-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Travels with Dr. Death and othe unusual investigations
Ron Rosebnbaum�1991
Viking Penguin
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY, 10014
ISBN 0-14-013845-5
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If'n ya ain't seen this one 'efore.
Om
K
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Ron Rosenbaum - Esquire Magazine - September, 1977
The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones
Take a look at the hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they call it a
tomb. It's the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret
societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. For nearly a century and
a half, Skull and Bones has been the most influential secret society in the
nation, and now it is one of the last.
In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be concealed about
anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank tombstone walls could be
holding the last secrets left in America.
You could ask Averell Harriman whether there's really a sarcophagus in the
basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce (Time
magazine) lay down naked in the coffin and spilled the secrets of their
adolescent sex life to 14 fellow Bonesmen. You could ask Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart if there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a
skeleton suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside the
tomb. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pie as part
of his initation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so
eagerly plunged. You could ask Bill Bundy or William F. Buckley, both of who
went into the CIA after leaving Bones - or George Bush, who ran the CIA /
President - whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for
the clandestine trade. ("Spook," the Yale slang for spy.) You could ask J.
Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune,
just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it's true that each new
initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and
guaranteed financial security for life.
You could ask...but I think you get the idea. The lending lights of the
Eastern establishment � in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman
pays Bone's tax bill), in a blue-blood law firms (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett,
for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy
establishment � the people who have shaped America's national character since
it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character
shaped in that crypt over there. Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War
under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class,
called his experience in the tomb the most profound one in his entire
education.
But none of them will tell you a thing about it. They've sworn an oath never
to reveal what goes on inside and they're legendary for the lengths to which
they'll go to avoid prying interrogation. The mere mention of the words "skull
and bones" in the presence of a true-blue Bonesman, such as Blackford Oakes,
the fictional hero of Bill Buckley's spy thriller, 'Saving the Queen', will
cause him to "dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed."
I can trace my personal fascination with the mysteriouis goings- on in the
sepulcher across the street to a spooky scene I witnessed on its shadowy steps
late one April night eleven years ago. I was then a sophmore at Yale, living
in Jonathan Edwards, the residential college (anglophile Yale name for dorm)
built next to the Bones tomb. It was part of Jonathan Edwards folklore that on
a April evening following "tap night" at Bones, if one could climb to the
tower of Weir Hall, the odd castle that overlooks the Bones courtyard, one
could hear strange cries and moans coming from the bowels of the tomb as the
fifteen newly "tapped" members were put through what sounded like a harrowing
ordeal. Returning alone to my room late at night, I would always cross the
street rather than walk the sidewalk that passed right in front of Bones. Even
at that safe distance, something about it made my skin crawl.
But that night in April I wasn't alone; a classmate and I were coming back
from an all-night diner at about two in the morning. At the time, I knew
little about the mysteries of Bones or any of the other huge windowless
secret-society tombs that dominated with dark authority certain key-corners of
the campus. They were nothing like conventional fraternities. No one lived in
the tombs. Instead, every Thursday and Sunday night the best and the brightest
on campus, the fifteen seniors in Skull and Bones and in the Scroll and Key,
Book and Snake, Wolf's Head, Berzelius, in all the seven secret societies,
disappeared into their respective tombs and spent hours doing something -
something they were sworn to secrecy about. And Bones, it was said was the
most ritualistic and secretive of all. Even the very door to the Bones tomb,
that huge triple-padlocked iron door, was never prermitted to open in the
presence of an outsider.
All this was floating through my impressionable sophmore mind that night as my
friend Mike and I approached the stone pylons guarding the entrance to Bones.
Suddenly we froze at the sight of a strange thing lying on the steps. There in
the gloom of the doorway on the top step was a long white object that looked
like the thighbone of a large mammal. I remained frozen. Mike was more
adventuresome: he walked right up to the steps and picked up the bone. I
wanted to get out of there fast; I was certain we were being spied upon from a
concealed window. Mike couldn't decide what to do with the bone. He went up to
the door and began examining the array of padlocks. Suddenly a bolt shot. The
massive door began to swing open and something reached out at him from within.
He grasped, terrified, and jumped back, but not before something clutched the
bone, yanked it out of his hand and back into the darkness within. The door
slammed shut with a clang that rang in our ears as we ran away.
Recollected in tranquility, the dreamlike gothic moment seems to me an emblem
of the strangeness I felt at being at Yale, at being given a brief glimpse of
the mysterious workings of the inner temples of privelege but feeling
emphatically shut out of the secret ceremonies within. I always felt
irrelevant to the real purpose of the institution, which was from its
missionary beginnings devoted to converting the idle progeny of the ruling
class into morally serious leaders of the establishment. It is frequently in
the tombs that conversions take place.
