Chapter 7 – Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale 1

—Abraham Lincoln “Wise statesmen … established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began….”—Abraham Lincoln Honeymoon The U.S. Navy delivered George Bush back home for good on Christmas Eve, 1944; the war in the Pacific raged on over the next half year, with Allied forces taking Southeast Asia, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), and islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Barbara Pierce quit Smith College in her sophomore year to marry George. Prescott and Mother Bush gave a splendid prenuptial dinner at the Greenwich Field Club. The wedding took place January 6, 1945, in the Rye, New York Presbyterian Church, as the U.S. Third Fleet bombarded the main Philippine island of Luzon in preparation for invasion. Afterwards there was a glamorous reception for 300 at Apawamis Country Club. The newlyweds honeymooned at The Cloisters, a five-star hotel on Sea Island, Georgia, with swimming, tennis and golf. George’s next assignment was to train pilots at Norfolk, Virginia Naval Air Station. “George’s duty … was light. As for other young marrieds, whose husbands were between warzone tours, this was kind of an extended (and paid) honeymoon.”2 Japan surrendered in August. That fall, George and Barbara Bush moved to New Haven where Bush entered Yale University. He and Barbara moved into an apartment at 37 Hillhouse Avenue, across the street from Yale President Charles Seymour. College life was good to George, what he saw of it. A college career usually occupies four years. But we know that George Bush is a rapidly moving man. Thus he was pleased with the special arrangement made for veterans, by which Yale allowed him to get his degree after attending classes for only two and a half years. Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of the Fashionable Set: “[M]embers of [Bush’s] class have since sighed with nostalgia for those days of the late 1940s…. Trolley cars still rumbled along the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons they would be crowded with students going out to football games at the Yale Bowl, scattering pennies along the way and shouting `scramble’ to the street kids diving for them”[emphasis added].3 In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President’s namesake. By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal is known about George Bush’s career at Yale, except the part about books and studies. Unfortunately for those who would wish to consider his intellectual accomplishment, everything about that has been sealed shut and is top secret. The Yale administration says they have turned over to the FBI custody of all of Bush’s academic records, allegedly because the FBI needs such access to check the résumé of important office holders. From all available testimony, his mental life before college was anything but outstanding. His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran, Bush was “serious” at Yale. But we cannot check exactly how he achieved election to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated college experience. Without top secret clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read his essays, or learn much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a trustee of the university, in charge of “developmental” fundraising. And his family friends were in control of the U.S. secret services. A great deal is known, however, about George Bush’s status at Yale. His fellow student John H. Chafee, later a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and Secretary of the Navy, declared: “We didn’t see much of him because he was married, but I guess my first impression was that he was–and I don’t mean this in a derogatory fashion–in the inner set, the movers and shakers, the establishment. I don’t mean he put on airs or anything, but … just everybody knew him.” Chafee, like Bush, and Dan Quayle, was in the important national fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE or the “Dekes”). But Chafee says, “I never remember seeing him there. He wasn’t one to hang around with the fellows.”4 The Tomb George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights at Yale in the strange companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones Society.5 Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership, George was the last one to be notified of his selection–this honor is traditionally reserved for the highest of the high and mighty. His father, Prescott Bush, several other relatives and partners, and Roland and Averell Harriman, who sponsored the Bush family, were also members of this secret society. The undoubted political and financial power associated with Skull and Bones has given rise to many popular questions about the nature and origin of the group. Its members have fed the mystery with false leads and silly speculations. The order was incorporated in 1856 under the name “Russell Trust Association.” By special act of the state legislature in 1943, its trustees are exempted from the normal requirement of filing corporate reports with the Connecticut Secretary of State. As of 1978, all business of the Russell Trust was handled by its lone trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started with Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George Bush’s father. Each year, Skull and Bones members select (“tap”) 15 third-year Yale students to replace them in the senior group the following year. Graduating members are given a sizeable cash bonus to help them get started in life. Older graduate members, the so-called “Patriarchs,” give special backing in business, politics, espionage and legal careers to graduate Bonesmen who exhibit talent or usefulness. The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale campus is a stone building resembling a mausoleum, and known as “the Tomb.” Initiations take place on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an island owned by the Russell Trust Association), with regular reunions on Deer Island and at Yale. Initiation rites reportedly include