The following is from a "white paper" written for Japanese readership, page 1

Sorry, but its a long one. After reading this, you may understand the dangers of secret societies.

[The following is from a "white paper" written for Japanese readership. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of ctrl.org or its editors]

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order

Paul Goldstein

Jeffrey Steinberg

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order

A New American View -- International Edition White Paper

April 1991

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................ii
The Order of Skull & Bones.......... ......2
Initiation and Ritual......................7
The Spartan Model ........................10
Henry Stimson: Master Bonesman............13
Stimson's Kindergarten and the Cold War...16
Vietnam: The Bonesmen's Debacle.......... 19
Bush in Profile...........................23
The Order's Network.......................25
The New World Order.......................28
The Persian Gulf War......................31
Implications for Japan ...................34
Bibliography..............................38
Some Prominent Members....................39
Selected Quotations.......................43
Introduction

This special report is intended to assist the Japanese audience in more fully understanding the present policies of the United States under the administration of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind America's military adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes toward the Middle East region.

In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most powerful organization in America--the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading members of the U.S. government and the American intelligence community received their formal education. The Order, as it is referred to by its members, is a bastion of White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture, which is at the core of the American 20th century outlook.

The reader will learn that President George Herbert Walker Bush's concept of the New World Order is an old idea, one which has its origins in the philosophy and beliefs of the secret Skull & Bones fraternity. Today in particular, this is the prevailing outlook of the U.S. government, many of whose most influential members, like the president himself, are part of the Skull & Bones network. These men seek to recreate the American imperium of the immediate post-World War II period, an era which President Bush frequently refers to as "the American Century."

The powerful men of Skull & Bones genuinely believe that they have a strategic and moral "right" to control world affairs. Consequently, they take upon themselves the authority to crush any rivalrous threat to U.S. imperial leadership, whether by current allies, such as Japan, Germany or Great Britain, or by Cold War adversaries, like the Soviet Union. The members of the Order, due to their narrow WASP upbringing, view with particular suspicion the maneuverings of Zionist Israel and its affluent, influential lobby in the United States.

Bush, his fellow Bonesmen and their like-thinking elitist allies in the American Establishment see themselves as New World Order warriors, an American samurai caste of sorts, whose mission is restoring American greatness. They intend to utilize the institutional networks of the U.S. government and key private agencies, such as the New York Council on Foreign Relations, to advance their purpose.

The Skull & Bones members believe in the idea of "constructive chaos." By keeping their true policy intentions secret, by constantly sending out mixed signals on all critical policy issues, they consciously seek to sow confusion among both their nominal "friends" and "enemies" alike.

The fulcrum for the policy of constructive chaos is, at present, the Middle East situation. Although U.S. military action in the region has for the time being subsided, America's military power will remain a critical determinant in the future of that vital zone of conflict. American military power is aimed at securing undisputed control over the vast reservoir of oil -- not at necessarily fostering any permanent alignment of local states or combinations of regional interests.

If President George Bush and his fellow true believers are successful, the United States will be first among equals in the New World Order. This is their goal. It is also the quest of the Bonesmen of the Order of Skull & Bones -- America's warrior aristocracy.

THE ORDER OF SKULL & BONES

Skull & Bones was founded at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in 1832. It is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale's seven secret societies. Among the others are: Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, Wolf's Head, Eliahu, and Berzelius. These fraternities serve as a recruiting ground for young men destined for careers in government, law, finance and other influential sectors of American life. Skull & Bones is the elite of the elite among these secret societies. Only Scroll & Key can claim a near equal influence on American affairs over the past 160 years.

Unlike the Greek fraternities on most other American university campuses, Skull & Bones and its similar secret societies exist exclusively at Yale. They are not part of any nationwide public association. The other elite Ivy League colleges, Harvard and Princeton have similar exclusive secret societies. Yet, even among these few universities, the secret societies of Yale -- led by Skull & Bones -- are unchallenged in their influence on American political affairs.

According to some accounts, the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale has an underground affiliation with two other societies which were simultaneously founded at two other locations. The number "322" that appears under the skull and crossbones on the Order's emblem is believed to indicate the year of its founding -- 1832 -- and the fact that it is the second lodge within an international system. By some accounts, the lodge holding the number "1" is in Germany and the lodge numbered "3" is based at another American college.

Since its founding, Skull & Bones has only inducted about 2,500 members. At any given time, only about 600 or so members of the Order are alive. This small number underscores the tremendous concentration of power in the hands of its members.

If the members of Skull & Bones were to select a Hall of Fame from among their own elite ranks, some of the people whose names would almost certainly appear at the top of the list would be:

* Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880).

* William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President of and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

* Henry Lewis Stimson, partner in the Wall Street law firm of Root and Stimson, Secretary of War under President Taft (1908-1912), Governor General of the Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1940-1946).

* Averell Harriman, investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman, director of the Lend-Lease program of the U.S. State Department (1941-1942), U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943-1946), Governor of New York, Under Secretary of State for Asia (1961-1963), and presidential secret envoy to Soviet leaders Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov.

* Robert Lovett, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, Assistant Secretary of War for Air (1941-1945), Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense (1950), leading member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.

* Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.

* Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).

* Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert Walker Bush

* George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Congressman (1964-1970), Chairman of the Republican National Committee, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, first American Diplomatic Liaison to the Peoples Republic of China, Director of the Central Intelligence Ageney (1975-1977). Vice President of the United States (1980-1988), President of the United States (1988- ).

* John Thomas Daniels, agro-industrialist, founder of Archer Daniels Midland.

* Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counselor to Japan (1911- 1921), U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1924-1927), Assistant Secretary of State (1937-1938). Ambassador to Germany 1938), Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (1939-1941), Office of Strategic Services (1941-1945)

The members of the Order of Skull & Bones, true to their firm belief in "constructive confusion," have intentionally allowed a series of conflicting mythologies to spring up about the origins and history of their secret fraternity. According to one version of the Order's founding, it was an outgrowth of an earlier British or Scottish freemasonic grouping first established at All Soul's College at Oxford University in the late 17th century. Another version of the history of Skull & Bones is that it grew out of the German "nationalistic" secret .societies of the early 19th century. Still a third explanation is that Skull & Bones is an uniquely American institution which adopted some of the rituals of European freemasonry, but molded these rituals and beliefs into a new form.

Regardless of these conflicting accounts, it can be stated with certainty that the Order was first established on the Yale campus in 1832 It was officially incorporated only in 1856 under the name Russell Trust Association. According to virtually all the available biographical data on its early members, the money required to sustain the secret order's campus affairs and its broader role in placing its members into key positions of influence upon their graduation from Yale, derived from the opium trade in the Far East. That trade was set up by the British East India Company and was flourishing by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 ending the American War for Independence. The East India Company during this period was controlled by the Baring Brothers Bank (Toward the closing decades of the 17th century, the British House of Rothschild would supplant the Baring Brothers as the controlling financial interests in the China opium trade.

Through the sponsorship of the Barings and also the Rothschilds, a number of leading New England families, some of whom had sided with Great Britain during the American Revolution, were brought into the opium trade as junior partners. These merchant families ran fleets of clipper ships and became in many cases fabulously wealthy as the result of their association with the British East India Company. Among these key New England merchant families were: Cabot, Coolidge, Forbes, Higginson, Sturgis, Lodge, Lowell, Perkins and Russell.

These New England merchant families founded the United Fruit Company and the Bank of Boston. The founding families of Skull & Bones included the Russell and Perkins families, Over several generations, however, all these families heavily intermarried and became, in effect, one extended power grouping.

William Huntington Russell incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell Trust Association. Throughout the 20th century, the Russell Trust Association listed the New York City headquarters of Brown Brothers Harriman as its address.

Russell was valedictorian of his class at Yale in 1833. He and his Skull & Bones comrades considered themselves to be a special elite among the merchant banking and Puritan pilgrim elite of Yale. They took the Puritan beliefs of the early New England settlers, that they were "elected by God," and pre-ordained to rule North America.

The founding of Yale College in 1701 pre-dates the American Revolution by several generations. Many of the founders of Yale were righteous men of the Puritan heritage who devoutly believed in God and country. Some of these patriotic souls later made up the core of Benjamin Franklin's political coalition which ultimately broke with the mother country, Great Britain. Many graduates of Yale were active in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.

Two critics of the Order, historian Antony Sutton and investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum (himself a Yale graduate), both concluded that Skull & Bones has degenerated since its founding and has taken on more of the occult and ritualistic trappings of the majority of European freemasonic and Illuminati secret societies. Sutton charges that the Order is secretly known among its initiates as the "Brotherhood of Death" and has become an evil instrument in the hands of America's secret power elite. Rosenbaum claims that the society's Germanic origins are inherently wicked and pre-Nazi.

In a long 1977 article in Esquire magazine, Rosenbaum charged that the Skull & Bones building on the Yale campus houses remnants from Hitler's private collection of silver. While these stories cannot be dismissed out of hand, it must be noted that authors Rosenbaum and Sutton may be biased. As a young Jewish student at Yale, Rosenbaum was almost automatically excluded on religious grounds from the inner sanctum of the campus's secret societies. Sutton, a British-born eccentric historian, proudly admits his strong British biases, frequently citing philosopher John Stuart Mill as the spiritual mentor in his book on the Order.

Despite the possible personal biases in these two accounts of the history of the Order of Skull & Bones, it must be acknowledged that the membership of the society has tended over generations to converge upon a small group of New England families who have intermarried and then sponsored their sons and nephews into the Order. This kind of inbreeding always tends to produce narrow-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, which can be a serious shortcoming, particularly among individuals responsible for charting the course of a nation as powerful as the United States.

It can be documented by comparing the family charts of the early Bonesmen that there is today a core group of no more than 20 to 30 families who form the nucleus of the Order. The majority are old-line Puritan families who came to North America in the very first wave of settlers in the 17th century. Among these prominent families are: Whitney, Lord, Phelps. Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams, Stimson, Taft, Gilman and Perkins. A second group of families in the Skull & Bones core earned fabulous fortunes during the 18th and 19th centuries and thus won a rite of passage into the New England elite, even though they were not among the earliest settlers. The leading Skull & Bones families in this second category are: Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison, Pillsbury and Weyerhauser.

A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to the United States during the 18th and l9th centuries were eventually granted limited access to the WASP inner sanctums. Some families, like the Schiff, Warburg, Guggenheim and Meyer families, were unofficially designated as intermediaries between the New England WASPs and their cousins in London. This was especially true after the Rothschild interests supplanted the Anglican Baring group as the most powerful financial cabal in the City of London. Some of these German Jewish families became so absorbed into the WASP or Anglican society that they eventually converted from Judaism to Protestantism and were gradually ostracized from the Jewish aristocracy.

The WASP families, however, never saw the prominent Jewish investment banking families of America as equals. The Jews were considered politically and culturally different by the WASPs, and have never been accepted into the latter's inner circle. For the most part, these Jewish merchant bankers are viewed with suspicion and distrust by the members of the Order. Moreover, the Jewish fraternal societies, such as B'nai B'rith, were formed out of the British-based Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Their sponsors in America, the Rothschilds and the Cecil Rhodes Trust (also known as the British Round Table Group), are connected with the British Foreign Office and its secret intelligence apparatus.

