Prescott Bush

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Prescott Sheldon Bush (born May 15, 1895 in Columbus, Ohio — died October 8, 1972 in New York City, New York,) was a United States Senator from Connecticut and a Wall Street executive banker with Brown Brothers Harriman.

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Early life

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

Bush attended the Douglas School in Columbus and then St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale University, starting a family tradition of higher education, as his son, former president George H.W. Bush, and his grandson, current President George W. Bush, as well as his great-granddaughter Barbara are all Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity while at Yale, though his son and grandson would opt for Delta Kappa Epsilon. All three Bushes, however, would be members of the Skull and Bones secret society.

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

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Military life

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

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

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

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

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

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Political and business life

He served as the 1942 Treasurer of the capital campaign of Planned Parenthood.

From 1944 to 1956, Prescott Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. From 1947 to 1950 he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950, losing to Senator William Benton by only 1,000 votes.

Prescott Bush was one of the earliest supporters of the United Negro College Fund, and, in 1951, he was elected chairman of the organization's Connecticut branch.

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

In a speech about Nathan Hale given on June 6, 1955, in New London, Connecticut, Prescott Bush shared his reflections on the Cold War. "We must maintain strong defenses, military and spiritual," he said. "It is our conduct, our patriotism and belief in our American way of life, our courage that will win the final battle."

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

Future president Richard Nixon considered Prescott Bush to be his political mentor and consulted him before his famous 1952 "Checkers speech", in which Nixon, then the vice-presidential candidate, addressed his exoneration of receiving $18,000 in illegal campaign contributions. However, Nixon admitted accepting a cocker spaniel pup from a supporter. Nixon was defiant, stating: "the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now: that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it."

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War seizures controversy

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

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

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

Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to the Silesian-American Corporation makes him complicit with the corporation's mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed. Allegations that Prescott Bush profited from slave labor or the Auschwitz concentration camp remain unsubstantiated.

There are unsubstantiated rumors concerning Prescott Bush's associations with the Nazi party. The Anti-Defamation League has stated, "Rumors about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, have circulated widely through the Internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated." [1] The rumors began with extreme right-wing attacks on George H.W. Bush during his 1980 presidential run and were renewed during his 1988 run.

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

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

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Further reading

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

Bush family conspiracy theory

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External links

Bush's articles include:

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

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