George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

On March 5, 1942--at about the time Poppy Bush and Rocky Rockefeller were
contemplating the tortures they would inflict on the Class of 1943 A.U.V. recruits--the
Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense Program began
explosive public hearings in Washington, D.C. The subject: cartel agreements between
U.S. and Nazi firms that should be hit with anti-trust actions. Pearl Harbor, the draft of
American boys, and these sensational hearings were causing a popular attitude quite
dangerous for the higher-level Nazi collaborators (see Chapter 2).
But on March 20, 1942, Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War and president of
Andover prep's Board of Trustees, sent a memorandum to President Franklin Roosevelt
recommending stopping the investigations of the U.S.-Nazi trusts: the resulting lawsuits
would `` unavoidably consume the time of executives and employees of those
corporations which are engaged in war work. '' Stimson got Navy Secretary Frank Knox
and Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold to co-sign the memo. President
Roosevelt agreed to Stimson's request, but conceded to Arnold and his antitrust staff that
he would press for extended statutes of limitation to make postwar prosecutions
possible.@s2@s6
Stimson's intervention for his friends could not, however, entirely cancel the already
ongoing exposure and prosecution of Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey, as we
saw in Chapter 4. After Farish's death, the prosecutions were suspended, but the seizures
of Nazi corporate assets continued, and this would soon lead to Prescott Bush and to
Grandfather Walker. Could aristocratic friends be relied upon to prevent scandal or legal
trouble from smashing up Poppy's world, and wrecking his carefully prepackaged golden
future?
As George wound up his Andover career, and paid court to Barbara, U.S. government
investigators sifted through the affairs of the Hitler-Harriman-Bush steamship lines,
Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd. Their final report, issued under confidential
seal on July 18, 1942, would show that long-time Harriman-Bush executive Christian J.
Beck was still the New York attorney for the merged Nazi firms. (See Chapter 3 for
details and description of sources.)
Seizure orders on the shipping lines would be issued in August. The government would
seize other Nazi assets, still managed by the Bush family, in the autumn. Prescott Bush,
legally responsible for Nazi German banking operations in New York, would have to be
named in a seizure order. Could friends in high places keep all this out of the public eye?
Along about this time, something was going very wrong with the secret societies at
Andover prep school.
Andover's historian, as quoted above, affirmed that `` until the Society crisis of the 1940s,
A.U.V. continued strong and successful. '' But a few months after Poppy Bush and Rocky
Rockefeller left the school, Headmaster Fuess and his trustees announced they were
closing and banning the secret societies forever. This set off a storm of controversy.