Skull and Bones Secret Society
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 initiation 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
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 initiation 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