Article 15189 of alt.activism: From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Newsgroups: alt.activism Subject: Part 1: Unauthorized Biography Of George Bush 1RokeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com Date: 15 Jan 92 03:55:59 GMT Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 1361
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
With this issue of the New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 39, we begin to serialize the book, {George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,} by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. This book will soon be published by {Executive Intelligence Review}.
At the heart of any effort at biography is the attempt to discover the essence of the subject as a human personality. The essential character of the subject is what the biographer must strive to capture, since this is theindispensable ingredient that will provide coherence to the entire story whose unity must be provided by the course of a single human life.
During the preparation of the present work, there was one historical moment which more than any other delineated the character of George Bush. The scene was the Nixon White House during the final days of the Watergate debacle. White House officials, including George Bush, had spent the morning of that Monday, August 5, 1974 absorbing the impact of Nixon's notorious "smoking gun" tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, shortly after the original Watergate break-in, which could now no longer be withheld from the public. In that exchange of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered that the CIA stop the FBI from further investigating how various sums of money found their way from Texas and Minnesota via Mexico City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect thePresident (CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the "Plumbers" arrested in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergatebuilding. These revelations were widely interpreted as establishing a {prima facie} case of obstruction of justice against Nixon. That was fine with George, who sincerely wanted his patron and benefactor Nixon to resign. George's great concern was that the smoking gun tape called attention to a money-laundering mechanism which he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil, and Robert Mosbacher, had helped to set up at Nixon's request. When Nixon, in the "smoking gun" tape, talked about "the Texans" and "some Texas people," Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher were among the most prominent of those referred to. The threat to George's political ambitions was great.
The White House that morning was gripped by panic. Nixon would be gonebeforethe end of the week. In the midst of the furor, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted to know if everyone who needed to be informed had been briefed about the smoking gun transcript. In a roomful of officials, some of whom were already sipping Scotch to steady their nerves, Timmons asked Dean Burch,
"Dean, does Bush know about the transcript yet?" "Yes," responded Burch. "Well, what did he do?" inquired Timmons. "He broke out into assholes and shit himself to death," replied Burch. Inthis exchange, which is recordedin Woodward and Bernstein's {The Final Days,} we grasp the essential George Bush, in a crisis, and for all seasons.
Introduction
The thesis of this book is simple: if George Bush were to be re-elected in November 1992 for a second term as the President of the United States, this country and the rest of the world would face a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.
The necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in the minds of the authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the Iraq war of January-February 1991. That war was an act of savage and premeditated genocide on the part of Bush, undertaken in connivance with a clique in London which has, in its historical continuity, represented boththe worst enemy of the long-term interests of the American people, and the most implacable adversary of the progress of the human species.
Theauthors observed George Bush as the Gulf crisis and the war unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged publicoutbursts constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged mental state that was full of ominous portent for humanity. The authors were also horrified by the degree to which their fellow citizens willfully ignored the shocking reality of these public fits. A majority of the American people proved more than willing to lend its support to a despicable enterprise of killing.
By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and the House ofRepresentatives authorized Bush's planned war measures to restore the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds chattel slaves. That vote was a crime against God's justice.
This book is part of an attempt to help the American people to survive this terrible crime, both for the sake of the world and for their ownsake. It is intended as a contribution to a process of education that might help to save the American people from the awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is further intended as a warning to all citizens that if they fail to deny Bush a second term, they will deserve what they get after 1993.
As this book goes to press, public awareness of the long-term depression of the American economy is rapidly growing. If Bush were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond the reach of the American electorate; with the federal deficit rising over a billion dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate such crushing austerity as to bring the country to thebrink of civil war. Some examples of this point are described in the last chapter of this book.
Ourgoal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush as possible within thetime constraints imposed bythe 1992 election. Time and resources have not permitted us meticulous attention to certain matters of detail; we can say, nevertheless, that both our commitment to the truth and our final product are betterthan anythinganyoneelse has been able to muster, including news organizationsand intelligence agencies with capabilities that far surpass our own.
Why do we fight the Bush power cartel with a mere book? We have no illusions of easy success, but we were encouraged in our work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition to Bush and his policies.It will certainly pose a new set of problems for those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although Bush is now what journalists call a world leader, no accurate account of his actual career exists in the public domain.
Thevolumewhich we submit to the court of world public opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first book-length, unauthorized biography ofGeorgeBush. It is the first approximation of the truth about his life. This is the first biography worthy of the name, a fact that says a great deal about the sinister and obsessive secrecy of this personage. None of the other biographies (including Bush's campaign autobiography) can be takenseriously; each of these books is a pastiche of lies, distortions and banalities that run the gamut from campaign panegyric, to the Goebbels Big Lie, to fake but edifying stories for credulous children. Almost without exception, the available Bush literature is worthless as a portrait of the subject.
Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a networkasset of Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful political forces in the United States during much of the twentieth century, and for many years the largest private bank inthe world. It suffices in this context to think of Averell Harriman negotiating duringWorld War IIin the name of the United States with Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers Harriman partner Robert Lovett in guiding John F. Kennedy's choice of his cabinet, to begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott Bush's post as managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers Harriman networks pervade government and the mass media. Again and again in the course of the following pages wewill see stories embarrassing to George Bush refused publication, documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and witnesses inculpatoryto Bush be overtaken by mysterious and conveniently timed deaths. The few relevant facts which have found their way into the public domain have necessarily been filtered by this gigantic apparatus. This problemhas been compounded by thecorruption and servility of authors, journalists, news executives and publishers who have functioned more and more as kept advocates for a governmental regime of which Bush has been a prominent part for a quarter-century.
The Red Studebaker Myth
George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain covert. At the same time, he senses thathis need for coverup is a vulnerability.The need to protect this weak flank accounts for the steady stream of fake biographical material concerning George, as well as the spin given to many studies that may never mention Georgedirectly. Over the past several months, we have seen a new book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public something newby fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring the central role of George Bush and his business partners in the Watergate affair. We have a new book by Lt. Col. Oliver North which alleges that Reagan knew everything about the Iran-Contra affair, but that George Bush was not part of North's chain of command. The latter point merely paraphrasesBush'sown lame excusethat he was "out of the loop" during all those illegal transactions. During the hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to become director of Central Intelligence, nobody had anything new to add about the role of George Bush, the boss of the National Security Council's Special Situation Group crisis staff that was a command center for the whole affair. These charades are peddledto a very credulous public by operatives whose task goes beyond mere damage control to mind control--the "MK" in the government's MK-Ultra operation.
Part of the free ride enjoyed by George Bush during the 1988 elections is reflected in the fact that at no point in the campaign was there any serious effort byany of the news organizations to provide the public with an accurate and complete account of his political career. At least two biographies of Dukakis appeared which, although hardly critical,were not uniformly laudatory either. But in the case of Bush, all the public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign biography and a newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of lies.
Early in the course of our research for the present volume it became apparent that all books and most longerarticles dealing with the life of George Bush had been generated from a single print-out of thoroughly approved "facts" about Bush and his family. We learned that during 1979-80, Bush aide Pete Roussel attempted to recruit biographers to prepare a life of Bush based on a collection of press releases, news summaries, and similar pre-digested material. Most biographical writing about Bush consists merely of the points from this printout, strung out chronologically and made into anarrative through the interpretation of comments, anecdotes, embellishments, or special stylistic devices.
Thecanonical Bush-approved printout is readily identified. One dead giveaway is the inevitability with which the hacks out to cover up the substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red Studebaker which George Bush allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas in 1948. This is the sort of detail which has been introduced into Bush's real life in a deliberate and deceptive attempt to humanize his image.It has been our experience that any text that features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably been derived from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore practically worthless for serious research into Bush's life. We therefore assign such texts to the "red Studebaker school" of coverup and falsification.
Some examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography, {Looking Forward,} ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold:"Heading into Texas in my Studebaker, all I knewabout the state's landscape was what I'd seen from the cockpit of a Vultee Vibrator during my training days in the Navy."s1 Here is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh Green, a friend of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his {George Bush: An Intimate Portrait,} published after Bush had won the presidency: "He (Bush) gassed up his1948 Studebaker, arranged for his wife and son to follow, and headed for Odessa, Texas."s2
Harry Hurt III wrote the followinglines in a 1983 Texas magazine article that was even decorated with a drawing of what apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but whichdoes not look like a Studebaker of that vintage at all: "When George Herbert Walker Bush drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa in the summer of 1948, the town's population, though constantly increasing with newly-arrived oil field hands, was still under 30000."s3
We see that Harry Hurt has more imagination than many Bush biographers, and hisarticle does provide a few useful facts. More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben Kramer, whose biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992. Cramer was given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into the same tired old printout. But the very fact that the Bush team feels that it requires another biography indicates that it still feels that it has a potential vulnerability here. Cramer has attempted to solve his problem byrecasting thesame old garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we would almost say {hyperthyroid} style. The following is from an excerpt of this forthcoming book that was published in {Esquire} in June 1991: "In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from Pres), and started driving south."s4
Was that Studebakershiny and new, or old andbattered? Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point; in any case, as we see, our authorities diverge.
Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush at war, the {Flight of the Avenger,}s5 does notinclude the obligatory "red Studebaker" reference, but this is more than compensated for bythe most elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service. The publication of {Flight of the Avenger,} which concentrates on an heroic retelling of Bush's war record,and ignores all evidence that might tend to puncture this myth, was timed to coincide with Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile tract written with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara Bush, and the White House staff. {Flight of the Avenger} recallsthe practice of totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime should be accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's strong man ina martial posture. In any case, this book deals with Bush's life up to the end of World War II; we never reach Odessa.
Only one of the full-length accounts produced by the Bush propaganda machine neglects the red Studebaker story. This is Nicholas King's {George Bush: A Biography,} the first book-length version of Bush's life, produced as a result of Pete Roussel's efforts for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had served as Bush'sspokesman when he was U.S.Ambassador to the United Nations. King admits in his preface that he can be impugned for writing a work of the most transparent apologetics: "In retrospect," he says , "this book may seem open to the charge of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable all around."s6 Indeed.
Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details from the sameprintout. Here is the relevant excerpt from the warmly admiring {Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait ofAmerica's CandidFirst Lady,} writtenby Donnie Radcliffe and published after Bush's 1988 election victory: "With $3000 left over after he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the1947 red Studebaker his father had given him for graduation after George's car died on the highway."s7
Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the same old Bushprintout. The German author and reporter Rainer Bonhorst, the former Washington correspondent of the {Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,} in his 1988 book {George Bush: The New Man in the White House,} named a chapter of this Bush political biography "To Texas in the Red Studebaker." Bonhorst writesas follows: "Then there was still the matter of the red Studebaker. It plays--rightafter the world wareffort--a central role in thelife history of George Bush. It is the history of his rebellion. The step which made a careless Texan out of a stiff NewEnglander, a self-made man out ofa patrician's son, born into wealth.... Thus, George and Barbara Bush, 24 and23 years old, he having just finished with his studies, she having prematurely withdrawn from her university and become a mother a few months earlier, packed their baby and their suitcases and loaded them into their glaring red Studebaker coupe.
