Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared regularly for Prescott's campaign. None of this was
particularly effective, however, with the voting population.
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 Control League 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. The defeat was burned into the family's memory, leaving 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.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters
were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election.... ''
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.
Prescott Bush moved into action again in 1952 as a national leader of the push to give the
Republican presidential nomination to Gen. Dwight D. (`` Ike '') Eisenhower. Among the
other team members were Bush's Hitler-era lawyer John Foster Dulles, and Jupiter
Islander C. Douglas Dillon.