The Honorable W.A. Harriman,The White House,
Washington, D.C.
Dear Averell:
I was sorry to miss you in Washington but appreciate your cordial note.
I shall hope for better luck another time. I hope you had a good rest at Hobe Sound.
With affectionate regard, I am,
Sincerely yours,Pres [signed]
Prescott S. Bush.
A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of
covert operations, and psychological warfare. '' Harriman, together with his lawyers and businesspartners, Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad. This would supposedly ensure a stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American financial and political interests. The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite eugenics movement in North Carolina following World War II (see Chapter 3). Gordon Gray was an avid Anglophile, whose father had gotten controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company through alliance with the British Imperial Tobacco cartel's U.S. representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray, Jr., was also a Naval Intelligence officer, known around Washington as the
founder of opePrescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of hisrational intelligence. '' Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of (^)
covert policy.
But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was, constituted an obstacle to the covert warriors.
An insular Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution, he remained skepticalabout secret service activities that reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo.
So, `` covert operations '' could not fully take off without a change of the Washington regime. And
it was with the Republican Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics in 1950, as his partners took control of
the levers of governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers Harriman, he ran against
Connecticut's William Benton for a seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was for a two-year unexpired
term, left empty by the death of the previous Senator.)
In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was making a circus-like crusade
against communist influence in Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State
Department personnel, politicians and Hollywood figures. He generally left unscathed the Wall
Street and London strategists who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist dictatorship--
like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left and right.