strenuous and traumatic activities of the new member, while immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin. More important is the “sexual autobiography”: The initiate tells the Order all the sex secrets of his young life. Weakened mental defenses against manipulation, and the blackmail potential of such information, have obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among members. The loyalty is intense. One of Bush’s former teachers, whose own father was a Skull and Bones member, told our interviewer that his father used to stab his little Skull and Bones pin into his skin to keep it in place when he took a bath. Members continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on their psycho-sexual thoughts to their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer sitting in a coffin. This has been the case with President George Bush, for whom these ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond the psychological manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very solid political reasons for Bush’s strong identification with this cult. Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have accepted various deceptive notions about the order. There are two outstanding, among these falsehoods: 1) that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of wealthy, elite “patriots”; it is in fact, an agency for British Empire penetration and subversion of the American republic; and 2) that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control over the United States. This misconception is certainly understandable, given the rather astonishing number of powerful, historically important and grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull and Bones. But there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League colleges, which reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power of several heavily intermarried financier families. The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining the history of Skull and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American Eastern Establishment. Skull and Bones–the Russell Trust Association–was first established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate. There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic. But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut (see accompanying chart). The blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years. The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic. Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire. The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-styled “blue bloods” or Brahmins of Boston’s north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices. ** Certain of the prominent Boston opium families, such as Cabot and Weld, did not affiliate directly with Russell, Connecticut and Yale, but were identified instead with Harvard. John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its open pirate emblem–Skull and Bones. With British ties of family, shipping and merchant banking, the old New England Tories had continued their hostility to American independence after the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. These pretended conservative patriots proclaimed Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 presidential inauguration “radical usurpation.” The Massachusetts Tories (“Essex Junto”) joined with Vice President Aaron Burr, Jr. (a member of the Connecticut Edwards and Pierpont families) and Burr’s cousin and law partner Theodore Dwight, in political moves designed to break up the United States and return it to British allegiance. The U.S. nationalist leader, former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, exposed the plan in 1804. Burr shot him to death in a duel, then led a famous abortive conspiracy to form a new empire in the Southwest, with territory to be torn from the U.S.A. and Spanish Mexico. For the “blue bloods,” the romantic figure of Aaron Burr was ever afterwards the symbol of British feudal revenge against the American republic. The Connecticut Tory families hosted the infamous Hartford Convention in 1815, toward the end of the second war between the U.S. and Britain (the War of 1812). Their secessionist propaganda was rendered impotent by America’s defensive military victory. This faction then retired from the open political arena, pursuing instead entirely private and covert alliances with the British Empire. The incestuously intermarried Massachusetts and Connecticut families associated themselves with the British East India Company in the criminal opium traffic into China. These families made increased profits as partners and surrogates for the British during the bloody 1839-42 Opium War, the race war of British forces against Chinese defenders. Samuel and William Huntington Russell were quiet, wary builders of their faction’s power. An intimate colleague of opium gangster Samuel Russell wrote this about him: While he lived, no friend of his would venture to mention his name in print. While in China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost as a hermit, hardly known outside of his factory [the Canton warehouse compound] except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua [Chinese security director for the British East India Company], but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home with well-earned wealth he lived hospitably in the midst of his family, and a small circle of intimates. Scorning words and pretensions from the bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; hating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted on for every good work which did not involve publicity. The Russells’ Skull and Bones Society was the most important of their domestic projects “which did not involve publicity.” A police-blotter type review of Russell’s organization will show why the secret order, though powerful, was not the unique organ of “conspiracy” for the U.S. Eastern Establishment. The following gentlemen were among Russells’ partners: Augustine Heard (1785-1868): ship captain and pioneer U.S. opium smuggler.

