Bert Walker had arranged a "marriage" of J.P. Morgan credit and Harriman family
inherited wealth.
W.A. Harriman & Co., of which Walker was president and founder, was merging with
the Morton & Co. private bank--and Walker was " prominent in the affairs of Morton &
Co.," which was interlocked with the Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust Co.
The Hamburg-Amerika takeover created an effective instrument for the manipulation and
fatal subversion of Germany. One of the great "merchants of death," Samuel Pryor, was
in it from the beginning. Pryor, then chairman of the executive committee of Remington
Arms, helped arrange the deal and served with Walker on the board of Harriman's
shipping front organization, the American Ship and Commerce Co.
Walker and Harriman took the next giant step in 1922, setting up their European
headquarters office in Berlin. With the aid of the Hamburg-based Warburg bank, W.A.
Harriman & Co. began spreading an investment net over German industry and raw
materials.
From the Berlin base, Walker and Harriman then plunged into deals with the new
dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They led a select group of Wall Street and British
Empire speculators who re-started the Russian oil industry, which had been devastated by
the Bolshevik Revolution. They contracted to mine Soviet manganese, an element
essential to modern steelmaking. These concessions were arranged directly with Leon
Trotsky, and then with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet dictatorship's secret
intelligence service (K.G.B), whose huge statue was finally pulled down by pro-
democracy demonstrators in 1991.
These speculations created both channels of communication, and the style of
accommodation, with the communist dictatorship, that have continued in the family down
to President Bush.
With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to satisfy his
passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected president of the U.S. Golf
Association in 1920. He negotiated new international rules for the game with the Royal
and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. After these talks he contributed the
three-foot-high silver Walker Cup, for which British and American teams have since
competed every two years.
Bert's son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association, during
the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott became USGA
President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family firm's work with Nazi
Germany.
When George was one year old, in 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman headed a
syndicate, which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of Sport. Walker
was at the center of New York's gambling scene in its heyday, in that Prohibition era of