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. 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
Ageney (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 17th
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 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
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 MODEL
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 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 Geofrey 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... wish 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. Harvey 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 Intelligence 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 untill , 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 & Bones'
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 1975,
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 1970s 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 antisemitism among the Bonesmen and
their blueblood upperclass 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 l940 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. Desser, 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 Kathanne 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
re-conquer 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 Rurnham 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 Plimpton 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 to 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 hundreds
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 have 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
economic 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 for 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-sheduled 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.
Alfred Knopf, New York, 1990.
Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wisemen: 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 Establishment: 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 the 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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