DEM BONES:

Bush, Kerry Share Tippy-Top Secret: Yalies Bush and Kerry Share a Patrician Past Of Skull and Bones (Don Oldenburg, April 4, 2004, Washington Post)

People passing through on High Street barely notice the cryptlike Greco-Egyptian building called the Tomb.

On a snowy March morning, Yale professor Ingeborg Glier hurries to class past the grim, practically windowless, brown limestone mausoleum. For 138 years it has housed Skull and Bones -- a secret society that links President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, and is imagined by some to be the most potent in the nation's history.

"I know it exists but that's about as much as I know," says Glier, who has taught Germanic language and literature at Yale for 34 years. "Once in a while there is a sort of furtive person slinking into this building."

Bulldozing a stump in front of the Tomb's towering padlocked front doors, grounds worker Dawn Landino says that after 19 years on the job she knows "nothing" about the secret society. "I never see anyone around the Tomb," she says. "I think it's more of an after-hours club."

New Haven cabby Gerald Walthall grins knowingly. "They're supposed to have Geronimo's bones in there, but they could be anyone's bones," he says. "College kids do crazy things. . . . But because Skull and Bones doesn't tell you anything, people suspect it."

Rick Beckwith flips sausages and eggs on the grill at the Yankee Doodle diner, a Yale institution three blocks away. "From what I hear," says the New Haven native, whose grandfather opened the popular eatery 54 years ago, "it's the most powerful secret society at Yale. Looking at the number of powerful people who come out of Yale, Skull and Bones is probably everything it's made out to be."

It's no secret that Bush and Kerry are both Yalies. Bush graduated in 1968, Kerry in '66. It's no secret either that they both come from privileged preppy backgrounds. What remains shrouded in mystery is their membership in Skull and Bones, an elite, covert club for which involvement continues long past the last refrain of "Pomp and Circumstance" on graduation day.

Never before have two Bonesmen run against each other for the presidency. It's a coincidence of historic political proportions.

Where did all these journalists who think fraternal orders are so mysterious live when they were in college, Peace House?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2004 6:44 PM