by Kitty Kelley
Since the United States allowed no direct commerce with the Nazis, Bert devised a scheme for a Swiss bank, fronting for the German owners of Silesian-American, to buy the shares of the American owners and pay off the bondholders. Unfortunately, the Swiss payment would come from ores mined in Poland with cooperation of the Nazis. Still, Bert and Brown Brothers Harriman hoped their convoluted plan would appear benign enough to get U.S. approval.
In a confidential memo, Ray Morris of Brown Brothers Harriman wrote to Roland Harriman: “We had the Silesian-American and Silesian Holding company meetings this morning, and Bert Walker came through all right, so that there was a unanimous vote in favor of accepting the proposition from the Swiss company and taking the necessary steps to put it into effect.”
The U.S. government blocked the plan under Roosevelt’s executive orders banning foreign transactions that might aid the Nazis. The pile-driving deal maker reconfigured the scheme for resubmission, but again it was rejected. Undeterred, Bert tried a third, and final, time; the U.S. Treasury once more slammed the door. It was against U.S. policy for companies to have any dealing with Hitler’s Germany after the invasion of Poland.
The willingness of George Herbert Walker and Brown Brothers Harriman to do business with Germany was not unique in those times. Like BBH, quite a few American firms had opened offices in Berlin after World War I and were reluctant to terminate the stream of income. Others, like Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York City law firm of John Foster Dulles, who later became Secretary of State under Eisenhower, took a stand on principle.
Some time after 1935, when the Nazi persecution of Jews could no longer be denied, Dulles was confronted with a partners’ revolt. As Townsend Hoopes reported in his book The Devil and John Foster Dulles, Dulles’s law partners informed him they were prepared to resign en bloc rather than continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany. Dulles protested vigorously, citing the huge loss of profits that would be incurred by giving up German transactions. The partners remained adamant. Dulles finally capitulated “in tears.”
No such tearful meeting ever occurred at Brown Brothers Harriman, where Knight Woolley and Prescott Bush were the managing partners. In fact, their involvement in Union Banking Corporation from 1924 to 1942 makes them vulnerable to charges of dealing with the enemy.
Union Banking Corporation existed solely for the benefit of Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist who had inherited an empire of steel factories, coal mines, and banks. He met Averell Harriman, the scion of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, during the 1920s when both were traveling in Europe. Thyssen told Harriman he was starting a bank in New York to look after his American financial interests, and he asked Harriman to serve on the board. Harriman turned the matter over to his brother, Roland, who agreed to join the directorate with a few of his partners. Thyssen’s U.S. bank, a subsidiary of his Dutch bank in Rotterdam, was founded in 1924 and operated out of the Brown Brothers Harriman offices at 39 Broadway in New York City. The bank, UBC, opened an investment account with Brown Brothers Harriman, which Prescott managed, and Thyssen’s bank paid investment fees to BBH. All of this was perfectly legal and quite profitable for both Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman for a decade. The issue became morally freighted in the 1930s when Hitler rose to power and Thyssen, an early supporter of the Third Reich, became known as “Hitler’s Angel.”
Still, Roland Harriman was not confronted by outraged partners. No one at Brown Brothers Harriman expressed concern that Thyssen’s bank might be a Nazi front. No questions were raised about the ethics of continuing to accept fees from the man whose memoir was titled I Paid Hitler.
As German troops swept across Europe, absorbing Austria, bludgeoning Czechoslovakia, raping Poland, swallowing Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, grabbing Luxembourg and Belgium, invading France, and bombarding the British Isles, no one at Brown Brothers Harriman stepped forward to decry their continuing business ties with Germany.
The remunerative relationship between Fritz Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman continued for sixteen years. BBH’s investment fees suddenly stopped coming in May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. On Roosevelt’s executive orders, all Dutch assets in the United States were frozen, including those of UBC, Thyssen’s Dutch holding company.
President Roosevelt had made no secret of his desire to bring his country into the war. In his fifteenth fireside chat to the nation, on January 6, 1941, he said, “Never before . . . has our American civilization been in such danger.” He warned that the Nazis wanted “to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.” He concluded: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
Even the most obtuse partners of Brown Brothers Harriman had to see that it was only a matter of time before the United States would take up arms against Germany. One key partner, Averell Harriman, was living in London as minister plenipotentiary to England to expedite lend-lease aid to the British. With this in mind, and the UBC assets frozen by executive order, Knight Woolley finally wrote a letter on January 14, 1941, to the superintendent of banks of New York, expressing concern about the association of Brown Brothers Harriman with Fritz Thyssen’s Union Banking Corporation:
My partners have been giving serious consideration to withdrawing from the board. Should the United States enter the war, they feel they might be under some embarrassment because of their connection with the bank, even though we have no financial interest in the Union Banking Corporation, nor do we participate in its earnings. They act as directors merely as a matter of business courtesy.
Woolley neglected to mention the lucrative investment fees from Union Banking Corporation that BBH had enjoyed for sixteen years. The superintendent expressed full “confidence” in the BBH directors and said the department “would be gratified if these gentlemen could find it possible to remain on the Board during this period of uncertainty.”
