The Psychos are Running the Asylum, the Spooks Control the Media, and the Money-grubbers Own Us All
Skull and Bones: The disgusting initiation ceremonies at the heart of the American Establishment
By Ron Rosenbaum, New York ObserverOriginally published on April 23, 2001
Yale Skull and Bones initiates of 1918. Prescott Bush, George W Bush's grandfather, who funnelled massive loans from Wall Street to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and even into the Second World War, is standing left of the clock.
It's the primal scene of American power, of Bush family values. For two centuries, the initiation rite of Skull and Bones has shaped the character of the men who have shaped the American character, including two Presidents named Bush.
And last Saturday, April 14, 2001 - for the first time ever - that long-secret rite was witnessed by a team of outsiders, including this writer.
Using high-tech night-vision video equipment able to peer through the gloom into the inner courtyard of the Skull and Bones "Tomb" in New Haven, The Observer team witnessed:
- The George W. effect: intoxicated by renewed proximity to Presidential power, a robed Bonesman posing as George W. harangued initiates in an eerily accurate Texas drawl: "I'm gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore" and "I'm gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."
- Privileged Skull and Bones members mocked the assault on Abner Louima by crying out repeatedly, "Take that plunger out of my ass!"
- Skull and Bones members hurled obscene sexual insults ("lick my bumhole") at initiates as they were forced to kneel and kiss a skull at the feet of the initiators.
- Other members acted out the tableau of a throat-cutting ritual murder.
Further revelations turned up by the Observer Bones Investigation Unit include:
- The words to the secret Skull and Bones "death mantra."
- Copies of the Skull and Bones tax returns, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, raise questions about the legitimacy of the secret society's claim to charitable tax-exempt deduction status - particularly relevant considering recent criticism of the Bush tax plan for favoring the privileged few.
- A possible explanation emerged in the course of the initiation ceremony for George W.'s decision to run for President in the first place.
The Observer Mission Impossible expedition had its inception several months ago with a phone call from Peggy Adler, the research associate on my previous Skull and Bones piece in The Observer (July 17, 2000). She is the demon investigator and former Iran-contra committee staffer who, among other coups, cross-referenced corporate boards to crack the 'RTA code', the corporate shell game by which the corporate shell of the Skull and Bones society, the Russell Trust Association, shielded its paper trail from prying eyes by changing its name to RTA Inc.
Ms. Adler said she had been approached by a member of the Yale community who wanted to share with us a remarkable coup of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of 2000, to audiotape the Skull and Bones initiation ceremony. And he wanted to know if we'd be interested in an attempt to videotape it this time.
And so one afternoon last December, shortly after the Bush electoral victory had been certified, I met with the intrepid fellow; he booted up his laptop and let me listen to the sounds of a ceremony that had been the subject of fevered speculation for nearly two centuries now.
Of course, there is more to Skull and Bones than the mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. The rituals are less important than the relationships - the bonds of power and influence that develop between Skull and Bones initiates after they graduate. But the relationships are first forged by the rituals and the fact that the founders of Time Inc. and the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of State and National Security Advisors - the men who made the decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and plunge us into Vietnam, the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts - all took part in this initiation ritual may have something to do with the real world power of those bonds. The unspoken understanding, the comfort level with the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is exercised.
The initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating into the elect of the elite (just 15 out of 1,300 in every Yale class) the same mystical sense of mission that allowed the British Old Boy network to rule a worldwide empire.
The whole phenomenon is rarely looked into beyond the exotic ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy mandarins in The Wise Men). But it's something I've been investigating off and on for a quarter of a century now. I am the Ahab of Skull and Bones, pursuing the white whale (or white male) leviathan to the utmost depths. As an undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and Bones Tomb, and back in 1977 I published the first outsider's investigation into Skull and Bones, its rituals and its influence on American political culture (an updated version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange with George and Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune).
And so it was momentous for me to actually hear the sounds of the Skull and Bones initiation on that laptop. But in listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and embarrassment - and an even deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.
In part it was the fact that the ritual was heard but not seen. My Yale source had found a previously unexploited perch from which to record the sounds of the ceremonies, but could glimpse them only incompletely. He reported a figure dressed like the devil, another one in a hooded-skeleton costume and others in robes. The thing that stood out for me, listening to it, was what I've come to think of as "the death mantra."
