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The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones 1970s, Culture, Esquire, Features, Politics, Ron Rosenbaum Facebook Twitter By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire September 1977 Take a look at that hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they call it a tomb. It’s the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. For nearly a century and a half, Skull and Bones has been the most influential secret society in the nation, and now it is one of the last. In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be concealed about anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank tombstone walls could be holding the last secrets left in America. You could ask Averell Harriman whether there’s really a sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce lay down naked in that coffin and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to fourteen fellow Bonesmen. You could ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart if there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a skeleton suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside the tomb. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pile as part of his initiation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. You could ask Bill Bundy or Bill Buckley, both of whom went into the C.I.A. after leaving Bones—or George Bush, who ran the C.I.A.—whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. (“Spook,” the Yale slang word for secret-society member, is, of course, Agency slang for spy.) You could ask J. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it’s true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security for life. You could ask … but I think you get the idea. The leading lights of the Eastern establishment—in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman pays Bones’s tax bill), in blue-blood law firms (Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment—the people who have shaped America’s national character since it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in that crypt over there. Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class, called his experience in the tomb the most profound one in his entire education. But none of them will tell you a thing about it. They’ve sworn an oath never to reveal what goes on inside and they’re legendary for the lengths to which they’ll go to avoid prying interrogation. The mere mention of the words “skull and bones” in the presence of a true-blue Bonesman, such as Blackford Oakes, the fictional hero of Bill Buckley’s spy thriller, Saving the Queen, will cause him to “dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed.” I can trace my personal fascination with the mysterious goings-on in the sepulcher across the street to a spooky scene I witnessed on its shadowy steps late one April night eleven years ago. I was then a sophomore at Yale, living in Jonathan Edwards, the residential college (anglophile Yale name for dorm) built next to the Bones tomb. It was part of Jonathan Edwards’ folklore that on the April evening following “tap night” at Bones, if one could climb to the tower of Weir Hall, the odd castle that overlooks the Bones courtyard, one could hear strange cries and moans coming from the bowels of the tomb as the fifteen newly “tapped” members were put through what sounded like a harrowing ordeal. Returning alone to my room late at night, I would always cross the street rather than walk the sidewalk that passed right in front of Bones. Even at that safe distance, something about it made my skin crawl. But that night in April I wasn’t alone; a classmate and I were coming back from an all-night diner at about two in the morning. At the time, I knew little about the mysteries of Bones or any of the other huge windowless secret-society tombs that dominated with dark authority certain key corners of the campus. They were nothing like conventional fraternities. No one lived in the tombs. Instead, every Thursday and Sunday night, the best and the brightest on campus, the fifteen seniors in Skull and Bones and in Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, Wolf’s Head, Berzelius, in all the seven secret societies, disappeared into their respective tombs and spent hours doing something—something they were sworn to secrecy about. And Bones, it was said, was the most ritualistic and secretive of all. Even the very door to the Bones tomb, that huge triple-padlocked iron door, was never permitted to open in the presence of an outsider. All this was floating through my impressionable sophomore mind that night as my friend Mike and I approached the stone pylons guard...

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