The founder of the modern Bush dynasty was Samuel Prescott Bush, an Ohio steel executive, whose Buckeye Steel Castings Co. business projects included making parts for the Harriman railway empire. Before becoming President of Buckeye (1905-1927), Samuel Bush held a railroad position in Pennsylvania.

After the US entered World War I in April 1917, Samuel Bush obtained a position as head of the War Industries Board's Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section. This is surprising, considering he had no background in armaments. There was a hidden logic. As an apparent 'cleanskin' suitable for a sensitive official position, Bush already had powerful patrons eager to put his name forward. We can note for example Frank and Percy Rockefeller, whose famous family had moved to gain control of the Remington Arms Company in 1914. (Frank Rockefeller, a brother of clan head John D. Rockefeller, was the previous President of Buckeye Steel).

The period following the Civil War in the US and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe opened both a great general industrial expansion and the largest explosion of arms manufacturing ever known until the modern era. It was a time of huge fortunes being built by ruthless industrialists and bankers. These gentlemen, later styled the "robber barons" by historians, look little better than gangsters in retrospect. However many of them founded family dynasties whose descendants were to become not only rich but also eminently respectable.

The most evil aspect of the unregulated free-for-all that characterised the 1865 -1914 period of rapid industrial expansion was the development of an arms trade which did not just sell weapons but actively promoted war tensions and conflict to do so. Fear was in fact the greatest weapon the arms dealers peddled. Beginning in 1894 an international arms cartel was formed, enabling leading arms manufacturers to jointly exploit markets worldwide without the annoyance of risking undercutting each other's profits.

Arms panics in 1889 & 1892-3 created by agents of the weapons manufacturers resulted in huge surges of military spending in Britain and France, kicking off a corresponding rise in Germany. The resulting arms race made Europe a "powderkeg" ready for the fatal conflagration that occurred in 1914, the most disastrous and bloody war in all human history.

In Britain, after arms manufacturers successfully fooled the public with the "big Navy Scare” of 1909, rampant behind- the-scenes corruption burst into the public view for the first time when Vickers Ltd. was caught out bribing Rear Admiral Fujii of the Imperial Japanese Navy, to place an order with their company for the construction of warships. In 1913 the great arms cartel fell apart, and the arms makers began competing open slather with each other.

World War I was enormously beneficial for the rich of America. Twenty-one thousand new millionaires were created. Du Pont stock became fifty times more valuable, and the banker J.P. Morgan became rich beyond his wildest imaginings. In 1917 Bethlehem Steel paid a dividend of an astounding 200% of its stock (share) value.

In his new official position Samuel Bush helped organise munitions for the US Government's war effort, and channelled Government assistance to needy weapon makers (though why they needed it was a profound mystery to outsiders). Although only a relative 'small fry' in business himself, he was now perfectly placed to give the nod to particularly profitable contracts for others and receive "kickbacks" in return, from transactions that were handily shrouded in wartime secrecy. And sure enough, fat war contracts now flowed to Buckeye Steel. It was Samuel Prescott Bush, then, who began the long tradition of the" patriotic" Bushes, the proud American family who just happen to be always making money from war.

Strangely, most (but fortunately not all) of the detailed US records of the Samuel Bush wartime transactions later disappeared from the relevant Archives and have never been recovered. By the time Prescott Bush was a teenager, the Bushes were sufficiently established to be regarded as part of the aspirational elite who were shaping the new, booming economy of the United States.

Prescott Bush attended Yale University. There the tall (6 ft 4 in), athletic and handsome young man formed an advantageous close friendship with E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, younger son of the immensely wealthy Harriman family. "Bunny's" father, railroad baron & stock broker E.H.Harriman was denounced by President Theodore Roosevelt as an "undesirable citizen" guilty of "deep-seated corruption" for issuing tens of millions of dollars of fraudulent railroad stock; but Harriman had managed to keep the cash and become one of America's richest men.

