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Prescott Bush

buddy of Ike, convinced him to choose rmn? hydra p 17

palast bbc video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m51hKJgwQEo&feature=fvw

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SrcWtch

Prescott Sheldon Bush

From SourceWatch

Prescott Sheldon Bush was born May 15, 1895, in Columbus (Franklin County), Ohio, and died October 8, 1972, in New York City. Prescott married Dorothy Walker on August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport (York County), Maine.[1]

Prescott's parents were Samuel Prescott Bush, born October 4, 1863, in Brick Church, New Jersey (died February 8, 1948, in Columbus, Ohio). Samuel married Flora Sheldon on June 20, 1894, in Columbus. Flora was born March 17, 1872, in Franklin, Ohio (died September 4, 1920) in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.[2]

Prescott S. Bush "received a B.A. from Yale University in 1917 and completed his Army career in 1919. Bush joined the firm of Brown Brothers and Company became a partner in 1930 ... A resident of Greenwich, CT, Bush was elected as a member of its representative town meeting. In 1933 he was elected as moderator, a post to which he was re-elected until his election to the United States Senate in 1952. Bush announced his intention not to run for re-election in 1961."[3]

Prescott S. Bush was the first in a line of Bush men who were tapped at Yale University to become members of the Skull & BonesSociety. Prescott was followed by his son George Herbert Walker Bush and grandson George Walker Bush.

Timeline: Political Dynasty from CBSNews

Prescott Bush Dinner: "the state [of Connecticut] Republican Party's annual fund-raiser."[5]

Other Related SourceWatch Resources

External links

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Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics in 1950, as his partners took control of the levers of governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers Harriman, he ran against Connecticut’s William Benton for a seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was for a two-year unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous Senator.)

In those days, Wisconsin’s drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was making a circus-like crusade against communist influence in Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State Department personnel, politicians and Hollywood figures. He generally left unscathed the Wall Street and London strategists who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist dictatorship–like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left and right.

Prescott Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe McCarthy, and appeared to be neutral about his crusade. But the Wisconsin Senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came into Connecticut 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 a statement 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 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@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…. Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the 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.

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.

Dillon and his father were the pivots as the Harriman-Dulles combination readied Ike for the presidency. As a friend put it: “ When the Dillons … invited [Eisenhower] to dinner it was to introduce him to Wall Street bankers and lawyers. ”@s1@s2

Ike’s higher-level backers believed, correctly, that Ike would not interfere with even the dirtiest of their covert action programs. The bland, pleasant Prescott Bush was in from the beginning: a friend to Ike, and an original backer of his presidency.

On July 28, 1952, as the election approached, Connecticut’s senior U.S. Senator, James O’Brien McMahon, died at the age of 48.*

This was extremely convenient for Prescott. He got the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator at a special delegated meeting, with backing by the Yale-dominated state party leadership. Now he would run in a special election for the suddenly vacant Senate seat. He could expect to be swept into office, since he would be on the same electoral ticket as the popular war hero, General Ike. By a technicality, he would instantly become Connecticut’s senior Senator, with extra power in Congress. And the next regularly scheduled senatorial race would be in 1956 (when McMahon’s term would have ended), so Prescott could run again in that presidential election year–once again on Ike’s coattails!

With this arrangement, things worked out very smoothly. In Eisenhower’s 1952 election victory, Ike won Connecticut by a margin of 129,507 votes out of 1,092,471. Prescott Bush came in last among the statewide Republicans, but managed to win by 30,373 out of 1,088,799 votes case, his margin nearly 100,000 behind Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns.

In Eisenhower’s 1956 reelection, Ike won Connecticut by 303,036 out of 1,114,954 votes, the largest presidential margin in Connecticut’s history. Prescott Bush managed to win again, by 129,544 votes out of 1,085,206–his margin this time 290,082 smaller than Eisenhower’s.@s1@s3

In January 1963, when this electoral strategy had been played out and his second term expired, Prescott Bush retired from government and returned to Brown Brothers Harriman.

http://tarpley.net/online-books/george-bush-the-unauthorized-biography/chapter-4-the-center-of-power-is-in-washington/

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uk guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade.The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz.The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situationFoster Dullesis insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor".

He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.  http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-America-Stranglehold-Corporate-Religious/dp/0975290681

   see also several online interview

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes".

Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".

Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.

Biography

Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.

However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

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http://hubpages.com/hub/The_Bush-Nazi_scandal_by_John_Loftus_former_Federal_Prosecutor

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The Bush heritage is something closer to the Puritan stereotype. The presidential line descends from James Smith Bush (1825–1889), whose connection to Yale and the Episcopal clergy dates from the 1840s, and who married into a distinguished Concord, Massachusetts, family. James Bush left the law for the ministry, which he served in Orange, New Jersey, San Francisco, and Staten Island.

It is with J. S. Bush that we first spot the intensity of duty and principle that is one powerful strain in the Bush ethos. This struggle comes through in the two books of sermons he published, More Words About the Bible (1883) and Evidence of Faith (1885). As the second title suggests, the Reverend Bush was divided between reason and belief. He thought that Christianity needed a rational basis, not an appeal to miracles, and he lost his respect for an Episcopal hierarchy he thought detached from the use of intellect and true spirituality. Under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Bush resigned his parish in Staten Island and moved to Concord in 1883. He was on his way to leaving the Episcopal Church and becoming a Unitarian. According to his Yale obituary, it was anguish over this decision that killed him at the age of sixty-five.