"Asupermodern, smart car, certainly somewhat loud for the New England taste,' the Bushes later recalled. But finally it departed towards Texas."s8 We see that Bonhorst isacutely awareof the symbolic importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic accounts of Bush's life.
What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas, in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston. In arecentletterto the {Texas Monthly,} Wyatt specifies that "when people speak of Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of Dresser Industries.... I hate it when people make statements about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just didn'thappenthat way," writes Mr. Wyatt.s9 Dresser was a Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its subsidiaries.One history of Dresser Industries contains a photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son "in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas."s1s0 Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of 1948? In anycase, this most cherished myth ofthe Bush biographers is very much open to doubt.
The Roman Propaganda Machine
Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in world literature. The red Studebaker school goes back a long way; these writers of today can be usefullycompared witha certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who was thus an approximate contemporary of Jesus Christ. Velleius Paterculus was an historian and biographer who is known today, if at all, for his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which are contained within Paterculus's history of Rome.
Paterculus,writing underTiberius, gave a very favorable treatment of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to write of Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery came in Velleius Paterculus's treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is part of what he writes about that tyrannical ruler:
"Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have passed in the view, and are fresh in the memory of all, who shall presume to give a full account? ... credit has been restored to mercantile affairs, seditionhas been banished from the forum, corruption from the Campus Martius, and discord from the senate-house; justice, equity and industry, which had long lain buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority has been given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and solemnity to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in the theatre have been suppressed, and all men have had either a desire excited in them, or a necessity imposed on them, of acting with integrity. Virtuous actsare honored, wicked deeds are punished. The humble respects the powerful, without dreading him; the powerful takes precedenceof the humble without condemning him. When were provisions more moderate in price? When were the blessings of peace more abundant? Augustan peace, diffused overall the regions of the east and the west, and all that lies between the south and the north, preserves every corner of the world free from all dread of predatory molestation. Fortuitous losses, not only of individuals, but of cities, the munificence of the prince is ready to relieve. The cities of Asia have been repaired; the provinces have been secured from the oppression of their governors. Honor promptly rewards the deserving, and the punishment of the guilty, ifslow, is certain. Interest gives place to justice, solicitation to merit.For the best of princes teaches his countrymen to act rightly by his own practice; and while he is the greatest in power, he is still greater in example.
"Having exhibited a general view of the administration of Tiberius Caesar, let us now enumerate a few particulars respecting it.... How formidable a war, excited by the Gallic chief Sacrovir and Julius Florius, did he suppress, and with such amazing expedition and energy, that the Roman people learned that they were conquerors, before they knew that they were at war, and the news of the victory outstripped the news of the danger! The African war too, perilous as it was, and daily increasing in strength, was quickly terminatedunder his auspices and direction...."s1s1
All of this was written in praise of the regime that crucified Jesus Christ, and one of the worst genocidal tyrannies in the history of the world.Paterculus, we must sadly conclude, was a sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush machine.
In addition to feeding the personality cult ofTiberius, Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and for manyyears Tiberius's number one favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In many respectsSejanus was not unlike James Baker III under the Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time inseclusion on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day control of the vastempireand its 100 millionsubjects. Paterculus wrote of Sejanusthat he was "a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of government ... aman of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness ... assuming nothing to himself." That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in about 30 A.D. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to Tiberius himself; somewhat later, the emperor, suspecting a coup plot, condemned Sejanus andhad him tornlimb from limb in gruesome retribution.
But why bring up Rome? Some readers may be scandalized by the things that truth obliges us to record about a sittingpresident of the United States. Are we not disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the reasons for glancing back at Imperial Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural degradation like our own, rulers of great evil haveinflicted incalculable sufferingon humanity.In our modern time of war and depression, this is once again the case.If Caligula was possible then, who could claim that the America of the New World Order should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with these old Romans, because they can show us much about ourselves.
In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable about the first dozen emperors, we must wait until the infamous Julio-Claudian dynastyof Julius Caesar, Augustus,Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the rest had entirely passed from the scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 A.D.; Caligula, his designated successor, from 37 to 41 A.D.; and Nero from 54 to 68 A.D. But the first accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes from Publius Cornelius Tacitus in about 115-17 A.D., late in the reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write and publish a more realistic account of the Julio-Claudian emperors because oneof the constant themes of Trajan's propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor through comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants.
Tacitus manages to convey how the destructivenessof these emperors in their personal lives correlated with their mass executions and their genocidal economic policies. Tacitus was familiar withthe machinery of Roman Imperial power: he was of senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 A.D., and was the governor of theimportant province of western Anatolia (today's Turkey) which the Romans referred tosimplyas Asia. Tacitus writes of Tiberius: "... his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of anoriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to locate and procure his requirements.... It was like the sack of a captured city."
Tiberius was ableto dominate the legislative branch of his government, the senate, by subversion and terror: "It was, indeed, a horrible feature of this period that leading senators became informers evenon trivial matters--some openly, many secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect as strangers, old stories as damaging as new. Inthe Main Square, ata dinner-party, a remark on any subject might mean prosecution. Everyone competed forpriority in marking down the victim. Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic.... I realize that many writers omit numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid that catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal may equally depress their readers.But numerous unrecorded incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known.
"... Even women were in danger.They could not be charged with aiming at supreme power. So they were charged with weeping: one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death. The senate decidedthis case.... In the same year the high price of corn nearly caused riots....
"Frenzied with bloodshed, (Tiberius) now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, therethey lay, strewn about--or in heaps. Relatives and friends were forbidden to stand by or lament them, or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded them, spying on their sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged to the Tiber,they floated away or grounded--with none to cremate or touch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality drove compassion away."s1s2
This is the sameTiberius administration so extravagantly praised by Velleius Paterculus. Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that have come down to us, much of what we know of the rule of Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 A.D.) derives from {The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,} a book by GaiusSuetonius Tranquillus. The character and administration of Caligula present some striking parallels with the subject of the present book.
Asa stoic, Caligula was a great admirer of his own "immovable rigor." His motto was "Remember that Ihave the right to do anything to anybody." He made no secret of his bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green team in the Roman arena, and when the crowd applaudeda charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula criedout, "I wish the Roman people had but a single neck." At one of his state dinnersCaligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, andwhen a consul askedhim what was so funny, he replied that it was the thought that as emperor Caligula had the power to have the throats of the top officials cut at any time he chose. Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck of his wife or one of his mistresses, he liked to remark: "Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word."
Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two notebooks were found among his personal papers, one labelled "The Sword"and the other labelled "The Dagger." These were lists of the persons he had proscribed and liquidated,and were the forerunners of the enemies lists and discrediting committee of today. Suetonius frankly calls Caligula "a monster," and speculates on thepyschologicalrootsof his criminal disposition: "I think I may attributeto mental weakness the existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person, extreme assurance and, on theotherhand,excessive timorousness." Caligula was"full of threats" against "the barbarians," but at the same time prone to precipitous retreats and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his "body language" by "practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror."
Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit himself as an object of public worship, delighting in being hailed as "Jupiter Latiaris" by the populace. Later Caligula would officially opentemples in his own name. Caligula was brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose members he subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many senators were "secretly put to death." "He often inveighed against all the Senators alike.... He treated the other orders with like insolence and cruelty." Suetonius recites whole catalogues of "special instances of his innate brutality" toward persons of all walks of life. He enjoyed inflicting torture, and revelled in liquidating political opponents or those who had insulted or snubbed him in some way. He had a taste for capital executions as theperfect backdrop for parties and banquets. Caligula also did everything he could to denigrate the memory of the great men of past epochs, so that their fame could not eclipse his own: "He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less envy and malice than insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of famous men" and tried to destroy all the texts of Homer.
Caligula "respected neither his own chastity nor that of any one else." He was reckless in his extravagance, and soon emptied out the imperial treasury of all the funds that old Tiberius had squirreled away there. After that, Caligula tried to replenish his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations, property seizures, and public auctions. He also "levied new and unheard-of taxes," to the point that "no class of commodities was exempt from some kind of tax or other." Caligula taxed all foodstuffs, took a fortiethof the award in any lawsuit, an eighth of the daily wages of the porters, and demandedthat the prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average price charged to each individual customer. (It is rumored that this part of Caligula's career is under study by those planning George Bush's second term.) Caligula also opened a brothel in his palace as anadditional source of income, which may prefigure today's White House staff. Among Caligula's moresingular hobbies Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of gold coins.
Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (describedby Suetonius as "neither beautiful nor young") with him until the very end. But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he made consul of theRoman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune Gaius Chaerea, a man whomCaligula had taken special delight in humiliating.s1s3
The authors of the present study are convinced that these references tothe depravityof the Roman emperors, and to the records of that depravity provided by such authors as Tacitus and Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task offollowing the career of a member of the senatorial class of the Anglo-American elite through the various stages of hisformation and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The Roman Imperial model is germane because the American rulingelite of today is far closerto the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the world of the American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention of 1789. The leitmotif of modern American presidential politics is unquestionably an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by Bush in his slogan for 1990, "The NewWorld Order," and for 1991, the "pax universalis." The central project of the Bush presidency isthe creation and consolidation of a single, universal Anglo-American (orAnglo-Saxon) empire very directly modelled on the various phases of the Roman Empire.
The Olympian Delusion
There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical methodof the Graeco-Roman world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides composed hismonumental work on the PeloponnesianWar, those who have sought to imitate his style--with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among them--have employed the device of attributing long speeches to historical personages, even when it appears very unlikely that such lengthy orations could have been made by the protagonists at the time. This has nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political writing, which attempts to present historical events asa series of trivial and banal soap-opera exchanges, which carry on for such interminable lengths as to suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are convinced that by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the reader a more faithful--and damning--account of Bush's actions.
George Bush might agreethat "history is biography," although we suspect that he would not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the present work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale,and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special, exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generallygoes togetherwith a fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are indeed superior. These notions of "breeding" are a constant in the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe, especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like Bush must necessarily strive.At the very least, oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground between the immortals above and the {hoi polloi} below. The culmination of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders, by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe according to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account this element of fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in regardto the Gulf War, international finance, or the AIDS epidemic must defy all comprehension.
Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by George Bush is theemphasis on one's own family pedigree.This accounts for the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of this book to Bush's family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. It is impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality unless we realize that it is important for him to be considered a cousin, however distant, of Queen Elizabeth II of theHouse of Mountbatten-Windsor and for his wife Barbara to be viewed in some sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.
The Family Firm
Forrelated reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate the role played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by his maternal grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and George Herbert Walker, Jr., and by George H.W. Bush's father, the late Senator Prescott Bush. In the course of this task, we must speak at length about the institution to which George Bush owes the most, the Wall Street international investment bank of Brown Brothers Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse mentioned above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was and remains the family firm in the deepest sense. The formidable power of this bank and its ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator Prescott Bush up through the time of his death in 1972, and still activeon George's behalf down to the present day, is the single most important key to every step of George'sbusiness, covert operations, and political career.
