Skull & Bones Society
A rare look inside Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society and
sometime haunt of the presumptive Republican nominee for President
by Alexandra Robbins
ON High Street, in the middle of the Yale University campus, stands a
cold-looking, nearly windowless Greco-Egyptian building with padlocked
iron doors. This is the home of Yale's most famous secret society,
Skull and Bones, and it is also, in a sense, one of the many homes of
the family of George W. Bush, Yale '68.
Bush men have been Yale men and Bonesmen for generations. Prescott
Bush, George W.'s grandfather, Yale '17, was a legendary Bonesman; he
was a member of the band that stole for the society what became one of
its most treasured artifacts: a skull that was said to be that of the
Apache chief Geronimo. Prescott Bush, one of a great many Bonesmen who
went on to lives of power and renown, became a U.S. senator. George
Herbert Walker Bush, George W.'s father, Yale '48, was also a
Bonesman, and he, too, made a conspicuous success of himself. Inside
the temple on High Street hang paintings of some of Skull and Bones's
more illustrious members; the painting of George Bush, the most
recently installed, is five feet high.
There were other Bush Bonesmen, a proud line of them stretching from
great uncle George Herbert Walker Jr. to uncle Jonathan Bush to
cousins George Herbert Walker IIIand Ray Walker. So when George W. was
"tapped" for Skull and Bones, at the end of his junior year, he, too,
naturally became a Bonesman -- but, it seems, a somewhat ambivalent
one.
New members of Skull and Bones are assigned secret names, by which
fellow Bonesmen will forever know them. Some Bonesmen receive
traditional names, denoting function or existential status; others are
the chosen beneficiaries of names that their Bones predecessors wish
to pass on. The leftover initiates choose their own names. The name
Long Devil is assigned to the tallest member; Boaz (short for
Beelzebub) goes to any member who is a varsity football captain. Many
of the chosen names are drawn from literature (Hamlet, Uncle Remus),
from religion, and from myth. The banker Lewis Lapham passed on his
name, Sancho Panza, to the political adviser Tex McCrary. Averell
Harriman was Thor, Henry Luce was Baal, McGeorge Bundy was Odin. The
name Magog is traditionally assigned to the incoming Bonesman deemed
to have had the most sexual experience, and Gog goes to the new member
with the least sexual experience. William Howard Taft and Robert Taft
were Magogs. So, interestingly, was George Bush.
George W. was not assigned a name but invited to choose one. According
to one report, nothing came to mind, so he was given the name
Temporary, which, it is said, he never bothered to replace; Temporary
is how Bush's fellow Bonesmen know him today. (In recent interviews I
asked a number of Bush's Bonesmen classmates about the name and
elicited no denials.)
The junior George's diffidence in the matter of his secret name seems
to reflect a larger ambivalence toward Yale and its select, the most
elite of whom are the members of Skull and Bones. The elder George
holds his fellow Yalies -- particularly his Bones brethren -- in great
esteem, and over the years has often gone to them for advice. George
W., in contrast, has publicly made a point of his disdain for the
elite northeastern connections that shaped his father's world and, to
some extent, his own. Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of
baseball, who is a Bush family friend and himself the son of a
Bonesman, says, "Young George is as unlikely a Bonesperson as I've
ever met." Young George has not attended a Yale reunion since he
graduated.
Bush's dismissal of Yale and all it stands for may be a response to
the repeated charges of political opponents that he is not much more
than a papa's boy. Kent Hance, who trounced Bush in his 1978
congressional race, insinuated that Bush was not a true Texan and
accused him of "riding his daddy's coattails."
If George W. truly wanted to detach himself from his father and from
the traditions of a long line of ancestors, he chose a curious path --
in effect, retracing his father's footsteps.
SKULL and Bones is the oldest of Yale's secret societies and by far
the most determinedly secretive. As such, it has long been an
inspiration for speculation and imagination. It still is. The society
is, of course, the inspiration for the new Universal Pictures thriller
The Skulls, about a nefarious secret society at an Ivy League school
in New Haven. In 1968, when George W. Bush was in Skull and Bones,
there were eight "abovegrounds, " or societies that met in their own
"tombs," and as many as ten "undergrounds, " which held meetings in
rented rooms. In an article in the 1968 Yale yearbook Lanny Davis, a
1967 Yale graduate and a secret-society member who would go on to
become a White House special counsel in the Clinton Administration,
described how Bones, famous for its distinguished list of members,
held more sway than the others.