The relationship between Brown Brothers Harriman and Fritz Thyssen, who had at last disassociated himself from Hitler, became news on July 31, 1941, with a front-page story in the New York Herald Tribune. The headline: “Thyssen Has $3,000,000 Cash in New York Vaults.” The subhead: “Union Banking Corp. May Hide Nest Egg for High Nazis He Once Backed.”
The story, which named Prescott Bush as a one-share director of UBC, reprinted in full the correspondence between Knight Woolley and the New York banks superintendent. This suggests that Brown Brothers Harriman cooperated fully with the reporter in relating the history between “Mr. Harriman” and “Herr Thyssen,” as the newspaper referred to the two men.
Knight Woolley’s letter states that the firm’s paramount concern was “embarrassment” about being publicly associated with Hitler’s financier. There’s no expression of moral indignation, let alone repugnance for Thyssen’s previous support of the Third Reich. The concern is more for appearances as Woolley downplays the relationship between Brown Brothers Harriman and the former Nazi as merely “a matter of business courtesy.”
The New York Herald Tribune stated: “This [relationship] took place, of course, at a time when the present world tangle could hardly have been foreseen and when such courtesies were part of the normal routine of international banking relations.”
No other newspaper followed up on the story, and the issue remained dormant for many years. Only when John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, decided in 1994 to look at the World War II dealings of Brown Brothers Harriman did Prescott Bush’s association with Union Banking Corporation become an issue.
“If Prescott Bush were alive today,” said John Loftus in 2002, “I would move to have him indicted for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.”
Loftus asserted that, as the managing investment partner of his firm, Prescott Bush benefited illegally, immorally, and unfairly from the fees of a Nazi-connected company that was later seized by the U.S. Office of Alien Property.
As a former president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, Loftus is
concerned with serious issues. Having left the Justice Department to investigate the extent to which U.S. intelligence agencies had recruited former Nazis, he has written extensively on the subject. But in this instance there is no evidence to support his accusation that Prescott Bush was a Nazi war accomplice.
While Prescott and his partners never stood up on the issue, Loftus mistakenly believes that UBC was an ongoing activity until 1942; it was not. All UBC assets were frozen in 1940, so it is unfair to assert that the silence of Prescott and his partners makes them complicit in the treasonous act of trading with the enemy.
As morally reprehensible as the actions of Prescott’s firm might have been, it was legal to do business with UBC because it was Dutch owned. The sensational assertions that circulate on the Internet that Prescott Bush built his family fortune on the backs of Nazi victims are grossly exaggerated. No intelligence documents available from that era suggest that Prescott endorsed Nazi ideals or supported Germany’s rearmament. Rather, he appears to be nothing more than a businessman very much in the mold of his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, whose priorities—first, last, and always—were to make money.
The sounds of the war in Europe were muffled in Greenwich, Connecticut, as Pressy and Poppy were growing up. They were far more frightened of their authoritarian father than of Hitler’s bombs, especially Little Pop, or Poppy, who clung to his older brother for protection from their father’s fierce temper. The two boys insisted on sharing a room together, and Poppy started school a year early just to remain by his older brother’s side. In those years, Prescott junior was bigger and stronger than George, despite a congenital cataract that blinded him in one eye and lameness in one leg from an injury. Although Poppy was the superior athlete, he revered his older brother because Pressy stood up to their father and actually defied him on occasion.
“Not often,” said Prescott junior many years later. “Not often.”
“But George never,” said their brother Jonathan.
“Their father was a very austere man—cold, cold, cold,” said George “Red Dog” Warren, a childhood friend. “George liked my father enormously because Dad was outgoing and friendly and very funny. That was probably the main reason George and I became such good friends. He gave me the nickname ‘Red Dog,’ but I can’t remember why now. I do remember he came over to my house every chance he could get if my father was around.”
After the Greenwich Country Day School, the boys were sent to boarding school at Phillips Andover in Massachusetts, known then as “Yale’s biggest feeder.” There was no question about where the sons of Prescott Bush would go to college. In those days Andover was like a miniature Yale, from its all-male enrollment to its jacket-and-tie dress code to its secret societies. Out of 215 boys in George’s 1942 Andover class, 96 went to Yale.
“Andover meant more to me than Yale,” George said many years later. “You had to read War and Peace, do your languages. You were made to study, made to think . . . The minute I walked into that place I took a giant leap ahead of many others out there in the educational system . . . I was blessed.”
Known as Poppy even at school, George became part of Andover lore. He soared above his mediocre grades (C+) with an outstanding athletic record that is prominently cited in a book devoted solely to Andover sports: “Poppy Bush’s play throughout the season ranked him as one of Andover’s all-time soccer greats.” His 1942 class yearbook listed twenty-five activities (class average was ten), including captain of baseball, captain of soccer, varsity basketball, president of senior class, and president of Greeks. The rest of his activities were boards, clubs, and societies.
