-Caveat Lector- from: Fame Magazine ©1989 Fame Magazine Group, Inc Steven ML Aronson SECRET SOCIETY Skull and Bones, Yale’s most exclusive boy’s club, claims as its own some of America’s most prominent figures, George Bush among them. STEVEN M.L. ARONSON, Yale ‘65, rattles a few skeletons in the closet of the 150-year-old bastion of leaders to come. THE YEAR WAS 1948, and the distinguished Harvard professor F. 0. Matthiessen, “Foggy” to his students and “Matty” to his friends, was dining at the Cambridge Massachusetts: apartment of Donald Ogden Stewart, the humorist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. It was a jittery time: Matthiessen was waiting to be called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and Stewart, a “parlor pink” who belonged to the left wing of the Screen Writers Guild, had good reason to be uneasy himself. Another guest at that long-ago dinner, Eileen Finletter, recalls today: “I very distinctly heard Matty say to Don Stewart, ‘As long as we have somebody from Bones who can bring pressure on the committee, I should think we’ll be all right.’” The two were Bonesmen, linked for life in—members unto death of—Skull and Bones, not only the oldest, richest, and most powerful of the seven secret societies at Yale, but the most exclusive of all college clubs and arguably the most seductive little sodality in the world. Plainly they believed that being Bonesmen guaranteed them special dispensations throughout life, and in this they were not mistaken. Ever since its founding in 1832, Skull and Bones has rattled and reverberated in the loftiest reaches of the American meritocracy, resounding most sonorously in the fields of foreign policy, domestic intelligence, banking, law, and letters. Two presidents of the United States, including the sitting one, have taken the society’s oath of allegiance. When George Herbert Walker Bush—Bonesman, and son, nephew, cousin, brother, and father of Bonesmen—was sworn into the office of vice president of the United States, in 1981, the oath was administered by a fellow Bonesman, Associate justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court. In emotional terms, however, it might well have been a less important oath than the one he had taken thirty-four years before in Skull and Bones. For George Bush, his secret society is the tie that binds and bonds. A few weeks after being sworn in as vice president, he made the time to entertain the twelve surviving Bonesmen from his Yale class, their wives, and the widows of the other two, at the vice- presidential residence, Bob Woodward reported in The Washington Post. One of the men recited a sophomoric poem he had written for the occasion, which featured the com-forting rhyme, “Old Poppy, our own V.P.- Comraderie: All his adult life Bush has drawn these from the well of Skull and Bones. In the early 1950s a daughter died of leukemia, and his fraternal Bonesmen were there for him, as they would be when he needed political advice or campaign money. And he was there for them-best man at one Bonesman’s wedding; in constant attendance at the bed-side of another, who was dying of cancer; and faithful corres-pondent, sending some eighty-five letters in the past twenty-two years to just a single member of his Bones delegation. Other Bonesmen whose commitment to the society was (or is) as unbreakable as Bush’s, and whose names will also ring—or merely tinkle—in eternity include: Henry R. Luce, father of Time; President William Howard Taft; Henry Stimson, President Hoover’s secretary of state; Robert A. Lovett, President Truman’s secretary of defense; authors John Hersey, Brendan Gill, and William F. Buckley Jr.; Gerald Murphy, the inspiration for the character Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night; singer Lanny Ross; McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s assistant for national security affairs; William H. Donaldson and Dan W. Lufkin, founders of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; Winston Lord, President Reagan’s ambassador to China; and US senators David Boren of Oklahoma, John Chafee of Rhode Island, and John Kerry of Massachusetts (Skull and Bones has always had a kind of baby-senator quality to it; there’s that sense of incipient power throbbing throughout). And let’s not forget statesman W. Averell Harriman, who chose the Skull and Bones magic number 322 for the combination of the briefcase in which he carried top-secret dispatches between London and Moscow during World War II. Or Archibald MacLeish, librarian of Congress and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright; a Bonesman once showed me a letter he’d received from MacLeish, written late in his long and estimable life, that was signed, with an undiminished trustingness, “Yours in—& out of—322, Archie. “Hurrah for old 322/ Hurrah for Skull and Bones” is the society’s call to arms, so to speak. (Or rather, so not to speak, since members are supposed to leave the room whenever even the words skull and bones, let alone the sacred numerals, are uttered by outsiders.) The 322 derives from 322 B.C., the date of the death of the great Demosthenes, who founded a society from which Bones is said to have taken its baleful bearings. Its trappings are baleful, too. The society’s emblem, a skull on crossed thigh bones with a 322 between them, serves as a memento mori to members: The death’s head grinning back at them will soon enough be their own. It was at the end of his Junior year at Yale that each of the above yet-to-be-hewn Mount Rushmore sculptures was “tapped” for Bones—that is, chosen along with fourteen of his classmates by the fifteen graduating seniors in the society. The deliberations were held in secret, but it was clear from the elections that Skull and Bones wanted one thing only: leaders, present and future. (Were one unfortunate enough not to be tapped by Bones or any other society, the humiliation was no secret; the results were published in the Yale Daily News for all to see.) “On a Thursday afternoon in mid-May, the Junior class and hundreds of onlookers would gather on Old Campus to await the verdict,” write Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their book The Wise Men, avidly resurrecting the ritual of tapping in a long-since-vanished Yale. “As the chapel bell struck five, the roar would go up: ‘First man!’ Grim as death’s hand, dressed in black with a gold Bones pin, a member would suddenly appear and head straight for some trembling junior. Grabbing him by the shoulder, he would wheel him around and slap him hard on the back, crying, ‘Skull and Bones! Go to your room. Legs shaking, the Chosen would stumble off through the parting crowd.” Today, the fifteen young men tapped for Bones still meet every Thursday and Sunday throughout their senior year in the immense, windowless, Egyptian-style Skull and Bones “Tomb” on New Haven’s High Street—a mausoleum of seemingly indestructible solidity, which continues after 150 years to draw close attention and distant awe. They begin their year together as pledged initiates guessing at each other’s essences; they conclude it having spoken more intimately of themselves than they ever had before or, perhaps, ever would again. MYTHS AND LEGENDS ABOUT BONES, PUT ABOUT BY the barbarian world outside its gates, have proliferated over the years: that members are made to wrestle in the nude in a mud pile; that handymen entering the building to make necessary repairs must first be inducted into the society; that clocks are set five minutes fast to admonish Bonesmen that they start life five steps ahead of where the uninitiated rest of us leave off; that a collection of souvenir skulls decorates the tomb’s interior, including those of Pancho Villa and Gerommo. Of course, outsiders have always laughed at Skull and Bones, partly out of envy, partly out of nervous respect: One mocks what one cannot possess. Even the occasional insider, however, will send the society up. Bonesman Christopher T. Buckley, son of Bonesman William F. Buckley Jr., and onetime speechwriter for Bonesman George Bush, recently told the New York Times: “We have Sarah Bernhardt’s right leg. And we have Peter Stuyvesant’s left leg. We keep them in a case and we call them ‘Jack and Jill. “’ But—the question fairly asks itself—what actually does go on inside Skull and Bones? To begin with, there is a ceremony called the “Life History” (“LH” for short), an autobiographical performance that members must give in one Thursday night session each. First, however, comes the “Connubial Bliss” session (called the “CB” for short), a ritual where each member spends a Sunday night recounting his sexual history. While the CB recognizes the element of sexual competition between the men (as any rite involving male testing would), it has the overall purpose of promoting solidarity; it guarantees that each member becomes a hostage to the collective fortune of the group. He has no choice but to stand fully committed, having all but put his life in his fellow members’ hands by revealing himself so completely (the CB encourages in the young men a kind of warrior machismo to be as honest as possible). Both the LH and the CB function as an inoculation against any indifference. The CB also establishes that the relationship between a man and a woman is less important than the relationship between men. Despite the fact that Yale for twenty years has been coeducational, Skull and Bones remains doggedly all-male. Its refusal to accept women can be taken as a measure of the depths of its commitment to the male principle, which is a belief in the sanctity of male relationships and the conviction that it’s unnecessary to violate them with democratic ethics. Little wonder, then, that the wife of a prominent Bonesman characterized the society for me as “a sinister, unhealthy offshoot of the gentleman’s code ... a weird CIA-like thing.” A member of Skull and Bones once told me that during his CB he confessed that, one evening the summer before senior year, he had loitered in Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village in the hope of finding a man who would prove sexually congenial, which he did. This story, delivered to a monolithic, monosexual group in the priggish 1950s, produced an extraordinary convulsion. A layer of protection, a level of elementality, had been removed, leaving not shocked disapproval so much as fear. But the CB and the LH are no mere titillating exercises in self-revelation. What the fifteen Bonesmen engage in, in the encouraging near-darkness of their Tomb, is part group therapy, part psycho-exotic pastimes (one irresistible rumor has each member pumping out his CB while lying naked in a coffin). These unburdenings are ruthlessly orchestrated to the sometimes strident tune of criticism and cross-examination, their single-minded purpose to knock a member down in order to build him up again as a Bonesman. After enduring dark questionings and stumbling through the murky ambiguities of his own character, he will emerge from the Tomb with a new confidence in his authority and worth, a sense of destiny. After all, there is much in the “long eventful famous history” of Skull and Bones to remind him that he has been elected to the elect of the elect. And if you are elected to political office later in life, you might be in need of a refresher course, which Bones provides. One recipient of the society’s largesse was George Bush, smack in the middle of his lackluster vice