Word: prescott
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...went to war and became a hero, came home and became a husband, went to Yale and became a star: Phi Beta Kappa, baseball-team captain, fraternity president, Skull and Bones member--all in less than four years and always upholding the family code. At supper with parents Prescott and Dorothy, boys were expected to wear ties and use the right fork. There was lots of love but no sloppy affection--and certainly no sass, much less open rebellion. "See, Senior was never a child," a family friend argues. "He grew up always doing what Prescott expected. He never rebelled...
...formidable as Prescott was--6 ft. 4 in., movie-star handsome, a Wall Street legend and Connecticut Senator--it was Dorothy Walker Bush who pruned and staked the shrubbery. President Bush once described his mother, a championship-tennis player, as a "perfectionist, and a fierce competitor." She kept the Ping-Pong table in the entry hall of the Greenwich, Conn., house--the games were always front and center. Her rules? Never brag. Never quit. Never let 'em know you're hurting. Be honest. Be kind. Care about the other guy--help him. Don't look down on anyone. Compete hard...
...sooner won than the new generation began to make its moves. Jeb had his eye on the Florida Governor's mansion, W. on Texas. But first there was a piece of the family code that his mother insisted he honor, one handed down all the way from Prescott, who made a fortune on Wall Street, through Dad, who struck it rich in the oil business. "My dad would talk about my grandfather's lesson," W. says, "which is that before you enter public service, you go out and make some money and take care of your family. But my grandfather...
...come a long way from Prescott and Dorothy of Greenwich, but the path looked a lot like a huge circle on the morning of his inauguration in 1995. His dad passed the family torch to his firstborn, presenting W. with a pair of cufflinks that his own father Prescott had given him when he went off to war. He had called them "my most prized possession." "At first I didn't think about the continuity, the grandfather part," Bush says, recalling that busy, glorious day. "The main thing I thought was that it was from my dad. He was saying...
Along with a set of cufflinks and a sense of duty, Prescott Bush passed along something else that is still at work today: an addiction to politics that would not subside even after leaving office. After less than two terms in the Senate, Prescott retired in 1962 for health reasons. He had suddenly begun to lose weight, and a doctor told him, "You'd be a fool to run." So Prescott complied, a decision he would regret. "Once you've had the exposure to politics that I had," he said later, "...it gets in your blood, and then when...