The most telling citation on his list was the Johns Hopkins Prize, which was a three-hundred-dollar reward to be “divided among those students who have received no demerits for absence or tardy marks in the year.” Not surprisingly, Poppy Bush was a good boy—pleasant, punctual, and respectful. Although he barely made passable grades, he handed out hymnals for daily chapel service, took up the collection plate in church, and clapped erasers for teachers after school.
“I don’t know that you can judge one’s life by how many entries there are in the yearbook,” Bush told the Andover alumni bulletin in 1989. “What really drove me and what I loved back then was sports. The competition of athletics—I loved it . . . I wasn’t a particularly good student.”
No one disputes his inferior scholarship, including his roommate. “Our room during senior year at Andover saw many schoolboy intellectual bull sessions,” said George “Red Dog” Warren. “Bush seldom got involved; rather, he was content to wisecrack from the sidelines. George was not an intellectual, or even intellectually curious. He was more of an achiever [a doer].”
Hart Leavitt, a Yale professor who taught English composition, nearly flunked Poppy Bush. “He just sat in the class and handed in papers . . . I had very little respect for his mentality . . . He showed no imagination or originality,” said Leavitt. “In my class he was a nonentity . . . didn’t contribute much. A nice guy, but that’s about all. He looked like the cover on The Preppy Handbook that came out a while ago. I didn’t have much contact with him outside class.”
At Andover, the basketball coach, Frank DiClementi, who had much more contact with George, raved about him. “From the first day I saw him, I knew he was something special. He came from a family with the right priorities . . . Always hustling . . . Poppy was captain of baseball and soccer, played every minute of every game, but I had to talk him into going out for basketball. He was afraid of denying another kid a place on the team . . . There was a Jewish kid nicknamed Ovie who left school when he didn’t get tapped for any of the Greek societies. They talked him into coming back, and Poppy was the first to befriend him, got him to come out for baseball. One day a fly ball bounced off Ovie’s head into the left fielder’s glove, and Poppy congratulated him on an assist.”
Due to an illness in his senior year—a staph infection in his shoulder that developed into hepatitis—George spent two weeks in Massachusetts General Hospital, and many more recuperating in bed at home. “He came very close to losing his life before they were able to get it under control,” said Prescott Bush Jr. As a result, George had to repeat his senior year and spent five years, not four, at Andover.
The time off allowed Poppy to return to his prep school taller, heavier, and healthier. “He was put together, and handsome—a beautiful example of those who matured the fastest because they had the least to mature with,” said William Sloane Coffin, an Andover classmate who, as Yale’s chaplain during the 1960s, clashed with George over civil rights and the Vietnam War. “A lot of students that I know are a long time immature, but that’s because they have a lot to mature with. Bush didn’t have that much to begin with.”
In a class poll, Poppy Bush did not finish first in any category, but like his brother Pressy, he placed second as the student with the “Most Faculty Drag,” in recognition of “attempts to gain favor in teachers’ eyes by elaborately dubious means; to pay teacher in advance with flattery for grades one hopes to get.” He placed third as “Best All-Round Fellow,” “Best Athlete,” “Most Respected,” “Most Popular,” and “Handsomest.” He did not make the top three for “Politician,” “Ladies’ Man,” or “Most Likely to Succeed.”
Still, he was representative of his class. In one poll by the Phillipian, students were asked: “Do you think studies, friendships, or athletics are the most important in the long run?” The majority chose friendships. The newspaper concluded: “The average student came to Andover with making contacts uppermost in his mind.”
“Poppy Bush was very popular . . . very friendly and everybody admired him as an individual,” said Henry See, another Andover classmate. “He was the kind of guy that, when you looked at him, you would say, ‘I wish I was as popular as he, as bright as he.’” See credited Bush’s popularity to his eagerness to be liked and his ability to please everyone. “He would have you think that you and he thought alike on issues, but whe
n you think back, he just nodded and you thought he went along with you . . . I don’t remember him ever taking a stand on anything controversial.”
At Andover, teachers were called masters, classes were recitations, and nothing was more important than manhood. During weekly assemblies students were reminded: “Other schools have boys. Andover has men.” Andover’s motto “Non Sibi” means “Not for Self.” Andover men were expected to conform to the rules. “The basic Andover code,” said the Phillipian, “assumes every student is first and foremost a gentleman.”
The epitome of Andover was Colonel Henry Lewis Stimson, Secretary of War, who was president of the academy’s board of trustees and the school’s most honored alumnus, having served under five presidents. Stimson was introduced by a student to the class of 1942 as the “living and vital representative of our ways and of our type of existence, who is out setting an example to the whole nation . . . living proof that the Andover Way is the way of men who guide the fortunes of nations.”
On December 7, 1941, Poppy Bush was thrashing George “Red Dog” Warren in a Ping-Pong match in the clubhouse of their secret society, AUV, when they heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. The boys dropped their paddles and dashed for their dorm. The United States was at war.
The headmaster summoned the school to assembly; the flag was raised, the national anthem played. “You men must get at attention,” he said, “and stay there.” The students rose to their feet as one.