John Cleve Green (1800-75): married to Sarah Griswold; gave a fortune in opium profits to Princeton University, financing three Princeton buildings and four professorships; trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary for 25 years.

Abiel Abbott Low (1811-93): his opium fortune financed the construction of the Columbia University New York City campus; father of Columbia’s president Seth Low.

John Murray Forbes (1813-98): his opium millions financed the career of author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes’s daughter, and bankrolled the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was Forbes’s son.

Joseph Coolidge: his Augustine Heard agency got $10 million yearly as surrogates for the Scottish dope-runners Jardine Matheson during the fighting in China; his son organized the United Fruit Company; his grandson, Archibald Cary Coolidge, was the founding executive officer of the Anglo-Americans’ Council on Foreign Relations.

Warren Delano, Jr.: chief of Russell and Co. in Canton; grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Russell Sturgis: his grandson by the same name was chairman of the Baring Bank in England, financiers of the Far East opium trade. Such persons as John C. Green and A.A. Low, whose names adorn various buildings at Princeton and Columbia Universities, made little attempt to hide the criminal origin of their influential money. Similarly with the Cabots, the Higginsons and the Welds for Harvard. The secret groups at other colleges are analogous and closely related to Yale’s Skull and Bones. Princeton has its “eating clubs,” especially Ivy Club and Cottage Club, whose oligarchical tradition runs from Jonathan Edwards and Aaron Burr through the Dulles brothers. At Harvard there is the ultra-blue-blooded Porcelian (known also as the Porc or Pig club); Theodore Roosevelt bragged to the German Kaiser of his membership there; Franklin Roosevelt was a member of the slightly “lower” Fly Club. A few of the early initiates in Skull and Bones went on to careers in obvious defiance of the order’s oligarchical character; two such were the scientists Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1837), and William Chauvenet (Skull and Bones 1840). This reflects the continued importance of republican factions at Yale, Harvard and other colleges during the middle three decades of the nineteenth century. Silliman and Chauvenet became enemies of everything Skull and Bones stood for, while the Yale secret group rapidly conformed to the Russells’ expectations. Yale was the northern college favored by southern slaveowning would-be aristocrats. Among Yale’s southern students were John C. Calhoun, later the famous South Carolina defender of slavery against nationalism, and Judah P. Benjamin, later Secretary of State for the slaveowners’ Confederacy. Young South Carolinian Joseph Heatly Dulles, whose family bought their slaves with the money from contract-security work for the British conquerors in India, was in a previous secret Yale group, the “Society of Brothers in Unity.” At Yale Dulles worked with the Northern secessionists and attached himself to Daniel Lord; their two families clove together in the fashion of a gang. The Lords became powerful Anglo-American Wall Street lawyers, and J.H. Dulles’s grandson was the father of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles. In 1832-33 Skull and Bones was launched under the Russell pirate flag. Among the early initiates of the order were Henry Rootes Jackson (S&B 1839), a leader of the 1861 Georgia Secession Convention and post-Civil War president of the Georgia Historical Society (thus the false accounts of the “good old slavery days” and the “bad northern invaders”); John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 Louisiana Secession Convention, who fled abroad for 13 years after the Civil War; and William Taylor Sullivan Barry (S&B 1841), a national leader of the secessionist wing of the Democratic Party during the 1850s, and chairman of the 1861 Mississippi Secession Convention. Alphonso Taft was a Bonesman alongside William H. Russell in the Class of 1833. As U.S. Attorney General in 1876-77, Alphonso Taft helped organize the backroom settlement of the deadlocked 1876 presidential election. The bargain gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency (1877-81) and withdrew the U.S. troops from the South, where they had been enforcing blacks’ rights. Alphonso’s son, William Howard Taft (S&B 1878), was U.S. President from 1909 to 1913. President Taft’s son, Robert Alphonso Taft (S&B 1910), was a leading U.S. Senator after World War II; his family’s Anglo-Saxon racial/ancestral preoccupation was the disease which crippled Robert Taft’s leadership of American nationalist “conservatives.” Other pre-Civil War Bonesmen were: William M. Evarts (S&B 1837): Wall Street attorney for British and southern slaveowner projects, collaborator of Taft in the 1876 bargain, U.S. Secretary of State 1877-81;

Morris R. Waite (S&B 1837): Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1874-88, whose rulings destroyed many rights of African-Americans gained in the Civil War; he helped his cohorts Taft and Evarts arrange the 1876 presidential settlement scheme to pull the rights-enforcing U.S. troops out of the South;

Daniel Coit Gilman (S&B 1852): co-incorporator of the Russell Trust; founding president of Johns Hopkins University as a great center for the racialist eugenics movement;

Andrew D. White (S&B 1853): founding president of Cornell University; psychic researcher; and diplomatic cohort of the Venetian, Russian and British oligarchies;

