Inside George W.’s Secret Crypt
by Ron Rosenbaum
Where is the all-girl break-in team now that we need them? Where are the
intrepid young women who had the nerve and daring to pull off one of the
great investigative coups of our era: to sneak into the triple-locked "tomb"
of Skull and Bones, the secret citadel, the sanctum sanctorum, the heart of
the heart of the Eastern Establishment, the place of weird, clandestine,
occult bonding rituals that has shaped the character of American ruling-class
figures from the 27th President, William Howard Taft, to the 41st, George
Herbert Walker Bush and perhaps the next one too: George W., Skull and Bones
1968. The place where generations of Bushes, Tafts and Buckleys and the like
lay down in coffins and spewed the secrets of their sex lives. The place
where many of America’s top spies and spy masters were initiated into their
clandestine destinies. The place where all conspiracy theories converge. The
place where the people who shaped America’s character had their character
shaped.
But the superspooks of Skull and Bones had nothing on the all-girl break-in
team, which managed to outwit their security, slip into the tomb and take
pictures of each and every sacred ritual room. Including that dread enclosure
I call the "Room With the License Plates of Many States."
I know because I once held in my hands the fruits of the all-girl break-in
Skull and Bones raid. Yes, there came a time when I gazed at some glossy
black-and-white prints that revealed the innermost sanctums of perhaps the
most secrecy-shrouded interior in America, the interior of the Skull and
Bones Tomb on the Yale campus in New Haven.
It is a space that is likely to have even more attention focused on it in the
coming months because an initiate once again is poised to become President.
And because of the imminent release of a film called The Skulls transparently
based on Skull and Bones. But it was only recently that I began thinking
about the all-girl break-in team, which was, I believe, inspired by something
I’d written–the first and I think still the only outside investigation of
Skull and Bones, its secrets, its legacy, its powerful subterranean influence
on American history.
In fact, it is my belief that the all-girl break-in team might be doing W. a
favor by demystifying this black hole in his biography: the occult rituals he
engaged in twice a week in the bowels of the Skull and Bones tomb in the
crucial 21st year of his life.
In fact, if I might engage in a speculative digression about W., who was my
college classmate, though barely known to me–I have a feeling there is a part
of him that might secretly have approved of the all-girl break-in team’s act
of clandestine mischief. An irreverent spirit, something I thought I glimpsed
in a chance encounter with him and Hunter Thompson a quarter-century ago at a
Super Bowl in Houston.
I can’t recall who was hanging out with whom, but it was January 1974, it was
in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency, the Super Bowl headquarters hotel (I was
there to write about the spectacle which featured Dolphins versus Vikes that
year) and I think it was a mutual friend, a fun-loving preppy guy I knew from
college who also somehow knew Hunter and W. who brought us all together in a
room in the Hyatt. I don’t remember exactly what went on, but I do remember
coming away with a favorable impression of W.
I remember thinking he was one of the preppy types I’d always kind of liked,
the hang-loose, good-ole-boy types, many of whom took the interregnum on
careerism, which the war and the draft mandated as a cue to break out of the
mold a bit, wander off the reservation, poke into the sides of life their
trust funds otherwise might have sheltered them from. I sensed what W. liked
about Hunter Thompson was that Hunter too was another button-down good old
frat boy (once) who went weird but in a good-old-boy way.
This, in other words, was W. II, the kind of a guy who just might have seen
through all the suits and trappings of moral seriousness Skull and Bones
attempted to imbue its initiates with, one who might have seen it as a bit
silly and pompous and who might have preferred, like some of his fellow
preppy prince Hals, to spend time with Falstaffian misleaders of youth such
as Mr. Thompson.
If you think of W. I as the guy who was tapped for Skull and Bones at Yale,
W. II was a kind of counter-W. I. We know W. II was soon to be replaced,
because he’s told us he stopped doing any Bad Things in 1974. Except liquor:
It was then he turned into the hard-drinking W. III. To be succeeded in 1986
when he gave up spirits as well by the solemn and preachy W. IV we have today.
My feeling is: Bring back W. II! I have a feeling W. II saw through the whole
Skull and Bones charade, the pomposity of its ritual posturing, the
preposterousness of its occult mumbo jumbo.
