The First World War had brought the little St. Louis oligarchy into the Confederate-slave
owner-oriented administration of President Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Col.
Edward House and Bernard Baruch.
Walker's friend Robert Brookings got into Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board as
director of national Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis became U.S. ambassador to
Russia in 1916. As the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, we find Bert Walker busy
appointing people to Francis's staff in Petrograd.
Walker's earliest activities in relation to the Soviet state are of significant interest to
historians, given the activist role he was to play there together with Harriman. But
Walker's life is as covert as the rest of the Bush clan's, and the surviving public record is
extremely thin.
The 1919 Versailles peace conference brought together British imperial strategists and
their American friends to make postwar global arrangements. For his own intended
international adventures, Harriman needed Bert Walker the seasoned intriguer, who
quietly represented many of the British-designated rulers of American politics and
finance.
After two persuasion trips west by Harriman Walker at length agreed to move to New
York. But he kept his father's summerhouse in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November
- Walker became the bank's president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was
chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland (“Bunny”), Prescott Bush's
close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial
sponsor.
In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker's daughter
Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921.
Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight
Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917. The
Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the "Walker country home"
in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush's parents down to the present
day.
When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co.,
railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife's father was building one of the most
gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to
Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company
owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought
the little family business and moved it near there.
Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush--
the future U.S. President--was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.