Stepping Out Of The Shadow

“Be like George,” Bert’s father urged him. “George could do this.”

Bert was George Herbert Walker III. And George was George Herbert Walker Bush, future president of the United States.

Both boys were named after their grandfather. But George was seven years older and almost 8 inches taller, captain of the baseball teams at Andover (Phillips Academy) and Yale University. Bert’s dad, a baseball fanatic who would later buy a share of the New York Mets, thrilled to his nephew’s triumphs (jock, war hero at 19, president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, inducted into Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society) and helped set him up in business.

“They even had the same sense of humor,” Bert Walker recalls. “George was so gentle and considerate of others, he needed to surround himself with people who were tougher. My father became one of his primary mentors.” Bert pauses, smiles apologetically. “It was difficult for my brother and me to swallow.”

Bert’s brother eventually broke away. But Bert stayed close, eager to earn a place in his big, high-achieving family.

The Walkers spent every summer with their Bush cousins at the family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. The kids would run along Walker’s Point peninsula and splash into the cold Atlantic; they’d hurl pillows in the third-floor dormitory of their grandparents’ nine-bedroom house. Jonathan Bush was Bert’s age, and the two became fast friends. One took to the constant games, the other didn’t.

“Bert was competitive to please his dad, but I don’t think he really cared,” Jonathan says. “I was more the ball-and-bat guy. Bert was talking about world government when he was 8.”

International affairs didn’t help on the family tennis courts, though. “We were definitely not a bookish crowd—no one ever accused anybody in our family of being intellectuals,” Bert chuckles. “When you came home, it was ‘What did you do today?’—and if you weren’t able to say you’d had a full day, you felt sheepish. I had a very hard time holding my own.”

What saved him was looking up, sweaty and flushed, from a missed serve or fumbled ball and catching the knowing, sympathetic eye of his Aunt Dorothy Bush. “I felt like she was saying, ‘We know you are a little unhappy because you are not always included in the best games.’ Aunt Dot was incredibly competitive herself—especially for her family, nobody could ever say anything negative about them. But she was compassionate. At the low points in my life, she made me feel that I was important.”

She was crisper with the future president. “Aunt Dot couldn’t stand anybody bragging about themselves,” Bert says. “Once George came home after a tennis game and said, ‘I played well,’ and she said, ‘You don’t have a game. I don’t want to hear any bragging in my family.’” 

The Walker family dynasty began in St. Louis in 1874, when Bert’s great-grandfather David Walker started the Ely Walker Dry Goods Co. and clothed the city. In 1900, a son, the first George Herbert Walker, switched to finance, founding the G.H. Walker & Co. investment firm.

George Herbert Walker was a born leader—but an aloof and autocratic one. He boxed and played top-flight golf (the Walker Cup was named after him), and he was the power behind the scenes in the local Democratic party, only switching to Republican after moving to New York in 1921. There, at the request of railroad baron E.H. Harriman, he started a private banking firm for Harriman’s son W. Averell Harriman. Soon Walker and the younger Harriman were also buying yachts and racehorses together—at least until Walker’s wife learned of Harriman’s marital indiscretions and banned him from the house.

The next George Herbert Walker, Bert’s father, was as tough and remote as the first. “Bert’s gentle manner came from his mother,” says Jonathan Bush. “‘Gentle’ is not something you would have called his father.” Bert grew up in Connecticut (his father managed the family firm’s New York branch) and went to Yale, where he and Jonathan both pledged Delta Kappa Epsilon. Bert also did an inordinate amount of public service and charity work. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he spent two years in the Air Force. George H.W. Bush was by now in the oil business, making money hand over fist. All Bert wanted to do was join a Connecticut law firm and run for political office.

“Why don’t you join our family business and make some money so you can go into politics?” his father retorted.

Bert moved to St. Louis in 1958 to join the family firm.

The civic giant at the time was David Calhoun, who had started his career at Ely Walker Dry Goods. He headed the St. Louis Country Club and was active in the Log Cabin Club (Bert would later join both), and he was constantly pushing for St. Louis to recover its grandeur. Bert remembered his family’s history in the city and resolved to help.

