Prescott Bush

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Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 — October 8, 1972) was a United States Senator from Connecticut and a Wall Street executive banker with Brown Brothers Harriman.

Contents

1 Early life

1.1 Military service

2 Business career
3 Political career
4 War seizures controversy
5 Further reading
6 External links

Early life

Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio to Flora Sheldon and Samuel Prescott Bush, a railroad executive, and later, steel company president and during World War I, a federal government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major weapons contractors.

Bush attended the Douglas School in Columbus and then St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale University, starting a family tradition of higher education, as his son, former president George H.W. Bush, and his grandson, current President George W. Bush, as well as his great-granddaughter Barbara are all Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity while at Yale, though two of his sons and grandson would opt for Delta Kappa Epsilon. All four Bushes, however, would be members of the Skull and Bones secret society (along with several Walkers), and Bush has long been implicated in the society's alleged theft of the skull of Native American leader Geronimo, when three Bonesmen were stationed at Fort Sill.[link] Some historians, and Cecil Adams, regard this claim as false.

Prescott Bush played varsity golf, football, and baseball, and was president of the Yale Glee Club, and, in fact, was regarded as the best close-harmony man in the class of 1917. His strong devotion to singing at Yale became another of his passions, as evidenced by his founding of the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937.

He maintained homes in Long Island, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; a 10,000 acre (40 km²) plantation in South Carolina; and an island retreat in Florida.

Military service

After graduation, Prescott Bush served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917-1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France, and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, Captain Bush came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Controversially, Prescott Bush wrote home about receiving medals for heroic exploits. His letters were later published in Columbus newspapers, but were retracted a few weeks later when it was revealed that he, in fact, had not received such medals. The retraction was made in a cable in which Prescott Bush stated that his earlier letter had been written "in a spirit of fun" and was not intended for publication.

Business career

After his discharge in 1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

On August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine, he wed Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker (who would be the namesake of Prescott Bush's second son, George Herbert Walker Bush). They would have four other children: Prescott Bush, Jr., Jonathan Bush, William H.T. Bush, and Nancy Bush.

Among those attending the wedding ceremony were Isabel Stillman Rockefeller (daughter of Percy Rockefeller), Hope Lincoln, Mary Keck, Elizabeth Trotter, Martha Pittman, Ruth Lionberger, Nancy Walker, George Herbert Walker, Knight Wooley, Frank Shephard, John Shepley, Richard Bentley, Henry Isham, William Potter Wear, and Henry Fenimore Cooper.

The Bushes moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1923, where Prescott Bush went to work for the Hupp Products Company, where his business efforts generally failed. He left in November, 1923 to become president of sales for the Stedman Products company of South Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1925, he joined the United States Rubber Company of New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut.

From 1944 to 1956, Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. Bush was on the board of directors of CBS, having been introduced to chairman William Paley around 1932 by his close friend and colleague Averell Harriman, who became a major Democratic party power-broker.

Political career

Bush was a typical New England Republican of his time; as a former banker, he was pro-business, but held many positions today considered socially liberal. Later he would be identified with the Rockefeller Republicans, and right-wing elements of the party distrusted and at times openly opposed him, a pattern that has continued with his son and grandson. These disputes would be the source of many of the charges laid against him, which have been taken up in recent years by critics of President George W. Bush, such as being a sympathizer of the Nazi party or of eugenics.

Bush was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. Bush was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

From 1947 to 1950 he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. The ties with Planned Parenthood hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute alleged smear campaign in churches; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Democrat William Benton by only 1,000 votes.

In 1952 he was elected to the United States Senate, defeating Abraham Ribicoff for the vacant seat which was caused by the death of James O'Brien McMahon. A staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (another golf aficionado), Prescott Bush served until January, 1963.

Bush's moderate politics became more complicated in time. He disliked Nelson Rockefeller despite the close relationship his father Samuel P. Bush had with the Rockefeller family and his own friendship with Nelson's great-uncle Percy, and when Nelson divorced his first wife and remarried, causing an infidelity scandal that ditched his campaign for the 1964 Republican nomination for President, Bush spoke at grandson George W.'s high school Andover and denounced Nelson. He threw his support behind ultraconservative Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater, and campaigned for Goldwater in the election. Bush liked Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative and recommended it to his son George H.W. and grandson George W.

War seizures controversy

Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Dealing with Nazi Germany wasn't illegal when Hitler declared war on the US, but, six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:

Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman)
Holland-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take the full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Bush's interest in UBC consisted of one share. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. These assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry. This presupposes that Union Banking Corporation was worth $4 billion, of which almost all would have been paid to the Harrimans. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030214.html by Cecil Adams addresses this claim with some skepticism.

Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) make him complicit with the mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed. Allegations that Prescott Bush profited from slave labor or the Auschwitz concentration camp remain unsubstantiated.

There are unsubstantiated rumors concerning Prescott Bush's associations with the Nazi party. The Anti-Defamation League has stated, "Rumors about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, have circulated widely through the Internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated." [link] The rumors began with extreme right-wing attacks on George H.W. Bush during his 1980 presidential run and were renewed during his 1988 run.

The New York Herald-Tribune referred to the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, as "Hitler's Angel" and mentioned Bush only as an employee of the investment banking firm Thyssen used in the USA. The label was ironic, since by the time the Tribune article appeared, Hitler had turned on Thyssen and imprisoned him. Reportedly, however, there has been a determined effort by Canadian bloggers, apparently connected with Lyndon LaRouche, to circulate reports that Bush himself was known as "Hitler's Angel".

On November 7, 2003, John Buchanan and Stacey Michael published an article in the New Hampshire Gazette titled "'Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951' - Federal Documents."[link] The article chronicles Prescott Bush's dealings with Thyssen through Brown Brothers Harriman based on records from the National Archives and Records Administration. The Associated Press and The London Guardian reported and confirmed these findings.[link]

(For more information on the Bush family and the arms industry, see Samuel P. Bush.)

External links

Bush's articles include:

"Timely Monetary Policy," Banking, June 1954 and July 1954
"To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959
"Politics Is Your Business," Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960.

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