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Skull
and Bones, the Ivy League,
and the Hidden Paths of Power
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MSNBC - Today Show Article |
September 4, 2002
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Inside
a cold, foreboding structure of brown sandstone in New Haven,
Conn., lives one of the most heavily shrouded secret societies
in American history. Yale’s super-elite Skull and Bones, a
200-year-old organization whose roster is stocked with some of
the country’s most prominent families: Bush, Harriman, Phelps,
Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney. Journalist Alexandra Robbins,
herself a member of another of Yale’s secret societies,
interviewed more than a hundred Bonesmen and writes about the
rituals that make up the organization. Read an excerpt from her
book ‘The Secrets of the Tomb’ below.
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THE LEGEND OF SKULL AND BONES
Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale
student named William H. Russell—the future valedictorian of the class
of 1833- traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an
inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America’s most despicable
business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company,
an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut
state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the
founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While
in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret
society that hailed the death’s head as its logo. Russell soon became
caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious
eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the
United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his
beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously
stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the
most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future
secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to
Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of
vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States
has ever known.
The men called their organization
the Brotherhood of Death, or, more informally, the Order of Skull and
Bones. They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was
the second chapter of the German organization and founded in 1832. They
worshiped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and plotted an
underground conspiracy to dominate the world.
Fast-forward 170 years. Skull and
Bones has curled its tentacles into every corner of American society.
This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members into
the most powerful political position in the world. And the group’s
influence is only increasing-the 2004 presidential election might
showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The
secret society is now, as one historian admonishes, ” ‘an
international mafia’. . . unregulated and all but unknown.” In its
quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and
places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy,
prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in
infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and
government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has
been running the United States for years.
Skull and Bones cultivates its
talent by selecting members from the junior class at Yale University, a
school known for its strange, Gothic elitism and its rigid devotion to
the past. The society screens its candidates carefully, favoring
Protestants and, now, white Catholics, with special affection for the
children of wealthy East Coast Skull and Bones members. Skull and Bones
has been dominated by about two dozen of the country’s most prominent
families—Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and
Whitney among them—who are encouraged by the society to intermarry so
that its power is consolidated. In fact, Skull and Bones forces members
to confess their entire sexual histories so that the club, as a eugenics
overlord, can determine whether a new Bonesman will be fit to mingle
with the bloodlines of the powerful Skull and Bones dynasties. A rebel
will not make Skull and Bones; nor will anyone whose background in any
way indicates that he will not sacrifice for the greater good of the
larger organization.
As soon as initiates are allowed
into the “tomb,” a dark, windowless crypt in New Haven with a roof
that serves as a landing pad for the society’s private helicopter,
they are sworn to silence and told they must forever deny that they are
members of this organization. During initiation, which involves
ritualistic psychological conditioning, the juniors wrestle in mud and
are physically beaten—this stage of the ceremony represents their
“death” to the world as they have known it. They then lie naked in
coffins, masturbate, and reveal to the society their innermost sexual
secrets. After this cleansing, the Bonesmen give the initiates robes to
represent their new identities as individuals with a higher purpose. The
society anoints the initiate with a new name, symbolizing his rebirth
and rechristening as Knight X, a member of the Order. It is during this
initiation that the new members are introduced to the artifacts in the
tomb, among them Nazi memorabilia—including a set of Hitler’s
silverware-dozens of skulls, and an assortment of decorative tchotchkes:
coffins, skeletons, and innards. They are also introduced to “the
Bones whore,” the tomb’s only full-time resident, who helps to
ensure that the Bonesmen leave the tomb more mature than when they
entered. |
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Members of Skull and Bones must make some sacrifices to the
society—and they are threatened with blackmail so that they remain
loyal—but they are remunerated with honors and rewards, including a
graduation gift of $15,000 and a wedding gift of a tall grandfather
clock. Though they must tithe their estates to the society, each member
is guaranteed financial security for life; in this way, Bones can ensure
that no member will feel the need to sell the secrets of the society in
order to make a living. And it works: No one has publicly breathed a
word about his Skull and Bones membership, ever. Bonesmen are
automatically offered jobs at the many investment banks and law firms
dominated by their secret society brothers. They are also given
exclusive access to the Skull and Bones island, a lush retreat built for
millionaires, with a lavish mansion and a bevy of women at the
members’ disposal.
