Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years Read Online Free PDF

task for a man whose father, Prescott, was a senior partner at the preeminent British-American investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman.
     
    Understanding the role of Brown Brothers Harriman is central to understanding the Bush legacy and the vast, if underappreciated, influence of the Bushes’ immediate circle. At Yale, in 1916, Prescott Bush had become close friends with his classmate Roland “Bunny” Harriman, heir, along with his older brother, W. Averell Harriman, to E. H. Harriman’s vast railroad, shipping, mining, and banking empire. Both Harrimans, like Prescott Bush, were initiates of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. After graduation, Prescott took a job offer from a Skull and Bones elder in St. Louis, where he soon married the daughter of the prominent St. Louis stockbroker George Herbert Walker. Shortly after that, G. H. Walker was hired by the Harrimans to come to New York and build a new investment banking empire for the family.
     
    Perhaps to forestall charges of obvious nepotism, Prescott spent several years working for other firms before joining W. A. Harriman in 1926. One year after the stock market crash of 1929, W. A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers, a white-shoe banking partnership whose Wall Street operation dated to 1843, and whose roots went back decades earlier to cotton mills in England. The oldest and largest partnership bank in the United States, Brown Brothers Harriman has never been widely known outside Wall Street and Washington, yet it remains extremely influential in the closely connected worlds of finance and politics.
     
    The firm’s real power lies in its ability to meld moneymaking with policy— in particular, foreign policy advantageous to the interests of its clients. On June 7, 1922, the Nation published an editorial titled “The Republic of Brown Brothers.” It attacked the “new imperialism” of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, a concomitant in good part of the “dollar diplomacy” promoted by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox during President Taft’s administration. The editorial asserted that over the past dozen years, the American government had reduced Haiti, Santo Domingo (later known as the Dominican Republic), and Nicaragua “to the status of colonies with at most a degree of rather fictitious self-government.” The United States had “forced ruinous loans, making ‘free and sovereign’ republics the creatures of New York banks.” In effect, the U.S. government had been “agents for these bankers, using American Marines when necessary to impose their will.” But according to Brown Brothers Harriman’s in-house history, Partners in Banking , it was the other way around—the firm was doing the U.S. government a favor. 11
     
    Earlier partners in the Brown Brothers bank in England had served in governments in that country, and the firm’s influence in the United States was perhaps even greater. Brown Brothers Harriman was resolutely bipartisan, and partners moved effortlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back through a steadily revolving door. Prescott and some others were Republicans, while Democrat Averell Harriman built a formidable career for himself in government service, at high levels and in every conceivable capacity, for presidents from FDR to Lyndon Johnson. Partner Robert Lovett, yet another Bonesman in the firm, worked directly as one of Henry Stimson’s “wise men” on foreign policy before being named secretary of defense by President Truman.
     
    The Brown Brothers Harriman group was to a person rabidly Anglophilic. Indeed, the Bushes have long touted their distant familial ties to the House of Windsor. 12 And like the once-great British Empire, the sun never set on the operations of the banking firm. Thus it was that the vanquishing of the German Empire in World War I presented abundant opportunities to invest throughout Europe, and led to extensive financial relationships in German-influenced