In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him personally have noted, the networklooms much larger than George's own character and will. The reader will search in vain for strong principled commitments in George Bush's personality; the most that will be found is a series of characteristic obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal ambition, and settling scores with adversaries. What emerges by contrast is the decisive importance of Bush's network of connections. His response to the Gulf crisis of 1991 will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical insight, but rather by his connections to the British oligarchy, to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses. If the question is one of finance, then the opinions of J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry Kravis, Robert Mosbacher,T. Boone Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker III and the City of London will be decisive. If covert operations and dirty tricks are on the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys with whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of 1989, despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a weak and passive executive, waiting for his networks to show him what it was he was supposed to do. When German reunification and the crumblingof the Soviet empire spurred those--primarily British--networks intoaction, Bush was suddenly capable of violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second term approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new wars designed to secure his re-election.
The United States in Decline
Biography has itsown inherent discipline: Itmust be concerned with the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray too far away. In no way has it been our intention tooffer an account of American history during the lifetime of George Bush. The present study neverthelessreflects manyaspects of that recent historyof U.S. decline. It will be noted that Bush has succeeded in proportion as the country has failed,and that Bush's advancement has proceeded {paripassu}with the degradation of the national stage upon which he has operated and which he has come to dominate. At various phases in his career, Bush has come into conflict with persons who were intellectually and morally superior to him. Onesuch was Senator Ralph Yarborough, and another was Senator Frank Church. Our study will be found to catalogue the constant decline in the qualities of Bush's adversaries as human types until the 1980s, by which time his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than Bush himself.
Theexception to this trend is Bush's long-standing personal vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most consistent and capable adversary. LaRouche was jailed seven days after Bush's inauguration in the most infamous political frameup of recent U.S. history. As our study will document, at critical moments in Bush's career, LaRouche's political interventions have frustrated some of Bush's best-laid political plans: A very clear example is LaRouche's role in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the New Hampshire primary. Over the intervening years, LaRouche has become George Bush's "man in the iron mask," the principled political adversary whom Bush seeks to jail and silence at all costs.The restoration of justice in this country must include the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's political associates, and all the other political prisoners of the Bush regime.
As for the political relevance of our project, we think that it is very real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been important for the public to know more about Bush's business dealings withthe Royal Family ofKuwait. During the 1992 presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent crop ofjunk-bond assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to bankruptcy court, and state workers all across the United States are informed that the retirement pensions they had been promised will never be paid, the relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis will surely constitute an explosive political issue. Similarly, once Bush's British and Kissingerian pedigree is recognized, the methods he is likely to pursue in regard to situations such as the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro regime in Cuba, or theprovocation of a splendid little nuclear war involving North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will hardly be mysterious.
Theauthors have been at some pains to makethis work intelligible to readers around the world. We offer this book to those who share our aversion to the imperialist-colonialist New World Order, and our profound horror at the concept ofa return to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested by Bush's "pax universalis" slogan. This work is tangible evidence that there is anopposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the new Caligula is very vulnerable indeed on the level of the exposure of his own misdeeds.
It will be argued that this book should have been published before the 1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been avoided. That is certainly true, but it is an objection which should also be directed to many institutions and agencies whose resources far surpassour modest capabilities. We can only remind our fellow citizens that when he asks for their votes for his re-election, George Bush also enters that court of public opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They shouldnot waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of his career and future intentions, since it is Bush who comes forward appealing for their support. To aid in this process, we have provided a list of TwentyQuestions forCandidate George Bush on the campaign trail, and this will be found in the appendix.
We do not delude ourselves that we have said the last word about George Bush. But we have for the first time sketched out at least some of the most salient features and gathered them into a comprehensible whole. We encourage an aroused citizenry, as well as specialized researchers, to improve upon what we have been able to accomplish.In sodoing, we recall the words of the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he reluctantly accepted the order of a powerful king to produce an account of the old Roman Pantheon: "If I don't succeed completely in this exposition, at least I will provide a stimulus for the better work of others who are wiser."--Boccaccio, {Genealogy of the National Gods} {To be continued.}
Notes
1. George Bush andVic Gold, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 47.
2. Fitzhugh Green, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Hippocrene, 1989), p. 53.
3. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," {TexasMonthly,} June, 1983, p.142.
4. Richard Ben Cramer, "How He Got Here," {Esquire,} June, 1991, p. 84.
5. Joe Hyams, {Flight of the Avenger} (New York, 1991).
6. Nicholas King, {George Bush: A Biography} (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. xi.
7. Donnie Radcliffe, {Simply Barbara Bush,} (New York: Warner, 1989), p. 103.
8. Rainer Bonhorst, {George Bush, Der Neue Mann im Weissen Haus,} (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80-81.
9. See "TheRoar of the Crowd," {Texas Monthly,} November, 1991. See also Jan Jarboe, "Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog," {Texas Monthly,} April 1991, p. 122 ff. Here Wyatt observes: "I knew from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only because he was politically ambitious.He flew out here on an airplane owned by Dresser Industries. His daddy was a member of the board of Dresser."
10. Darwin Payne, {Initiative in Energy} (NewYork: Simon and Shuster, 1979), p. 233.
11. John Selby Watson (translator), {Sallust, Florus, and Velleius Paterculus} (London: George Bell andSon, 1879), pp. 542-46.
12. CorneliusTacitus, {The Annals of Imperial Rome} (Penguin, 1962), pp. 193-221.
13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, {The Lives of the Twelve Caesars} (New York: Modern Library,1931),pp. 165-204, { passim.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15244 of alt.activism: From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Newsgroups: alt.activism Subject: Part 2: George Bush Unauthorized Biography mV3LeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com Date: 15 Jan 92 21:58:09 GMT Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 1495
The followingis from the New Federalist serialization of a forthcoming book concerning George Bush.
For further information or to subscribe to New Federalist, please contact me by e-mail.
CHAPTER 2 THE HITLER PROJECT
1. Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparingits first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown BrothersHarriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot.
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the {Trading with the Enemy Act}, the government took over the {Union Banking Corporation,} in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.s1
The order seizing the bank "vest[ed] [seized] all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, aNew York corporation," and named the holders of its shares as:
sb|"E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares." Harriman was chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is"Bunny" Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments.
sb|"Cornelis Lievense--4 shares." Lievense was president and director of UBC, and a New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis.
sb|"Harold D. Pennington--1 share." Pennington was treasurer and director of UBC, and an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman.
sb|"Ray Morris--1 share." Morris was director of UBC, anda partner of Bush and the Harrimans.
sb|"Prescott S. Bush--1 share." Bush was director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; he was senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman.
sb|"H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share" Kouwenhoven was director of UBC; he organized UBCas the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; he was also managing director ofUBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive inNazi Germany,and also director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust.
sb|"Johann G. Groeninger--1 share." Groeninger was director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; he was an industrial executive in Nazi Germany.
The order also specified: "all of which shares areheld for the benefit of ... membersof the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country...."
By October 26, 1942, U.S. troops were underway for North Africa. On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by theBush-Harriman bank: the {Holland-American Trading Corporation} and the {Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.}s2
U.S. forces landed under fire nearAlgiers on November 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the {Silesian-American Corporation,} long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 171942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.s3
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late.President Bush'sfamily had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding ofPresident George Herbert Walker Bush and ofthe danger to mankind that he represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result of theHitlerproject. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project.
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news,s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union BankingCorporation was run for the "Thyssen family" of "Germany and/or Hungary"--"nationals ... of a designated enemy country."
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union BankingCorp. were legally {front men for the Nazis}, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way {were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed by} the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examinethe Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.
2. Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen andhis business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiersof Adolf Hitler's takeover ofGermany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, {I Paid Hitler},s5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923.Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.
Buttwo weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that "W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist." Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. "[C]ertain of[Harriman's] associates would serve as directors...." Thyssen agent "H.J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection...."s7
When exactly was "Harriman in Europe sometimeprior to 1924"? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation wasestablished formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned {Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart} (BHS) inthe Netherlands. The investigators concluded that "theUnion BankingCorporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment."
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the "Thyssen interests" in Germany. By putting up about $400000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
{How important was the Nazienterprise for whichPresident Bush's father was the New York banker?}
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or {German Steel Trust}) led by FritzThyssen and his two brothers.After the war, congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units.The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced thefollowing approximate proportions of total German national output: "50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron; 41.4% of Nazi Germany'suniversal plate;36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate; 38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet; 45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes;22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire; 35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives."s8
This accounts for many, many Nazi submarines, bombs, rifles, gas chambers, etc.
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new {German Steel Trust,} Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the "Merchants of Death" bureau in World War I.
In return for putting up $70 millionto create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representativeson the boardof the new Steel Trust.s9
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, forpolitical and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the Steel Trust did itscorporate banking through Dillon Read.
TheWalker-Bush firm's banking activities werenot just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide withthe aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from BertWalker, written fromKennebunkport to Averell Harriman: "It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it."s1s0
Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascistdictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: "... During these last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June."s1s1
Thegreat financial collapse of1929-31 shook America, Germany, and Britain,weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world.It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russianbusiness, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H.Walker& Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners ofthe new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name--Brown, Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the juniorLovettsoon replacedhis father as chief exexcutive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project. American patriots had cursed its name back in Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South overto British mill owners; through their usurious credit they controlled and manipulated the slave-owners.
Now, in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been bossof Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avidof Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner wasMontagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayedat the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German actitivites, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.s1s2
3. Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking:Thyssen's German Steel Trust;and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.s1s3
Letus look moreclosely at the Bushfamily's German partners.
{Fritz Thyssen} told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: "In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph]Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fuaur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate].I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands....
"The credit was about 250-300000 [gold] marks--about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it...."s1s4
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others--in a period of terrible money-shortage in Germany.
{Friedrich Flick} was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's longtimecollaborator and sometime competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S.government said that Flick was"one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of 'Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS."s1s5
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the GermanSteel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
The {Harriman Fifteen Corporation} (George Walker, president, Prescott Bushand Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, January 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanshipof the {Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation,} the American group owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.s1s6
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
"Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... 'Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer,' 1938[title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--'Military Economy Leader']...."s1s7
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel, and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation--initiated analert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership.s1s8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the {New York Times} of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled "Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company...."
The {Times} article continued: "The company has long been accused of mismanagement,excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make thecompany's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly."
The{Times} noted that the company's mines and mills "employ 25000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production.Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States."
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler's Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Bush, Harriman, and their Nazi partners should at least pay fulltaxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: "Have undertaken new steps London Berlin... please establishfriendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]."
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made "in Berlin" to sell an 8000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.s1s9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanksand bombs "settled" this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker, and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably fewpeopleat the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumpedfrom Baku wells revived bythe Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis'share in theSilesian-American Corporationunder the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a "business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation...."s2s0
Bert Walker was still the senior directorof the company, which he hadfounded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.
Theinvestigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the "NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large andvaluable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort."s2s1
Thereportnoted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.
4. Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the {American Ship and Commerce Corp.} as a unit of the W.A.Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.s2s2
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush. From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and advisor to Averell and his brother "Bunny"--he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker& Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman &Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce, and of the Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, {Wilhelm Cuno}, and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg.Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society.In the 1930-32 drive fora Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.s2s3
{Albert Voegler} was chiefexecutive of the Thyssen-Flick GermanSteel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flickin their heavy 1930-33Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power.s2s4
The {Schroeder} family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities ofHarriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Huettefoundry alongwith Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder wastreasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed.Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's proteaageaaHjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangments for Hitler to enter the government.s2s5
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's inGermany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour ofPrescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932--on the eve of their Hitler-triumph.s2s6
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.
TheU.S. Embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the "costly election campaigns" and "the cost of maintaining a private army of 300000 to 400000 men" had raised questions as to theNazis'financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic movedto defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. Embassy reported that the {Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces.}s2s7
Thousands of German opponents ofHitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi BrownShirts. In this connection, we note that the original "Merchant of Death," SamuelPryor,was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp.Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
TheU.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler's seizure of power, the senators found that "German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspectionor interference. The Hitlerists and Communists arepresumed to get arms in this manner. The principal armscomingfrom America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers.The number is great."s2s8
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line--and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to bethe corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.s2s9
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors thatthe Hitler government was good for Germany: "For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reactionis making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also underthe very active propaganda against Germany, caused bysome unpleasant circumstances.These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated inthe foreign press.The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, andI feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever."s3s0
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious "alarm" inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son Erich sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director ofthe Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc." Frederick cabled back to Erich: "No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] Germangoods[,] merely excited individuals." Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the {American-Jewish Committee,} controlled bythe Warburgs,and the {B'nai B'rith,} heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers' ({NewYork Times}),issueda formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counselling "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, [and advising] ... that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed."s3s1
The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the "Anti-DefamationLeague") continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why "professional Nazi-hunters" have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?
The executive board of the {HamburgAmerika Line}{(Hapag)} met jointly with the North Lloyd company board in Hamburg on September 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp.installed Christian J. Beck, a longtime Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines {(Hapag-Lloyd)}) on November 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the {Nazi Labor Front} rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.s3s2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg torepresent thecompany's heavyshareinterest atthe forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office repliedwith the information that "we represented you" at the stockholders meeting and "exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3509600 Hapag stock deposited with us."
The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: "It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the samebasis as heretofore...." In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic ona Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.
After the meeting with theZeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: "I am glad to learnthat Mr. Hellferich [sic] hasstated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore."s3s3
Two months before moving against Bush's Union Banking Corp., the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure reportthat Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm.s3s4
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The {Harriman International Co.,} led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct {all exports from Hitler's Germany to the United States}.s3s5
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of "covert action government," that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.
Throughoutthe 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi warmaking apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.
Dulles wrote to PrescottBush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originallybeen reached with non-Nazicorporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, whomanaged these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
"Sept. 22, 1937 "Mr. Prescott S. Bush "59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
"Dear Press, "I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Companyto Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers' agreement. "Sincerely yours, "John Foster Dulles"
Dulles enclosed aproposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature, and the changes went through.s3s6
In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Companyattempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler "law" was invalid in the UnitedStates; smallbondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.s3s7
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax.
Forhis part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
Notes
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248. Signedby Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942. 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (November 7, 1942). The {New York City Directory of Directors}, 1930s-40s, list Prescott Bushas a director of Union Banking Corp. from 1934 through 1943.
2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order Number 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.
4. {New York Times,} December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: "The Union BankingCorporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place ofbusiness to 120 Broadway." The {Times} omitted the factthat the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.
5. FritzThyssen, {I Paid Hitler}, 1941, reprintedin (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted "putsch" against the constitutional government.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932,on microfilm in {Confidential Reportsof U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany,} at major U.S. libraries.
7. October 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Officeof Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file boxrelating to Vesting Order Number 248.
8. {Elimination of German Resources for War}: HearingsBeforea Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department,July 2, 1945. Page 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of1938; Thyssenorganization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-731.
9. Robert Sobel, {The Life and Times of Dillon Read} (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991),pp. 92-111.The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, August 11, 1927, in W. Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress(hereafter "WAH papers").
11. "Iaccarino" to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927.
12. Andrew Boyle, {Montagu Norman} (London: Cassell, 1967). Sir Henry Clay, {Lord Norman} (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71. John A. Kouwenhouven, {Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman} (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place ata single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line,carried out through Harriman's American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, {An Introduction to The Order} (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).
15. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, U. S. Government Printing Office, (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
16. "Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors," October 31, 1930 (WAH papers), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board. Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum December 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp. Annual Report of United Kings and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (WAH papers) lists "Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin" and "William Averell Harriman ... New York" on the Board of Directors. "HarrimanFifteen Coporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," WAH papers. This report showsHarriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1628800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings. The {New York City Directory of Directors}volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W.Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp. "Appointments," (three typed pages) marked "Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H.," (among the papers from PrescottBush'sNew York Officeof Brown Brothers Harriman, WAH papers), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The "Report To the Stockholders of theHarriman Fifteen Corporation," October19, 1933 (WAH papers) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows theHarriman Fifteen Corp.'s address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and Co.
17. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,} p. 1686.
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman. "Dear Averell: "In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it adviseable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossidated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]...."
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders January 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed November 17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Prop. Custodian.F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed, December 31, 1942; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943). The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98000 shares of common and 50000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American. TheNazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with "an invitation to take part in the regular meetingof the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georgvon Giesche'sErben...." WAH papers.
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives,Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in filebox relating to Vesting Order Number 370.
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organizationthrough 1928.Consult {New York City Directory of Directors}. "Harriman FifteenCorporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," {op. cit.} The report lists 46861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp. See"Message from Mr. Bullfin," August 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, WAH papers) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker,respectively director and president of the corporation.
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, L., {The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,} p. 1688.
24. See "Elimination of German Resources for War," {op. cit.,} pages 881-882 on Voegler. SeeAnnualReport of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesel schaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors.A copy is in the New York PublicLibrary Annexat 11th Avenue, Manhattan.
25. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B,} {op. cit.,} pp. 1178, 1453-1454, 1597, 1599. See "Elimination of German Resources for War," {op. cit.,} pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, {op. cit.} Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, November 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, December 9, 1932. In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney. Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor MontaguNorman, and Baron Bruno's partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.
27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op. cit.}
28. U.S. Senate "Nye Committee" hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-1198, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and January 9, 1933.
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933. MaxWarburg had brokeredthe sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlledthe Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad. Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe.He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, {The Warburgs: The Story of A Family} (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs.Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations,are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, {American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis} (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
32. {Investigation of Nazi PropagandaActivities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities}: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934--Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members. See {New York Times,} July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936. Rudolph Brinckmannto Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helferrich's letter. Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinkmann c/o M.M. Warburg andCo, July 6, 1936, WAH papers. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc.42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (Number 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Officeof Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file boxrelating to Vesting Order Number 126.
35. {New York Times,} May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegramwhich somehowescaped the shredder. It is addressed to Nazi official HjalmarSchacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: "Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tueday afternoon....I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail. with my regards W.A. Harriman" (WAH papers).
36. Dulles to Bush, letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. {New York Times,} Jan. 19, 1938.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15394 of alt.activism: From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Newsgroups: alt.activism Subject: Part 3: George bush Unauthorized Biography 1VVReB1w164w@ccs.covici.com Date: 19 Jan 92 01:12:47 GMT Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 1544
The following is part 3 of an unauthorized biography of George Bush -- a forthcoming book serialized in New Federalist. This article is from Issue 1 V6.
For further information, or to subscribe, please contact me by e-mail.
Chapter 3 RACE HYGIENE: Three Bush Family Alliances "The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children....The prevention of the faculty and opportunity toprocreate on the part of the physically degenerateand mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity froman immeasurable misfortune."s1
"The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clearthat one of the major challenges ofthe 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility."
These two quotations are alike in their mock show of concern for human suffering, and in their cynical remedy for it: Big Brother must prevent the "unworthy" or "unwanted" people from living. Letus now further inquire into the family background of our President, so as to help illustrate how the second quoted author, {George Bush}s1 came to share the outlook of the first, {Adolf Hitler}.s2 We shall examine here the alliance of the Bush family with three other families: {Farish, Draper} and {Gray.} The private associations among these families have led to the President's relationship tohis closest, most confidential advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler project and its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will help us to explain George Bush's obsession with the supposed overpopulation of the world's non-Anglo-Saxons, and the dangerous means he has adopted to deal with this "problem."
Bush and Farish
When George Bush was elected vice president in 1980, Texas mystery man William Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush's personal wealth in a "blind trust."Known as one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment.s3 Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and confidante. He is also the unique private host toBritain's Queen Elizabeth: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with the Queen's mares. That is her public rationale when she comes to America and stays in Farish's house. It is a vital link in the mind of our Anglophile President. President Bush can count on Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own familyfortune was made inthe same Hitler project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.
On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnoldannounced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President's money manager) had pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between StandardOil Co. of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern.The merged enterprise had opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 141940, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death and then murdered. Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of New Jersey (later known as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had agreedto stop hiding fromthe United States patents for artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis.s4 A Senate investigating committeeunder Senator (later U.S. President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on corporations' collaboration with the Nazis. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynicalway Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he know there was a war on? The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter, written to Standard president Farish by his vice president, shortly after the beginning of World War II (September1, 1939) in Europe. The letter concerned arenewal of their earlier agreements with the Nazis:
Report on European Trip Oct. 12, 1939 Mr. W.S. Farish 30 Rockefeller Plaza
Dear Mr. Farish: ... I stayed in France until Sept. 17th.... In England I met by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland, and ... a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the state of war.... [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British.... Ialso had several meetings with ... the [British] Air Ministry.... I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to Holland.... After discussions with the [American] Ambassador [Joseph Kennedy] the situation was cleared completely.... The gentlemen in the Air Ministry ... very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering England.... Pursuant to thesearrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some 2000 foreign patents and {we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in....} [emphasis added] Very truly yours, F[rank] A. Howards5
Here are some cold realities behind the tragedy of World War II, which help explain the Bush-Farish family alliance--and their peculiar closeness to the Queen of England: sb|Shell Oil is principally owned by the British Royal family. Shell's chairman, Sir Henri Deterding, helped sponsor Hitler's rise to power,s6 by arrangement with the Royal Family's Bank of England Governor, Montagu Norman. Their ally, Standard Oil, would take part in the Hitler project right up to the bloody, gruesome end. sb|When grandfather Farish signed the Justice Department's consent decree in March 1942, the government had already started picking its way through the tangled web of world-monopoly oil and chemical agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many patents and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation for another seven months. The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year, the Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a director and financialczar of Dresser, installinghis Yale classmate Neil Mallon as chairman.s7 George Bush would later name one of his sons after the Dresser executive. William S. Farish was the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co. of Texas, which Farish merged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard empire of pipelines and refineries in Texas.s8 Thestock market crashed just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protege Hjalmar Schacht, who was to become Hitler's economics minister, paid frantic visits to New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.
