Prescott Bush had no publhis crusade. But the Wisconsin Senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came into Conneic ties to the notorious Joe McCarthy, and appeared to be neutral aboutcticut 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 astatement 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.
Not only was the American Eugenics Society itself headquartered at Yale, but all parts of this
undead fascist movement had a busy home at Yale. The coercive psychiatry and sterilization
advocates had made the Yale/New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School their laboratories for
hands-on practice in brain surgery and psychological experimentation. And the Birth ControlLeague was there, which had long trumpeted the need for eugenical births--fewer births for parents (^)
with inferior '' bloodlines. Prescott's partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was eugenics advocate Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School. Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates of sterilization of unfit '' or unnecessary '' people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush.) But the Birth Control League was public--just about then it was changing its name to the euphemistic Planned Parenthood. ''
Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being an
activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election by
about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes. He and his family blamed the defeat on the expose@aa. The
defeat was burned into the family's memory, leaving a bitterness and perhaps a desire for revenge.
In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote about that 1950
election: `My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day,revealed' that my father was involved with Planned Parenthood.... Mpolitical observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with theany (^)
birth controllers to cost him the election.... ''@s1@s1
Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican candidates fared well in Connecticut. When
he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the outcome to the blind whims of the public.