Secret Societies
Skull & Bones
George Bush, Skull & Bones and the NWO - part 1 of 4 A NEW AMERICAN VIEW-INTERNATIONAL EDITION WHITE PAPER
April 1991
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction INTRODUCTION
This special report is intended to assist the
Japanese audience in more fully understanding the present policies of the United States under the administration of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind America's military adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes
toward the Middle East region.
In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most
powerful organization in America-the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading members of the U.S. govemment 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 Ameriean 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 mernbers believe in the idea of
"construclive 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 e~clusive 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 Ageney (1975-1977). Vice
President of the United States (1980-1988), President of the United States (1988- ).
* John Thomas Daniels, agro-industnalist, founder of Archer Daniels Midland.
* Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counsellor 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 intentionallv 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 & Bon~s 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 Bankt (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 asscoiation 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 intemarried 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
Amencan 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, Bllndy, 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 cultrally 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 bueblood family pedigrees, attend one of the prestigious New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high schools. (Whereas a large number of the most elite of the Harvard University students attend Groton, a school with close ties to the Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive a thoroughly Anglophilic education, the preferred prep schools for the future Bonesmen are the two Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)
The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The
prospective Bonesmen are judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England countryside or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa, the jungles of South America or even the American badlands of the Plains states, is a prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the Order.
The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of
combat during wartime is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see themselves as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale Bonesmen of President George Bush's generation, as the result of the outbreak of World War II, went directly from prep school into the military service
prior to their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the preferred military service has historically been with thc 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 coffln-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 Ihe
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
by Paul Goldstein
Jeffrey Steinberg
The Order of Skull & Bones
Initiation and Ritual
The Spartan Model
Henry Stimson: Master Bonesman
Stimson's Kindergarten and the Cold War
Vietnam: The Bonesmen's Debacle
Bush in Profile
The Order's Network
The New World Order
The Persian Gulf War
Implications for Japan
Bibliography
Some Prominent Members
Selected Quotations