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Article 15189 of alt.activism:
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Part 1: Unauthorized Biography Of George Bush
Message-ID: <1RokeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
Date: 15 Jan 92 03:55:59 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
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George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
With this issue of the New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 39, we begin
to serialize the book, {George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,}
by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. This book will
soon be published by {Executive Intelligence Review}.
At the heart of any effort at biography is the attempt to
discover the essence of the subject as a human personality. The
essential character of the subject is what the biographer must
strive to capture, since this is the indispensable ingredient
that will provide coherence to the entire story whose unity must
be provided by the course of a single human life.
During the preparation of the present work, there was one
historical moment which more than any other delineated the
character of George Bush. The scene was the Nixon White House
during the final days of the Watergate debacle. White House
officials, including George Bush, had spent the morning of that
Monday, August 5, 1974 absorbing the impact of Nixon's notorious
``smoking gun'' tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon and
his chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, shortly after the original
Watergate break-in, which could now no longer be withheld from
the public. In that exchange of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered
that the CIA stop the FBI from further investigating how various
sums of money found their way from Texas and Minnesota via Mexico
City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect the President
(CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the ``Plumbers'' arrested
in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.
These revelations were widely interpreted as establishing a
{prima facie} case of obstruction of justice against Nixon. That
was fine with George, who sincerely wanted his patron and
benefactor Nixon to resign. George's great concern was that the
smoking gun tape called attention to a money-laundering mechanism
which he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil, and Robert
Mosbacher, had helped to set up at Nixon's request. When Nixon,
in the ``smoking gun'' tape, talked about ``the Texans'' and
``some Texas people,'' Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher were among
the most prominent of those referred to. The threat to George's
political ambitions was great.
The White House that morning was gripped by panic. Nixon
would be gone before the end of the week. In the midst of the
furor, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted
to know if everyone who needed to be informed had been briefed
about the smoking gun transcript. In a roomful of officials,
some of whom were already sipping Scotch to steady their nerves,
Timmons asked Dean Burch,
``Dean, does Bush know about the transcript yet?''
``Yes,'' responded Burch.
``Well, what did he do?'' inquired Timmons.
``He broke out into assholes and shit himself to death,''
replied Burch.
In this exchange, which is recorded in Woodward and
Bernstein's {The Final Days,} we grasp the essential George Bush,
in a crisis, and for all seasons.
Introduction
The thesis of this book is simple: if George Bush were to be
re-elected in November 1992 for a second term as the President of
the United States, this country and the rest of the world would
face a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.
The necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in the
minds of the authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the
Iraq war of January-February 1991. That war was an act of savage
and premeditated genocide on the part of Bush, undertaken in
connivance with a clique in London which has, in its historical
continuity, represented both the worst enemy of the long-term
interests of the American people, and the most implacable
adversary of the progress of the human species.
The authors observed George Bush as the Gulf crisis and the
war unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged public outbursts
constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged
mental state that was full of ominous portent for humanity. The
authors were also horrified by the degree to which their fellow
citizens willfully ignored the shocking reality of these public
fits. A majority of the American people proved more than willing
to lend its support to a despicable enterprise of killing.
By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and
the House of Representatives authorized Bush's planned war
measures to restore the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds
chattel slaves. That vote was a crime against God's justice.
This book is part of an attempt to help the American people to
survive this terrible crime, both for the sake of the world and
for their own sake. It is intended as a contribution to a
process of education that might help to save the American people
from the awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is
further intended as a warning to all citizens that if they fail
to deny Bush a second term, they will deserve what they get after
1993.
As this book goes to press, public awareness of the long-term
depression of the American economy is rapidly growing. If Bush
were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond the reach of the
American electorate; with the federal deficit rising over a
billion dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate
such crushing austerity as to bring the country to the brink of
civil war. Some examples of this point are described in the last
chapter of this book.
Our goal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush
as possible within the time constraints imposed by the 1992
election. Time and resources have not permitted us meticulous
attention to certain matters of detail; we can say, nevertheless,
that both our commitment to the truth and our final product are
better than anything anyone else has been able to muster,
including news organizations and intelligence agencies with
capabilities that far surpass our own.
Why do we fight the Bush power cartel with a mere book? We
have no illusions of easy success, but we were encouraged in our
work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition to
Bush and his policies. It will certainly pose a new set of
problems for those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although
Bush is now what journalists call a world leader, no accurate
account of his actual career exists in the public domain.
The volume which we submit to the court of world public
opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first book-length,
unauthorized biography of George Bush. It is the first
approximation of the truth about his life. This is the first
biography worthy of the name, a fact that says a great deal about
the sinister and obsessive secrecy of this personage. None of
the other biographies (including Bush's campaign autobiography)
can be taken seriously; each of these books is a pastiche of
lies, distortions and banalities that run the gamut from campaign
panegyric, to the Goebbels Big Lie, to fake but edifying stories
for credulous children. Almost without exception, the available
Bush literature is worthless as a portrait of the subject.
Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a network asset of
Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful political
forces in the United States during much of the twentieth century,
and for many years the largest private bank in the world. It
suffices in this context to think of Averell Harriman negotiating
during World War II in the name of the United States with
Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers Harriman
partner Robert Lovett in guiding John F. Kennedy's choice of his
cabinet, to begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott
Bush's post as managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers
Harriman networks pervade government and the mass media. Again
and again in the course of the following pages we will see
stories embarrassing to George Bush refused publication,
documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and
witnesses inculpatory to Bush be overtaken by mysterious and
conveniently timed deaths. The few relevant facts which have
found their way into the public domain have necessarily been
filtered by this gigantic apparatus. This problem has been
compounded by the corruption and servility of authors,
journalists, news executives and publishers who have functioned
more and more as kept advocates for a governmental regime of
which Bush has been a prominent part for a quarter-century.
The Red Studebaker Myth
George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain covert.
At the same time, he senses that his need for coverup is a
vulnerability. The need to protect this weak flank accounts for
the steady stream of fake biographical material concerning
George, as well as the spin given to many studies that may never
mention George directly. Over the past several months, we have
seen a new book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public
something new by fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring
the central role of George Bush and his business partners in the
Watergate affair. We have a new book by Lt. Col. Oliver North
which alleges that Reagan knew everything about the Iran-Contra
affair, but that George Bush was not part of North's chain of
command. The latter point merely paraphrases Bush's own lame
excuse that he was ``out of the loop'' during all those illegal
transactions. During the hearings on the nomination of Robert
Gates to become director of Central Intelligence, nobody had
anything new to add about the role of George Bush, the boss of
the National Security Council's Special Situation Group crisis
staff that was a command center for the whole affair. These
charades are peddled to a very credulous public by operatives
whose task goes beyond mere damage control to mind control--the
``MK'' in the government's MK-Ultra operation.
Part of the free ride enjoyed by George Bush during the 1988
elections is reflected in the fact that at no point in the
campaign was there any serious effort by any of the news
organizations to provide the public with an accurate and complete
account of his political career. At least two biographies of
Dukakis appeared which, although hardly critical, were not
uniformly laudatory either. But in the case of Bush, all the
public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign biography and a
newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of lies.
Early in the course of our research for the present volume it
became apparent that all books and most longer articles dealing
with the life of George Bush had been generated from a single
print-out of thoroughly approved ``facts'' about Bush and his
family. We learned that during 1979-80, Bush aide Pete Roussel
attempted to recruit biographers to prepare a life of Bush based
on a collection of press releases, news summaries, and similar
pre-digested material. Most biographical writing about Bush
consists merely of the points from this printout, strung out
chronologically and made into a narrative through the
interpretation of comments, anecdotes, embellishments, or special
stylistic devices.
The canonical Bush-approved printout is readily identified.
One dead giveaway is the inevitability with which the hacks out
to cover up the substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red
Studebaker which George Bush allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas
in 1948. This is the sort of detail which has been introduced
into Bush's real life in a deliberate and deceptive attempt to
humanize his image. It has been our experience that any text
that features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably
been derived from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore
practically worthless for serious research into Bush's life. We
therefore assign such texts to the ``red Studebaker school'' of
coverup and falsification.
Some examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography,
{Looking Forward,} ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold: ``Heading
into Texas in my Studebaker, all I knew about the state's
landscape was what I'd seen from the cockpit of a Vultee Vibrator
during my training days in the Navy.''s1
Here is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh
Green, a friend of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his
{George Bush: An Intimate Portrait,} published after Bush had won
the presidency: ``He (Bush) gassed up his 1948 Studebaker,
arranged for his wife and son to follow, and headed for Odessa,
Texas.''s2
Harry Hurt III wrote the following lines in a 1983 Texas
magazine article that was even decorated with a drawing of what
apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but which does not
look like a Studebaker of that vintage at all: ``When George
Herbert Walker Bush drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa
in the summer of 1948, the town's population, though constantly
increasing with newly-arrived oil field hands, was still under
30,000.''s3
We see that Harry Hurt has more imagination than many Bush
biographers, and his article does provide a few useful facts.
More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben Kramer, whose
biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992. Cramer
was given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into
the same tired old printout. But the very fact that the Bush
team feels that it requires another biography indicates that it
still feels that it has a potential vulnerability here. Cramer
has attempted to solve his problem by recasting the same old
garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we would almost say
{hyperthyroid} style. The following is from an excerpt of this
forthcoming book that was published in {Esquire} in June 1991:
``In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in
New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation
gift from Pres), and started driving south.''s4
Was that Studebaker shiny and new, or old and battered?
Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point; in any case,
as we see, our authorities diverge.
Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush at war, the {Flight of the
Avenger,}s5 does not include the obligatory ``red Studebaker''
reference, but this is more than compensated for by the most
elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service.
The publication of {Flight of the Avenger,} which concentrates on
an heroic retelling of Bush's war record, and ignores all
evidence that might tend to puncture this myth, was timed to
coincide with Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile tract written
with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara Bush, and the White
House staff. {Flight of the Avenger} recalls the practice of
totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime
should be accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's
strong man in a martial posture. In any case, this book deals
with Bush's life up to the end of World War II; we never reach
Odessa.
Only one of the full-length accounts produced by the Bush
propaganda machine neglects the red Studebaker story. This is
Nicholas King's {George Bush: A Biography,} the first book-length
version of Bush's life, produced as a result of Pete Roussel's
efforts for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had served as
Bush's spokesman when he was U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations. King admits in his preface that he can be impugned for
writing a work of the most transparent apologetics: ``In
retrospect,'' he says , ``this book may seem open to the charge
of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable all
around.''s6 Indeed.
Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details
from the same printout. Here is the relevant excerpt from the
warmly admiring {Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait of America's
Candid First Lady,} written by Donnie Radcliffe and published
after Bush's 1988 election victory: ``With $3,000 left over after
he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947 red
Studebaker his father had given him for graduation after George's
car died on the highway.''s7
Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics
about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the
same old Bush printout. The German author and reporter Rainer
Bonhorst, the former Washington correspondent of the
{Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,} in his 1988 book {George Bush:
The New Man in the White House,} named a chapter of this Bush
political biography ``To Texas in the Red Studebaker.'' Bonhorst
writes as follows: ``Then there was still the matter of the red
Studebaker. It plays--right after the world war effort--a
central role in the life history of George Bush. It is the
history of his rebellion. The step which made a careless Texan
out of a stiff New Englander, a self-made man out of a
patrician's son, born into wealth.... Thus, George and Barbara
Bush, 24 and 23 years old, he having just finished with his
studies, she having prematurely withdrawn from her university and
become a mother a few months earlier, packed their baby and their
suitcases and loaded them into their glaring red Studebaker
coupe.
``A supermodern, smart car, certainly somewhat loud for the
New England taste,' the Bushes later recalled. But finally it
departed towards Texas.''s8
We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware of the symbolic
importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic
accounts of Bush's life.
What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason
to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas,
in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known
Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of
Houston. In a recent letter to the {Texas Monthly,} Wyatt
specifies that ``when people speak of Mr. Bush's humble
beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode
down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied
by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of
Dresser Industries.... I hate it when people make statements
about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just
didn't happen that way,'' writes Mr. Wyatt.s9 Dresser was a
Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its
subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a
photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son
``in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas.''s1s0 Can
this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of
1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush
biographers is very much open to doubt.
The Roman Propaganda Machine
Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in
world literature. The red Studebaker school goes back a long
way; these writers of today can be usefully compared with a
certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire
under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who was thus an
approximate contemporary of Jesus Christ. Velleius Paterculus was
an historian and biographer who is known today, if at all, for
his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which are
contained within Paterculus's history of Rome.
Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable
treatment of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to
write of Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery came in
Velleius Paterculus's treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is
part of what he writes about that tyrannical ruler:
``Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have
passed in the view, and are fresh in the memory of all, who shall
presume to give a full account? ... credit has been restored to
mercantile affairs, sedition has been banished from the forum,
corruption from the Campus Martius, and discord from the
senate-house; justice, equity and industry, which had long lain
buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority has
been given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and
solemnity to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in the
theatre have been suppressed, and all men have had either a
desire excited in them, or a necessity imposed on them, of acting
with integrity. Virtuous acts are honored, wicked deeds are
punished. The humble respects the powerful, without dreading
him; the powerful takes precedence of the humble without
condemning him. When were provisions more moderate in price?
