When Bonesmen Fight

I hope some journalist has the guts to ask John Kerry (Skull and Bones, 1965) and George Bush (Skull and Bones, 1967) whether they have any qualms about belonging to a secret, oath-bound network since their college days. Did they discuss Skull and Bones in code when President Bush called Senator Kerry to congratulate him on his primary victories? Will they agree not to leave the room if the reporter blurts out "322", coded references to Demosthene's birthday and Skull and Bones' founding.

Am I scratching the blackboard yet, dear reader? Or are you smugly dismissing these questions as paranoid and unsophisticated?

I don't consider myself a conspiracy nut, but is it really all right that four decades after the egalitarian Sixties, and some 225 years since the Declaration of Independence, the American voters' choices in 2004 are two Bonesmen?

The lesson is that aristocracy still survives democracy.

I was a member of a secret society during the same era as Bush and Kerry, at the University of Michigan, and can testify that these are profoundly lasting experiences. As a junior, I was tapped for the Druids, which involved a two-day ritual that included being stripped to my underpants, pelted with eggs, smeared with red dye and tied to a campus tree. These humiliations signified my rebirth from lowly student journalist to Big Man on Campus.

Soon, however, I became alienated. None of the bonding could make me feel I actually belonged. Perhaps I was an outsider by nature, an Irish Catholic descendant of immigrants, first in my family to attend university. The clubbiness had one purpose, as a source told Alexandra Robbins for her book on Skull and Bones. It was "to make the other people who didn't get in feel bad." But even as an insider, I felt bad, undeserving, resentful.

When I was tapped in my senior year for the most prestigious secret society, Michigauma, I decided instead to hide out in a girlfriend's apartment, becoming the first refusenik in Michigauma history. But I still felt like something was wrong with me, that I didn't have the right stuff, that I was blowing my future.

In summer 1960, I experienced the same self-doubt at the national convention of the U.S. National Student Association, which then was controlled by an older clique of student leaders who seemed, as they say, to the manor born. On the one hand, ambition inclined me to challenge the clique by running for national affairs vice president, a path I would eventually follow twenty years later. On the other hand, the radical civil rights and student movements, like the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society, were pulling at my heart. Should I work within the establishment or create something new and risky?

One night I came across a yellow pad left on a desk by the NSA leadership. At the top of a chart was written "Control Group". On the left was my name and that of Alan Haber, a founder of SDS. On the right was a box marked "YAF" -- Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative group founded at Yale by William F. Buckley (Bones 1950).

Seven years later, it was revealed that the CIA secretly controlled and funded NSA, and that former editors of the Michigan Daily were among the spooks they recruited. I went south as a Freedom Rider and drafted the SDS Port Huron Statement.

In those years, George Bush was a Yale cheerleader and devoted Deke. John Kerry became a Navy lieutenant shooting up the Mekong Delta. Bush never seemed to question authority, while Kerry's loyalties were shaken by war. But they both belonged to the vast, safe, surreptitious Affirmative Action Program for old boys.

It seems like a lifetime since those days, but we still suffer from many gaps based on privilege. The political system is a moneyed oligarchy underneath its democratic trappings. The vast majority of voters are like fans in the bleachers: We participate from the cheap seats, supposed to enjoy our place, and vote for whichever Bonesman we prefer. Our taxes even subsidize their corporate box seats.