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 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, Ð''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