Alfred Mendes outlines the history of America's beloved First Family and some of their choice friends.

1897: Long-established Union Pacific Railroad (UPR) bankrupted.

1898: Edward Henry Harriman & legal partner, Judge Robert Scott Lovett, buy UPR for $110 million, a deal brokered by New York-based Kuhn Loeb investment bank house, of which Felix Warburg was a partner.During this period, Samuel Prescott Bush was president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Co.

1914: With war looming, Percy A. Rockefeller took control of the arms manufacturer, Remington Arms & appoints Samuel F. Pryor as CEO.

1918: Robert Scott Lovett (above) now president of UPR. Samuel Prescott Bush (above) made director of the facilities division of the US War Industries Board under its chairman Bernard Baruch & his assistant, the banker Clarence Dillon.

Nov.1919: George Herbert Walker forms W.A.Harriman & Co. bank - with Walker as president & chief executive, & Averell Harriman (son of Edward Henry Harriman - above) as chairman (He was to become US Ambassador to the USSR [‘43 - ‘46]; US Secretary of Commerce [‘46 - ‘48]; & Governor of NY State [‘55 - ‘59])

1920: Averell Harriman & George Herbert Walker of W.A.Harriman & C0. gain control of the German Hamburg-Amerika Line after negotiations with the latter’s chief executive, William Cuno, & Max Warburg of the shipping line’s bankers, M.M. Warburg. The American holding now known as the American Ship & Commerce Corp. (ASCC). Samuel F. Pryor (above) of Remington Arms had been involved in the deal & now served on the board of ASCC.
(Cuno was subsequently to become a heavy contributor to Nazi Party funds). It should be noted that Averell Harriman was chairman of UPR from 1920-1946.

1922: Averell Harriman set up a branch of W. A. Harriman & Co. in Berlin under the residency of his partner, George H. Walker.

Oct. 1923: Fritz Thyssen’s contributions to the Nazi Party began with a donation of 100,000 marks (ref: his book “I Paid Hitler” ‘41).

Prior to ‘24: As revealed in a US government memorandum dated Oct. 5 ‘42 to the Executive Committee of the office of the Alien Property Custodian: “W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 & at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist”, and they agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. It adds that the Thyssen agent “H. J. Kouwenhoven..came to the United States..prior to 1924 for
conferences with the Harriman company in this connection”.

1924: W.A.Harriman & Co invested $400,000 in setting up Union Banking Corp. (UBC) in New York to act in partnership with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvart (Bank for Trade and Shipping, BHS) in Holland. The UBC was now in a position to transfer funds back & forth between the US and Thyssen’s companies in Germany - his Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel) in particular. Prescott Sheldon Bush Snr. (son of Samuel Bush, & son-in-law of George H Walker) joins the Harriman - controlled US Rubber Co.

1926: Prescott S. Bush Snr. made Vice-President of W. A. Harriman & Co. The Wall Street banker, Clarence Dillon (an old colleague of Prescott S.  Bush Snr.’s father, Sam Bush - see above), of Dillon Read, set up the German Steel Trust with Thyssen & partner, Friedrich Flick, whereby Dillon Read would handle the Trust’s corporate banking in return for two Dillon
Read representatives being on the board of the German Steel Trust, whose chief executive was Albert Voegler, another German industrialist who was to help Hitler into power. He (Voegler) also held directorships in the BHS bank, & the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The UBC was by now in partnership with Friedrich Flick’s vast steel, coal &  zinc conglomerate operating in Germany & Poland - the Silesian Holding Co. Walker, Bush, & Harriman now owned one third of Flick’s conglomerate,  calling their holding the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corp.

1930/’31; As admitted by Fritz Thyssen during interrogation in Sept. ‘45, he arranged with Rudolph Hess for the transfer of “about 250-300,000 marks” via his (Thyssen’s) Dutch bank BHS to the Nazi Party - adding it was “about the sum I’d given before”. In total, he had donated & loaned more than one million dollars to the Nazi Party.

Jan. 1 ‘31: W. A. Harriman & Co. merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, resulting in Prescott S. Bush Snr., Thatcher M. Brown & the two Harriman brothers being the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. A board member of Brown Bros., Robert A. Lovett (son of Robert Scott Lovett [above] & Asst. Sec. for Air [in WW2]; Under Sec. of State [‘47 - ‘49]; Dep. Sec. of Defense [‘50 - ‘51]; Secretary of Defense [‘51 - ‘53]), an American whose father had served on the War Industries Board of WW 1 with Sam Bush [above]), became another partner in the newly- merged firm. Prescott S. Bush Snr. now ran the New York office of the the newly-merged firm, while Thatcher Brown ran the London end. vCertain pertinent facts about Brown Bros. are worthy of note here: Montagu Collet Norman, governor of the Bank of England & well-known Nazi sympathiser, was not only an ex-Brown Bros. partner - his grandfather had also been boss of Brown Bros. during the American Civil War when they (Brown Bros.) were shipping 75% of slave cotton from the southern states of America to British mills.