From J. S. Bush on, father-son relationships on the Bush side of the family follow a distinct pattern of rebellious emulation. Sons seek their own paths to the paternal destinations of financial independence and political accomplishment. Unlike Walker men, Bush men never simply join the family firm. Walker sons tend to succumb in a contest of wills with their fathers. Bush sons follow their fathers while convincing themselves they are starting from scratch. As Jeb once put it, the Bush kids grew up believing they “weren’t crap” (meaning that they were crap) until they’d gone out and done something on their own. The Walker kids were raised to believe they were crap in any case, and would have a chair waiting for them at the G. H. Walker & Co. office in St. Louis. Running through the conjoined family is a confusion between high personal accomplishment, which both Bushes and Walkers expect, and hereditary privilege, which both sides assume, but the Bushes disclaim.

Rather than follow his father to Yale and into the ministry, Samuel Prescott Bush (1863–1948) studied business at Stevens College and in the 1890s went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Columbus, Ohio. But Samuel P. Bush embodies the family type as much as the seeking transcendentalist he rebelled against: he is described as austere and frugal, a rather cold man, but with a powerful sense of social obligation. He went on to pursue a successful career in the railroad equipment business, eventually running a Rockefellerbacked company called Buckeye Steel, where he was known for his community-mindedness and benevolent paternalism toward his workers, many of whom were African-American.

Samuel’s oldest son, Prescott Bush, followed the family pattern in rejecting his father’s chosen home (the Midwest), his calling (manufacturing), and his politics (Democratic). Later in life, after he had achieved his own financial independence and political success as a two-term senator from Connecticut, Prescott often said — and seemed actually to believe — that he had been required to make his own way in the world because his father couldn’t afford to support him. Though Prescott returned to work briefly for his father after college, the two were never close, and according to his own children, Prescott never spoke about him. When Samuel P. Bush died in 1948, Prescott turned down his share of the inheritance. Temperamentally, father and son seem to have been very much alike.

 Sent to St. George’s, an elite boarding school on the East Coast, Prescott was elected head prefect his final year and contemplated a career in the ministry. After he arrived at Yale in 1913, he epitomized the college career depicted in Stover at Yale, the 1912 novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald called a “textbook” for his generation. Like Stover, Prescott came from the Midwest, learned to navigate a social system revolving around sports and secret societies, and triumphed by being tapped for Skull and Bones. At a time when Ivy League sports were treated as having national significance, he collected varsity letters in baseball, hockey, and golf. A powerful bass, he was a fixture of the Yale Men’s Choir, the Glee Club, and the Whiffenpoofs. As for Stover, his college years paved his path to business success and defined the rest of his life.

In Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Prescott and fellow members of the Yale Battalion“crooked” a skull they claimed was Geronimo’s from an Apache cemetery for the Bones temple — a prank that would have repercussions for his son and grandson when the tribe sought to have it returned. From there, Prescott shipped out to France, where he served in the trenches near Verdun for the last ten weeks of the First World War. The key episode in his military career — and perhaps in his entire early life — was a missed joke that embarrassed the family. Prescott wrote a satiric letter home about his Davy Crockett–like exploits; he spun a satiric yarn about saving the lives of the Allies’ three most famous generals, Foch, Haig, and Pershing, by batting away a German shell with his service knife. Prescott went on to humorously describe being covered with ribbons and medals by the grateful French, British, and Americans. Prescott’s mother, Flora, missing her son’s Yale-inflected irony and taking the facetious account literally, proudly sent the letter off to her local newspaper, the Ohio State Journal. Also missing the joke, the paper ran an account on its front page (“3 High Military Honors Conferred on Capt. Bush”), which was then picked up by the New Haven Journal-Courier (“Triple Honor to P.S. Bush, Yale ’17”). Parents and son alike felt deep shame when the local paper had to publish a letter from his mother as a front-page retraction. In this episode, Prescott inadvertently transgressed every Bush family value — modesty, honesty, and propriety.

After Prescott returned home in 1919, he moved to St. Louis to take a job selling hardware for Walter Simmons, whom he met at a Yale reunion. There he began courting the eighteen-year-old Dorothy Walker. If Bert Walker had a touch of Gatsby, Prescott Bush was at that stage the ingenuous Nick Carraway. Bert was impressed by Prescott’s physical presence and athletic ability, and even more that he’d been a member of the right secret society at Yale. Prescott always tried to downplay his father-in-law’s role in bringing him to Harriman Brothers a few years later. As he often noted, he had his own connections there: fellow Bonesmen Roland Harriman, Bob Lovett, and Knight Woolley. In reality, Prescott had considerable help from his father-in-law but resented anyone thinking he had.

Despite the chumminess of his Wall Street world, Prescott could not have flourished on the basis of relationships alone. He thrived because of his business sense. After the financial crash in 1929, he helped save Harriman by pushing the spendthrift Averell to close offices in Paris and Warsaw and cut costs in the one remaining European outpost in Berlin. It was Prescott who initiated a pivotal merger with his fellow Bonesmen at the more solvent Brown Brothers, which had the further advantage of pushing his father-in-law out.Prescott had a nose for deals, including one to buy a quarter-interest in CBS for $2.5 million in 1932. At one point, Prescott served on seventeen corporate boards, not counting the Yale Corporation.

As he achieved his own success, Prescott pulled his wife away from her father and his avaricious values. Indeed, it was Dotty Bush who became known as the guardian of the family’s Puritan ethic because of the way she inculcated their five children with the wisdom that intense competitiveness was compatible with severe modesty. Dotty was known in the family for slapping down anyone caught bragging, and is probably responsible for her son the forty-first president’s nonsense-generating aversion to the first-person pronoun (and sometimes to pronouns altogether). Dotty’s version of this ethic came originally from her long-suffering mother, Loulie Walker, but was powerfully reinforced by Prescott. At Prescott’s funeral in 1972, Dorothy gave a eulogy in which she thanked her late husband for teaching her a “lack of pride in material possessions.”

