Prescott Bush >>George H. W. Bush >> George W. Bush

부시 할아버지, 나치 독일 도왔다

히틀러 자금줄 ‘유니언 뱅킹’ 중역…반역죄 판결에 재산 몰수당해

[676호] 2002.10.08 (월) 프랑크푸르트·허 광 편집위원 | rena@sisapress.com  

미국이 히틀러 독재로부터 유럽을 구했다는 것은 상식이지만, 이런 상식으로는 이해하기 힘든 일이 있다. 히틀러에게 전차를 팔고 기름을 댄 것은 미국 기업이다. 제너럴 모터스·록펠러 그룹에 속하는 스탠더드 오일이 그들이다. 코카콜라는 히틀러가 나치즘을 선전하는 무대로 삼은 1936년 베를린올림픽을 후원한 대표적인 기업이다.

미국 정부는 2차 세계대전에 개입한 후 그 때까지 나치스와 거래한 기업들을 색출했는데 이 중 1942년 10월에 적발된 기업이 ‘유니언 뱅킹 코퍼레이션’이다. 이때 재산을 몰수당하고 반역죄 판결을 받은 유니언 뱅킹 중역은 프레스코트 부시, 바로 현 부시 대통령의 조부이다.

유니언 뱅킹은 1924년, 독일 기업 튀센과 합작해 뉴욕에서 문을 열었는데, 튀센은 히틀러의 권력 장악을 돕는 자금을 댄 대표적인 기업이다. 프레스코트는 유니언 뱅킹의 중역으로서 튀센의 재무 관리를 맡았으니 히틀러에게 흘러가는 월가 자금은 모두 그의 손을 거친 셈이다.

유니언 뱅킹의 물주는, 2차 세계대전 중에 모스코바 주재 대사였으며, 베트남 전쟁 때까지 미국 외교에 깊이 개입했던 애브럴 해리먼이다. 그는 1926년에 설립된 독일 최대 규모 기업인 ‘독일 철강 트러스트’에 투자해 독일 군수산업을 지원했는데, 철강 트러스트가 세계 공황에 휩쓸려 파산하자 독일 정부가 시도한 국유화를 가로막고 튀센이 경영권을 갖게끔 공작을 벌였다.

히틀러가 1933년 2월 의회 방화 사건을 통해 정적을 제거하고 독재체제를 굳히게 되자 5월에 베를린에서 독·미 무역 협상이 시작되었다. 이 때 미국쪽 협상 대표가 당시 독일계 기업의 국제 변호사였고 1950년대에는 공화당 실력자, 냉전 외교의 대변자로 유명했던 존 포스터 덜레스이다. 전후 덜레스와 그의 친구 앨런 중앙정보국장의 도움을 받아 정계에 복귀한 프레스코트는 1972년에 죽기까지 공화당 상원의원을 지냈다. 미국이 독일을 히틀러 독재에서 해방했다고 하지만, 미국에 히틀러 지원 세력이 없었다면 그 해방은 불필요했을지도 모른다. 

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Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 – October 8, 1972) was an American banker and politician. He was a Wall Street executive banker and a United States Senator, representing Connecticut from 1952 until January 1963. He was the father of George H. W. Bush (41st President of the United States) and the grandfather of George W. Bush (43rd President of the United States) and Jeb Bush (43rd Governor of Florida).

Early life

Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Samuel Prescott Bush and Flora Sheldon Bush. Samuel Bush was a railroad middle manager, then a steel company president and, during World War I, also a federal government official in charge of coordination of and assistance to major weapons contractors.

Bush attended St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale University, where his grandfather, James Smith Bush (class of 1844), and his uncle Robert E. Sheldon Jr (class of 1904) had matriculated. Three subsequent generations of the Bush family have been Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity and Skull and Bones secret society. George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush are also members of that society.

According to Skull and Bones lore, Prescott Bush was among a group of Bonesmen who dug up and removed the skull of Geronimo from his grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1918. According to historian David L. Miller, the Bonesmen probably dug up somebody at Fort Sill, but not Geronimo.

Prescott Bush was a cheerleader, played varsity golf, football and baseball, and was president of the Yale Glee Club.