When were the blessings of peace more abundant? Augustan peace,
diffused over all the regions of the east and the west, and all
that lies between the south and the north, preserves every corner
of the world free from all dread of predatory molestation.
Fortuitous losses, not only of individuals, but of cities, the
munificence of the prince is ready to relieve. The cities of
Asia have been repaired; the provinces have been secured from the
oppression of their governors. Honor promptly rewards the
deserving, and the punishment of the guilty, if slow, is
certain. Interest gives place to justice, solicitation to
merit. For the best of princes teaches his countrymen to act
rightly by his own practice; and while he is the greatest in
power, he is still greater in example.
``Having exhibited a general view of the administration of
Tiberius Caesar, let us now enumerate a few particulars
respecting it.... How formidable a war, excited by the Gallic
chief Sacrovir and Julius Florius, did he suppress, and with such
amazing expedition and energy, that the Roman people learned that
they were conquerors, before they knew that they were at war, and
the news of the victory outstripped the news of the danger! The
African war too, perilous as it was, and daily increasing in
strength, was quickly terminated under his auspices and
direction....''s1s1
All of this was written in praise of the regime that crucified
Jesus Christ, and one of the worst genocidal tyrannies in the
history of the world. Paterculus, we must sadly conclude, was a
sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are
close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush machine.
In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius,
Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the
Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's
number one favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In
many respects Sejanus was not unlike James Baker III under the
Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time in seclusion
on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day
control of the vast empire and its 100 million subjects.
Paterculus wrote of Sejanus that he was ``a most excellent
coadjutor in all the toils of government ... a man of pleasing
gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness ... assuming nothing to
himself.'' That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in
about 30 A.D. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to
Tiberius himself; somewhat later, the emperor, suspecting a coup
plot, condemned Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in
gruesome retribution.
But why bring up Rome? Some readers may be scandalized by the
things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president
of the United States. Are we not disrespectful to this high
office? No. One of the reasons for glancing back at Imperial
Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural
degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have inflicted
incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war
and depression, this is once again the case. If Caligula was
possible then, who could claim that the America of the New World
Order should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with
these old Romans, because they can show us much about ourselves.
In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable
about the first dozen emperors, we must wait until the infamous
Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius,
Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the rest had entirely passed from
the scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius
reigned from 14 to 37 A.D.; Caligula, his designated successor,
from 37 to 41 A.D.; and Nero from 54 to 68 A.D. But the first
accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes
from Publius Cornelius Tacitus in about 115-17 A.D., late in the
reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write
and publish a more realistic account of the Julio-Claudian
emperors because one of the constant themes of Trajan's
propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor
through comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants.
Tacitus manages to convey how the destructiveness of these
emperors in their personal lives correlated with their mass
executions and their genocidal economic policies. Tacitus was
familiar with the machinery of Roman Imperial power: he was of
senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 A.D., and was
the governor of the important province of western Anatolia
(today's Turkey) which the Romans referred to simply as Asia.
Tacitus writes of Tiberius: ``... his criminal lusts shamed him.
Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant.
Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by
beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names
for types of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to
locate and procure his requirements.... It was like the sack of
a captured city.''
Tiberius was able to dominate the legislative branch of his
government, the senate, by subversion and terror: ``It was,
indeed, a horrible feature of this period that leading senators
became informers even on trivial matters--some openly, many
secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect as strangers,
old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a
dinner-party, a remark on any subject might mean prosecution.
Everyone competed for priority in marking down the victim.
Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of
contagion, like an epidemic.... I realize that many writers omit
numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid
that catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal
may equally depress their readers. But numerous unrecorded
incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known.
``... Even women were in danger. They could not be charged
with aiming at supreme power. So they were charged with weeping:
one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death. The
senate decided this case.... In the same year the high price of
corn nearly caused riots....
``Frenzied with bloodshed, (Tiberius) now ordered the
execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It
was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence
or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about--or in heaps.
Relatives and friends were forbidden to stand by or lament them,
or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded them, spying on their
sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged to the
Tiber, they floated away or grounded--with none to cremate or
touch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising
surge of brutality drove compassion away.''s1s2
This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly
praised by Velleius Paterculus.
Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that
have come down to us, much of what we know of the rule of
Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 A.D.) derives from
{The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,} a book by Gaius Suetonius
Tranquillus. The character and administration of Caligula present
some striking parallels with the subject of the present book.
As a stoic, Caligula was a great admirer of his own
``immovable rigor.'' His motto was ``Remember that I have the
right to do anything to anybody.'' He made no secret of his
bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green
team in the Roman arena, and when the crowd applauded a
charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula cried out, ``I
wish the Roman people had but a single neck.'' At one of his
state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable
laughter, and when a consul asked him what was so funny, he
replied that it was the thought that as emperor Caligula had the
power to have the throats of the top officials cut at any time he
chose. Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal
life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck of his wife or one
of his mistresses, he liked to remark: ``Off comes this beautiful
head whenever I give the word.''
Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two
notebooks were found among his personal papers, one labelled
``The Sword'' and the other labelled ``The Dagger.'' These were
lists of the persons he had proscribed and liquidated, and were
the forerunners of the enemies lists and discrediting committee
of today. Suetonius frankly calls Caligula ``a monster,'' and
speculates on the pyschological roots of his criminal
disposition: ``I think I may attribute to mental weakness the
existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person,
extreme assurance and, on the other hand, excessive
timorousness.'' Caligula was ``full of threats'' against ``the
barbarians,'' but at the same time prone to precipitous retreats
and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his ``body language''
by ``practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions
before a mirror.''
Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the
Temple of Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit
himself as an object of public worship, delighting in being
hailed as ``Jupiter Latiaris'' by the populace. Later Caligula
would officially open temples in his own name. Caligula was
brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose members he
subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many senators
were ``secretly put to death.'' ``He often inveighed against all
the Senators alike.... He treated the other orders with like
insolence and cruelty.'' Suetonius recites whole catalogues of
``special instances of his innate brutality'' toward persons of
all walks of life. He enjoyed inflicting torture, and revelled
in liquidating political opponents or those who had insulted or
snubbed him in some way. He had a taste for capital executions
as the perfect backdrop for parties and banquets. Caligula also
did everything he could to denigrate the memory of the great men
of past epochs, so that their fame could not eclipse his own:
``He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less envy and
malice than insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of
famous men'' and tried to destroy all the texts of Homer.
Caligula ``respected neither his own chastity nor that of any
one else.'' He was reckless in his extravagance, and soon emptied
out the imperial treasury of all the funds that old Tiberius had
squirreled away there. After that, Caligula tried to replenish
his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations,
property seizures, and public auctions. He also ``levied new and
unheard-of taxes,'' to the point that ``no class of commodities
was exempt from some kind of tax or other.'' Caligula taxed all
foodstuffs, took a fortieth of the award in any lawsuit, an
eighth of the daily wages of the porters, and demanded that the
prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average price
charged to each individual customer. (It is rumored that this
part of Caligula's career is under study by those planning George
Bush's second term.) Caligula also opened a brothel in his palace
as an additional source of income, which may prefigure today's
White House staff. Among Caligula's more singular hobbies
Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of
gold coins.
Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by Suetonius as
``neither beautiful nor young'') with him until the very end.
But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he made consul
of the Roman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a
conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune Gaius
Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken special delight in
humiliating.s1s3
The authors of the present study are convinced that these
references to the depravity of the Roman emperors, and to the
records of that depravity provided by such authors as Tacitus and
Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task of following
the career of a member of the senatorial class of the
Anglo-American elite through the various stages of his formation
and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The Roman Imperial model
is germane because the American ruling elite of today is far
closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the
world of the American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention
of 1789. The leitmotif of modern American presidential politics
is unquestionably an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by
Bush in his slogan for 1990, ``The New World Order,'' and for
1991, the ``pax universalis.'' The central project of the Bush
presidency is the creation and consolidation of a single,
universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly
modelled on the various phases of the Roman Empire.
The Olympian Delusion
There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical
method of the Graeco-Roman world which we have sought to borrow.
Ever since Thucydides composed his monumental work on the
Peloponnesian War, those who have sought to imitate his
style--with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among
them--have employed the device of attributing long speeches to
historical personages, even when it appears very unlikely that
such lengthy orations could have been made by the protagonists at
the time. This has nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of
current American political writing, which attempts to present
historical events as a series of trivial and banal soap-opera
exchanges, which carry on for such interminable lengths as to
suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea
of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George
Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct
quotation. We are convinced that by letting Bush express himself
directly in this way, we afford the reader a more faithful--and
damning--account of Bush's actions.
George Bush might agree that ``history is biography,''
although we suspect that he would not agree with any of our other
conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the present
work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers
himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes
first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable
of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as
Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the
self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special,
exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run
of mankind as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This
mentality generally goes together with a fascination for
eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of
building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are
indeed superior. These notions of ``breeding'' are a constant in
the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe,
especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like
Bush must necessarily strive. At the very least, oligarchs like
Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground between
the immortals above and the {hoi polloi} below. The culmination
of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since
attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of
the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders,
by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living
deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding
the laws of the universe according to their own irrational
caprice. If we do not take into account this element of fatal
and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in
regard to the Gulf War, international finance, or the AIDS
epidemic must defy all comprehension.
Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by George Bush
is the emphasis on one's own family pedigree. This accounts for
the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of this book to
Bush's family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century and
beyond. It is impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality
unless we realize that it is important for him to be considered a
cousin, however distant, of Queen Elizabeth II of the House of
Mountbatten-Windsor and for his wife Barbara to be viewed in some
sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.
The Family Firm
For related reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate the
role played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by
his maternal grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and
George Herbert Walker, Jr., and by George H.W. Bush's father, the
late Senator Prescott Bush. In the course of this task, we must
speak at length about the institution to which George Bush owes
the most, the Wall Street international investment bank of Brown
Brothers Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse
mentioned above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was
and remains the family firm in the deepest sense. The formidable
power of this bank and its ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator
Prescott Bush up through the time of his death in 1972, and still
active on George's behalf down to the present day, is the single
most important key to every step of George's business, covert
operations, and political career.
In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him
personally have noted, the network looms much larger than
George's own character and will. The reader will search in vain
for strong principled commitments in George Bush's personality;
the most that will be found is a series of characteristic
obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal
ambition, and settling scores with adversaries. What emerges by
contrast is the decisive importance of Bush's network of
connections. His response to the Gulf crisis of 1991 will be
largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical
insight, but rather by his connections to the British oligarchy,
to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in
his fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal
houses. If the question is one of finance, then the opinions of
J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry Kravis, Robert Mosbacher, T. Boone
Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker III and the City of London
will be decisive. If covert operations and dirty tricks are on
the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys with
whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of
1989, despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a
weak and passive executive, waiting for his networks to show him
what it was he was supposed to do. When German reunification and
the crumbling of the Soviet empire spurred those--primarily
British--networks into action, Bush was suddenly capable of
violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second term
approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven
self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new
wars designed to secure his re-election.
The United States in Decline
Biography has its own inherent discipline: It must be
concerned with the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray too
far away. In no way has it been our intention to offer an
account of American history during the lifetime of George Bush.
The present study nevertheless reflects many aspects of that
recent history of U.S. decline. It will be noted that Bush has
succeeded in proportion as the country has failed, and that
Bush's advancement has proceeded {pari passu} with the
degradation of the national stage upon which he has operated and
which he has come to dominate. At various phases in his career,
Bush has come into conflict with persons who were intellectually
and morally superior to him. One such was Senator Ralph
Yarborough, and another was Senator Frank Church. Our study will
be found to catalogue the constant decline in the qualities of
Bush's adversaries as human types until the 1980s, by which time
his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than Bush
himself.
The exception to this trend is Bush's long-standing personal
vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most consistent and capable
adversary. LaRouche was jailed seven days after Bush's
inauguration in the most infamous political frameup of recent
U.S. history. As our study will document, at critical moments in
Bush's career, LaRouche's political interventions have frustrated
some of Bush's best-laid political plans: A very clear example is
LaRouche's role in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the
New Hampshire primary. Over the intervening years, LaRouche has
become George Bush's ``man in the iron mask,'' the principled
political adversary whom Bush seeks to jail and silence at all
costs. The restoration of justice in this country must include
the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's political associates,
and all the other political prisoners of the Bush regime.
As for the political relevance of our project, we think that
it is very real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been
important for the public to know more about Bush's business
dealings with the Royal Family of Kuwait. During the 1992
presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent crop of junk-bond
assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to bankruptcy
court, and state workers all across the United States are
informed that the retirement pensions they had been promised will
never be paid, the relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis
will surely constitute an explosive political issue. Similarly,
once Bush's British and Kissingerian pedigree is recognized, the
methods he is likely to pursue in regard to situations such as
the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro regime in
Cuba, or the provocation of a splendid little nuclear war
involving North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will
hardly be mysterious.
The authors have been at some pains to make this work
intelligible to readers around the world. We offer this book to
those who share our aversion to the imperialist-colonialist New
World Order, and our profound horror at the concept of a return
to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested by Bush's ``pax
universalis'' slogan. This work is tangible evidence that there
is an opposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the
new Caligula is very vulnerable indeed on the level of the
exposure of his own misdeeds.
It will be argued that this book should have been published
before the 1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been
avoided. That is certainly true, but it is an objection which
should also be directed to many institutions and agencies whose
resources far surpass our modest capabilities. We can only
remind our fellow citizens that when he asks for their votes for
his re-election, George Bush also enters that court of public
opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They
should not waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of
his career and future intentions, since it is Bush who comes
forward appealing for their support. To aid in this process, we
have provided a list of Twenty Questions for Candidate George
Bush on the campaign trail, and this will be found in the
appendix.
We do not delude ourselves that we have said the last word
about George Bush. But we have for the first time sketched out at
least some of the most salient features and gathered them into a
comprehensible whole. We encourage an aroused citizenry, as well
as specialized researchers, to improve upon what we have been
able to accomplish. In so doing, we recall the words of the
Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he reluctantly accepted the
order of a powerful king to produce an account of the old Roman
Pantheon: ``If I don't succeed completely in this exposition, at
least I will provide a stimulus for the better work of others who
are wiser.''--Boccaccio, {Genealogy of the National Gods}
{To be continued.}
Notes
1. George Bush and Vic Gold, {Looking Forward,} (New York:
Doubleday, 1987), p. 47.
2.
Fitzhugh Green, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Hippocrene, 1989),
p. 53.
3. Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush, Plucky Lad,'' {Texas Monthly,}
June, 1983, p. 142.
4. Richard Ben Cramer, ``How He Got Here,'' {Esquire,} June,
1991, p. 84.
5. Joe Hyams, {Flight of the Avenger} (New York, 1991).
6.
Nicholas King, {George Bush: A Biography} (New York, Dodd, Mead,
1980), p. xi.
7. Donnie Radcliffe, {Simply Barbara Bush,} (New York: Warner,
1989), p. 103.
8. Rainer Bonhorst, {George Bush, Der Neue Mann im Weissen Haus,}
(Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80-81.
9. See ``The Roar of the Crowd,'' {Texas Monthly,} November,
1991. See also Jan Jarboe, ``Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog,'' {Texas
Monthly,} April 1991, p. 122 ff. Here Wyatt observes: ``I knew
from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only because he was
politically ambitious. He flew out here on an airplane owned by
Dresser Industries. His daddy was a member of the board of
Dresser.''
10. Darwin Payne, {Initiative in Energy} (New York: Simon and
Shuster, 1979), p. 233.
11. John Selby Watson (translator), {Sallust, Florus, and
Velleius Paterculus} (London: George Bell and Son, 1879), pp.
542-46.
12. Cornelius Tacitus, {The Annals of Imperial Rome} (Penguin,
1962), pp. 193-221.
13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, {The Lives of the Twelve
Caesars} (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 165-204, {
passim.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15244 of alt.activism:
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Part 2: George Bush Unauthorized Biography
Message-ID: <mV3LeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
Date: 15 Jan 92 21:58:09 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Lines: 1495
The following is from the New Federalist serialization of a
forthcoming book concerning George Bush.
For further information or to subscribe to New Federalist, please
contact me by e-mail.
CHAPTER 2 THE HITLER PROJECT
1. Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America
was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces.
Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman.
His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just
begun training to become a naval pilot.
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure
of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were
being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the {Trading with the Enemy Act}, the government took
over the {Union Banking Corporation,} in which Bush was a
director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking
Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush,
E. Roland ``Bunny'' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two
other associates of Bush.s1
The order seizing the bank ``vest[ed] [seized] all of the
capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York
corporation,'' and named the holders of its shares as:
sb|``E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares.'' Harriman was chairman
and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is ``Bunny''
Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't
get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal
investments.
sb|``Cornelis Lievense--4 shares.'' Lievense was president and
director of UBC, and a New York resident banking functionary for
the Nazis.
sb|``Harold D. Pennington--1 share.'' Pennington was treasurer
and director of UBC, and an office manager employed by Bush at
Brown Brothers Harriman.
sb|``Ray Morris--1 share.'' Morris was director of UBC, and a
partner of Bush and the Harrimans.
sb|``Prescott S. Bush--1 share.'' Bush was director of UBC,
which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George
Walker; he was senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and
Averell Harriman.
sb|``H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share'' Kouwenhoven was director of
UBC; he organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in
negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; he was also
managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi
occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany, and also
director and chief foreign financial executive of the German
Steel Trust.
sb|``Johann G. Groeninger--1 share.'' Groeninger was director
of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; he was an industrial
executive in Nazi Germany.
The order also specified: ``all of which shares are held for
the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is
property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country....''
By October 26, 1942, U.S. troops were underway for North
Africa. On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two
Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the
{Holland-American Trading Corporation} and the {Seamless Steel
Equipment Corporation.}s2
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on November 8,
1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in
the {Silesian-American Corporation,} long managed by Prescott
Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized
under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 17, 1942. In
this action, the government announced that it was seizing only
the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on
the business.s3
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in
wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President
Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and
arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and
managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of
Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi
genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known
results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications
reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George
Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he
represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result
of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family
associations, which later boosted him into the Central
Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's
partners in the Hitler project.
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo
T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property
of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order,
published in obscure government record books and kept out of the
news,s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the
Union Banking Corporation was run for the ``Thyssen family'' of
``Germany and/or Hungary''--``nationals ... of a designated enemy
country.''
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the
Union Banking Corp. were legally {front men for the Nazis}, the
government avoided the more important historical issue: In what
way {were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed
by} the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an
executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler
project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek
an answer for that question.
2. Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally
recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf
Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing
the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had
already published his famous book, {I Paid Hitler},s5 admitting
that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since
October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of
Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S.
diplomats in Berlin in 1932.s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen
bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the
perpetrators who had been nailed.
But two weeks before the official order, government
investigators had reported secretly that ``W. Averell Harriman
was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became
acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist.''
Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New
York. ``[C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as
directors....'' Thyssen agent ``H.J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the
United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman
Company in this connection....''s7
When exactly was ``Harriman in Europe sometime prior to
1924''? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin
branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in
1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co.,
interlocking with the Thyssen-owned {Bank voor Handel en
Scheepvaart} (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators
concluded that ``the Union Banking Corporation has since its
inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch
bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment.''
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz
Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking
Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between
New York and the ``Thyssen interests'' in Germany. By putting up
about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner
and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
{How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President
Bush's father was the New York banker?}
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's
Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte
Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or {German Steel
Trust}) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the
war, congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests,
Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation
showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following
approximate proportions of total German national output: ``50.8%
of Nazi Germany's pig iron; 41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal
plate; 36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate; 38.5% of Nazi
Germany's galvanized sheet; 45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and
tubes; 22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire; 35.0% of Nazi Germany's
explosives.''s8
This accounts for many, many Nazi submarines, bombs, rifles,
gas chambers, etc.
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in
1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a
giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime
sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new {German Steel Trust,}
Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926
by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade
of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the ``Merchants of
Death'' bureau in World War I.
In return for putting up $70 million to create his
organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company
two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel
Trust.s9
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential
accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through
the Walker-Bush organization; the Steel Trust did its corporate
banking through Dillon Read.
The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just
politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to
coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's
European business in those days was organized around
anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew
this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to
Averell Harriman: ``It seems to me that the suggestion in
connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from
Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we
have drawn our line and should hew to it.''s1s0
Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito
Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed
good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: ``... During
these last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our
c[o]ntract 15 June.''s1s1
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America,
Germany, and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made
the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever
was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in
this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the
installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and
rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged
with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on
January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker &
Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Thatcher
M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers
Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family
firm continued operating under its historic name--Brown,
Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown
Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief,
had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father.
Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the
junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief exexcutive of
Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for
the Hitler project. American patriots had cursed its name back
in Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A.
and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of
the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill
owners; through their usurious credit they controlled and
manipulated the slave-owners.
Now, in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of
England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown
Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown
Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as
the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling
circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to
his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown
Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's
intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always
stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips
to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German
actitivites, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old
England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.s1s2
3. Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933,
and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive
and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the
Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal
undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the
Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.s1s3
Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German
partners.
{Fritz Thyssen} told Allied interrogators after the war about
some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: ``In 1930 or
1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would
arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank
fuaur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart
(BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ...
he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank
because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my
position, and because I thought it was better to do business with
a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more
in my hands....
``The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks--about the sum
I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the
Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it....''s1s4
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans
to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he
raised from others--in a period of terrible money-shortage in
Germany.
{Friedrich Flick} was the major co-owner of the German Steel
Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's longtime collaborator and
sometime competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal
at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was ``one of
leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed
large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of `Circle of Friends' of
Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS.''s1s5
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their
private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and
Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by
Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker,
President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the
German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast
operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
The {Harriman Fifteen Corporation} (George Walker, president,
Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a
substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the
merger with Brown Brothers, January 1, 1931. This holding
correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the
{Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation,} the American group
owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining and
zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich
Flick owned two-thirds.s1s6
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
``Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial
enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating
plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer,' 1938 [title awarded to
prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military
Economy Leader']....''s1s7
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel,
and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was
condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he
served three years. With friends in New York and London,
however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German
Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation--initiated an alert to
the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed
in the Flick partnership.s1s8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from
the {New York Times} of that day, which reported that the Polish
government was fighting back against American and German
stockholders who controlled ``Poland's largest industrial unit,
the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company....''
The {Times} article continued: ``The company has long been
accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious
bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in
December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They
were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles.
Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's
board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until
the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen
regularly.''
The {Times} noted that the company's mines and mills ``employ
25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel
output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the
company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German
steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in
the United States.''
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was
being exported to Hitler's Germany under depression conditions,
the Polish government thought that Bush, Harriman, and their Nazi
partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish
holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout.
The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their
European representative: ``Have undertaken new steps London
Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish
Ambassador [in Washington].''
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker
announced an agreement had been made ``in Berlin'' to sell an
8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.s1s9
But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from
continuing its partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanks and bombs ``settled'' this dispute in September,
1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The
Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker, and Bush,
with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could
appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and
invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil
pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush
enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the
Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the
Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49
percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred
stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a ``business enterprise
within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich,
Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft
George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation....''s2s0
Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company,
which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the
creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's
partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was
also a director.
The investigative report prior to the government crackdown
explained the ``NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an
American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries,
which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia,
Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have
been in the possession of and have been operated by the German
government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance
to that country in its war effort.''s2s1
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to
regain control of the European properties after the war.
4. Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take
control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had
organized the {American Ship and Commerce Corp.} as a unit of the
W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over
Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush
shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the
Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.s2s2
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic,
handsome Prescott Bush. From the Brown Brothers Harriman
skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing
partner, confidential investments manager and advisor to Averell
and his brother ``Bunny''--he walked across to the Harriman
Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H.
Walker & Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at
39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and
still the offices for American Ship and Commerce, and of the
Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for
the entire Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the
steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War
I chief executive, {Wilhelm Cuno}, and with the line's bankers,
M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the
Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German
Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler
dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi
Party.s2s3
{Albert Voegler} was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick
German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the
New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS
Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush
Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their
heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final
Nazi leap into national power.s2s4
The {Schroeder} family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi
activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their
lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive
Thyssen-Huette foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott
Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer
of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies,
to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and
Montagu Norman's proteaageaa Hjalmar Schacht together made the
final arrangments for Hitler to enter the government.s2s5
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of
the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell
Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron
Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers
Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932--on the eve of
their Hitler-triumph.s2s6
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping
line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in
this century.
The U.S. Embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that
the ``costly election campaigns'' and ``the cost of maintaining a
private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men'' had raised questions as
to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government
of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by
ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S.
Embassy reported that the {Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing
and distributing propaganda attacks against the German
government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's
forces.}s2s7
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or
intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this
connection, we note that the original ``Merchant of Death,''
Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking
Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor
was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central
figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler
project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party
banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington
after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the
Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to
Hitler's seizure of power, the senators found that ``German
political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all
armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from
America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before
the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through
Holland without police inspection or interference. The
Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this
manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson
submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great.''s2s8
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre
changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line--and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max
Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was
to be the corporation's official, designated representative on
the board of Hamburg-Amerika.s2s9
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American
sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: ``For
the last few years business was considerably better than we had
anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some
months. We are actually suffering also under the very active
propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant
circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of
the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily
exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly
resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I
feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause
for any alarm whatsoever.''s3s0
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew,
was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated
rather serious ``alarm'' inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi
operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman,
Max's son Erich sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg,
a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick
to ``use all your influence'' to stop all anti-Nazi activity in
America, including ``atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in
foreign press, mass meetings, etc.'' Frederick cabled back to
Erich: ``No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of]
German goods[,] merely excited individuals.'' Two days after
that, On March 31, 1933, the {American-Jewish Committee,}
controlled by the Warburgs, and the {B'nai B'rith,} heavily
influenced by the Sulzbergers' ({New York Times}), issued a
formal, official joint statement of the two organizations,
counselling ``that no American boycott against Germany be
encouraged, [and advising] ... that no further mass meetings be
held or similar forms of agitation be employed.''s3s1
The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of
the ``Anti-Defamation League'') continued with this hardline,
no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the
fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place
entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain
something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish
and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his
family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why
``professional Nazi-hunters'' have never discovered how the Bush
family made its money?