Prescott was a huge man — six foot four and 250 pounds, a giant to his children, with a gravelly baritone voice and formal bearing. He wore a coat and tie to dinner, even during summer vacations at Kennebunkport. His children feared and admired him; it’s not clear that anyone other than Dorothy ever felt much affection for him.

 He comes across in family descriptions as gloomy and distant, a “scary man” to his son Jonathan, “stern” and “righteous” in his grandson Jeb’s description. Prescott never spoke to his children about the sudden death of his mother, Flora, who was killed by a car while strolling on vacation, in 1920. In later life, after retiring from public office, he demanded that the grandchildren call him “Senator.” In various accounts, Prescott is a curiously blank figure — an upright man, expressing little emotion other than irritability, which was exacerbated when he drank. He liked playing golf, but his only apparent joy was music, and in particular the Ivy League style of a cappella singing. Never happier than when harmonizing in a straw boater, he performed “I’m Going to Raise the Deuce When I Get Loose in Town” with his barbershop quartet of Yale Glee Club alumni at a Connecticut Republican convention. He was extremely proud of the comic speech he delivered at the Alfalfa Club’s 1959 dinner, which he naturally concluded with a solo performance of “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

The only attempt to write Prescott Bush’s biography, by the Houston sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz, resulted in vivid sketches of everyone around him, with a void at the center of the canvas.* Prescott’s own autobiographical account, a 454-page oral history he deposited at Columbia University, is singularly lacking in color, passion, or emotion. What does come through is his sense of propriety and obligation — to community, country, and family. The Bush patriarch operated according to a code typical of his era and social class, but with a particular emphasis on the repression of selfish desire. Bush played golf well enough to pursue a professional career, but never seems to have considered it — though he later rendered “service” to the sport as president of the U.S. Golf Association. In his family, one pursued one’s passions as hobbies, not vocations. He both envied and disapproved of his third son, Johnny Bush, who pursued a career in musical theater before settling down to work for G. H. Walker. Prescott’s code also involved strict rules about how to live, dress, and comport oneself. “I never heard him fart,” Johnny once said of his father. As a senator, Prescott introduced a rule change forbidding his colleagues to wave to guests in the gallery.

At the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich, Prescott stormed out of the locker room when a friend told a mildly dirty joke in front of his fourteen-year-old son. “I don’t ever want to hear that kind of language in here again,” he harrumphed. Prescott was struck dumb by the vamping and flirting of Clare Boothe Luce, a sometime rival in Connecticut Republican politics. He broke off relations with his younger brother James, when James left his first wife in 1946. Years later, he pulled his support from Nelson Rockefeller on the same grounds. “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation when the governor of a great state — one who perhaps aspires to be nominated for President of the United States — can desert a good wife, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?” he asked the 1963 graduating class at the girls’ prep school Rosemary Hall in a commencement address. This survives as Senator Bush’s only memorable speech.

Prescott had definite ideas about money, one of which was that men shouldn’t live off their wives. That his home in Greenwich was purchased by his father-in-law and remained in Dorothy’s name was a contradiction he had to live with. Prescott was perpetually distinguishing himself from both the kind of people who inherited wealth and those who pursued money for its own sake — namely the Walkers. The cheapness of the Bush men isn’t just an endearing comic trait. It reflects the reality that there has never been any large pool of capital on the Bush side of the family. Though he poor-mouthed preposterously, Prescott actually accumulated fairly little, and didn’t leave much behind. When George H. W. Bush set up his first oil business in 1950, he got his seed capital from his Uncle Herbie Walker, who was by then running G. H. Walker. When George W. Bush did the same thing twenty-five years later, it was with money from a Walker trust fund.

Wealth for Prescott Bush was a lever rather than a yardstick. He deplored people who took their servants for granted or used them as markers of status. The Bush servants were auxiliary semifamily — the not-really-a-chauffeur Alec who drove him to the station in his secondhand car, the-sort-of-a-housekeeper Alice — as opposed to the cowed, uniformed cadres at the Walker mansions. For Prescott, the point of money was the freedom to perform service, or “giving back to the community” as his son Poppy called it. Prescott idealized the role his partner Averell Harriman played for FDR and Truman. Short of opportunities at that level, he was willing to put in decades of drudgery at the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting. Campaigning for office was a necessary evil, a debasing impediment on the path to public service and ultimately becoming a Harrimantype wise man.

Prescott Bush established three essential myths that Bush men live by. The first is: I made it on my own. The second is: I’m not really rich. The third is: I’m running to serve my country. Not until 1950, when he was in his mid-fifties and nearly done paying private school bills did Prescott feel financially secure enough to try for a U.S. Senate seat left open by a retirement. This was the first of four campaigns that remain significant because of the way they forged the Bushes as a polit- ical force, and because of the lessons the family developed from them. Though Poppy, unlike his siblings, worked on none of his father’s campaigns, he watched closely and took in the implications. His sons George and Jeb would do the same with his, fostering the conundrum of independence as a family tradition. Bush men try to be different by doing essentially the same thing.