The Congress on Eugenics
The mostimportant American political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous Third International Congress on Eugenics, held at NewYork's American Museum of Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.s9 This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly "inferior" and "socially inadequate"groups in reproducing, expanding their numbers, and "amalgamating" with others. It was recommendedthat these "dangers" to the "better" ethnic groups and to the "well-born," could be dealt with by sterilization or "cutting off the bad stock" of the "unfit." Italy's fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of "entertainment" for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on "racial purity," W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and interracial sex in Virginia. TheCongress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother; she had paidfor the founding ofthe race-science movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old George Herbert Walker--they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with "breeding thoroughbreds" among horses and humans.s1s0 Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting.s1s1 The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr.Rudin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics "research." Dr. Rudin had addressed the International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on "Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene," while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit. Rudin had led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C. At the Harrimans' 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected President of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder, Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz. As depression-maddened financiersschemed in Berlin and New York, Rudin was now official leader of the world eugenics movement. Components of his movement included groups with overlapping leadership, dedicated to: sb|sterilization of mental patients ("mental hygiene societies"); sb|execution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill ("euthanasia societies"); and sb|eugenical race-purification by prevention of births to parents from inferior blood stocks ("birth control societies").
Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly for the elimination of the "unfit" by means including force and violence.s1s2 Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler's interior minister Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick called the Germans a"degenerate"race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany's parentsfor producing"feeble-minded" and "defective" children. The following month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity," the sterilization law modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states. Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf, and alcoholics.A quarter million people in these categorieswere sterilized. Rudin, Ploetz, and their colleagues trained a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists--as sterilizers and as killers. When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors, and psychiatrists staffed the new "T4" agency, which planned and supervised the mass killings: first at "euthanasia centers," where the same categories which had firstbeen subject to sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent in lots of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such as Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews andother race victims, at straight extermination campsin Poland, such as Treblinka and Belsen.s1s3 In 1933, as what Hitler called his"New Order"appeared, John D. Rockefeller,Jr. appointedWilliam S. Farish the chairman of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (in 1937 he was made president and chief executive). Farish moved his offices to Rockefeller Center, New York, where he spent a good deal of time with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben; his company paid a publicity man,Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda and get it into the U.S. press. Now that he was outside of Texas, Farish found himself in the shipping business--like the Bush family. He hired Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers. And he hired {Emil Helfferich,} chairman of the Walker/Bush/Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line, as chairman also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a top Farish-Standard executive in Germany.s1s4 This interlock between their Nazi German operations put Farish together with Prescott Bush ina small, select group of men operating from abroad through Hitler's "revolution," and calculating that they would never be punished. In 1939, Farish's daughter Martha married Averell Harriman's nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry, and Farish in-laws became Prescott Bush's partners at 59 Broadway.s1s5 Both Emil Helfferich andKarl Lindemann were authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, ona special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton, Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944,when the SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the warthat these were not his personal contributions--they were corporate Standard Oil funds.s1s6 After pleading "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, WilliamStampsFarishwas fined $5000. (Similar fines were levied against Standard Oil--$5000 each for the parent company and for several subsidiaries.) This of course did not interfere with the millionsof dollars that Farishhad acquired in conjunction with Hitler's New Order, as a large stockholder, chairman, and president of StandardOil. All the government sought was the use of patents which his company had given to the Nazis--the Auschwitz patents--but had withheld from the U.S. military and industry. Buta warwas on, and if young men were to be asked to die fighting Hitler something more was needed. Farish was hauled beforethe Senate committee investigating the national defense program. The committee chairman, Senator Harry Truman, told newsmen before Farish testified: "I think this approaches treason."s1s7 Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his "indignation" at the senators, and claimed hewas not "disloyal." After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and theCongress on Farish and Standard Oil.Farishhad deceived the U.S. Navy to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force. Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World WarII were released tothe Senate, showing that Farish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy I.G.'sshare in certain patents because "in the event of war between ourselves and Germany ... it would certainly be very undesireable to havethis 20 percent Standard-I.G. pass to an alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest."s1s8 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson, and John D. Rockefeller III), the controlling owner of Standard Oil, told the Roosevelt administration that he knew nothing of the day-to-day affairs of his company, that all these matters were handled by Farish and other executives.s1s9 In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942. The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William StampsFarish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later.s2s0 With this double death, the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William ("Will") Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the most secretive multimillionaire in Texas, with investments of "that money" in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of exoticcontacts overlapping the intelligence andfinancial worlds--particularly in Britain. The Bush-Farish axis started George Bush's career.After his 1948 graduation from Yale (and theSkull and Bones secret society), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate jet and was employed by his father's Dresser Industries. In a couple of years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and Farish's British banker friends, to set him up in the oil property speculation business. Soon thereafter, George Bush founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put oil drilling rigs into certain locations of great strategic interest to the Anglo-American intelligence community. Twenty-five-year-old Will Farish was personal aide to Zapata chairman George Bush in Bush's unsuccessful 1964 campaign for Senate. Farish used "that Auschwitz money" to back George Bush financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to Congress in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board.s2s1 When George Bush became U.S. vice-president in 1980, the Farish and Bush family fortunes were again completely, secretly commingled. As we shall see, the old projects were now being revived on a breathtaking scale.
Bush and Draper
Twenty years before he was U.S. President, George Bush brought two "race-science" professors in front of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. As chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the committee how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans were "down-breeding" the American population. Afterwards, Bush personally summed up for the Congress the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the Task Force.s2s2 George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a better frame of mind--celebrating mankind's progress from the first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush's obsessive thinking on this subject was guided by his family's friend, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion about the so-called "population bomb" in the non-white areas of the world. If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues {how his family had come to know General Draper,} they would perhaps have felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention to Bush's presentation. Unfortunately,the Draper-Bush population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy. William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers. Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account. We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation in George Herbert Walker’s bank at 39Broadway, Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen some time after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen--at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler's political career. In January 1926, Dillon Read created the {German Credit and Investment Corporation} in Newark,New Jersey and Berlin, Germany, as Thyssen's short-term banker. That same year, Dillon Read created the {Vereinigte Stahlwerke} (German Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of New York and London finance.s2s3 William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president, and assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper's clients sponsored Hitler's terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United States. The Nazis were Draper's direct partners in Berlin and New Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president; Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the German Steel Trust, moved to the United States in 1926 and served as Draper's co-director in Newark. Draper's role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German Credit and Investment Corp.(GCI) was a "front" for Dillon Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of both firms.s2s4 Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas Dillon were directors of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence Dillon was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee's famous "Pecora" hearings in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative pyramid schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of millions of dollars. These investment policies had rotted the U.S. economy to the core, and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. But William H. Draper, Jr.'s GCI "front" was not {apparently} affiliated with the USIS "front" or with Dillon, and the GCI escaped the congressmen's limited scrutiny. This oversight was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50 million people who subsequently died in World War II. Dillon Read hired public relations man Ivy Lee to prepare their executives for their testimony and to confuse and further baffle the congressmen.s2s5 Lee apparently took enough time out from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that the congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in Germany--and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with Hitler's U.S. money men. Thus, in 1932, Willam H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the International Eugenics Congress as a "Supporting Member."s2s6 Was reusing his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did the funds come from Dillon Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be written off income tax as "expenses for German project: race purification"? Draper helped select Ernst Rudin as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he called Adolf Hitler's "holy, national and international racial hygienic mission."s2s7 W.S. Farish was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush's Nazi banking office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott’s close friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H. Draper, Jr., {neither died nor moved out of German affairs.} Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated until November1943.s2s8 Buta war was on. Draper, a colonel from previous military service, went off to the Pacific theater and became a general. General Draper apparently had a hobby:magic--illusions, sleight of hand, etc.--and he was a member of the Society of American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to his subsequent career. The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July 1945, General Draper was called to Europe by the American military government authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the Economics Division of the U.S. Control Commission. He was assigned to take apart the Nazi corporate cartels. There is an astonishing but perfectly logical rationale to this--Draper knew a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had spent about 15 years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi enterprises, was now authorized to decide {who was exposed, who lost and who kept his business, and in practical effect, who was prosecuted for war crimes.}s2s9 (Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation government. Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for a year in Italy, serving as an adviser to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.)s3s0
William H. Draper, Jr., as a "conservative," was paired with the "liberal" U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945 and 1946, Draper "protected" Germany from the Morgenthau Plan ... but at a price. Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world accept the {collective guilt of the German people} as {the }explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order, and the Nazi war crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still convenient decades later, allowing Prescott's son,President Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism. Germans are too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order. After several years of government service (often working directly for Averell Harriman in the North Alliance), Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman of a committee which was to advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper course for U.S. military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott Bush was a U.S. senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well. Prescott's old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the Schroder bank, was head of the CIA. This friendly environment emboldened our General Draper to pull off a stunt with his military aid advisory committee. He changed the subject under study. The following year, the Draper committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the supposed threat of the "population explosion" by formulating plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the world's non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous to the national security of the United States!s3s1 President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the next decade, General Draper founded the "Population Crisis Committee" and the "Draper Fund," joining with the Rockefeller and DuPont families to promote eugenics as "population control." The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the Agency for International Development. General William Draper was George Bush's guru on the population question.s3s2 But there was also Draper's money--from that uniquely horrible source--and Draper's connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper's son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance(chief of fundraising) of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the world. Draper was vice president of Dillon Read until 1953. During the 1950s and 1960s, the chief executive there was Frederic Brandi, the German who was Draper's co-director for the Nazi investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi Steel Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi's partner from 1954, and replaced him as the firm's chief executive in 1971. Nicholas Brady, who knows where all the bodies are buried, was chairman of his friend George Bush's 1980 election campaign in New Jersey, and has been United States Treasury Secretary throughout Bush's presidency.s3s3
Bush and Grey
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) says that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration's "first choice" method of population reduction in the Third World.s3s4 The United Nations Population Fund claims that 37 percent of contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H. Draper III's U.N. agency asserts that 254 million couples will be surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if present trends continue, 80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico and Panama will be surgically sterilized.s3s5 The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations. Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was drawn up in July 1991, at a USAID strategy session. India and Brazil are second and third priorities, respectively. On contract with the Bush administration, U.S. personnel are working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions of Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program is to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed their families. George Bush has a rather deep-seated personal feeling about this project, in particular as it pits him against Pope John Paul II in Catholic countries such as Mexico. (See Chapter 4 below, on the origin of a Bush-family grudge in this regard.) The spending for birth control in the non-white countries is one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush administration budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID said its Population Account would receive $300 million, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Within this project, a significant sum is spent on political and psychological manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of their religions and governments.s3s6 These activities might be expected to cause serious objections from the victimized nationalities, or from U. S. taxpayers, especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity. Quite aside from moral considerations, {legal} questions would naturally arise, which could be summed up: {How does George Bush think he can get away with this?} In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr. (Clayland) Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the 1980 election. As chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden Gray can walk the President through the dangers and complexities of waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations. Gray knows how these things are done. When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project for the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North Carolina. It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking fora way to begin again in America. Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world. The Sterilization League of America, which had changed its name during the war to "Birthright, Inc.," wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate "inferior" and "defective"people. The Leaguetried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative publicity: a little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died from the operation. They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could play the perfect host.s3s7 Through British imperial contacts, Boyden Gray's grandfather Bowman Gray had become principal owner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The medical school was already a eugenics center. As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray,who had raised him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the "Human Betterment League," the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical sterilization movement. Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of "medical genetics" at Bowman Gray medical school. Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers' national field operations chief. The experiment worked as follows.{All children enrolled in the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special "intelligence test." Those children who scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.} We quote now from the official story of the project: "In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization League's] field committee had participated in testing projects to identify school age children who should be considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by a 'Mr. Hanes,' a friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project was also financed by Hanes. ["Hanes" was underwear mogul James Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and treasurer of Alice Gray's group].... "The medical school had a long history of interest in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon ... made a statement to the press on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases.... "The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange County the results indicated that three percent of the school age children were either insane or feeble-minded.... [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to review each case ... and to present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had the authority to order sterilization...." Race science experimenter Dr. Claude Nash Herndon provided more details in an interview in 1990:s3s8 "Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina.... What did I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also director of outpatient services at North Baptist Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children there.... I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of the barrel, like below 70. "Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a relatively minor operation.... It was usually not until the child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an incision and tie the tube.... We more often performed the operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor." Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that "we had a very good relationship with the press" for the project. This is not surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the {Winston-Salem Journal,} the {Twin City Sentinel,} and radio station WSJS. In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller family. At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president of the Population Council. The Gray family's child-sterilizer, Dr. C. Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller patronage. Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics Society. The undead enemy from World War II, renamed "Population Control," had now been revived. George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the United States Agency for International Development first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The league had changed its name twice again,and was now called the "Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception."The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize non-whites in foreign countries. The Gray family experiment had succeeded. In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed its latest contract with the old Sterilization League (a.k.a. "Association for Voluntary Sterilization"), committing the U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years. Having gotten away with sterilizing several hundred North Carolina school children, "not usually less than eight to ten years old," the identical group is now authorized by President Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America. The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized only2 million people, with87 percent of the bill paid by U.S. taxpayers. Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray's favorite soap manufacturer, formed his own "Pathfinder Fund" as a split-off from the Sterilization League. Gamble’s Pathfinder Fund, with additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams.