The executive board of the {Hamburg Amerika Line} {(Hapag)}
met jointly with the North German Lloyd company board in Hamburg
on September 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two
firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce
Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a longtime Harriman
executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America
for the new joint Nazi shipping lines {(Hapag-Lloyd)}) on
November 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before
Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the {Nazi Labor Front} rode
with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New
York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front
organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to
individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the
line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done
in Germany against the constitutional German government.s3s2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp.
cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's
heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika
stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the
information that ``we represented you'' at the stockholders
meeting and ``exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm
[gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us.''
The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil
Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the
Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: ``It is the intention to
continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as
heretofore....'' In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman
Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic on a
Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.
After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the
Harriman-Bush office replied: ``I am glad to learn that Mr.
Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg
American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis
as heretofore.''s3s3
Two months before moving against Bush's Union Banking Corp.,
the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the
Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading
with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure
report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney
representing the Nazi firm.s3s4
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an
agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi
commerce with the U.S.A. The {Harriman International Co.,} led by
Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate
of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct {all exports from
Hitler's Germany to the United States}.s3s5
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's
economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles,
international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the
counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and
the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's
friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central
Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the
Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of
inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of
``covert action government,'' that both of these Dulles brothers
were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.
Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt
restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued
by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between
the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of
the growing Nazi warmaking apparatus for producing tanks, poison
gas, etc.
Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such
arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi
Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made
debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank
during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements,
which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate
officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for
Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi
officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
``Sept. 22, 1937
``Mr. Prescott S. Bush
``59 Wall Street, New
York, N.Y.
``Dear Press,
``I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic]
Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the
only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers
and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the
bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the
modification of the bankers' agreement.
``Sincerely yours,
``John Foster Dulles''
Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's
signature, and the changes went through.s3s6
In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic
Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller
American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for
arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court
decided that this particular Hitler ``law'' was invalid in the
United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between
the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.s3s7
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the
intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi
financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic
climax.
For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid
a fortune.
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
Notes
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248.
Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed
October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942. 7
Fed. Reg. 9097 (November 7, 1942).
The {New York City Directory of Directors}, 1930s-40s, list
Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corp. from 1934
through 1943.
2.
Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel
Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order Number 261: Holland-American
Trading Corp.
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370:
Silesian-American Corp.
4. {New York Times,} December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page
25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department.
Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: ``The
Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received
authority to change its principal place of business to 120
Broadway.''
The {Times} omitted the fact that the Union Banking
Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with
the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the
government's Alien Property Custodian.
5.
Fritz Thyssen, {I Paid Hitler}, 1941, reprinted in (Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says
his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923,
for Hitler's attempted ``putsch'' against the constitutional
government.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, to the
U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in
{Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany,} at
major U.S. libraries.
7. October 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
Number 248.
8. {Elimination of German Resources for War}: Hearings Before a
Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States
Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United
States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. Page 507: Table of
Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total
as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking
Corporation pp. 727-731.
9. Robert Sobel, {The Life and Times of Dillon Read} (New York:
Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm
cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, August 11, 1927, in W.
Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress (hereafter ``WAH
papers'').
11. ``Iaccarino'' to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927.
12. Andrew Boyle, {Montagu Norman} (London: Cassell, 1967).
Sir Henry Clay, {Lord Norman} (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957),
pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
John A. Kouwenhouven, {Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers
Harriman} (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
13.
Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a
single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been
set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the
Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American
Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39
Broadway.
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in
U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony
Sutton, {An Introduction to The Order} (Billings, Mt.: Liberty
House Press, 1986).
15. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, by the Office
of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis
Criminality, U. S. Government Printing Office, (Washington, D.C.,
1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
16. ``Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the]
Meeting of Board of Directors,'' October 31, 1930 (WAH papers),
shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum December 19, 1930
on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.
Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works
for the year 1930 (WAH papers) lists ``Dr. Friedrich Flick ...
Berlin'' and ``William Averell Harriman ... New York'' on the
Board of Directors.
``Harriman Fifteen Coporation Securities Position February
28, 1931,'' WAH papers. This report shows Harriman Fifteen
Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C.
worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half
the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.
The {New York City Directory of Directors} volumes for the
1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott
Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of
Harriman Fifteen Corp.
``Appointments,'' (three typed pages) marked ``Noted May 18
1931 W.A.H.,'' (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York
Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, WAH papers), lists a meeting
between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00
P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by
a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the
Hamburg-Amerika Line.
The ``Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen
Corporation,'' October 19, 1933 (WAH papers) names G.H. Walker
as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen
Corp.'s address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and
Co.
17. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,}
p. 1686.
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March
19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.
``Dear Averell:
``In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it adviseable for me
to let you know that we received the following cable from [our
European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to
conflict with the Polish government]....''
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders January
7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed November 17,
1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Prop. Custodian. F.R. Doc.
42-14183; Filed, December 31, 1942; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1,
1943).
The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of
common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American.
The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote to Averell
Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with ``an invitation to
take part in the regular meeting of the members of the
Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben....'' WAH
papers.
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
Number 370.
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce
from its organization through 1928. Consult {New York City
Directory of Directors}.
``Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February
28, 1931,'' {op. cit.} The report lists 46,861 shares in the
American Ship & Commerce Corp.
See ``Message from Mr. Bullfin,'' August 30, 1934 (Harriman
Fifteen section, WAH papers) for the joint supervision of Bush
and Walker, respectively director and president of the
corporation.
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press
Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail
cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking
power. William L. Shirer, L., {The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. {Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,} p. 1688.
24. See ``Elimination of German Resources for War,'' {op. cit.,}
pages 881-882 on Voegler.
See Annual Report of the
(Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesel schaft (Hapag or
Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A
copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue,
Manhattan.
25. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B,} {op. cit.,}
pp. 1178, 1453-1454, 1597, 1599.
See ``Elimination of German Resources for War,'' {op. cit.,}
pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, {op. cit.}
Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, November 14,
1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter,
December 9, 1932.
In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American
affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen
Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the
principal attorney.
Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank
of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner
Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of
England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was
Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International
Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements
for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the
Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the
outbreak of World War II.
27.
Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op. cit.}
28. U.S. Senate ``Nye Committee'' hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp.
1197-1198, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated
June 27, 1932 and January 9, 1933.
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg,
March 7, 1933.
Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to
Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn
Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had
staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union
Pacific Railroad.
Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the
racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa
and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for
several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank.
The reader may consult David Farrer, {The Warburgs: The Story of
A Family} (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill
[sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59
Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish
organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, {American
Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis} (New York:
Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
32. {Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and
Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities}: Public
Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on
Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives,
Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934--Hearings
No. 73-NY-7 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934).
See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul
von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
See {New York Times,} July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of
Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to
Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph
Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.
Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June
20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helferrich's letter.
Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinkmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July
6, 1936, WAH papers. The file copy of this letter carries no
signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 126.
Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed
August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942,
10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (Number 176, Sept. 5, 1942.)
July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
Number 126.
35. {New York Times,} May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement
is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder. It is
addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower
Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: ``Much disappointed to
have missed seeing you Tueday afternoon.... I hope to see you
either in Washington or New York before you sail.
with my regards W.A. Harriman'' (WAH papers).
36. Dulles to Bush, letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. {New York Times,} Jan. 19, 1938.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15394 of alt.activism:
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Part 3: George bush Unauthorized Biography
Message-ID: <1VVReB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
Date: 19 Jan 92 01:12:47 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Lines: 1544
The following is part 3 of an unauthorized biography of George Bush
-- a forthcoming book serialized in New Federalist. This article is
from Issue 1 V6.
For further information, or to subscribe, please contact me by
e-mail.
Chapter 3 RACE HYGIENE: Three Bush Family Alliances ``The
[government] must put the most modern medical means in the
service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and
mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their
suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of
the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the
physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only
600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable
misfortune.''s1
``The per capita income gap between the developed and the
developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of
higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India,
unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form
an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle
these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major
challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's
fertility.''
These two quotations are alike in their mock show of concern for
human suffering, and in their cynical remedy for it: Big Brother
must prevent the ``unworthy'' or ``unwanted'' people from
living.
Let us now further inquire into the family background of our
President, so as to help illustrate how the second quoted author,
{George Bush}s1 came to share the outlook of the first, {Adolf
Hitler}.s2
We shall examine here the alliance of the Bush family with
three other families: {Farish, Draper} and {Gray.}
The private associations among these families have led to the
President's relationship to his closest, most confidential
advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler
project and its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will
help us to explain George Bush's obsession with the supposed
overpopulation of the world's non-Anglo-Saxons, and the dangerous
means he has adopted to deal with this ``problem.''
Bush and Farish
When George Bush was elected vice president in 1980, Texas
mystery man William Stamps Farish III took over management of all
of George Bush's personal wealth in a ``blind trust.'' Known as
one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business
affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his
immense wealth is known, not its employment.s3
Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and
confidante. He is also the unique private host to Britain's
Queen Elizabeth: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with
the Queen's mares. That is her public rationale when she comes
to America and stays in Farish's house. It is a vital link in
the mind of our Anglophile President.
President Bush can count on Farish not to betray the violent
secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own
family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a
nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.
On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman
Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the
President's money manager) had pleaded ``no contest'' to charges
of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal
manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil Co. of New
Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had
opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to
produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler
government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves,
who were worked to near death and then murdered.
Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of New Jersey (later known
as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had
agreed to stop hiding from the United States patents for
artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis.s4
A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later U.S.
President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify
at hearings on corporations' collaboration with the Nazis. The
Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was
continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back
in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he
know there was a war on?
The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter,
written to Standard president Farish by his vice president,
shortly after the beginning of World War II (September 1, 1939)
in Europe. The letter concerned a renewal of their earlier
agreements with the Nazis:
Report on European Trip Oct. 12, 1939 Mr. W.S. Farish 30
Rockefeller Plaza
Dear Mr. Farish:
... I stayed in France until Sept. 17th.... In England I met
by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from
Holland, and ... a general agreement was reached on the necessary
changes in our relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the
state of war.... [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially
British.... I also had several meetings with ... the [British]
Air Ministry....
I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to
Holland.... After discussions with the [American] Ambassador
[Joseph Kennedy] the situation was cleared completely.... The
gentlemen in the Air Ministry ... very kindly offered to assist
me [later] in reentering England....
Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my
appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal
Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the
representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some
2,000 foreign patents and {we did our best to work out complete
plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of
the war, whether or not the U.S. came in....} [emphasis added]
Very truly yours, F[rank] A. Howards5
Here are some cold realities behind the tragedy of World War
II, which help explain the Bush-Farish family alliance--and their
peculiar closeness to the Queen of England:
sb|Shell Oil is principally owned by the British Royal
family. Shell's chairman, Sir Henri Deterding, helped sponsor
Hitler's rise to power,s6 by arrangement with the Royal Family's
Bank of England Governor, Montagu Norman. Their ally, Standard
Oil, would take part in the Hitler project right up to the
bloody, gruesome end.
sb|When grandfather Farish signed the Justice Department's
consent decree in March 1942, the government had already started
picking its way through the tangled web of world-monopoly oil and
chemical agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many
patents and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been
seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian.
Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush's Union Banking
Corporation for another seven months.
The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year, the
Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline
couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a
director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale
classmate Neil Mallon as chairman.s7 George Bush would later name
one of his sons after the Dresser executive.
William S. Farish was the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co.
of Texas, which Farish merged into the Standard Oil Company of
New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard empire of
pipelines and refineries in Texas.s8
The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into
the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger
of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former
Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protege Hjalmar Schacht, who
was to become Hitler's economics minister, paid frantic visits to
New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime
for Germany.
The Congress on Eugenics
The most important American political event in those
preparations for Hitler was the infamous Third International
Congress on Eugenics, held at New York's American Museum of
Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the
International Federation of Eugenics Societies.s9 This meeting
took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other
allegedly ``inferior'' and ``socially inadequate'' groups in
reproducing, expanding their numbers, and ``amalgamating'' with
others. It was recommended that these ``dangers'' to the
``better'' ethnic groups and to the ``well-born,'' could be dealt
with by sterilization or ``cutting off the bad stock'' of the
``unfit.''
Italy's fascist government sent an official representative.
Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of ``entertainment'' for
the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her
state supplied the speaker on ``racial purity,'' W.A. Plecker,
Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly
held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to
stop race-mixing and interracial sex in Virginia.
The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's
mother; she had paid for the founding of the race-science
movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record
Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London.
She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races
by old George Herbert Walker--they shared with the Bushes and the
Farishes a fascination with ``breeding thoroughbreds'' among
horses and humans.s1s0
Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush
Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to
New York for this meeting.s1s1 The most famous among those
transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where
the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire
floor with his eugenics ``research.'' Dr. Rudin had addressed the
International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on
``Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene,'' while others (Germans and
Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit.
Rudin had led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene
Congress in Washington, D.C.
At the Harrimans' 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin
was unanimously elected President of the International Federation
of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder
of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder,
Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz.
As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New
York, Rudin was now official leader of the world eugenics
movement. Components of his movement included groups with
overlapping leadership, dedicated to:
sb|sterilization of mental patients (``mental hygiene
societies'');
sb|execution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill
(``euthanasia societies''); and
sb|eugenical race-purification by prevention of births to
parents from inferior blood stocks (``birth control
societies'').
Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these
British-American-European groups called openly for the
elimination of the ``unfit'' by means including force and
violence.s1s2
Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler's interior minister
Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich.
Frick called the Germans a ``degenerate'' race, denouncing
one-fifth of Germany's parents for producing ``feeble-minded''
and ``defective'' children. The following month, on a commission
by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote the ``Law for the Prevention of
Hereditary Diseases in Posterity,'' the sterilization law modeled
on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states.
Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of
German mental patients, the blind, the deaf, and alcoholics. A
quarter million people in these categories were sterilized.
Rudin, Ploetz, and their colleagues trained a whole generation of
physicians and psychiatrists--as sterilizers and as killers.
When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors, and
psychiatrists staffed the new ``T4'' agency, which planned and
supervised the mass killings: first at ``euthanasia centers,''
where the same categories which had first been subject to
sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent in lots
of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such as
Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews and other race victims, at
straight extermination camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and
Belsen.s1s3
In 1933, as what Hitler called his ``New Order'' appeared,
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. appointed William S. Farish the
chairman of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (in 1937 he was made
president and chief executive). Farish moved his offices to
Rockefeller Center, New York, where he spent a good deal of time
with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben; his company paid a
publicity man, Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi
propaganda and get it into the U.S. press.
Now that he was outside of Texas, Farish found himself in the
shipping business--like the Bush family. He hired Nazi German
crews for Standard Oil tankers. And he hired {Emil Helfferich,}
chairman of the Walker/Bush/Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line, as
chairman also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany.
Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a
top Farish-Standard executive in Germany.s1s4
This interlock between their Nazi German operations put Farish
together with Prescott Bush in a small, select group of men
operating from abroad through Hitler's ``revolution,'' and
calculating that they would never be punished.
In 1939, Farish's daughter Martha married Averell Harriman's
nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry, and Farish in-laws became Prescott
Bush's partners at 59 Broadway.s1s5
Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann were authorized to
write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a
special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the
German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to
U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton,
Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the
SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben
Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied
interrogators after the war that these were not his personal
contributions--they were corporate Standard Oil funds.s1s6
After pleading ``no contest'' to charges of criminal
conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined
$5,000. (Similar fines were levied against Standard Oil--$5,000
each for the parent company and for several subsidiaries.) This
of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that
Farish had acquired in conjunction with Hitler's New Order, as a
large stockholder, chairman, and president of Standard Oil. All
the government sought was the use of patents which his company
had given to the Nazis--the Auschwitz patents--but had withheld
from the U.S. military and industry.
But a war was on, and if young men were to be asked to die
fighting Hitler something more was needed. Farish was hauled
before the Senate committee investigating the national defense
program. The committee chairman, Senator Harry Truman, told
newsmen before Farish testified: ``I think this approaches
treason.''s1s7
Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his
``indignation'' at the senators, and claimed he was not
``disloyal.''
After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing
out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and
Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the U.S. Navy to prevent the
Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the
Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and
tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force.
Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak
of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that
Farish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government
into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy
I.G.'s share in certain patents because ``in the event of war
between ourselves and Germany ... it would certainly be very
undesireable to have this 20 percent Standard-I.G. pass to an
alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an
unfriendly interest.''s1s8
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson, and John
D. Rockefeller III), the controlling owner of Standard Oil, told
the Roosevelt administration that he knew nothing of the
day-to-day affairs of his company, that all these matters were
handled by Farish and other executives.s1s9
In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was
now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the
intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While
Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his
Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He
collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942.
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William
Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was
humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling
the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six
months later.s2s0
With this double death, the fortune comprising much of
Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be
settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William
(``Will'') Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the
most secretive multimillionaire in Texas, with investments of
``that money'' in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of
exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence and financial
worlds--particularly in Britain.
The Bush-Farish axis started George Bush's career. After his
1948 graduation from Yale (and the Skull and Bones secret
society), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate jet and
was employed by his father's Dresser Industries. In a couple of
years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and
Farish's British banker friends, to set him up in the oil
property speculation business. Soon thereafter, George Bush
founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put oil drilling rigs into
certain locations of great strategic interest to the
Anglo-American intelligence community.
Twenty-five-year-old Will Farish was personal aide to Zapata
chairman George Bush in Bush's unsuccessful 1964 campaign for
Senate. Farish used ``that Auschwitz money'' to back George Bush
financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to
Congress in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board.s2s1
When George Bush became U.S. vice president in 1980, the
Farish and Bush family fortunes were again completely, secretly
commingled. As we shall see, the old projects were now being
revived on a breathtaking scale.
Bush and Draper
Twenty years before he was U.S. President, George Bush
brought two ``race-science'' professors in front of the
Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. As
chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited
Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the
committee how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans
were ``down-breeding'' the American population.
Afterwards, Bush personally summed up for the Congress the
testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the Task
Force.s2s2 George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by
black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a
better frame of mind--celebrating mankind's progress from the
first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush's obsessive thinking on
this subject was guided by his family's friend, Gen. William H.
Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis
Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood
Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion
about the so-called ``population bomb'' in the non-white areas of
the world.
If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues {how his
family had come to know General Draper,} they would perhaps have
felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention
to Bush's presentation. Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush
population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy.
William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when
he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers.
Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the
Thyssen account.
We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking
Corporation in George Herbert Walker's bank at 39 Broadway,
Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun
working with Fritz Thyssen some time after Averell Harriman first
met with Thyssen--at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf
Hitler's political career.
In January 1926, Dillon Read created the {German Credit and
Investment Corporation} in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin,
Germany, as Thyssen's short-term banker. That same year, Dillon
Read created the {Vereinigte Stahlwerke} (German Steel Trust),
incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of
New York and London finance.s2s3
William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president, and
assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His
business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for
Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper's clients sponsored
Hitler's terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the
Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United
States. The Nazis were Draper's direct partners in Berlin and New
Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president;
Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the
German Steel Trust, moved to the United States in 1926 and served
as Draper's co-director in Newark.
Draper's role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom
Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German
Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI) was a ``front'' for Dillon
Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International
Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of
both firms.s2s4
Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas Dillon were directors
of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence Dillon was hauled
before the Senate Banking Committee's famous ``Pecora'' hearings
in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative
pyramid schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of
millions of dollars. These investment policies had rotted the
U.S. economy to the core, and led to the Great Depression of the
1930s.
But William H. Draper, Jr.'s GCI ``front'' was not
{apparently} affiliated with the USIS ``front'' or with Dillon,
and the GCI escaped the congressmen's limited scrutiny. This
oversight was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50
million people who subsequently died in World War II.
Dillon Read hired public relations man Ivy Lee to prepare
their executives for their testimony and to confuse and further
baffle the congressmen.s2s5 Lee apparently took enough time out
from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi
I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that
the congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in
Germany--and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with
Hitler's U.S. moneymen.
Thus, in 1932, Willam H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the
International Eugenics Congress as a ``Supporting Member.''s2s6
Was he using his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did
the funds come from Dillon Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be
written off income tax as ``expenses for German project: race
purification''? Draper helped select Ernst Rudin as chief of the
world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he
called Adolf Hitler's ``holy, national and international racial
hygienic mission.''s2s7
W.S. Farish was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and
destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush's Nazi banking
office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott's close
friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H.
Draper, Jr., {neither died nor moved out of German affairs.}
Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and
Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated
until November 1943.s2s8 But a war was on. Draper, a colonel
from previous military service, went off to the Pacific theater
and became a general.
General Draper apparently had a hobby: magic--illusions,
sleight of hand, etc.--and he was a member of the Society of
American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to his subsequent
career.
The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July 1945, General
Draper was called to Europe by the American military government
authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the
Economics Division of the U.S. Control Commission. He was
assigned to take apart the Nazi corporate cartels. There is an
astonishing but perfectly logical rationale to this--Draper knew
a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had spent about 15
years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi
enterprises, was now authorized to decide {who was exposed, who
lost and who kept his business, and in practical effect, who was
prosecuted for war crimes.}s2s9
(Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation
government. Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military
Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under
instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for
a year in Italy, serving as an adviser to the fascist government
of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the
Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the
1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi
chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.)s3s0
William H. Draper, Jr., as a ``conservative,'' was paired with
the ``liberal'' U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a
vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly
destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be
reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945
and 1946, Draper ``protected'' Germany from the Morgenthau Plan
... but at a price.
Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world
accept the {collective guilt of the German people} as {the
}explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order, and the Nazi war
crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General
Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still
convenient decades later, allowing Prescott's son, President
Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism. Germans are
too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order.
After several years of government service (often working
directly for Averell Harriman in the North Atlantic Alliance),
Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman of a committee which was to
advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper course for U.S.
military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott Bush was
a U.S. senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf
partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an
important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well.
Prescott's old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was
Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the
Schroder bank, was head of the CIA.
This friendly environment emboldened our General Draper to
pull off a stunt with his military aid advisery committee. He
changed the subject under study. The following year, the Draper
committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the
supposed threat of the ``population explosion'' by formulating
plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the
world's non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as
dangerous to the national security of the United States!s3s1
President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the
next decade, General Draper founded the ``Population Crisis
Committee'' and the ``Draper Fund,'' joining with the Rockefeller
and DuPont families to promote eugenics as ``population
control.'' The administration of President Lyndon Johnson,
advised by Draper on the subject, began financing birth control
in the tropical countries through the Agency for International
Development.
General William Draper was George Bush's guru on the
population question.s3s2 But there was also Draper's money--from
that uniquely horrible source--and Draper's connections on Wall
Street and abroad. Draper's son and heir, William H. Draper III,
was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the
Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With
George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the
depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the
world.
Draper was vice president of Dillon Read until 1953. During
the 1950s and 1960s, the chief executive there was Frederic
Brandi, the German who was Draper's co-director for the Nazi
investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi Steel
Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi's partner from 1954, and
replaced him as the firm's chief executive in 1971. Nicholas
Brady, who knows where all the bodies are buried, was chairman of
his friend George Bush's 1980 election campaign in New Jersey,
and has been United States Treasury Secretary throughout Bush's
presidency.s3s3
Bush and Grey
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) says
that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration's ``first
choice'' method of population reduction in the Third World.s3s4
The United Nations Population Fund claims that 37 percent of
contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have
already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H.
Draper III's U.N. agency asserts that 254 million couples will be
surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if
present trends continue, 80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico
and Panama will be surgically sterilized.s3s5
The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations.
Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was
drawn up in July 1991, at a USAID strategy session. India and
Brazil are second and third priorities, respectively.
On contract with the Bush administration, U.S. personnel are
working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions of
Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program
is to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed
their families.
George Bush has a rather deep-seated personal feeling about
this project, in particular as it pits him against Pope John Paul
II in Catholic countries such as Mexico. (See Chapter 4 below, on
the origin of a Bush-family grudge in this regard.)
The spending for birth control in the non-white countries is
one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush
administration budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID
said its Population Account would receive $300 million, a 20
percent increase over the previous year. Within this project, a
significant sum is spent on political and psychological
manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of
their religions and governments.s3s6
These activities might be expected to cause serious objections
from the victimized nationalities, or from U.S. taxpayers,
especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity.
Quite aside from moral considerations, {legal} questions would
naturally arise, which could be summed up: {How does George Bush
think he can get away with this?}
In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr.
(Clayland) Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the
1980 election. As chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden
Gray can walk the President through the dangers and complexities
of waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations.
Gray knows how these things are done.
When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father
organized the pilot project for the present worldwide
sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North
Carolina.
It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a
way to begin again in America.
Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the
conscience of the world. The Sterilization League of America,
which had changed its name during the war to ``Birthright,
Inc.,'' wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome
public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate
``inferior'' and ``defective'' people. The League tried to
surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative
publicity: a little boy had recently been sterilized there and
had died from the operation.
They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could
play the perfect host.s3s7 Through British imperial contacts,
Boyden Gray's grandfather Bowman Gray had become principal owner
of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray,
had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in
Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The
medical school was already a eugenics center.
As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice
Shelton Gray, who had raised him from childhood, was living in
his household. Aunt Alice had founded the ``Human Betterment
League,'' the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical
sterilization movement.
Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47
experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon,
whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of ``medical
genetics'' at Bowman Gray medical school.
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap
fortune, was the sterilizers' national field operations chief.
The experiment worked as follows. {All children enrolled in
the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special
``intelligence test.'' Those children who scored below a certain
arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.}
We quote now from the official story of the project: ``In
Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the
[Sterilization League's] field committee had participated in
testing projects to identify school age children who should be
considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was
conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by
a `Mr. Hanes,' a friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the
field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project
was also financed by Hanes. [``Hanes'' was underwear mogul James
Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and
treasurer of Alice Gray's group]....
``The medical school had a long history of interest in
eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families
carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon ...
made a statement to the press on the use of sterilization to
prevent the spread of inheritable diseases....
``The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school
children was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange
County the results indicated that three percent of the school age
children were either insane or feebleminded.... [Then] the field
committee hired a social worker to review each case ... and to
present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the
State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had the
authority to order sterilization....''