NOVEMBER, 1976: SECURITY MEASURES
It's night and we're back in front of the tomb, Mike and I, reinforced by nine
years in the outside world, two skeptical women friends and a big dinner at
Mory's. And yet once again there is an odd, chilling encounter. We're re-
creating that first spooky moment. I'm standing in front of the stone pylons
and Mike has walked up to stand against the door so we can estimate its height
by his. Then we notice we're being watched. A small red foreign car has pulled
up on the sidewalk a few yards away from us. The driver has been watching us
for some time. Then he gets out. He's a tall, athletic looking guy, fairly
young. He shuts the card door behind him and stands leaning against it,
continuing to observe us. We try to act oblivious, continuing to sketch and
measure.
The guy finally walks over to us, "You seen Miles?" he asks.
We look at each other. Could he think we're actually Bones alumni, or is he
testing us? Could "You seen Miles?" be some sort of password?
"No," we reply. "Haven't seen Miles."
He nods and remains there. We decide we've done enough sketching and measuring
and stroll off.
"Look!" one of the women says as she turns and points back. "He just ran down
the side steps to check the basement-door locks. He probably thought he caught
us planning a break-in."
I found the episode intriguing. What it said to me was that Bones still cared
about the security of its secrets. Trying to find out what goes on inside
could be a challenge.
And so it was that I set out this April to see just how secure those last
secrets are. It was a task I took on not out of malice or sour grapes. I was
not tapped for a secret society so I'm open to the latter charge, but I plead
guilty only to the voyeurism of a mystery lover. I'd been working on a novel,
a psychological thriller of sorts that involved the rites of Bones, and I
thought it wouldn't hurt to spend some time in New Haven during the week of
tap night and initiation night, poking around and asking questions.
You could call it espionage if you were so inclined, but I tried to play the
game in a gentlemanly fashion: I would not directly ask a Bonesman to violate
his sacred oath of secrecy. If, however, one of them happened to have fudged
on the oath to some other party and that the other party were to convey the
gist of the information to me, I would rule it fair game. And if any Bonesman
wants to step forward and add something. I'll be happy to listen.
What follows is an account of my search for the meaning behind the mysterious
Bones rituals. Only information that might be too easily traced to its source
has been left out, because certain sources expressed fear of reprisals against
themselves. Yes, reprisals. One of them even insisted, with what seemed like
deadly seriousness, that reprisals would be taken against me.
"What bank do you have your checking account at?" this party asked me in the
middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual.
I named the bank,.
"Aha," said the party. "There are three Bonesmen on the board. You'll never
have a line of credit again. They'll tap your phone. They'll..."
Before I could say, "A line of what?" the source continued: "The alumni still
care. Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of
Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every level of power in the
country. You'll see - it's like trying to look into the Mafia. Remember,
they're a secret society, too."
WEDNESDAY NIGHT, APRIL 14: THE DOSSIER
Already I have in my possession a set of annotated floor plans of the interior
of the tomb, giving the location of the sanctum sanctorum, the room called
322. And tonight I recieved a dossier on Bones ritual secrets that was
compiled from the archives of another secret society. (It seems that one
abiding preoccupation of many Yale secret societies is keeping files on the
secrets of other secret societies, particularly Bones.)
The dossier of Bones is a particularly sophisticated one, featuring
"reliability ratings" in prercentiles for each chunk of information. It was
obtained for me by an enterprising researcher on the condition that I keep
secret the name of the secret society that supplied it. Okay I will say,
though, that it's not the secret society that is rumored to have Hitler's
silverware in its archives. That's Scroll and Key, chief rival of Bones for
the elite of Yale � Dean Acheson and Cy Vance's society � and the source of
most of the rest of the American foreign policy establishment.
But to return to the dossier. Let me tell you what it says about the
initiation, the center of some of the most lurid apocryphal rumors about
Bones. According to the dossier, the Bones initiation ritual of 1940 went like
this: "New man placed in coffin - carried into central part of the building.
New man chanted over and 'reborn' into society. Removed from coffin and given
robes with symbols on it. (sic) A bone with his name on it is tossed into bone
heap at start of every meeting. Initiates plunged into mud pile."
THURSDAY EVENING: THE FILE AND CLAW SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERY OF 322
I'm standing in the shadows across the street from the tomb, ready to tail the
first person to come out. Tonight is tap night, the night fifteen juniors will
be chosen to receive the one-hundred- forty-five-year-old secrets of Bones.
Tonight the fifteen seniors in Bones and the fifteen in each of the other
societies will arrive outside the rooms of the prospective tappees. They'll
pound loudly on the doors. When the chosen junior opens up, a Bonesman will
slam him on the shoulder and thunder: "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?"
