Secret Societies
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale
- part 2 of 2
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.@s6
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.''@s7
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 original federal prosecutor of
Lyndon LaRouche and 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 tells@s8:
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.