Race science experimenter Dr. Claude Nash Herndon provided
more details in an interview in 1990:s3s8
``Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She
and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the
commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina.... What did
I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The
social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also
director of outpatient services at North Carolina Baptist
Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children
there.... I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the
Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored
really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of
the barrel, like below 70.
``Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a
relatively minor operation.... It was usually not until the
child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an
incision and tie the tube.... We more often performed the
operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut
open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor.''
Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that ``we had a very good
relationship with the press'' for the project. This is not
surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the {Winston-Salem Journal,}
the {Twin City Sentinel,} and radio station WSJS.
In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the
Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series
of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the
non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller
set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars
from the Rockefeller family.
At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious
from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old
headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its
headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the
two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the
Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president
of the Population Council. The Gray family's child-sterilizer,
Dr. C. Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics
Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller
patronage.
Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was
founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics
Society.
The undead enemy from World War II, renamed ``Population
Control,'' had now been revived.
George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972,
when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the United States
Agency for International Development first made an official
contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The league
had changed its name twice again, and was now called the
``Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception.'' The U.S.
government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize
non-whites in foreign countries.
The Gray family experiment had succeeded.
In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed
its latest contract with the old Sterilization League (a.k.a.
``Association for Voluntary Sterilization''), committing the
U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years.
Having gotten away with sterilizing several hundred North
Carolina school children, ``not usually less than eight to ten
years old,'' the identical group is now authorized by President
Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America.
The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized only 2
million people, with 87 percent of the bill paid by U.S.
taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray's favorite soap
manufacturer, formed his own ``Pathfinder Fund'' as a split-off
from the Sterlization League. Gamble's Pathfinder Fund, with
additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of
local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down
psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams.
Notes
1. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United
States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973),
``Forward'' by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.
2.
Adolf Hitler, {Mein Kampf} (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1971), p. 404.
3. ``The Ten Richest People in Houston,'' in {Houston Post
Magazine,} March 11, 1984. ``$150 milion to $250 million from ...
inheritance, plus subsequent investments ... chief heir to a
family fortune in oil stock.... As to his financial interests,
he is ... coy. He once described one of his businesses as a
company that `invests in and oversees a lot of smaller companies
... in a lot of foreign countries.'|''
4. The announcements were made in testimony before a Special
Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense
Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March 5, 24, 26,
27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche,
law section, Library of Congress. See also {New York Times,}
March 26 and March 27, 1942, and {Washington Evening Star,} March
26 and March 27, 1942.
5. {Ibid.,} Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the
hearing record. See also Charles Higham, {Trading With The
Enemy} (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 36.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op.
cit.,} chapter 2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most
notorious pro-Nazis of the early war period.
7. See sections on Prescott Bush in Darwin Payne, {Initiative in
Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc.} (New York: Distributed by Simon
and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).
8. William Stamps Farish obituary, {New York Times,} Nov. 30,
1942.
9. {A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the
Third International Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum
of Natural History New York, August 21-23, 1932.} (Baltimore:
Williams & Wilkins Company, September, 1934).
The term ``eugenics'' is taken from the Greek to signify
``good birth'' or ``well-born,'' as in aristocrat. Its basic
assumption is that those who are not ``well-born'' should not
exist.
10.
See among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39
Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, February 21, 1925, in
W.A. Harriman papers.
11.
Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles B. Davenport, President, The
International Congress of Eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.,
N.Y.:
January 21, 1932
Dear Dr. Davenport:
I will be only too glad to put you in touch with the
Hamburg-American Line they may be able to co-operate in making
suggestions which will keep the expenses to a minimum. I have
referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika
executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate
with you.
Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman, 59 Wall Street, New York,
N.Y.
January 23, 1932
Dear Mr. Harriman:
Thank you very much for your kind letter of January 21st and
the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter from
Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for
correspondence, which I hope will enable more of our German
colleagues to come to America on the occasion of the congresses
of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.
Congressional hearings in 1934 established that
Hamburg-Amerika routinely provided free transatlantic passage for
those carrying out Nazi propaganda chores. See {Investigation of
Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other
Propaganda Activities,} {op. cit.,} chapter 2.
12.
Alexis Carrel, {Man the Unknown} (New York: Halcyon House,
published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp.
318-19.
The battle cry of the New Order was sounded in 1935 with the
publication of {Man the Unknown,} by Dr. Alexis Carrel of the
Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel Prize-winner said
``enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane
asylums.... Why do we preserve these useless and harmful
beings? This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society
not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical
manner? ... The community must be protected against troublesome
and dangerous elements.... Perhaps prisons should be
abolished.... The conditioning of the petty criminal with the
whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay
in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals,
including those] who have ... misled the public on important
matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small
euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar
treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty
of criminal acts.''
Carrel claimed to have transplanted the head of a dog to
another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.
13.
Bernhard Schreiber, {The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to
the World,} France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language
edition supplied by H. & P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London
W2. A copy of this book is now held by Union College Library,
Syracuse, N.Y.
14.
Higham, {op. cit.,} p. 35.
15.
Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, {New York Times,} p. 20.
See also {Directory of Directors} for New York City, 1930s and
1940s.
16.
Higham, {op. cit.,} pp. 20, 22 and other references to
Schroeder and Lindemann.
Anthony Sutton, {Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler} (Seal
Beach: '76 Press, 1976). Sutton is also a good source on the
Harrimans.
17.
{Washington Evening Star,} March 27, 1942, p. 1.
18. Higham, {op. cit.} p. 50.
19.
{Ibid.,} p. 48.
20.
{Washington Post,} April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, {op. cit.,}
pp. 52-53.
21.
Zapata annual reports, 1950s-1960s, Library of Congress
microforms.
22.
See {Congressional Record} for Bush speech in the House of
Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the
testimony given before his Task Force on August 5, 1969.
23. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 92-111. See also Boyle, {op. cit.,}
chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led Dawes Committee of Germany's
foreign creditors.
Like Harriman, Dillon used the Schroeder and Warburg banks to
strike his German bargains. All Dillon Read & Co. affairs in
Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Thomas
Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor Montagu
Norman.
24. See {Poor's Register of Directors and Executives,} (New York:
Poor's Publishing Company, late 1920s, '30s and '40s). See also
{Standard Corporation Records} (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935
edition pp. 2571-25, and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for
description and history of the German Credit and Investment
Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See also Sobel, {op. cit.,} p.
213-214.
25. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 180, 186. Ivy Lee had been hired to
improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly difficult
after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women
in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out
dimes to poor people lined up at his porch.
26.
Third International Eugenics Congress papers {op. cit.,}
footnote 7, p. 512, ``Supporting Members.''
27.
Schreiber, {op. cit.,} p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress
papers, p. 526, lists the officers of the International
Federation as of publication date in September, 1934. Rudin is
listed as president--a year after he has written the
sterilization law for Hitler.
28.
{Directory of Directors for New York City,} 1942. Interview with
Nancy Bowles, librarian of Dillon Read & Co.
29.
Higham, {op. cit.,} p. 129, 212-15, 219-23.
30.
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, {The Wise Men: Six Friends and
the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett,
McCloy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 122, 305.
31.
Piotrow, {op. cit.,} pp. 36-42.
32.
{Ibid.,} p. viii. ``As chairman of the special Republican Task
Force on Population and Earth Resources, I was impressed by the
arguments of William H. Draper, Jr.... General Draper continues
to lead through his tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund.''
33.
Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 298, 354.
34.
Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official with
the USAID's Population Office.
35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, ``The State of World Population,'' 1991, New
York, United Nations Population Fund.
36.
See {User's Guide to the Office of Population,} 1991, Office of
Population, Bureau for Science and Technology, United States
Agency for International Development. Available from S&T/POP,
Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington D.C. 20523-1819.
37. ``History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization
[formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64,'' thesis
submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the University
of Minnesota by William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978,
available on microfilm, Library of Congress. This is the official
history, written with full cooperation of the Sterilization
League.
38.
Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June 20, 1990.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com
Article 15412 of alt.activism:
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Part 4: George Bush Unauthorized Biography
Message-ID: <uNcTeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
Date: 19 Jan 92 20:12:41 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Lines: 1271
The following is part of a not yet published book being serialized in
New Federalist. For further information, or to subscribe, please
contact me by e-mail.
CHAPTER 4: ``THE CENTER OF POWER IS IN WASHINGTON'' Brown
Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York Cable Address
``Shipley-New York'' Business Established 1818
Private Bankers
September 5, 1944
The Honorable W. A. Harriman American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.
American Embassy, Moscow, Russia
Dear Averell:
Thinking that possibly Bullitt's article in the recent issue
of ``LIFE'' may not have come to your attention, I have clipped
it and am sending it to you, feeling that it will interest you.
At present writing all is well here.
With warm regards, I am, Sincerely yours,
Pres
`At present writing all is well here.'' Thus the ambassador to
Russia was reassured by the managing partner of his firm,
Prescott Bush. Only 22 and a half months before, the U.S.
government had seized and shut down the Union Banking
Corporation, which had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany by
Bush and the Harrimans. But that was behind them now, and they
were safe. There would be no publicity on the Harriman-Bush
sponsorship of Hitlerism.
Prescott's son George, the future U.S. President, was also
safe. Three days before this note to Moscow was written, George
Bush had parachuted from a Navy bomber airplane over the Pacific
Ocean, killing his two crew members when the unpiloted plane
crashed.
Five months later, in February 1945, Prescott's boss Averell
Harriman escorted President Franklin Roosevelt to the fateful
summit meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. In
April Roosevelt died. The agreement reached at Yalta, calling
for free elections in Poland once the war ended, was never
enforced.
Over the next eight years (1945 through 1952), Prescott Bush
was Harriman's anchor in the New York financial world. The
increasingly powerful Mr. Harriman and his allies gave Eastern
Europe over to Soviet dictatorship. A Cold War was then
undertaken, to ``counterbalance'' the Soviets.
This British-inspired strategy paid several nightmarish
dividends. Eastern Europe was to remain enslaved. Germany was
``permanently'' divided. Anglo-American power was jointly
exercised over the non-Soviet ``Free World.'' The confidential
functions of the British and American governments were merged.
The Harriman clique took possession of the U.S. national security
apparatus, and in doing so, they opened the gate and let the Bush
family in.
- * * * -
Following his services to Germany's Nazi Party, Averell
Harriman spent several years mediating between the British,
American, and Soviet governments in the war to stop the Nazis. He
was ambassador to Moscow from 1943 to 1946.
President Harry Truman, whom Harriman and his friends held in
amused contempt, appointed Harriman U.S. ambassador to Britain
in 1946.
Harriman was at lunch with former British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill one day in 1946, when Truman telephoned.
Harriman asked Churchill if he should accept Truman's offer to
come back to the U.S. as Secretary of Commerce. According to
Harriman's account, Churchill told him: ``Absolutely. The center
of power is in Washington.''s1
Jupiter Island
The reorganization of the American government after World War
II--the creation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency along
British lines, for example--had devastating consequences. We are
concerned here with only certain aspects of that overall
transformation, those matters of policy and family which gave
shape to the life and mind of George Bush, and gave him access to
power.
It was in these postwar years that George Bush attended Yale
University, and was inducted into the Skull and Bones society.
The Bush family's home at that time was in Greenwich,
Connecticut. But it was just then that George's parents, Prescott
and Dorothy Walker Bush, were wintering in a peculiar spot in
Florida, a place that is excluded from mention in literature
originating from Bush circles.
Certain national news accounts early in 1991 featured the
observations on President Bush's childhood by his elderly mother
Dorothy. She was said to be a resident of Hobe Sound, Florida.
More precisely, the President's mother lived in a hyper-security
arrangement created a half-century earlier by Averell Harriman,
adjacent to Hobe Sound. Its correct name is Jupiter Island.
During his political career, George Bush has claimed many
different ``home'' states, including Texas, Maine, Massachusetts,
and Connecticut. It has not been expedient for him to claim
Florida, though that state has a vital link to his role in the
world, as we shall see. And George Bush's home base in Florida,
throughout his adult life, has been Jupiter Island.
The unique, bizarre setup on Jupiter Island began in 1931,
following the merger of W.A. Harriman and Co. with the
British-American firm Brown Brothers.
The reader will recall Mr. Samuel Pryor, the ``Merchant of
Death.'' A partner with the Harrimans, Prescott Bush, George
Walker, and Nazi boss Fritz Thyssen in banking and shipping
enterprises, Sam Pryor remained executive committee chairman of
Remington Arms. In this period, the Nazi private armies (SA and
SS) were supplied with American arms--most likely by Pryor and
his company--as they moved to overthrow the German republic.
Such gun-running as an instrument of national policy would later
become notorious in the ``Iran-Contra'' affair.
Sam Pryor's daughter Permelia married Yale graduate Joseph V.
Reed on the last day of 1927. Reed immediately went to work for
Prescott Bush and George Walker, as an apprentice at W.A.
Harriman and Co.
During World War II, Joseph V. Reed had served in the
``special services'' section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A
specialist in security, codes and espionage, Reed later wrote a
book entitled {Fun with Cryptograms}.s2
Sam Pryor had had property around Hobe Sound, Florida, for
some time. In 1931, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed bought the
entirety of Jupiter Island.
This is a typically beautiful Atlantic coast ``barrier
island,'' a half-mile wide and nine miles long. The middle of
Jupiter Island lies just off Hobe Sound. The south bridge
connects the island with the town of Jupiter, to the north of
Palm Beach. It is about 90 minutes by auto from Miami--today, a
few minutes by helicopter.
Early in 1991, a newspaper reporter asked a friend of the Bush
family about security arrangements on Jupiter Island. He
responded, ``If you called up the White House, would they tell
you how many security people they had? It's not that Jupiter
Island is the White House, although he [George Bush] does come
down frequently.''
But for several decades before Bush was President, Jupiter
Island had an ordinance requiring the registration and
fingerprinting of all housekeepers, gardeners, and other
non-residents working on the island. The Jupiter Island police
department says that there are sensors in the two main roads that
can track every automobile on the island. If a car stops in the
street, the police will be there within one or two minutes.
Surveillance is a duty of all employees of the Town of Jupiter
Island. News reporters are to be prevented from visiting the
island.s3
To create this astonishing private club, Joseph and Permelia
Pryor Reed sold land only to those who would fit in. Permelia
Reed was still the grande dame of the island when George Bush was
inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact that
the Reeds know where {all} the bodies are buried, President Bush
appointed Permelia's son, Joseph V. Reed, Jr., chief of protocol
for the U.S. State Dept., in charge of private arrangements with
foreign dignitaries.
Averell Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his
1940s takeover of the U.S. national security apparatus. It was
in that connection that the island became possibly the most
secretive private place in America.
Let us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48,
to see some of the uses various of the residents had for the
Harriman clique.
Residence on Jupiter Island
sb|Jupiter Islander {Robert A. Lovett,}s4, Prescott Bush's
partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, had been Assistant Secretary
of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading American
advocate of the policy of terror-bombing of civilians. He
organized the Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the
American and British governments by the staff of the Prudential
Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock Psychiatric
Clinic.
In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated with
Prudential Insurance, one of Lovett's intelligence channels to
the British secret services. Prescott was listed by Prudential
as a director of the company for about two years in the early
1950s.
Their Strategic Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real
military advantage accruing from such outrages as the
fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. But the Harrimanites
nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air.
They glorified this as ``psychological warfare,'' a part of the
utopian military doctrine opposed to the views of military
traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to
terror-bomb Vietnam. President George Bush revived the doctrine
with the bombing of civilian areas in Panama, and the destruction
of Baghdad.
On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created
the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the
government on the post-World War II organization of U.S.
intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was
unknown to the public until an official CIA history was released
from secrecy in 1989. But the CIA's author (who was President
Bush's prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real
details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: ``The
record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately,
was not in the archives of the agency when this account was
written.''s5
The CIA's self-history does inform us of the advice that
Lovett provided to the Truman cabinet, as the official War
Department intelligence proposal.
Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central
Intelligence Agency. The new agency would ``consult'' with the
armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the
field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency
should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should
be granted by Congress without public hearings.
Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy
on November 14, 1945. He spoke highly of the FBI's work because
it had ``the best personality file in the world.'' Lovett said
the FBI was expert at producing false documents, an art ``which
we developed so successfully during the war and at which we
became outstandingly adept.'' Lovett pressed for a virtual
resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in a
new CIA.
U.S. military traditionalists centered around Gen. Douglas
MacArthur opposed Lovett's proposal. The continuation of the OSS
had been attacked at the end of the war on the grounds that the
OSS was entirely under British control, and that it would
constitute an American Gestapo.s6 But the CIA was established in
1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter
Island.
sb|{Charles Payson} and his wife, {Joan Whitney Payson,} were
extended family members of Harriman's and business associates of
the Bush family.
Joan's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a relative of
the Harrimans. Gertrude's son, Cornelius Vanderbilt (``Sonny'')
Whitney, long-time chairman of Pan American Airways (Prescott was
a Pan Am director), became assistant secretary of the U.S. Air
Force in 1947. Sonny's wife Marie had divorced him and married
Averell Harriman in 1930. Joan and Sonny's uncle, Air Marshal Sir
Thomas Elmhirst, was director of intelligence for the British Air
Force from 1945 to 1947.
Joan's brother, John Hay (``Jock'') Whitney, was to be
ambassador to Great Britain from 1955 to 1961 ... when it would
be vital for Prescott and George Bush to have such a friend.
Joan's father, grandfather, and uncle were members of the Skull
and Bones secret society.
Charles Payson organized a uranium refinery in 1948. Later, he
was chairman of Vitro Corporation, makers of parts for
submarine-launched ballistic missiles, equipment for frequency
surveillance and torpedo guidance, and other subsurface
weaponry.
Naval warfare has long been a preoccupation of the British
Empire. British penetration of the U.S. Naval Intelligence
service has been particularly heavy since the tenure of Joan's
Anglophile grandfather, William C. Whitney, as secretary of the
Navy for President Grover Cleveland. This traditional covert
British orientation in the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence and the
Navy's included service, the Marine Corps, forms a backdrop to
the career of George Bush--and to the whole neighborhood on
Jupiter Island. Naval Intelligence maintained direct relations
with gangster boss Meyer Lansky for Anglo-American political
operations in Cuba during World War II, well before the
establishment of the CIA. Lansky officially moved to Florida in
1953.s7
sb|{George Herbert Walker, Jr.} (Skull and Bones, 1927), was
extremely close to his nephew George Bush, helping to sponsor his
entry into the oil business in the 1950s. ``Uncle Herbie'' was
also a partner of Joan Whitney Payson when they co-founded the
New York Mets baseball team in 1960. His son, G.H. Walker III,
was a Yale classmate of {Nicholas Brady} and Moreau D. Brown
(Thatcher Brown's grandson), forming what was called the ``Yale
Mafia'' on Wall Street.
sb|{Walter S. Carpenter, Jr.} had been chairman of the finance
committee of the Du Pont Corporation (1930-40). In 1933,
Carpenter oversaw Du Pont's purchase of Remington Arms from Sam
Pryor and the Rockefellers, and led Du Pont into partnership with
the Nazi I.G. Farben company for the manufacture of explosives.
Carpenter became Du Pont's president in 1940. His cartel with the
Nazis was broken up by the U.S. government. Nevertheless,
Carpenter remained Du Pont's president, as the company's
technicians participated massively in the Manhattan Project to
produce the first atomic bomb. He was chairman of Du Pont from
1948 to 1962, retaining high-level access to U.S. strategic
activities.
Walter Carpenter and Prescott Bush were fellow activists in
the Mental Hygiene Society. Originating at Yale University in
1908, the movement had been organized into the World Federation
of Mental Health by Montague Norman, himself a frequent mental
patient, former Brown Brothers partner and Bank of England
Governor. Norman had appointed as the federation's chairman,
Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, director of the Tavistock Clinic,
chief psychiatrist and psychological warfare expert for the
British intelligence services. Prescott was a director of the
society in Connecticut; Carpenter was a director in Delaware.
sb|{Paul Mellon} was the leading heir to the Mellon fortune,
and a long-time neighbor of Averell Harriman's in Middleburg,
Virginia, as well as Jupiter Island, Florida. Paul's father,
Andrew Mellon, U.S. treasury secretary 1921-32, had approved the
transactions of Harriman, Pryor, and Bush with the Warburgs and
the Nazis. Paul Mellon's son-in-law, {David K.E. Bruce,} worked
in Prescott Bush's W.A. Harriman & Co. during the late 1920s;
was head of the London branch of U.S. intelligence during World
War II; and was Averell Harriman's Assistant Secretary of
Commerce in 1947-48. Mellon family money and participation would
be instrumental in many domestic U.S. projects of the new Central
Intelligence Agency.
sb|{Carll Tucker} manufactured electronic guidance equipment
for the Navy. With the Mellons, Tucker was an owner of South
American oil properties. Mrs. Tucker was the great-aunt of
{Nicholas Brady,} later George Bush's Iran-Contra partner and
U.S. treasury secretary. Their son Carll Tucker, Jr. (Skull and
Bones, 1947), was among the 15 Bonesmen who selected George Bush
for induction in the class of 1948.
sb|{C. Douglas Dillon} was the boss of William H. Draper,
Jr. in the Draper-Prescott Bush-Fritz Thyssen Nazi banking
scheme of the 1930s and 40s. His father, Clarence Dillon, created
the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (Thyssen's German Steel Trust) in 1926.
C. Douglas Dillon made {Nicholas Brady} the chairman of the
Dillon Read firm in 1971 and himself continued as chairman of the
Executive Committee. C. Douglas Dillon would be a vital ally of
his neighbor Prescott Bush during the Eisenhower administration.
sb|{Publisher Nelson Doubleday} headed his family's publishing
firm, founded under the auspices of J.P. Morgan and other British
Empire representatives. When George Bush's ``Uncle Herbie''
died, Doubleday took over as majority owner and chief executive
of the New York Mets baseball team.
Some other specialized corporate owners had their place in
Harriman's strange club.
sb|{George W. Merck,} chairman of Merck & Co., drug and
chemical manufacturers, was director of the War Research Service:
Merck was the official chief of all U.S. research into biological
warfare from 1942 until at least the end of World War II. After
1944, Merck's organization was placed under the U.S. Chemical
Warfare Service. His family firm in Germany and the United States
was famous for its manufacture of morphine.
sb|{James H. McGraw, Jr.,} chairman of McGraw Hill Publishing
Company, was a member of the advisory board to the U.S. Chemical
Warfare Service and a member of the Army Ordnance Association
Committee on Endowment.
sb|{Fred H. Haggerson,} chairman of Union Carbide Corp.,
produced munitions, chemicals, and firearms.
sb|{A.L. Cole} was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an
executive of {Readers Digest.} In 1965, just after performing a
rather dirty favor for George Bush [which will be discussed in a
coming chapter--ed.], Cole became chairman of the executive
committee of the {Digest,} the world's largest-circulation
periodical.
From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center for
the direction of covert action by the U.S. government and,
indeed, for the covert management of the government. Jupiter
Island will reappear later on, in our account of George Bush in
the Iran-Contra affair.
Target: Washington
George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered the
family's Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now
briefly describe the forces that descended on Washington, D.C.
during those years when Bush, with the assistance of family and
powerful friends, was becoming ``established in business on his
own.''
From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's boss Averell Harriman was
U.S. ``ambassador-at-large'' to Europe. He was a non-military
``Theater Commander,'' the administrator of the
multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating in all
military/strategic decision-making by the Anglo-American
alliance.
The U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, had become a
problem to the Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive
at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in recent years he had gone
astray. As secretary of the navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the
racial integration of the Navy. As defense secretary, he pressed
for integration in the armed forces and this eventually became
the U.S. policy.
Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement
coupled with brinkmanship. He was simply opposed to communism.
On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of office and flown
on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to ``Hobe Sound''
(Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist
dealt with him.s8
He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army
Hospital and given insulin shock treatments for alleged ``mental
exhaustion.'' He was denied all visitors except his estranged
wife and children--his son had been Averell Harriman's aide in
Moscow. On May 22, Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe cord
tied tightly around his neck, after he had plunged from a
sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist called
the death a suicide even before any investigation was started.
The results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's
diaries were published, 80 percent deleted, after a year of
direct government censorship and rewriting.
- * * * -
North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, after
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close
friend) publicly specified that Korea would not be defended.
With a new war on, Harriman came back to serve as President
Truman's adviser, to ``oversee national security affairs.''
Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel
to Truman. Clifford, however, remained close to Harriman and his
partners as they gained more and more power. Clifford later
wrote about his cordial relations with Prescott Bush:
``Prescott Bush ... had become one of my frequent golfing
partners in the fifties, and I had both liked and respected
him.... Bush had a splendid singing voice, and particularly
loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he organized a quartet
that included my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in
Washington, and, on occasion, he invited the group to Hobe Sound
in Florida to perform. His son [George], though, had never
struck me as a strong or forceful person. In 1988, he presented
himself successfully to the voters as an outsider--no small trick
for a man whose roots wound through Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil,
the CIA, a patrician background, wealth, and the Vice
Presidency.''s9
With Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean
Acheson drove to Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the
British-backed U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall as secretary of
defense. At the same time, Prescott's partner, Robert Lovett,
himself became assistant secretary of defense.
Lovett, Marshall, Harriman, and Acheson went to work to
unhorse Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in
Asia. MacArthur kept Wall Street's intelligence agencies away
from his command, and favored real independence for the non-white
nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's firing on March 23, 1951,
citing MacArthur's insistence on defeating the Communist Chinese
invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there was
``no substitute for victory,'' was read in Congress on April 5;
MacArthur was fired on April 10, 1951.
That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary
of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual
Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American
military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers Harriman was
everything but commander-in-chief.
- * * * -
These were, of course, exciting times for the Bush family,
whose wagon was hitched to the financial gods of Olympus--to
Jupiter, that is.
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York 5, N.Y.
Business Established 1818 Cable Address ``Shipley-New York''
Private Bankers
April 2, 1951
The Honorable W.A. Harriman, The White House, Washington, D.C.
Dear Averell:
I was sorry to miss you in Washington but appreciate your
cordial note. I shall hope for better luck another time.
I hope you had a good rest at Hobe Sound.
With affectionate regard, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Pres [signed]
Prescott S. Bush
A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington
(1950-53) was the organization of covert operations, and
``psychological warfare.'' Harriman, together with his lawyers
and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the
government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda
campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and
paramilitary campaigns abroad. This would supposedly ensure a
stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American
financial and political interests.
The Harriman security regime created the Psychological
Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the
PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the
child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite
eugenics movement in North Carolina following World War II.
Gordon Gray was an avid Anglophile, whose father had gotten
controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
through alliance with the British Imperial tobacco cartel's U.S.
representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's
brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval
intelligence officer, known around Washington as the ``founder of
operational intelligence.'' Gordon Gray became a close friend and
political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for
Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert
policy.
But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was,
constituted an obstacle to the covert warriors. An insular
Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution,
he remained skeptical about secret service activities that
reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo.
So, ``covert operations'' could not fully take off without a
change of the Washington regime. And it was with the Republican
Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
Prescott Runs for Senate
Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics
in 1950, as his partners took control of the levers of
governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers
Harriman, he ran against Connecticut's William Benton for his
seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was actually for a two-year
unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous
senator).
In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
was making a circus-like crusade against communist influence in
Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State
Department personnel, politicians, and Hollywood figures. He
generally left unscathed the Wall Street and London strategists
who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist
dictatorship--like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left
and right.
Prescott Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe
McCarthy, and appeared to be neutral about his crusade. But the
Wisconsin senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came into
Connecticut three times that year to campaign for Bush and
against the Democrats. Bush himself made charges of ``Korea,
Communism and Corruption'' into a slick campaign phrase against
Benton, which then turned up as a national Republican slogan.
The response was disappointing. Only small crowds turned out
to hear Joe McCarthy, and Benton was not hurt. McCarthy's
pro-Bush rally in New Haven, in a hall that seated 6,000, drew
only 376 people. Benton joked on the radio that ``200 of them
were my spies.''
Prescott Bush resigned from the Yale Board of Fellows for his
campaign, and the board published a statement to the effect that
the ``Yale vote'' should support Bush--despite the fact that
Benton was a Yale man, and in many ways identical in outlook to
Bush. Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared regularly for
Prescott's campaign. None of this was particularly effective,
however, with the voting population.s1s0
Then Papa Bush ran into a completely unexpected problem. At
that time, the old Harriman eugenics movement was centered at
Yale University. Prescott Bush was a Yale trustee, and his former
Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence Tighe, was Yale's
treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the truth
about the Bush-Harriman firm's Nazi activities now made its way
into the campaign.
Not only was the American Eugenics Society itself
headquartered at Yale, but all parts of this undead fascist
movement had a busy home at Yale. The coercive psychiatry and
sterilization advocates had made the Yale/New Haven Hospital and
Yale Medical School their laboratories for hands-on practice in
brain surgery and psychological experimentation. And the Birth
Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for
eugenical births--fewer births for parents with ``inferior''
bloodlines. Prescott's partner Tighe was a Connecticut director
of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was
the eugenics advocate, Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.
Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush
knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement.
There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open
advocates of sterilization of ``unfit'' or ``unnecessary''
people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General
Draper and his friend George Bush.) But the Birth Control League
was public--just about then it was changing its name to the
euphemistic ``Planned Parenthood.''
Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush
was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the
old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election
by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes. He and his family blamed
the defeat on the exposeaa. The defeat was burned into the
family's memory, leaving a bitterness and perhaps a desire for
revenge.
In his foreword to a population control propaganda book,
George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: ``My own first
awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a
jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate
in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day,
`revealed' that my father was involved with Planned
Parenthod.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number
of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth
controllers to cost him the election....''s1s1
Prescott Bush gave a graphic description of these events in
his ``oral history'' interview at Columbia University: ``In the
1950 campaign, when I ran against Benton, the very last week,
Drew Pearson, famous columnist, was running a radio program at
that time.... In this particular broadcast, just at the end of
our campaign [Pearson said]: ``I predict that Benton will retain
his seat in the United States Senate, because it has just been
made known that Prescott Bush, his opponent, is president of the
Birth Control Society'' or chairman, member of the board of
directors, or something, ``of the Birth Control Society. In this
country, and of course with Connecticut's heavy Catholic
population, and its laws against birth control ... this is going
to be too much for Bush to rise above. Benton will be elected.
I predict.''
The next Sunday, they handed out, at these Catholic Churches
in Waterbury and Torrington and Bridgeport, handbills, quoting
Drew Pearson's statement on the radio about Prescott Bush, you
see--I predict. Well, my telephone started ringing that Sunday
at home, and when I'd answer, or Dotty [Prescott's wife, George's
mother] would answer--``Is this true, what they say about
Prescott Bush? This can't be true. Is it true?''
She'd say, ``No, it isn't true.'' Of course, it wasn't true.
But you never catch up with a thing like this--the election's
just day after tomorrow, you see? So there's no doubt, in the
estimate of our political leaders, that this one thing cost me
many thousand votes--whether it was 1, 3, 5 or 10 thousand we
don't know, we can't possibly tell, but it was enough. To have
overcome that thousand vote, it would only have had to be 600
switch [sic].
[Mrs. Bush then corrected the timing in Prescott Bush's
recollections.]
``I'd forgotten the exact sequence, but that was it.... The
state then--and I think still is--probably about 55 percent
Catholic population, with all the Italian derivation people
[sic], and Polish is very heavy, and the Catholic church is very
dominant here, and the archbishop was death on this birth control
thing. They fought repeal every time it came up in the
legislature, and {we never did get rid of that prohibition until
just a year or two ago,} as I recall it [emphasis added].s1s2
Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican
candidates fared well in Connecticut. He attributed his loss to
the Catholic Church. After all, he had dependable friends in the
news media. The {New York Times} loved him for his bland
pleasantness. He just about owned CBS. Twenty years earlier,
Prescott Bush had personally organized the credit to allow
William S. Paley to buy the CBS (radio, later television) network
outright. In return, Prescott was made a director and the
financial leader of CBS; Paley himself became a devoted follower
and servitor of Averell Harriman.
Well, when he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the
outcome to the blind whims of the public.
Prescott Bush moved into action in 1952 as a national leader
of the push to give the Republican presidential nomination to
Gen. Dwight D. (``Ike'') Eisenhower. Among the other team members
were Bush's Hitler-era lawyer John Foster Dulles, and Jupiter
Islander C. Douglas Dillon.
Dillon and his father were the pivots as the Harriman-Dulles
combination readied Ike for the presidency. As a friend put it:
``When the Dillons ... invited [Eisenhower] to dinner it was to
introduce him to Wall Street bankers and lawyers.''s1s3
Ike's higher level backers believed, correctly, that Ike would
not interfere with even the dirtiest of their covert action
programs. The bland, pleasant Prescott Bush was in from the
beginning: a friend to Ike, and an original backer of his
presidency.
On July 28, 1952, as the election approached, Connecticut's
senior U.S. senator, James O'Brien McMahon, died at the age of
48. (McMahon had been Assistant U.S. Attorney General, in charge
of the Criminal Division, from 1935 to 1939. Was there a chance
he might someday speak out about the unpunished Nazi-era crimes
of the wealthy and powerful?)
This was {extremely} convenient for Prescott. He got the
Republican nomination for U.S. senator at a special delegated
meeting, with backing by the Yale-dominated state party
leadership. Now he would run in a special election for the
suddenly vacant Senate seat. He could expect to be swept into
office, since he would be on the same electoral ticket as the
popular war hero, General Ike. By a technicality, he would
instantly become Connecticut's senior senator, with extra power
in Congress. And the next regularly scheduled senatorial race
would be in 1956 (when McMahon's term would have ended), so
Prescott could run again in that presidential election year ...
once again on Ike's coattails!
With this arrangement, things worked out very smoothly. In
Eisenhower's 1952 election victory, Ike won Connecticut by a
margin of 129,507 votes out of 1,092,471. Prescott Bush came in
last among the statewide Republicans, but managed to win by
30,373 out of 1,088,799, his margin nearly 100,000 behind
Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns.
In Eisenhower's 1956 re-election, Ike won Connecticut by
303,036 out of 1,114,954 votes, the largest presidential margin
in Connecticut's history. Prescott Bush managed to win again, by
129,544 votes out of 1,085,206--his margin this time 290,082
smaller than Eisenhower's.s1s4
In January 1963, when this electoral strategy had been played
out and his second term expired, Prescott Bush retired from
government and returned to Brown Brothers Harriman.
The 1952 Eisenhower victory made John Foster Dulles Secretary
of State, and his brother Allen Dulles head of the CIA. The
reigning Dulles brothers were the ``Republican'' replacements for
their client and business partner, ``Democrat'' Averell
Harriman. Occasional public posturings aside, their strategic
commitments were identical to his.
Undoubtedly the most important work accomplished by Prescott
Bush in the new regime was on the golf links.
Those who remember the Eisenhower presidency know that Ike
played ... quite a bit of golf! Democrats sneered at him for
mindlessness, Republicans defended him for taking this healthy
recreation. Golf was Ike's ruling passion. And there at his
side was the loyal, bland, pleasant Senator Prescott Bush, former
president of the U.S. Golf Association, son-in-law of the very
man who had reformulated the rules of the game.
Prescott Bush was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite golf partner.
Prescott could reassure Ike about his counselors, allay his
concerns, and monitor his moods. Ike was very grateful to
Prescott, who never revealed the President's scores.
The public image of his relationship to the President may be
gleaned from a 1956 newspaper profile of Prescott Bush's role in
the party. The {New York Times,} which 11 years before had
consciously protected him from public exposure as a Nazi banker,
fawned over him in an article entitled, ``His Platform:
Eisenhower'':``A tall, lean, well-dressed man who looks exactly
like what he is--a wealthy product of the Ivy League--is chairman
of the Republican Convention's platform committee. As such,
Prescott Bush, Connecticut's senior United States Senator, has a
difficult task: he has to take one word and expand it to about
5,000.
``The one word, of course, is `Ike'--but no party platform
could ever be so simple and direct....
``Thus it is that Senator Bush and his fellow committee
members ... find themselves confronted with the job of wrapping
around the name Eisenhower sufficient verbiage to persuade the
public that it is the principles of the party, and not the grin
of the man at the head of it, which makes it worthy of
endorsement in [the] November [election].
``For this task Prescott Bush, a singularly practical and
direct conservative, may not be entirely fitted. It is likely
that left to his own devices he would simply offer the country
the one word and let it go at that.
``He is ... convinced that this would be enough to do the
trick ... if only the game were played that way.
``Since it is not, he can be expected to preside with dignity,
fairness and dispatch over the sessions that will prepare the
party credo for the 1956 campaign.
``If by chance there should be any conflicts within the
committee ... the Senator's past can offer a clue to his
conduct.
``A former Yale Glee Club and second bass in the All-Time
Whiffenpoofs Quartet, he is ... [called] `the hottest
close-harmony man at Yale in a span of twenty-five years.'
``Close harmony being a Republican specialty under President
Eisenhower, the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in twenty-five
years would seem to be an ideal choice for the convention job he
holds at San Francisco....
``[In addition to his business background, he] also played
golf, competing in a number of tournaments. For eight years he
was a member of the executive committee of the United States Golf
Association....
``As a Senator, Connecticut's senior spokeman in the upper
house has followed conservative policies consistent with his
business background.
He resigned all his corporate directorships, took a leave from
Brown Brothers, Harriman, and proceeded to go down the line for
the Eisenhower program....
``Around the Senate, he is known as a man who does his
committee work faithfully, defends the Administration stoutly,
and fits well into the clublike atmosphere of Capitol
Hill....''s1s5
{To be continued.}
Notes
1.
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, {The Wise Men}: Six Friends and
the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett,
McCloy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 377.
2.
Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat, the
founder of the Triton Press and the president of the American
Shakespeare Theater.
3.
{Palm Beach Post,} January 13, 1991.
4.
For Lovett's residency there see Isaacson and Thomas, {op.
cit.,} p. 417. Some Jupiter Island residencies were verified by
their inclusion in the 1947 membership list of the Hobe Sound
Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress; others
were established from interviews with long-time Jupiter
Islanders.
5.
Arthur Burr Darling, {The Central Intelligence Agency: An
Instrument of Government, to 1950}, (College Station:
Pennsylvania State University, 1990), p. 59.
6. The {Chicago Tribune}, Feb 9, 1945, for example, warned of
``Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the
postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.
{Cf. Anthony Cave Brown, {Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero}, (New
York: Times Books, 1982), p. 625, on warnings to FDR about the
British control of U.S. intelligence.
7. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, {Meyer Lansky: Mogul of
the Mob} (New York: Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28.
8. See John Ranelagh, {The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the
CIA}, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 131-32.
9. Clark Clifford, {Counsel to the President} (New York: Random
House, 1991).
10. Sidney Hyman, {The Life of William Benton} (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 438-41.
11. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United
States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973),
``Forward'' by George H.W. Bush, p. vii.
12. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research
Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower
Administration Part II; pp. 62-4.
13. Herbert S. Parmet, {Eisenhower and the American Crusades}
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 14.
14. {New York Times}, Sept. 6, 1952, Nov. 5, 1952, Nov. 7, 1956.
15. {New York Times}, Aug. 21, 1956.
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
this group.
Thanks.
John Covici
coviciccs.covici.com