At that point, according to my dossier, if the candidate accepts, he will be
handed a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed in black wax with the
skull-and-crossbones emblem and the mystic Bones number, 322. The message
appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night -
next Tuesday - the first time the newly tapped candidate will be permitted
inside the tomb. Candidates are "instructed to wear no metal" to the
initiation, the dossier notes ominously. (Reliability rating for the stated to
be one hundred prercent.)
Not long before eight tonight, the door to Bones swings open. Two dark-suited
young men emerge. One of them carries a slim black attache case. Obviously
they're on their way to tap someone. I decide that Bones inititates are taken
to a ceremony somewhere near the campus before the big initiation inside the
tomb. The Bonesmen head up High Street and pass the library, then make a
right.
Passing the library, I can't help but recoil when I think of the embarrissing
discovery I made in the manuscript room this afternoon. The last thing I
wanted to do was reduce the subleties of the social function of Bones to some
simpleminded conspiracy theory. And yet I do seem to have come across
definite, if skeletal links between the origins of Bones rituals and those of
the notorious Bavarian Illuminists. For me, an intersted but skeptical student
of the conspiracy world, the introduction of the Illuminists, or Illuminati,
into certain discussions (say for instance, of events in Dallas in 1963) has
become the same thing that the mention of Bones is to a Bonesman - a signal to
leave the room. Because although the Bavarian Illuminists did have a real
historical existence (from 1776 to 1785 they were an esoteric secret society
within the more mystical freethinking lodges of German Freemasonry), they have
also had a paranoid fantasy existence throughout two centuries of conspiracy
literature. They are the imagined megacabal that manipulated such alleged
plots as the French and Russian revolutions, the elders of Zion, the rise of
Hitler and the House of Morgan. Yes the Bilderbergers and George De
Mohrenschildt, too. Silly as it may sound, there are suggestive links between
the historical if not mytho-conspiratorial, Illuminists and Bones.
First consider the account of the origins of Bones to be found in a century-
old pamphlet published by an anonymous group that called itself File and Claw
after the tools they used to pry their way inside Bones late one night. I came
upon the File and Claw break-in pamphlet in a box of disintigrating documents
filed in the library's manuscript room under Skull and Bone's corporate name,
Russell Trust Association. The foundation was named for William H (later
General) Russell, the man who founded Bones in 1832. I was trying to figure
out what mission Russell had for the secret order he founded and why he had
chosen that particular death-head brand of mumbo jumbo to embody his vision.
Well, according to the File and Claw breakin crew, "Bones is a chapter of
corps of a German university. It should properly be called the Skull and Bones
chapter. General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his senior year
and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. The
meaning of the permanent number 322 in all Bones literature is that it was
founded in '32 as the second chapter of the German society. But the Bonesman
has a pleasing fiction that his faternity is a descendant of an old Greek
patriot society founded by Demosthenes, who died in 322 BC."
They go on to describe a German slogan painted "on arched walls above the
vault" of the sacred room 322. The slogan appears above a painting of skulls
surrounded by Masonic symbols, a picture said to be "a gift of the German
chapter." "Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob
Reich, im Tode gleich," the slogan reads, or, "Who was the fool, who the wise
man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."
Imagine my surprise when I ran into that very slogan in a 1798 Scottish anti-
Illuminatist tract reprinted in 1967 by the John Birch Society. The tract
(proofs of a conspiracy by John Robinson) prints alleged excerpts from
Illuminist ritual manuals supposedly confiscated by the Bavarian police when
the secret order was banned in 1785. Toward the end of the ceremony of
initiation in the "Regent degree" of Illuminism, according to the tract, "a
skeleton in pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a
crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king,
nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says
to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance''".
Doesn't that sound similar to the German slogan the File and Claw team claims
to have found inside Bones? Now consider a haunting photograph of the altar
room of one of the Masonic lodges at Nuremburg that is closely associated with
Illuminism. Haunting because at the altar room's center, approached through
the aisle of hanging human skeletons, is a coffin surmounted by - you guessed
it - a skull and crossed bones that look exactly like the particular
arrangement of jawbones and thighbones in the official Bones emblem. The skull
and crossbones was the official crest of another key Illuminist lodge, one
right-wing Illuminist theoretician told me.
Now you can lok at this three ways. One possibility is that the Bircher right
- and the conspiracy-minded left are correct: The Eastern establishment is the
demonic creation of a clandestine elite manipulating history, and Skull and
Bones is one of its recruiting centers. A more plausible explanation is that
the death's-head symbolism was so prevalent in Germany when the impressionable
young Russell visited that he just stumbled on the same mother lode of pseudo-
Masonic mummery as the Illuninists. The third possibility is that the break-in
pamphlets are an elaborate fraud designed by the File and Claw crew to pin the
taint of Illuminism on Bones and that the rituals of Bones have innocent
Athenian themes, 322 being only the date of the death of Demosthenes. (In
fact, some Bones literature I've seen in the archives does express the year as
if 322 BC were the year one, making 1977 anno Demostheni 2299.)