By all accounts, even W. I was a bit skeptical and alienated from the
blue-blood pooh-bahs of the Eastern Establishment who ruled the roost at
Yale. Yes, he went to Andover, but he grew up in Texas. I wonder how much
patience he had for the self-dramatizing seriousness of the basement
confessionals in the Skull and Bones Tomb.
His own father tapped him, it would have been hard to turn it down, but you
get the sense the Bush family still finds confessional rituals, particularly
sexual confessionals, mortifying intrusions. How do I know? Well, let me
explain by describing a harrowing encounter I had 35,000 feet in the air with
George and Barbara Bush on the subject of Skull and Bones. An encounter made
harrowing by Barbara Bush’s knitting needles.
Ah, yes, Barbara Bush’s knitting needles. There’s a chilling line from The
Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." But you have not
known fear until you’ve been in close proximity, in stabbing range of Barbara
Bush’s knitting needles when you ask her husband about Skull and Bones.
It was the summer of 1986, then-Vice President Bush was making a
Congressional campaign swing through the South. I was on board Air Force Two
on an assignment for The New Republic, and when my time came for a one-on-one
with the Vice President, I found him ensconced in the forward cabin sitting
across from Barbara Bush who–I could just tell, maybe it was my beard–deeply
disapproved of me instantly. I don’t hold this against her, I disapprove of
myself, too, for probably better reasons.
But her disapproval deepened into something far more profound when I brought
up the subject of Skull and Bones. First of all, there was the "leave the
room" protocol, the perhaps unscrupulous way I had George Bush trapped. The
legendary protocol of Skull and Bones requires its members to promptly leave
the room if a non-initiate even so much as mentions the words Skull and Bones
(the better to forestall any participation in outsider guessing games about
the deep dark secrets).
But Mr. Bush couldn’t leave the room. Not without a parachute: We were 35,000
feet in the air. (Hmm, maybe that’s why he’s subsequently become a parachute
jumper.)
But there was more than the impropriety of asking the question, there was the
history behind it. I’d prefaced my forbidden question by admitting I’d been
the author of a magazine story about Skull and Bones that had caused a
certain amount of trouble for George Bush. My story first appeared back in
1976 in Esquire under the title "The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones." The
concept of the piece was to see just what I, an outsider, could learn about
the secret rituals of the ultimate secret society, in a brief, intense
investigation. Plenty, it turned out.
I succeeded in confirming several long-rumored rituals, the so-called "sexual
confessional" for instance, by debriefing the disaffected girlfriends of
several Skull and Bones initiates who were angry and eager to talk about the
peculiar practice, long a feature of the secret bonding rituals of the
society.
To understand the role of the sexual confession, you have to put it in
perspective of the larger, unspoken mission of Bones, which I described as a
kind of "ongoing informal eugenics project" of the Eastern Establishment
elite. Every year the society, the oldest and most secretive and (once) most
exclusive of the dozen or so secret societies at Yale, selects or "taps" 15
members of the junior class for cultlike initiation whose ritualistic
coffins, skeletons and mystical oaths derived (I believe I was the first to
reveal) from the mumbo jumbo of some early 19th-century Masonic lodges in
Germany. (If you’re familiar with the Bavarian Illuminati, you know the
drill.)
Beginning in the fall of their senior year, every Thursday and Sunday
evening, the Bones initiates disappear into the spooky windowless "tomb" of
Skull and Bones and descend into the basement. There, one by one, they strip
bare their souls, the better to bond with their brothers, the better to begin
to rebuild their lives around the mission of Skull and Bones, which
is–depending on how you look upon it–a kind of enlightened noblesse oblige
elitism, or a secret conspiracy to rule the world.
One way to look at it is the WASP version of psychoanalysis, intensive group
therapy for members of an ethnic group that requires loads of occult mumbo
jumbo and the imprimatur of a mythic, ancient mission to let down their hair.
(They pretend-date their "order" to the year 322 B.C. and claim it was
founded by Demosthenes in Athens. Skull and Bones has its own special
calendar that numbers the years by adding 322.)
But the heart of it, the thing that makes it weird and kind of
embarrassing–but perhaps the thing that makes it work–is that sexual
confessional session. The sexual confessional session is also, I believe, at
the heart of the eugenic function.