1932: As reported by the US embassy in Berlin to Washington not long before Hitler’s taking over of power, questions were being raised as to who were the financial backers behind the Nazi Party electioneering & their 300,000 - 400,000 SA & SS troops - adding that the American-owned Hamburg-Amerika Line was funding propaganda against the German government’s attempts to disband these troops!

Jan. 1933: Hitler assumes power in Germany.

Mar. 7 ‘33: Prescott S. Bush Snr. notified Max Warburg (above) that he (Warburg) was to be the American Ship & Commerce Line official representative on the board of the Hamburg- Amerika Line. Warburg had been a long-time advisor to Hjalmar Schacht (German Economics Minister & a close friend of Montagu Norman), & was an executive in the Reichsbank. A further pertinent connection: Max Warburg’s brothers ran the Kuhn Loeb investment bank, which had handled E. H. Harriman’s buy-out of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1890’s (above).

Mar. 29 ‘33: As revealed in Moshe Gottlieb’s book “American Anti-Nazi Resistance ‘33 - ‘41”, Max Warburg’s son, Erich, cabled his cousin, Frederick Warburg - who was a director of the Union Pacific Railroad - instructing him to use his influence to stop all anti-Nazi propaganda &
activity in America.

Mar. 31 ‘33: As a result: the American-Jewish committee (within which the Warburgs had much influence) & The B’nai B’rith (which subsequently became known as the Anti-Defamation League) issued a joint statement counselling “that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged”!

May. 20. ‘33: As reported in the New York Times: on Hitler achieving power, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht (above) & John Foster Dulles. As a result of this, the Harriman International Co. - under Oliver Harriman (Averell’s first cousin) - formed a syndicate of 150 firms/individuals to conduct all exports from Germany to America. It should be noted here that the two Dulles brothers, partners in the corporate law firm Sullivan &
Cromwell, had acted for many Nazi enterprises during & after this period, including I. G. Farben, developer of the nerve gas, Tabun; SKF, supplier of 60% of its bearings to Germany; & the Schroeder Banking house, of which Allen Welsh Dulles became a director of its New York branch - a post he held until 1944. (Further pertinent details of the Dulles brothers: J. F. Dulles became Secretary of State [‘53 - ‘59]; A. W. Dulles became CIA Deputy Director for Plans [‘51]; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence [‘51 - ‘53]; & Director of CIA [‘53 -’61]).

Sept. 5 ‘33: North German Lloyd Co. merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line in Hamburg.

Nov. 4 ‘33: American Ship & Commerce Corp. (owners of Hamburg-Amerika - see above) installed long-time Harriman executive, Christian Beck as manager of ‘freight & operations’ in North America for this newly-merged company, now known as Hapag-LLoyd, whose chairman was Emil Helfferich, a Nazi. Nazi security guards accompanied all shipping so engaged in this trade.

Sept. ‘34: At the US Senate Nye Committee hearings, it was revealed that Samuel Pryor, executive ctte. chairman of Remington arms & founding director of both the UBC & the American Ship & Commerce Corp., had joined in a cartel agreement with I. G. Farben, the German chemical/armaments conglomerate (see above). It was further revealed that the Nazi troops (noted above) were “nearly all armed with American guns”.

Dec. 7 ‘41: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour - US now in World War 2.

Aug. 28 ‘42: Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the US government - via Leo T. Crowley, the US Alien Property Custodian - ordered the seizure of all property of Hapag-LLoyd.

Oct. 20 ‘42: Leo T. Crowley, the US Alien Property Custodian - seized the stock shares of the Union Banking Corp. of New York, whose shareholders were: Chm./Dir. E. Rowland Harriman (of Brown Brothers Harriman); Pres./Dir. Cornelis Lievense (banking functionary for the Nazis); Treasurer/Dir. Harold D. Pennington (of Brown Brothers Harriman); Dir. Ray
Morris (of Brown Brothers Harriman); Dir. Prescott S. Bush Snr.(of Brown Brothers Harriman); Dir. H.J. Kouwenhoven (Dir./Chief foreign financial exec. of German Steel Trust & the man who had brokered the deal between Fritz Thyssen & the UBC); Dir. Johann G. Groeninger (Industrial Exec. in Nazi Germany). These seized shares were described in the Vesting Order as “shares held for the benefit of members of the Thyssen family, property of nationals.. of a
designated enemy country”.

