American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [17]
But if you check out Kevin Phillips’s book on the Bush family, American Dynasty, you can find some interesting cross-references. Dating back to the First World War, George Herbert Walker (Prescott’s father-in-law) was involved with “a frequently collaborative group of moneymen—Averell Harriman, Percy Rockefeller at National City Bank, and others at Guaranty Trust—who had large international plans.”11 (Remember that one of the anti-FDR coup leaders had ties to Guaranty Trust). In 1919 National City Bank “joined in setting up the new W.A. Harriman and Company, soon to be under George Walker’s presidency” and including Remington’s Samuel Pryor as “part of this cabal.”12 Five years later, Harriman and Walker established the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) in New York “on behalf of the politically active German steel baron Fritz Thyssen”—a major funder of Hitler’s Nazi Party.13 Prescott Bush and a number of his Skull and Bones pals from Yale “came together under one roof through the Brown Brothers Harriman merger in 1931.”14
Phillips doesn’t bring the Smedley Butler story into his book, but he goes on to say: “Unfortunately, we have no reliable way of knowing exactly why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford, and several Rockefellers maintained investment relationships with Hitler’s Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl Harbor.”15
“By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman ... and Dillon Read were two notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler.” Prescott Bush “handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman,” working closely with Wall Street lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles. Prescott was also a director of the UBC bank “that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family.... In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined ‘Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank’” that Thyssen was possibly holding for “Nazi bigwigs.” In October 1942, the federal government then “seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation” under the Trading with the Enemy Act.16
Prescott Bush went on to be a U.S. Senator from Connecticut; the Dulles brothers ran the CIA and the State Department under Eisenhower; Averell Harriman ended up governor of New York. “It is almost as if these various German embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but in essence business as usual,” Kevin Phillips writes.17
So maybe that’s how the FDR plot was conceived, too—“business as usual,” which the president’s New Deal was obstructing. Smedley Butler did his best to issue the warning. Lecturing around the country as spokesman for the “forgotten veteran,” the general accused the big industrialists of bloating themselves on the blood of the soldiers in the First World War. He pointed out that DuPont’s profits had soared from only $6 million before the conflict, to $58 million in the course of it. Similar huge jumps were made by companies like Bethlehem Steel and International Nickel. Munitions, as the “war to end all wars” proved, was a mighty profitable enterprise.
Butler also asked a question, in his book War Is a Racket, that I’ve thought about a lot in terms of today: “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” His idea was: “Let the officers and directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders ... as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.”18
Do you think we’d have gone to war in Iraq if Dick Cheney and his Halliburton buddies