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Prescott Bush

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Prescott Sheldon Bush
United States Senator from Connecticut
In office
November 5, 1952 – January 2, 1963
Preceded byWilliam A. Purtell
Succeeded byAbraham A. Ribicoff
Personal details
Born(1895-05-15)May 15, 1895
Columbus, Ohio
DiedOctober 8, 1972(1972-10-08) (aged 77)
New York City
NationalityAmerican
Political partyRepublican
SpouseDorothy Walker Bush
ChildrenPrescott Bush, Jr.
George H.W. Bush
Nancy Walker Bush Ellis
Jonathan Bush
William H.T. Bush
Alma materYale University
Signature
Military service
Branch/serviceUnited States Army
UnitAmerican Expeditionary Forces
Battles/warsWorld War I

Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895– October 8, 1972) was a Wall Street executive banker, and a United States Senator representing Connecticut from 1952 until January 1963. He was the father of George H. W. Bush, 41st President of the United States and the grandfather of George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States.

Early life

Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Samuel Prescott Bush and Flora Sheldon Bush. Samuel Bush was a railroad executive, then a steel company president, and, during World War I, also a federal government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major weapons contractors.

Bush attended St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale University, where his grandfather James Smith Bush, class of 1844, and his uncle Robert E. Sheldon Jr., class of 1904, had matriculated. Three subsequent generations of the Bush family have been Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity and Skull and Bones secret society. George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush are also members of that society.

Prescott Bush played varsity golf, football, and baseball, and was president of the Yale Glee Club.

Military service

After graduation, Bush served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France, and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, Bush came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Business career

After his discharge in 1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Bushes moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1923, where Prescott Bush briefly worked for the Hupp Products Company. In November 1923 he became president of sales for Stedman Products in South Braintree, Massachusetts. During this time, he lived in a Victorian home at 173 Adams Street in Milton, Massachusetts, where his son, George H.W. Bush, was born.

In 1924, Bush became vice-president of A. Harriman & Co. His father-in-law, George Herbert Walker also worked with the company, as did E. Roland Harriman and Knight Woolley, Bush's Yale classmates and fellow Bonesmen. In 1931, Bush became a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which was created through the 1931 merger of A. Harriman & Co with Brown Bros. & Co. (a merchant bank founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1818) and with Harriman Brothers & Co. (established in New York City in 1927).

In 1925, Bush joined the United States Rubber Company of New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. He was an avid golfer, and in 1935 named head of the USGA.[1]

From 1944 to 1956, Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. Bush was on the board of directors of CBS, having been introduced to chairman William S. Paley around 1932 by his close friend and colleague William Averell Harriman, who became a major Democratic Party power-broker.

Union Banking Corporation

Bush was one of seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation, an investment bank controlled by the Thyssen family.[2] Thyssen was arrested by the Nazis in 1938.[3] In October 1942 the United States seized the bank under the Trading with the Enemy Act and held the assets for the duration of World War II.[2]

Some conspiracy theorists have used the Union Banking connection to allege Bush ties with the Nazis;[2] Joe Conason has criticized these claims, saying that Bush's involvement with UBC was purely commercial and that he was not a Nazi sympathizer.[4] The Anti-Defamation League[3] and historian Herbert Parmet[5] have also refuted the conspiracy theory.

United States Senator

Bush was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. Bush was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

File:Prescott Bush and Eisenhower 1.jpg
Bush with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office.

From 1947 to 1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A columnist in Boston said that Bush "is coming on to be known as President Truman's Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn't a Chinaman's chance."[6] Bush's ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Benton by only 1,000 votes.

Bush sought a rematch with Benton in 1952, but withdrew as the party turned to William Purtell. The death of Senator Brien McMahon later that year however created a vacancy and this time Republicans nominated Bush.[7] Bush defeated the Democratic nominee, Abraham Ribicoff, and was elected to the Senate. A staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bush served until January 1963. He was reelected in 1956 with 55 percent of the vote over Democrat Thomas J. Dodd (later U.S. Senator from Connecticut and father of the recent U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Christopher J. Dodd), and decided not to run for another term in 1962. He was a key ally for the passage of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System,[8] and during his tenure supported the Polaris submarine project (which were built by Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut), civil rights legislation, and the establishment of the Peace Corps.[9]

On December 2, 1954, Bush was part of the large (67–22) majority to censure Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, after McCarthy had taken on the U.S. Army and the Eisenhower administration. During the debate leading to the censure, Bush said that McCarthy has "caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers: that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or, in his eyes, you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line."[10] Eisenhower later included Bush's name on an undated handwritten list of prospective candidates he favored for the 1960 GOP presidential nomination.