Chauncey M. Depew (S&B 1856): general counsel for the Vanderbilt railroads, he helped the Harriman family to enter into high society. By about the mid-1880s, the Skull and Bones membership roster began to change from its earlier, often “scholarly,” coloration; the change reflected the degradation of American political and economic life by imperialist, neo-pagan and racialist ideology. Irving Fisher (S&B 1888) became the racialist high priest of the economics faculty (Yale professor 1896-1946), and a famous merchant of British Empire propaganda for free trade and reduction of the non-white population. Fisher was founding president of the American Eugenics Society under the financial largesse of Averell Harriman’s mother. Gifford Pinchot (S&B 1889) invented the aristocrats’ “conservation” movement. He was President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief forester, substituting federal land-control in place of Abraham Lincoln’s free-land-to-families farm creation program. Pinchot’s British Empire activitism included the Psychical Research Society and his vice-presidency of the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912. Helping Pinchot initiate this century’s racialist environmentalism were his cohorts George W. Woodruff (S&B 1889), Teddy Roosevelt’s Assistant Attorney General and Acting Interior Secretary; and Henry Solon Graves (S&B 1892), chief U.S. forester 1910-20. Frederick E. Weyerhauser (S&B 1896), owner of vast tracts of American forest, was a follower of Pinchot’s movement, while the Weyerhauser family were active collaborators of British-South African super-racist Cecil Rhodes. This family’s friendship with President George Bush is a vital factor in the present environmentalist movement. With Henry L. Stimson (S&B 1888) we come to the Eastern Liberal Establishment which has ruled America during the twentieth century. Stimson was President Taft’s Secretary of War (1911-13), and President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State (1929-33). As Secretary of War (1940-45), this time under President Harry Truman, Stimson pressed Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. This decision involved much more than merely “pragmatic” military considerations. These Anglophiles, up through George Bush, have opposed the American republic’s tradition of alliance with national aspirations in Asia; and they worried that the invention of nuclear energy would too powerfully unsettle the world’s toleration for poverty and misery. Both the U.S. and the Atom had better be dreaded, they thought. The present century owes much of its record of horrors to the influential Anglophile American families which came to dominate and employ the Skull and Bones Society as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their lawyers, the Lords and Tafts and Bundys. The politically aggressive Guaranty Trust Company, run almost entirely by Skull and Bones initiates, was a financial vehicle of these families in the early 1900s. Guaranty Trust’s support for the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions overlapped the more intense endeavors in these fields by the Harrimans, George Walker and Prescott Bush a few blocks away, and in Berlin. Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by the circles of Averell Harriman. They displaced remaining traditionalists such as Douglas MacArthur from power in the United States. For George Bush, the Skull and Bones Society is more than simply the British, as opposed to the American, strategic tradition. It is merged in the family and personal network within which his whole life has been, in a sense, handed to him prepackaged. Britain’s Yale Flying Unit During Prescott Bush’s student days, the Harriman set at Yale decided that World War I was sufficiently amusing that they ought to get into it as recreation. They formed a special Yale Unit of the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, at the instigation of F. Trubee Davison. Since the United States was not at war, and the Yale students were going to serve Britain, the Yale Unit was privately and lavishly financed by F. Trubee’s father, Henry Davison, the senior managing partner at J.P. Morgan and Co. At that time, the Morgan bank was the official financial agency for the British government in the United States. The Yale Unit’s leader was amateur pilot Robert A. Lovett. They were based first on Long Island, New York, then in Palm Beach, Florida. The Yale Unit has been described by Lovett’s family and friends in a collective biography of the Harriman set: Training for the Yale Flying Unit was not exactly boot camp. Davison’s father … helped finance them royally, and newspapers of the day dubbed them “the millionaires’ unit.” They cut rakish figures, and knew it; though some dismissed them as dilettantes, the hearts of young Long Island belles fluttered at the sight…. [In] Palm Beach … they ostentatiously pursued a relaxed style. “They were rolled about in wheel chairs by African slaves amid tropical gardens and coconut palms,” wrote the unit’s historian…. “For light exercise, they learned to glance at their new wristwatches with an air of easy nonchalance”…. [Lovett] was made chief of the unit’s private club, the Wags, whose members started their sentences, “Being a Wag and therefore a superman”…. Despite the snide comments of those who dismissed them as frivolous rich boys, Lovett’s unit proved to be daring and imaginative warriors when they were dispatched for active duty in 1917 with Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service.6 Lovett was transferred to the U.S. Navy after the U.S. joined Britain in World War I. The Yale Flying Unit was the glory of Skull and Bones. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and their 1917 Bonesmates selected for 1918 membership in the secret order these Yale Flying Unit leaders: Robert Lovett, F. Trubee Davison, Artemus Lamb Gates, and John Martin Vorys. Unit flyers David Sinton Ingalls and F. Trubee’s brother, Harry P. Davison (who became Morgan vice chairman), were tapped for the 1920 Skull and Bones. Lovett did not actually have a senior year at Yale: “He was tapped for Skull and Bones not on the Old Campus but at a naval station in West Palm Beach; his initiation, instead of being conducted in the `tomb’ on High Street, occurred at the headquarters of the Navy’s Northern Bombing Group between Dunkirk and Calais.”7 Some years later, Averell Harriman gathered Lovett, Prescott Bush and other pets into the utopian oligarchs’ community a few miles to the north of Palm Beach, called Jupiter Island (see Chapter 4). British Empire loyalists flew right from the Yale Unit into U.S. strategymaking positions: F. Trubee Davison was Assistant U.S. Secretary of War for Air from 1926 to 1933. David S. Ingalls (on the board of Jupiter Island’s Pan American Airways) was meanwhile Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aviation (1929-32). Following the American Museum of Natural History’s Hitlerite 1932 eugenics congress, Davison resigned his government Air post to become the Museum’s president. Then, under the Harriman-Lovett national security regime of the early 1950s, F. Trubee Davison became Director of Personnel for the new Central Intelligence Agency.

