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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 [Herbert Walker] 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 of 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 Agency (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 l7th 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 Anglophile 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 MODE
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. 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 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 FDR 's 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 FDR 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
[ascribed] 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 Eliahu Root, President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary
of War. Although Stimson and 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 . . . Iwish 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. Haryvey 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 Inte!ligence 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 until 1966,
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 &
Bone's 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 l975, 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 l970s 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 upper-class 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
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 1940 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 member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker,
also a Skull & Bonesman, 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 Katherine 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 reconquer 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 Burnham
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 Plimton
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 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 hundred 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 haw 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
econornic 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 or 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-scheduled 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. Afred Knopf, New York, 1990.
Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: 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 Establishrnent: 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 thc 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 Whitneys 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.
Selected Quotations
*During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, two Skull
& Bones advisers to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy
and Robert Lovett, met in the west wing of the White House
to discuss strategy. According to author Godfrey Hodgson,
there was a photograph of master Bonesman Henry L. Stimson,
their mentor, on Lundy's desk. "All during the conversation
the old Colonel seemed to be staring me straight in the
face," recalled Lovett. Finally, he said to Bundy,
"Mac, I think the best service we can perform for the
president is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson
would."
*At the Potsdam summit in 1946 when President Truman first
met Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Stimson told the president:
"The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is
that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust
him."
*Commenting on the plan of Robert Morgenthau, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, to deindustrialize
Germany after World War II, Stimson wrote: ". . . just
such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate
on their victims . . . a crime against civilization itself?"
He added rather ironically that the plan was like "a
beautiful Nazi program! This is to laugh!"
*"They possessed a common background, common experience,
and a common liking for old wines, proper English and Savile
Row clothing," wrote the biographer of former U.S.
Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. A top level diplomat and
State Department powerhouse during the first half of the
20th century, Bonesman Hugh Wilson adds, "The Foreign
Service [is] a pretty good club."
*"These men helped establish a distinguished network
connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations and
proper clubs," wrote historian and former JFK aide
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "The New York financial and
legal community was the heart of the American Establishment.
Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root;
its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy;
its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie
foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations."
*British author Godfrey Hodgson stated in an essay on the
American Establishment that it was "characteristic
of these men to take on the burdens of world power with
a certain avidity . . . It reflected a grim but grand duty
that was a legacy from half-buried layer of New England
Puritanism."
*Averell Harriman's father, owner of the largest railroad
company in the United States at the turn of the century,
told his son: "Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility.
Money must work for the country."
*"I scoffed at Harvard's Porcellian club. It was too
smug. But to get into Bones, you had to do something for
Yale, wrote Averell Harriman. He would frequently return
to the "Tomb on High Street." During the Paris
Peace Conference on the Vietnam War, Harriman was quite
upset about not being able to attend a "Bones Reunion."
In the book The Wise Men, Harriman is described as
willing to talk openly about national security affairs,
but "he refused, however, to tell [even] his family
anything about Bones . . . so complete was his trust in
Bones's code of secrecy . . ."
*Stimson during the liberation of France in 1944 wrote
about the need for France's reconstruction following the
Nazi occupation of France: "America cannot supervise
the elections of a great country like France. Consequently,
we must eventually leave the execution of the State Department
formula to the French themselves . . . where we ourselves
will assume responsibility in part or more for its execution
according to Anglo-Saxon ideals."
*Stimson on Austria and Germany following World War II:
"They [the British] haven't any grasp apparently of
the underlying need of proper economic arrangements to make
peace stick . . . If they restore Austria to her position
in which she was left by the Versailles arrangement 25 years
ago, why they would reduce her to a non-self-sustaining
state [is beyond me] . . . Central Europe after the war
has got to eat. She has got to be free of tariffs in order
to eat."
*Stimson was "opposed to a Carthaginian Peace"
in which Germany was reduced to a non functioning society.
He wrote, "The Ruhr and Saarland . . . [must not] be
turned into a second rate industrial land . . . regardless
of what it means to Germany . . . [rather] to the welfare
of the entire continent "
*In 1948, the debate within the U.S. government over the
creation of the state of Israel was reaching critical intensity.
President Truman was the "dark horse" candidate
to defeat the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey. Truman thought
he needed the Jewish groups to mobilize in his support in
order to get elected. He also believed that after so many
years of suffering and persecution, the Jews deserved a
homeland of their own. However, his most trusted foreign
policy advisers, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Robert
Lovett, were, according to the book The Wise Men,
"all dead set against the birth of Israel . . . However
humanitarian a Jewish homeland might seem . . . it posed
a real risk to U.N. national security. It was absolutely
vital that the U.S. maintain its pipeline to Mideast oil.
Supporting the Zionist cause would only antagonize the Arabs."
Lovett said, "Israel was one ally too many "
*On Japan, Stimson and McGeorge Bundy wrote their book
On Active Service in Peace and War: "Since 1937,
when the Japanese attacked China, Stimson had been urging,
as a private citizen, an embargo on all American trade with
Japan, and this attitude he carried with him into the Cabinet
[when he became Secretary of War]." Stimson prepared
a memorandum in 1940 pointing out how Japan had yielded
before American firmness, in her withdrawal from Shantung
and Siberia in 1919 and her acceptance of naval inferiority
in 1921. "Japan," Stimson wrote, "has historically
shown that she can misinterpret a pacifistic policy of the
United States for weakness. She has also historically shown
that when the United States indicates by clear language
and bold actions that she intends to carry out a clear and
affirmative policy in the Far East, Japan will yield to
that policy even though it conflicts with her own Asiatic
policy and conceived interests. For the United States now
to indicate either by soft words or inconsistent actions
that she has no such clear and definite policy towards the
Far East will only encourage Japan to bolder action."
*On December 7, 1941, Stimson wrote in his diary: "When
the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first
feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that
crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.
This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the
news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel
that this country united has practically nothing to fear,
while the apathy and division stirred by unpatriotic men
have been hitherto very discouraging."
*On the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
Stimson wrote in an article for Harper's Weekly in 1947:
"My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with
the least possible cost in the lives of men in the armies
which I had helped to raise. In the light that no man, in
our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding
in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing
this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to
use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face."
*At the Truman White House in the presence of Secretary
of State James Byrnes, Adm. Leahy and Secretary of the Navy
James Forrestal, according to his biographer: "Stimson
had argued consistently for a commitment to allow the Japanese
to keep their Emperor, not because--with the memory of Manchuria
in his mind--he had any special sympathy for him, but because
only the Emperor could persuade the Japanese to surrender
and therefore save American lives."
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