presidency. According to Bob Woodward, in 1985 four members of Bush’s own delegation, concerned about his plummeting political image, gave him a “buck-him-up” dinner at the Washington home of fellow Bonesman Thomas W. L. Ashley, former Democratic congressman from Ohio. At one point in the evening one of them said, “Let’s repair to the inner sanctum.” Ashley recalled afterward that Bush had rejoiced at the opportunity. “There was a flow of communication. Bush was as vulnerable and as much a target as anyone and he handled it with apparent candor. He was aware of the dilemma of being Ronald Reagan’s vice president.” An hour later George Herbert Walker Bush emerged, if not a new man, then at least a new “old boy.” AND SO THE SOCIETY STANDS TODAY, in the waning years of the twentieth century, just as it has always stood: an amalgam of status assertion, elitism, and male bonding, not to mention the promise of jobs to come, “Jobs for the boys.” (George Bush was given his first Job out of Yale by a fellow Bonesman.) Membership does indeed have its privileges: The society provides a network of lifetime comfort, protection, and remedy. The Russell Trust Asso-ciation, which runs Bones’s huge endowment, reputedly has sums set aside to help those who have fallen on hard times—a kind of safety net-although I know of one middle-aged Bonesman who must have slipped through that net: He’s a court stenographer in Washington, DC. The trust also owns a summer retreat called The Ledges, on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River, where alumni can go on being everlasting boys together-or as much as that’s possible with wives and children in tow. “Bones is home away from home,” a newly minted member enthused to me. “It’s a great hangout: servants, your own chef—and damn good, too. Your own library. Bones is beautiful, elegant. It’s high-minded and high-style. That high style is reflected in the architecture of the Skull and Bones headquarters. Bones is, in fact, a complex of buildings, a kind of settlement, having been expanded over a period of at least a hundred years (thanks to several generations of gifts). The mammoth double-wing main structure was originally one large wing, and the beautiful Gothic tower that overlooks the garden-designed by one of the greatest architects America ever had, Alexander Jackson Davis-originally stood where Yale Station is today, on the Old Campus; it was marked for demolition but was saved when an old member purchased it from the university and had it set within the Bones complex. It is hard to conceive of now, but time was, Skull and Bones wielded such great power at Yale—longtime university president Charles Seymour; longtime university secretary Carl A. Lohmann, universally called “Caesar,” and one of the founders of the Whiffenpoofs; and longtime college dean Frederick S. Jones were all Bonesmen—that it was able to dictate that everything around the Tomb be designed in such a way that nobody could see inside it. Witness the back of the Romanesque-style Yale University Art Gallery, which, bridging High Street, backs up on Bones—it’s practically blanked out; the few windows it does have are of frosted glass, translucent but not transparent. To this day few people realize how vast the Skull and Bones property is, there being no point at which they can get hold of it to look at it. Except, of course, by means of an invention undreamt of by the society’s founders; with a helicopter one could have a grand expose. The strange, sealed structure that is Skull and Bones lives up to its sobri-quet as the Tomb. More than any- thing, it embodies the sense of the dis-embodied, of stepping outside the culture one lives in, leaving behind the familiar lineaments of this world. Deliberately un-windowed, transportingly spooky, it represents the opposite of a fraternity house, which is open, inviting, and implies happy times, parties, drinking, dancing. Just to the north of Skull and Bones is the most conspicuous mortuary symbol in New Haven, the Grove Street Cemetery. The very shape of the Bones Tomb speaks kindly to the battered walls and the Egyptian gateway leading into the cemetery, where many of the eighteenth-century gravestones not worn blunt by time display crossed bones and winged skulls. As architectural typology, then, Skull and Bones calls up memories of the primitive burial mound or the hut where the hermit lives in the imagined equivalent of tomb or womb. As psychological experience, the society signifies being chosen, being anointed, and, once anointed, having the right and the duty to anoint others. AT YALE IN ITS STERN EARLY HISTORY, AS AT Harvard and Princeton in theirs, the kind of bonding that was going on was largely theological. These colleges had been founded to produce men of God. They were, in effect, divinity schools-scholarship being held to exist for the greater glory of God-and were hell-bent on the formation of a priestly elite. The senior societies grew up in part as a reaction to the severity of the theological disciplines that these chaste young men were engaged in by day, and in part out of a need for close comradeship, secrets, a world altogether opposite to the one they were bound to enter. Emboldened by the solidarity they found in the safe precincts of their societies, they would let off steam through a sort of mock diabolism that was related to the Hellfire clubs in England and Ireland, where young baronets and gentry would “break out” and gather at midnight to drink and to practice what was thought by outsiders to be diabolism. Why then, as Yale College grew more sectarian, did these very peculiar societies not disappear? The reason they have survived is simply that human beings are creatures adapted to the