On top of these three myths were the seven lessons that Prescott’s Senate losses and eventual victories imparted to the family. The first lesson was the treachery of the press. In 1950, Bush was running even with William Benton, the Democratic nominee. But on the Sunday before the election, the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson asserted on his radio show that Prescott was treasurer of the Birth Control League. In the days before Griswold v. Connecticut, birth control remained illegal in the majority-Catholic state. While the family has long decried this as a smear, it was in fact a minor distortion — carefully orchestrated for maximum harm. Prescott was listed as treasurer on a letterhead for Planned Parenthood, a successor organization to the Birth Control League, which had closed up shop in 1942. Though he denied the charge, Prescott lost by 1,102 votes.

Lesson #2 from Prescott’s early campaigns was the importance of moment. Bush tried again in 1952, but this time lost the Republican primary. He thought his final shot had passed. Then he got a third chance when Connecticut’s other sitting senator died and he was handed the Republican nomination for an open seat. Prescott got the Whiffs out on the trail again and, wearing a raccoon coat, introduced Dwight Eisenhower at a rally in New Haven. With the wind of Ike’s 1952 landslide at his back, Prescott won. In future campaigns, family members would ponder obsessively whether conditions were ripe.

Lesson #3 was money before politics. Prescott thought only someone who was financially secure could resist the corrupting pressures of politics. In 1956, he was pleased to tell President Eisenhower that he had brushed off threats to run Poppy out of the oil business if Prescott voted against legislation to deregulate natural gas. Prescott opposed increasing the salary of senators from $12,500 to $22,500, arguing that the job was “service” like the ministry or teaching. In this vision, either an independent income or a monastic lifestyle was required for elected officials. Like Prescott, Poppy and his sons would seek wealth before aiming for office.

Lesson #4 was the primacy of connections and manners. Politics for the “modern Republican” Prescott Bush was not principally about ideology or a set of beliefs. It was an establishment responsibility pursued on the basis of relationships cultivated through sports, business, and the Ivy League. The best golfer in the Senate, Prescott played often with Eisenhower at the Burning Tree Country Club.

But Prescott also shared Yale and Ohio bonds with Robert Taft, who led the antediluvian wing of the GOP. Prescott helped Taft’s son become ambassador to Ireland as a way to arbitrate between the president and the party leader. In an act of some courage, he introduced Joe McCarthy at a rally in Bridgeport in 1952 while expressing “reservations” about Mc- Carthy’s methods. But he took greatest pride in being one of the only colleagues to visit McCarthy on his deathbed at Walter Reed Hospital.

Lesson #5 was that Northeastern moderates were becoming an endangered species. In office, Prescott Bush supported civil rights legislation, larger immigration quotas, and higher taxes. Conservatives classified him alongside Clifford Case of New Jersey, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, and Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Liberal Republicanism was his son Poppy’s natural political tendency as well. But it wouldn’t last and couldn’t travel. An international investment banker trailing Whiffenpoofs, Prescott was easily caricatured as a softheaded patrician. His son Poppy’s decision to pursue politics from Texas rather than Connecticut — and his early efforts to appease the most noxious elements on the right, including the John Birch Society — reflected his understanding of what sort of Republican would predominate in the future. Prescott’s Texas-bred grandsons George W. and Jeb would shed the taint of moderation altogether and hide their establishment trappings more convincingly.

Lesson #6 was to not give up. Prescott Bush got elected to the Senate only on his third try, thanks to an opportunity that arose unexpectedly after he had seemingly failed for good. Beset by dizzy spells and stomach pains — and facing what would have been a tough campaign — Prescott did not run for reelection in 1962. This was a decision he came to regret as soon as he took a rest and felt better. He returned to Brown Brothers Harriman, where he had little to do, and lived for another ten years, lamenting his mistake until the end.

The most important lesson of all, #7, was to trust only the family. Prescott’s Democratic partners, Averell Harriman and Bob Lovett, supported his opponent Abraham Ribicoff in the 1952 election. At the state Democratic convention, Harriman gave a rousing speech attacking Prescott. Prescott, who had helped save the firm during the Depression, took this as an enormous betrayal and the two men didn’t speak to each other for more than a decade. This is the trust-onlyblood mind-set that led Howard Fineman of Newsweek to dub the Bushes “the WASP Corleones.” George H. W. Bush’s longtime spokesman Marlin Fitzwater once described a meeting that took place in 1985 at Camp David, to organize Poppy’s upcoming presidential run. Poppy’s brothers and sons were on one side of a long table, the advisers on the other. “It struck me then and there that the Bushes were very different from the Kennedys in that they would never have their Ted Sorensen,” Fitzwater said. “No one outside the family would ever enter the inner circle.”

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There’s a useful comparison here to the tribe the Bushes have always regarded as their antithesis. Joe Kennedy was Prescott Bush’s contemporary, just six years older, and bore a striking physical resemblance to him. Like Prescott, he did not found a dynasty so much as he took one over in a merger and made it a success, displacing his fatherin- law as patriarch of the family. Joe Kennedy’s father-in-law, John Fitzgerald, was the first Irish mayor of Boston and one of its famous citizens, while his own father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was merely a prosperous bar owner and minor politician. Through sheer force of will — and because his children got his last name rather than his wife’s — Joe Kennedy was able to dominate the family, mold it in his image, and direct its fortunes.}:

Prescott Bush never liked what he saw reflected in the Kennedy mirror. Part of this was old-fashioned social snobbery; Prescott was a member of all the clubs that wouldn’t let in Joe Kennedy because he was Irish and Catholic. And part of the complaint was political. The Democratic Kennedys were on the other side of presidential campaigns in which Prescott and his sons supported Eisenhower and Nixon. But the real reason Prescott Bush found the Kennedys so distasteful is that he identified them with the hubristic wealth and entitlement of his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker’s, large Catholic family. Joe Kennedy was too greedy, too flashy, and insufficiently devoted to the community. With their well-known infidelities, reckless risk-taking, and scandals, the Kennedys, like the Walkers, were morally deficient. Prescott also objected to Joe Kennedy’s effort to direct and finance the political careers of his sons, which violated his family’s precept of making it on your own (with help). Prescott took what he considered a more proper route of giving his sons a good start in life and setting an example for them to follow.

