When they`re side by side, the resemblance is remarkable. The same small and intense blue eyes, similarly chiseled features with a patrician smile parting thin, delicate lips. Similar, even to the full head of hair that`ll always be more blond than gray.
Dorothy Walker Bush named her second son after her father, George Herbert Walker, but the child who would be president inherited more from his mother than her looks and family name.
”Her philosophy was give your all, try your hardest, do your best,”
said Nancy Bush Ellis, the president`s only sister. ”Mother is religious and not just on Sunday. She was always reminding us to do unto others, to share, reminding us to consider other people`s feelings.”
Those who read newspapers or watch TV news know that two times a year the president helps the first mother into or out of an Episcopal church in Kennebunkport, Maine, or Hobe Sound, Fla., her summer and winter homes for decades. Most know little else about this woman who raised five children, including one of the world`s most powerful men, and who is revered by her large family and close circle of friends.
”We are all better people after being with Mrs. Bush,” said First Lady Barbara Bush, a daughter-in-law for 46 1/2 years. ”She always sees the good in people, and they strive to be as good as she thinks they are. A rare person.”
Dorothy Bush, who will be 90 on Monday, is frail and mostly stays at home, where she is cared for by round-the-clock nurses, a companion and a tiny black poodle named Petey.
Aside from a Thursday-morning Bible class in Hobe Sound, an occasional early dinner at her brother`s house next door or a late afternoon ride in a golf cart when daughter Nancy was in town, last winter, she rarely left the breezy pink bungalow she and her husband, Prescott, bought in Hobe Sound some 30 years ago after he had served 10 years in the U.S. Senate.
A senator`s wife, a president`s mother. Those are the public sides of Dorothy Walker Bush. The private life of Mrs. Prescott Bush, as she enjoyed being known before her husband`s death in 1972, primarily was spent as captain of the family ship.
She made the decisions, kept the peace and taught her children kindness, humility, competitiveness and duty. The Prescott Bush family ship, Nancy Ellis said as she knocked on wood in their Hobe Sound living room, sailed on beautiful, glassy seas.
”Mother would be the first to acknowledge she was enormously lucky.”
She was born into a life of gentle privilege on July 1, 1901, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, who in 1920 helped create the amateur golf competition between the United States and Britain that bears his name: the Walker Cup Match.
Her grandfather had made a fortune in dry goods in St. Louis and bought a huge tract of land in Kennebunkport, where he and his family built summer homes. Dottie was born there, and there she has spent every summer.
The Walkers lived in St. Louis but traveled extensively. In the fall, her father, a financier, would load his private train cars with family, friends and servants and lead the entourage to Duncannon Plantation in South Carolina. At the huge old house built in 1820, they spent many Thanksgivings and Christmases, hunting on the 10,000 acres that were part of the plantation, five miles west of the little town of Snelling.
Dorothy was a fine golfer, shooter and horsewoman, which made her father- an excellent golfer, hunter and polo player-proud. But he didn`t believe girls should go to college.
”He thought college made women tough, argumentative and bluestockings,” Nancy recalled with a laugh. Dorothy longed to join a friend at Vassar College, but she had to settle for Miss Porter`s Finishing School in Connecticut and six months in France with an aunt. Some 20 years later she sent her only daughter to Vassar.
It wasn`t long after Dorothy and her older sister, also named Nancy, returned to St. Louis from their Paris adventures that Dottie met the man who won her heart. Prescott Bush was six years older-he had finished Yale and served two years as captain in the Army in World War I-and was working in St. Louis when he befriended Nancy Walker.
One afternoon when Prescott was over for tea, Dorothy bounced in ”blond and breathless after a tennis game,” as her daughter recounted the family story. ”He spotted a kindred spirit.”
He was smitten immediately with this pretty girl who loved athletic competition as much as he did, but it took Dorothy a little while to realize it was a good match.
They were married the month after she turned 20, and her father built a bungalow for them at Kennebunkport, where she still spends every July and August.
A year after they were married they had their first son, Prescott, followed two years later by another, George. Two years later, Nancy came along. The family moved several times as Prescott`s career in finance was building, but they eventually settled in a nine-bedroom brown-shingle house on a hill in Greenwich, Conn., which is still home to Dorothy Bush.
The Walker clan continued to convene in Duncannon for holidays after Dorothy married and had children, but the family sold the plantation after World War II. Eventually, most of the land was sold for commercial purposes, but the homestead-furniture, legends and all-was acquired in 1952 by a family of South Carolinians.
”We`ve left the holes in the ceiling in the dining room where Mr. Walker shot at a wasp that had stung him,” said Suzanne McMillan, who raised five children of her own at Duncannon.