Notes
1. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Forward" by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.
2. Adolf Hitler, {Mein Kampf} (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 404.
3. "The Ten Richest People in Houston," in {Houston Post Magazine,} March 11, 1984. "$150 million to $250 million from ... inheritance, plus subsequent investments ... chief heir to a family fortune in oil stock.... As to his financial interests, he is ... coy. He once described one of his businesses as a company that 'invests in and oversees a lot of smaller companies ... in a lot of foreign countries.'|"
4. The announcements were made in testimony before a Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March 5, 24, 26, 27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche, law section, Library of Congress. See also {New York Times,} March 26 and March 27, 1942, and {Washington Evening Star,} March 26 and March 27, 1942.
5. {Ibid.,} Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the hearing record. See also Charles Higham,{Trading With The Enemy} (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 36.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op. cit.,} chapter2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most notorious pro-Nazis of the early war period.
7. See sections on Prescott Bush in Darwin Payne, {Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc.} (New York: Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).
8. William Stamps Farish obituary, {New York Times,} Nov. 30, 1942.
9. {A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum of Natural History New York, August 21-23, 1932.} (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, September, 1934). The term "eugenics" is taken from the Greek to signify "good birth" or "well-born," as in aristocrat. Its basic assumption is that those who are not "well-born" should not exist.
10. See among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39 Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, February 21, 1925, in W.A. Harriman papers.
11. Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles B. Davenport, President, The International Congress of Eugenics,Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., N.Y.:
January 21, 1932 Dear Dr. Davenport: I will be only too glad to put you in touch with the Hamburg-American Line they may be able to co-operate in making suggestions which will keep the expenses to a minimum. I have referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate with you.
Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman, 59Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
January 23, 1932 Dear Mr. Harriman: Thank you very much for your kind letter of January 21st and the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter from Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for correspondence, which I hope will enable more of our German colleagues to come to America on the occasion of the congresses of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.
Congressional hearings in 1934 established that Hamburg-Amerika routinely provided free transatlantic passage for those carrying out Nazi propaganda chores. See {Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities,} {op. cit.,} chapter 2.
12. Alexis Carrel, {Man the Unknown} (New York: Halcyon House, published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 318-19. The battle cry of the New Order was sounded in 1935with the publication of {Man the Unknown,} by Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel Prize-winner said "enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums.... Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? ... The community must be protected against troublesome and dangerouselements.... Perhaps prisons should be abolished.... The conditioning of the petty criminal with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals, including those] who have ... misled the public on important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts." Carrel claimed to have transplanted the head of a dog to another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.
13. Bernhard Schreiber, {The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World,} France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language edition supplied by H.& P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London W2. Acopy of this book is now held by Union College Library, Syracuse, N.Y.
14. Higham, {op. cit.,} p. 35.
15. Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, {New York Times,}p. 20. See also {Directory of Directors} for New York City, 1930s and 1940s.
16. Higham, {op. cit.,} pp. 20, 22 and other references to Schroeder and Lindemann. Anthony Sutton, {Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler} (Seal Beach: '76 Press, 1976). Sutton is also a good source on the Harrimans.
17. {Washington Evening Star,} March 27, 1942, p.1.
18. Higham, {op. cit.} p. 50.
19. {Ibid.,} p. 48.
20. {Washington Post,} April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, {op. cit.,} pp. 52-53.
21. Zapata annual reports, 1950s-1960s, Library of Congress microforms.
22. See {Congressional Record} for Bush speech in the House of Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the testimony given before his Task Force on August 5, 1969.
23. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 92-111. See also Boyle, {op. cit.,} chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led Dawes Committee of Germany's foreign creditors. Like Harriman, Dillon used the Schroeder and Warburg banks to strike his German bargains. All Dillon Read & Co. affairs in Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Thomas Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman.
24. See {Poor's Register of Directors and Executives,} (New York: Poor's Publishing Company, late 1920s, '30s and '40s).See also {Standard Corporation Records} (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935 edition pp. 2571-25,and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for description and history of the German Credit and Investment Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See also Sobel, {op. cit.,} p. 213-214.
25. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 180, 186.Ivy Lee had been hired to improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly difficult after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out dimes to poor people lined up at his porch.
26. Third International Eugenics Congress papers {op. cit.,} footnote 7, p.512, "Supporting Members."
27. Schreiber, {op. cit.,} p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress papers, p. 526, lists the officers of the International Federation as of publication date in September, 1934.Rudin is listed as president--a year after he has written the sterilization law for Hitler.
28. {Directory of Directors for New York City,} 1942. Interview with Nancy Bowles, librarian of Dillon Read & Co.
29. Higham, {op. cit.,} p. 129, 212-15, 219-23.
30. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, {The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 122, 305.
31. Piotrow, {op. cit.,} pp. 36-42.
32. {Ibid.,} p. viii. "As chairman of the special Republican Task Force on Population and Earth Resources, I was impressed by the arguments of William H. Draper, Jr.... General Draper continues to lead through his tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund."
33. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 298, 354.
34. Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official with the USAID's Population Office.
35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, "The State of World Population," 1991, New York, United Nations Population Fund.
36. See {User's Guide to the Office of Population,} 1991, Office of Population, Bureau for Science and Technology, United States Agency for International Development. Available from S&T/POP, Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington D.C. 20523-1819.
37. "History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization [formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64," thesis submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the University of Minnesota by William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978, available on microfilm, Library of Congress. This is the official history, written with full cooperation of the Sterilization League.
38. Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June 20, 1990.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15412 of alt.activism: From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Newsgroups: alt.activism Subject: Part 4: George Bush Unauthorized Biography uNcTeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com Date: 19 Jan 92 20:12:41 GMT Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 1271
The following is part of a not yet published book being serialized in New Federalist. For further information, or to subscribe, please contact me by e-mail.
CHAPTER 4: "THE CENTER OFPOWER IS IN WASHINGTON" Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York Cable Address "Shipley-New York" Business Established 1818 Private Bankers
September 5, 1944
The Honorable W. A. Harriman American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. American Embassy, Moscow, Russia
Dear Averell:
Thinking that possibly Bullitt's article in the recent issue of "LIFE" may not have come to your attention, I have clipped it and am sending it to you, feeling that it will interest you. At present writing all is well here.
With warm regards, I am, Sincerely yours,
Pres
'At present writing all is well here." Thus the ambassador to Russia was reassured by the managing partner of his firm, Prescott Bush. Only 22 and a half months before, the U.S. government had seized and shut down the Union Banking Corporation, which had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany by Bush and the Harrimans. But that was behind them now, and they were safe. There would be no publicity on the Harriman-Bush sponsorship of Hitlerism. Prescott's son George, the future U.S. President, was also safe. Three days before this note to Moscow was written, George Bush had parachuted from a Navy bomber airplane over the Pacific Ocean, killing his two crew members when the unpiloted plane crashed. Five months later, in February 1945, Prescott's boss Averell Harriman escorted President Franklin Roosevelt to the fateful summit meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. In April Roosevelt died. The agreement reached at Yalta, calling for free elections in Poland once the war ended, was never enforced. Over the next eight years (1945 through 1952), Prescott Bush was Harriman'sanchorin the New York financial world. The increasingly powerful Mr. Harriman and his allies gave Eastern Europe over to Soviet dictatorship. A Cold War was then undertaken, to "counterbalance" the Soviets. This British-inspired strategy paid several nightmarish dividends. Eastern Europe was to remain enslaved. Germany was "permanently" divided. Anglo-American power was jointly exercised over the non-Soviet "Free World." The confidential functions of the British and American governments were merged. The Harriman clique took possession of the U.S. national security apparatus, and in doing so, they opened the gate and let the Bush family in. - * * * -
Following his services to Germany's Nazi Party, Averell Harriman spent several years mediating between the British, American, and Soviet governments in the war to stop the Nazis. He was ambassador to Moscow from 1943 to 1946.
