During the summers, the Bushes stayed in a second home on the family's ten-acre spread
at Walker's Point at Kennebunkport, Maine. Flush from the Soviet oil deals and the
Thyssen-Nazi Party arrangements; Grandfather Walker had built a house there for
Prescott and Dorothy. They and other well-to-do summer colonists used Kennebunkport's
River Club for tennis and yachting. In the winter season, they took the train to
Grandfather Walker's plantation, called Duncannon, '' near Barnwell, South Carolina. The novices were instructed in skeet shooting, then went out on horseback, following the hounds in pursuit of quail and dove. George's sister Nancy recalled the care taken '' by
the servants `` over the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. The
most wonderful black servants who would come into the bedrooms early in the morning
and light those crackling pinewood fires...waited us on. ''
The money poured in from the Hamburg-Amerika steamship line, its workforce crisply
regulated by the Nazi Labor Front. The family took yet another house at Aiken, South
Carolina. There the Bush children had socially acceptable `` tennis and riding partners.
Aiken was a Southern capital of polo in those days, a winter resort of considerable
distinction and serenity that attracted many Northerners, especially the equestrian
oriented. The Bush children naturally rode there, too.... '' Averell Harriman, a world-class
polo player, also frequented Aiken.
Poppy Bush's father and mother anxiously promoted the family's distinguished lineage,
and its growing importance in the world. Prescott Bush claimed that he `` could trace his
family's roots back to England's King Henry III, making George a thirteenth cousin, twice
removed of Queen Elizabeth. ''
This particular conceit may be a bad omen for President Bush. The cowardly, acid-
tongued Henry III was defeated by France's Louis IX (Saint Louis) in Henry's grab for
power over France and much of Europe. Henry's own barons at length revolted against
his blundering arrogance, and his power was curbed.
As the 1930s economic crisis deepened, Americans experienced unprecedented hardship
and fear. The Bush children were taught that those who suffered these problems had no
one to blame but themselves.
A hack writer, hired to puff President Bush's `` heroic military background, '' wrote these
lines from material supplied by the White House:
`` Prescott Bush was a thrifty man.... He had no sympathy for the nouveau riches who
flaunted their wealth--they were without class, he said. As a sage and strictly honest
businessman, he had often turned failing companies around, making them profitable
again, and he had scorn for people who went bankrupt because they mismanaged their
money. Young George absorbed Prescott’s lessons.... ''
When he reached the age of five, George Bush joined his older brother Pres in attending
the Greenwich Country Day School. The brothers' `` lives were charted from birth. Their
father had determined that his sons would be ... educated and trained to be members of