The good stuff happens on Saturday night, and already limos are cruising the quiet streets that crisscross the Yale campus, conveying initiates of other secret societies to their rituals.

It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on Thursday, is not generally the same as initiation night. The Observer Mission Impossible Force met to plot strategy an hour before sunset on initiation night, Saturday, April 12. (“I’ll ream you like I reamed Al Gore”) was. Perhaps it was an improvisation, like this year’s impersonation of George W. Hard to ever take seriously again anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA BOOGA.īut as it turned out, “OOGA BOOGA” was not evident in this year’s ceremony, as far as we were able to tell. Part of the ceremony on the tape involved an initiation master ordering the neophytes to fetch bones and uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie “native” chant “OOGA BOOGA.” It left me feeling embarrassed for Skull and Bones. Oh, yes–before we get to the night-vision videotape, there was one more thing, the embarrassing part of the audiotape, the OOGA-BOOGA part. Probably not, but it made me more eager to participate in this year’s caper: the attempt to see as well as hear it, to capture it all on video–for educational, historical and journalistic purposes to document a defining rite of passage of the American ruling class. equals death,” you might say.Īnd what about the devil? (Well, the figure dressed like the devil.) Is that the secret they’ve been covering up ever since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a German secret society: devil worship? A fulfillment of the paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe the Eastern establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy. But in listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and embarrassment–and an even deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.Ĭould one detect a capital-punishment theme here–the hangman as executioner presaging George W.’s prolific execution rate as Texas governor? “George W. As an undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and Bones Tomb, and back in 1977 I published the first outsider’s investigation into Skull and Bones, its rituals and its influence on American political culture (an updated version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange with George and Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune ).Īnd so it was momentous for me to actually hear the sounds of the Skull and Bones initiation on that laptop. I am the Ahab of Skull and Bones, pursuing the white whale (or white male) leviathan to the utmost depths. But it’s something I’ve been investigating off and on for a quarter of a century now. The whole phenomenon is rarely looked into beyond the exotic ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy mandarins in The Wise Men ). The initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating into the elect of the elite (just 15 out of 1,300 in every Yale class) the same mystical sense of mission that allowed the British Old Boy network to rule a worldwide empire. The unspoken understanding, the comfort level with the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is exercised. and the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of State and National Security Advisors–the men who made the decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and plunge us into Vietnam, the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts–all took part in this initiation ritual may have something to do with the real world power of those bonds.

But the relationships are first forged by the rituals and fact that the founders of Time Inc. The rituals are less important than the relationships–the bonds of power and influence that develop between Skull and Bones initiates after they graduate. Of course, there is more to Skull and Bones than the mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. And he wanted to know if we’d be interested in an attempt to videotape it this time.Īnd so one afternoon last December, shortly after the Bush electoral victory had been certified, I met with the intrepid fellow he booted up his laptop and let me listen to the sounds of a ceremony that had been the subject of fevered speculation for nearly two centuries now. Adler said she had been approached by a member of the Yale community who wanted to share with us a remarkable coup of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of 2000, to audiotape the Skull and Bones initiation ceremony.

Skull and bones bush