Come "Tap Day" ... if you're a junior, despite the fact that you've
banged your fist at the lunch table and said, "This is 1968," and have
loudly denounced societies as anachronisms, when the captain of the
football team is standing by your door and when the tower clock
strikes eight he rushes in and claps your shoulder and shouts, "Skull
and Bones, accept or reject?" you almost always scream out, "Accept!"
and you never, never, pound your fist at the lunch table, not for that
reason ever again.
Fewer than a tenth of Yale's 1,400 seniors are members of the
university's secret societies, which many undergraduates view as
self-serving vehicles for real and aspiring aristocrats. Certainly
this view seems to have some validity when it comes to Bonesmen. Until
1992, when it became one of the last two secret societies to admit
women, Skull and Bones had a history of picking the same kinds of
people over and over. Davis's yearbook article explained,
If the society had a good year, this is what the "ideal" group will
consist of: a football captain; a Chairman of the Yale Daily News; a
conspicuous radical; a Whiffenpoof; a swimming captain; a notorious
drunk with a 94 average; a film-maker; a political columnist; a
religious group leader; a Chairman of the Lit; a foreigner; a ladies'
man with two motorcycles; an ex-service man; a negro, if there are
enough to go around; a guy nobody else in the group had heard of,
ever.
Indeed, George W.'s 1968 brethren slip easily into the desired slots:
among them were the Olympic swimmer and gold medalist Don Schollander;
a future Harvard Medical School surgeon, Gregory Gallico; a future
Rhodes scholar, Robert McCallum; the Whiffenpoofs' pitch, Robert
Birge; Donald Etra, an Orthodox Jew; Muhammed Saleh, a Jordanian; a
future deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Rex
Cowdry; and the black soccer captain Roy Austin. Only George W.
himself fell into none of the aforementioned categories. He was
generally regarded as a legacy tap.
Given the society's history as an incubator and meeting point for
rising generational elites, it is not surprising that an especially
susceptible kind of "barbarian" -- the Bones term for a nonmember --
has long seen the society as a locus of mystery, wealth, and
conspiracy. One doesn't need to scratch deeply to uncover accusations
of sinister ties with the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, the
Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, even the Nazis. It turns
out that the Yale admissions committee that voted to admit George W.,
despite his poor record at Andover, included three members (out of
seven) who were Bonesmen; those seeking evidence of malign influence
will surely raise an eyebrow. (For the conspiracy-minded, the most
useful omnium gatherum is the British writer Antony C. Sutton's
feverish 1983 tract An Introduction to the Order.) World domination
aside, the most pervasive rumors about Bones are that initiates must
masturbate in a coffin while recounting their sexual exploits, and
that their candor is ultimately rewarded with a no-strings-attached
gift of $15,000. Bonesmen, who are sworn to secrecy at initiation,
have not publicly denied or confirmed these rumors; they have usually
made a point of refusing to speak to the press about the society at
all. As The Skulls was about to be released, and as George W.'s quest
for the Republican presidential nomination looked increasingly certain
to succeed, the society sent all members a memo reminding them of
their vow of silence. Still, as I recently discovered in the course of
looking into Skull and Bones, not all Bonesmen see the necessity of
remaining tight-lipped about a society whose biggest secret may be
that its secrets are essentially trivial.
THE story of Skull and Bones begins in December of 1832. Upset
(according to one account) by changes in the Phi Beta Kappa election
process, a Yale senior named William Russell and a group of classmates
decided to form the Eulogian Club as an American chapter of a German
student organization. The club paid obeisance to Eulogia, the goddess
of eloquence, who took her place in the pantheon upon the death of the
orator Demosthenes, in 322 B.C., and who is said to have returned in a
kind of Second Coming on the occasion of the society's inception. The
Yale society fastened a picture of its symbol -- a skull and
crossbones -- to the door of the chapel where it met. Today the number
322, recalling the date of Demosthenes' death, appears on society
stationery. The number has such mystical overtones that in 1967 a
graduate student with no ties to Skull and Bones donated $322,000 to
the society.
(The number 322 has also been a particular favorite of
conspiracy-minded hunters for evidence of Skull and Bones's global
connections. It was the combination to Averell Harriman's briefcase
when he carried classified dispatches between London and Moscow during
World War II. Antony C. Sutton claims that 322 doubles as a reminder
of the society's mother organization in Germany; the American group,
founded in 1832, is the second chapter -- thus 32-2.)