In 1963, he went to Chicago to start a branch office. By the time he returned to St. Louis in 1971, cousin George had made millions and served two terms in Congress.

Bert focused on St. Louis. He was elated to see “the first stirrings of the city coming back: new buildings, people moving back.” He became chairman of Downtown St. Louis.

After the family firm was acquired by White, Weld & Co., Bert decided it was time to be his own boss. In 1976, he became executive vice president of Stifel Nicolaus “with the promise that if I minded my P’s and Q’s, I could become the CEO. And in December of 1978, I did.” There’s a lilt in his voice; he says he’d felt like a failure until that moment.

When Bert took over, Stifel had $13 million in revenue and a net worth of $4 million. Today, it has revenues of more than $250 million and a net worth of $125 million. Bert attributes Stifel’s success to his carefully chosen successor, Ron Kruszewski. Others credit Bert with laying the foundation. John Bachmann, senior partner at rival Edward Jones, remembers a time when “Stifel could have taken advantage of our misfortune, and Bert made it clear that they were going to compete hard but not on that basis. It was a very statesmanlike thing to do.”

Bert Walker intrigues people, not because he is aloof or enigmatic but because he is so nice—unpretentious and unassuming, devoid of Ivy League arrogance or Texas swagger. “Bert Walker could sit down on the corner with you and eat a hot dog, and you’d never know he was going home to have a conversation with the president of the United States,” says former St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. “We play golf sometimes—I hit ’em far, he hits ’em straight.” Bosley grins, thinking of how quietly subversive his friend can be. “In 1994, Bert brought 10 or 15 African-Americans to a meeting at the Bogey Club to talk about city issues and race relations. It was probably the first time that many black people had ever been at the Bogey Club.”

Friends say Bert was maneuvering women and minorities onto boards long before inclusivity was a mandate. Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan once called him “a man of grace, civility and goodness.”

“He is never thinking of himself,” says attorney and longtime friend Ken Teasdale. “He’s probably been disappointed by the way other people act, but I’ve never seen it turn him cynical. I’ve seen him with people who have not treated him well, and he will still always say good things about them and wish them luck.”

What intrigues Teasdale is that Bert doesn’t pay a price. “He’s someone people are extremely fond of, and he’s so positive, he usually comes out of any situation in great shape. It’s been very refreshing to watch. It tells me the world is a nicer place than it sometimes seems.”

Bert intends the world to be such a place. Long after most of the cousins had stopped going to Kennebunkport, he continued the family tradition.

“I never quite measured up athletically,” he says, “which was a disappointment to my father, but I did have an absolute desire to be something my father approved of—an absolute determination to be worthy of our family.”

While George H.W. Bush was serving as ambassador to the United Nations, special envoy to China, Republican national chairman, director of the CIA, vice president and then president of the United States, Bert was building his firm. Finally, in 1992, he left Stifel to do what he’d wanted to do all along (and George had done back in 1966): run for Congress as a state representative.

He asked to be just “Bert Walker” on the ballot rather than echo the now-presidential “George Herbert Walker.” He raised a lot of money. And he lost.

“I was beaten in the primary by Jim Talent,” he says. “That was hard. I loved politics. I’d always seen myself—” he breaks off. “My wife threw herself into the campaign, helping me; my grandchildren helped. George W. Bush was not yet in politics—he came up from Texas to campaign for me.”

But Bert didn’t stomp away from public life and go off to perfect his golf game. He gave himself over to gritty, thankless city politics and its most boring and crucial issue: home rule.

“The leader of the employee service union, who was the big power behind Freeman Bosley Jr. becoming mayor, said, ‘Freeman Bosley doesn’t know anything at all about being a mayor. And he’s not’—I have to watch my words here—‘as sophisticated as a future mayor might be,’” Bert recalls. “So we started a committee to advise Freeman on helping St. Louis come back and getting more businesses involved. And when we got into it, we realized how much of the city government was out of the mayor’s control. If St. Louis was going to become a great city again, we had to bring more power to the mayor.”

In 1996, largely through Walker’s efforts, a home-rule bill passed. But the final step, giving the mayor control over some of those offices, was defeated in a city-wide vote in 2004. “There was nothing he could have done differently,” says Bosley, “because no one was listening. The politicians weren’t gonna put themselves out of business.”

