![]() We were discouraged from gathering in groups around campus because it would perpetuate the notion that this was an elitist group.” “He thought it was inappropriate,” said Cross. As an adult, William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, developed a distaste for it. Not every Bonesman has loved the club unconditionally. David Boren and FedEx founder Frederick Smith. Buckley and Christopher Buckley, former Sen. A partial roster of the famous includes diplomat Averill Harriman, poet Archibald MacLeish, financier Dean Witter Jr., Time magazine founder Henry Luce, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, writers William F. Three have become president (both Bushes and William Howard Taft). Not surprisingly, given Yale’s lofty status in the firmament of American universities, Bonesmen often have occupied positions of power and prestige as adults. There was always security, said Cross, a professor of social medicine and pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the knowledge that “what goes on inside, what people reveal about themselves. In later generations, the conversations became not just confessional but confrontational in the manner of group therapy, according to some reports. Alan Cross, one of Kerry’s classmates and a third-generation Bonesman, the club was “basically a debating society, where members of the senior class would get together and discuss important topics of the day.” (Bonesmen have a special regard for Demosthenes, the famed Greek orator who died in 322 BC.) Russell, a Yale student who modeled it after one he’d encountered in Germany. The number 322 is a variation on the year (1832) that the club was founded by William H. “They were always ripping things off with ‘322' on them.” It’s just like a big clubhouse, but it’s not in a tree.” There was a large dining room with a long table, and she recalled a room full of license plates. “They made it into this big mystery thing. “It’s kind of foreboding looking,” said a 48-year-old Toronto writer who sneaked into the Tomb with her boyfriend during spring break 1975. It is windowless, ersatz Greco-Egyptian temple, readily identified on Yale maps. ![]() Women were admitted in 1991, after a rancorous 20-year battle.īones members spend each Thursday and Sunday of their senior year in the Tomb, the group’s clubhouse on High Street in the middle of the Yale campus. There have never been specific criteria for membership, which in generations past might have included some standard campus types: the editor of the Yale Daily, an outstanding athlete, a son of a Bonesman etc. Next month, an eclectic group of 15 juniors will be tapped for Skull and Bones by this year’s seniors. “Most of us,” he said, “put friendship first and politics a far, far second.” Etra, who called himself “a strong Zionist,” said one of his closest Bones friends is a Jordanian-born Muslim. “I am a liberal Democratic criminal defense attorney who voted for George Bush, and I will vote for him again,” said Bush’s fellow Bonesman Donald Etra, an Orthodox Jew who lives in L.A. ![]() If nothing else, Skull and Bones has produced some odd bedfellows. They know each other, they trust each other and they bonded at an early age.” “I would say the best way of describing it is by analogy to the old boys’ network in England, where graduates of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge form a network of influence and power and share a mind-set. Rosenbaum disputes that there is a specific “power agenda” at work. Bones, she said, has “a power agenda” that “prioritizes its own elitism and its own members above other concerns.” Is this a group that has an institutionalized superiority complex? Yes,” said Alexandra Robbins, a 27-year-old journalist and Yale alumna whose book “Secrets of the Tomb” explores the 172-year-old club based on interviews with 100 anonymous Bonesmen. Is this a group that operates as a shadow government? No. Instead, discussions on the Internet, talk radio and cable TV, generally turn on suspicions that Skull and Bones has attempted to mastermind a “new world order” in which only a handful of wealthy, old-line families control the planet. Indeed, a serious political discussion might examine the meaning of both presidential candidates maintaining an inherently undemocratic affiliation and refusing to address an important aspect of their university lives. “Obviously, it’s part of what shaped the character of the two presidential candidates, and yet there’s a lot of overblown conspiracy theory that has outweighed the seriousness.” Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum (Yale ’68), who wrote the seminal article on Skull and Bones for Esquire in 1977, thinks the Bush-Kerry coincidence should be treated thoughtfully. ![]()
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