INITIATION AND RITUAL

To be initiated into the Order of Skull & Bones, one must endure a ritual of selection called "tapping". It is conducted by 15 senior classmen of Yale University who make up the current membership of the secret society. They select 15 members of the junior class to be the Bonesmen the following year. Historically, Skull & Bones kept blacks, Jews and all other non-WASPs from its ranks. Within the last 30 years, however, token members from these groups have been occasionally selected to join. Thus, in the most recent list of initiates to the Order, there is one Yalie with a Jewish surname and even one with a Chinese name. According to author Rosenbaum, in recent years, the Order has inducted members of homosexual rights groups on the campus into its ranks.

Among the criterion for selection -- apart from family ties to the order, which has always been an important factor -- is what is referred to by historians and members as the "Three Ordeals." These ordeals are intended to measure the prospective Bonesman's ability to "make it" in the world beyond the university campus.

The first ordeal is boarding school. The overwhelming majority of Bonesmen, given their wealthy blueblood family pedigrees, attend one of the prestigious New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high schools. (Whereas a large number of the most elite of the Harvard University students attend Groton, a school with close ties to the Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive a thoroughly Anglophilic education, the preferred prep schools for the future Bonesmen are the two Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)

The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The prospective Bonesmen are judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England countryside or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa, the jungles of South America or even the American badlands of the Plains states, is a prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the Order.

The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of combat during wartime is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see themselves as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale Bonesmen of President George Bush's generation, as the result of the outbreak of World War II, went directly from prep school into the military service prior to their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the preferred military service has historically been with the U.S. Navy. During World II the Naval air corp was a particularly important track for future Bones initiates. In peacetime, participation at Yale in military officer's training is desirable but not essential. The commitment to enter some branch of the military upon graduation is viewed with favor.

After the formal selection of the next group of prospective Bonesmen, there is an invitation followed by a formal initiation ceremony. First the 15 senior class members who are the members of the Order select a group of junior class members who are to be "tapped" for Skull & Bones. A group of Bonesmen proceed to the dormitory room of the "tappee." Upon reaching the door, they pound loudly. When the prospective member opens the door, a Bonesman will tap him on the shoulder and yell, "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?" If the candidate accepts, a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed by black wax with the skull and crossbones emblem and the mystical Bones number 322 is handed to the "tappee." The message appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night. Candidates are instructed to wear no metal objects or clothing.

According to a 1940 Skull & Bones document, the initiation ceremony involves the following kinds of things: "New man placed in coffin -- carried into central part of building. New man chanted over and reborn into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. A bone with his name on it is tossed into the bone heap at the start of every meeting."

Within the Skull & Bones Crypt, also known as "the Tomb," there is what is referred to as a "sacred room" with the number 322, On the arched wall about the vault entrance is inscribed in German: "Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."

This quotation from a German Freemasonic ritual remains a source of controversy surrounding the origins of Skull & Bones. It is one of the bits of "evidence" cited by some of the Order's most ardent critics that the group is "Nazi like" and singularly "Germanic". In fact, the rituals of the Order are very much like the rituals employed by Scottish and English freemasonic lodges.

Some of the mystery and confusion surrounding these occult symbols and rituals is intentionally fostered by the Order itself. Among the principles taught to the members of the Yale secret society are the value of ambiguity and secrecy. These values are not taught as part of a purely mystical or occult quasi-religion. They are taught as valuable tools to be applied by the Bonesmen when they leave the insulated environment of the Yale campus and become officials of government, the intelligence community, the military or the private sector.

A careful study of the often confusing and self-contradictory behavior and public statements of President Bush and his closest advisers throughout the months of the Persian Gulf crisis of last year and war that followed offers a valuable example of how ambiguity and secrecy are applied by Bonesmen.

For the initiates of the Order, the question of whether secrecy and ambiguity are used for the purpose of accomplishing "good" or "evil" is of secondary importance. Secrecy and ambiguity are essential instruments for wielding power. The effective wielding of power is one of the overarching goals of all Bonesmen. The secret ties built up during the Bonesmen's senior year of active membership in the Order are maintained for life. Those ties link each Bonesman to every other initiate, especially to those initiates who were members of the Order in the same year.

Thus, every member of Skull & Bones is, in real and practical terms, part of a small elite group of young Yale graduates -- most from wealthy and powerful WASP families -- who enter the world of politics, business, finance, intelligence or education and who proceed to make their mark on the world.

According to several sources, President George Bush to this day frequently consults with several of his fellow Yale Bonesmen, and has, on occasion, called upon Skull & Bones members to carry out secret diplomatic missions for the White House.

THE SPARTAN MODEL

These rites of passage into the upper ranks of the WASP Establishment are capped by the experience the Bonesmen go through in their final year at Yale -- the year in which they actively participate in the Order. For the vast majority of the initiates, the process of inculcation with the ideas of WASP supremacy, an American Calvinist version of what British imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling called the "White Man's Burden," began at prep school.

According to the biographical accounts of a number of the leading Bonesmen, the prep school experience is paramount. At prep school, intellectual pursuits are encouraged, but special emphasis is also placed on athletic performance. Future Yale Bonesmen are expected to excel in some team sport, such as baseball and football, both American inventions. (Members of Skull & Bones were involved in the development of both games.) Team sports supposedly prepare the future Bonesman to accept leadership responsibility, and more importantly, teach him to "respect the rules of the game."