* * *
I am still following the dark-suited Bonesman at a discreet distance as they
make their way along Prospect Street and into a narrow alley, which to my
dismay, turns into a parking lot. They get into a car and drive off, obviously
to tap an off-campus prospect. So much for tonight's clandestine work I'd
never get to my car in time to follow them. My heart isn't in it anyway. I am
due to head off to the graveyard to watch the initiation ceremony of Book and
Snake, the secret society of Deep Throat's friend Bob Woodward (several Deep
Throat theories have postulated Yale secret-society ties as the origin of
Woodward's underground-garage connection, and two Bonesmen, Ray Price and
Richard Moore, who weree high Nixon aides, have been mentioned as suspects -
perhaps because of their experience at clandestine underground truth telling).
And later tonight I hope to make the first of my contacts with persons who
have been inside - not just inside the tomb, but inside the skulls of some of
the Bonesmen.
LATER THURSDAY NIGHT: TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEXUAL AUTOBIOGRPHIES
In his senior year, each member of Bones goes through an intense two-part
confessional experience in the Bones crypt. One Thursday night he tells his
life story, giving what is meant to be a painfully forthright autobigraphy
that exposes his traumas, shames, and dreams. (Tom Wolfe calls this Bones
practice a fore-runner of the Me Decade's fascination with self.) The
following Sunday-night session is devoted exclusively to sexual histories.
They don't leave out anything these days. I don't know what it was like in
General Russell's day, maybe there was less to talk about, but these days the
sexual stuff is totally explicit and there's less need for fabricating
exploits to fill up the allotted time. Most Sunday-night sessions start with
talk of prep school masturbation and don't stop until the intimate details of
Saturday night's delights have come to light early Monday morning.
This has begun to cause some disruptions in relationships. The women the
Bonesmen talk about in the crypt are often Yale co-eds and frequently
feminists. While it might seem to be a rebuke to Bone's spirit of
consciousness raising, none of these women is too pleased at having the most
intimate secrets of her relationship made the subject of an all-night
symposium consecrating her lover's brotherhood with fourteen males she hardly
knows. As one woman put it, "I objected to fourteen guys knowing whether I was
a good lay...It was like after that each of them thought I was his woman in
some way."
Some women have discovered that their lovers take their vows to Bones more
solemnly than their commitments to women. There is the case of the woman who
revealed something very personal - not embarassing, just private - to her
lover and made him swear never to repeat it to another human. When he came
back from the Bones crypt after his Sunday-night sex session, he couldn't meet
her eyes. He'd told his brothers in Bones.
It seems that the whole secret society system at Yale is in the terminal
stages of a sexual crisis. By the time I arrived this April, all but three of
the formerly all male societies had gone co-ed, and two of the remaining
holdouts - Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head - were embroiled in bitter battles
over certain members' attempts to have them follow the trend. The popular
quarterback of the football team had resigned from Scroll and Key because its
alumni would not even let him make a pro-coeducation plea to their
convocation. When one prominent alumnus of Wolf's Head was told the current
members had plans to tap women, he threatened to "raze the building" before
permitting it. Nevertheless, it seemed as though it wouldn't be long before
those two holdouts went co-ed. But not Bones. Both alumni and outsiders see
the essence of the Bones experience as some kind of male bonding, a Victorian,
muscular, Christian-missionary view of manliness and public service.
While changing the least of all societies over its one hundred forty-five
years. Bones did begin admitting Jews in the early Fifties and tapping blacks
in 1949. It offered membership to some of the most outspoken rebels of the
late Sixties and more recently, added gay and bisexual members, including the
president of the militant Gay Activist Alliance, a man by the name of Miles.
But women, the Bones alumni have strenuously insisted, are different. When a
rambunctious Seventies class of Bones proposed tapping the best and brightest
of the new Yale women, the officers of the Russell Trust Association
threatened to bar that class from the tomb and change the locks if they dared.
They didn't.
The sort of thing is what persuaded the person I am meeting with late tonight
- and a number of other persons - to talk about what goes on inside: after
all, isn't the core of the Bones group experience the betrayal of their loved
ones' secrets? Measure for measure.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20: INITIATION NIGHT�
TALES OF THE TOMB AND DEER ISLAND
When I return to New Haven on initiation night to stand again in the shadows
across the street from Bones in the hope of glimpsing an initiate enter, it
is, thanks to my sources (who insist on anonymity), with a greater sense of
just what it means for the initiate to be swallowed up by the tomb for the
first time.
