an excerpt from:
Fleshing Out Skull and Bones — Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society
Trine Day
October 2003
www.fleshingoutskullandbones.com
www.trineday.com
For the complete story plus documentation go to: Fleshing Out Skull & Bones — Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society
Prescott Bush, the Union Banking Corporation and The Story
Kris Millegan
©2003
“There’s three things to remember: claim everything, explain nothing, deny everything,” recalled Prescott Bush as to how politics was explained to him by Clare Booth Luce, congresswoman and wife of fellow Bonesman and magazine magnate, Henry Luce. The remarks were recorded in a 1966 interview with Prescott for an oral history project about the Eisenhower Administration by Columbia University.
The Bush political family seems to have taken those words to heart, one example being the story of Prescott’s involvement with the Union Banking Corporation and the financing of Hitler and fascism. Why there has been such a deliberate and hard cover-up of this affair is in no doubt due to its sensitive nature.
The who, what and where of this business is already covered in several of the other articles in this book. Here we will examine the story as it appears today.
The specific allegations about the Union Banking Corporation first surfaced in Antony Sutton’s 1975 book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Sutton at that time did not know about the Order of Skull & Bones. After becoming aware of the Order in 1983 he expanded his writings on the subject in How the Order Creates War and Revolution in 1984, which was later published, with Antony’s three other booklets on The Order of Skull & Bones, together as America’s Secret Establishment in 1986. The charges were articulated again in 1988 in Sutton’s The Two Faces of George Bush.
The mainstream press and establishment historians ignored Sutton’s books and the accusations.
In 1992, Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin authored George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (some chapters are presented in this book), which took the investigations further. They found in U.S. government archives the vesting order seizing the Union Banking Corporation and documented other Harriman/Bush controlled interests that were doing business with the Nazis. Their book was published by Executive Intelligence Review, a Lyndon Laurouche organization, and again the reports were ignored.
John Loftus, a former attorney for the Office of Special Operations prosecuting Nazi war criminals in the US Justice Department also added information about the situation in his 1994 book, The Secret War Against the Jews.
A Dutch producer Daniël De Witt, from Dutch National Television interviewed Sutton, Chaitkin, Tarpley and others in 1996, for a documentary on Skull & Bones that included confirmation from Dutch officials concerning the Union Banking Corporation and its activities in financing Hitler through a Dutch bank, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvart ( Bank for Trade and Shipping). “Original documents of the Amsterdam based International Institute of Social History (Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis) clearly show the connection between the BHS, the August Thyssen Bank from Fritz Thyssen and Harrimans Union Banking Corporation.”
The show — as produced — never aired.* The show was listed in printed schedules and there was a preview in a TV guide but the program was pulled just before being a televised in 1998. Finally in January 2001, a re-edited thirty minute segment of the original eighty minute film was aired plus ten minutes of new footage of interviews of the movie, The Skulls, writer and director.
With the advent and growth of the Internet and its ability to by-pass the mainstream media editorial bottleneck there was a growing awareness of the Nazi-Bush financial connections. Newspaper reporter Michael Kranish finally made the accusations public through a mainstream press article in the Boston Globe that became the story about the charges. A front-page article headlined Triumphs, Troubles Shape Generations, ran on April 23, 2001. The story was told in first three paragraphs.
The story:
Prescott Bush was surely aghast at a sensational article the New York Herald Tribune splashed on its front page in July 1942.
“Hitler’s Angel Has 3 Million in US Bank,” read the headline above a story reporting that Adolf Hitler’s financier had stowed the fortune in Union Banking Corp., possibly to be held for “Nazi bigwigs.” Bush knew all about the New York bank: He was one of its seven directors. If the Nazi tie became known, it would be a potential “embarrassment,” Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman worried, explaining to government regulators that their position was merely an unpaid courtesy for a client. The situation grew more serious when the government seized Union’s assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the sort of action that could have ruined Bush’s political dreams.
As it turned out, his involvement wasn’t pursued by the press or political opponents during his Senate campaigns a decade later. But the episode may well have been one of the catalysts for a dramatic change in his life. Just as the Union Banking story broke, Bush volunteered to be chairman of United Service Organizations, putting himself on the national stage for the first time. He traveled the country raising millions of dollars to help boost the morale of US troops during World War II, enhancing his stature in a way that helped him get elected US senator. A son and grandson would become presidents.