In 1919 wealthy Missouri corporate wheeler- dealer George Herbert Walker obliged the Harriman family patriarch by forming the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank for the Harriman sons to have something to do. Prescott Bush met George Herbert Walker's daughter Dorothy, wooed her, & married her in 1921. Bush was tapped by his old Yale chum "Bunny" to work firstly for the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in 1924, & then in 1926 directly for the W. A. Harriman bank itself. In 1931 the Harriman bank was to merge with the British-American firm Brown Bros. and Co. to form Brown Brothers Harriman, with E.Roland Harriman as vice-president and Prescott Bush now a full partner.

Prescott also sat on several corporate boards alongside "Bunny" Harriman, including (1929 -1952) Dresser Industries. In September 1998, Dresser merged with Halliburton. The Bushes, the Walkers, the Harrimans and their connections remained close socially as well as in business. NYT shows a wedding on November 11 1950 uniting a Miss Marie Abbie Walker with a John Malcolm Lilley. One of the bridesmaids is a Joan Harriman. The bridegroom, it transpires, is an employee of the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Co. and the grandson of a Samuel Bush.

Meanwhile in 1920 the Harrimans had initiated their "German connection", relaunching Germany's Hamburg-Amerika Line, whose steamships the Harrimans had somehow acquired after the ships were confiscated by the US at the end of WWI. They now took a half share in the line, & until 1940 had complete control of the US end. At the other end was to be Baron Rudolph von Schroeder, vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies and a gentleman who sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932, shortly before Hitler took power in Germany.

After the Nazi takeover, Hamburg-Amerika was henceforth to provide free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda and spying purposes, to subsidise pro-Nazi newspapers in the USA, and in general act as a conduit for the Nazi cause. WA Harriman & Co. linked with the Hamburg-based Warburg bank to make widespread investments in the new German Republic in the 1920s. Germany was then democratic, but from Berlin they also made huge secretive oil & mining deals with Soviet Russia through commissar Leon Trotsky and KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky.

While in Berlin in 1922 W. Averell Harriman had become acquainted with leading German industrialist and steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, and agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. As a result the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) was established in August 1924 in the Manhattan offices of WA Harriman & Co., with George Herbert Walker as president. The UBC was a front in the US for Thyssen, who bankrolled & boosted Adolph Hitler from his early days of the beer hall "putsch" of 1923 onwards. Thyssen industrial group became leading builders of the German war machine.

Prescott Bush, his pal "Bunny" Harriman and six others were directors of the UBC from 1934 to 1943, wholly within the Nazi era. Moreover it was Prescott who ran the business day-to-day. Prescott and W. Averell Harriman were also the sole directors of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, which occupied the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street New York (Prescott's father-in-law George Herbert Walker was the company president). Much of Harriman Fifteen's investments were in the Silesian Holding Company, which owned mining operations in Poland. In the Nazi era, Silesian was to boost its profits using slave labour from the death camps.

In May 1933 negotiations were concluded in Berlin between Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's new economics minister, and a US international attorney (John Foster Dulles) to coordinate Nazi-American trade. A syndicate of 150 firms and individuals was formed as a result, and it was headed by none other than the Harriman International Company.

After Germany invaded Poland, the US Govt. blocked Nazi payments to the Silesian-American Corporation's US bondholders. Undeterred, George Herbert Walker tried three times to arrange subterfuge schemes so the money could come in through Switzerland. The next year (1940), the UBC's US assets were frozen. W. Averell Harriman was also chairman of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, an American group owning one-third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which one Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds. Flick, later imprisoned after the Nuremberg war crimes trials

As to the charge that Bush and the Harrimans personally and intentionally worked to bring Hitler to power, because they thought it would be best for Germany, business and their own pockets, the minimum we can say is "not proven, but cannot be excluded, and circumstantial evidence must cast them under a cloud". Fortunately for Bush and the Harrimans, their ubiquitous circle of friends and Bonesmen kept their names out of the official announcements concerning the seized companies. No charges were ever laid against them.