The first initiate arrives shortly before eight p.m., proceeds up the steps
and halts at attention in front of the great door. I don't see him ring a
bell; I don't think he has to. They are expecting him. The doors open. I can't
make out who or what is inside, but the initiate's reaction is unmistakable:
he puts his hands up as if a gun has been pointed at him. He walks into the
gloom and the door closes behind him.
Earlier, according to my source, before the initiate was allowed to approach
that door, he was led blindfolded to a Bones house somewhere on Orange Street
and conducted to the basement. There two older Bonesmen dressed in skeleton
suits had him swear solemn oaths to keep secret whatever he was to experience
in the tomb during the initiation rite and forever after.
Now I am trying to piece together what I know about what is happening to that
initiate tonight and, more generally, how his life will change now that he has
been admitted inside. Tonight he will die to the world and be born again into
the Order, as he will thenceforth refer to it. The Order is a world unto
itself in which he will have a new name and fourteen new blood brothers, also
with new names.
The "death" of the initiate will be as frightful as the liberal use of human
skeletons and ritual psychology can make it. Whether it's accompanied by
physical beatings or wrestling or a plunge into a mud or dung pile I have not
been able to verify, but I'd give a marginally higher reliability rating to
the mud-pile plunge. Then it's into the coffin and off on a symbolic journey
through the underworld to rebirth, which takes place in room number 322. There
the Order clothes the newborn knight in its own special garments, implying
that henceforth he will tailor himself to the Order's mission.
Which is-if you take it at face value-to produce an alliance of good men. The
Latin for "good men" is "boni," of course, and each piece of Bones literature
sports a Latin maxim making use of "boni." "Good men are rare," is the way one
maxim translates. "Of all societies none is more glorious nor of greater
strength than when good men of similar morals are joined in intimacy,"
proclaims another.
The intimacy doesn't really begin to get going until the autobiographical
sessions start in September. But first there are some tangible rewards. In the
months that follow tonight's initiation, the born-again Bonesmen will begin to
experience the wonderful felicity of the Protestant ethic: secular rewards
just happen to accrue to the elect as external tokens of their inner
blessedness.
Fifteen thousand dollars, for instance. According to one source, each initiate
gets a no-strings, tax-free gift of fifteen thousand dollars from the Russell
Trust Association just for having been selected by Bones. I'd heard rumors
that Bonesmen were guaranteed a secure income for life in some way-if only to
prevent a downtrodden alcoholic brother from selling the secrets for a few
bucks. When I put this question to, my source, the reply was that of course
the society would always help a downtrodden member with interest-free loans,
if necessary, but, he added, the only outright contribution was a flat fifteen
-thousand -dollar payment.
When I mentioned the fifteen-thousand-dollar figure to writer Tom Powers, a
member of a secret society called Elihu, he, like members of other secret
societies, professed incredulity. But the day after I spoke to him I received
this interesting communication from Powers:
"I have checked with a Bones penetration and am now inclined to think you have
got the goods where the fifteen thousand dollars is concerned. A sort of
passive or negative confirmation. I put the question to him and he declined to
comment in a tone of voice that might have been, but was not, derisory. Given
an ideal opportunity to say, 'That's bullshit!' he did not.
"The interesting question now is what effect the fifteen-thousand-dollar
report is going to have on next tap day. The whole Bones mystique will take on
a mercenary air, sort of like a television game show. If there is no fifteen
thousand, the next lineup of tappees will be plenty pissed. I can hear the
conversations now: outgoing Bones members telling prospects there is one thing
they've got to understand, really and truly-there i's no fifteen thousand!!!
While the prospects will be winking and nudging and saying, 'I understand. Ha-
ha! You've got to say that, but just between us. . . .'
"If Bones has got a cell in C.I.A.," Powers concluded his letter, "you could
be in big trouble."
Ah, yes. The Bones cell in the Central Intelligence Agency. Powers had' called
my attention to a passage in Aaron Latham's new novel, Orchids for Mother, in
which the thinly veiled version of C.I.A. master. spy James Angleton recalls
that the Agency is "Langley's New Haven all over again.... Secret society'd be
closer, like Skull and Bones."
"There are a lot of Bonesmen around, aren't there?" asks a young C.I.A.
recruit.
Indeed, says the master spy, with all the Bones spooks it's "a regular haunted
house."
If you were a supersecret spy agency seeking to recruit the most trustworthy
and able men for dangerous missionary work against the barbarian threat
wouldn't you want someone whose life story, character and secrets were already
known to you? You'd certainly want to know if there were any sexual
proclivities that might make the future spy open to temptation or blackmail.
Now, I'm not saying the C.I.A. has bugged the Bones crypt (although who could
rule it out with certainty?). But couldn't the Agency use old Bonesmen to
recruit new ones, or might they not have a trusted de scenclant of a
Bonesmanjust one in each fifteen would be enoough-, advise them on the,
suitability of the other fourteen for initiation into postgraduate secrets?
