Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that "Bunny" Harriman stepped in to rescue
his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber
Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to
grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.
Then on May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its vice president,
under the bank's president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and George's maternal
grandfather--the head of the family.
The Great Game
Prescott Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in 1926. And the
bank, with the scope and power of many ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents.
George Bush's Grandfather Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly,
using all the international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the
beginning of the Harriman firm--the Bush family enterprise--and follow its course into
one of history's darkest projects.
The firm's first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into Germany by
dominating that country's shipping. Averell Harriman announced in 1920 that he would
re-start Germany's Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months of scheming and arm-
twisting. Hamburg-Amerika's commercial steamships had been confiscated by the United
States at the end of the First World War. These ships had then become the property of the
Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements with the U.S. authorities that were never
made public.
The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world's largest private shipping line.
Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a heavy price. The Harriman
enterprise took "the right to participate in 50 percent of all business originated in
Hamburg" ; and for the next twenty years (1920-1940), the Harriman enterprise had
"complete control of all activities of the Hamburg line in the United States."
Harriman became co-owner of Hamburg-Amerika. The Harriman-Walker firm gained a
tight hold on its management, with the not-so-subtle backing of the post-World War I
occupation of Germany by the armies of England and America.
Just after Harriman's public statement, the St. Louis press celebrated Bert Walker's role in
assembling the money to consummate the deal:
"Ex-St. Louisiana Forms Giant Ship Merger"
"G. H. Walker is Moving Power Behind Harriman-Morton Shipping Combine...."
The story celebrated a "merger of two big financial houses in New York, which will
place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of the new American-German shipping
combine...."