In 1856 Daniel Coit Gilman, who went on to become the founding
president of Johns Hopkins University, officially incorporated the
society as the Russell Trust Association, and Skull and Bones moved
into the space it still occupies. The Bones tomb is forbidding only on
the outside. Marina Moscovici, a Connecticut conservator who recently
spent six years restoring fifteen paintings from the Skull and Bones
building, describes the atmosphere inside as "funny spooky." She says,
"Sort of like the Addams Family, it's campy in an old British
men's-smoking- club way. It's not glamorous by any means."
"Bones is like a college dorm room," a 1980s Bonesman told me. "Ours
was a place that used to be really nice but felt kind of beat up,
lived in. There were socks underneath the couch, old half-deflated
soccer balls lying around." Dozens of skeletons and skulls, human and
animal, dangle from the walls, on which German and Latin phrases have
been chiseled ("Whether poor or rich, all are equal in death"), among
moose heads, sconces, medieval armor, antlers, boating flags,
manuscripts, statuettes of Demosthenes, and a pair of boots that one
member wore throughout his active duty with American forces in France
during World War II. The gravestone of Elihu Yale, the eponymous
eighteenth-century merchant, was stolen years ago from its proper
setting in Wrexham, Wales, and is displayed in a glass case, in a room
with purple walls.
As noted, for many years the society has possessed a skull that
members call Geronimo. In the 1980s, under pressure from Ned Anderson,
a former Apache tribal chairman in Arizona, the society produced the
skull in question. The skull didn't match Anderson's records, and it
was returned to the society's tomb. Anderson wasn't finished. He
reportedly took the issue up with his congressman, John McCain; McCain
tried to arrange a meeting between Anderson and George Bush, who was
then the Vice President. Bush wasn't interested, and the matter was
dropped. "We still call it Geronimo anyway," a Bonesman says. The
issue of Geronimo's skull never surfaced in the public record during
the bitter contest between McCain and George W. for the Republican
nomination.
The most private room in the building, known as the Inner Temple, or
(this will be no surprise) Room 322, is approximately fourteen feet
square and guarded by a locked iron door. Inside, a case contains a
skeleton that Bonesmen refer to as Madame Pompadour. Compartments in
the case guard the society's cherished manuscripts, including the
secrecy oath and instructions for conducting an initiation.
The initiation ceremony, held in April, involves as many alumni, or
"patriarchs, " as possible, one of whom in each instance serves as the
supervisor, known as Uncle Toby. The Inner Temple is cleared of
furniture except for two chairs and a table, and Bonesmen past and
present assemble: Uncle Toby in a robe; the shortest senior, or
"Little Devil," in a satanic costume; a Bonesman with a deep voice in
a Don Quixote costume; one in papal vestments; another dressed as
Elihu Yale; four of the brawniest in the role of "shakers"; and a crew
of extras wearing skeleton costumes and carrying noisemakers.
According to the initiation script, Uncle Toby "sounds like the only
sane person in the room."
As an initiate enters the room, patriarchs standing outside the Inner
Temple shout, "Who is it?" The shakers bellow the initiate's name,
which the patriarchs echo. The shakers push the initiate toward the
table, where the secrecy oath has been placed, and he is enjoined to
"Read! Read! Read!" The shakers then half-carry the initiate to a
picture of Eulogia, and the Bonesmen shriek, "Eulogia! Eulogia!
Eulogia!" After another trip to the oath, the shakers fire the
initiate toward a picture of a woman that Bonesmen call Connubial
Bliss.
Rituals along these lines go on for quite some time, recalling a cross
between haunted-house antics and a human pinball game -- "like
something from a Harry Potter novel," in the words of one Bonesman,
now an engineer. It is perhaps worth noting, in light of George W.'s
controversial episode at Bob Jones University and the specter of
anti-Catholicism, that at one point in the proceedings every initiate
kisses the slippered toe of the "Pope." At last the initiate is
formally dubbed a Knight of Eulogia. Amid more raucous ritual he is
cast from the room into the waiting arms of the patriarchs.
WITHIN the tomb students run on Skull and Bones time, which is five
minutes ahead of the time in the rest of the world. "It was to
encourage you to think that being in the building was so different
from the outside world that you'd let your guard down," a Bonesman
('72) explains. At 6:30 on Thursdays and Sundays the Bonesmen gather
in the Firefly Room for supper. The room is dim and intimate; light
shines through the gaping eyeholes of fixtures shaped like skulls.