The next fifty plus paragraphs extolled Prescott’s liberal virtues, proclaimed him to be “akin to the Kennedys” and mentions Prescott’s membership in the Yale singing group the Whiffenpoofs, but failed to inform about his membership in the Order of Skull & Bones.
Alexandra Robbins, a member of Yale’s second oldest senior secret society Scroll & Key, used the story in 2002 to deflect the charges in her faux exposé of the Order of Skull & Bones, Secrets of the Tomb:
Nor was it Skull and Bones that specifically instructed members to aid Adolf Hitler, though Hitler’s financier stowed $3 million in the Union Banking Corporation, a bank that counted among its seven directors Prescott Bush.
That’s it. That is Ms. Robbins complete comment on the subject of the Union Banking Corporation, financing of Hitler and the Order of Skull & Bones. No mention about the American Ship and Commerce Company, Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, Hamburg-Amerika Lines, Harriman Fifteen Corporation, Harriman International Company, Holland-American Trading Company, Steamless Steel Corporation or the Silesian-American Corporation, companies of which Brown Brothers Harriman were involved and all of which were enmeshed with Hitler’s rise to power. No mention that under the Trading with the Enemy Act many of these companies were seized and were placed at the US Office of Alien Property Custodian. No mention that the Union Banking Corporation was established in August 1924 with George Herbert Walker serving as president and working out of the offices of W. A. Harriman and Company. No mention that in 1932, four out of the eight bank directors were members of the Order of Skull & Bones. No mention that, in the fall of 1942 when Union Banking Corporation was taken over by the government, that a total of three out of seven directors were members of the Order and that a fourth director was an employee of Brown Brothers Harriman — effectively giving Brown Brothers Harriman voting control. No mention that while there were many other non-Bones personnel in partnership at Brown Brothers Harriman, none of them were directors of Union Banking, only Bones partners were on the Union Banking Corporation board. The only exception being not another partner but a Brown Brothers Harriman employee. No mention that two of the other directors have been identified as Nazis. There was no mention of published accounts such as “[a] 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker’s Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide-range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States;” or that in June of 1936 “[i]nstead of divesting of the Nazi money, [Prescott] Bush hired a lawyer to hide his assets. The lawyer he hired … was Allen Dulles.” Was it because Ms. Robbins didn’t do her homework — or was she just advancing the story?
The story next gets extended and massaged in Mickey Herskowitz’s craftily written just released 2003 biography of Prescott Bush, Duty, Honor, Country:
In everyone’s life there is a summer of ‘42; Prescott Bush spent his on Wall Street, where nostalgia and romance are not the hot commodities they were in the motion picture that made the phrase symbolic.
A headline that landed on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune in July of that year read: “Hitler’s Angel Has 3 Million in U.S. Bank.” The reference was to the Union Banking Corporation. Prescott may have been upset or alarmed by the disclosure — he was one of its seven directors. A person of less established ethics would have been panicked.
The story claimed that the bank held $3 million in deposits for a German businessman, described as a “financier” for Adolf Hitler. There was speculation that the account may have been intended for the later use of “Nazi bigwigs.”
Buried in the databases that dealt with the Bush family political tradition, the article was rediscovered and reported in the Boston Globe, in April 2001, by Michael Kranish. He concluded in the article that the connection had represented a potential “embarrassment” for Prescott. No one actually knew what purpose the fortune had been meant to serve, or who controlled it. Possibly, the money had been socked away as a hedge against Germany’s defeat.
Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was “an unpaid courtesy for a client. The situation,” wrote Kranish, “grew more serious when the government seized Union’s assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the sort of action that could have ruined Bush’s political dreams.” The phrase was an ominous one.
The client was believed to be a friend of Charles Lindbergh, according to Roland Harriman. Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill.
A decade later when he ran for the Senate, his involvement in the bank went untouched by the press or his political opponents.
Earlier that year he had accepted the chairmanship of the USO (United Service Organizations.) He traveled the country over the next two years raising millions for the National War Fund and, as the Boston Globe noted, “putting himself on the national stage for the first time ... (and) boosting the morale of U.S. troops.” Out of adversity good things came.