After Kruszewski took over at Stifel in 1997, Bert served on boards for the Urban League, the Missouri Historical Society, the Saint Louis Science Center. He’d already served years as chairman of the board at Webster University, shaping the small liberal-arts college into a business-oriented university with global reach. Now he and his wife, Carol, rehabbed a century-old Missouri limestone mansion in the Central West End, making it warm and welcoming, and Bert filled his study with old political photos and maps of Yale.

Still, he felt restless. So he summoned his nerve and called the man he refers to as “the former President Bush, my first cousin.”

“He said, ‘Come down tomorrow; I have no lunch plans,’” Bert recalls, “so I flew down to Houston that night. I said, ‘I’m not ready to retire, and my wife and I would love to go to work for your son, but we don’t want to go to Washington. We’d really like to go to some foreign country, perhaps where there is a fragile relationship, and be part of the family of the president; maybe that could be helpful.’ He said, ‘Great idea—but I’m not going to tell my son what to do, so write him a letter.’”

Bert wrote in May of 2002. Months passed. In 2003, President George W. Bush came to St. Louis. “He asked me to ride in his limo, and about halfway to his speaking engagement, he said, ‘Hey, I hear you could be interested in serving our country. What country could you be interested in?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, wherever you think I could be of service.’”

The next week, the official call came: ambassador to Hungary. Nine months of vetting followed: “Medical information, financial information, what political contri-butions I had made, what political contributions my children had made. That scared me a bit—I have some children who are not necessarily consistent with the president’s views!”

Finally he learned that he’d passed muster—and that he would be sworn in by Colin Powell.

Bert had been one of the behind-the-scenes players persuading Powell to run for president. Now, as an entirely new chapter of Bert’s life opened—and he finally attained the public office he had dreamed of his entire life—he would be sworn in by a man he admired wholeheartedly.

He made his wife listen to his speech 15 times to make sure he wouldn’t cry.

The first days of ambassadorship were tricky. “I asked one of the senior people in our embassy where he’d been before, and he said Uzbekistan,” Bert recalls ruefully. “I’d never heard of it. I thought it was probably a country deep in Africa, so I said, ‘Oh my gosh, it must have been very hot.’ ‘Hot?’ he said. The next day he brought me in a huge map of the world.”

Soon Bert found his stride. He learned bits of Hungarian: first and foremost csókolom, which means “I kiss your hand.” He enjoyed the lavish parties (“Hungary is a 20-pound post—Henry Kissinger said that!”) and the trips to 600-year-old Hungarian towns and, most of all, his chats with Hungarian high school students.

To his relief, he sensed none of the anti-American fury that was sweeping other European countries. There were other challenges, though. One day a middle-aged Hungarian man walked into his office. The man’s son had been working for a U.S. contractor in Iraq—and was killed by an American soldier. The official claim was that he’d gone through a checkpoint at top speed, but that was, Bert knew, “somewhat contested.” Now he listened as the father blurted, “I didn’t want my son to go to Iraq, but he was a great believer in the United States, and he believed he was doing something to help the people of Iraq.”

Bert hung a picture of the man’s son in his office. “I look at it almost every morning,” he says, “and think how horrible, horrible that war is. I really do believe that if George Bush is correct in having gone in, which I do believe, and if we can establish democracy there, it will spread. But all the innocent lives lost ...”

He has fallen in love with the brilliance and bravery of the Hungarian people. “There have been 16 Nobel Prize winners from Hungary since World War II,” he says. “Their education is very good. And life has not been easy—they have been in a lot of wars and lost them all. It gives them resilience.”

Resilient himself, and a natural diplomat, Bert has hosted a succession of politicians and business executives, scientists and opera singers, historians and civic leaders. He’s made deals and partnerships with St. Louis companies possible. He’s also forged close ties with Hungarians across the political spectrum.

“We went over to Hungary and visited with the prime minister,” says Jonathan Bush, “and then we visited with the opposition party. Everybody lit up when they saw Bert.”

He was born for this role.

All he has to be is himself.