Consider the case of once gung-ho-C.I.A. Bonesman William Sloane' Coffin, who
later became a leader of the antiwar movement. A descenclant of an aptly named
family with three generations of Bonesmen, Coffin headed for the C.I.A. not
long after graduation from Bones. And' the man Coffin tapped for Bones,
William F. Buckley Jr., was himself tapped by the C.I.A. the following year.
When I tried to reach Coffin to ask him about C.I.A. recruiting in Bones, I
was told that he was "in seclusion," writing his memoirs. (Okay, Chaplain, but
I want to let you know that I'll be looking in your memoirs to see just how
much you tell about the secrets of Bonet and the C.I.A., how loyal you still
are to their secrets. Which side are you on?)
In the late summer following his initiation, right before he begins his senior
year, the initiate is given a gift of greater value than any putative fifteen
-thousand -dollar recruitment fee: his first visit to the private resort
island owned and maintained by the Russell Trust Association in the St.
Lawrence River. There, hidden among the Thousand Islands, the reborn initiate
truly finds himself on an isle of the blessed, For there, on this place called
Deer Island, are assembled the active, Bones alumni and their families, and
there he gets a sense of how many powerful establishment institutions are run
by wonderful, civilized silver-haired Bonesmen eager to help the initiate's
establishment dreamt come true. He can also meet the wives of Bonesmen of all
ages and get a sense of what kind of woman is most acceptable and appropriate
in Bones society and perhaps even meet that most acceptable of all type of
women-the daughter of a Bonesman.
A reading of the lists of Bonesmen selected over the past one hundred' forty-
five years suggests that like the secret society of another ethnic group,
certain powerful families dominate: the Tafts, the Whitneys, the Thachers, the
Lords, for instance. You also get the feeling there's a lot of intermarriage
among these Bones families. Year after year there will, be a Whitney Townsend
Phelps in the same Bones class as a Phelps' Townsend Whitney. It's only
natural, considering the way they grow up together with Bones picnics, Bones
outings and a whole quiet panoply of Bones social events outside the campus
and the tomb. Particularly on the island.
Of course, if the initiate has grown up in a Bones family and gone to picnics
on the island all his life, the vision-the introduction to powerful people,
the fine manners, the strong bonds-is less awesome. But to the nonhereditary
slots in a Bones class of fifteen, the outsidersfrequently the football
captain, the editor of the Yale Daily News, a brilliant scholar, a charismatic
student politician-the island experience comes as a seductive revelation:
these powerful people want me, want my talents, my services; perhaps they even
want my genes. Play along with their rules and I can become one of them. They
want me to become one of them.
In fact, one could make a half-serious case that functionally Bones serves as
a kind of ongoing informal establishment eugenics project bringing vigorous
new genes into the bloodlines of the Stimsonian elite. Perhaps that explains
the origin of the sexual autobiography. It may have served some eugenic
purpose in General Russell's vision: a sharing of birth-control and self-
control methods to minimize the chance of a good man and future steward of the
ruling class being trapped into marriage by a fortune hunter or a working-
class girl-the way the grand tour for an upper-class American youth always
included an initiation into the secrets of Parisian courtesans so that once
back home the young man wouldn't elope with the first girl who let him get
past second base.
However, certain of the more provincial Bones families do not welcome all
genes into the pool. There is a story about two very wellknown members of a
Bones class who haven't spoken to each other for more than two decades. One of
them was an early Jewish token member of Bones who began to date the sister of
a fellow Bonesman. Apparently the Christian family made its frosty reaction to
this development very plain. The Christian Bonesman did not convince his
Jewish blood brother he was entirely on his side in the matter. The dating
stopped and so did the speaking. It's an isolated incident, and I wouldn't
have brought it up had I not been told of the "Jew-canoe" incident, which
happened relatively recently.
There's a big book located just inside the main entrance to Bones. in it are
some of the real secrets. Not the initiation rites or the grip, but reactions
to, comments on and mementos of certain things that went on in the tomb,
personal revelations, interpersonal encounters. The good stuff. I don't know
if the tale of the brokenhearted token gay and the rotting-paella story are in
there, but they should be. I'm almost sure the mysterious "Phil" incident
isn't there. (According to one source, the very mention of the name "Phil" is
enough to drive certain Bonesmen up the wall.) But the unfortunate "Jew-canoe"
incident is in that book.