Poppy later channeled his father’s view of the Kennedy clan in relation to his son George W.’s presidential campaign. Now he was Joseph Kennedy, the father of the candidate, in the imputed analogy. Poppy emphasized that the Bushes didn’t have anything to prove, that they didn’t need to win the way the Kennedys did. “It’s not that this is John F. Kennedy’s father driving his sons to do something,” George H. W. Bush told Hugh Sidey of Time during the post-election limbo in November 2000. “We are not that way in this family. This is not about vindication or legacy or entitlement.” In Poppy’s mind as in his father’s, the decent and sincere Bushes seek office as individuals. The corrupt and decadent Kennedys run as representatives of the family conglomerate. The Bush boys got to choose their paths in life. The Kennedys had theirs chosen for them. George W. Bush perpetuated the family prejudice, “They never had to work,” he commented about the Kennedys in 1989, “They never had to have a job.”

Perhaps it was the parallels in his own generation that prompted Poppy to disown the natural comparison so strenuously. In Prescott Bush’s as in Joe Kennedy’s household, the second son took his older brother’s place as the vehicle for the family’s ambitions as a result of what happened in the Second World War. John F. Kennedy, who suffered from chronic health problems, was given a battlefield promotion by his father only after his older and more beloved brother Joseph Kennedy Jr. was killed in the defense of Britain. Jack’s wartime heroism in rescuing the survivors of PT-109 strengthened his father’s confidence in his political prospects. After JFK was assassinated, the family elevated Robert F. Kennedy to the leadership position. After Robert was killed, it focused on the youngest of the four brothers, Ted.

In the Bush family, Poppy overtook his older brother, Prescott Jr. (b. 1922), in a similar way during World War II, but without anyone getting killed. Pressie, two years older than Poppy, wanted to enlist in the armed forces as well, but was rejected for service because of near-blindness in one eye. While Poppy flew bombing missions over the Pacific, Pressie whiled away his days at a tennis club in Rio. Poppy’s wartime heroics fixed his position as first among Prescott Sr.’s four sons, and turned Pressie into a frustrated subordinate sibling.

Thereafter, as Poppy flourished in business and politics, Pressie stayed close to the Round Hill Country Club and the world of his parents, serving as a factotum to his father in Connecticut politics and his successor on the Republican Town Committee and at the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting. The reversal of the positions of the two brothers became more glaring when Pressie finally tried for national office himself in 1982, announcing against Senator Lowell Weicker in the Republican primary. Starting at the Senate was a family tradition and the Bushes detested Weicker, but this was a poor choice of moment. Challenging the vulnerable incumbent would only soften Weicker up enough to hand his seat, and possibly control of the Senate, to the Democrats. The awkward work of getting Pressie to withdraw from the race fell to his little brother the vice president, George H. W. Bush.

Pressie’s abortive political career pointed to one way in which the Bushes were indeed not like the Kennedys: the imputed line of succession in the Bush family descended vertically rather than horizon- tally. Of the four Bush brothers, Poppy was the only one who would succeed in following the business-to-politics route established by his father and the only one who would amount to much in either pursuit. Like John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush received critical help from his father in establishing his financial base and his political career. Unlike JFK, he needed the illusion that he had done it all on his own.

The Kennedy family’s permanent home is the summer compound Joe bought in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, in 1928. The Bush family summers farther up the Atlantic Coast, in Kennebunkport, Maine. The cedar-shingled house that David Walker and his son Bert built there is the primary scene of the Bush-Walker struggle. Dorothy Walker Bush was born there in 1901 and raised there in summers, competing as fiercely as her brothers, and often beating them at tennis and other contests. She and Prescott were given a bungalow on the property as a wedding present in 1921, and continued to spend summers there with their children through the 1940s. But after Poppy returned from the Pacific, the bungalow became increasingly uncomfortable for Prescott. Bert’s ethic of fabulous wealth and brutal competition got on his nerves, in part because of how much it impressed his two oldest sons. Prescott rejected the Walker family ethos that ruled at Kennebunkport, which Elsie Walker Kilbourne once described as “having to be big shots” at everything they did.

Prescott loved golf, tennis, and baseball, liked to win, and was a better athlete than his father-in-law. But he and his wife raised their sons to compete within the boundaries of civility. Poppy learned from his mother to call close tennis shots in and preferred doubles to singles. His sportsmanship is best expressed in his passion for horseshoes — a less than serious game that he takes incredibly seriously. The Walker brothers play without any such irony. Theirs was a family, after all, in which sloppy tennis could get you sent to work in a factory. Visitors have often described a special edge to matches that pitted the Walkers against the Bushes. Both families tease when they play. But the teasing of Poppy and his brothers is funny and mostly benign. The Walker teasing during a tennis match can be personal and nasty.

Bert Walker’s grandson Ray Walker told me that his family “treats winning as an end in itself” — a trait he sees in Poppy and George W. Bush as well. One of the things some of the Walkers most wanted to win was Prescott and Dorothy Bush’s sons. Bert Walker would let his grandsons tool around on his thirty-eight-foot speedboat, the Tomboy, disturbing the peace with blasts of its deafening siren. Pressie and Poppy were fascinated by “Gampy,” and, to the irritation of their father, were said to resemble him in appearance and personality.