President Harry Truman, whom Harriman and his friends held in amused contempt, appointed Harriman U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1946. Harriman was at lunch with former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill one day in 1946,when Truman telephoned. Harriman asked Churchill if he should accept Truman's offer to come back to the U.S. as Secretary of Commerce. According to Harriman's account, Churchill told him: "Absolutely. The center of power is in Washington."s1
Jupiter Island
The reorganization of the American government after World War II--the creation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency along British lines, for example--had devastating consequences. We are concerned here with only certain aspects of that overall transformation, those matters of policy and family which gave shape to the life and mind of George Bush, and gave him access to power. It was in these postwar years that George Bush attended Yale University, and was inducted into the Skull and Bones society. The Bush family's home at that time was in Greenwich, Connecticut. But it was just then that George's parents, Prescott and Dorothy Walker Bush, were wintering in a peculiar spot in Florida, a place that is excluded from mention in literature originating from Bush circles. Certain national news accounts early in 1991 featured the observations on President Bush's childhood by his elderly mother Dorothy. She was said to be a resident of Hobe Sound, Florida. More precisely, the President's mother lived in a hyper-security arrangement created a half-century earlier by Averell Harriman, adjacent to Hobe Sound. Its correct name is Jupiter Island. During his political career, George Bush has claimed many different "home" states, including Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. It has not been expedient for him to claim Florida, though that state has a vital link to his role in the world, as we shall see. And George Bush's home base in Florida, throughout his adult life, has been Jupiter Island. The unique, bizarre setup on Jupiter Island began in 1931, following the merger of W.A. Harriman and Co. with the British-American firm Brown Brothers. The reader will recall Mr. Samuel Pryor, the "Merchant of Death." A partner with the Harrimans, Prescott Bush, George Walker, and Nazi boss Fritz Thyssen in banking and shipping enterprises, Sam Pryor remained executive committee chairman of Remington Arms. In this period, the Nazi private armies (SA and SS) were supplied with American arms--most likely by Pryor and his company--as they moved to overthrow the German republic. Such gun-running as an instrument of national policy would later become notorious in the "Iran-Contra" affair. Sam Pryor's daughter Permelia married Yale graduate Joseph V. Reed on the last day of 1927. Reed immediately went to work for Prescott Bush and George Walker, as an apprentice at W.A. Harriman and Co. During World War II, Joseph V. Reed had served in the "special services" section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A specialist insecurity, codes and espionage, Reed later wrote a book entitled {Fun with Cryptograms}.s2
Sam Pryor had had property around Hobe Sound, Florida, for some time. In 1931, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed bought the entirety of Jupiter Island. This is atypically beautiful Atlantic coast"barrier island," a half-mile wide and nine miles long. The middle of Jupiter Island lies just off Hobe Sound. The south bridge connects the island with the town of Jupiter, to the north of Palm Beach. It is about 90 minutes by auto from Miami--today,a few minutes by helicopter. Early in 1991, a newspaper reporter asked a friend of the Bush family about security arrangements on Jupiter Island. He responded, "If you called up the White House,would they tell you how many security people they had? It's not that Jupiter Island is the White House, although he [George Bush] does come down frequently." But for several decades before Bush was President, Jupiter Island had an ordinance requiring the registration and fingerprinting of all housekeepers, gardeners, and other non-residents working on the island. The Jupiter Island police department says that there are sensors in the two main roads that can track every automobile on the island. If a car stops in the street, the police will be there within one or two minutes. Surveillance is a duty of all employees of the Town of Jupiter Island. News reporters are to be prevented from visiting the island.s3 To create this astonishing private club, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed sold land only to those who would fit in. Permelia Reed was still the grande dame of the island when George Bush was inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact that the Reeds know where {all} the bodies are buried, President Bush appointed Permelia's son, Joseph V. Reed, Jr., chief of protocol for the U.S. State Dept., in charge of private arrangements with foreign dignitaries. Averell Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his 1940s takeover of the U.S. national security apparatus. It was in that connection that the island became possibly the most secretive private place in America. Let us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48, to see some of the uses various of the residents had for the Harriman clique.
Residence on Jupiter Island
sb|Jupiter Islander {Robert A. Lovett,}s4, Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, had been Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading American advocate of the policy of terror-bombing of civilians. He organized the Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the American and British governments by the staff of the Prudential Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock Psychiatric Clinic. In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated with Prudential Insurance,one of Lovett's intelligence channels to the British secret services. Prescott was listed by Prudential as a director of the company for about two years in the early 1950s. Their Strategic Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real military advantage accruing from such outrages as the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. But the Harrimanites nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air. They glorified this as "psychological warfare," a part of the utopian military doctrine opposed to the views of military traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to terror-bomb Vietnam. President George Bush revived the doctrine with the bombing of civilian areas in Panama, and the destruction of Baghdad. On October 22, 1945, Secretary of war Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was unknown to the public until an official CIA history was released from secrecy in 1989. But the CIA's author (who was President Bush’s prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: "The record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately, was not in the archives of the agency when this account was written."s5 The CIA's self-history does inform us of the advice that Lovett provided to the Truman cabinet, as the official War Department intelligence proposal. Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central Intelligence Agency. The new agency would "consult"with the armed forces,but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945. He spoke highly of the FBI's work because it had "the best personality file in the world." Lovett said the FBI was expert at producing false documents, an art "which we developed so successfully during the war and at which we became outstandingly adept." Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in a new CIA. U.S. military traditionalists centered around Gen. Douglas MacArthur opposed Lovett's proposal. The continuation of the OSS had been attacked at the end of the war on the grounds that the OSS was entirely under British control, and that it would constitute an American Gestapo.s6 But the CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island. sb|{Charles Payson} and his wife, {Joan Whitney Payson,} were extended family members of Harriman's and business associates of the Bush family. Joan's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a relative of the Harrimans. Gertrude's son, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, long-time chairman of Pan American Airways (Prescott was a Pan Am director), became assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force in 1947. Sonny's wife Marie had divorced him and married Averell Harriman in 1930. Joan and Sonny's uncle, Air Marshal Sir Thomas Elmhirst, was director of intelligence for the British Air Force from 1945 to 1947. Joan's brother, John Hay("Jock") Whitney, was to be ambassador to Great Britain from 1955 to 1961 ... when it would be vital for Prescott and George Bush to have such a friend. Joan’s father, grandfather, and uncle were members of the Skull and Bones secret society. Charles Payson organized a uranium refinery in 1948. Later, he was chairman of Vitro Corporation,makers of parts for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, equipment for frequency surveillance and torpedo guidance, and other subsurface weaponry. Naval warfare has long been a preoccupation of the British Empire. British penetration of the U.S. Naval Intelligence service has been particularly heavy since the tenure of Joan's Anglophile grandfather, William C. Whitney, as secretary of the Navy for President Grover Cleveland. This traditional covert British orientation in the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence and the Navy’s included service, the Marine Corps, forms a backdrop to the career of George Bush--and to the whole neighborhood on Jupiter Island. Naval Intelligence maintained direct relations with gangster boss Meyer Lansky forAnglo-American political operations in Cuba during World War II,well before the establishment of the CIA. Lansky officially moved to Florida in 1953.s7 sb|{George Herbert Walker, Jr.} (Skull and Bones, 1927), was extremely close to his nephew George Bush, helping to sponsor his entry into the oil business in the 1950s. "Uncle Herbie" was also a partner of Joan Whitney Payson when they co-founded the New York Mets baseball team in 1960. His son, G.H. Walker III, was a Yale classmate of {Nicholas Brady} and Moreau D. Brown (Thatcher Brown's grandson), forming what was called the "Yale Mafia" on Wall Street. sb|{Walter S. Carpenter, Jr.} had been chairman of the finance committee of the Du Pont Corporation (1930-40).In 1933, Carpenter oversaw Du Pont's purchase of Remington Arms from Sam Pryor and the Rockefellers, and led Du Pont into partnership with the Nazi I.G. Farben company for the manufacture of explosives. Carpenter became Du Pont's president in 1940. His cartel with the Nazis was broken up by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, Carpenter remained Du Pont's president, as the company’s technicians participated massively in the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic bomb. He was chairman of Du Pont from 1948 to 1962, retaining high-level access to U.S. strategic activities. Walter Carpenter and Prescott Bush were fellow activists in the Mental Hygiene Society. Originating at Yale University in 1908, the movement had been organized into the World Federation of Mental Health by Montague Norman, himself a frequent mental patient, former Brown Brothers partner and Bank of England Governor. Norman had appointed as the federation’s chairman, Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, director of the Tavistock Clinic, chief psychiatrist and psychological warfare expert for the British intelligence services. Prescott was a director of the society in Connecticut; Carpenter was a director in Delaware. sb|{Paul Mellon} was the leading heir to the Mellon fortune, and along-time neighbor of Averell Harriman's in Middleburg, Virginia, as well as Jupiter Island,Florida. Paul's father, Andrew Mellon, U.S. treasury secretary 1921-32, had approved the transactions of Harriman, Pryor, and Bush with the Warburgs and the Nazis. Paul Mellon's son-in-law, {David K.E. Bruce,} worked in Prescott Bush's W.A. Harriman & Co. during the late 1920s; was head of the London branch of U.S. intelligence during World War II; and was Averell Harriman's Assistant Secretary of Commerce in 1947-48. Mellon family money and participation would be instrumental in many domestic U.S. projects of the new Central Intelligence Agency. sb|{Carll Tucker} manufactured electronic guidance equipment for the Navy. With the Mellons, Tucker was an owner of South American oil properties. Mrs. Tucker was the great-aunt of {Nicholas Brady,} later George Bush's Iran-Contra partner and U.S. treasury secretary. Their son Carll Tucker, Jr. (Skull and Bones,1947), was among the 15 Bonesmen who selected George Bush for induction in the class of 1948. sb|{C. Douglas Dillon} was the boss of William H. Draper, Jr. in the Draper-Prescott Bush-Fritz Thyssen Nazi banking scheme of the 1930s and 40s. His father, Clarence Dillon, created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (Thyssen's German Steel Trust) in 1926. C. Douglas Dillon made{Nicholas Brady} the chairman of the Dillon Read firm in 1971 and himself continued as chairman of the Executive Committee. C. Douglas Dillon would be a vital ally of his neighbor Prescott Bush during the Eisenhower administration. sb|{Publisher Nelson Doubleday} headed his family's publishing firm, founded under the auspices of J.P. Morgan and other British Empire representatives. When George Bush's"Uncle Herbie" died, Doubleday took over as majority owner and chief executive of the New York Mets baseball team. Some other specialized corporate owners had their place in Harriman's strange club. sb|{George W. Merck,} chairman of Merck & Co., drug and chemical manufacturers, was director of the War Research Service: Merck was the official chief of all U.S. research into biological warfare from 1942 until at least the end of World War II. After 1944, Merck’s organization was placed under the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service. His family firm in Germany and the United States was famous for its manufacture of morphine. sb|{James H. McGraw, Jr.,} chairman of McGraw Hill Publishing Company, was a member of the advisory board to the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and a member of the Army Ordnance Association Committee on Endowment. sb|{Fred H. Haggerson,} chairman of Union Carbide Corp., produced munitions, chemicals, and firearms. sb|{A.L. Cole} was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an executive of {Readers Digest.} In 1965, just after performing a rather dirty favor for George Bush [which will be discussed in a coming chapter--ed.],Cole became chairman of the executive committee of the {Digest,} the world's largest-circulation periodical. From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center for the direction of covert action by the U.S. government and, indeed, for the covert management of the government. Jupiter Island will reappear later on, in our account of George Bush in the Iran-Contra affair.
