TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
This special report is intended to assist the Japanese audience in more
fully understanding the present policies of the United States under the
administration of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind
America's military adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes
toward the Middle East region.
In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most powerful organization in
America--the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based at
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading
members of the U.S. government and the American intelligence community
received their formal education. The Order, as it is referred to by its
members, is a bastion of White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture,
which is at the core of the American 20th century outlook.
The reader will learn that President George Herbert Walker Bush's concept
of the New World Order is an old idea, one which has its origins in the
philosophy and beliefs of the secret Skull & Bones fraternity. Today in
particular, this is the prevailing outlook of the U.S. government, many of
whose most influential members, like the president himself, are part of
the Skull & Bones network. These men seek to recreate the American
imperium of the immediate post-World War II period, an era which President
Bush frequently refers to as "the American Century."
The powerful men of Skull & Bones genuinely believe that they have a
strategic and moral "right" to control world affairs. Consequently, they
take upon themselves the authority to crush any rivalrous threat to U.S.
imperial leadership, whether by current allies, such as Japan, Germany or
Great Britain, or by Cold War adversaries, like the Soviet Union. The
members of the Order, due to their narrow WASP upbringing, view with
particular suspicion the maneuverings of Zionist Israel and its affluent,
influential lobby in the United States.
Bush, his fellow Bonesmen and their like-thinking elitist allies in the
American Establishment see themselves as New World Order warriors, an
American samurai caste of sorts, whose mission is restoring American
greatness. They intend to utilize the institutional networks of the U.S.
government and key private agencies, such as the New York Council on
Foreign Relations, to advance their purpose.
The Skull & Bones members believe in the idea of "constructive chaos." By
keeping their true policy intentions secret, by constantly sending out
mixed signals on all critical policy issues, they consciously seek to sow
confusion among both their nominal "friends" and "enemies" alike.
The fulcrum for the policy of constructive chaos is, at present, the
Middle East situation. Although U.S. military action in the region has for
the time being subsided, America's military power will remain a critical
determinant in the future of that vital zone of conflict. American
military power is aimed at securing undisputed control over the vast
reservoir of oil -- not at necessarily fostering any permanent alignment
of local states or combinations of regional interests.
If President George Bush and his fellow true believers are successful, the
United States will be first among equals in the New World Order. This is
their goal. It is also the quest of the Bonesmen of the Order of Skull &
Bones -- America's warrior aristocracy.
THE
ORDER OF SKULL & BONES
Skull & Bones was founded at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in
1832. It is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale's seven secret
societies. Among the others are: Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, Wolf's Head,
Eliahu, and Berzelius. These fraternities serve as a recruiting ground for
young men destined for careers in government, law, finance and other
influential sectors of American life. Skull & Bones is the elite of the
elite among these secret societies. Only Scroll & Key can claim a near
equal influence on American affairs over the past 160 years.
Unlike the Greek fraternities on most other American university campuses,
Skull & Bones and its similar secret societies exist exclusively at Yale.
They are not part of any nationwide public association. The other elite
Ivy League colleges, Harvard and Princeton have similar exclusive secret
societies. Yet, even among these few universities, the secret societies of
Yale -- led by Skull & Bones -- are unchallenged in their influence on
American political affairs.
According to some accounts, the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale has
an underground affiliation with two other societies which were
simultaneously founded at two other locations. The number "322" that
appears under the skull and crossbones on the Order's emblem is believed
to indicate the year of its founding -- 1832 -- and the fact that it is
the second lodge within an international system. By some accounts, the
lodge holding the number "1" is in Germany and the lodge numbered "3" is
based at another American college.
Since its founding, Skull & Bones has only inducted about 2,500 members.
At any given time, only about 600 or so members of the Order are alive.
This small number underscores the tremendous concentration of power in the
hands of its members.
If the members of Skull & Bones were to select a Hall of Fame from among
their own elite ranks, some of the people whose names would almost
certainly appear at the top of the list would be:
Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary
of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880).
William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President
and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Henry Lewis Stimson, partner in the Wall Street law firm of Root and
Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft (1908-1912), Governor
General of the Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under President
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1940-1946).
Averell Harriman, investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman,
director of the Lend-Lease program of the U.S. State Department
(1941-1942), U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943-1946), Governor of
New York, Under Secretary of State for Asia (1961-1963), and presidential
secret envoy to Soviet leaders Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov.
Robert Lovett, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, Assistant Secretary
of War for Air (1941-1945), Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of
Defense (1950), leading member of the New York Council on Foreign
Relations.
Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.
Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).
Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers
Harriman, United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert
Walker Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Congressman (1964-1970),
Chairman of the Republican National Committee, United States Ambassador to
the United Nations, first American Diplomatic Liaison to the Peoples
Republic of China, Director of the Central Intelligence Ageney
(1975-1977). Vice President of the United States (1980-1988), President of
the United States (1988- ).
John Thomas Daniels, agro-industrialist, founder of Archer Daniels
Midland.
Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counselor to Japan (1911- 1921),
U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1924-1927), Assistant Secretary of State
(1937-1938). Ambassador to Germany 1938), Special Assistant to the
Secretary of State (1939-1941), Office of Strategic Services (1941-1945)
The members of the Order of Skull & Bones, true to their firm belief in
"constructive confusion," have intentionally allowed a series of
conflicting mythologies to spring up about the origins and history of
their secret fraternity. According to one version of the Order's founding,
it was an outgrowth of an earlier British or Scottish freemasonic grouping
first established at All Soul's College at Oxford University in the late
17th century. Another version of the history of Skull & Bones is that it
grew out of the German "nationalistic" secret .societies of the early 19th
century. Still a third explanation is that Skull & Bones is an uniquely
American institution which adopted some of the rituals of European
freemasonry, but molded these rituals and beliefs into a new form.
Regardless of these conflicting accounts, it can be stated with certainty
that the Order was first established on the Yale campus in 1832 It was
officially incorporated only in 1856 under the name Russell Trust
Association. According to virtually all the available biographical data on
its early members, the money required to sustain the secret order's campus
affairs and its broader role in placing its members into key positions of
influence upon their graduation from Yale, derived from the opium trade in
the Far East. That trade was set up by the British East India Company and
was flourishing by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 ending
the American War for Independence. The East India Company during this
period was controlled by the Baring Brothers Bank (Toward the closing
decades of the 17th century, the British House of Rothschild would
supplant the Baring Brothers as the controlling financial interests in the
China opium trade.
Through the sponsorship of the Barings and also the Rothschilds, a number
of leading New England families, some of whom had sided with Great Britain
during the American Revolution, were brought into the opium trade as
junior partners. These merchant families ran fleets of clipper ships and
became in many cases fabulously wealthy as the result of their association
with the British East India Company. Among these key New England merchant
families were: Cabot, Coolidge, Forbes, Higginson, Sturgis, Lodge, Lowell,
Perkins and Russell.
These New England merchant families founded the United Fruit Company and
the Bank of Boston. The founding families of Skull & Bones included the
Russell and Perkins families, Over several generations, however, all these
families heavily intermarried and became, in effect, one extended power
grouping.
William Huntington Russell incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell Trust
Association. Throughout the 20th century, the Russell Trust Association
listed the New York City headquarters of Brown Brothers Harriman as its
address.
Russell was valedictorian of his class at Yale in 1833. He and his Skull &
Bones comrades considered themselves to be a special elite among the
merchant banking and Puritan pilgrim elite of Yale. They took the Puritan
beliefs of the early New England settlers, that they were "elected by
God," and pre-ordained to rule North America.
The founding of Yale College in 1701 pre-dates the American Revolution by
several generations. Many of the founders of Yale were righteous men of
the Puritan heritage who devoutly believed in God and country. Some of
these patriotic souls later made up the core of Benjamin Franklin's
political coalition which ultimately broke with the mother country, Great
Britain. Many graduates of Yale were active in the American Revolution and
the founding of the United States.
Two critics of the Order, historian Antony Sutton and investigative
journalist Ron Rosenbaum (himself a Yale graduate), both concluded that
Skull & Bones has degenerated since its founding and has taken on more of
the occult and ritualistic trappings of the majority of European
freemasonic and Illuminati secret societies. Sutton charges that the Order
is secretly known among its initiates as the "Brotherhood of Death" and
has become an evil instrument in the hands of America's secret power
elite. Rosenbaum claims that the society's Germanic origins are inherently
wicked and pre-Nazi.
In a long 1977 article in Esquire magazine, Rosenbaum charged that
the Skull & Bones building on the Yale campus houses remnants from
Hitler's private collection of silver. While these stories cannot be
dismissed out of hand, it must be noted that authors Rosenbaum and Sutton
may be biased. As a young Jewish student at Yale, Rosenbaum was almost
automatically excluded on religious grounds from the inner sanctum of the
campus's secret societies. Sutton, a British-born eccentric historian,
proudly admits his strong British biases, frequently citing philosopher
John Stuart Mill as the spiritual mentor in his book on the Order.
Despite the possible personal biases in these two accounts of the history
of the Order of Skull & Bones, it must be acknowledged that the membership
of the society has tended over generations to converge upon a small group
of New England families who have intermarried and then sponsored their
sons and nephews into the Order. This kind of inbreeding always tends to
produce narrow-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, which can be a
serious shortcoming, particularly among individuals responsible for
charting the course of a nation as powerful as the United States.
It can be documented by comparing the family charts of the early Bonesmen
that there is today a core group of no more than 20 to 30 families who
form the nucleus of the Order. The majority are old-line Puritan families
who came to North America in the very first wave of settlers in the 17th
century. Among these prominent families are: Whitney, Lord, Phelps.
Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams, Stimson, Taft, Gilman and Perkins. A
second group of families in the Skull & Bones core earned fabulous
fortunes during the 18th and 19th centuries and thus won a rite of passage
into the New England elite, even though they were not among the earliest
settlers. The leading Skull & Bones families in this second category are:
Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison, Pillsbury and Weyerhauser.
A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to
the United States during the 18th and l9th centuries were eventually
granted limited access to the WASP inner sanctums. Some families, like the
Schiff, Warburg, Guggenheim and Meyer families, were unofficially
designated as intermediaries between the New England WASPs and their
cousins in London. This was especially true after the Rothschild interests
supplanted the Anglican Baring group as the most powerful financial cabal
in the City of London. Some of these German Jewish families became so
absorbed into the WASP or Anglican society that they eventually converted
from Judaism to Protestantism and were gradually ostracized from the
Jewish aristocracy.
The WASP families, however, never saw the prominent Jewish investment
banking families of America as equals. The Jews were considered
politically and culturally different by the WASPs, and have never been
accepted into the latter's inner circle. For the most part, these Jewish
merchant bankers are viewed with suspicion and distrust by the members of
the Order. Moreover, the Jewish fraternal societies, such as B'nai B'rith,
were formed out of the British-based Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Their
sponsors in America, the Rothschilds and the Cecil Rhodes Trust (also
known as the British Round Table Group), are connected with the British
Foreign Office and its secret intelligence apparatus.
INITIATION AND RITUAL
To be initiated into the Order of Skull & Bones, one must endure a ritual
of selection called "tapping". It is conducted by 15 senior classmen of
Yale University who make up the current membership of the secret society.
They select 15 members of the junior class to be the Bonesmen the
following year. Historically, Skull & Bones kept blacks, Jews and all
other non-WASPs from its ranks. Within the last 30 years, however, token
members from these groups have been occasionally selected to join. Thus,
in the most recent list of initiates to the Order, there is one Yalie with
a Jewish surname and even one with a Chinese name. According to author
Rosenbaum, in recent years, the Order has inducted members of homosexual
rights groups on the campus into its ranks.
Among the criterion for selection -- apart from family ties to the order,
which has always been an important factor -- is what is referred to by
historians and members as the "Three Ordeals." These ordeals are intended
to measure the prospective Bonesman's ability to "make it" in the world
beyond the university campus.
The first ordeal is boarding school. The overwhelming majority of
Bonesmen, given their wealthy blueblood family pedigrees, attend one of
the prestigious New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high
schools. (Whereas a large number of the most elite of the Harvard
University students attend Groton, a school with close ties to the
Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive a thoroughly Anglophilic
education, the preferred prep schools for the future Bonesmen are the two
Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)
The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The prospective Bonesmen are
judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England
countryside or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa,
the jungles of South America or even the American badlands of the Plains
states, is a prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the
Order.
The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of combat during wartime
is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see
themselves as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale
Bonesmen of President George Bush's generation, as the result of the
outbreak of World War II, went directly from prep school into the military
service prior to their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the
preferred military service has historically been with the U.S. Navy.
During World II the Naval air corp was a particularly important track for
future Bones initiates. In peacetime, participation at Yale in military
officer's training is desirable but not essential. The commitment to enter
some branch of the military upon graduation is viewed with favor.
After the formal selection of the next group of prospective Bonesmen,
there is an invitation followed by a formal initiation ceremony. First the
15 senior class members who are the members of the Order select a group of
junior class members who are to be "tapped" for Skull & Bones. A group of
Bonesmen proceed to the dormitory room of the "tappee." Upon reaching the
door, they pound loudly. When the prospective member opens the door, a
Bonesman will tap him on the shoulder and yell, "Skull and Bones: Do you
accept?" If the candidate accepts, a message wrapped with a black ribbon
sealed by black wax with the skull and crossbones emblem and the mystical
Bones number 322 is handed to the "tappee." The message appoints a time
and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night. Candidates
are instructed to wear no metal objects or clothing.
According to a 1940 Skull & Bones document, the initiation ceremony
involves the following kinds of things: "New man placed in coffin --
carried into central part of building. New man chanted over and reborn
into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. A
bone with his name on it is tossed into the bone heap at the start of
every meeting."
Within the Skull & Bones Crypt, also known as "the Tomb," there is what is
referred to as a "sacred room" with the number 322, On the arched wall
about the vault entrance is inscribed in German: "Who was the fool, who
was the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in
death."
This quotation from a German Freemasonic ritual remains a source of
controversy surrounding the origins of Skull & Bones. It is one of the
bits of "evidence" cited by some of the Order's most ardent critics that
the group is "Nazi like" and singularly "Germanic". In fact, the rituals
of the Order are very much like the rituals employed by Scottish and
English freemasonic lodges.
Some of the mystery and confusion surrounding these occult symbols and
rituals is intentionally fostered by the Order itself. Among the
principles taught to the members of the Yale secret society are the value
of ambiguity and secrecy. These values are not taught as part of a purely
mystical or occult quasi-religion. They are taught as valuable tools to be
applied by the Bonesmen when they leave the insulated environment of the
Yale campus and become officials of government, the intelligence
community, the military or the private sector.
A careful study of the often confusing and self-contradictory behavior and
public statements of President Bush and his closest advisers throughout
the months of the Persian Gulf crisis of last year and war that followed
offers a valuable example of how ambiguity and secrecy are applied by
Bonesmen.
For the initiates of the Order, the question of whether secrecy and
ambiguity are used for the purpose of accomplishing "good" or "evil" is of
secondary importance. Secrecy and ambiguity are essential instruments for
wielding power. The effective wielding of power is one of the overarching
goals of all Bonesmen. The secret ties built up during the Bonesmen's
senior year of active membership in the Order are maintained for life.
Those ties link each Bonesman to every other initiate, especially to those
initiates who were members of the Order in the same year.
Thus, every member of Skull & Bones is, in real and practical terms, part
of a small elite group of young Yale graduates -- most from wealthy and
powerful WASP families -- who enter the world of politics, business,
finance, intelligence or education and who proceed to make their mark on
the world.
According to several sources, President George Bush to this day frequently
consults with several of his fellow Yale Bonesmen, and has, on occasion,
called upon Skull & Bones members to carry out secret diplomatic missions
for the White House.
THE SPARTAN MODEL
These rites of passage into the upper ranks of the WASP Establishment are
capped by the experience the Bonesmen go through in their final year at
Yale -- the year in which they actively participate in the Order. For the
vast majority of the initiates, the process of inculcation with the ideas
of WASP supremacy, an American Calvinist version of what British
imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling called the "White Man's Burden," began
at prep school.
According to the biographical accounts of a number of the leading
Bonesmen, the prep school experience is paramount. At prep school,
intellectual pursuits are encouraged, but special emphasis is also placed
on athletic performance. Future Yale Bonesmen are expected to excel in
some team sport, such as baseball and football, both American inventions.
(Members of Skull & Bones were involved in the development of both games.)
Team sports supposedly prepare the future Bonesman to accept leadership
responsibility, and more importantly, teach him to "respect the rules of
the game."
According to one biographer, when George Bush was a Yale undergraduate he
was a member of the university baseball team. Although he was apparently
not a very good baseball player, he eventually became captain of the Yale
team. One day during the Yale baseball season, he excitedly visited his
mother to proudly proclaim that he had hit his first home run. She
reportedly looked back at him with patrician coolness, and asked, "Yes,
George, but did your team win the game?"
The particular emphasis on team sports during the prep school and Yale
years is, according to several historians, part of the Spartan training
that is so essential to the Skull & Bones philosophy. In the world of
Skull & Bones, one of the greatest virtues is the ability to steer the
nation into war and to successfully prosecute the war.
To the Bonesmen, the use of military power is a natural and essential
corollary to political power. The Bonesmen are taught that, although ideas
have their place, to truly transform history, military force is almost
always required. Critics of the Order have pointed out that this
philosophy of power and the imperial use of military force comes straight
from the chronicles of the Roman Empire -- especially the Roman Empire
during its phase of decline and collapse.
The criticism may prove to be most prophetically true of the current
generation of Bonesmen who are leading the United States under the
presidency of George Bush. During the final phase of the Roman Empire,
legions were deployed out around the world to conquer and subjugate vast
territories, while back in Rome, there was a breakdown, a crisis in which
the entire social and cultural fabric of the early Roman republic was
eroding and giving way to something akin to the drug, rock-sex
counterculture of today. The Roman imperial policy of attempting to gloss
over the decadence at home by engaging in constant wars of expansion led
ultimately to the total collapse of Rome.
In this regard, the Spartan-Roman imperial outlook of the American WASP
warrior caste, exemplified by Skull & Bones, cannot be precisely compared
to the Japanese samurai code of Bushido. The Japanese Bushido code
emphasized honor among the warriors and presumed a fundamentally moral or
ethical vision of the world.
No such emphasis on morality and honor exists in the code of Skull &
Bones. On the contrary, the Skull & Bones philosophy, according to several
of its most astute critics and historians, emphasizes the "double-cross
system." The "double-cross" is symbolically represented by the crossbones
on the emblem of the Order. According to this philosophy, anyone who is
not an initiate is inferior, and can be lied to and manipulated to further
the power of the WASP Establishment. To the extent that Japanese leaders
view their American WASP counterparts as men of honor whose word is sacred
and whose intentions are presumed to be virtuous, they will miss the
fundamental character of the American Imperium. This is of special
importance today, with a leading member of the Skull & Bones system
occupying the White House.
Skull & Bones philosophy first manifested itself at the American national
political level in the late l9th century. At that time, the men of the
Order adopted all the critical features of the British imperial system,
especially the belief in the Anglo Saxon God-given right to rule over all
the other races. Even countries like Japan, which were never colonial
possessions of the Anglo-American combination, were viewed as inferior
nations to be treated no differently from the colonies in Africa, India or
Latin America.
In 1898, President William McKinley, one of the last of the American
presidents to manifest any of the early republican (anti-British
imperialism) traditions of the Founding Fathers, was under enormous
pressure from the Skull & Bones-led American imperialists. Eventually, he
went to war against Spain to "free" Cuba and seize the Philippines. This
was the first time that the United States entered a war through devious
manipulation and purely in order to expand its territories. [Misses the US
military saber-rattling along the Nueces River, the border with Mexico to
provoke the War with Mexico.] It marked the beginning of a new epoch
in American history which would forever alter the vision of the United
States. It was the first evidence that the men of the Order were at the
helm of the ship of state.
President McKinley's capitulation to the WASP warriors would prove to be
fatal to himself and, some would say, for his country, too. The
Spanish-American War of 1898 catapulted the Skull & Bones crowd into a
position of dominance within the Republican Party. At the 1900 party
presidential nominating convention, McKinley was forced to accept Teddy
Roosevelt as his vice presidential running mate. The McKinley-Roosevelt
slate was swept into office, in part as the result of the jingoist climate
built up by the just-concluded Spanish-American War. Those circumstances
were not all that different from the mood that prevails in America in the
aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991.
Within months of his inauguration of 1901, President McKinley was
assassinated by an "anarchist" [stooge] while traveling through Buffalo,
New York. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt became president, and the Order of Skull &
Bones for the first time moved into the White House. Roosevelt surrounded
himself with Bonesmen. His successor in 1908, William Howard Taft, was
himself a second generation member of Skull & Bones.
HENRY
STIMSON: MASTER BONESMAN
According to a January 1991 article by the Washington syndicated
columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, when President George Bush was
making his final decision to use military force to crush Saddam Hussein
and decimate Iraq, he spent most of the Christmas holidays closeted at
Camp David reading a newly published biography of one of his true heroes,
fellow Skull & Bones initiate Henry Stimson. While most White House
advisers thought that the Gulf Crisis would be ultimately resolved through
diplomacy, unbeknownst to them, President Bush had already decided on the
use of devastating military force -- regardless of what measures the world
community or the Iraqi leaders took to avert war. Intimate Bush advisers
described the President as being in a "mesmerized" state of mind as he
walked around the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains with his
Stimson biography, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson,
under his arm at all times.
Indeed, for most contemporary Bonesmen, Henry Lewis Stimson, the
quintessential WASP warrior, was the very personification of the Order's
full ascent to power during the period of World War II.
A member of the Order's class of 1888, Stimson served seven U.S.
presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (a fellow Bonesman),
Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Harry S Truman. As the Secretary of War under FDR and Truman, Stimson
oversaw the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Stimson
personally decided on the use of that devastating weapon against the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years earlier, as the chairman
of the American delegation at the London Naval Conference and as Secretary
of State under President Hoover (1929-1933), Stimson had played a pivotal
role in restricting the size of the Japanese Imperial Navy. He would be an
architect of the
Roosevelt Administration's economic provocations
against Japan which ultimately helped induce Japan into the
attack at
Pearl Harbor, thus bringing the United
States formally into World War II. And Stimson was also ultimately
responsible for the Roosevelt Administration's decision to intern the
Nisei (Japanese-Americans) after Pearl Harbor.
Yet, it was also Stimson who ordered American bombers to refrain from
attacking the old Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto, a city rich in
religious and historical tradition and artifacts. And, according to at
least one of Stimson's biographers, it was also "the Colonel" who decided
at the close of the war that the Japanese emperor should not be deposed.
His sensitivity to Japanese culture and the importance of allowing Japan
to retain honor even in defeat is widely attributed to his close adviser,
Joseph Grew, a longtime U.S. ambassador to Japan and an accomplished
historian. Whether this report of Stimson's involvement in the decision to
maintain the emperor is accurate or whether it underplays the role of Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, the fact remains certain that Stimson was the key
policymaker overseeing the postwar occupations of both Japan and Germany.
To fully understand President George Bush's attitudes and policies toward
Japan, one must first appreciate the overarching influence that Stimson
had on the current occupant of the White House.
According to his British biographer Geoffrey Hodgson, Stimson's membership
in Skull & Bones was "the most important educational experience in his
life." Unlike most of his fellow Bonesmen, Stimson earned his membership
solely on the basis of his achievements at Yale -- not through family
money. His parents were not wealthy, although his forefathers did come to
America as early Puritan colonists. But Stimson made up for his lack of
financial credentials by his fierce competitive spirit. As he himself put
it, the "idea of a struggle for prizes, so to speak, has always been one
of the fundamental elements of my mind, and I can hardly conceive of what
my feelings would be if I ever was put in a position or situation in life
where there are no prizes to struggle for."
Although Stimson did not come from classic blueblood background, he
married into wealth and power. His wife, Mabel White, came from a
prominent Establishment family with longstanding ties to the Order. Thus,
upon graduation from law school, Stimson became a partner in the law firm
of Elihu Root, President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War.
Although Stimson and Teddy Roosevelt would have a falling out in later
years, early on Roosevelt and Root provided "the Colonel" with the
critical sponsorship and training required to succeed in the world of
Establishment politics. According to Stimson's biographers, Roosevelt
would frequently taunt the young Bonesman about the fact that he, unlike
the president, had never been in the military or fought in any wars.
(Roosevelt had resigned as Under Secretary of the Navy to go off and fight
in the Spanish-American War.) Thus, at the ripe old age of 44, Stimson
joined the Army during World War I and served in the American
Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Among the other lasting interests that Roosevelt would pass on to Stimson
was his deep passion for the Pacific. Roosevelt was convinced that
America's imperial destiny was dependent upon its domination of the
Pacific Ocean and the Far East. The Spanish-American War, which marked the
beginning of America's imperial phase -- and the virtual abandonment of
the republican principles upon which the nation had been founded -- began
the U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines, which would continue
through half of the next century. Ultimately, Stimson would himself serve
as the American Governor General of the islands.
In 1900, Roosevelt wrote to Stimson: "Our people are neither craven nor
weaklings, as we face the future high of heart and confident of soul,
eager to do the great work of a great power... wish to see the United
States the dominant power on the Pacific Ocean."
STIMSON'S KINDERGARTEN
AND THE COLD WAR
Henry Stimson's towering influence on George Bush and many other current
members and like-thinking allies of the Order was based not only on "the
Colonel's" lifetime of achievements. It was also rooted in the fact that
Stimson used the World War II period to groom a successor generation of
young WASP warriors who would dominate American policymaking during the
Cold War and beyond. Although not every member of what came to be known as
the "Stimson's Kindergarten" was a member of Skull & Bones, or even a Yale
graduate, many were. All were inculcated with the Skull & Bones philosophy
and methodology of wielding power. It is through this alliance and
patronage system that the influence of the Order has been extended far
beyond its small membership roster.
Among the leading members of the "Stimson Kindergarten" were:
John J. McCloy, who was
Assistant Secretary of War and later served as the High Commissioner for
Germany during the postwar occupation.
Robert Lovett, a member of
Skull & Bones and a partner in the Order's preeminent Wall Street
investment house Brown Brothers Harriman. He became Stimson's Assistant
Secretary of War (Air Section). Lovett remained an influential policymaker
through the presidency of John F. Kennedy.
Harvey Bundy, another
Bonesman, who became Stimson's special assistant at the War Department.
Harvey Bundy's two sons, McGeorge and William, fresh out of Yale
University and Skull & Bones, joined their father on Stimson's personal
staff. McGeorge Bundy would co-author Stimson's memoirs In Active Service
in Peace and War.
Dean Acheson, Assistant
Secretary of State, Yale graduate (he was not a member of the Order, but,
rather, of one of the other Yale secret societies, Scroll Key) and senior
policy adviser to FDR and Truman, who ultimately made him Secretary of
State.
Gen. George C. Marshall,
Chief of Staff of the armed forces during World War II and later Truman's
Secretary of State.
This group of high-powered policymakers of World War II and immediate
post war period were known as the "Stimson-Marshall-Acheson Circle." They
shaped America's Cold War containment policy against the Soviet Union and
Communist China, including the involvement of the United States in the
Korean War. It was also this group which, for better or worse, directed
the postwar reconstruction programs in Germany and Japan.
Another influential member of Skull & Bones, Averell Harriman, was
personally responsible for the sacking of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was
Harriman, a banker, intriguer and former American Ambassador to Moscow,
who convinced President Truman to fire MacArthur.
The
predominant role that Averell Harriman would play over the course of 40
years of postwar American policymaking underscores the fact that not all
leading members of Skull & Bones share the identical policy outlook. While
some members of the Stimson inner circle were critical of Harriman, whom
they considered to be too personally ambitious (he was also a liberal
imperial Democrat in a secret fraternity dominated historically by
moderate Republicans), Harriman nevertheless stands out as one of the
Order's most active figures. The fact that he was a business partner and
social intimate throughout his adult life of fellow Bonesman and
Republican Sen. Prescott Bush Sr., the father of the current president
underscores that point.
Henry Stimson died in 1950, leaving behind a core group of political
offspring led by members of his old secret society, Skull & Bones. In the
final years of his life he was involved in helping to shape a number of
postwar government agencies which would become bastions of power and
influence for the Order for years to come. Through this active role in
shaping the key institutions of the Cold War era, Stimson was able to
establish a continuity of power that would more than compensate for the
fact that no single figure among his "kindergarten" emerged as a clear
successor, and that several, like McGeorge Bundy, would prove ultimately
to be rather disappointing students.
The National Security Act of 1947 transformed Stimson's old War Department
into the Department of Defense, a sprawling civilian bureaucracy which
would in future years house many of the most important members of the
Order. Robert Lovett, for example, would become the Secretary of Defense
in 1950. The 1947 act also established the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) as the permanent successor to the wartime Office of Strategic
Services (OSS). In the early 1950s, the State Department's Office of
Policy Coordination was merged into the CIA, giving the secret agency
total control of America's clandestine operations. The National Security
Agency (NSA) also was established, under the direction of the Department
of Defense, vastly expanding America's signal intelligence capability.
Of all these agencies of the Cold War era, the CIA would stand out as a
singular power center for Yale University alumni in general and Skull &
Bones initiates in particular. The term "spooks," the well-known CIA term
for a clandestine operator, was originally Yale campus argot for a secret
society member. According to a recently published article in the Covert
Action Information Bulletin, there is reportedly a "Bones club" within the
CIA which helps promote the intelligence careers of members of the Yale
secret society.
It should be pointed out that bureaucratic standing is not a real measure
of power within the CIA. Very often, individuals in relatively
insignificant positions within the organizational chart wield tremendous
clout and maintain access to the most sensitive information and policy.
Thus, for example, the present U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, a
member of Skull & Bones and a career CIA man, is being suggested to
replace William Webster as Director of Central Intelligence. For Lilley to
step in as director of CIA would at this moment represent a demotion for
the senior field operator. It is, however, a demotion he might accept as a
personal favor to fellow Bonesman and longtime intimate pal George Bush.
The predominance of Yale graduates inside the CIA is also a part of the
Stimson legacy. During World War II, many Yale students and even several
leading faculty members entered the OSS. The X-2 Branch of OSS, the
counterintelligence unit, was dominated by Yale students, as well as Yale
English Literature professor Norman Holmes Pearson. One of the Yale men in
X-2, James Jesus Angleton, went on to a legendary career as director of
the CIA's counterintelligence staff.
Yale Skull & Bonesman and Stimson "Kindergartener" William Bundy assumed a
senior post at CIA during the 1950s, as did Yale graduates Richard Bissell
and Cord Meyer and Yale professor Sherman Kent.
VIETNAM: THE BONESMEN'S
DEBACLE
According to author David Halberstam's best-selling critique of the
Kennedy years, "The Best and the Brightest," the JFK presidency
marked the high point of Skull & Bones postwar power. But it also marked
the beginning of the secret fraternity's fall from the position of
unchallenged power, and the beginning of America's precipitous decline as
a world power. All these factors are summed up in one word: Vietnam.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Cabinet was largely handpicked by Skull & Bones
elder statesman Robert Lovett, who was personally approached by Joseph
Kennedy, the president's father, and asked to shape the direction of the
new administration. Lovett had been one of the architects of the World War
II industrial mobilization under President Franklin Roosevelt, which
helped bring the United States out of the Great Depression. He had been a
factional opponent of Averell Harriman within the Skull & Bones circles,
initially opposing the Cold War containment doctrine and pushing the idea
of Atoms for Peace during the early years of the Eisenhower presidency
(l952-1960).
Kennedy had personally asked Lovett to join his Cabinet, but Lovett, a
partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, preferred to shun formal government
service. Instead, he placed a number of younger Bonesmen into the critical
posts. McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy's National Security Adviser.
Averell Harriman was made Under Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, a
position that placed him in charge of many of the most critical decisions
along the way to disaster in Vietnam. William Bundy remained in a senior
post at CIA.
The decision to escalate the American military involvement in Vietnam -- a
rejection of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's prophetic warning that the United
States should never engage in a ground war in Asia -- was made by members
of the Order. According to some accounts, President Kennedy began to have
serious second thoughts about escalating the war, particularly after
several private Oval Office discussions with MacArthur.
With Kennedy's assassination, American soldiers began pouring into
Southeast Asia. Harriman remained a fixture of Vietnam policy under
President Lyndon Baines Johnson. McGeorge Bundy remained on as LBJ's
National Security Adviser untill , when he left government service to
assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the largest tax-exempt
philanthropic agency in the United States. The Ford Foundation annually
dispenses of nearly $3 billion in grants.
In his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy helped finance
the anti-Vietnam War movement. The National Student Mobilization
Committee, the umbrella group for the entire New Left of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, was led by David Dellinger, a Yale graduate. Episcopal
Church activist William Sloan Coffin, a Bonesman, a second leading figure
in the anti-war protest movement, had previously served as a CIA officer.
Thus, the Order had its hands in two critical elements of the policy
debacle of the second half of the 1960s. Some leading Bonesmen helped
shape the disastrous limited war strategy in Vietnam, while other members
of the Order, at least tacitly, contributed to the growth of the
drug-rock-sex counterculture by nourishing the New Left soil from which it
sprang.
As a result of the Vietnam debacle, the "Stimson Kindergarten" literally
drove itself out of the corridors of power which it had occupied without
challenge for the previous 20 years. With the election of Richard Nixon as
president of the United States in November 1968, a different team came
into prominence. The politics of that team were personified by Henry A.
Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.
In a May 1982 speech in London at the Chatham House headquarters of the
Royal Institute for International Affairs, Kissinger boasted that he was
an enthusiastic follower of the late British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and that throughout his years in senior government posts under
Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford (1974-1976), he had always consulted more
frequently with his counterparts in the British Foreign Office than he had
with officials of his own government.
Although Kissinger had enjoyed early patronage from McGeorge Bundy, when
the Bonesman was Dean of Harvard University and Kennedy's NSC adviser, the
Kissinger era marked a low point in Skull & Bones' government power. The
Central Intelligence Agency, a hub of the Order's clout, was decimated by
scandals that only compounded the damage done to the Agency as the result
of its role in the Vietnam disaster.
According to some respected writers, for example, Jim Hougan, author of "Secret
Agenda," the CIA attempted to reverse the route by helping to bring
down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There is significant evidence to bolster
some of these accounts.
When Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 following Nixon's
resignation, Skull & Bones made a brief comeback. In what came to be known
as the "Saturday Night Massacre," Ford, in the autumn of 1975, removed
Henry Kissinger from his post as NSC Adviser, replacing him with Gen.
Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger ally James Schlesinger was fired as Secretary
of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. And CIA Director William
Colby, who had dueled with Angleton, was fired and replaced by Skull &
Bones member George Bush.
If these maneuvers were intended to be the first step in a more ambitious
comeback by the WASP warrior faction, the plan was short-circuited with
the election in November 1976 of Jimmy Carter as president. It would
really not be until the inauguration of George Bush as president in
January 1989 -- a dozen years later -- that Skull & Bones would resurface
with the same degree of governmental power that it had enjoyed during the
Stimson years. George Bush's selection as Ronald Reagan's vice
presidential running mate in the 1980 and 1984 elections was the
transition back to that power.
Many things had gone wrong in the years since Vietnam to drive the
Bonesmen off the center stage. With more than a little input from Bonesmen
like McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, the United States had gone into
a period of scientific, technological and industrial retreat. The Nixon
decision on August 15, 1971 to remove the dollar from a fixed, gold-backed
exchange rate system, had triggered a move toward double-digit inflation,
urban decay, rising unemployment and soaring interest rates. The
Kissinger-orchestrated Iranian-Middle East oil crisis in the early 1970s
had contributed to a rate of deindustrialization that ultimately
transformed the United State from the biggest creditor nation in the world
to the world's biggest debtor nation. According to estimates compiled
around the time of George Bush's inauguration as president, the total U.S.
internal indebtedness had skyrocketed to more than $12 trillion.
Moreover, the period of the 1970s and 1980s had given rise to a new and
powerful political-financial combination demanding a share of government
clout. This new grouping, with its principle power bases in the U.S.
Congress, in Hollywood and on Wall Street, was known as the Zionist lobby.
Although Jewish names had been prominent in the legal profession and on
Wall Street since the founding of the American republic, in the aftermath
of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors, Zionist
power took on a whole different proportion. Again, Henry Kissinger's
position in the Nixon administration symbolized the fact that the
pro-Israel lobby had moved in with a vengeance to the corridors of power
in the nation's capital. Even on Wall Street the 1970s and 1980s had seen
a new generation of Jewish financiers come into power, replacing their
more cultured and Anglicized predecessors. The WASP Establishment had
developed a tolerance of and working relationship with the largely German
Jewish bankers known among themselves as "Our Crowd." The new upstart Wall
Street Zionists, however, were viewed by the WASPs as a collection of
gangsters.
If the Skull & Bonesmen needed a legitimate justification for reviving
their ever-present dislike of the East European Ashkenazic Jews, the Wall
Street Zionists who became known as the so-called "New Crowd" provided
them with all the excuses necessary. When Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Naval
intelligence analyst, was arrested in November 1985 and charged with
spying for Israel against the United States, there was a resurgence of
more unabashed anti-Semitism among the Bonesmen and their blueblood
upperclass mates. It has since become a hallmark of the Bush White House.
Even when practical political affairs have demanded that the Bush
administration deal with the American Zionist lobby or the right-wing
Shamir government of Israel, there has been a distinctive undertone of
distrust bordering on overt hostility.
BUSH
IN PROFILE
[See also
The Unauthorized Biography of George H. W. Bush
by Tarpley and Chaitkin]
Unlike Averell Harriman, who reportedly coveted personal political power
and drew sharp criticism from some of his fellow Bonesmen, George Bush has
been a long-term "project" of Skull & Bones. The Bush presidency in real
and symbolic terms represents the effort by the Order to restore the lost
spirit of the WASP warrior Henry Stimson. With the passage of time and the
decay of the WASP elite, the Bush presidency may yet prove to be a tragic
replay of past American dreams.
George Bush's career was sponsored every step of the way by Skull & Bones
members, mostly of his father's generation. Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones
Class of 1917), a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who would serve one term
in Congress as senator from Connecticut, sent George to the traditional
private preparatory school, Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire,
which grooms young New England squires for later studies at Yale.
It was while finishing his prep school training at Andover that Bush was
first exposed to Henry Stimson. Reportedly, Stimson delivered a stirring
patriotic speech to the Phillips student body in l940 arguing forcefully
for American intervention in the war in Europe. Ironically, at that very
moment on the Yale campus, the majority of Skull & Bonesmen were leading
the America First movement, which opposed any such U.S. entanglement in
Europe.
When war with Japan broke out a year later, George Bush enlisted in the
Navy and was trained as a pilot. He flew more than 50 missions before
being shot down in the Pacific. At Yale after the war, Bush captained the
baseball team and followed his father's footsteps into the Order.
Political legends have it that George Bush shunned his family's patronage
and went off on his own to launch a business career as an oil wildcatter,
or speculator, in Texas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush
moved to Texas to work for Dresser Industries selling oil drilling
equipment. The job was arranged for him by his father with Dresser
president Neil Mallon, who was a fellow member of Skull & Bones. Dresser,
according to several sources, had close ties with the CIA.
After a few years with Dresser, George Bush set up his own company, Zapata
Oil, to explore new oil fields in Texas and Mexico. Again, Bush was
heavily backed by a member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker,
also a Skull & Bonesman, who put up a large amount of capital, as did
Brown Brothers Harriman. Lazard Brothers, a Jewish brokerage house with
longstanding friendly ties to the New England WASPs, put up some money as
well, at the urging of Andre Meyer, the owner of the Washington Post
Corporation and the father of the current Post publisher Katharine Graham.
Zapata Oil sunk the first offshore well for the Kuwaiti government.
Even with that kind of backing, George Bush was less than a success as a
businessman. In 1964, a longtime Bush friend, William Farrish III of
Scotland, bought the majority of shares in Zapata for $3.2 million to keep
the business afloat, while George, in a major career shift, ran for U.S.
Congress from a wealthy district in Houston, Texas. He won.
During his three terms in Congress (Bush lost the 1970 Senate race to
Lloyd Bentsen), George Bush distinguished himself as an advocate of zero
population growth and a defender of the eugenics movement. Both of these
positions, radical for their day, were probably the result of Bush's close
friendship with William Draper Jr. -- a fellow Bonesman and a longtime
advocate of population reduction schemes in the Third World.
The 1970s were for George Bush years of grooming in high-level politics
and foreign policy. During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, George
Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He later
joined the chorus calling for Nixon's resignation. After a tour as the
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush was sent off to Communist
China as the Chief Liaison Officer prior to the formalization of
diplomatic relations. Bush shared the Beijing experience with Winston
Lord, a fellow Skull & Bones member who was the CIA station chief. Lord
went on to become president of the New York Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR) in 1983. (The Lord family founded the city of Hartford, Connecticut,
has a large number of Skull & Bones members on its family tree, and set up
one of the most powerful old-line Wall Street law firms, Lord Day Lord.)
In 1975, George Bush completed his "grooming" with a brief stint as Gerald
Ford's CIA director.
In 1980, Bush ran a short-lived campaign against Ronald Reagan for the
Republican Party's presidential nomination. Future running mate Reagan cut
short Bush's 1980 presidential hopes by defeating him soundly in the
primary election in New Hampshire, in the heart of New England. Reagan
blasted Bush for his membership in the internationalist Trilateral
Commission, which had attained notoriety because 20 members of the
unpopular Carter administration had served on the commission. Bush's
campaign was otherwise noteworthy because a significant number of his
campaign volunteers were CIA officials; his campaign organization was
directed by six top Agency and Pentagon retirees.
THE ORDER'S NETWORK
With Bush in the White House, the WASP Establishment is seeking to
re-conquer lost territory, not only within the domain of national
politics, but within the financial community, the legal profession and big
business. A struggle between some elements of the WASP crowd and the
Jewish "New Crowd" on Wall Street has been playing out in the newspapers
and federal courts for the past six years, beginning with the criminal
indictments of junk bond dealers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and the
bankrupting and criminal prosecuting of the powerful Zionist-run brokerage
house Drexel Rurnham Lambert.
To some extent these wars reflect the kind of scramble that always takes
place during a financial crisis and shakeout, when certain formerly
powerful financial institutions are wiped out and others profit from their
rivals' adversity. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the House of
Morgan came out on top. Not coincidentally, Morgan Guaranty Trust and
Morgan Stanley have been cornerstones of the Skull & Bones grouping on
Wall Street since their founding during the last century. Founding partner
Harold Stanley was a Bonesman.
One hub of the Order's postwar economic power, the major multinational oil
corporations, have clearly benefited greatly from President Bush's
"charming little colonial war" in the Persian Gulf. The leading oil
companies which are linked to the Order are: Standard Oil Trust
Corporation, Shell Oil of America, Creole Petroleum Corporation and
Pennzoil Corporation. The founder and present chairman of the board of
Pennzoil started out in the oil business in partnership with George Bush
in Zapata Oil. It is interesting to note in the context of the Bonesmen's
deep involvement in the world petroleum business that George Bush, during
his early days as a Texas oilman, had worked closely with the Kuwaitis.
Eight major Wall Street and Washington, D.C. law firms stand out as
practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Order of Skull & Bones. Each
of these firms was founded by members of the Order, and each of these
firms continues to provide up-and-coming Order initiates in the legal
community with training, credentials and connections. A review of the
major corporate clients of these firms would reveal many of the most
powerful companies among the Fortune 500.
The Skull & Bones law firms are:
Lord Day Lord
Davis Polk Wardwell
Simpson Thacher Bartlett
Debevoise Plimpton Lyons & Gates
Cravath Swaine & Moore
Covington & Burling
Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods
Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy.
In addition to their corporate clientele and their direct involvement
in government through the frequent appointment of partners to Cabinet
posts, these firms also specialize in handling the personal financial
affairs and investment portfolios of the leading WASP families. In this
respect, the Skull & Bones-centered WASP Establishment imitates the
Venetian model. During the height of power of Venice, which was the
trading capital of the Byzantine Empire, the leading families used their
personal wealth to establish insurance companies, family funds and
cultural programs through which they extended their political power.
Today, the prominent law firms listed above play a special role in
directing the affairs of the leading tax-exempt foundations which shape
the culture and public opinion of the United States and many foreign
countries. We have already seen that McGeorge Bundy, a leading Bonesman,
left his position as National Security Adviser to President Lyndon Johnson
in 1966 to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation. During the nearly
two decades that Bundy spent directing the $3 billion tax-exempt fund, he
arguably wielded more power than he did during his six years as the
National Security Adviser to two presidents. Under the Bundy reign the
Ford Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch the
environmentalist movement and funded scores of projects devoted to
population reduction in the Third World.
From its early decades, the Order has concentrated much of its efforts at
establishing, controlling and, in some instances, capturing the major
tax-exempt philanthropic foundations of America. The Russell Sage
Foundation, which specializes in "social control" programs, was founded by
Bonesmen. Among the leading functions of the Russell Sage Foundation today
is the maintaining of a centralized tracking of the finances of all the
large tax-exempt foundations in the United States. The Peabody Foundation,
the Slater Foundation and several of the Rockefeller foundations were all
either started by members of the Order or have been dominated by Bonesmen
from their inception. Other major family funds, like the Ford Foundation
and the Carnegie Endowment, were wrestled from family control by the Skull
& Bones apparatus. During the tenure of McGeorge Bundy, two members of the
Ford family resigned from the Ford Foundation in disgust over the
direction in which Bundy had taken the philanthropic agency.
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton
wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to
informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided
with a large file of the Order's internal documents, including minutes of
some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a
rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early
1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as
a book in 1986.
For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and
attempting to gain some insight into George Bush's performance during that
largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume
stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order.
According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat
flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a
primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates
into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.
It is a world dominated by American military power and American control
over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta
provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the
Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides
the model for the Bonesmen's New World Order. The image of Secretary of
State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital
demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New
World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian
Empire.
According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired
President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to
go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually
cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and
overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military
fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to
understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones.
Although America's Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the
Bonesmen's failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its
massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies,
is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste's reincarnation.
When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam,
he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen -- not to the
American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part
of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed.
On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the
Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the
least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series
of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf
showdown, the president's own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media
scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil's
photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing
fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in
every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular
disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal
government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for
Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking
business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was
pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had
ended.
On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most
dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was
about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of
its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of
independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the
outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic
assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections
to the immediate reunification of Germany.
At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in
sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been
nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic
summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of
1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany's plan of
unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the
position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund
requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance.
In the Far East, Japan's continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a
threat to Washington's desire to retain superpower status. If President
Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical
analogy, their British "cousins" were quick to pick up on the parallels
between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical
international situation that existed 100 years earlier.
In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign
Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance
with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental
Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland
infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters,
Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of
rapid economic growth and extensive trade.
Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial
hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked
to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging
the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the
Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by
then led by Henry Stimson's old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt
the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the
Great Depression were the consequences of that interference.
THE PERSIAN GULF WAR
It was against this historical backdrop that President Bush, invoking the
World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson, went to war
against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was personally
instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby
provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have
emphasized that a two-hour private meeting between the president and
Margaret Thatcher in the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S.
Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2, 1990 helped finalize Bush's decision
to immediately deploy military force.
Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel between
Bush and FDR, who was greatly influenced by Stimson. According to the
writer, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of
economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to
strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam
Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have
consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East.
As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States is in the
process of establishing a string of permanent military bases throughout
the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led by
Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military
presence to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is effectively captured by
Washington. American bankers aided by U.S. gunboats now are setting world
oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the Persian Gulf War is that the
United States now has an oil weapon -- pointed principally at Germany and
Japan. Ironically, America's two chief economic rivals have paid out a
total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush administration
military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington's hand.
Another telling example of how the Order's man in the Oval Office intends
to administer a crumbling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New
World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout
of the majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by
Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American
commercial banks on the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the
Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System to be "too big to
fall." The stock purchase amounted to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of
Citicorp, using the increased profits being enjoyed by the House of Saud
as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil production since the
beginning of the Gulf crisis in August 1990.
There points up a striking difference between the role of the United
States in World War II and the Bush administration's handling to date of
the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went
through a genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel
Huntington described it as a "neo Hamiltonian" policy, a reference to the
first United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
Beginning in 1939, America became a major supplier of military and
industrial goods under the Lend-Lease program to the European states
fighting Hitler. At the same time, the federal government began issuing
low-interest credits to revive the nation's manufacturing base which had
been gutted by a decade of economic depression. The industrial buildup
accelerated once the United States formally entered .World War II, leading
to the establishing of entirely new industrial sectors, such as aerospace
and petrochemicals.
This time around -- at least to date -- there has been no such marshaling
of the U.S. domestic industrial base. Despite moderate increases in the
production of certain high-tech weapons systems, the U.S. economy
continues its gradual slide into what could be a new depression.
Unemployment is greater than at any point in the last decade. Some
sociologists fear that the complete disintegration of America's urban
centers could produce new race-riots as early as the summer of 1991.
The single greatest challenge to George Bush and the Order is: Can they
capitalize on the current revival of the American spirit to reverse the
disastrous post-industrial society dogmas, and launch their own version of
the World War II neo-Hamiltonian industrial recovery? So far, some
doomsayers claim, it appears that Bush and his administration plan instead
to direct their efforts at looting and blackmailing the rest of the world
-- especially the gulf oil sheikdoms, Japan and Germany -- into bailing
out the bankrupt U.S. financial houses and federal government and
financing the posting of American-led foreign legions at every corner of
the globe where there are large deposits of strategic raw materials. If
this policy is not altered, George Bush may soon find himself presiding
over a new disaster that will make the Vietnam debacle appear
insignificant in comparison.
The politics of the New World Order appear to be borrowed largely from the
pages of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Political columnist
Patrick Buchanan, an early vocal opponent of the Bush Persian Gulf
strategy, warned as early as August 1990 that the White House was falling
into the trap of British "balance of power" politics, the very politics
that left Great Britain on the scrap heap of world powers at the close of
World War II, and put Winston Churchill, the architect of World War II and
the Cold War, out of a job.
Since the crushing military defeat of Iraq by a technologically far
superior American-led coalition, the Bush administration has vacillated on
a postwar policy for the region. It has pursued a pragmatic power
balancing game which is rife with potential problems. The two key elements
of the American balance-of-power politics in the region are the
preservation of a weakened but territorially whole Iraq to offset the
other would-be regional-powers Iran and Syria. At the same time, it is
tilting toward a nominally more "pro-Arab" position with regard to the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
While the harsh reparations terms being imposed upon a war-devastated Iraq
are probably, in the mind of Bush, aimed at dissuading any future regional
military power from launching-cross-border aggressions, they amount to the
slow, excruciating extermination of the population of that country. As one
seasoned observer noted recently, earlier air wars had caused greater
immediate losses of life, due to the inaccuracy of bombs and rockets, but
had generally left basic infrastructures intact. The precision bombing of
Iraq's entire infrastructure has caused what a United Nations team has
called an "apocalypse." The greater loss of life will occur in the
aftermath of the combat as a country with 16 million inhabitants is
suddenly thrown into a "pre-industrial" state with no electricity, no
water or other necessities. American humanitarian aid, administered by
occupying troops, will not offset this apocalypse -- especially if harsh
war reparations and asset seizures deprive Iraq of the financial resources
needed to begin a rebuilding process.
Regardless of the fact that the United States has not thrown the full
weight of its military presence behind the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein
regime, the shortsightedness of the present Bush policy may very well lead
to a Lebanon-type protracted civil war in Iraq. Such a war could
potentially spread throughout the region.
IMPLICATIONS FOR JAPAN
Throughout this short study of the Order of Skull & Bones, emphasis has
been placed on the philosophy, the rituals and the modus operandi of the
Bonesmen who have devoted their post-Yale careers to world politics. This
particular emphasis was chosen in order to provide the Japanese reader
with an insight into how the Bush presidency views the rest of the world,
so that it will be possible for Japan to better understand what it faces
in the post-Persian Gulf War strategic environment.
The implications of Skull & Bones domination over American policymaking
under the Bush presidency are enormous. Japan must be prepared to meet
what amounts to a fundamentally new challenge. Few of the postwar
experiences in U.S. Japanese relations will have prepared the Japanese
government and the leaders of Japanese industry and finance for-what they
now face.
In the recent past, the policy of Washington toward Japan has been simply
to use political leverage, mostly related to Japan's regional security
concerns, to exact compromises and concessions in the economic and
financial sphere. But the United States, under its policy of free trade,
privatization of the monetary and credit mechanisms, and the transition to
post-industrial service-oriented forms of economic activity at home, has
suffered a gradual but steady decline over the past 20 to 30 years. Japan,
meanwhile, has prospered under a more protectionist and industry oriented
policy.
In the past decade, Japan has been increasingly thrust into the role of
scapegoat for the decline of American prosperity, while at the same time
coming under mounting pressure to help finance the United States out of
its economic mess. The pressures upon Japan to bail out its postwar big
brother have caused tensions between Washington and Tokyo, but the Cold
War had provided a common security interest that generally offset the
occasional rough language.
Under the George Bush Skull & Bones regime at the White House all that has
changed. True to the Bonesmen's credo of constructive chaos and global
political domination by the WASP Establishment, the United States is now
out to dominate U.S.-Japanese relations with a degree of brutal frankness
that will fly in the face of all previous American sensitivities to
Japan's honor. Gone are the days of former U.S. Ambassador Michael
Mansfield, who always sought to maintain a public climate of friendship
and cooperation between the two nations even when behind the scenes he was
taking the toughest of stands on the most divisive issues.
Under the American-led New World Order, Japan can expect to be treated
with far less respect publicly. It can expect that the Bush
administration, including his coterie of former top CIA men now working
directly out of the Oval Office, will be constantly interfering, covertly
in the internal affairs of Nippon.
This shift in style has held sway since the Bush inauguration and the
subsequent appointment of Michael Armacost as U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo.
Armacost has assumed the posture of a Roman pro-consul, dictating policy
to a weak satrap, rather than to engage, in diplomatic dialogue.
Armacost's performance even before the recent events in the Persian Gulf
reestablished American military might as the defining factor in world
affairs -- should have provided the Japanese leadership with a clue as to
the shift under way in Washington's new policy approach.
The Bush policy can best be described as a sophisticated containment
policy. The new approach to Pacific affairs was telegraphed in the early
days of the Bush administration when the president deployed three of his
most trusted senior spooks to three critical Asian diplomatic posts:
Armacost was sent to Tokyo; Bush's vice presidential national security
aide and former career CIA operator Donald Gregg was sent to Seoul; and
John Lilly, another career CIA man and a fellow Yale Skull & Bones member,
was sent to Beijing. The fact that three of the CIA's most experienced
clandestine field operators were assigned the senior diplomatic posts says
a great deal about the Bush administration's intentions to conduct
sophisticated political-warfare and sow confusion among the three major
nations of the Far East. Bush clearly intends to pursue the historic Skull
& Bones mission of extending America's dominion over the entire Pacific
region. The idea of even paying lip service to equal partnership between
Washington and Tokyo is over, at least for the time being.
The process of internally weakening Japan's resistance to this overarching
domination by Washington's New World Order began with the Recruit scandal,
when the Takeshita government was brought down through a U.S.-inspired
secret intelligence operation. One of the primary targets of that
operation was Yashuhiro Nakasone, the former prime minister and the
architect of Japan's post-1973 effort to develop independent ties to the
oil-producing Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
It is important to understand that Bush's WASP warriors, while adopting a
similar approach of non-compromise and domination over Israel and the
Zionist lobby inside the United States, will not hesitate to use the
Jewish lobby as an instrument for bashing Japan into line. Thus, Commerce
Secretary Robert Mosbacher went out of his way to encourage the
Anti-Defamation League's leadership convention, which he addressed last
year, to join with the Bush administration in pressuring Japan to submit
to American free trade demands.
The Bush administration will at times encourage the Zionist lobby and
Israel to mercilessly attack Japan and will at other times severely
criticize Zionist "insensitivity" to Tokyo. This will all be part of the
Bush strategy to dominate the Pacific Rim by playing one country or
faction off against another, using hard cop-soft cop and other classic
techniques of the intelligence trade.
Japan will be offered a limited junior partner status in the New World
Order, while coming under mounting pressure to continue providing tribute
to finance the American imperium. Above all else, Japan will be forbidden
from developing any independent foreign policy toward its neighbors, the
Soviet Union, the Arab world or anyone else. Such programs as the Global
Infrastructure Fund, to the extent that they pose an alternative to the
U.S.-dominated international regime, will be vetoed.
As a subservient junior partner in the New World Order arrangement,
Japan's financial and economic muscle will be used as the piggy-bank for
U.S. imperial objectives. The $14 billion "contribution" to the U.S.-led
Gulf-War coalition was another benchmark in the transition in
U.S.-Japanese relations, as was President Bush's abrupt cancellation of
his long-sheduled state visit to Tokyo. When the chairman of the Liberal
Democratic Party (LDP) attempted to visit Kuwait immediately after the
gulf cease-fire in March l991, the U.S. State Department refused to grant
him permission to go into the American-occupied territory. These
intentional diplomatic affronts should be understood as telling signs of
the new American-Japanese relationship.
On the other-hand, President Bush also suddenly scheduled a brief summit
with Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu in Newport Beach, California for April
4, 1991. One purpose of the sudden meeting was to lay out clear parameters
of acceptable behavior on the part of the Japanese government when the
prime minister meets later in April with Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev. Japanese Soviet relations, like all other crucial Japanese
foreign relations, will be expected to conform with those of the U.S.
An essential blackmail "stick" that the Bush administration intends to
hold over Tokyo is-Japanese dependency on Persian Gulf oil. As-the result
of the Gulf War and the post war American military occupation of Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia and other-key oil-producing sheikdoms, the Bush
administration will exert unabashed control over world oil supplies -- and
prices. In the New World Order, Japan's oil supply will be increasingly
linked to concessions on a range of monetary and economic issues,
including the Global Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) talks, which
broke up last year as the result of largely Japanese and continental
European resistance to the pure free-trade system sought by Bush and
Thatcher. Assistant Treasury Secretary David Mulford, a former senior
official at White Weld Securities, Inc., which restructured Saudi Arabia's
entire financial apparatus, has recently announced that he will seek to
prosecute Japan for its violations of the GATT regulations that call upon
Tokyo to surrender government control over interest rate policies to the
international banking community.
The Bush presidency, with its ambitious drive for domination over former
friends and foes alike, poses an unprecedented challenge to Japan. While
this is neither the time nor the place to offer a solution to the growing
dilemma, the profile of the men of Skull & Bones in this white paper
should provide the Japanese reader with helpful insights into the nature
of the American WASP warrior class and the secret society which spawned
it.
Bibliography
"Bush Boy's Club: Skull and Bones." Covert Information Action Bulletin,
Winter, 1990.
Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. Random House, New
York, 1969.
Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson.
Alfred Knopf, New York, 1990.
Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wisemen: Six Friends and the
World They Made. Simon and Schuster, New York, l986.
"Membership List of All Skull and Bones Members From 1833-1950." The
Russell Trust Association, New Haven, Conn., 1949.
Ranleagh, John. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1986.
Rosenbaum, Ron. "Skull and Bones: An Elegy for Mumbo Jumbo." Esquire
Magazine, September, 1977.
"Skull and Bones: A Short History." Executive Intelligence Review,
January 30, 1980.
Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy. In Active Service in Peace and War.
Octagon Press, New York, 1949
Sutton, Antony C. America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to
the Order of Skull and Bones. Liberty Press, Billings, Mont., 1986.
Winks, Robin. Cloak and Gown Scholars in the Secret War William
Morrow, New York, 1987.
Some Prominent
Members of Skull & Bones:
William F. Buckley, Jr. (Bones Class of 1950):
Founder of National Review, the leading conservative magazine in the
United States. Brother James (Skull & Bones l944) is now a member of the
U.S. Court of Appeals. William F. Buckley, Jr., former CIA officer in
Mexico, also built the political grassroots conservative movement in the
U.S. in the 1960s. President Bush and Buckley have recently split over
Buckley's strong pro-lsraelism.
McGeorge Bundy (Skull & Bones initiate of 1940):
Scion of the Skull & Bones Bundy family. Father Harvey H. Bundy was Skull
& Bones, as was brother William P. Bundy. McGeorge served in the War
Department during World War II as Henry Stimson's assistant and later
became the National Security Adviser to President Kennedy. William Bundy
became a CIA official and later served in key positions at the Departments
of State and Defense. McGeorge headed the Ford Foundation (1968-1980) and
William chaired the Council on Foreign Relations (1972-1983).
George Bush (initiated in 1948):
President of the United States. Comes from a complete Bones family. Father
Prescott, a Bones initiate of the class of 1917. Uncle George Herbert
Walker, Bones Class of 1927. U S Federal District Court Judge John Walker
is also a relative and a Bonesman.
Alfred Cowles (Class of 1913):
Built the Cowles Communication empire based on the Des Moines (lowa)
Register and the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star and Tribune. These two
newspapers play a significant role in shaping the early presidential
primaries, especially in Iowa.
Hugh Cunningham (Bones 1934):
CIA man from 1947 to 1973. He served in top positions in the Clandestine
Services, the Board of National Estimates and later as Director of
Training.
Thomas Daniels (initiated in 1914):
Founder of the largest agro-business and grain cartel company in Minnesota
-- Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM). Served in the Foreign Service and later
during World War II as head of the Fats and Oils Section of the War
Production Board. ADM Corporation's new head Dwayne Andreas is one of the
most powerful figures in U.S.-Soviet trade relations. Daniels's only son,
John (Bones 1943), also works in ADM. The bank which underwrites ADM stock
issues is the Morgan Stanley investment bank
Richard Ely Danielson (Skull & Bones 1907):
Past publisher of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, one of the leading
magazines for seeing which policy line on a variety of issues is coming
out of the Eastern Establishment.
Russell Wheeler Davenport (initiated in 1923):
Fortune magazine writer and editor, made this magazine the leading
authority on financial matters in the United States. Davenport created the
Fortune 500 companies list.
Henry P. Davison (Bones Class of l920):
Key senior partner in the Morgan banking and financial trust networks. His
fellow Bonesman Harold Stanley (1908) founded the investment bank Morgan
Stanley. Davison and his family helped set up the Guaranty Trust
Corporation which became Morgan Guaranty Thomas Cochran (1904 Bonesman)
was one of the most powerful partners in the Morgan bank. The influence of
the Morgan banking system can be seen in its relationship with the
hierarchy of U.S. intelligence. The head of the Office of Strategic
Services, Gen. William Donovan, worked as a Morgan intelligence operative
in the 1920s and prepared the intelligence reports for the Morgan banking
concerns on developments in Europe. F. Trubee Davison became CIA Director
of Personnel in 1951 and placed key Bonesmen in the right positions inside
the CIA.
Averell Harriman (1913 initiate):
Scion of the Harriman railroad family. His brother Roland (Skull & Bones
1917) ran the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman. Averell was one of
the most powerful members of the Skull & Bones fraternity, His government
posts ranged from Ambassador to Russia during World War II and various
State Department positions to chief negotiator on the Vietnam Talks.
Confidential adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and
later Nixon and Carter. His investment banking firm is virtually a Skull &
Bones bank-nine senior partners are from Skull & Bones. President Bush's
father worked in Brown Brothers Harriman after helping to merge several
companies in the United Rubber Corporation of America.
Winston Lord (Bones Class of 1959):
Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1983-l988). Former State
Department official and CIA officer in Asia. China expert. Six members of
the Lord family were Skull & Bones, including Charles Edwin Lord, former
Comptroller of the Currency, Department of the Treasury. Oswald Bates Lord
(Skull & Bones l926) married Mary Pillsbury of the Minnesota based
Pillsbury Flour Corporation. Winston Lord is their son.
Robert A. Lovett (1918 initiate):
Put together the Brown Brothers Harriman merger and later organized the
aviation industry mobilization for World War II. Became part of the most
exclusive power group in World War II under Henry Stimson. Lovett was one
of the five or six most powerful men in the United States for nearly 40
years until his death in 1986.
Henry Luce (initiated in 1920):
Built the Time-Life publishing empire. Became the leading publicist of the
"American century" doctrine.
Dino Pionzio (Bones Class of 1950):
CIA deputy chief of station in Chile during the overthrow of Chilean
President Salvador Allende. Now works at the investment firm Dillion Read.
Alphonso Taft (initiated in 1833):
Secretary of War (1876), Attorney General (1876-1877) and later Minister
to Austria and Russia. Co-founder of Skull & Bones.
Robert A. Taft (1910 initiate):
Speaker of the House of Representatives (1921-1926) and Senator (R-Ohio).
Leader of the Isolationist movement in the 1930s. His son Robert A. Taft,
Jr., also senator from Ohio, led the right-wing of the Republican Party in
the 1950s and 1960s. Robert A. Taft, Jr., however, was the only member of
the Taft family who was not Skull & Bones.
William H. Taft (Skull & Bones 1878):
President of the United States (1908-1912) and appointed Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court (1921-1930). Secretary of War (1904-1908). Trustee,
Carnegie Institution. Part of the long line of Tafts who served in the
U.S. government.
William Collins Whitney (initiated 1863):
Secretary of the Navy (1885-1889). Promoter of the Naval Shipyards and
financier. Part of the Whitney family which sent eight of its members to
Yale to become Skull & Bonesmen. Family intermarried with the Payne,
Harriman and Vanderbilt clans. The Whitney's became some of Wall Street's
most powerful financiers through the Guaranty and Knickerbocker Trust
Companies.
Current U.S. senators who are Skull & Bones members:
Sen. Jonathan Bingham (D-N.M.).
Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) is chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.); Former Navy Secretary and on the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.): Recently killed in an airplane crash. was a
Bonesman as was his father. The Heinz family has one of the largest
food-producing companies in the world.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.): Formerly on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Kerry is now on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
See also
Skull and Bones and other Secret Societies
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