Robert Lovett was Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941-45.

Lovett’s 1918 Bonesmate Artemus Gates (chosen by Prescott and his fellows) became Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air in 1941. Gates retained this post throughout the Second World War until 1945. Having a man like Gates up there, who owed his position to Averell, Bob, Prescott and their set, was quite reassuring to young naval aviator George Bush; especially so, when Bush would have to worry about the record being correct concerning his controversial fatal crash. Other Important Bonesmen Richard M. Bissell, Jr. was a very important man to the denizens of Jupiter Island.

He graduated from Yale in 1932, the year after the Harrimanites bought the island. Though not in Skull and Bones, Bissell was the younger brother of William Truesdale Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., had put the U.S. insurance industry’s inside knowledge of all fire-insured industrial plants at the disposal of government planners during World War I. The senior Bissell, a powerful Yale alumnus, was also the director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane; there, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society, a major Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA’s cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure known as “MK-Ultra.” Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He then joined Harriman’s entourage in the U.S. government. Bissell was an economist for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board in 1942-43, while Averell Harriman was the U.S. leader of that board in London. In 1947 and 1948, Bissell was executive secretary of the “Harriman Commission,” otherwise known as the President’s Commission on Foreign Aid. When Harriman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan, Bissell was assistant administrator. Harriman was director of Mutual Security (1951-53), while Bissell was consultant to the director of Mutual Security 1952. Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA Director, Bissell was one of his three aides. Why could this be of interest to our Floridians? We saw in Chapter 4, that the great anti-Castro covert initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents. We need now add to that assessment only the fact that the detailed management of the invasion of Cuba, and of the assassination planning, and the training of the squads for these jobs, was given into the hands of Richard M. Bissell, Jr. This 1961 invasion failed. Fidel Castro survived the widely-discussed assassination plots against him. But the initiative succeeded in what was probably its core purpose: to organize a force of multi-use professional assassins. The Florida-trained killers stayed in business under the leadership of Ted Shackley. They were all around the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They kept going with the Operation Phoenix mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with Middle East drug and terrorist programs, and with George Bush’s Contra wars in Central America. Harvey Hollister Bundy (S&B 1909) was Henry L. Stimson’s Assistant Secretary of State (1931-33); then he was Stimson’s Special Assistant Secretary of War, alongside Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett of Skull and Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman.

Harvey’s son William P. Bundy (S&B 1939) was a CIA officer from 1951 to 1961; as a 1960s defense official, he pushed the Harriman-Dulles scheme for a Vietnam war. Harvey’s other son, McGeorge Bundy (S&B 1940), co-authored Stimson’s memoirs in 1948. As President John Kennedy’s Director of National Security, McGeorge Bundy organized the whitewash of the Kennedy assassination, and immediately switched the U.S. policy away from the Kennedy pullout and back toward war in Vietnam. There was also Henry Luce, a Bonesman of 1920 with David S. Ingalls and Harry Pomeroy. Luce published Time magazine, where his ironically-named “American Century” blustering was straight British Empire doctrine: Bury the republics, hail the Anglo-Saxon conquerors.

William Sloane Coffin, tapped for 1949 Skull and Bones by George Bush and his Bone companions, was from a long line of Skull and Bones Coffins. William Sloane Coffin was famous in the Vietnam War protest days as a leader of the left protest against the war. Was the fact that he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency embarrassing to William Sloane? This was no contradiction. His uncle, the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin (S&B 1897), had also been a “peace” agitator, and an oligarchical agent. Uncle Henry was for 20 years president of the Union Theological Seminary, whose board chairman was Prescott Bush’s partner Thatcher Brown. In 1937, Henry Coffin and John Foster Dulles led the U.S. delegation to England to found the World Council of Churches, as a “peace movement” guided by the pro-Hitler faction in England. The Coffins have been mainstays of the liberal death lobby, for euthanasia and eugenics. The Coffins outlasted Hitler, arriving into the CIA in the 1950s.

Amory Howe Bradford (S&B 1934) married Carol Warburg Rothschild in 1941. Carol’s mother, Carola, was the acknowledged head of the Warburg family in America after World War II. This family had assisted the Harrimans’ rise into the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in concert with the Sulzbergers at the New York Times, they had used their American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith to protect the Harriman-Bush deals with Hitler. This made it nice for Averell Harriman, just like family, when Amory Howe Bradford worked on the Planning Group of Harriman’s NATO secretariat in London, 1951-52. Bradford was meanwhile assistant to the publisher of the New York Times, and went on to become general manager of the Times.