According to one biographer, when George Bush was a Yale undergraduate he was a member of the university baseball team. Although he was apparently not a very good baseball player, he eventually became captain of the Yale team. One day during the Yale baseball season, he excitedly visited his mother to proudly proclaim that he had hit his first home run. She reportedly looked back at him with patrician coolness, and asked, "Yes, George, but did your team win the game?"

The particular emphasis on team sports during the prep school and Yale years is, according to several historians, part of the Spartan training that is so essential to the Skull & Bones philosophy. In the world of Skull & Bones, one of the greatest virtues is the ability to steer the nation into war and to successfully prosecute the war.

To the Bonesmen, the use of military power is a natural and essential corollary to political power. The Bonesmen are taught that, although ideas have their place, to truly transform history, military force is almost always required. Critics of the Order have pointed out that this philosophy of power and the imperial use of military force comes straight from the chronicles of the Roman Empire -- especially the Roman Empire during its phase of decline and collapse.

The criticism may prove to be most prophetically true of the current generation of Bonesmen who are leading the United States under the presidency of George Bush. During the final phase of the Roman Empire, legions were deployed out around the world to conquer and subjugate vast territories, while back in Rome, there was a breakdown, a crisis in which the entire social and cultural fabric of the early Roman republic was eroding and giving way to something akin to the drug, rock-sex counterculture of today. The Roman imperial policy of attempting to gloss over the decadence at home by engaging in constant wars of expansion led ultimately to the total collapse of Rome.

In this regard, the Spartan-Roman imperial outlook of the American WASP warrior caste, exemplified by Skull & Bones, cannot be precisely compared to the Japanese samurai code of Bushido. The Japanese Bushido code emphasized honor among the warriors and presumed a fundamentally moral or ethical vision of the world.

No such emphasis on morality and honor exists in the code of Skull & Bones. On the contrary, the Skull & Bones philosophy, according to several of its most astute critics and historians, emphasizes the "double-cross system." The "double-cross" is symbolically represented by the crossbones on the emblem of the Order. According to this philosophy, anyone who is not an initiate is inferior, and can be lied to and manipulated to further the power of the WASP Establishment. To the extent that Japanese leaders view their American WASP counterparts as men of honor whose word is sacred and whose intentions are presumed to be virtuous, they will miss the fundamental character of the American imperium. This is of special importance today, with a leading member of the Skull & Bones system occupying the White House.

Skull & Bones philosophy first manifested itself at the American national political level in the late l9th century. At that time, the men of the Order adopted all the critical features of the British imperial system, especially the belief in the Anglo Saxon God-given right to rule over all the other races. Even countries like Japan, which were never colonial possessions of the Anglo-American combination, were viewed as inferior nations to be treated no differently from the colonies in Africa, India or Latin America.

In 1898, President William McKinley, one of the last of the American presidents to manifest any of the early republican (anti-British imperialism) traditions of the Founding Fathers, was under enormous pressure from the Skull & Bones-led American imperialists. Eventually, he went to war against Spain to "free" Cuba and seize the Philippines. This was the first time that the United States entered a war through devious manipulation and purely in order to expand its territories. It marked the beginning of a new epoch in American history which would forever alter the vision of the United States. It was the first evidence that the men of the Order were at the helm of the ship of state.

President McKinley's capitulation to the WASP warriors would prove to be fatal to himself and, some would say, for his country, too. The Spanish-American War of 1898 catapulted the Skull & Bones crowd into a position of dominance within the Republican Party. At the 1900 party presidential nominating convention, McKinley was forced to accept Teddy Roosevelt as his vice presidential running mate. The McKinley-Roosevelt slate was swept into office, in part as the result of the jingoist climate built up by the just-concluded Spanish-American War. Those circumstances were not all that different from the mood that prevails in America in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991.

Within months of his inauguration of 1901, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist while traveling through Buffalo, New York. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt became president, and the Order of Skull & Bones for the first time moved into the White House. Roosevelt surrounded himself with Bonesmen. His successor in 1908, William Howard Taft, was himself a second generation member of Skull & Bones.

HENRY STIMSON: MASTER BONESMAN

According to a January 1991 article by the Washington syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, when President George Bush was making his final decision to use military force to crush Saddam Hussein and decimate Iraq, he spent most of the Christmas holidays closeted at Camp David reading a newly published biography of one of his true heroes, fellow Skull & Bones initiate Henry Stimson. While most White House advisers thought that the gulf crisis would be ultimately resolved through diplomacy, unbeknownst to them, President Bush had already decided on the use of devastating military force -- regardless of what measures the world community or the Iraqi leaders took to avert war. Intimate Bush advisers described the president as being in a "mesmerized" state of mind as he walked around the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains with his Stimson biography, "The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson," under his arm at all times.

Indeed, for most contemporary Bonesmen, Henry Lewis Stimson, the quintessential WASP warrior, was the very personification of the Order's full ascent to power during the period of World War II.

A member of the Order's class of 1888, Stimson served seven U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (a fellow Bonesman), Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. As the Secretary of War under FDR and Truman, Stimson oversaw the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Stimson personally decided on the use of that devastating weapon against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years earlier, as the chairman of the American delegation at the London Naval Conference and as Secretary of State under President Hoover (1929-1933), Stimson had played a pivotal role in restricting the size of the Japanese Imperial Navy. He would be an architect of the FDR 's administration's economic provocations against Japan which ultimately helped induce Japan into the attack at Pearl Harbor, thus bringing the United States formally into World War II. And Stimson was also ultimately responsible for the FDR administration's decision to intern the Nisei (Japanese-Americans) after Pearl Harbor.