Oct. 28 ‘42: US government seized 2 Nazi front companies - the Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. & Holland-American Trading Corp. - both run by the UBC.

.Nov. 17 ‘42: Nazi financial interests (only) in Silesian-American Corp. (above) seized, leaving US partners (UBC) “to carry on the business”.

Jul. 2 ‘45: As revealed by the US Treasury Dept. in hearings before a 79th Congress committee: the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (see above) had produced the following proportions of Nazi Germany’s total output: Pig iron 50.8%; Pipe & tubes 45.5%; Universal plate 41.4%; Galvanised sheet 38.5%; Heavy plate 36%; Explosives 35%; Wire 22.1%.

1954: George Herbert Walker Bush Snr. (son of Prescott S. Bush Snr., grandson of Samuel Bush & George Walker - see above) now president of Zapata Offshore (oil drilling company). He had previously joined Dresser Industries & subsequently co-founded the Bush-Overby Development Co. (both in oil).

‘71 - ‘72: George Herbert Walker Bush Snr. made US ambassador to UN.

1972: George Bush Snr. made chairman of the Republican Party National committee.

‘74 - ‘75: In aftermath of President Nixon’s resignation, President Gerald Ford appointed George Bush Snr. to head the US Liaison Office in Beijing

 

Jan. 30 ‘76 - Mar. 9 ‘77: George Bush Snr. Director of CIA.

1979: During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, & as a result of the Sandanista rebellion led by Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza fled the country.

Jan. 20 ‘81: Ronald Reagan now president with George Bush Snr. his Vice-President. Defeat of the left-wing Sandanistas became an immediate aim of the Reagan Administration, & this was to be implemented using secretive methods (which were later to prove illegal) under the control of the Special Situations Group, whose chairman was Vice-President George Bush Snr. (who had wrested this post from Secretary of State Alexander Haig early on). Enter Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North who served on both the Inter-Departmental Group on Terrorism & the Terrorist Incident Working Group - both under Bush. They were to set-up, finance & arm an
anti-Sandanista militia, the Contras, using neighbouring Guatemala as a training ground.

1983: Contras begin offensive against Sandanistas in Nicaragua.

Apr. ‘84: US congress refuses to authorise $24 million aid to Contras requested by Reagan.

Sept. ‘84: The small oil company Arbusto Energy Inc. founded by George Walker Bush Jnr. (eldest son of George H. W. Bush Snr.) in the mid-70’s proves to be an unsuccessful venture & is bought out by another oil company, Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. George W. Bush Jnr. is made president of Spectrum.

Oct. ‘84: Congress cuts off any funding & support to the Contras. John Ellis (‘Jeb’) Bush, the 2nd eldest son of George Bush Snr. - & a real estate developer - had been acting as the Reagan administration’s unofficial link with Contra & Nicaraguan exiles in Miami. He also put the
right-wing Guatemalan politician, Dr. Mario Castejon, in touch with Oliver North, which led to Castejon & Henry Whaley ( a former arms dealer) proposing that the State Department supply medicines, field hospitals & light aircraft to the Contras. This proposal was passed to the CIA via TGS International, a firm owned by Ted Shackley, who had served as Associate
Deputy Director of Operations in the CIA under George Bush Snr. (‘76 -
‘77).

Dec. ‘85: Congress partially lifts ban on Contra aid, & authorises $13 million in aid - plus $27 million for ‘humanitarian’ aid.

1986: Behind-the-scenes machinations of the US Administration becomes public knowledge with the revelation of the illegal ‘Arms for Hostages’ scandal - known as the ‘Iran-Contra affair’. The Spectre 7 Energy Corp. (above) proves to be another unsuccessful venture for George W. Bush Jnr. It is sold to another small oil company,  Harken Energy Corp., a deal whereby the partners in Spectrum received $2 million worth of shares in Harken, & George Bush Jnr. was made director & consultant of the Harken - with the added bonus of $600,000 extra shares.

Oct. ‘86: US Congress lifts remaining ban & authorises £100 million aid to Contras.

1987: In a CBS interview with Jane Wallace, Michael ‘Mickey’ Tolliver, a pilot involved in the trade of drugs, revealed details of one flight he had made involving the Contras: he had flown to Honduras with a cargo of 28.000 lbs of guns & ammunition, & after a 3-day rest there he had returned with a cargo of 25,360 lbs of marijuana - landing at the US Airforce Base in Homestead, Florida, where the cargo was unloaded! He had been paid $75.000.