Target: Washington
George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered the family's Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now briefly describe the forces that descended on Washington, D.C. during those years when Bush, with the assistance of family and powerful friends, was becoming "established in business on his own." From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's boss Averell Harriman was U.S. "ambassador-at-large" to Europe. He was a non-military "Theater Commander," the administrator of the multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating in all military/strategic decision-making by the Anglo-American alliance. The U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, had become a problem to the Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in recent years he had gone astray. As secretary of the navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the racial integration of the Navy. As defense secretary, he pressed for integration in the armed forces and this eventually became the U.S. policy. Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement coupled with brinkmanship. He was simply opposed to communism. On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of office and flown on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to "Hobe Sound" (Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist dealt with him.s8 He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army Hospital and given insulin shock treatments for alleged "mental exhaustion." He was denied all visitors except his estranged wife and children--his son had been Averell Harriman's aide in Moscow. On May 22, Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe cord tied tightly around his neck, after he had plunged from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist called the death a suicide even before any investigation was started. The results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's diaries were published, 80 percent deleted, after a year of direct government censorship and rewriting. - * * * - North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, after U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close friend) publicly specified that Korea would not be defended. With a new war on, Harriman came back to serve as President Truman's adviser, to "oversee national security affairs." Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel to Truman. Clifford, however, remained close to Harriman and his partners as they gained more and more power. Clifford later wrote about his cordial relations with Prescott Bush: "Prescott Bush ... had become one of my frequent golfing partners in the fifties, and I had both liked and respected him.... Bush had a splendid singing voice,and particularly loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he organized a quartet that included my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in Washington, and, on occasion, he invited the group to Hobe Sound in Florida to perform. His son [George], though, had never struck me as a strong or forceful person. In 1988, he presented himself successfully to the voters as an outsider--no small trick for a man whose roots wound through Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil, the CIA, a patrician background, wealth, and the Vice Presidency."s9
With Forrestal out of the way,Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson drove to Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the British-backed U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall as secretary of defense. At the same time, Prescott's partner, Robert Lovett, himself became assistant secretary of defense. Lovett, Marshall, Harriman, and Acheson went to work to unhorse Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Asia. MacArthur kept Wall Street's intelligence agencies away from his command, and favored real independence for the non-white nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's firing on March 23, 1951, citing MacArthur’s insistence on defeating the Communist Chinese invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there was "no substitute for victory," was read in Congress on April 5; MacArthur was fired on April 10, 1951. That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now,Brown Brothers Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief. - * * * - These were, of course, exciting times for the Bush family, whose wagon was hitched to the financial gods of Olympus--to Jupiter, that is.
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York 5, N.Y. Business Established 1818 Cable Address "Shipley-New York" Private Bankers April 2, 1951
The Honorable W.A. Harriman, The White House, Washington, D.C.
Dear Averell: I was sorry to miss you in Washington but appreciate your cordial note. I shall hope for better luck another time. I hope you had a good rest at Hobe Sound. With affectionate regard, I am, Sincerely yours,
Pres [signed] Prescott S. Bush
A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations, and "psychological warfare." Harriman,together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad. This would supposedly ensure a stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American financial and political interests. The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite eugenics movement in North Carolina following World War II. Gordon Gray was an avid Anglophile, whose father had gotten controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company through alliance with the British Imperial tobacco cartel's U.S. representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer, known around Washington as the "founder of operational intelligence." Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy. But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was, constituted an obstacle to the covert warriors. An insular Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution, he remained skeptical about secret service activities that reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo. So, "covert operations" could not fully take off without a change of the Washington regime. And it was with the Republican Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
Prescott Runs for Senate
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 his seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was actually 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 6000, 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 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.s1s0 Then Papa 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 the 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 Draperand 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 1000 out of 862000 votes. He and his family blamed the defeat on the exposeaa. 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 that1950 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...."s1s1 Prescott Bush gave a graphic description of these events in his "oral history" interview at Columbia University: "In the 1950 campaign, when I ran against Benton, the very last week, Drew Pearson,famous columnist, was running a radio program at that time.... In this particular broadcast, just at the end of our campaign [Pearson said]: "I predict that Benton will retain his seat in the United States Senate, because it has just been made known that Prescott Bush, his opponent, is president of the Birth Control Society" or chairman, member of the board of directors, or something, "of the Birth Control Society. In this country, and of course with Connecticut's heavy Catholic population, and its laws against birth control ... this is going to be too much for Bush to rise above. Benton will be elected. I predict." The next Sunday, they handed out, at these Catholic Churches in Waterbury and Torrington and Bridgeport, handbills, quoting Drew Pearson's statement on the radio about Prescott Bush, you see--I predict. Well, my telephone started ringing that Sunday at home, and when I'd answer, or Dotty [Prescott's wife, George's mother] would answer--"Is this true, what they say about Prescott Bush?This can't be true. Is it true?" She'd say, "No, it isn't true." Of course, it wasn't true. But you never catchup with a thing like this--the election's just day after tomorrow, you see? So there's no doubt, in the estimate of our political leaders, that this one thing cost me many thousand votes--whether it was 1, 3, 5 or 10 thousand we don't know, we can't possibly tell, but it was enough. To have overcome that thousand vote, it would only have had to be 600 switch [sic]. [Mrs. Bush then corrected the timing in Prescott Bush's recollections.] "I'd forgotten the exact sequence, but that was it.... The state then--and I think still is--probably about 55 percent Catholic population, with all the Italian derivation people [sic],and Polish is very heavy, and the Catholic church is very dominant here, and the archbishop was death on this birth control thing. They fought repeal every time it came up in the legislature, and {we never did get rid of that prohibition until just a year or two ago,} as I recall it [emphasis added].s1s2
Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican candidates fared well in Connecticut. He attributed his loss to the Catholic Church. After all, he had dependable friends in the news media. The {New York Times}loved him for his bland pleasantness. He just about owned CBS. Twenty years earlier, Prescott Bush had personally organized the credit to allow William S. Paley to buy the CBS (radio, later television) network outright. In return, Prescott was made a director and the financial leader of CBS; Paley himself became a devoted follower and servitor of Averell Harriman. Well, when he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the outcome to the blind whims of the public. Prescott Bush moved into action 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."s1s3 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. (McMahon had been Assistant U.S. Attorney General, in charge of the Criminal Division, from 1935 to 1939. Was there a chance he might someday speak out about the unpunished Nazi-era crimes of the wealthy and powerful?) 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 129507 votes out of 1092471. Prescott Bush came in last among the statewide Republicans, but managed to win by 30373out of 1088799, his margin nearly 100000 behind Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns. In Eisenhower's 1956 re-election, Ike won Connecticut by 303036 out of 1114954 votes, the largest presidential margin in Connecticut's history. Prescott Bush managed to win again, by 129544 votes out of 1085206--his margin this time 290082 smaller than Eisenhower's.s1s4 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. The 1952 Eisenhower victory made John Foster Dulles Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles head of the CIA. The reigning Dulles brothers were the "Republican" replacements for their client and business partner, "Democrat" Averell Harriman. Occasional public posturings aside, their strategic commitments were identical to his. Undoubtedly the most important work accomplished by Prescott Bush in the new regime was on the golf links. Those who remember the Eisenhower presidency know that Ike played ... quite a bit of golf! Democrats sneered at him for mindlessness, Republicans defended him for taking this healthy recreation. Golf was Ike's ruling passion. And there at his side was the loyal, bland, pleasant Senator Prescott Bush, former president of the U.S. Golf Association, son-in-law of the very man who had reformulated the rules of the game. Prescott Bush was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite golf partner. Prescott could reassure Ike about his counselors, allay his concerns, and monitor his moods. Ike was very grateful to Prescott, who never revealed the President's scores. The public image of his relationship to the President may be gleaned from a 1956 newspaper profile of Prescott Bush's role in the party. The {New York Times,}which 11 years before had consciously protected him from public exposure as a Nazi banker, fawned over him in an article entitled, "His Platform: Eisenhower":"A tall, lean, well-dressed man who looks exactly like what he is--a wealthy product of the Ivy League--is chairman of the Republican Convention's platform committee. As such, Prescott Bush, Connecticut's senior United States Senator, has a difficult task: he has to take one word and expand it to about 5000. "The one word, of course, is 'Ike'--but no party platform could ever be so simple and direct.... "Thus it is that Senator Bush and his fellow committee members ... find themselves confronted with the job of wrapping around the name Eisenhower sufficient verbiage to persuade the public that it is the principles of the party, and not the grin of the man at the head of it, which makes it worthy of endorsement in [the] November [election]. "For this task Prescott Bush, a singularly practical and direct conservative, may not be entirely fitted. It is likely that left to his own devices he would simply offer the country the one word and let it go at that. "He is ... convinced that this would be enough to do the trick ... if only the game were played that way.
"Since it is not, he can be expected to preside with dignity, fairness and dispatch over the sessions that will prepare the party credo for the 1956 campaign. "If by chance there should be any conflicts within the committee ... the Senator's past can offer a clue to his conduct. "A former Yale Glee Club and second bass in the All-Time Whiffenpoofs Quartet,he is ...[called] 'the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in a span of twenty-five years.' "Close harmony being a Republican specialty under President Eisenhower, the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in twenty-five years would seem to be an ideal choice for the convention job he holds at San Francisco.... "[In addition to his business background,he] also played golf, competing in a number of tournaments. For eight years he was a member of the executive committee of the United States Golf Association.... "As a Senator, Connecticut's senior spokesman in the upper house has followed conservative policies consistent with his business background. He resigned all his corporate directorships, took a leave from Brown Brothers, Harriman, and proceeded to go down the line for the Eisenhower program.... "Around the Senate, he is known as a man who does his committee work faithfully, defends the Administration stoutly, and fits well into the club like atmosphere of Capitol Hill...."s1s5 {To be continued.}
Notes
1. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, {The Wise Men}: Six Friends and the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 377.
2. Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat, the founder of the Triton Press and the president of the American Shakespeare Theater.
3. {Palm Beach Post,} January 13, 1991.
4. For Lovett's residency there see Isaacson and Thomas, {op. cit.,} p. 417. Some Jupiter Island residencies were verified by their inclusion in the 1947 membership list of the Hobe Sound Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress; others were established from interviews with long-time Jupiter Islanders.
5. Arthur Burr Darling, {The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government,to 1950}, (College Station: Pennsylvania State University, 1990), p. 59.
6. The {Chicago Tribune}, Feb 9, 1945,for example, warned of "Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens sat home. {Cf. Anthony Cave Brown, {Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero}, (New York: Times Books, 1982), p.625, on warnings to FDR about the British control of U.S. intelligence.
7. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, {Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob} (New York: Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28.
8. See John Ranelagh, {The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA}, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 131-32.
9. Clark Clifford, {Counsel to the President} (New York: Random House, 1991).
10. Sidney Hyman, {The Life of William Benton} (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 438-41.
11. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Forward" by George H.W. Bush, p. vii.
12. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia University in1966, Eisenhower Administration Part II; pp. 62-4.
13. Herbert S. Parmet, {Eisenhower and the American Crusades} (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 14.
14. {New York Times}, Sept. 6, 1952, Nov. 5, 1952, Nov. 7, 1956.
15. {New York Times}, Aug. 21, 1956.
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John Covici coviciccs.covici.com