Walker's friend Robenational Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis became U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1916. Art Brookings got into Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board as director ofs the
Bolshevik Revolution broke out, we find Bert Walker busy appointing people to Francis's staff in
Petrograd.@s1@s
Walker's earliest activities in relation to the Soviet state are of significant interest to historians,given the activist role he was to play there together with Harriman. But Walker's life is as covert as (^)
the rest of the Bush clan's, and the surviving public record is extremely thin.
The 1919 Versailles peace conference brought together British imperial strategists and their
American friends to make postwar global arrangements. For his own intended internationaladventures, Harriman needed Bert Walker the seasoned intriguer, who quietly represented many of (^)
the British-designated rulers of American politics and finance.
After two persuasion trips west by Harriman,@s1@s3 Walker at length agreed to move to New
York. But he kept his father's summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker
became the bank's president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling
co-owner with his brother Roland ( "Bunny" ), Prescott Bush's close friend from Yale; and Percy
Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor.
In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker's daughter Dorothy.
They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921.@s1@s4 Among the
ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other
fellow Skull and Bonefamily has gathered each summer at the "Walker country home" in Kennebunkportsmen from the Yale Class of 1917.@s1@s5 The Bush-Walker extended, from this
marriage of President Bush's parents down to the present day.
When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co., railroad
equipment suppliers, while his wife's father was building one of the most gigantic businesses in theworld. The following year the couple tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked (^)
for a short time in a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to
Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near there.
Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush--the futureU.S. President--was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.
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 tConnecticut, a suburb bothe young fah of New York and of New Haven/Yale. mily moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich,
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.@s1@s6 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