Prescott S. Bush

Prescott S. Bush (born May 15, 1895, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.—died October 8, 1972, New York, New York) was an American investment banker, politician, and patriarch of a family that created a Republican political dynasty. Bush represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1952 to 1963. His son George H.W. Bush and grandson George W. Bush were, respectively, the 41st and 43rd U.S. presidents.

The Bush family tree

The Bush family’s roots in the United States extend back to the arrival of the Mayflower (1620). Ancestors include Samuel Prescott, who joined Paul Revere and William Dawes on their ride to warn their fellow colonists of the British march on Lexington and Concord (1775), and War of 1812 veteran Obadiah Bush. The family’s long connection with Yale University dates to the 1840s, when James Smith Bush prepared for the Episcopal ministry there. His son Samuel Prescott Bush successfully guided the fortunes of Buckeye Steel Castings, a railroad equipment manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio, that had the financial backing of John D. Rockefeller’s brother Frank.

The early life of Prescott S. Bush

One of five children of Samuel and Flora Bush, Prescott attended St. George’s School near Newport, Rhode Island, and then matriculated at Yale. Six feet four inches (1.9 metres) tall, handsome, and athletic, he lettered in baseball and golf (he carried his accomplished golf game into later life, serving as president of the U.S. Golf Association in 1935 and winning the national senior championship in 1951 at age 56). He was also renowned as a singer at Yale, where he was a member of the Wiffenpoofs, a prestigious a cappella group. Moreover, Bush was a member of Skull and Bones, Yale’s famous secret society. As a junior, he joined the Connecticut National Guard. Having attended officers training school, Bush became a captain in an army artillery unit when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Reportedly, while training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, he participated in disinterring a skull that was rumoured to be that of Apache leader Geronimo and that was conveyed to the Tomb, the Skull and Bones clubhouse at Yale.

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Once overseas, Bush would take part in the Battles of the Meuse-Argonne, but, before he ever saw combat, he sent home a prank letter in which he claimed to have been honoured for having single-handedly prevented the deaths of French Gen. Ferdinand Foch, British Gen. Douglas Haig, and U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing by batting away an incoming shell with his machete-like bolo knife. Missing the intended cheeky humour of her son’s fantastic boast, Bush’s mother relayed the story to the Ohio State Journal, which unquestioningly reported the incident as factual, as did the New Haven Journal-Courier, ultimately forcing her to publish a retraction letter. The incident was a source of enduring embarrassment for Bush. Some observers pointed to it as a cause of the somber countenance he would thereafter often present to the world and as the origin of his personal motto, “Moderation in all things.”

Business career, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and association with Nazi Germany

After the war, Bush began working for a St. Louis-based wholesale hardware business. In St. Louis he met and courted Dorothy Walker. Her father, George Herbert Walker, had founded one of the Midwest’s first investment banks and became even wealthier heading up the Wall Street investment firm founded by brothers Roland and W. Averell Harriman with money inherited from their father, railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. In 1921 Bush married Dorothy. He then started a company that manufactured rubber flooring, which he soon sold but agreed to continue to manage, moving to Massachusetts to do so. In 1925 he took a position with New York City-based United States Rubber and relocated to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he would establish his family. In 1926 he joined his father-in-law’s investment firm, W.A. Harriman & Company, which in 1930 merged with the British-American banking firm Brown Brothers. Bush became a managing partner in the new company, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH).

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.

Political career and patriarch of presidents

As his nuclear family grew to include five children—sons Prescott Jr., George, Jonathan, and William (“Bucky”) and daughter Nancy—Bush became immersed in local politics, serving as the moderator of the Greenwich Town Meeting for more than 15 years. Reputedly, he set aside his ambitions for higher office until he had met the bills for putting his children through elite private schools. 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.

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Bush’s first forays into statewide Connecticut politics included a stint as finance chairman of the state’s Republican committee during the late 1940s. In 1950 he ran in an interim election for an emptied U.S. Senate seat for Connecticut and lost narrowly (by just 1,102 votes out of more than 850,000 cast) to William Benton. Some two years later, when death opened Connecticut’s other seat in the Senate, Bush triumphed over high-profile rival Clare Boothe Luce in a crowded Republican field to win the right to contest the seat in the general election, which Bush won over Democratic Congressman Abraham Ribicoff. In 1956 Bush defeated Democratic Rep. Thomas J. Dodd to secure a full term of his own.

During his tenure in the Senate, Bush was a steadfast supporter, sometime golfing buddy, and confidant of Republican Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bush shared Eisenhower’s conservative preference for moderate tax cuts, balanced budgets, limited government intervention in the economy, and foreign policy grounded in cooperation with international institutions. Like Eisenhower, he also staked out a strong anticommunist position, but, mostly behind the scenes, he opposed the indiscriminate allegations, unsubstantiated charges, and reactionary investigations of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Bush voted for McCarthy’s censure in 1954, having earlier expressed a “sense of shame” at McCarthy’s conduct, and he introduced a resolution that called for a uniform code of conduct during committee proceedings of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Bush was also a strong advocate for civil rights, and, despite opposing many of the policies of Eisenhower’s Democratic successor as president, John F. Kennedy, Bush supported the founding of the Peace Corps. He chose not to run for reelection in 1962 but took great satisfaction in the political ascent of his son George H.W. Bush, who was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time of his father’s death in 1972 and would rise to the vice presidency under Pres. Ronald Reagan (1981–89). George H.W. Bush ultimately rose to the presidency (1989–93), as did his son George W. Bush (2001–09).