Mar. 11 ‘88: Robert McFarlane (Reagan’s National Security Advisor ‘83 - ‘85) found guilty of criminal charges of witholding information from Congress about secret aid to the Contras.

Mar. 16 ‘88: John Poindexter (National Security Advisor from ‘85 - ‘86) & Oliver North (National Security Council - see above) both charged with conspiracy to defraud the US Government - but trials delayed.

Late ‘88: US Federal Regulators shut down Silverado Banking Savings & Loan co., due, primarily, to non-repayment of questionable loans they had made. Neil Bush (3rd son of George Bush Snr.) had been director of Silverado from ‘85.

Jan. 20 ‘89: George Bush Snr. inaugurated as president of US.

May ‘89: Oliver North convicted on 3 counts, & in July ‘89 is fined $150,000 - plus a 3-year suspended jail sentence.

June ‘89: President George Bush Snr. imposed economic sanctions on China as a result of Tiananmen Square killings. Soon after these sanctions were imposed, the President’s older brother, Prescott Bush Jnr. of the consultancy firm Prescott Bush Resources, was hired by Asset Management International Financing & Settlement at a fee of $250,000 for consultation re-its (Asset’s) joint venture with China to set up the latter’s internal communications network. (This involved $300 million worth of Hughes Aircraft satellites - a key component of the deal).
Concurrent with this, Prescott Bush Jnr. was also acting as middleman for the buying-out of Asset Management by West Tsusho, a Tokyo-based investment firm controlled by the Inagawakai branch of the Yakuza, the well-known politically influential Japanese Mob. For this he received a $250,000 ‘finder’s fee’ & promised an annual retainer of $250,000 for the next 3
years - as consultant.

Nov. ‘89: US Congress passed additional sanctions specifically barring the export of US satellites to China - unless the president found the sale “in the national interest”.

Dec. 19 ‘89: President George Bush Snr. lifted the sanctions, citing “the national interest”.

1990: Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro Cuban, leader of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organisations, who had masterminded many bombings in Cuba & a Cuban airliner over Barbados on October 5th ‘76, had finally been imprisoned in ‘88 in Miami for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbour. He is now paroled after John Ellis Bush has lobbied his
father’s administration for his release from prison.

Jan. ‘90: Somewhat surprisingly for a small company, Harken Energy Corp. clinches a deal with the Gulf State of Bahrain, whereby the latter gives Harken exclusive right for oil & gas exploration. The report of the Office of Thrift Supervision into the failure of Silverado Banking revealed that Neil Bush (see above) had failed to disclose to Silverado Banking (on whose board he sat) his business connections with Ken Good & Bill Walters who had defaulted on $132 million in loans from Silverado.  Good had given Neil Bush a $100,000 loan to invest in the commodities market. Neil Bush had Silverado write a letter of recommendation to Argentina, where Good International - in partnership with Neil Bush’s oil company JNB Exploration (which he had founded in ‘83) - was exploring for gas & oil. Bill Walters had
contributed $150,000 to the initial capitalisation of JNB, and - through his bank Cherry Creek National Bank -had extended a $1.5 million line of credit to JNB (from which he, Bush, had drawn a salary of $500,000 over the next 5 years).

Apr. 7 ‘90: John Poindexter convicted on 5 counts, & sentenced to 6 months imprisonment - but convictions of both North & Poindexter subsequently ‘set aside’.

June 22 ‘90: George W. Bush Jnr. sold $848,560 of his Harken shares - & one week later the company announces a $23 million loss for the past quarter, & loses a further 60% of its value over the following 6 months. As the ‘News & World Report’ noted at the time: Bush Jnr. had recently been appointed by Harken to study the possible economic restructuring of the company!

Aug. 2 ‘90: Iraq invades Kuwait.

Mar. ‘91: Asset Management (see above) goes bankrupt, & the following year West Tsusho filed a $2.5 million suit against Prescott Bush Jnr. for not protecting their $5 million investment in Asset Management.

Apr.19 ‘91: US Government declared Neil Bush a bankrupt & imposed sanctions on him for violating ‘conflict of interest’ rules.

1992: Caspar W. Weinberger (Secretary of Defense ‘81 - ‘87) indicted on 5 counts of lying to Congress.

Dec. 24 ‘92: President George Bush Snr., having just been defeated by Clinton, pardons all those principal players (above) in the Iran-Contra scandal.

1998: George W. Bush Jnr. governor of Texas (for the second time); John Ellis (‘Jeb’) Bush governor of Florida.

Jan. 20 ‘2001: George W. Bush inaugurated as president of the USA (with not a little help from his brother ‘Jeb’).