Prescott Bush

Prescott Sheldon Bush
Senator (Class 3) Connecticut
In office November 4, 1953— January 2, 1963
Preceded by	William A. Purtell
Succeeded by	Abraham A. Ribicoff
Personal details
Nationality	american
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Dorothy Walker Bush

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. He is the father of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and the grandfather of current President George W. Bush.

Early life

Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio to Flora Sheldon and Samuel Prescott Bush. Samuel Bush was a railroad executive, and later, a steel company president. During World War I, his father was 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, continuing a family tradition of higher education, as his grandfather, James Smith Bush, his son, George H.W. Bush, his grandson, 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.[1] 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, Robert Wright 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. It was during this time that he lived in a Victorian home at 173 Adams Street in Milton, Massachusetts, where his son and the future President was born in 1924. In 1925, Prescott Bush 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 a pro-business conservative, but held many positions today considered socially moderate. Conservatives distrusted and at times openly opposed him, a pattern that continued with his son.

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. One of his opponents at the time, a Republican woman named Vivien Kellems, said that Bush's nomination was an inside job of political sabotage in favor of William Benton, the Democratic nominee. A columnist in Boston said that Bush "is coming on to be known as President Truman's Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn't a Chinaman's chance." Bush's ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute smear campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to 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, Prescott Bush served until January, 1963. He was reelected in 1956 with 55% of the vote over Democrat Thomas J. Dodd (father of the current U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Christopher J. Dodd), and decided not to run for another term in 1962. He was a key ally for the passage of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System., and during his tenure supported the Polaris submarine project (ships which were built by Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut), civil rights legislation, and the establishment of the Peace Corps.

Bush's moderate politics became more complicated in time. In terms of issues he generally agreed with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but personally disliked the man, despite the close relationship his father Samuel P. Bush had with the Rockefeller family. When Rockefeller divorced his first wife and remarried to a woman about twenty years his junior with whom he had been having an adulterous relationship while married to his first wife, a scandal that hurt his campaign for the 1964 Republican nomination for President, Bush denounced Rockefeller for his behavior. Bush attended the Republican convention with the intent of backing the moderate Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, although his son George, then running for the Senate from Texas, was a confirmed delegate for conservative Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. George had read Goldwater's book the The Conscience of a Conservative, after Prescott had recommended it. George Bush also disliked Rockefeller and wrote in a letter later published in his book All the Best that he found "Rockefeller's brand of liberalism" unacceptable and that "under no circumstances will Texas take Nelson Rockefeller".

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. Business transactions for profit with Nazi Germany were not 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 after it had been made public that U.S. companies were doing business with the declared enemy of the United States. 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). The President of UBC at that time was George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush's father-in-law. He is the grandfather and great-grandfather of the former and current President Bush.
• 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. Prescott Bush was on the board of directors of UBC and held one share in the company. 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. Critics have addressed this claim with 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 Auschwitz, 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." [2] 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". Some records in the National Archives, including the Harriman papers, document the continued relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with Thyssen and some of his German investments up until his 1951 death. 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." Two former slave laborers from Poland have filed suit in London against the government of the United States and the heirs of Prescott Bush in the amount of $40 billion. A class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. in 2001 was dismissed.

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

Writings

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.

Further reading

• The Prescott Bush Papers are at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
• The Greenwich Library Oral History Project has interviews with Prescott Bush, Jr., and Mary Walker.
• There is material by and about Bush in the History of the Class of 1917 Yale College (1919) and the supplementary class albums.
• John Atlee Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman (1968).
• Obituaries are in the Washington Post, Oct. 9, 1972; the New York Times, Oct. 9, 1972; the Hartford Courant, Oct. 9, 1972; and Yale Alumni Magazine, Dec. 1972.
• "Prescott Sheldon Bush. "Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971-1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.
• Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880-1978. New York: Simon and Schuster (1979).
• Kelley, Kitty. 2004, 2005. The Family: The True Story of the Bush Dynasty. Doubleday, Anchor.[3]

External links

• University of Connecticut's profile of Prescott Bush
• Bush Family Tree
• Gravesite: Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA
• Article on Bush's involvement with Nazi Germany
• George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
• 10 Minute Video Clip of John Buchanan Discussing Prescott Bush (WMV)