Arthur Burr Darling, while still head of Andover's history department, was chosen by the
Harrimanites to organize the historical files of the new Central Intelligence Agency, and to write theCIA's own official account of its creation and first years. Since this cynical project was secret,
Darling's 1971 obituary did not reflect his CIA employment.@s2@s5 Darling's The Central
Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 was classified Secret on its completion
in December 1953. For 36 years it was only to be consulted for self-justification by the
Harrimanites. This mercenary work was finally declassified in 1989 aPennsylvania State University in 1990. Subsequent editions of Who Was Who in America werend was published by (^)
changed, in the fashion of Joe Stalin's history revisers, '' to tell the latest, official version of what George Bush's history teacher had done with his life. Crisis Having met his future wife Barbara, Poppy Bush returned from the Christmas holidays after New Year's Day, 1942, for his final months at Andover. The U.S. entry into World War II made things rather awkward for Bush and some of his schoolmates, and cast a dark shadow on his future. Since early 1941, tU.S. firms. This probe centered on the Harriman, Rockefeller, Du Pont and related enterprises,he Justice Department had been investigating the Nazi support apparatus among implicating George's father Prescott, his partners and the Bushes' close family friends. On March 5, 1942--at about the time Poppy Bush and Rocky Rockefeller were contemplating the tortures they would inflict on the Class of 1943 ASenate Investigating the National Defense Program began explosive public hearings in Washington,.U.V. recruits--the Special Committee of the U.S. (^) D.C. The subject: cartel agreements between U.S. and Nazi firms that should be hit with anti-trust actions. Pearl Harbor, the draft of American boys, and these sensational hearings were causing a popular attitude quite dangerous for the higher-level Nazi collaborators (see Chapter 2). But on March 20, 1942, Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War and president of Andover prep's Board of Trustees, sent a memorandum to President Franklin Roosevelt recommending stopping the investigations of the U.S.-Nazi trusts: the resulting lawsuits would unavoidably consume the time
of executives and employees of those corporations which are engaged in war work. '' Stimson got
Navy Secretary Frank Knox and Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold to co-sign the memo.President Roosevelt agreed to Stimson's request, but conceded to Arnold and his antitrust staff that
he would press for extended statutes of limitation to make postwar prosecutions possible.@s2@s6
Stimson's intervention for his friends could not, however, entirely cancel the already ongoing
exposure and prosecution of RocAfter Farish's death, the prosecutions were suspended, but the seizures of Nazi corporate assetskefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey, as we saw in Chapter 4.
continued, and this would soon lead to Prescott Bush and to Grandfather Walker. Could aristocratic
friends be relied upon to prevent scandal or legal trouble from smashing up Poppy's world, and
wrecking his carefully prepackaged golden future?
As George wound up his Andover career, and paid court to Barbara, U.S. government investigators
sifted through the affairs of the Hitler-Harriman-Bush steamship lines, Hamburg-Amerika and
North German Lloyd. Their final report, issued under confidential seal on July 18, 1942, would
show that long-time Harriman-Bush executive Christian J. Beck was still the New York attorney for
the merged Nazi firms. (See Chapter 3 for details and description of sources.)
Seizure orders on the shipping lines would be issued in August. The government would seize other
Nazi assets, still managed by the Bush family, in the autumn. Prescott Bush, legally responsible for
Nazi German banking operations in New York, would have to be named in a seizure order. Could
friends in high places keep all this out of the public eye?