Anthony22 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia CommonsThe bank had strong ties to German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, a man who did not hide his association and admiration for Hitler and the Nazis.
In July 1942, Bush’s Union Bank was suspected of holding gold on behalf of Nazi leaders and by October of that same year, the bank was seized and its assets held under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Although documents proved that Bush had been involved heavily with business deals with Thyssen, the extent of his involvement with the Nazis was never fully proved.
Prescott’s son George H.W. Bush would be cut from the same ambitious cloth as his father, however, it wouldn’t be in banking but oil where he would make his fortune, starting his career as an oil field equipment salesman for Dresser Industries.
In the same year that his father was elected to represent Connecticut, Bush Jnr would volunteer and campaign for Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in his ultimately successful bid to become the 34th president of the United States.
By 1953, he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation and was named president of the subsidiary Zapata Offshore Company just a year later.
He would soon follow in his father’s political footsteps when he would run for, and win, a seat in the United States House of Representatives in Texas’s 7th congressional district in 1966, despite initially trailing in the polls.
By 1968, while most Republicans were lending their support to the rising star of Ronald Reagan, Bush would support the eventual winner Richard Nixon. This move would pay considerable dividends when in 1971, with the support of now president Nixon and after failing to get a seat in the Senate, he would be appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