It seems that not too long ago the boys in a recent Bones class were sitting
around the tomb making some wisecracks that involved Jewish stereotypes. "He
drives a Cadillac-you know, the Jew canoe." Things like that. Well, one Jewish
token member that year happened to be present, but his blood brothers
apparently didn't think he'd mind-it being only in fun and all that. Then it
got more intense, as it can in groups when a wound is suddenly opened in one
of their number. The Jewish member stalked out of the tomb, tears in his eyes,
feeling betrayed by his brothers and thinking of resigning forthwith. But he
didn't. He went back and inscribed a protest in the big book, at which time
his brothers, suitably repentant, persuaded him not to abandon the tomb.
Outsiders often do have trouble with the Bones style of intimacy. There was,
for instance, the story of one of the several token bisexuals and gays that
Bones has tapped in recent years. He has the misfortune to develop, during the
long Thursday and Sunday nights of shared intimacy, a deep affection for a
member of his fifteen-man coven who declared himself irrevocably heterosexual.
The intimacy of the tomb experience became heartbreaking and frustrating for
the gay member. When the year came to a close and it came time to pick the
next group of fifteen from among the 'Junior class, he announced that he was
not going to tap another token gay and recommended against gay membership
because he felt the experience was too intense to keep from becoming sexual.
There's a kind of backhanded tribute to something genuine there. The Bones
experience can be intense enough to work real transformations. Idle, preppie
Prince Hals suddenly become serious students of society and themselves, as if
acceptance into the tomb were a signal to leave the tavern and prepare to rule
the land. Those embarrassed at introspection and afraid of trusting other men
are given the mandate and the confidence to do so.
"Why," said one source, "do old men-seventy and over-travel thousands of miles
for Bones reunions? Why do they sing the songs with such gusto? Where else can
you hear Archibald MacLeish take on Henry Luce in a soul-versus-capital debate
with no holds barred? Bones survives because the old men who are successful
need to convince themselves that not luck or wealth put them where they are,
but raw talent, and a talent that was recognized in their youth. Bones,
because of its elitism, connects their past to their present. It-is more
sustaining, for some, than marriage."
Certainly the leaders that Bones has turned out are among the more humane and
civilized of the old Yankee establishment. In addition to cold -warriors, Viet
warriors and spies, there are as many or more missionaries, surgeons, writers
(John Hersey, Archibald MacLeish) and great teachers (William Graham Sumner,
F.O. Matthiessen) as there are investment bankers. There is, in the past of
Bones, at least, a genuine missionary zeal for moral, and not merely surplus,
value.
* * *
It's now a century since the break-in pamphlet of the File and Claw crew
announced "the decline and fall of Skull and Bones," so it would be premature
for me to announce the imminence of such an event, but almost everyone I spoke
to at Yale thought that Bones was in headlong decline. There have been
unprecedented resignations. There have been an increasing number of
rejections�people Bones wants who don't want Bones. Or who don't care enough
to give up two nights a week for the kind of marathon encounter any Esalen
graduate can put on in the Bougainvillea Room of the local Holiday Inn.
Intimacy is cheap and zeal is rare these days. The word is out that Bones no
longer gets the leaders of the class but lately has taken on a more
lackadaisical, hedonist, comfortable�even, said some, decadent�group. (I was
fascinated to learn from my source that some Bones members still partake in
certain sacraments of the Sixties. Could it be that the old black magic of
Bones ritual has kind of lost its spell and needs a psychedelic dramatizing
these days?)
And the reasons people give now for joining Bones are often more foreboding
than the rejections. They talk about the security of a guaranteed job with one
of the Bones-dominated investment banks or law firms. They talk about the
contacts and the connections and maybe in private they talk about the fifteen
thousand dollars (regardless of whether Bones actually delivers the money, it
may deliberately plant the story to lure apathetic 'but mercenary recruits).
Bones still has the power to corrupt, but does it have the power to inspire?
The recent classes of Bones just do not, it seems, take themselves as
seriously as, General Russell or Henry Stimson or Blackford Oakes might want
them to.
The rotting-paella story seems a perfect emblem of the decay~. The story goes
that a recent class of Bones decided they would try to a meal in the basement
kitchen of the tomb. It was vacation time and the servants were not on call to
do it for them. They produced a passable paella, but left the remains of the
meal there in the basement kitchen presuming that someone would be in to clean
up after them. No came in for two weeks. When they returned, they found the
interior of the tomb smelling worse than if there actually had been dead
bodies there. The servants refused to cook the meal for the next
autobiographical session unless the Bonesmen cleaned up the putrefying paella
themselves. The Bonesmen went without food. I don't know who finally. cleaned
up, but there's a sense that like the paella, the original mission, of Bones
has suffered from, neglect and apathy and that the gene pool, like the stew,
is becoming stagnant.