In terms of issues, Bush often agreed with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, but personally disliked and politically opposed him, despite the close relationship his father had with the Rockefeller family. During the 1964 election, Bush denounced Rockefeller for divorcing his first wife and marrying a woman about 20 years his junior with whom Rockefeller had been having an affair while married to his first wife.[9]

Another of Senator Bush's major legislative interests was flood and hurricane protection. He drafted Public Law 71, the Bush Hurricane Survey Act, enabling Army engineers to develop a new program of community protection against tidal flooding.[11][12]

Personal life

The grave of Prescott Bush

Bush married Dorothy Walker on August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine. They had five children: Prescott Bush, Jr. (Aug 10, 1922 – June 23, 2010),[13][14][15] George H. W. Bush (b. 1924, named after Dorothy's father George Herbert Walker), Nancy Bush (b. 1926), Jonathan Bush (b. 1931), and William "Bucky" Bush (b. 1938).

Bush founded the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937. Following his father-in-law, he was a member of the United States Golf Association, serving successively as secretary, vice-president and president, 1928–1935. He was a multi-year club champion of the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was on the committee set up by New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. to help create the New York Mets.

Bush maintained homes in New York, Long Island, and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; a 10,000 acre (40 km²) plantation in South Carolina; and a secluded island off the Connecticut coast, Fishers Island.

The headstone of Prescott Bush

He died in 1972 at age 77 and was interred at Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Writings

Bush's articles include:

  • "Timely Monetary Policy," Banking, June 1955 and July 1955
  • "To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959
  • "Politics Is Your Business," Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960

References

  1. ^ AP (1934-11-09). "Prescott Bush Named Head Of U.S.G.A.". The Washington Post.
  2. ^ a b c Aris, Ben; Campbell, Duncan (September 25, 2004). "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power". London: The Guardian. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
  3. ^ a b "Internet Rumors: Prescott Bush's Alleged Nazi "Ties"". Anti-Defamation League. December 16, 2003. Retrieved June 5, 2011.
  4. ^ Conason, Joe (October 26, 2003). "Bush 'Nazi' Smear Unworthy of Critics". New York: The New York Observer. Retrieved June 5, 2011.
  5. ^ Parmet, Herbert. "What Should We Make of the Charge Linking the Bush Family Fortune to Nazism?". History News Network. Retrieved June 5, 2011.
  6. ^ "Fair Enough" by Westbrook Pegler, Burlington Daily News-Times (North Carolina), August 22, 1950
  7. ^ http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=oaA0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=InMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1643,653871&dq=prescott+bush+brien+mcmahon&hl=en
  8. ^ "A Bush at Both Ends: Before and After the Interstate Era". U.S. Federal Highway Administration. January 18, 2005 (last modified). Retrieved 2006-08-06. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ a b Stephen Mansfield (2004). The Faith of George W. Bush. Tarcher.
  10. ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,935382,00.html#ixzz1SCQ7EDbh
  11. ^ McQuaid, John; Schleifstein, Mark (2006). Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. Little, Brown and Company: Hachette Book Group USA. p. 54. ISBN 978-0-316-01642-1. {{cite book}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  12. ^ Freudenburg, William R.; Gramling, Robert; Laska, Shirley; Erikson, Kai (2009). Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow. Washington, DC: Island Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-59726-682-6. {{cite book}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
  13. ^ O'Connor, Anahad (June 24, 2010). "Prescott Bush Jr., Scion of a Political Family, Dies at 87". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-06-25.
  14. ^ http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/national_world&id=7519029
  15. ^ http://www.nndb.com/people/007/000055839/

Further reading

  • The Prescott Bush Papers are at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
  • The Greenwich Library Oral History Project has interviews with Prescott Bush, Jr., and Mary Walker.
  • There is material by and about Bush in the History of the Class of 1917 Yale College (1919) and the supplementary class albums.
  • John Atlee Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman (1968).
  • Obituaries are in the Washington Post, October 9, 1972; the New York Times, October 9, 1972; the Hartford Courant, October 9, 1972; and Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1972.
  • "Prescott Sheldon Bush. "Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.
  • Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880–1978. New York: Simon and Schuster (1979).
U.S. Senate
Preceded by U.S. senator (Class 3) from Connecticut
November 5, 1952 – January 3, 1963
Served alongside: William B. Benton, William A. Purtell, Thomas J. Dodd 		Succeeded by

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