Skull and Bones can be seen as the American equivalent of Britain’s old-boy
network, but a far more conscious rather than casual old-boy network. It’s
one that has produced stewards of the ruling class from Henry Stimson and
Henry Luce, to Vietnam war architect McGeorge Bundy and current State
Department mandarin Strobe Talbott.
A conscious–and shrewd–eugenic project because built in to the Bones
experience is a combination of outreach and inbreeding. Outreach beyond the
inbred Bones families, the Tafts, the Bushes, the Whitneys and the like.
Outreach to the best and brightest new talent to punch up the stagnant WASP
gene pool. Because each year in addition to tapping "legacy" candidates like
George W. who showed no special luster beyond his name, they also take brains
(typically the chairman of the Daily News), brawn (the top athletes, the
football or crew star) even, recently, tokens of diversity (they began
tapping the occasional black and Jew back in the 50’s).
Here’s where the sexual confessional comes in. As I put it, ever so
delicately, in my original story:
"Most Sunday-night sessions start with talk of prep school masturbation and
don’t stop until the intimate details of Saturday night’s delights have come
to light early Monday morning.… It may have served some eugenics purpose in
the founders’ vision: a sharing of birth control and self-control methods to
minimize the chance of a … future steward of the ruling class being trapped
into marriage by a fortune hunter or a working-class girl–the way the grand
tour for an upper-class American youth always included an initiation into the
secrets of Parisian courtesans so that, once back home, the young man
wouldn’t elope with the first girl who let him get past second base."
The problem–and here I’m getting to why the tempo with which Barbara Bush’s
knitting needles stabbed into her fabric stepped up as I broached the
subject–was the reaction of a certain group of women: the girlfriends of
Bones initiates at newly coeducational Yale who didn’t appreciate having
their most intimate secrets disclosed to a bunch of strange men. They were my
best sources–and perhaps the ones who later became the nucleus of the
all-girl break-in team (although perhaps with the complicity of a male mole
in Bones).
Or as one of them put it: "I objected to 14 guys knowing whether I was a good
lay … it was like after that each of them thought I was his woman in a way."
Skull and Bones broke into their privacy–so turnabout was fair play: They
broke into Bones’.
And so the trouble began for Skull and Bones. In the years since my story
appeared, it has served as a lens for each new crop of potential
candidates–and their girlfriends. It was a source of a growing agitation for
the coeducation of secret societies, an agitation which all the societies but
Skull and Bones succumbed to in the 80’s. An agitation Bones resisted to the
bitter end–threatening to throw out entire classes of initiates who wanted to
tap women, threatening to exclude them from the promised land of old-boy
networking for even the thought of such a transgression. It wasn’t until
heated debate and a secret vote in the early 90’s that women were finally
allowed in.
I don’t want to claim I was solely responsible for ending the all-male regime
at Skull and Bones, but I’m glad to have played a part. I’m not as happy for
another unintended consequence of my story, the further enshrinement of Skull
and Bones as an icon, as a kind of Rorschach of American conspiracy theory
literature. A fevered fantasy literature that projected upon the sealed
interior of Skull and Bones every possible conspiratorial connection
imaginable up to and including the rise of Adolf Hitler.
It began in 1980 when George Bush was first running for the Presidency. At
the height of the closely contested New Hampshire primary, the right-wing
Manchester Union Leader, the most powerful paper in the state, made an issue
of Mr. Bush’s Skull and Bones membership, quoting my story in a way to make
it seem more sinister. Soon the Tomb became a conspiracy theory icon, the
Bush family sinister puppet masters in the literature.
My story, for anyone who cares to read it (and for those who do it will be
reprinted in a forthcoming collection of my work from Random House, The
Secret Parts of Fortune), tried to take a nuanced view of how power in
America works. That it wasn’t a matter of a cabal getting together in the
basement of Skull and Bones and ordering assassinations.
They didn’t have to conspire to exercise power: At the height of what Bones
member Henry Luce called "the American century," all they had to do was
breathe, i.e. get born into the right family in an elite that practically did
rule the world. That and a wink and a nod to a trusted friend now and then,
no need for a secret handshake: Their power was public, in-your-face, had no
need to hide itself.
The irony, which got lost in translation, was that Skull and Bones and the
elite it represented was at a moment of crisis and decline in 1976 when my
story appeared. I called my story an elegy: an elegy for mumbo jumbo.
But back to Air Force Two: I wondered what Barbara Bush really thought of
