They’ve sworn an oath never to reveal what goes on inside and they’re legendary for the lengths to which they’ll go to avoid prying interrogation. Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class, called his experience in the tomb the most profound one in his entire education.īut none of them will tell you a thing about it. The leading lights of the Eastern establishment-in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman pays Bones’s tax bill), in blue-blood law firms (Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment-the people who have shaped America’s national character since it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in that crypt over there. You could ask … but I think you get the idea. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it’s true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security for life. (“Spook,” the Yale slang word for secret-society member, is, of course, Agency slang for spy.) You could ask J. after leaving Bones-or George Bush, who ran the C.I.A.-whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. You could ask Bill Bundy or Bill Buckley, both of whom went into the C.I.A. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pile as part of his initiation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. 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 Averell Harriman whether there’s really a sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce lay down naked in that coffin and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to fourteen fellow Bonesmen. 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. 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.

It’s the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. Take a look at that hulking sepulcher over there.

Skull and bones presidents