Yet, it was also Stimson who ordered American bombers to refrain from attacking the old Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto, a city rich in religious and historical tradition and artifacts. And, according to at least one of Stimson's biographers, it was also "the Colonel" who decided at the close of the war that the Japanese emperor should not be deposed. His sensitivity to Japanese culture and the importance of allowing Japan to retain honor even in defeat is widely to his close adviser, Joseph Grew, a longtime U.S. ambassador to Japan and an accomplished historian. Whether this report of Stimson's involvement in the decision to maintain the emperor is accurate or whether it underplays the role of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the fact remains certain that Stimson was the key policymaker overseeing the postwar occupations of both Japan and Germany.

To fully understand President George Bush's attitudes and policies toward Japan, one must first appreciate the overarching influence that Stimson had on the current occupant of the White House.

According to his British biographer Geofrey Hodgson, Stimson's membership in Skull & Bones was "the most important educational experience in his life." Unlike most of his fellow Bonesmen, Stimson earned his membership solely on the basis of his achievements at Yale -- not through family money. His parents were not wealthy, although his forefathers did come to America as early Puritan colonists. But Stimson made up for his lack of financial credentials by his fierce competitive spirit. As he himself put it, the "idea of a struggle for prizes, so to speak, has always been one of the fundamental elements of my mind, and I can hardly conceive of what my feelings would be if I ever was put in a position or situation in life where there are no prizes to struggle for."

Although Stimson did not come from classic blueblood background, he married into wealth and power. His wife, Mabel White, came from a prominent Establishment family with longstanding ties to the Order. Thus, upon graduation from law school, Stimson became a partner in the law firm of Eliahu Root, President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War.

Although Stimson and Roosevelt would have a falling out in later years, early on Roosevelt and Root provided "the Colonel" with the critical sponsorship and training required to succeed in the world of Establishment politics. According to Stimson's biographers, Roosevelt would frequently taunt the young Bonesman about the fact that he, unlike the president, had never been in the military or fought in any wars. (Roosevelt had resigned as Under Secretary of the Navy to go off and fight in the Spanish-American War.) Thus, at the ripe old age of 44, Stimson joined the Army during World War I and served in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

Among the other lasting interests that Roosevelt would pass on to Stimson was his deep passion for the Pacific. Roosevelt was convinced that America's imperial destiny was dependent upon its domination of the Pacific Ocean and the Far East. The Spanish-American War, which marked the beginning of America's imperial phase -- and the virtual abandonment of the republican principles upon which the nation had been founded -- began the U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines, which would continue through half of the next century. Ultimately, Stimson would himself serve as the American Governor General of the islands.

In 1900, Roosevelt wrote to Stimson: "Our people are neither craven nor weaklings, as we face the future high of heart and confident of soul, eager to do the great work of a great power... wish to see the United States the dominant power on the Pacific Ocean."

STIMSON'S KINDERGARTEN AND THE COLD WAR

Henry Stimson's towering influence on George Bush and many other current members and like-thinking allies of the Order was based not only on "the Colonel's" lifetime of achievements. It was also rooted in the fact that Stimson used the World War II period to groom a successor generation of young WASP warriors who would dominate American policymaking during the Cold War and beyond. Although not every member of what came to be known as the "Stimson's Kindergarten" was a member of Skull & Bones, or even a Yale graduate, many were. All were inculcated with the Skull & Bones philosophy and methodology of wielding power. It is through this alliance and patronage system that the influence of the Order has been extended far beyond its small membership roster.

Among the leading members of the "Stimson Kindergarten" were:

* John J. McCloy, who was Assistant Secretary of War and later served as the High Commissioner for Germany during the postwar occupation.

* Robert Lovett, a member of Skull & Bones and a partner in the Order's preeminent Wall Street investment house Brown Brothers Harriman. He became Stimson's Assistant Secretary of War (Air Section). Lovett remained an influential policymaker through the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

* Harvey Bundy, another Bonesman, who became Stimson's special assistant at the War Department. Harvey Bundy's two sons, McGeorge and William, fresh out of Yale University and Skull & Bones, joined their father on Stimson's personal staff. McGeorge Bundy would co-author Stimson's memoirs In Active Service in Peace and War.

* Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State, Yale graduate (he was not a member of the Order, but, rather, of one of the other Yale secret societies, Scroll Key) and senior policy adviser to FDR and Truman, who ultimately made him Secretary of State.

* Gen. George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the armed forces during World War II and later Truman's Secretary of State.

This group of high-powered policymakers of World War II and immediate post war period were known as the "Stimson-Marshall-Acheson Circle." They shaped America's Cold War containment policy against the Soviet Union and Communist China, including the involvement of the United States in the Korean War. It was also this group which, for better or worse, directed the postwar reconstruction programs in Germany and Japan.

Another influential member of Skull & Bones, Averell Harriman, was personally responsible for the sacking of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was Harriman, a banker, intriguer and former American Ambassador to Moscow, who convinced President Truman to fire MacArthur.

The predominant role that Averell Harriman would play over the course of 40 years of postwar American policymaking underscores the fact that not all leading members of Skull & Bones share the identical policy outlook. While some members of the Stimson inner circle were critical of Harriman, whom they considered to be too personally ambitious (he was also a liberal imperial Democrat in a secret fraternity dominated historically by moderate Republicans), Harriman nevertheless stands out as one of the Order's most active figures. The fact that he was a business partner and social intimate throughout his adult life of fellow Bonesman and Republican Sen. Prescott Bush Sr., the father of the current president underscores that point.

Henry Stimson died in 1950, leaving behind a core group of political offspring led by members of his old secret society, Skull & Bones. In the final years of his life he was involved in helping to shape a number of postwar government agencies which would become bastions of power and influence for the Order for years to come. Through this active role in shaping the key institutions of the Cold War era, Stimson was able to establish a continuity of power that would more than compensate for the fact that no single figure among his "kindergarten" emerged as a clear successor, and that several, like McGeorge Bundy, would prove ultimately to be rather disappointing students.

