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