George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Here they were attended by four servants--three maids (one of whom cooked) and a
chauffeur.
The U.S.A. was plunged into the Great Depression beginning with the 1929-31 financial
collapse. But George Bush and his family were totally insulated from this crisis. Before
and after the crash, their lives were a frolic, sealed off from the concerns of the
population at large.
During the summers, the Bushes stayed in a second home on the family's ten-acre spread
at Walker's Point at Kennebunkport, Maine. Flush from the Soviet oil deals and the
Thyssen-Nazi Party arrangements, Grandfather Walker had built a house there for
Prescott and Dorothy. They and other well-to-do summer colonists used Kennebunkport's
River Club for tennis and yachting. In the winter season, they took the train to
Grandfather Walker's plantation, called `` Duncannon, '' near Barnwell, South Carolina.
The novices were instructed in skeet shooting, then went out on horseback, following the
hounds in pursuit of quail and dove. George's sister Nancy recalled `` the care taken '' by
the servants `` over the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. We were
waited on by the most wonderful black servants who would come into the bedrooms early
in the morning and light those crackling pine-wood fires.... ''@s2
The money poured in from the Hamburg-Amerika steamship line, its workforce crisply
regulated by the Nazi Labor Front. The family took yet another house at Aiken, South
Carolina. There the Bush children had socially acceptable `` tennis and riding partners.
Aiken was a Southern capital of polo in those days, a winter resort of considerable
distinction and serenity that attracted many Northerners, especially the equestrian
oriented. The Bush children naturally rode there, too.... ''@s3 Averell Harriman, a worldclass
polo player, also frequented Aiken.
Poppy Bush's father and mother anxiously promoted the family's distinguished lineage,
and its growing importance in the world. Prescott Bush claimed that he `` could trace his
family's roots back to England's King Henry III, making George a thirteenth cousin, twice
removed of Queen Elizabeth. ''@s4
This particular conceit may be a bad omen for President Bush. The cowardly, acidtongued
Henry III was defeated by France's Louis IX (Saint Louis) in Henry's grab for
power over France and much of Europe. Henry's own barons at length revolted against
his blundering arrogance, and his power was curbed.
As the 1930s economic crisis deepened, Americans experienced unprecedented hardship
and fear. The Bush children were taught that those who suffered these problems had no
one to blame but themselves.
A hack writer, hired to puff President Bush's `` heroic military background, '' wrote these
lines from material supplied by the White House: