Prescott Bush
Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 - October 8, 1972) was a Connecticut Senator and Wall Street banker with Brown Brothers Harriman. His son, George H. W. Bush, and grandson George W. Bush would both later become US Presidents.
Born in Columbus, Ohio to Samuel P. Bush, a steel manufacturer, Prescott attended Yale University and served as an Artillery Captain in World War I. A Yale University legend tells of Bush digging up the skull of Geronimo (1918) and giving it to the Skull and Bones society. He entered business in the organization of George Herbert Walker and Averell Harriman and became an officer in the Harriman Bank (later Brown Brothers-Harriman) in 1926. In August 1921 he married Dorothy, George Walker's daughter. He became a managing partner at Harriman in 1930.
In 1952 he was elected to the U.S. Senate (Republican, Connecticut), where he served until January 1963, a staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He maintained homes in Long Island, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; a 10,000-acre plantation in South Carolina; and an island retreat in Florida.
Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Dealing with Nazi Germany wasn't illegal until Hitler declared war on the US, but, six days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.
Prescott Bush's business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:
Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to the Silesian-American Corporation resulted in his connection with the corporation's mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz concentration camp would later be constructed; however, such charges remain, essentially, unsubstantiated.
War seizures controversy
Bush's interest in UBC consisted of one share. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. External links