Other modern Bonesmen have been closely tied to George Bush’s career. George Herbert Walker, Jr. (S&B 1927) was the President’s uncle and financial angel. In the 1970s he sold G.H. Walker & Co. to White, Weld & Co. and became a director of White, Weld; company heir William Weld, the current Massachusetts governor, is an active Bush Republican.

Publisher William F. Buckley (S&B 1950) had a family oil business in Mexico. There Buckley was a close ally to CIA covert operations manager E. Howard Hunt, whose lethal antics were performed under the eyes of Miami Station and Jupiter Island.

David Lyle Boren (S&B 1963) was assistant to the director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and a propaganda analyst for the U.S. Information Agency, before graduating from Yale. Thus while he was imbibing the British view at Oxford University (1963-65), Boren was already an Anglo-American intelligence operative, listed in the “speakers bureau” of the American embassy in London. David Boren was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1979 and became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Though a Democrat (who spoke knowingly of the “parallel government” operating in Iran-Contra), Boren’s Intelligence Committee rulings have been (not unexpectedly) more and more favorable to his “Patriarch” in the White House. Bush’s Own Bones Among the traditional artifacts collected and maintained within the High Street Tomb are human remains of various derivations. The following concerns one such set of Skull and Bones. Geronimo, an Apache faction leader and warrior, led a party of warriors on a raid in 1876, after Apaches were moved to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona territory. He led other raids against U.S. and Mexican forces well into the 1880s; he was captured and escaped many times. Geronimo was finally interned at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He became a farmer and joined a Christian congregation. He died at the age of 79 years in 1909, and was buried at Fort Sill. Three-quarters of a century later, his tribesmen raised the question of getting their famous warrior reinterred back in Arizona. Ned Anderson was Tribal Chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe from 1978 to 1986. This is the story he tells8: Around the fall of 1983, the leader of an Apache group in another section of Arizona said he was interested in having the remains of Geronimo returned to his tribe’s custody. Taking up this idea, Anderson said that the remains properly belonged to his group as much as to the other Apaches. After much discussion, several Apache groups met at a kind of summit meeting held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The army authorities were not favorable to the meeting, and it only occurred through the intervention of the office of the Governor of Oklahoma. As a result of this meeting, Ned Anderson was written up in the newspapers as an articulate Apache activist. Soon afterwards, in late 1983 or early 1984, a Skull and Bones member contacted Anderson and leaked evidence that Geronimo’s remains had long ago been pilfered–by Prescott Bush, George’s father. The informant said that in May of 1918, Prescott Bush and five other officers at Fort Sill desecrated the grave of Geronimo. They took turns watching while they robbed the grave, taking items including a skull, some other bones, a horse bit and straps. These prizes were taken back to the Tomb, the home of the Skull and Bones Society at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. They were put into a display case, which members and visitors could easily view upon entry to the building. The informant provided Anderson with photographs of the stolen remains, and a copy of a Skull and Bones log book in which the 1918 grave robbery had been recorded. The informant said that Skull and Bones members used the pilfered remains in performing some of their Thursday and Sunday night rituals, with Geronimo’s skull sitting out on a table in front of them. Outraged, Anderson traveled to New Haven. He did some investigation on the Yale campus and held numerous discussions, to learn what the Apaches would be up against when they took action, and what type of action would be most fruitful. Through an attorney, Ned Anderson asked the FBI to move into the case. The attorney conveyed to him the Bureau’s response: If he would turn over every scrap of evidence to the FBI, and completely remove himself from the case, they would get involved. He rejected this bargain, since it did not seem likely to lead toward recovery of Geronimo’s remains. Due to his persistence, he was able to arrange a September 1986 Manhattan meeting with Jonathan Bush, George Bush’s brother. Jonathan Bush vaguely assured Anderson that he would get what he had come after, and set a follow-up meeting for the next day. But Bush stalled–Anderson believes this was to gain time to hide and secure