The National Security Act of 1947 transformed Stimson's old War Department into the Department of Defense, a sprawling civilian bureaucracy which would in future years house many of the most important members of the Order. Robert Lovett, for example, would become the Secretary of Defense in 1950. The 1947 act also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the permanent successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the early 1950s, the State Department's Office of Policy Coordination was merged into the CIA, giving the secret agency total control of America's clandestine operations. The National Security Agency (NSA) also was established, under the direction of the Department of Defense, vastly expanding America's signal intelligence capability.

Of all these agencies of the Cold War era, the CIA would stand out as a singular power center for Yale University alumni in general and Skull & Bones initiates in particular. The term "spooks," the well-known CIA term for a clandestine operator, was originally Yale campus argot for a secret society member. According to a recently published article in the Covert Action Information Bulletin, there is reportedly a "Bones club" within the CIA which helps promote the intelligence careers of members of the Yale secret society.

It should be pointed out that bureaucratic standing is not a real measure of power within the CIA. Very often, individuals in relatively insignificant positions within the organizational chart wield tremendous clout and maintain access to the most sensitive information and policy. Thus, for example, the present U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, a member of Skull & Bones and a career CIA man, is being suggested to replace William Webster as Director of Central Intelligence. For Lilley to step in as director of CIA would at this moment represent a demotion for the senior field operator. It is, however, a demotion he might accept as a personal favor to fellow Bonesman and longtime intimate pal George Bush.

The predominance of Yale graduates inside the CIA is also a part of the Stimson legacy. During World War II, many Yale students and even several leading faculty members entered the OSS. The X-2 Branch of OSS, the counterintelligence unit, was dominated by Yale students, as well as Yale English Literature professor Norman Holmes Pearson. One of the Yale men in X-2, James Jesus Angleton, went on to a legendary career as director of the CIA's counterintelligence staff.

Yale Skull & Bonesman and Stimson "Kindergartener" William Bundy assumed a senior post at CIA during the 1950s, as did Yale graduates Richard Bissell and Cord Meyer and Yale professor Sherman Kent

VIETNAM: THE BONESMEN'S DEBACLE

According to author David Halberstam's best-selling critique of the Kennedy years, "The Best and the Brightest," the JFK presidency marked the high point of Skull & Bones postwar power. But it also marked the beginning of the secret fraternity's fall from the position of unchallenged power, and the beginning of America's precipitous decline as a world power. All these factors are summed up in one word: Vietnam.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Cabinet was largely handpicked by Skull & Bones elder statesman Robert Lovett, who was personally approached by Joseph Kennedy, the president's father, and asked to shape the direction of the new administration. Lovett had been one of the architects of the World War II industrial mobilization under President Franklin Roosevelt, which helped bring the United States out of the Great Depression. He had been a factional opponent of Averell Harriman within the Skull & Bones circles, initially opposing the Cold War containment doctrine and pushing the idea of Atoms for Peace during the early years of the Eisenhower presidency (l952-1960).

Kennedy had personally asked Lovett to join his Cabinet, but Lovett, a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, preferred to shun formal government service. Instead, he placed a number of younger Bonesmen into the critical posts. McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy's National Security Adviser. Averell Harriman was made Under Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, a position that placed him in charge of many of the most critical decisions along the way to disaster in Vietnam. William Bundy remained in a senior post at CIA.

The decision to escalate the American military involvement in Vietnam -- a rejection of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's prophetic warning that the United States should never engage in a ground war in Asia -- was made by members of the Order. According to some accounts, President Kennedy began to have serious second thoughts about escalating the war, particularly after several private Oval Office discussions with MacArthur.

With Kennedy's assassination, American soldiers began pouring into Southeast Asia. Harriman remained a fixture of Vietnam policy under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. McGeorge Bundy remained on as LBJ's National Security Adviser untill , when he left government service to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the largest tax-exempt philanthropic agency in the United States. The Ford Foundation annually dispenses of nearly $3 billion in grants.

In his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy helped finance the anti-Vietnam War movement. The National Student Mobilization Committee, the umbrella group for the entire New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was led by David Dellinger, a Yale graduate. Episcopal Church activist William Sloan Coffin, a Bonesman, a second leading figure in the anti-war protest movement, had previously served as a CIA officer.

Thus, the Order had its hands in two critical elements of the policy debacle of the second half of the 1960s. Some leading Bonesmen helped shape the disastrous limited war strategy in Vietnam, while other members of the Order, at least tacitly, contributed to the growth of the drug-rock-sex counterculture by nourishing the New Left soil from which it sprang.

As a result of the Vietnam debacle, the "Stimson Kindergarten" literally drove itself out of the corridors of power which it had occupied without challenge for the previous 20 years. With the election of Richard Nixon as president of the United States in November 1968, a different team came into prominence. The politics of that team were personified by Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State.

In a May 1982 speech in London at the Chatham House headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Kissinger boasted that he was an enthusiastic follower of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that throughout his years in senior government posts under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford (1974-1976), he had always consulted more frequently with his counterparts in the British Foreign Office than he had with officials of his own government.

Although Kissinger had enjoyed early patronage from McGeorge Bundy, when the Bonesman was Dean of Harvard University and Kennedy's NSC adviser, the Kissinger era marked a low point in Skull & Bones' government power. The Central Intelligence Agency, a hub of the Order's clout, was decimated by scandals that only compounded the damage done to the Agency as the result of its role in the Vietnam disaster.

According to some respected writers, for example, Jim Hougan, author of "Secret Agenda," the CIA attempted to reverse the route by helping to bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There is significant evidence to bolster some of these accounts.

When Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 following Nixon's resignation, Skull & Bones made a brief comeback. In what came to be known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," Ford, in the autumn of 1975, removed Henry Kissinger from his post as NSC Adviser, replacing him with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger ally James Schlesinger was fired as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. And CIA Director William Colby, who had dueled with Angleton, was fired and replaced by Skull & Bones member George Bush.

If these maneuvers were intended to be the first step in a more ambitious comeback by the WASP warrior faction, the plan was short-circuited with the election in November 1976 of Jimmy Carter as president. It would really not be until the inauguration of George Bush as president in January 1989 -- a dozen years later -- that Skull & Bones would resurface with the same degree of governmental power that it had enjoyed during the Stimson years. George Bush's selection as Ronald Reagan's vice presidential running mate in the 1980 and 1984 elections was the transition back to that power.

Many things had gone wrong in the years since Vietnam to drive the Bonesmen off the center stage. With more than a little input from Bonesmen like McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, the United States had gone into a period of scientific, technological and industrial retreat. The Nixon decision on August 15, 1971 to remove the dollar from a fixed, gold-backed exchange rate system, had triggered a move toward double-digit inflation, urban decay, rising unemployment and soaring interest rates. The Kissinger-orchestrated Iranian-Middle East oil crisis in the early 1970s had contributed to a rate of deindustrialization that ultimately transformed the United State from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the world's biggest debtor nation. According to estimates compiled around the time of George Bush's inauguration as president, the total U.S. internal indebtedness had skyrocketed to more than $12 trillion.

Moreover, the period of the 1970s and 1980s had given rise to a new and powerful political-financial combination demanding a share of government clout. This new grouping, with its principle power bases in the U.S. Congress, in Hollywood and on Wall Street, was known as the Zionist lobby.

Although Jewish names had been prominent in the legal profession and on Wall Street since the founding of the American republic, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors, Zionist power took on a whole different proportion. Again, Henry Kissinger's position in the Nixon administration symbolized the fact that the pro-Israel lobby had moved in with a vengeance to the corridors of power in the nation's capital. Even on Wall Street the 1970s and 1980s had seen a new generation of Jewish financiers come into power, replacing their more cultured and Anglicized predecessors. The WASP Establishment had developed a tolerance of and working relationship with the largely German Jewish bankers known among themselves as "Our Crowd." The new upstart Wall Street Zionists, however, were viewed by the WASPs as a collection of gangsters.

If the Skull & Bonesmen needed a legitimate justification for reviving their ever-present dislike of the East European Ashkenazic Jews, the Wall Street Zionists who became known as the so-called "New Crowd" provided them with all the excuses necessary. When Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Naval intelligence analyst, was arrested in November 1985 and charged with spying for Israel against the United States, there was a resurgence of more unabashed antisemitism among the Bonesmen and their blueblood upperclass mates. It has since become a hallmark of the Bush White House. Even when practical political affairs have demanded that the Bush administration deal with the American Zionist lobby or the right-wing Shamir government of Israel, there has been a distinctive undertone of distrust bordering on overt hostility.

BUSH IN PROFILE

Unlike Averell Harriman, who reportedly coveted personal political power and drew sharp criticism from some of his fellow Bonesmen, George Bush has been a long-term "project" of Skull & Bones. The Bush presidency in real and symbolic terms represents the effort by the Order to restore the lost spirit of the WASP warrior Henry Stimson. With the passage of time and the decay of the WASP elite, the Bush presidency may yet prove to be a tragic replay of past American dreams.

George Bush's career was sponsored every step of the way by Skull & Bones members, mostly of his father's generation. Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones Class of 1917), a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who would serve one term in Congress as senator from Connecticut, sent George to the traditional private preparatory school, Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, which grooms young New England squires for later studies at Yale.

It was while finishing his prep school training at Andover that Bush was first exposed to Henry Stimson. Reportedly, Stimson delivered a stirring patriotic speech to the Phillips student body in l940 arguing forcefully for American intervention in the war in Europe. Ironically, at that very moment on the Yale campus, the majority of Skull & Bonesmen were leading the America First movement, which opposed any such U.S. entanglement in Europe.

When war with Japan broke out a year later, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and was trained as a pilot. He flew more than 50 missions before being shot down in the Pacific. At Yale after the war, Bush captained the baseball team and followed his father's footsteps into the Order.

Political legends have it that George Bush shunned his family's patronage and went off on his own to launch a business career as an oil wildcatter, or speculator, in Texas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush moved to Texas to work for Dresser Industries selling oil drilling equipment. The job was arranged for him by his father with Dresser president Neil Mallon, who was a fellow member of Skull & Bones. Desser, according to several sources, had close ties with the CIA.

After a few years with Dresser, George Bush set up his own company, Zapata Oil, to explore new oil fields in Texas and Mexico. Again, Bush was heavily backed by member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker, also a Skull & Bonesman, put up a large amount of capital, as did Brown Brothers Harriman. Lazard Brothers, a Jewish brokerage house with longstanding friendly ties to the New England WASPs, put up some money as well, at the urging of Andre Meyer, the owner of the Washington Post Corporation and the father of the current Post publisher Kathanne Graham. Zapata Oil sunk the first offshore well for the Kuwaiti government.

Even with that kind of backing, George Bush was less than a success as a businessman. In 1964, a longtime Bush friend, William Farrish III of Scotland, bought the majority of shares in Zapata for $3.2 million to keep the business afloat, while George, in a major career shift, ran for U.S. Congress from a wealthy district in Houston, Texas. He won.

