George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

These speculations created both channels of communication, and the style of
accomodation, with the communist dictatorship, that have continued in the family down
to President Bush.
With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to satisfy his
passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected president of the U.S. Golf
Association in 1920. He negotiated new international rules for the game with the Royal
and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. After these talks he contributed the
three-foot-high silver Walker Cup, for which British and American teams have since
competed every two years.
Bert's son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association, during
the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott became USGA
President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family firm's work with Nazi
Germany.
When George was one year old, in 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman headed a
syndicate which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of Sport. Walker
was at the center of New York's gambling scene in its heyday, in that Prohibition era of
colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with million-dollar prize fights;
bookies and their clients pooled more millions, trying to match the pace of the
speculation-crazed stock and bond men. This was the era of "organized" crime--the
national gambling and bootleg syndicate structured on the New York corporate model.
By 1930, when George was a boy of six, Grandpa Walker was New York State Racing
Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have impressed
little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred race horses at his own stable,
the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont Park race track. Bert also
personally managed most aspects of Averell's racing interests-- down to picking the
colors and fabrics for the Harriman racing gear.@s1@s9
From 1926, George's father Prescott Bush showed a fierce loyalty to the Harrimans and a
dogged determination to advance himself; he gradually came to run the day-to-day
operations of W.A. Harriman & Co. After the firm's 1931 merger with the British-
American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush became managing partner of the
resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This was ultimately the largest and
politically the most important private banking house in America.
Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the fevered
speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped out the small
fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his devotion to the
Harrimans, they "did a very generous thing," as Bush later put it. They staked him to
what he had lost and put him back on his feet.
Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a confidential
interview: