Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In college, George W. Bush and his membership in Skull and Bones seemed to represent an Old World patronage on the brink of collapse. Or so I thought.
Mar 1, 2000 | I have just realized, with equal parts horror and glee, that George W. Bush and I were once mirror images, linked and yet opposite. The links are quite specific: Bush and I were members of the Yale Class of 1968, and we were both asked to join Skull and Bones, the most renowned (and strangest) of Yale's nine senior societies. The opposites are everything else: Bush was a WASP from a prominent Connecticut Republican family who attended Andover; I was a Jew from an actively Democratic California family who went to a public high school. Bush joined Skull and Bones; I didn't.
None of this would be worth mentioning, of course, except that Skull and Bones is the unofficial subject of "The Skulls," a movie to be released this month, and Bush has a leading role in the quadrennial national melodrama.
My Skull and Bones story first: Three decades ago, Yale senior societies struck many people as embarrassments, harking back to an all-too-proximate past when students formed clubs of 15 men to define ever more exclusive circles of the Soon-to-be-Great. All but one of the "above-ground" senior societies (in contrast to the "undergrounds," which carried no prestige) were housed in windowless, fortress-like buildings that very much lived up to the term used to describe them: "tombs." Of course, only members could enter them. At Skull and Bones, new members were even said to enact a rebirth ritual (suggesting that the heart of New Age thought in America may be considerably to the east of California). Then, through two meetings a week over the next year, with varying degrees of candor and calculation, they revealed the secrets of their predominantly uneventful lives, such as who they'd slept with and what their ambitions were. Wanting to be president was a common aspiration, though I suspect it hadn't occurred to Bush yet.
Skull and Bones' prestige rested on the illustriousness of its membership rolls, which included such luminaries as Henry Stimson, Herbert Hoover's secretary of state; Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart; New York governor and diplomat Averill Harriman; Time magazine founder Henry Luce; "Hiroshima" author John Hersey; and William Sloane Coffin Jr., Yale's outspoken chaplain. The place took itself so seriously that members were obligated to leave the room if a nonmember mentioned its name: huffy decampments by Bones men were occasionally witnessed. In addition, there were rumors: Skull and Bones' assets made it the largest corporation in Connecticut, we heard, and each member was guaranteed a lifetime annual stipend of $20,000. Nobody knew whether the rumors were true, but they lent the place an aura of raw wealth and power.
I learned I was going to be "tapped" for Skull and Bones after being summoned to a meeting with Delaney Kiphuth, Yale's director of athletics, of all things. I met him in his office in the cavernous Payne Whitney Gymnasium, whose dark neo-Gothic design seemed to echo the foreboding Bones motif. Kiphuth, himself a Bones alum, told me I would be among the first 15 members of my class to be asked to join. I asked him why I ought to. He said he couldn't answer, as Bones men were not allowed to reveal any aspect of their proceedings. Instead, he produced a biography of Stimson, and pointed to a passage in which the great statesman extolled Skull and Bones. Because Stimson, a member of the Class of 1888, liked it, so should I.
On my way out, Kiphuth did something I thought was interesting: he told me I'd be tapped on the designated society "Tap Night," 8 p.m. on a Friday late in April, unless I specifically told him I didn't want to join. I was not so immune to the lures of prestige that I'd written off societies entirely -- indeed, I was leaning towards Elihu, the sole above-ground society that was headquartered in an actual frame house with windows. Kiphuth's statement sounded so opaque and inflexible that my immediate reaction was "Why bother telling him no?"
On the night before Tap Night, a fellow student who was a photographer freelancing for the New York Times told me the paper was planning a story about Tap Night, and asked if I knew of good photo prospects. I told him to come by my room a little before 8 p.m. He was therefore present when, precisely on the hour, I heard scuffling outside the door and then a loud knock.
When I turned the knob, the door instantly swung open and hit the wall with a smack. A hulking middle-aged man in a suit and thick glasses -- he looked like a thuggish banker -- burst across the threshold, followed half a step later by a guy I knew from Elihu, whom he had shoved out of the way. (I never did understand the point of that. Did he think I'd choose Bones because he got to me first?) As flashbulbs popped, he swung his arm across my shoulder as if bearing a cudgel, and yelled, "Skull and Bones, accept or reject?"
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