During his three terms in Congress (Bush lost the 1970 Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen), George Bush distinguished himself as an advocate of zero population growth and a defender of the eugenics movement. Both of these positions, radical for their day, were probably the result of Bush's close friendship with William Draper Jr. -- a fellow Bonesman and a longtime advocate of population reduction schemes in the Third World.

The 1970s were for George Bush years of grooming in high-level politics and foreign policy. During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, George Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He later joined the chorus calling for Nixon's resignation. After a tour as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush was sent off to Communist China as the Chief Liaison Officer prior to the formalization of diplomatic relations. Bush shared the Beijing experience with Winston Lord, a fellow Skull & Bones member who was the CIA station chief. Lord went on to become president of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1983. (The Lord family founded the city of Hartford, Connecticut, has a large number of Skull & Bones members on its family tree, and set up one of the most powerful old-line Wall Street law firms, Lord Day Lord.) In 1975, George Bush completed his "grooming" with a brief stint as Gerald Ford's CIA director.

In 1980, Bush ran a short-lived campaign against Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Future running mate Reagan cut short Bush's 1980 presidential hopes by defeating him soundly in the primary election in New Hampshire, in the heart of New England. Reagan blasted Bush for his membership in the internationalist Trilateral Commission, which had attained notoriety because 20 members of the unpopular Carter administration had served on the commission. Bush's campaign was otherwise noteworthy because a significant number of his campaign volunteers were CIA officials; his campaign organization was directed by six top Agency and Pentagon retirees.

THE ORDER'S NETWORK

With Bush in the White House, the WASP Establishment is seeking to re-conquer lost territory, not only within the domain of national politics, but within the financial community, the legal profession and big business. A struggle between some elements of the WASP crowd and the Jewish "New Crowd" on Wall Street has been playing out in the newspapers and federal courts for the past six years, beginning with the criminal indictments of junk bond dealers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and the bankrupting and criminal prosecuting of the powerful Zionist-run brokerage house Drexel Rurnham Lambert.

To some extent these wars reflect the kind of scramble that always takes place during a financial crisis and shakeout, when certain formerly powerful financial institutions are wiped out and others profit from their rivals' adversity. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the House of Morgan came out on top. Not coincidentally, Morgan Guaranty Trust and Morgan Stanley have been cornerstones of the Skull & Bones grouping on Wall Street since their founding during the last century. Founding partner Harold Stanley was a Bonesman.

One hub of the Order's postwar economic power, the major multinational oil corporations, have clearly benefited greatly from President Bush's "charming little colonial war" in the Persian Gulf. The leading oil companies which are linked to the Order are: Standard Oil Trust Corporation, Shell Oil of America, Creole Petroleum Corporation and Pennzoil Corporation. The founder and present chairman of the board of Pennzoil started out in the oil business in partnership with George Bush in Zapata Oil. It is interesting to note in the context of the Bonesmen's deep involvement in the world petroleum business that George Bush, during his early days as a Texas oilman, had worked closely with the Kuwaitis.

Eight major Wall Street and Washington, D.C. law firms stand out as practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Order of Skull & Bones. Each of these firms was founded by members of the Order, and each of these firms continues to provide up-and-coming Order initiates in the legal community with training, credentials and connections. A review of the major corporate clients of these firms would reveal many of the most powerful companies among the Fortune 500.

The Skull & Bones law firms are:

* Lord Day Lord

* Davis Polk Wardwell

* Simpson Thacher Bartlett

* Debevoise Plimpton Lyons & Gates

* Cravath Swaine & Moore

* Covington & Burling

* Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods

* Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy.

In addition to their corporate clientele and their direct involvement in government through the frequent appointment of partners to Cabinet posts, these firms also specialize in handling the personal financial affairs and investment portfolios of the leading WASP families. In this respect, the Skull & Bones-centered WASP Establishment imitates the Venetian model. During the height of power of Venice, which was the trading capital of the Byzantine Empire, the leading families used their personal wealth to establish insurance companies, family funds and cultural programs through which they extended their political power.

Today, the prominent law firms listed above play a special role in directing the affairs of the leading tax-exempt foundations which shape the culture and public opinion of the United States and many foreign countries. We have already seen that McGeorge Bundy, a leading Bonesman, left his position as National Security Adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation. During the nearly two decades that Bundy spent directing the $3 billion tax-exempt fund, he arguably wielded more power than he did during his six years as the National Security Adviser to two presidents. Under the Bundy reign the Ford Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch the environmentalist movement and funded scores of projects devoted to population reduction in the Third World.

From its early decades, the Order has concentrated much of its efforts at establishing, controlling and, in some instances, capturing the major tax-exempt philanthropic foundations of America. The Russell Sage Foundation, which specializes in "social control" programs, was founded by Bonesmen. Among the leading functions of the Russell Sage Foundation today is the maintaining of a centralized tracking of the finances of all the large tax-exempt foundations in the United States. The Peabody Foundation, the Slater Foundation and several of the Rockefeller foundations were all either started by members of the Order or have been dominated by Bonesmen from their inception. Other major family funds, like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, were wrestled from family control by the Skull & Bones apparatus. During the tenure of McGeorge Bundy, two members of the Ford family resigned from the Ford Foundation in disgust over the direction in which Bundy had taken the philanthropic agency.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided with a large file of the Order's internal documents, including minutes of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986.

For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush's performance during that largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order.

According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.

It is a world dominated by American military power and American control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the model for the Bonesmen's New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire.

According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones.

Although America's Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the Bonesmen's failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste's reincarnation. When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam, he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen -- not to the American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed.

On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf showdown, the president's own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil's photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1