But Prescott’s nemesis in this battle was less his father-in-law than his brother-in-law George Herbert Walker Jr., known as “Uncle Herbie.” Herbie was a driven businessman, who began to challenge his father for dominance in the family business after the pattern of his own father in relation to D. D. Walker. After Herbie’s death, his widow, Mary Walker, remembered him as “a very aggressive person.” His aggression was turned on his own family as well. By the late 1930s, Uncle Herbie was already closer to George and his brothers, Pressie, Johnny, and Bucky, than he was to his own two sons, George Herbert Walker III (known, like his grandfather, as “Bert”) and Ray. Uncle Herbie hired Pressie and Johnny to work for G. H. Walker. His own older son and namesake was chosen to run the firm’s St. Louis office only after Poppy turned down the job. A baseball lover who co-founded the New York Mets as an expansion team in 1960, Herbie went to every one of George’s college games — but often skipped the sports matches of his own sons. “In our younger years, my dad held up George as a model to us,” George Herbert Walker III told a reporter in 1988. Ray Walker once described his father’s attitude toward his nephew Poppy as “hero worship.”

To the irritation of Prescott Bush, Poppy returned the sentiment, displaying tremendous affection and regard for his humorless and arrogant Uncle Herbie. In the White House, Poppy often talked to his aides about Uncle Herbie’s ownership of a baseball franchise as the life of Riley — the kind of thing he would have liked to do if he weren’t burdened with the responsibility of service and the cares of the world. This became the fantasy of young George W. as well, after his greatuncle Herbie took him to meet Casey Stengel and the legendary St. Louis player Rogers Hornsby in the Mets dugout.

A decade of Poppy’s and Uncle Herbie’s letters back and forth, preserved on onionskin carbons, reside in the Bush Library. It is an intimate business correspondence that skips seamlessly from drilling rights, offshore rigs, and stock placements to Yale football and family matters. “Dearest Pop,” Herbie writes in late 1951 after a visit to Texas with his wife, Mary, to inspect Bush’s new company. “I can’t tell you how much we all enjoyed our visit with you in Midland and the wonderful hospitality that you and Bar showed us. . . . It was grand to get a good feel of your picture, and I am confident that it is a matter of time until we really start to go places. I am also convinced that you are playing the thing the right way, and I am thoroughly pleased with the whole operation to date.” In his letters, Uncle Herbie glories in his role as benefactor to the Bush boys. He asks Poppy what he thinks of his trying to get brother Pressie the job of business manager of the Yale Athletic Association; he recounts brother Johnny’s arrival at G. H. Walker & Co.

Poppy’s letters back to his uncle are flattering and affectionate. He thanks Herbie and Mary every year for hosting his family at Kennebunkport, for meals and vacations in the Bahamas. The occasional personal letter from Poppy to his father, by comparison, reads like true business correspondence, answering requests for information and registering changes of address. After he and Barbara move to Houston in 1959, Poppy — who would request a $2 refund on a broken toaster — writes to ask whether the senator can get them a discount on beds from the Simmons Company, where he used to serve on the board.

This paternal triangle left wounds on both sides. Prescott envied his son’s closeness to Herbie. Herbie’s sons wondered why their father was so generous to his nephews and so tough on them. In one of the letters, Herbie confides his frustration with his younger son, Ray, who had quit the JV football squad at Yale, because at 145 pounds he was getting clobbered. “I, of course, feel that he made the decision too early as all the coaches have told me they expected to be able to use him substantially as the season went along,” Uncle Herbie writes to Poppy. Ray Walker subsequently took a turn considered bizarre in America’s least introspective family when he quit G. H. Walker to train as a Jungian analyst. Today he lives in Vermont, where he nurses bitter feelings about his father and his cousins.

Over the summers, Uncle Herbie tried to lay claim to the affections of Poppy’s sons the same way he had with Prescott’s. In one of the letters I found in the Bush Library, he describes for Poppy the scene in Kennebunkport, where the six-year-old Little George was visiting with his mother in July 1952, when Poppy was too busy to come. “Dear Pop,” Herbie writes:

I have just returned from Kennebunkport and Georgie, who without any exaggeration has taken the place over and is everybody’s favorite. He is a great kid and reminds everyone so much of you. He drove the speedboat alone for about fifteen minutes yesterday and was so sure of himself, demanded the right to bring it into the river and practically docked it. We then had him on the ball field for half an hour and you ought to see me try to knock tennis balls past him. . . . I was particularly touched when he wept buckets at saying goodbye to me. He is such a friendly and wonderfully emotional child and altogether something you should be tremendously proud of. Incidentally, he calls Ray “Uncle Ray” and me just plain Herbie.

The description is fascinating both for the early glimpse of George W. Bush’s personality (“so sure of himself”), and as an expression of Uncle Herbie’s urge to recapitulate his pattern of avuncular adoption.

When his father died in 1953, Herbie took ownership of both the big house in Kennebunkport and the role of Walker paterfamilias. He had also inherited his father’s bullying, egotistical personality, which irritated Prescott much more in Herbie than it had in Bert.