I began to feel sorry for the old Bonesmen: after a few days of asking around,
I found the going too easy; almost too many people were willing to spill their
secrets. I had to call a halt. In the spirit of Bonesman,. Gifford Pinchot,
godfather of the conservation movement, I'm protecting some of the last
secrets�they're an endangered species. I have to save some for my novel., And
besides, I like mumbo jumbo.
It's strange: I didn't exactly set out to write an expose of Skull and Bones,
but neither did I think I'd end up with an elegy.
-ESQUIRE
September 1977
POSTSCRIPT TO "THE LAST SECRETS OF SKULL AND BONES"
A personal postscript. In October 1986 aboard Air Force Two, 35,000 feet over
the Carolinas, I asked George Bush about Skull and Bones. It was probably a
bit unfair to choose that particular situation. We were strapped into seats in
the forward cabin; if, as legend had it, Skull and Bones members were required
to exit a room when anyone pronounced the secret society's name in their
presence, here the nearest exit was a seven-mile drop.
I had Bush trapped. (I was covering Bush on assignment for The New Republic,
to write about his pre-presidential midterm election campaign swing.)
There were a couple of factors complicating the situation, though. One was
named Barbara Bush. She had the window seat next to me in the cabin during the
interview, and I couldn't help but notice her expression of disapproval�the
knitted brow, the compressed lips�of the kinds of "character" questions I'd
been asking her husband even before I got to Skull and Bones.
It wasn't so much her knit brow but her knitting needles I found most
disconcerting. I could sense her disapproval with my questions in the stepped-
up tempo and, well, pointedness with which she stabbed the needles through the
fabric. At this point I can't recall whether it was crochet needles, knitting,
or needlepoint; all I remember are the glint of those needles flashing like
stillettos as I asked George Bush my Skull and Bones question.
But I had my own reasons for being uneasy about the Skull and Bones question.
In a certain sense I felt Bush had suffered a bit unfairly from my story. I
had written what I thought of as a story about the decline of one of the great
mythic emblems of the Yankee Eastern establishment. Indeed, the subtitle of
the story when it first appeared was "An Elegy for Mumbo Jumbo."
But, perhaps inevitably, conspiracy-minded right-wing groups had ignored the
subtleties in the story and used Bush's Bones connection to reify the myth of
Bones' occult power. During the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary, when
Bush's first run for the presidency had run aground, the right-wing Manchester
Union-Leader had aired the Skull and Bones connection, quoting my story; other
looney-right Trilateralist-conspiracy theory tracts had cited my story as
proof that Bush was a minion of what was portrayed as a conspiratorial secret
society of diabolical internationalist bankers that ruled the world from
behind the scenes, Protocols of the Elders of Connecticut-style.
And so it was with a bit of guilt that I asked the vice-president about the
influence of his secret society on his life. Did Bones inculcate an ethos of
leadership?
"Well, it wasn't about leadership per se," he said, "so much as about
friendship." He recited a number of similar platitudes, then he cut it short,
nodding to his furiously knitting wife and saying, "We're just not the type
who likes to get into all this self-analysis stuff." Barbara Bush nodded
vigorously back and returned to her needles.
The most shocking recent development to Bones-watchers� the one that, as far
as I'm concerned, really rent the fabric of the Bones mystique more than
anything I'd done�came during Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. In September
1988, The Washington Post published the first installment of a five-part Bob
Woodward review of Bush's life and career. The shock in that first installment
was that Woodward had interviewed many of Bush's class in Bones. And that
they'd talked. Not merely talked, gabbed. Blabbed. About Bones, about the
sexual confessional (they confirmed it), about Bush's experience in Bones,
about the midlife crisis Bush was suffering during his vice-presidency when he
summoned his Bones class to a kind of confessional session and confided in
them that he was worried he'd sold his principles in an effort to conform to
Ronald Reagan's. I was astonished by the way thatoverawed, perhaps, by
Woodward or by their sudden closeness to the next president (or both)Bush's
Bones brothers babbled about the very character analysis issues the Bushes
seemed to deplore.
This, more than anything, was a true measure of the decline of Skull and
Bones-when the glamour of the White House overshadowed the mystique of the
Tomb.
And speaking of the sexual confessional, I must admit I think I was misled on
one point in this story by one of my sources, an angry exgirlfriend of a Bones
man who was particularly irritated about having her private life bruited about
in the sexual confessional. It was she who told me about the $15,000
postgraduate stipend for Bones initiateswhich I now believe is an inaccurate
generalization from one initiate she knew getting a $15,000 loan for a
postgraduate grand tour.
The sexual confessional nonetheless continues to be a potent irritant to Bones
girlfriends. In the years since my story was published, I've received two sets
of photographs of the secret interior of Bones from two separate women-led
break-in groups. I also learned the truth about the mysterious "Phil" incident
referred to in the story. But on that embarrassing affair, I'm still sworn to
silence.
pps 375-395
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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