Again the other companies are conveniently ignored and new facts appear out of thin air and a theme is laid down. Mr. Herskowitz doesn’t cite any known sources for this new information. He cites the Kranish article but does not cite the Herald-Tribune or any other contemporaneous accounts; he says he had access to 46-hours of taped interviews and scrapbooks from the Bush family and mentions archives at the University of Connecticut. So we do not know where he gathered this particular new information. We do know that it is incorrect and misleading.
Let us examine the story:
First off the Herald-Tribune article didn’t appear in July of 1942 it was actually printed in July of 1941. The article itself proved to be quite the challenge to find. I talked with several different researchers and none had been able to find it, although spending hours looking at microfilm. Since, there was never a complete date given, just July, 1942, researchers were having to look at the whole month of July and when it wasn’t found there, began looking in June and August.
In a July 2003, call to Mr. Kranish at the Globe I was told that “several other people” had called him telling him that they were “unable to find it.” That there wasn’t a complete date reference on the Herald-Tribune article because the article — he had found it in an “archive of archives” — was cut out and there was not a full date just a month and year. He said he was sure it was July 1942. I asked Mike, if it was a special edition and if I could find out where this archive was? He said, “The Herald-Tribune doesn’t exist anymore and it is hard to find, you are just going to have to take my word for it. The story definitely appeared.” He then excused himself as being busy, that he had written the story over two years ago and he needed to go.
Well, we have found proof that the article did indeed appear — in July of 1941. First we found on Alex Jones’ infowars.com website an article from the July 31, 1941, Zanesville Signal in Ohio. The Thyssen/Union Banking news story was in an INS (International News Service) wire report, which says that it was “disclosed today in a news story in the New York Journal American. We then found, at ancestry.com, an AP wire report in the Sheboygan Press, a Wisconsin newspaper of August 1, 1941 which stated: “The Herald-Tribune said Thursday [July, 31, 1941], that Fritz Thyssen, German industrialist credited with helping finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, ‘has $3,000,000 in American cash salted away in the bank vaults of downtown New York.’” Armed with the correct date, we were then able to find both the New York Herald-Tribune and New York Journal American stories. The articles are presented in full later in this chapter.
So, big deal, what difference does a year make? Well, let’s see — in July of 1941 — when the article was really printed, there was no declared war, and the story allows the rehabilitation of Prescott’s honor by allowing him to “enhance his stature” before the revealing newspaper article, instead of after. The truth of the matter, that Prescott was possibly running for cover in February 1942, by serving as the national chairman of USO, is not broached and the scandal is covered-up.
What “embarrassment” Prescott may have felt isn’t known. The incident isn’t discussed in his oral history interviews nor were there any contemporaneous news articles except for the one flurry in July/August 1941 and the articles that mention his name do so without any personal comments. Neither establishment historians nor the mainstream media have dealt with the episode in any depth. Sutton’s works and others have been quietly ignored for years, it is only the power of the Internet that has brought forth the story.
In the History Of The Class Of 1917 Yale College, Volume V — Twenty-Fifth Record printed in 1942, Prescott proudly proclaims his directorship of the Union Banking Corporation, listing it third behind CBS and The Dresser Manufacturing Company and ahead of six other substantial companies. He had been on the bank’s board since 1934, his father-in-law was a founder and had been the bank’s president. It really wasn’t a bank per sé, but acted has a holding company for Thyssen, the German Steel Trust and its related components in their dealings with American industrial and financial markets. It allowed the Thyssen interests to raise money, sell and buy goods in America and then use Union Banking Corporation as their reciprocal bank to transfer monies back and forth.
And the theme of poor ol’ diligent, naïve Prescott and partners being flummoxed by Charles Lindbergh into such a position of “embarrassment” — is unfounded blame-shifting. The statements by Mr. Herskowitz of “[n]o one actually knew for what purpose the fortune had been meant to serve, or who controlled it” and ”that the account [was] opened in late 1930’s” are incorrect and disingenuous at best. The bank had working relations with the Thyssen interests since the 1920’s and Prescott would have had access to information concerning business. Prescott had been a director of the bank since the early 1930s and he was “running the business” at Brown Brothers Harriman at the time of the scandal. In Prescott’s own words, from the Columbia University oral history: “… the partners, like myself and Knight Wooley, who became — certainly after Lovett went to Washington in 1940 — from then on, we were really running the business, the day to day business, all the administrative decisions and the executive decisions. We were the ones that did it.”
