Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator with close personal and business ties to old
E.H. Harriman, ran the War Industries Board. Baruch's brokerage firm had handled
Harriman speculations of all kinds. In 1918, Samuel Bush became director of the
Facilities Division of the War Industries Board. Prescott's father reported to the Board's
Chairman, Bernard Baruch, and to Baruch's assistant, Wall Street private banker Clarence
Dillon.
Robert S. Lovett, President of Union Pacific Railroad, chief counsel to E.H. Harriman
and executor of his will, was in charge of national production and purchase "priorities"
for Baruch's board.
With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board,
U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and
certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S.
Senator Gerald Nye attacked the "Merchants of Death" -- war profiteers such as
Remington Arms and the British Vickers company --whose salesmen had manipulated
many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them.
Percy Rockefeller and Samuel Pryor's Remington Arms supplied machine guns and Colt
automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over half of the small-arms
ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I; and 69 percent of the
rifles used by the United States in that conflict.
Samuel Bush's wartime relationship to these businessmen would continue after the war,
and would especially aid his son Prescott's career of service to the Harrimans.
Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush's arms- related section of the
government have been burned, "to save space" in the National Archives. This matter of
destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to citizens of a constitutional
republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant impediment with regard to researching
George Bush's background: He is certainly the most "covert" American chief executive.
Now, arms production in wartime is by necessity carried on with great security
precautions. The public need not know details of the private lives of the government or
industry executives involved, and a broad interrelationship between government and
private sector personnel is normal and useful.
But during the period preceding World War I, and in the war years 1914-1917 when the
U.S. was still neutral, interlocking Wall Street financiers subservient to British strategy
lobbied heavily, and twisted U.S. government and domestic police functions. Led by the
J.P. Morgan concern, Britain's overall purchasing agent in America, these financiers
wanted a world war and they wanted the United States in it as Britain's ally. The U.S. and
British arms companies, owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons
abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The same
gentlemen, as we shall see, later supplied weapons and money to Hitler's Nazis.