"Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, took the skull and some personal relics of the Apache chief and brought them back to the tomb," says Robbins. It's a lot of mumbo-jumbo, says Robbins, but it means a lot to the people who are in it. And Don Quixote lifts his sword and taps the Bonesman on his left shoulder and says, 'By order of our order, I dub thee knight of Euloga.'" Finally, the Bonesman is shoved to his knees in front of Don Quixote as the shrieking crowd falls silent. And once an initiate is inside, the Bonesmen shriek at him. The initiates are led into the room one at a time. Robbins says the cast of the initiation ritual is right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula: "There is a devil, a Don Quixote and a Pope who has one foot sheathed in a white monogrammed slipper resting on a stone skull. "A woman holds a knife and pretends to slash the throat of another person lying down before them, and there's screaming and yelling at the neophytes," he says. And during the initiation rites, you could hear strange cries and whispers coming from the Skull and Bones tomb."ĭespite a lifetime of attempts to get inside, the best Rosenbaum could do was hide out on the ledge of a nearby building a few years ago to videotape a nocturnal initiation ceremony in the Tomb's courtyard. "It's this sepulchral, tomblike, windowless, granite, sandstone bulk that you can't miss. Rosenbaum, a self-described undergraduate nerd, was certainly not a contender for Bones. His investigation is a 30-year obsession dating back to his days as a Yale classmate of George W. And so that any society or institution that hints that there is something hidden is, I think, a legitimate subject for investigation." "We're supposed to do things out in the open in America. It's not supposed to be the way we do things," says Rosenbaum. "I think there is a deep and legitimate distrust in America for power and privilege that are cloaked in secrecy. Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy. Like the President, he's taken the Bones oath of silence. Most recently, he selected William Donaldson, Skull and Bones 1953, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. President Bush has tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration. "And that's why this is something that we need to know about." "They do have many individuals in influential positions," says Robbins. "There are only 15 people a year, which means there are about 800 living members at any one time."īut a lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power, which Robbins says is the main purpose of this secret society: to get as many members as possible into positions of power. That's what makes this staggering," says Robbins. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become patriarchs when they graduate - lifetime members of the ultimate old boys' club. Skull and Bones, with all its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832 as a new world version of secret student societies that were common in Germany at the time. Secret or not, Skull and Bones is as essential to Yale as the Whiffenpoofs, the tables down at a pub called Mory's, and the Yale mascot - that ever-slobbering bulldog. "But probably twice that number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me." "I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones and they were members who were tired of the secrecy, and that's why they were willing to talk to me," says Robbins. And to a man and women, they'd responded to questions with utter silence until an enterprising Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, "Secrets of the Tomb," reports CBS News Correspondent Morley Safer.
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