the stolen remains against any possible rescue action. The Skull and Bones attorney representing the Bush family and managing the case was Endicott Peabody Davison. His father was the F. Trubee Davison mentioned above, who had been president of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and personnel director for the Central Intelligence Agency. The general attitude of this Museum crowd has long been that “Natives” should be stuffed and mounted for display to the Fashionable Set. Finally, after about 11 days, another meeting occurred. A display case was produced, which did in fact match the one in the photograph the informant had given to Ned Anderson. But the skull he was shown was that of a ten-year-old child, and Anderson refused to receive it or to sign a legal document promising to shut up about the matter. Anderson took his complaint to Arizona Congressmen Morris Udahl and John McCain III, but with no results. George Bush refused Congressman McCain’s request that he meet with Anderson. Anderson wrote to Udahl, enclosing a photograph of the wall case and skull at the “Tomb,” showing a black and white photograph of the living Geronimo, which members of the Order had boastfully posted next to their display of his skull. Anderson quoted from a Skull and Bones Society internal history, entitled Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration, 17 June 1933, by The Little Devil of D’121. 9 From the war days [W.W. I] also sprang the mad expedition from the School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that brought to the T[omb] its most spectacular “crook,” the skull of Geronimo the terrible, the Indian Chief who had taken forty-nine white scalps. An expedition in late May, 1918, by members of four Clubs [i.e. four graduating-class years of the Society], Xit D.114, Barebones, Caliban and Dingbat, D.115, S’Mike D.116, and Hellbender D.117, planned with great caution since in the words of one of them: “Six army captains robbing a grave wouldn’t look good in the papers.” The stirring climax was recorded by Hellbender in the Black Book of D.117: “… The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards…. Finally Pat[riarch] Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat[riarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself…. We quickly closed the grave, shut the door and sped home to Pat[riarch] Mallon’s room, where we cleaned the Bones. Pat[riarch] Mallon sat on the floor liberally applying carbolic acid. The Skull was fairly clean, having only some flesh inside and a little hair. I showered and hit the hay … a happy man….” The other grave robber whose name is given, Ellery James, we encountered in Chapter 1–he was to be an usher at Prescott’s wedding three years later. And the fellow who applied acid to the stolen skull, burning off the flesh and hair, was Neil Mallon. Years later, Prescott Bush and his partners chose Mallon as chairman of Dresser Industries; Mallon hired Prescott’s son, George Bush, for George’s first job; and George Bush named his son, Neil Mallon Bush, after the flesh-picker. In 1988, the Washington Post ran an article, originating from the Establishment-line Arizona Republic, entitled “Skull for Scandal: Did Bush’s Father Rob Geronimo’s Grave?” The article included a small quote from the 1933 Skull and Bones History of Our Order: “An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and … Bush entered and started to dig….” and so forth, but neglected to include other names beside Bush. According to the Washington Post, the document which Bush attorney Endicott Davison tried to get the Apache leader to sign, stipulated that Ned Anderson agreed it would be “inappropriate for you, me [Jonathan Bush] or anyone in association with us to make or permit any publication in connection with this transaction.” Anderson called the document “very insulting to Indians.” Davison claimed later that the Order’s own history book is a hoax, but during the negotiations with Anderson, Bush’s attorney demanded Anderson give up his copy of the book.10 Bush crony Fitzhugh Green gives the view of the President’s backers on this affair, and conveys the arrogant racial attitude typical of Skull and Bones: “Prescott Bush had a colorful side. In 1988 the press revealed the complaint of an Apache leader about Bush. This was Ned Anderson of San Carlos, Oklahoma [sic], who charged that as a young army officer Bush stole the skull of Indian Chief [sic] Geronimo and had it hung on the wall of Yale’s Skull and Bones Club. After exposure of `true facts’ by Anderson, and consideration by some representatives in Congress, the issue faded from public sight. Whether or not this alleged skullduggery actually occurred, the mere idea casts the senior Bush in an adventurous light”11[emphasis added]. George Bush’s crowning as a Bonesman was intensely, personally important to him. These men were tapped for the Class of 1948: Thomas William Ludlow Ashley

