, but I now know that they don’t practice what they preach . . . They’re letting Neil cut me off with only a thousand dollars a month in alimony. They’re making me sell my house. I have no way to support myself. I gave up working [as a schoolteacher] when I married Neil [1980] because Bush wives aren’t supposed to work . . . They’re supposed to raise children and do volunteer work and I did that . . . I’ve raised three children and contributed to every community I’ve lived in with Neil. That’s been my whole life . . . I’ve worked for charity all the years of my marriage . . . Now what do I do? When I asked him how I was supposed to live on a thousand dollars a month, Neil said, ‘Just get remarried.’ But, Kitty, I just can’t sell my body for money.”

  Sharon sobbed as she talked about having to move out of her home. “My father-in-law wants me to leave Houston . . . He said I’d be happier somewhere else, but if I insist on staying, he’ll buy me a smaller place so I can get my last child, Ashley, through high school, then I have to sell the house and give him all the money.”

  The thought of living a pinched life of grocery-store coupons brought on more tears. Life as a Bush daughter-in-law had cosseted Sharon with summers in Kennebunkport and cruises through the Greek islands on the yacht of a Bush family friend. In New York City, she stayed in the penthouse of famed Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens. She socialized with Veronica Hearst. She had Billy Graham on speed dial.

  When their divorce was final and Neil Bush remarried in March 2004, Sharon had managed to save her house and increase her alimony to twenty-five hundred dollars a month, but she lost the social status of being the former President’s daughter-in-law. She will probably become one of the invisible wives on the family tree, no longer even a footnote to history. She has learned the hard way that there is not much room for a divorcée in the Bush family dynasty.

  I, too, learned a lesson writing about this family. Some days I felt like Alice in Wonderland because what I uncovered seemed unreal and did not square with established perceptions. I began second-guessing myself, asking, “How can this be true?” I watched people cringe with fear and others fall under the spell of the family’s power and wealth and influence. Then I remembered the line spoken by the actor Melvyn Douglas in the movie Hud about the mesmerizing power of a public image: “Little by little the country changes just by looking at the men we admire.”

  The country has changed quite a bit since I began writing this book and will continue to change as a result of both Bush presidencies. I hope that the research put forth in these pages will lead you to the essential truths that motivate, explain, and define the family as the American political dynas
ty responsible for these changes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flora Sheldon Bush was fuming. Her thirteen-year-old son, Prescott, was supposed to have spent that August of 1908 at a New Jersey sports resort with a classmate and his family. Flora’s husband, Samuel Prescott Bush, had sent the boy there to play tennis, while Flora, their two daughters, Mary and Margaret, their younger son, Jim, Samuel’s mother, Harriet, and the family nanny were spending the month at the East Bay Lodge in Osterville, Massachusetts. But Prescott had abruptly been sent home by his friend’s mother, Mrs. Dods. Flora’s regal mother-in-law, Harriet Fay Bush, urged her to demand an explanation and an apology from Mrs. Dods, but Flora, whose social instincts were unerring in these matters, restrained herself. “I am not ready for that,” she wrote to her husband. “I think I may hear from Mrs. D. and if so, you must forward the letter . . . for nothing has ever happened that raised my indignation more than her summary dismissal of Prescott.”

  A few days later Flora again mentioned her vexation: “Your mother is quite sure I ought to write Mrs. Dods. It scarcely seems right. I resent it all more than anything I have experienced.”

  The unexpected change in Prescott’s plans upset his father, who worried that the incident might have been Prescott’s fault. If so, that might affect his acceptance into St. George’s School in the fall. But after hearing her son’s side of the story, Flora tried to assure her husband that the youngster was not entirely to blame:

  I am sorry you are disappointed in Prescott and yet I am not surprised. He is of course a boy of very tender years. And I sometimes have a feeling of great dread at sending him away to school and yet I do feel that the strict discipline may be just the thing. He was glad to get back to us again but he misses his sport at Osterville—There are no tennis courts here but poor grass ones—he said if he had his clubs he would play golf.

  The matter of Prescott’s departure was finally cleared up when Samuel telegrammed Flora that the much-maligned Mrs. Dods had indeed written to explain herself. Samuel forwarded the letter from Ohio, and Flora was almost comforted to learn that Mrs. Dods had taken ill in New Jersey. “It was the only excuse I could possibly have accepted,” she wrote. “Her letter was as satisfactory as anything could be + while I do not justify the haste I at least can appreciate her anxiety to get rid of the young company—as summer cottages are not the quiet hospitals one needs in case of illness.”

  A few days later, Prescott received his golf clubs. And Samuel must have been somewhat reassured to receive a letter from his seventy-nine-year-old mother extolling the teenager, if not without reservation:

  I was much impressed with Prescott’s appearance and manner as he jumped out of the carriage + came to speak to me—he is a handsome boy + a well developed figure for [illegible] growth. I trust the time will soon come when he will—if I can use the word—slough off the pernicious habit of fooling. If I had not seen its results in Aunt Virginia’s family perhaps it would not seem to be so fraught with danger, but with you and Flora to guard him and the uniform discipline of a school he will doubtless find its disadvantages himself. It makes friends with the boys but antagonizes the teachers as I also know by personal experience but little can be done except . . . protect him until he is wise enough to check it.