Military service

After graduation, Bush served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France, and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, he came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Business career

After his discharge in 1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Bush family moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1923, where Prescott briefly worked for the Hupp Products Company. In November 1923, he became president of sales for Stedman Products in South Braintree, Massachusetts. During this time, he lived in a Victorian house at 173 Adams Street in Milton, Massachusetts, where his son, George H.W. Bush, was born.

In 1924, Bush became vice-president of the investment bank A. Harriman & Co. where his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker was president. Bush's Yale classmates and fellow Bonesmen E. Roland Harriman and Knight Woolley also worked with the company.

In 1925, he joined the United States Rubber Company of New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut.

In 1931, he became a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which was created through the 1931 merger of A. Harriman & Co with Brown Bros. & Co., (a merchant bank founded in Philadelphia in 1818) and with Harriman Brothers & Co. (established in New York City in 1927).

He was an avid golfer, and in 1935 named head of the USGA.[5]

From 1944 to 1956, Prescott Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. He was on the board of directors of CBS, having been introduced to chairman William S. Paley around 1932 by his close friend and colleague W. Averell Harriman, who became a major Democratic Party power-broker.

Union Banking Corporation

Bush was a founding member and one of seven directors (including W. Averell Harriman) of the Union Banking Corporation (holding a single share out of 4,000 as a director), an investment bank that operated as a clearing house for many assets and enterprises held by German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen.[6][7] In July 1942, the bank was suspected of holding gold on behalf of Nazi leaders.[8] A subsequent government investigation disproved those allegations but confirmed the Thyssens' control, and in October 1942 the United States seized the bank under the Trading with the Enemy Act and held the assets for the duration of World War II.[6] Journalist Duncan Campbell pointed out documents showing that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.[6]

According to journalist Joe Conason, Prescott Bush's involvement with UBC was purely commercial and he was not a Nazi sympathizer.[9] The Anti-Defamation League[10] and historian Herbert Parmet[7] agreed with that assessment. The Anti-Defamation League said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser." [6] The 1942 investigation did not establish a connection between Prescott Bush and Thyssen.[6]

Political life

Prescott Bush was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. He was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

From 1947 to 1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A columnist in Boston said that Bush "is coming on to be known as President Truman's Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn't a Chinaman's chance."[11] (Harry Hopkins had been one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's closest advisors.) Bush's ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Sen. William Burnett Benton by only 1,000 votes.

Prescott Bush sought a rematch with Sen. Benton in 1952, but withdrew as the party turned to William Purtell. The death of Senator Brien McMahon later that year, however, created a vacancy and this time the Republicans nominated Bush.[12] He defeated the Democratic nominee, Abraham Ribicoff, and was elected to the Senate. A staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he served until January 1963. He was reelected in 1956 with 55 percent of the vote over Democrat Thomas J. Dodd (later U.S. Senator from Connecticut and father of Christopher J. Dodd), and decided not to run for another term in 1962. He was a key ally for the passage of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System,[13] and during his tenure supported the Polaris submarine project (built by Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut), civil rights legislation, and the establishment of the Peace Corps.[14]

On December 2, 1954, Prescott Bush was part of the large (67–22) majority to censure Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy had taken on the U.S. Army and the Eisenhower administration. During the debate leading to the censure, Bush said that McCarthy has "caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers: that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or, in his eyes, you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line."[15] Eisenhower later included Prescott Bush on an undated handwritten list of prospective candidates he favored for the 1960 GOP presidential nomination.

In terms of issues, Bush often agreed with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. According to Theodore H. White's book about the 1964 election, Bush and Rockefeller were longtime friends. Bush favored a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket for 1960, and was presumed to support Rockefeller's 1964 presidential candidacy until the latter's remarriage in 1963. He then publicly denounced Rockefeller for divorcing his first wife and marrying a woman with whom Rockefeller had been having an affair while married to his first wife.[14]

Another of Senator Bush's major legislative interests was flood and hurricane protection. He drafted Public Law 71, the Bush Hurricane Survey Act, enabling U.S. Army engineers to develop a new program of community protection against tidal flooding.[16][17]

Personal life

The grave of Prescott Bush

Prescott Bush married Dorothy Walker on August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine. They had five children: Prescott S. Bush, Jr. (August 10, 1922 – June 23, 2010),[18][19][20] George H. W. Bush (b. 1924, named after Dorothy's father George Herbert Walker), Nancy Bush (b. 1926), Jonathan Bush (b. 1931) and William "Bucky" Bush (b. 1938).