The Union Banking Corporation was capitalized at $400,000 (most of the stock held by Roland Harriman) and acted as a repository for Thyssen’s funds earned in the United States. Tarpley and Chaitkin have written that government investigators reported “the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception [1924] handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank for Thyssen interests for American investment.” Averell Harriman had been in Berlin in 1922 establishing a “Berlin Branch of W. A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker’s presidency” at which time he “became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen.”
In the 1941 articles it was reported that Union Baking Corporation’s three million in funds had been frozen in May of 1940 and that the three million dollars, came from “organizations [that] did a thriving business rolling-up dollars.” There were four and a half billion dollars in “foreign assets frozen by the US Government since Adolf Hitler’s armies began overrunning Europe” in US banks. Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian and French assets were frozen in 1940 — after the Nazis occupied those countries. German assets were frozen June 14, 1941.
President Roosevelt ordered Axis funds in the United States frozen. In view of the unlimited national emergency declared by the President, … The Executive Order is designed, among other things, to prevent the use of the financial facilities of the United States in ways harmful to national defense and other American interests, to prevent the liquidation in the United States of assets looted by duress or conquest, and to curb subversive activities in the United States. Bulletin, p. 718. See also Vol. 6, Federal Register, p. 2897 (http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/4106int.htm)
So had an intrepid reporter, tracking down leads about frozen assets uncovered the story? Or was it some sort of controlled leakage? Over a third of the article consists of the letters to and from the Superintendent of Banks, Sate of New York which give some “patriotic” cover for the Brown Brothers Harriman partners. The article also sets out doctored facts, some in the bold subheads, such as “Enlisted Harriman in 1925, that is even contradicted in the newsstory. The theme of the Herald-Tribune article is a “chance” meeting, that it may be or not be that bad or duped Thyssen’s fault, that no compensation was received and how above-board and approved the whole affair is from the governments view. The use of controlled scandal to deflect and cover-up deeper scandal has been used many times in US political life and it sometimes even gets a reporter off an editor’s back. The story runs and is forgotten.
No matter what the reason, the reportage was quietly stifled. With Luce’s Time-Life combine, Harriman’s position at Newsweek and other Bones influenced media such as CBS, the New York Times and others, the scandal was effectively killed as an item of news.
There was no coverage of the Herald -Tribune article’s information on the Thyssen/Union Banking Corporation connection in the national news weeklies, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or even the New York Daily Worker. The afternoon daily, Hearst-owned Journal-American’s article was basically a condensed re-hash of the earlier Herald Tribune articles.
The next known mention of the Union Banking Corporation in the news was the cryptic one sentence in the December 16, 1944 New York Times* financial pages saying that:
The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.
The real story continued to be suppressed. No reportage that the corporation was taken over by the US Government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in the fall of 1942, nor that the address to where Union Banking Corporation was moved was the Office of the Alien Property Custodian.
Maybe that power to suppress, to fabricate, to deny everything and to explain nothing was why Prescott was so blasé and felt no need to hide from his peers his directorship in a company that had already been reported by the New York press to be holding $3 million dollars in Nazi funds, prior to him putting the “bite” on classmates as the National Chairman in Charge of the 1942 Fund Drive for the USO.
The next mention of Thyssen in the news were reviews in newspapers, and in Time, Newsweek and Nation and other magazines of the book, I Paid for Hitler, by Fritz Thyssen. In Bonesman Henry Luce’s Time magazine October 13, 1941 it was reported that a co-writer, Emery Reeves a journalist, who in April of 1940 met with Thyssen in Paris and persuaded Thyssen to go to Monte Carlo with Reeves, “a collaborator and a secretary.” Where Thyssen would “dictate three solid hours every day, then revised and approved the copy.”
In late May 1940. Reeves went “to Paris to check some names and dates.” As the Germans were also on their way to Paris. Reeves left France for Britain on a British destroyer. “He never saw or heard from Thyssen again. After more than a year, it seemed obvious that Thyssen was a captive; for if he were free, he would have communicated with his family in South America. Alive or dead, he was Reeves decided, beyond the power of the book to hurt or help. So Reeves decided to publish.”