Prescott couched his jealousy about Uncle Herbie’s relationships with his sons in moral censure. Like his father, Uncle Herbie was a gambler and a philanderer, who often boasted about his conquests, despite being married. One of the sports he played at Kennebunkport was chasing women — the kind of thing the Kennedys did in Hyannisport. Prescott, who had cut off his own brother James for leaving his wife, found Herbie’s boasting about his romantic conquests intolerable. The tensions were exacerbated after Prescott’s election to the Senate when Herbie, hoping to capitalize on his brother-in-law’s appointment to a congressional committee on nuclear energy, set up a partnership with other investors to get into the business. Prescott eventually refused to visit Kennebunkport while Herbie was there. Instead, he and Dorothy began vacationing on Fishers Island, off the coast of Connecticut. They later bought a house on Hobe Sound, the wealthy enclave on Jupiter Island, Florida.

When Prescott died in 1972, Poppy described him in a note to his friend C. Fred Chambers as an “inspiration” and “the incentive behind everything I did.” When Herbie lay on his deathbed five years later, Poppy was far more emotional, calling his uncle “father,” “brother,” and “best friend.” After the funeral, Poppy persuaded Herbie’s widow, Mary — with his mother, Dorothy’s, help — to sell Walker’s Point to him on an installment plan, for the significantly submarket price of $780,000. This infuriated Herbie’s sons, who stood to inherit the proceeds from subdivision and development. But the conflict was about more than money. The family jewel was going to their father’s surrogate son. Poppy proceeded to remodel and expand the house, turning it into a proper presidential compound. After 1981, the requirements of the Secret Service and the growing brood of Bush grandchildren crowded the Walker cousins out of their family home.

Poppy’s hostile takeover of Kennebunkport represented the submersion of the St. Louis clan and the repudiation of its mercantile values. He would turn it into the anti-Hyannisport, a place where nobody drank to excess, everyone went to sleep early (in the right bed), and got up for church on Sunday. Despite his greater affection for Herbie, Poppy was Prescott’s son, embodying his morality, good manners, and sense of fair play. The new paterfamilias was, like his father, a man bored with the social whirl, the acquisition of toys, and the accumulation of wealth. He’d rather invite his barber to go fishing for blues. (“He loves all the natives that have worked on the place,” his aunt Mary Walker said, some years after selling him the house.) Kennebunkport, with its weathered shingles, was now assumed to be the Bushes’ ancestral manse, a Yankee relic rather than a robber baron’s playground. In years to come, the public would only have the dimmest sense of the distaff side of Poppy’s family beyond his sturdy, spirited mother, Dorothy. Keenly aware of their defeat, the Walkers from time to time flare with resentment. Their occasional sparks are mercilessly extinguished by Barbara Bush, who since the late 1970s has served as “enforcer” not just for her own children, but for her husband’s entire tribe.**

George H. W. Bush, who occasionally expresses himself in verse, once wrote a poem about Kennebunkport. It describes a vision in which the departed Bushes and Walkers sit side by side at St. Ann’s Church on a Sunday morning — “my Dad and Herby there next to Lou.” (“Herby” is Poppy’s sentimental spelling from childhood.) In this imagining, family conflict has faded away, with the younger generation carrying on a singular Bush tradition.

I see the brides and the christened face

Soul strength from this sacred place ...

They’re all in bed now in the dorm

The pulse of generations firmly born

The sea’s the same — the rocks stay fast

The new ones’ strength — generations past.

The Kennebunkport of these verses is no longer Bert and Herbie Walker’s hedonistic playground. It is a place to “Just relax and watch the sea / Treasure the strength God’s given you.” George H. W. Bush’s retreat breeds the Yankee values instilled in him by his father — making one’s own way in the world and giving something back. In church, “the kids are passing the collection plate.” The “firmly born” are all now Bushes, even if their last names are Walker.

There is a double irony here. Prescott Bush, who died in 1972, didn’t live to see his ethic triumph in the family struggle. But in the end, the victory wasn’t permanent. George W. Bush likes to say he is his mother’s son. But many of his most distinctive traits don’t seem to come from her or from his father. He is impatient, aggressive, often angry, and sometimes cruel. He’s a plunger, not a careful analyst or a patient builder. He loves to compete but can’t stand losing. The man’s a Walker, through and through.

* That this book exists is the result of a conflict among Bush men. In 1999, Herskowitz, a wellregarded Texas ghostwriter, was hired to draft George W. Bush’s presidential campaign autobiography, the book published in 2000 as A Charge to Keep. But the early chapters Herskowitz submitted were judged to overemphasize W.’s early difficulties, describing him, for instance, as having been unsuccessful in the oil business. As a result, Herskowitz was fired in favor of George W.’s dauntless propagandist, Karen Hughes. But George H. W. Bush, who was friendly with Herskowitz, felt bad about this harsh treatment, and so gave Herskowitz the consolation prize of burnishing his late father’s image. This assignment reflected not just George H.W. Bush’s dismay at the mistreatment of a loyal family courtier, but his effort to posthumously ensure that his father would replace the rapacious Bert Walker as the family’s official founder.

** George Herbert Walker III failed in a run for Congress in 1992, when his father’s favorite nephew declined to endorse him in the GOP primary. He was appointed ambassador to Hungary in 2003 by his second cousin, George W. Bush.

The foregoing is excerpted from “The Bush Tragedy,” by Jacob Weisberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Random House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/books/chapters/1st-chapter-bush-tragedy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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 September 7, 2006

About Those Nazi Appeasers

Bush Family Values

By MICHAEL DONNELLY

It's astonishing to see how desperate our homegrown fascists have become. The entire cabal is in full-on media blitz mode with Rummy, Dick and Theodosius, er, Bush slamming their foreign opponents with the latest absurd tag "Islamic Fascists;" and, their domestic ones as "Nazi appeasers." Or, in the deranged mind of Condi Rice; domestic opponents are tantamount to folks who would have stopped the Civil War and allowed slavery to continue in the South.

