Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the
Papacy.
Prescott's 1950 defeat still rankled, as shown by Bush's extraordinary gesture in evoking
it during testimony he gave on the other side of Capitol Hill before Senator Gruening's
subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee on November 2, 1967.
Bush's vengeful tirade is worth quoting at length:
"I get the felling that it is a little less unfashionable to be in favor of birth control and planned
parenthood today than it used to be. If you will excuse one personal reference here: My father,
when he ran for the US Senate in 1950, was defeated by 600 or 700 votes. On the steps of several
Catholic Churches in Connecticut, the Sunday before the election, people stood there passing out
pamphlets saying, 'Listen to what this commentator has to say tonight. Listen to what this
commentator has to say.' That night on the radio, the commentator came on and said, "Of interest
to voters in Connecticut, Prescott Bush is head of the Planned Parenthood Birth Control League,'
or something like this. Well, he lost by about 600 votes and there are some us who feel that this
had something to do with it. I do not think that anybody can get away with that type of thing any
more."The Harriman family sponsored the creation of the eugenics movement in the United
States, which successfully campaigned for the mass sterilization of the "feeble-minded"
and "racially inferior" during the 1920s--practices later copied, not originated, by the
Nazis. As part of this campaign, the Harrimans helped organize a series of international
eugenics conferences. At the 1932 conference, held at the Museum of Natural History in
New York, the guest of honor was none other than Dr. Ernst Rudin, the head of the
German Society for Racial Hygiene, who, just a few years later, drafted the Nazi
miscegenation laws against te Jews, gypsies, and Slavs.
Among the Americans who rubbed shoulders with Rudin at the 1932 conference was
Gen. William Draper, a New York investment banker and close personal friend of
Prescott Bush, who became one of the most influential crusaders for radical population
control measures. He campaigned endlessly for zero population growth, and praised the
Chinese Communists for their "innovative" methods of achieving that goal. Draper's most
influential outlet was the Population Crisis Committee (PCC)-Draper Fund, set up in
1965 by Hugh Moore, who had taken over the Human Betterment Association, a leading
eugenics outfit, in 1937, renaming it the Association for Voluntary Sterilization.
In 1967-68, a PCC-Draper Fund offshoot, the Campaign to Check the Population
Explosion, ran a nationwide advertising campaign hyping the population explosion fraud,
and attacking those--particularly at the Vatican--who stood in the way of radical
population control.
In a 1971 article, Draper likened the developing nations to an animal reserve,'' where, when the animals become too numerous, the park rangersarbitrarily reduce one or
another species as necessary to preserve the balanced environment for all other animals.
But who will be the park ranger for the human race?,'' he asked.Who will cull out the
surplus in this country or that country when the pressure of too many people and too few
resources increases beyond endurance? Will the death-dealing Horsemen of the