The book has Thyssen pounding his head and muttering “‘Ein Dummkopf war ich!’ (What a dumbhead I was’)” and about Thyssen’s financial assistance to Hitler prior to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The Thyssen role in financing Hitler is covered extensively in other chapters, so we will not recount that history here. A new revelation in the book was the novel conspiracy theory that Adolph Hitler was the illegitimate son of Baron Rothschild. I Paid for Hitler was published in New York, by Farrar & Rinehart. Chairman of the Board of Farrar & Rinehart was John Chipman Farrar a member of the 1918 cell of the Order of Skull & Bones. The class that had been tapped by Prescott’s Bones cell. The 1918 Bones cell included US Congressman Malcolm Baldridge, CIA personnel Director F. Trubee Davison, mega-businessman Artemus Gates and the then, in 1941, Asst. Secretary of War and Brown Brothers Harriman partner Robert A Lovett. They had all been part of the famous Palm Beach, Florida, Yale WW I flying unit.
John C Farrar during WW II was a member of the Psychological Warfare Branch in the Office of War Information and was an editor for some of the OWI propaganda publications.
After the war, Thyssen “denied authorship” of I Paid for Hitler. Was there more to the book than met the eye? Was I Paid for Hitler created to confuse and possibly rehabilitate certain individuals and diffuse and confuse situations in the war-charged American atmosphere of the early 1940s? Similar to Bonesman Luce’s Life magazine reversing the Zapruder film frame of the JFK murder so as to accommodate the physics of the official story of that action.
You have got to be willing to do a lot of things furtively and secretly, to bring about a situation that will accomplish what you want to have accomplished. — Prescott Bush, speaking about the intelligence services in his oral history, done by Columbia University.
Prescott definitely understood this and it seems as though he and Brown Brothers Harriman was trying to keep the scandal in the dark — before some newshound broke the soon to be squashed news — because in the July 31, 1941, New York Herald-Tribune it says that seven months before, in January of 1941, Brown Brothers Harriman partner and Bonesman, Knight Wooley had written to the NY State Banking Board Superintendent that “[s]hould the United States enter the war, they [the Union Banking Corporation American directors] felt they might be under some embarrassment, … .”
Kept in the dark it was and Prescott won a special election in 1952, after the death of a sitting Senator, to serve as a US Senator from Connecticut. General Dwight Eisenhower, whom Prescott in November of 1951, had urged to run for the Republican party nomination for President of the US was also elected. Prescott golfed with President Eisenhower often, and spent a half-hour alone with him on Ike’s last day as President.
Senator Bush served on the Banking Committee, many times as a contact person for World Bank and Federal Reserve officials, who sometimes looked for more casual places to do business than the Senate committee rooms. In his second term — protecting his state’s interests — Prescott also served as a member of the Armed Service Committee. For years Connecticut had received more per capita of the defense dollar than any other state earning itself the sobriquet, the “Arsenal of Democracy.” That the Military-Industrial Complex began in Connecticut in the 1800s is relevant … but another tale.
Prescott was a member of two private clubs in Washington, the Alibi Club and the Alfalfa Club. Every presidential election season, the Alfalfa Club nominates one of its members in jest to run for President of the United States. In January 1959 Senator Bush was the nominee for Alfalfa Party. His acceptance speech was recorded and a transcript was included, by the Senator’s request, in his oral history given to Columbia University. In this speech Prescott says:
I recall here the immortal words of Granville Rice, when he wrote:
The rules of life apply the same
To any sport you choose
It matters not how you play the game,
So long as you never lose.
Prescott Bush retired from the Senate in 1962, returning to his work at Brown Brothers Harriman. He passed away in October of 1972. Antony Sutton didn’t write his book about the Order of Skull & Bones and the Union Banking Corporation’s involvement with financing Hitler until 1984. The story and Prescott’s defense didn’t appear till April 2001, just before his Bonesman grandson’s selection to serve as the President of the United States.
Prescott never heard the story. Do we wonder … what he would have said?
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For the complete story plus documentation go to: Fleshing Out Skull & Bones — Investigations into America's Most Powerful Secret Society
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