  Grandmother Bush was more perceptive than perhaps even she could have realized. Her grandson’s “pernicious habit of fooling” was something that would remain with him for years. At times, the result would be humorous; at other times, there would be serious repercussions.

  Prescott could simply not be suppressed. He possessed all the precocious gifts of a firstborn son who was indulged and adored by his parents. He had inherited humor, dramatic flair, and sociability from his mother, while he exhibited his father’s height, good looks, and graceful athleticism. The surprising effect of her “splendid boy” was not lost on Flora. “I have had one new experience,” she wrote to her husband, “and that is the devotion of girls 18 or 19 years old to Prescott. He is having a charming time dancing with them + going swimming + indeed walking or running. Prescott + one or two boys a little older are all the boys there are + you may imagine their popularity. I shall be glad to have him away from the girls. He is very kind to me + indeed to us all—but—of course, being in such demand for any length of time might turn his head.”

  Even his grandmother’s efforts could not rein him in, and she was someone to be reckoned with. Already widowed for nineteen years when she wrote the note analyzing Prescott, Harriet Fay Bush was born in Savannah, Georgia, of illustrious ancestors who fertilized the family tree with connections to British royalty. On occasion Mrs. Bush could be as starchy as Queen Victoria, but Flora loved her mother-in-law and fussed about the elderly woman’s frailty. “I wonder how she keeps up at all,” Flora wrote. “She has had so many wretched days + people tire and annoy her so very much that I have felt a number of times that it was almost too much for her.”

  Flora need not have worried. Behind that swansdown fan fluttered a steel magnolia who would outlast most of her relatives, including her daughter-in-law. As sturdy as the kudzu of Georgia, Harriet Fay Bush would live to be ninety-four years old.

  During the summer of 1908, the Bushes were completing a two-and-a-half-story colonial-style seventeen-room home on Roxbury Road overlooking the bluff of Marble Cliff in Columbus, Ohio. They had purchased the 2.7-acre site for $12,500 the year before, and their letters were filled with details of the seven-bayed windows, five dormered bedrooms, upstairs ballroom, cedar-lined storage room, and awninged porch atop the first-floor sunroom.

  “I still remember that house, and I’m ninety-five now,” recalled Indiana Earl in 2001. “Of course, it was fitting for Samuel Bush to live there because he was extremely wealthy and viewed with enormous respect in the community. The Bushes’ big white house sat at the top of a hill looking down on a marble quarry across the street from Sylvio Casparis’s castle . . . Mr. Bush was well-to-do wealthy but not as really rich as old Mr. Casparis, who owned the Marble Cliff Quarries.”

  As the daughter of a prominent dry-goods merchant, Flora understood how to run a fine home and was delighted when her husband, the president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company as well as one of the founders of the Scioto Country Club of Columbus, bought land in Grandview Heights near where her brothers and sisters were building their large homes. Flora oversaw the architectural plans for the new house and attended to the details of paying various merchants. “This bill of Sargents is a terror,” she wrote. “Certainly changing those panes is pretty expensive.” Her letters brimmed with eagerness to see the construction completed in time for her family to move in the fall. “We shall all be together and be so very happy,” she put in one of her notes.

  In an era before such modern conveniences as washing machines and dryers, Flora expressed concern for a satisfactory cellar that would be “clean and nice and serve as an excellent drying room for laundry.” She acceded to her husband’s love of flowers and his desire for larger gardens to accommodate more plantings, but insisted on her own way in other areas. “About the fireplace—it must be done,” she wrote. “There is no doubt about it. I am willing to compromise on the red. My only choice has been a suitable brown and if that cannot be found I shall certainly never give you cause to regret the red.”

  As pleased as Flora was to be at Cape Cod with her children and away from the noisy builders and summer heat of the Midwest, she missed her forty-four-year-old husband, who was known to intimates by his middle name. She began each letter with loving salutations such as “My Dear Prescott” or “My Dearest Boy.” Irrepressibly affectionate at the age of thirty-six, she signed off with endearments such as “Adieu, my darling Boy,” “I love you my darling and am thinking of you constantly,” “I love you sweetheart dearly. Don’t get on too well without me,” “Please miss me a little, my dearest.”

  Nor was she coy about her desire for the man she called “Bushy.” In one letter she wrote:

  I should li
ke to have you down here fore [sic] a week after every one has gone—+ we should lead an Adam + Eve existence—bathe and roam about—We could have a very happy time near to nature’s heart . . . I so seldom see a person I desire for a friend. Of course it is because you + I are so much to each other. We do not need the others—I surely need little dear when I am sure of you—but it is the most vital thing in the world that you stay by me.

  She also wrote about her own pleasure at “bathing,” especially on the rare days she dared to ditch her petticoats, whalebone collars, and fishnet hose. One day, she said, was absolutely perfect because “we went in without skirts or stockings and the sensation was delightful.” And Flora burbled on about the children’s swimming lessons: “Such progress as they are making is truly delightful. Diving or rather jumping into the water and swimming right off—it is fine—I would give anything to have that love for the water or rather the faith—for I do love it—but to be without fear—there is nothing like it.”

  Flora seemed quite ready to leave behind the nineteenth-century discomforts of carriages and embrace the new invention of the automobile. As she wrote to her husband, “There is only one comfortable way to get about and that is in a motor car—such a vastly cleaner mode of travel in this part.” That was the year Henry Ford introduced his Model T, which sold for $850.