Bonesmen drink various refreshments from skull-shaped cups, but never
alcohol. The dry-society rule, fervently enforced, was designed to
keep members level-headed for discussions -- a change of pace for
George W., who drank heavily during his college years.
At 7:55 barbarian time Uncle Toby rings a bell to summon the members
to the session. When the knights are seated, they sing two sacred
anthems before the Hearing of Excuses, during which members are
assessed fines for errors, such as arriving late or using a society
name outside the tomb. Uncle Toby then draws debate topics and an
order of speakers from the Yorick, a skull divided into compartments.
The ninety-minute period of debate can be frivolous or grave.
One of the standard pieces of lore about Skull and Bones is that each
member must at some point give an account of his sexual history, known
as the CB (for "Connubial Bliss"). "After the first one or two times
it's like guys listing their conquests, and that gets old," one young
Bonesman told me recently. "There's just not that much to talk about"
-- and so CBs have evolved into relationship discussions. "It's the
kind of stuff a lot of guys do with their teammates," says another
Bonesman ('83). "There was nothing perverse or surreal or prurient --
just an open exchange. It's like TV's Ricki Lake -- there's now a
national mania for purging thoughts at large. This is a way of doing
it in a very private, non-sensationalist way that benefits the people
who are listening and the people who are telling."
By mid-autumn, after each member has presented a CB, the time slot
shifts to Life Histories, when Bonesmen spend one or more nights
giving their autobiographies. George Bush's autobiography focused on
his military service but also looked ahead, a 1948 member told me. "He
was talking about the future, first about his family and then about
being able to have an impact in public service." George W., in
contrast, spoke often about his father. George W.'s fellow Bonesmen
have been unwilling to elaborate.
WHEN U.S. News & World Report asked President Bush in 1989 why he had
chosen to attend Yale, he replied, "My family had a major Yale
tradition." Today George W. Bush distances himself from Yale (although
supporters cite his alma mater to combat charges that he is a
lightweight) . He has criticized its "intellectual snobbery" and has
maintained that the school epitomizes "a certain East Coast attitude"
and an "intellectual arrogance." George W.'s attitude toward Yale
extends to its most elite society. Whereas George Bush returned to the
tomb in 1998 to be the dinner speaker at the annual Skull and Bones
commencement party, George W. has stayed away. In his 1999 campaign
autobiography, A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush mentions his
membership in Skull and Bones only in passing: "My senior year I
joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can't say
anything more."
Yet Skull and Bones was not relegated entirely to George W.'s past
after he graduated. In 1971, having been rejected by the University of
Texas Law School and needing a job, Bush called a Bonesman, Robert H.
Gow. Gow, who later told The Washington Post that his Houston-based
agricultural company had not been looking for anyone at the time,
hired Bush as a management trainee. In 1977, when Bush formed Arbusto
Energy, his first company, he once again applied to Skull and Bones
for financial aid. With assistance from his uncle Jonathan Bush (Bones
'53), he lined up $565,000 from twenty-eight investors. One of them
contributed $93,000 -- the California venture capitalist William H.
Draper III (Bones '50). Twelve Bonesmen (including family members)and
the son of a patriarch gave a total of $35,500 to Bush's 1998
gubernatorial campaign. At least forty-six Bonesmen or sons of
patriarchs have given approximately $1,000 apiece to his presidential
campaign -- the maximum allowed by law.
Not surprisingly, loyalty often flows in the other direction. In 1984
Bush flew to Tennessee to accompany the Republican Senate nominee and
Bonesman ('67) Victor Ashe on a seven-city tour. Ashe lost to Al Gore.
That George W. keeps his Skull and Bones connections in repair is
hardly a sign of anything insidious; it's just business as usual in
America. Compared with his family connections and his family's Yale
connections, the Skull and Bones network is just a sideshow. But in
the eyes of the conspiracy-minded, interconnections of any kind,
especially when cloaked in mystery and ritual, constitute virtual
proof of dark doings. Skull and Bones will probably never rid itself
of innuendo -- innuendo that has not helped the Bonesmen Bushes in the
pursuit of politics.
Conspiracy theories, which George W. has called "the kind of
connect-the- random-dots charges that are virtually impossible to
refute," contributed to Bush's defeat in his 1978 congressional
campaign. Bill Minutaglio, in his biography of Bush, First Son,
recalls an afternoon debate moderated by the radio talk-show host Mel
Turner:
Turner ... wanted to know if the young Bush was a tool of some shadow
government; it was the same thing people had confronted his father
with when they had called him a "tool of the eastern kingmakers."
