George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker's daughter
Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August,
1921.@s1@s4 Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S.
James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of
1917.@s1@s5 The Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the
"Walker country home" in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush's
parents down to the present day.
When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co.,
railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife's father was building one of the most
gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to
Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company
owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought
the little family business and moved it near there.
Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush-the
future U.S. President--was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.
Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that "Bunny" Harriman stepped in to rescue
his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber
Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to
grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.
Then on May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its vice president,
under the bank's president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and George's maternal
grandfather--the head of the family.@s1@s6
The Great Game
Prescott Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in 1926. And the
bank, with the scope and power of many ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents.
George Bush's Grandfather Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly,
using all the international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the
beginning of the Harriman firm--the Bush family enterprise--and follow its course into
one of history's darkest projects.
The firm's first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into Germany by
dominating that country's shipping. Averell Harriman announced in 1920 that he would
re-start Germany's Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months of scheming and armtwisting.
Hamburg-Amerika's commercial steamships had been confiscated by the United
States at the end of the First World War. These ships had then become the property of the
Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements with the U.S. authorities that were never
made public.
The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world's largest private shipping line.
Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a heavy price. The Harriman