The house, a two-story wooden structure with eight bedrooms and five bathrooms, was spared Gen. William T. Sherman`s torch in the Civil War, the story goes, because a woman was nursing a sick child.
Two more Bush sons, Johnny and Bucky, were born after the family settled in their comfortable nest in Greenwich. Dorothy had her first child when she was 21; her last, the year she turned 37.
Dorothy Bush hated selfishness. She despised carelessness. Toys were never to be left outside. She always reminded the children how hard their father worked for all the nice things they had. She knitted sweaters. And she played games.
”She was very much a member of the Walker clan-competitive, athletic, coordinated, keen, determined,” said Nathaniel Reed of Hobe Sound, who has known the Bushes for many years. ”She insisted on perfect sportsmanship: You won or lost with the same smile, the same high standards.”
Vigorous and strong, Dorothy used to join the boys` baseball games, turning singles into doubles, she was so quick around the bases. She struck out George, his brothers and their friends, and she could beat just about anyone who picked up a tennis racket against her.
She loved quail shooting, playing golf and swimming in the cold ocean off Maine. If the game was tiddlywinks, backgammon or croquet, Dorothy was in the middle of it.
Summers in Maine were glorious family affairs, Nancy said. Their mother organized picnics, treasure hunts, bonfires and cookouts.
The latest fashions and fancy jewels meant nothing to Dorothy.
”She hated shopping,” Nancy said. Dorothy`s mother, Loulie, used to send her a large check for her birthday, and she might leave it stuck on a pincushion for weeks without caring to spend it. She never was one to fuss over interior design decisions. She was easily satisfied with things functional, traditional and durable.
Prescott Bush became a partner in the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. He held public office in Greenwich for 17 years before deciding to run for the U.S. Senate after most of the children were grown.
He served 10 years in the Senate, and Dorothy wrote a column for Connecticut newspapers about goings-on in Washington. They lived in Georgetown and thoroughly enjoyed the political life. Prescott Bush was known as one of the wealthiest men in the Senate and a moderate Republican who generally supported President Dwight Eisenhower.
National politics and Wall Street high finance never took the Bushes far from a life based simply on family and old friends. Prescott, also a fine golfer, sang in a quartet, and he and Dorothy enjoyed songfest evenings with friends.
”They made a remarkable pair,” Reed observed. ”They were so supportive of each other, even in ordinary conversations.”
”They were suited,” Nancy said. ”They shared the same interests. And Mother really liked Dad`s hard-working life and was proud of all the things he did for his community.”
Of course, Dorothy contributed too. In the 1930s she was one of the Greenwich women who organized and ran a day-care center for working mothers. During World War II she volunteered for the motor corps, a group organized to drive people to safety in case of a national emergency.
”She knew all about carburetors and cylinders,” Nancy said.
”She was always very conscious of social responsibility to others: your fellow man, your fellow man, your fellow man,” Reed said. ”Right out of the Episcopalian Prayer Book, but also warm, loving, attentive and cheerful.”
Prescott and Dorothy celebrated 51 years of marriage in the summer of 1972. Soon afterward, doctors told the family that Prescott was dying of cancer.
After her husband had spent many difficult nights in a New York hospital, Dorothy told his doctors she longed to spend a night with him, that maybe he would rest better. To her surprise, they agreed, and she slept in his room. The next day her husband died, and the glow in her life dimmed forever.
”Life was never the same,” Nancy said. ”She was a good scout and knew enough not to complain. But life was not as sparkling as it was when he was alive.”
Even without her husband, Dorothy Bush has continued for nearly 20 years her seasonal migration from Greenwich to Hobe Sound in November, back to Greenwich in May, then to Kennebunkport in July and back to Greenwich in September. Her five children have given her 16 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren, all of whom call her Granny.
When son George announced in 1979 that he would run in the Republican primary for the presidential nomination, she stepped in to help him campaign because she always had enjoyed working for her husband.
She and Nancy made watercress sandwiches wrapped in tea towels and served them with white wine. They charged people $150, which still makes Nancy laugh. (George Bush withdrew in favor of Ronald Reagan in the primary, offering Reagan his ”wholehearted support,” and was named vice president on the Republican ticket that fall.)
Dorothy was proud of her son when he won the presidency in 1988, but she always had believed her children would do well. If they didn`t, it didn`t matter. She loved them all anyway.
This summer, the president will throw a party in Kennebunkport to honor his mother on her 90th birthday. It`ll be what she always enjoyed the most: a raucous family gathering, some games and plenty of laughter.
”The President really loves his mother,” Nancy said. ”Of course, all the boys did. But with the President, it was something special.”