Lucius Horatio Biglow, Jr.

George Herbert Walker Bush

John Erwin Caulkins

William Judkins Clark

William James Connelly, Jr.

George Cook III

David Charles Grimes

Richard Elwood Jenkins

Richard Gerstle Mack

Thomas Wilder Moseley

George Harold Pfau, Jr.

Samuel Sloane Walker, Jr.

Howard Sayre Weaver

Valleau Wilkie, Jr. Survivors of this 1948 Bones group were interviewed for a 1988 Washington Post campaign profile of George Bush. The members described their continuing intimacy with and financial support for Bush up through his 1980s vice-presidency. Their original sexual togetherness at Yale is stressed: The relationships that were formed in the “Tomb” … where the Society’s meetings took place each Thursday and Sunday night during the academic year, have had a strong place in Bush’s life, according to all 11 of his fellow Bonesmen who are still alive. Several described in detail the ritual in the organization that builds the bonds. Before giving his life history, each member had to spend a Sunday night reviewing his sex life in a talk known in the Tomb as CB, or “connubial bliss”…. “The first time you review your sex life…. We went all the way around among the 15,” said Lucius H. Biglow Jr., a retired Seattle attorney. “That way you get everybody committed to a certain extent…. It was a gradual way of building confidence.” The sexual histories helped break down the normal defenses of the members, according to several of the members from his class. William J. Connelly, Jr. … said, “In Skull and Bones we all stand together, 15 brothers under the skin. [It is] the greatest allegiance in the world.”12 Here is our future U.S. President with the other wealthy, amoral young men, excited about their future unlimited power over the ignorant common people, sharing their sex secrets in a mausoleum surrounded by human remains. The excited young men are entirely directed by the “Patriarchs,” the cynical alumni financiers who are the legal owners of the Order. The Yale Tories Who Made Skull and Bones This chart depicts family relationships which were vital to the persons appearing on the chart. At less exalted levels of society, one is supposed to be praised or blamed only according to one’s own actions. But in these Yale circles, “family”–genealogy–is an overwhelming consideration when evaluating individuals. Thus what we present here is more than simply a system of associations. It is a tradition which has operated powerfully on the emotions and judgment of the leaders of Yale University; they have merged their own identities into this tradition. Lines are directed downwards from parents to their children. A double hyphen–signifies the marriage of the persons on either side. GUIDE TO THE YALE FAMILY CHART 1) Rev. Nodiah Russell: One of 10 or 12 men who founded Yale University in 1701. Yale Trustee 1701-13. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. ca. 1691-1716. 2) Rev. James Pierpont: Most celebrated of the Yale founders. Yale Trustee, 1701-14. 3) William Russell: Yale Trustee 1745-61. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. 1716-61. 4) Jonathan Edwards: Graduated Yale 1720. Ultra-Calvinist theologian, president of Princeton University (called then “College of New Jersey”). 5) Rev. Nodiah Russell: Graduated Yale 1750. 6) Pierpont Edwards (1750-1826): Made Master of Connecticut Masons by the British Army occupying New York in 1783; he administered the estate of the traitor Benedict Arnold. 7) Aaron Burr, Sr.: Graduated yale 1735. President of Princeton University (“College of New Jersey”). 8) Matthew Talcott Russell: Graduated Yale 1769. Deacon of First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. for 30 years. Lawyer for the Middletown Russell family. Died ca. 1817. 9) Captain John Russell. Died 1801 or 1802. 10) Henry W. Edwards: Governor of Connecticut 1833, 1835-38. Protector of Samuel Russell’s opium-financed enterprises, patron of William Huntington Russell’s new secret society, Skull and Bones. 11) Aaron Burr, Jr.: U.S. Vice President 1801-08. Killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Secession conspirator. Acquitted of treason in 1807, but wanted for murder, he fled to England. Returned to U.S.A. in 1812. Wall Street lawyer, 1812-36. Hero of imperial Anglo-Americans. 12) Theodore Dwight (1764-1846): Law partner of his cousin Aaron Burr, Jr. Secretary of the secessionist Hartford Convention, 1815. He united the Connecticut pro-British party with Massachusetts “Essex Junto.” 13) Timothy Dwight: Secessionist. President of Yale, 1795-1817. 14) William Huntington Russell (1809-85): Graduated Yale 1833. Founder of Skull and Bones Society (or Russell Trust Association), which came to dominate Yale. Founded prep school for boys, 1836. His secret organization spread in the 1870s to Phillips Academy, the Andover, Massachusetts prep school. 15) Samuel Russell: Born in 1789 in the main ancestral house of the Russell family of Middletown. This house had been owned by the co-founder of Yale, Nodiah Russell (1), and by William Russell (3) and his wife Mary, sister-in-law to Jonathan Edwards. He became head of the Middletown Russells. He established Russell and Co. in 1823, which by the 1830s superseded Perkins syndicate as largest American opium smuggling organization. His partners included leading Boston families. He founded the Russell Manufacturing Company, Middletown, in 1837; he was president of Middlesex County Bank. During the formative years of Skull and Bones, the fabulously wealthy Samuel Russell was undisputed king of Middletown. Note to Reader: For the sake of clarity, we have omitted from this chart the ancestral line from Rev. James Pierpont (2) to his great grandson Rev. John Pierpont. Rev. John Pierpont wrote poetry for the pro-British secessionists; he denounced President Thomas Jefferson for saying that Pierpont’s New England relatives were “under the influence of the whore of England.” Rev. John was an employee of Aaron Burr’s family during Burr’s western conspiracy. Rev. John’s daughter Juliet married Connecticut-born British banker Junius Morgan and gave birth to U.S. financial kingpin John Pierpont Morgan, named for his grandfather Rev. John. Return to the Table of Contents Notes for Chapter VII Be Sociable, Share!

















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