smallscale, despite the urban deracinated life that burdens most contemporary experience. Thus we crave intense commitments, primordial attachments. These, Skull and Bones provides, along with narcotics like high status and naked emotion. The intensity of its secret rituals and secrecy vows, which are all marks of place in a rarefied community, is something that members carry with them into later life. One Bonesman confided in me that, well into his forties, he persuaded a girlfriend to help him realize a fantasy he’d had since early manhood: that a woman should sexually accommodate both him and a fellow Bonesman at the same time. The two men, penetrating her from different apertures (one from the front, the other from the back), were able to achieve across the thin membrane that separated them the all—but—final intimacy: “Yours in—& out of—322.” These aerobics went on for almost a year. That the woman was allowing her boyfriend in effect to have an affair with another Bonesman seemed somehow less odd to me than the intelligence that all three were married—to other people—at the time. SKULL AND BONES HAS ITSELF BEEN PENETRATED BY nonmembers, albeit unwillingly. Peter Beard, the adventurer, photographer, and Africanist, told me that in 1961, the year he graduated from Yale, he broke into the Bones Tomb. There he found a skull with the name of his grandfather, Anson McCook Beard, who had been in the Bones delegation of 1895, inscribed on it. “The bone lifted up—the top was on a hinge—and it looked like you could put votes in it. There were names written on it in ink, or it might have been very fine paint.” Beard, viewing the skull as “a trophy,” appropriated it for his own secret society, Scroll and Key. A few months later, Carlos French Stoddard, a high-level university official, saw the skull in its new setting (he was a member of Scroll and Key), deemed it criminally out of place, and in what Beard calls “a fit of righteousness” had it repatriated to Bones. Perhaps the most flagrant of recent invasions was carried out in the summer of 1979 by women, of all unwelcome things. It wasn’t an invasion exactly; the four had been invited in by a dissident member on the condition that his identity never be revealed. He took them for “sort of a quick canter through the premises,” one of them, a corporate lawyer, says today. “There were tons of rooms, a whole chain of them. There were a couple of bedrooms, and there was this monumental dining room with different rolls of Skull and Bones songs suspended from the ceiling. And there was a President Taft memorabilia room filled with flyers, posters, buttons—the whole room was like a Miss Haversham’s shrine. And a big living room with a beautiful rug. And then this big, huge, expensive-looking ivory carving in a hallway. The whole thing was on a very medieval scale. But it was all kind of a shambles. It looked like a boy’s dorm room, like it hadn’t been cleaned up in six months. There were a lot of old bones around—believe me, it could use a woman’s touch. “The most shocking thing—and I say this because I do think it’s sort of important—I mean, President Bush does belong to Skull and Bones, everyone knows that—there is, like, a little Nazi shrine inside. One room on the second floor has a bunch of swastikas, kind of an SS macho Nazi iconography. Somebody should ask President Bush about the swastikas in there. I mean, I don’t think he’ll say they’re not there. I think he’ll say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t a big deal, it was just a little thing in a little room,’ which I don’t think is true and which I wouldn’t find terribly reassuring anyway. But I don’t think he’d deny it altogether, because it’s true. I mean, I think the Nazi stuff was no more serious than all the bones that were around, but I still find it a little disconcerting. Another of the women present on that occasion, today also a lawyer, confirms the presence of artifacts from the Third Reich. “I saw some kind of pottery, weird glazed stuff they made in Germany with a swastika on it. It was on a mantelpiece in this small, narrow room with a conference table and chairs around it.” A few years after this unprecedented visit, yet another Yale female, who is a lawyer today as well, infiltrated the Bones sanctuary. This time the woman involved was brought in to participate in an actual Bones initiation ceremony—as a reward for having recommended several successful candidates for election. What she witnessed inside perhaps sums up, in its wedding of emotionality and weird high style, the ethos of Skull and Bones. “They took me up into a stone turret that overlooks an interior courtyard. They had me up there in the topmost tower room; there were torches burning, and it was filled with straw. I have to admit I was a bit nervous, since I was probably extra-territorial from any legal system. I was left alone there. I’d been told to dress up and I was wearing a kind of ragged rhinestone-studded ‘30s evening gown, and sitting on this pallet. And what I had to do was play a part that was apparently usually played by a man in drag. They would bring the new members up to the tower one by one and they would have to kiss my hand. It was a quite elaborate ritual, and it was really interesting to see the way these future leaders of America responded to this, because some of them kissed my hand tentatively and others were really into it. Many of them were actually weeping with terror from the whole initiation.” And perhaps from the specter of the excoriating truths that lay ahead. Because from the Tomb, where there is no lux, there always comes a form of veritas. * ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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