"Are you involved in, or do you know anybody involved in, one-world
government or the Trilateral Commission?"
Bush, who had been telling people he was tired of being hammered for
having "connections" through his father to the eastern establishment,
was fuming. "I won't be persuaded by anyone, including my father," he
said, with a biting tone in his voice.
On the way out of the restaurant, Bush was still livid. He refused to
shake hands with Turner. "You asshole," Turner heard him hiss as he
walked by.
George W.'s father has certainly felt that membership in Skull and
Bones damaged him politically. When Fay Vincent made a consolation
call to Bush after his 1980 loss of the Republican presidential
nomination to Ronald Reagan, the weary candidate said, "Fay, let me
tell you something. If you ever decide to run for office, don't forget
that coming from Andover, Yale, Skull and Bones, and the Trilateral
Commission is a big handicap. People don't know what they are, so they
don't know where you're coming from. It's really a big, big problem."
In The Skulls, members of the secret society murder a student
journalist who is attempting to probe its mysteries. Real-life
journalists have not met the same fate, so far as we know, although
Ron Rosenbaum, the author of a 1977 Esquire article on Skull and
Bones, wrote that a Bonesman warned him not to get too close: "The
alumni still care," the source warned.
"Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power
of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every lever of
power in the country. You'll see -- it's like trying to look into the
Mafia."
When I read this excerpt to one young Bonesman, he laughed and said,
"I really don't think I'd be working nights as a paralegal while
trying to be an actor if I had access to some golden key."
SKULL and Bones doesn't own an opulent island hideaway like the one
depicted in The Skulls. It does own an island on the St. Lawrence
River -- Deer Island, in Alexandria Bay. The forty-acre retreat is
intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to "get together and rekindle
old friendships. " A century ago the island sported tennis courts and
its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry
bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals.
But although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island,
the place leaves something to be desired. "Now it is just a bunch of
burned-out stone buildings," a patriarch sighs. "It's basically
ruins." Another Bonesman says that to call the island "rustic" would
be to glorify it. "It's a dump, but it's beautiful."
The fading of Deer Island exemplifies the dwindling finances of Skull
and Bones, which can no longer claim the largest society endowment at
Yale. Unlike members of other societies, Bonesmen pay no dues, though
patriarchs receive an annual letter requesting a "voluntary
contribution to the Russell Trust Association. " In truth, Skull and
Bones has never been wealthy.
The society's accounts are much fatter in the ineffables department. A
Skull and Bones document states,
The experience we have come to value in our society depends on
privacy, and we are unwilling to jeopardize that life in order to
solicit new members. The life which we invite you to share in our
society is based on such intangible factors that we cannot
meaningfully convey to you either its nature or quality.
Hardly a tool of Hades, but rather a staid wayside for students, its
heyday past, its glory faded, Skull and Bones may have little more
than this to conceal.
As for the $15,000 graduation gift, George W.'s contemporary Rex
Cowdry says, "I'm still waiting for mine."
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Alexandra Robbins, a 1998 graduate of Yale University, is on the staff
of The New Yorker's Washington bureau
This article originates at
http://www.theatlan tic.com/issues/ 2000/05/robbins. htm and is listed
here only to augment our material. Ms. Robbins has a book entitled
"Secrets of the Tomb" that deals with the society in greater depth.
Obedience to Authority a now famous study done at Yale.
The Yale Presidential Race
Skull and Bones Society - Rosenbaum
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
Do you trust Mr. President BUSH as Bone & Skeleton member from Yale
University as his father and grandpa?
already researched The Bush's history in 1990's and discovered the
facts on the Bush's membership of Bones and Skeleton at Yale
University. They taught them how to be serect leadership in government
thru New World Order. Also, few weeks ago i found it on internet as I
already knew it.
My friend who was former police and pastor to the deaf worked as
police officers at second shift. He went over the bank and notice the
special boxes in safe room and asked teller what it is for? The Teller
said that it is called "The Rainbow card" that means for New World
Order which President George H.W. Bush signed it. It is for only
emergency if every banks runs out of business then have back up the
rainbow cards for everyone. Teller says no one know about it. So that
how my friend preached in the deaf church in 1990's.
Main
Links
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Anwar Ul Haque
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