Essay About Undergraduate Power And Secret Societies

Skull and Bones Secret Society
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Take a look at the hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they
call it a tomb. Its the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most
powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society
system. For nearly a century and a half, Skull and Bones has been
the most influential secret society in the nation, and now it is one
of the last.
In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be
concealed about anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank
tombstone walls could be holding the last secrets left in America.
You could ask Averell Harriman whether theres really a
sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson
and young Henry Luce (Time magazine) lay down naked in the coffin
and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to 14 fellow
Bonesmen. You could ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart if
there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a skeleton
suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside
the tomb. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a
mud pie as part of his initiation
and how it compared with a later
quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. You could ask Bill
Bundy or William F. Buckley, both of who went into the CIA after
leaving Bones – or George Bush, who ran the CIA / President –
whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for
the clandestine trade. (“Spook,” the Yale slang for spy.) You
could ask J. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the
Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and
whether its true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift
of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security
for life.
You could askbut I think you get the idea. The lending lights
of the Eastern establishment – in old-line investment banks (Brown
Brothers Harriman pays Bones tax bill), in a blue-blood law firms
(Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the
highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment – the people
who have shaped Americas national character since it ceased being
an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in
that crypt over there. Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War
under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American
ruling class, called his experience in the tomb the most profound
one in his entire education.
But none of them will tell you a thing about it. Theyve sworn
an oath never to reveal what goes on inside and theyre legendary
for the lengths to which theyll go to avoid prying interrogation.
The mere mention of the words “skull and bones” in the presence
of a true-blue Bonesman, such as Blackford Oakes, the fictional
hero of Bill Buckleys spy thriller, ÐSaving the Queen, will cause
him to “dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed.”
I can trace my personal fascination with the mysteriouis goings-
on in the sepulcher across the street to a spooky scene I witnessed
on its shadowy steps late one April night eleven years ago. I was
then a sophmore at Yale, living in Jonathan Edwards, the residential
college (anglophile Yale name for dorm) built next to the Bones
tomb. It was part of Jonathan Edwards folklore that on a April
evening following “tap night” at Bones, if one could climb to the
tower of Weir Hall, the odd castle that overlooks the Bones
courtyard, one could hear strange cries and moans coming from the
bowels of the tomb as the fifteen newly “tapped” members were put
through what sounded like a harrowing ordeal. Returning alone to
my room late at night, I would always cross the street rather than
walk the sidewalk that passed right in front of Bones. Even at that
safe distance, something about it made my skin crawl.
But that night in April I wasnt alone; a classmate and I were
coming back from an all-night diner at about two in the morning.
At the time, I knew little about the mysteries of Bones or any of
the other huge windowless secret-society tombs that dominated with
dark authority certain key-corners of the campus. They were
nothing like conventional fraternities. No one lived in the tombs.
Instead, every Thursday and Sunday night the best and the brightest
on campus, the fifteen