Bush founded the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937. As was his father-in-law, he was a member of the United States Golf Association, serving successively as secretary, vice-president and president, 1928–1935. He was a multi-year club champion of the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was on the committee set up by New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. to help create the New York Mets.

Bush maintained homes in New York, Long Island and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; the 10,000-acre (40 km²) Duncannon Plantation near Barnwell, South Carolina; and a secluded island off the Connecticut coast, Fishers Island.

The headstone of Prescott Bush

He died in 1972 at age 77 and was interred at Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Writings

Bush's articles include:

"Timely Monetary Policy," Banking, June 1955 and July 1955

"To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959

"Politics Is Your Business," Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960

References

[1] Jump up ^ Chapman, Roger Culture Wars: an Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices Volume 1 M.E. Sharpe Inc. Armonk, New York 2010 page 61

[2] Jump up ^ "Geronimo's kin sue Skull and Bones". MSNBC. February 18, 2009. Retrieved January 10, 2013.

[3] Jump up ^ Lassila, Kathrin Day; Branch, Mark Alden (May–June 2006). "Whose Skull and Bones?". Yale Alumni Magazine. Retrieved January 10, 2013.

[4] Jump up ^ Cheerleading of the ’20s: Epitome of masculinity. Yale Daily News (2008-01-28). Retrieved on 2013-07-15.

[5] ^ "Prescott Bush Named Head Of U.S.G.A.". The Washington Post. Associated Press. 1934-11-09.

[6] ^ a b c d e Aris, Ben; Campbell, Duncan (September 25, 2004). "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power". London: The Guardian. Retrieved May 22, 2010.

[7] ^ a b Parmet, Herbert. "What Should We Make of the Charge Linking the Bush Family Fortune to Nazism?". History News Network. Retrieved June 5, 2011.

[8] ^ "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". New York Herald Tribune. July 30, 1942.

[9] ^ Conason, Joe (October 26, 2003). "Bush 'Nazi' Smear Unworthy of Critics". New York: The New York Observer. Retrieved June 5, 2011.

[10] ^ "Internet Rumors: Prescott Bush's Alleged Nazi "Ties"". Anti-Defamation League. December 16, 2003. Retrieved June 5, 2011.

[11] ^ "Fair Enough" by Westbrook Pegler, Burlington Daily News-Times (North Carolina), August 22, 1950

[12] ^ https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=oaA0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=InMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1643,653871&dq=prescott+bush+brien+mcmahon&hl=en

[13] ^ "A Bush at Both Ends: Before and After the Interstate Era". U.S. Federal Highway Administration. January 18, 2005. Retrieved 2006-08-06.

[14] ^ Jump up to: a b Stephen Mansfield (2004). The Faith of George W. Bush. Tarcher.

[15] ^ "National Affairs: Splendid Job". Time. December 13, 1954.

[16] ^ McQuaid, John; Schleifstein, Mark (2006). Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. Little, Brown and Company: Hachette Book Group USA. p. 54. ISBN 978-0-316-01642-1.

[17] ^ Freudenburg, William R.; Gramling, Robert; Laska, Shirley; Erikson, Kai (2009). Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow. Washington, DC: Island Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-59726-682-6.

[18] ^ O'Connor, Anahad (June 24, 2010). "Prescott Bush Jr, Scion of a Political Family, Dies at 87". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-06-25.

[19] ^ [1][dead link]

[20] ^ Prescott S. Bush, Jr. Nndb.com. Retrieved on 2013-07-15.

Further reading

The Prescott Bush Papers are at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

The Greenwich Library Oral History Project has interviews with Prescott Bush, Jr., and Mary Walker.

There is material by and about Bush in the History of the Class of 1917 Yale College (1919) and the supplementary class albums.

John Atlee Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman (1968).

Obituaries are in the Washington Post, October 9, 1972; the New York Times, October 9, 1972; the Hartford Courant, October 9, 1972; and Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1972.

"Prescott Sheldon Bush. "Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.

Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880–1978. New York: Simon and Schuster (1979).

External links

University of Connecticut's profile of Prescott Bush

Prescott Sheldon Bush at the Internet Movie Database

Bush Family Tree

"Prescott Bush". Find a Grave. Retrieved 2009-02-24.

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