corporations which are engaged in war work. '' Stimson got Navy Secretary Frank Knox
and Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold to co-sign the memo. President
Roosevelt agreed to Stimson's request, but conceded to Arnold and his antitrust staff that
he would press for extended statutes of limitation to make postwar prosecutions possible.
Stimson's intervention for his friends could not, however, entirely cancel the already
ongoing exposure and prosecution of Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey, as we
saw in Chapter 4. After Farish's death, the prosecutions were suspended, but the seizures
of Nazi corporate assets continued, and this would soon lead to Prescott Bush and to
Grandfather Walker. Could aristocratic friends be relied upon to prevent scandal or legal
trouble from smashing up Poppy's world, and wrecking his carefully prepackaged golden
future?
As George wound up his Andover career, and paid court to Barbara, U.S. government
investigators sifted through the affairs of the Hitler-Harriman-Bush steamship lines,
Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd. Their final report, issued under confidential
seal on July 18, 1942, would show that long-time Harriman-Bush executive Christian J.
Beck was still the New York attorney for the merged Nazi firms. (See Chapter 3 for
details and description of sources.)
Seizure orders on the shipping lines would be issued in August. The government would
seize other Nazi assets, still managed by the Bush family, in the autumn. Prescott Bush,
legally responsible for Nazi German banking operations in New York, would have to be
named in a seizure order. Could friends in high places keep all this out of the public eye?
Along about this time, something was going very wrong with the secret societies at
Andover prep school.
Andover's historian, as quoted above, affirmed that `` until the Society crisis of the 1940s,
A.U.V. continued strong and successful. '' But a few months after Poppy Bush and Rocky
Rockefeller left the school, Headmaster Fuess and his trustees announced they were
closing and banning the secret societies forever. This set off a storm of controversy.
Bush's A.U.V. had been humiliating students and teaching anti-Christian rituals since
- Fuess was himself a member of one of the Societies. What had happened, to
precipitate this drastic decision?
The great Society crisis at Andover was highly charged, because so many of the alumni
and parents of current students were leaders of government and finance. An ugly scandal
there would reverberate around the world. Whatever really prompted the closedown
decision was kept a tight secret, and remains wrapped in mystery today, a half-century
later.
Headmaster Fuess claimed that an event, which happened nine years earlier, had moved
him to the decision.