It's not just desperate; it's monumentally moronic, given the real history. This bizarre trip on the Wayback Machine demands a deeper look--though don't look to the mainstream media. Given the opening, one would think that everyone by now would be fully informed that the Bush Family took "Nazi appeasement" to far greater heights and were actually part of an American faction of documented Nazi SUPPORTERS.

We're also unlikely to see much mainstream media analysis of the new "Islamic Fascist" branding of those opposing the Empire's designs on the Middle East. As Sir Winston Bush gets a media pass as he tries to conflate fascism, communism and Islam while also trying to ironically tiehis criminal wars to WWII and the Cold War, it warrants our own trip on the Wayback Machine to see just what the Bush family was doing during those earlier "good wars."

Samuel Bush: arms merchant

George W. Bush's great-grandfather, Samuel Bush was charter member of the military/industrial complex. In 1918, he was chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section for the War Industries Board, with oversight responsibility for Percy Rockefeller'sRemington Company.Rockefeller had helped get Bush's son, Prescott into Yale and Skull and Bones in 1916.

A 1926 Senate Munitions Inquiry (the Nye Committee) into the military/industrial complex's WWI windfall examined Samuel Bush's dealings with Remington as part of his War Industries Board duties. Virtually ALL of the records of Samuel Bush's efforts were destroyed by the National Archives "to save space."

Prescott Sheldon Bush; George Herbert Walker: Nazi collaborators

George W. Bush's grandfather, former Connecticut Senator Prescott S. Bush was a Wall Street banker with Brown Brothers Harriman. (Averill Harriman was also instrumental in getting young Prescott into Yale and S&B.) Bush's maternal grandfather George Herbert Walker was the bank's first president. Walker built the famed Bush family estate at Kennebunkport on Walker Point. Prescott Bush joined W. A. Harriman & Company in 1926 and became its CEO.

Harriman Bank was the official Nazi financial conduit in the US. Closely tied to Fritz Thyssen, who proudly claimed in his 1941 book "I Paid Hitler" that he was the Nazi Party's first and greatest financial backer. The Union Banking Corporation (UBC) was a subsidiary of Harriman created by Walker and it was used for Nazi financial matters. Thyssen provided 100,000 gold marks ($10 million in today's dollars) to the Nazis in 1923 just prior to Hitler's failed putsch. By 1941, UBC held a private Nazi stash of over $3,000,000 ($36 million in today's dollars) in its New York vaults.

After the war, a Treasury Department investigation reported that during the two years after the Stock Market crash; "Thyssen dedicated his fortune and his influence to the single purpose of bringing Hitler to power. In 1932, he arranged the now famous meeting in the Düsseldorf Industrialists' Club, at which Hitler addressed the leading businessmen of the Ruhr and the Rhineland. At the close of Hitler's speech, Thyssen cried, `Heil Herr Hitler'. By the time of the German elections later that year, Thyssen had succeeded in eliciting contributions to Hitler's campaign fund from all of the big industrial combines. He himself is reported to have spent 3,000,000 ($30 million today) marks on the Nazis in 1932 alone.

During 1933 Thyssen served as intercessor between von Hindenburg, von Papen, and Hitler. He brought them together at a secret meeting which laid the basis for the appointment of Hitler as Reichschancellor."

It was Thyssen, not Prescott Bush as some now claim, who was called "Hitler's Angel" by the New York Herald Tribune. He later fled Germany in 1939.

Even though Hitler had declared war on the US, it was still legal for UBC to conduct finances for the Nazis. But, after Pearl Harbor that outrage finally changed. After another ten months of Bush/Harriman/UBC work for the Nazis; in November 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, all of the Harriman business interests were seized by the government, including UBC.

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war and then quickly returned. Prescott Bush' interest in UBC consisted of One Share--worth $1,500,000 ($19 million in today's dollars) at the time UBC was disbanded in 1951. (The Harriman family garnered $4 billion!) It wasthe money used to start the Bush Family Texas oil empire.

Another Harriman subsidiary through Silesian Holding Co.; Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation saw the Harriman-Bush group owning one-third of a complex of steel making, coal-mining, and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland. The other two-thirds were owned by Wehrwirtschaftsführer (Military Economy Leader) Friedrich Flick. Silesian Holding Company's president was George Walker and its sole directors were Prescott Bush and Averill Harriman.

Silesian Steel used slave labor from Auschwitz (even before the concentration camp was built there) in its coal, iron and zinc mining operations. At Nuremberg, Flick was sentenced to seven years for Silesian's role in building up the Nazi war machine. Harriman, Bush and Walker were never charged.

June 14, 1940, nine months after the Nazis conquered Poland, the IG Farben Company opened an Auschwitz factory and slave labor camp in occupied Poland, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal.This was done in a partnership with Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company (EXXON).

The millions made off the labor of hundreds of thousands of Nazi victims were inherited by William S. Farish III, grandson of William S. Farish, the head of the IG/Standard cartel. Farish III is George H.W. Bush's best friend and the person who took over Bush's assets and managed them in a blind trust after Bush was elected vice-president.

Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman to be prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

I've yet to take the Wayback Machine back to investigate Rice's whopper that decrying the carnage of the U.S. Civil War meant supporting leaving Slavery in place. But, I'm pretty certain that the same unsavory links to what John Trudell calls, "the colonial industrial class" were just as odious in the 1860s.

MICHAEL DONNELLY has numerous family members who fought in WWII against the Nazis while the Bush family was enriching themselves collaborating. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly09072006.html