# Prescott Bush **Prescott Sheldon Bush** (May 15, 1895 – Oct 8, 1972) is the **hinge of the [[Bush Family]] dynasty**. He converted its industrial and financial wealth into political office. He also set the template his son [[George H.W. Bush]] and grandson [[George W. Bush]] would follow: Andover, Yale, [[Skull and Bones]], Wall Street, then public service. ## Formation Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of steel-castings executive [[Samuel P. Bush]]. At Yale he was tapped for Skull and Bones, and in World War I he served as a field-artillery captain in the American Expeditionary Forces, coming under fire in the Meuse–Argonne. In 1921 he married [[Dorothy Walker Bush]], daughter of the financier [[George Herbert Walker]]. Walker brought him into the Harriman orbit, and he became a partner at **[[Brown Brothers Harriman]]** when the firm was formed in 1931. ## The Union Banking Corporation Bush was a founding director of the **Union Banking Corporation**, a New York bank housed in BBH's offices, and held one of its 4,000 shares. UBC did business only for, and was owned by, a Dutch bank controlled by the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early financier of the Nazi party. On **Oct 20, 1942**, the government seized UBC under the **[[Trading with the Enemy Act]]**, along with affiliated firms. What is established and what is not: - **Established** (National Archives vesting orders; *The Guardian*, 2004): Bush was a director and shareholder of companies that were seized as fronts for Thyssen interests. - **Not established:** any sympathy for Nazism. The *Guardian* investigation itself says "there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause." - **Contested:** a widely repeated $1.5 million payout figure is undocumented, and claimed links to forced labor through Consolidated Silesian Steel are ambiguous. - **The lawsuit:** two Holocaust survivors, Kurt Julius Goldstein and Peter Gingold, sought $40 billion from the U.S. government and the Bush family. A federal court dismissed the suit on state-sovereignty grounds; the year of dismissal is not confirmed by a reliable source. The episode belongs in the vault as a case study in how Wall Street's interwar German business was handled. The firm's partners kept their positions and their reputations. It does not belong as evidence of a family ideology. ## The Senate - **1947:** treasurer of Planned Parenthood's first national fundraising campaign. Opponents used it against him three years later. - **1950:** lost his first Senate race to William Benton by **1,102 votes**. - **1952:** won a special election over Abraham Ribicoff and served from **Nov 4, 1952 to Jan 3, 1963**. - **Dec 2, 1954:** voted to censure [[Joseph McCarthy]], on a 67–22 Senate vote. - **1962:** chose not to run again. He died in 1972. As a senator he was a moderate [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] Republican, part of the Northeastern establishment wing that the Goldwater movement spent the 1960s displacing. ## Why he matters Prescott Bush is the starting point for two arguments the vault tracks: - **The dynasty.** He shows how financial wealth becomes inherited political office. - **The ideology.** His moderate Republicanism (Planned Parenthood, the McCarthy censure) is a reminder that the dynasty began in the wing of the party the modern right defines itself against. The family's later politics moved with the party, not ahead of it. ## See also - [[Bush Family]] · [[George H.W. Bush]] · [[George W. Bush]] · [[Samuel P. Bush]] · [[George Herbert Walker]] · [[Dorothy Walker Bush]] - [[Brown Brothers Harriman]] · [[Skull and Bones]] · [[Trading with the Enemy Act]] - [[Joseph McCarthy]] · [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] · [[Republican Party]]