colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with million-dollar prizefights;
bookies and their clients pooled more millions, trying to match the pace of the
speculation-crazed stock and bondmen. This was the era of "organized" crime--the
national gambling and bootleg syndicate structured on the New York corporate model.
By 1930, when George was a boy of six, Grandpa Walker was New York State Racing
Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have impressed
little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred racehorses at his own stable,
the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont Park racetrack. Bert also personally
managed most aspects of Averell's racing interests-- down to picking the colors and
fabrics for the Harriman racing gear.
From 1926, George's father Prescott Bush showed a fierce loyalty to the Harrimans and a
dogged determination to advance himself; he gradually came to run the day-to-day
operations of W.A. Harriman & Co. After the firm's 1931 merger with the British-
American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush became managing partner of the
resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This was ultimately the largest and
politically the most important private banking house in America.
Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the fevered
speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped out the small
fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his devotion to the
Harrimans, they "did a very generous thing," as Bush later put it. They staked him to
what he had lost and put him back on his feet.
Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a confidential
interview:
I emphasize ... that the Harrimans showed great courage and loyalty and confidence in us,
because three or four of us were really running the business, the day to day business.
Averell was all over the place in those days ... and Roland was involved in a lot of
directorships, and he didn't get down into the "lift- up-and-bear-down" activity of the
bank, you see-- the day- to-day decisions ... we were really running the business, the day
to day business, all the administrative decisions and the executive decisions. We were the
ones that did it. We were the managing partners, let's say.
But of the "three or four" partners in charge, Prescott was effectively at the head of the
firm, because he had taken over management of the gigantic personal investment funds of
Averell and E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman.
In those interwar years, Prescott Bush made the family fortune, which George Bush
inherited. He piled up the money from an international project, which continued until a
new world war, and the action of the U.S. government, intervened to stop him.