Prescott Bush As Finpol

This year, we've been in and out of Ferdinand Lundberg's world of finpolity as outlined in his 1968 book The Rich and the Super-Rich, and which I summarized in this post. It turns out that, although Prescott Bush's wealth can be traced to his wife's father, George Herbert Walker. who was presidenr of the Harriman family investment bank, W A Harriman & Co, and Prescott himself became a managing partner of its successor, Brown Brothers Harriman, and was closely associated with Edward Harriman's sons, W Averell and E Roland, Prescott himself is never mentioned as a finpol in The Rich and the Super-Rich.

This was almost certainly by design. According to Britannica,

At least some portion of the Greenwich Bushes’ financial stability came by way of the largesse of the Walkers, who were ostentatious in their demonstrations of wealth, whereas Bush counseled his offspring to play down their wealth and instead advocated public service as a sort of noblesse oblige.

By the early 1900s, following the example of the Rockefellers, the object of the finpolity was to keep a low profile and generally stay out of the news, not least to avoid assassins and kidnappers, but also just to stay clear of damaging publicity. I suspect that most of the families Lundberg identified in his various books would have preferred not to be mentioned and envied the Bushes -- by 1968, for instance, George Bush pere was simply an obscure Texas congressman. However, neither Prescott nor his son George completely avoided accusations of shadowy connections. According to Wikipedia,

In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that [George H W] Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this claim.

In the 1930s, Prescott's name surfaced in connection with the so-called Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, "a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator".

In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany, although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error. According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."

Nazis? According to Britannica, this involved Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's company:

BBH’s association with the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, which continued even after the start of World War II, would taint its reputation. Similarly infamous was the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a BBH asset managed by Bush that transferred funds, bonds, gold, coal, oil, and steel to Nazi Germany during its military buildup. In 1942 the U.S. government, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized UBC and other German-affiliated BBH assets, but Bush was never found guilty of a crime, and the affair would neither prevent Averell Harriman from becoming the Democratic governor of New York nor have lasting political ramifications for Bush or his progeny.

It's possible to make too much of this. Germany was a major part of the European economy, and all US companies had involvement there after Hitler came to power, much like they have stakes in China now. But I noted yesterday a passage in a New Yorker piece that also referred to Prescott's involvement in funding a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor. It's also difficult to tell when Prescott's connection with Averell Harriman began. He and Harriman were from the same social background, and both were at Yale in the 1910s, where both were also members of the Skull and Bones secret society. By the early 1920s, Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was president of the Harriman bank.

By the time of World War II, when Prescott was also at BBH, Harriman was heavily involved in Allied diplomacy and strategic planning as Roosevelt's emissary.

Harriman served as ambassador to the Soviet Union until January 1946. When he returned to the United States, he worked hard to get George Kennan's Long Telegram into wide distribution.[13] Kennan's analysis, which generally accorded with Harriman's, became the cornerstone of Truman's Cold War strategy of containment.

From April to October 1946, he was ambassador to Britain, but he was soon appointed to become United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948, he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan. In Paris, he became friendly with the CIA agent Irving Brown, who organised anti-communist unions and organisations. Harriman was then sent to Tehran in July 1951 to mediate between Iran and Britain in the wake of the Iranian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

By this time, Harriman wasn't just involved in intelligence, he was driving intelligence at the policy level. By the early 1950s, both Harriman and Prescott Bush began to seek elective office. Harriman was elected Governor of New York as a Democrat in 1954 but was defeated for re-election by Nelson Rockefeller in 1958, one of many juxtapositions of finpol families in electoral competition. Prescott ran for the US Senate as a Republican in 1952 and won; he was re-elected in 1958 but declined to run again in 1964.

Business Insider quotes Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy (2008) in summing up Prescott Bush's political influence on George H W and Dubya:

His passion for politics, of course, trickled down to future generations of Bushes. Weisberg writes that, while George H.W. Bush never worked on any of his father's campaigns, he watched closely. He inherited his father's sense of duty.

"Prescott Bush established three essential myths that Bush men lived by," Weisberg writes. "The first is: I made it on my own. The second is: I'm not really rich. The third is: I'm running to serve my country."

But, in the spirit of Prescott Bush, this nevertheless leaves a great deal unsaid. How much was Prescott involvred in Averell Harriman's intelligence activities? How far was Prescott able to place his son George in CIA related activites? In particular, by the time George was named CIA Director in 1976, he'd had fairly minimal public involvement in intelligence -- he was a member of the US House from 1967-71; UN Ambassador from 1971-73; Chair of the Republican National Committee 1973-74; and Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China 1974-75, prestigious jobs, but not necessarily a worker bee at the policy level.

What else had he been doing suddenly to become the chief spymaster?