The influence of the cabal begins
at Yale, where Skull and Bones has appropriated university funds for its
own use, leaving the school virtually impoverished. Skull and Bones’
corporate shell, the Russell Trust Association, owns nearly all of the
university’s real estate, as well as most of the land in Connecticut.
Skull and Bones has controlled Yale’s faculty and campus publications
so that students cannot speak openly about it. “Year by year,” the
campus’s only anti-society publication stated during its brief tenure
in 1873, “the deadly evil is growing.”
The year in the tomb at Yale
instills within members an unwavering loyalty to Skull and Bones.
Members have been known to stab their Skull and Bones pins into their
skin to keep them in place during swimming or bathing. The knights (as
the student members are called) learn quickly that their allegiance to
the society must supersede all else: family, friendships, country, God.
They are taught that once they get out into the world, they are expected
to reach positions of prominence so that they can further elevate the
society’s status and help promote the standing of their fellow
Bonesmen. |
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This purpose has driven Bonesmen to ascend to the top levels of so
many fields that, as one historian observes, “at any one time The
Order can call on members in any area of American society to do what has
to be done.” Several Bonesmen have been senators, congressmen, Supreme
Court justices, and Cabinet officials. There is a Bones cell in the CIA,
which uses the society as a recruiting ground because the members are so
obviously adept at keeping secrets. Society members dominate financial
institutions such as J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown
Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners
were Bonesmen. Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided
financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a
Nazi-and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine. At least a dozen Bonesmen
have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first chairman of
the New York Federal Reserve. Skull and Bones members control the wealth
of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford families.
Skull and Bones has also taken
steps to control the American media.
Two of its members founded the law
firm that represents the New York Times. Plans for both Time and
Newsweek magazines were hatched in the Skull and Bones tomb. The society
has controlled publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In
the 1880s, Skull and Bones created the American Historical Association,
the American Psychological Association, and the American Economic
Association so that the society could ensure that history would be
written under its terms and promote its objectives. The society then
installed its own members as the presidents of these associations.
Under the society’s direction,
Bonesmen developed and dropped the nuclear bomb and choreographed the
Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and
the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council on Foreign Relations
and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push their own political
agenda. Skull and Bones government officials have used the number 322 as
codes for highly classified diplomatic assignments. The society
discriminates against minorities and fought for slavery; indeed eight
out of twelve of Yale’s residential colleges are named for slave
owners while none are named for abolitionists. The society encourages
misogyny: it did not admit women until the 1990s because members did not
believe women were capable of handling the Skull and Bones experience
and because they said they feared incidents of date rape. This society
also encourages grave robbing: deep within the bowels of the tomb are
the stolen skulls of the Apache chief Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and former
president Martin Van Buren.
Finally, the society has taken
measures to ensure that the secrets of Skull and Bones slip ungraspable
like sand through open fingers. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a
long but not probing article about the society in the 1970s, claimed
that a source warned him not to get too close.
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“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. . . ”
. . .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 lever of power in the country. You’ll see—it’s like trying
to look into the Mafia.”
In the 1980s, a man known only as
Steve had contracts to write two books on the society, using documents
and photographs he had acquired from the Bones crypt. But Skull and
Bones found out about Steve. Society members broke into his apartment,
stole the documents, harassed the would-be author, and scared him into
hiding, where he has remained ever since. The books were never
completed. In Universal Pictures’ thriller The Skulls (2000), an
aspiring journalist is writing a profile of the society for the New York
Times. When he sneaks into the tomb, the Skulls murder him. The real
Skull and Bones tomb displays a bloody knife in a glass case. It is said
that when a Bonesman stole documents and threatened to publish society
secrets if the members did not pay him a determined amount of money,
they used that knife to kill him. This, then, is the legend of Skull and
Bones.
It is astonishing that so many
people continue to believe, even in twenty-first-century America, that a
tiny college club wields such an enormous amount of influence on the
world’s only superpower. The breadth of clout ascribed to this
organization is practically as wide-ranging as the leverage of the
satirical secret society the Stonecutters introduced in an episode of
The Simpsons. The Stonecutters theme song included the lyrics:
Who controls the British crown? Who
keeps the metric system down? We do! We do. . .
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do.
Certainly, Skull and Bones does
cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public
spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for the Atlantic
Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, “If it’s not
portrayed positively, I’m sending a couple of my friends after you.”
After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my
office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones.
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He scolded me for writing the article—”writing that article
was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in
journalism,” he condescended —and then asked me how much I had been
paid for the story. When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen
minutes later, he called back.
“I have just gotten off the phone
with our people.” “Your people?” I snickered.
“Yes. Our people.” He told me
that the society demanded to know where I got my information.
“I’ve never been in the tomb
and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article,” I
replied.
“Then you must have gotten
something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to
talk to them,” he wheedled. “I don’t reveal my sources.”
Then he got angry. He screamed at
me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article.
“A lot of people are very despondent over this!” he yelled.
“Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!” I thanked him for
telling me his concerns.
“There are a lot of us at
newspapers and at political journalism institutions,” he coldly
hissed. “Good luck with your career”—and he slammed down the
phone.
Skull and Bones, particularly in
recent years, has managed to pervade both popular and political culture.
In the 1992 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat
Buchanan accused President George Bush of running “a Skull and Bones
presidency.” In 1993, during Jeb Bush’s Florida gubernatorial
campaign, one of his constituents asked him, “You’re familiar with
the Skull and Crossbones Society?” When Bush responded, “Yeah,
I’ve heard about it,” the constituent persisted, “Well, can you
tell the people here what your family membership in that is? Isn’t
your aim to take control of the United States?” In January 2001, New
York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used Skull and Bones in a simile:
“When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John
Ashcroft, before Christmas, he vividly showed how important it is to him
that his White House be as leak-proof as the Skull & Bones
‘tomb.’”
That was less than a year after the
Universal Pictures film introduced the secret society to a new
demographic perhaps uninitiated into the doctrines of modern-day
conspiracy theory. Not long before the movie was previewed in
theaters—and perhaps in anticipation of the election of George W.
Bush—a letter was distributed to members from Skull and Bones
headquarters. “In view of the political happenings in the barbarian
world,” the memo read, “I feel compelled to remind all of the
tradition of privacy and confidentiality essential to the well-being of
our Order and strongly urge stout resistance to the seductions and
blandishments of the Fourth Estate.” This vow of silence remains the
society’s most important rule. Bonesmen have been exceedingly careful
not to break this code of secrecy, and have kept specific details about
the organization out of the press. Indeed, given the unusual, strict
written reminder to stay silent, members of Skull and Bones may well
refuse to speak to any member of the media ever again.
But they have already spoken to me.
When? Over the past three years. Why? Perhaps because I am a member of
one of Skull and Bones’ kindred Yale secret societies. Perhaps because
some of them are tired of the Skull and Bones legend, of the claims of
conspiracy theorists and some of their fellow Bonesmen. What follows,
then, is the truth about Skull and Bones. And if this truth does not
contain all of the conspiratorial elements that the Skull and Bones
legend projects, it is perhaps all the more interesting for that fact.
The story of Skull and Bones is not just the story of a remarkable
secret society, but a remarkable society of secrets, some with basis in
truth, some nothing but fog. Much of the way we understand the world of
power involves myriad assumptions of connection and control, of cause
and effect, and of coincidence that surely cannot be coincidence. |
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