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Kisah Islamnya Yusuf Estes
Posted on 02/03/2009 by lutsinar
Dr. Yusuf Estes lahir tahun 1944 di Ohio, AS. Tahun 1962 hingga 1990 ia bekerja di gereja, penganut ajaran Injil sekali gus mengelolakan perniagaan alat muzik piano dan organ. Awal 1991 ia terlibat perniagaan dengan seorang pengusaha Muslim asal Mesir bernama Muhammad Abd Rahim.

Awalnya ia bermaksud mengkristiankan pemuda Mesir itu. Namun akhirnya ia memeluk ajaran Islam diikuti oleh isteri, anak-anak, ayah serta mertuanya. Ia menguasai bahasa Arab secara aktif, demikian juga ilmu Al-Quran selepas belajar di Mesir, Maroko dan Turki. Sejak 2006, Yusuf Estes selalu kelihatan di PeaceTV , Huda TV , rancangan TV islam yang diterbitkan Britain. Ia juga muncul dalam siri televisyen Islam untuk anak-anak bertajuk “Qasas Ul Anbiya” yang bercerita tentang kisah-kisah para Nabi.

Yusuf terlibat aktif di berbagai aktiviti dakwah. Misalnya, ia menjadi imam tetap di markas askar AS di Texas, dan di penjara sejak tahun 1994, dan pernah menjadi delegasi PBB untuk perdamaian dunia. Syekh Yusuf telah mengislamkan banyak kalangan, dari birokrat, guru, hingga pelajar. Berikut kisah Syekh Yusuf sebagaimana diterbitkannya di website islamtomorrow . Seperti mana yang dinyatakan di bawah ini;

Nama saya Yusuf Estes. Pada masa ini dipercayai memimpin sebuah organisasi bagi Muslim asli Amerika. Kini seluruh hidup saya, saya berikan untuk Islam. Saya mengembara di seluruh dunia untuk memberikan ceramah dan berbagai pengalaman bagaimana Islam hadir dalam diri saya. Organisasi kami terbuka untuk berdialog dengan berbagai kalangan seperti pendeta, rabbi (ulama kaum Yahudi) dan lainnya di mana pun mereka berada.

Kebanyakan bidang kerja kami adalah kawasan seperti kem askar, universiti, hingga penjara. Tujuan utama adalah untuk menunjukkan Islam yang sebenarnya dan memperkenalkan bagaimana hidup sebagai seorang Muslim. Meskipun Islam saat ini berkembang sebagai salah satu agama terbesar, kedua setelah Kristian, namun masih banyak lagi yang tidak mengetahui tentang Islam. Misalnya Islam selalu beridentitikan dengan hal yang berbau Arab.

Ramai bertanya pada saya bagaimana mungkin seorang pendeta atau pasteur Kristian boleh masuk Islam. Padahal tiap hari kami menyampaikan kebenaran Kristian. Belum lagi dengan berita-berita negatif tentang perilaku buruk Islam di media. Pasti tidak ada orang yang tertarik dengan Islam. Pernah seorang pemuda Kristian bertanya pada saya melalui e-mel kenapa dan bagaimana saya meninggalkan Kristian dan masuk Islam. Saya berterima kasih pada semua yang bersedia mendengar kisah saya berikut ini. Semoga di redai Allah..
Keluarga mentaati ajaran Kristian
Saya lahir di Ohio, besar dan bersekolah di Texas. Dalam tubuh saya mengalir darah Amerika, Irlandia dan Jerman hingga sering disebut WASP (white anglo saxon protestant). Keluarga kami adalah penganut Kristian yang sangat taat. Tahun 1949, ketika masih di bangku rendah kami pindah ke Houston, Texas. Saya dan keluarga sering hadir secara rutin ke gereja. Malah saya dibaptis pada usia 12 tahun di Pasadena, Texas.

Sebagai seorang remaja, saya punya keinginan untuk berkunjung ke banyak gereja di berbagai tempat untuk menambah pengalaman dan pengetahuan Kristian. Pada masa itu saya benar-benar mendalami perihal agama. Tidak hanya ajaran Kristian, bahkan ajaran Hindu, Buddha, Yahudi, hingga Metafisika juga saya pelajari. Hanya satu ajaran yang saya tidak begitu serius dan bahkan tidak berminat sama sekali, iaitu Islam.

Saya suka muzik terutama klasik. Hingga saya sering dapat undangan menyanyi di berbagai gereja. Di sekitar tahun 1960-an saya mengajar muzik dan tahun 1963 punya studio sendiri di Laurel, Maryland yang saya beri nama “Estes Music Studios.” Hingga tahun 1990 atau hampir 30 tahun lamanya saya bersama dengan ayah mengelola perniagaan entertainment. Kami juga punya kedai alat muzik piano dan organ di Texas, Oklahoma hingga Florida.

Ayah dulu pernah aktif dalam pelbagai kegiatan gereja. Mengadakan sekolah mingguan hingga aktivis pengumpul dana bagi mengembangkan sekolah Kristian. Dia sangat menguasai Bible dan juga terjemahannya. Melalui ayah pula saya belajar Bible dalam pelbagai versi dan terjemahan.

Ayah saya, seperti kebanyakan pendeta lainnya, selalu mendapat pertanyaan: ”Apakah Tuhan yang menulis Bible?”

Biasanya jawapannya adalah: “Bible adalah rangkaian kata inspirasi seorang lelaki yang berasal dari Tuhan.”

Itu bermakna, menurut saya, manusialah yang menulis Bible. Tentu saja, selama bertahun-tahun, jawaban itu menimbulkan banyak tanggapan bahkan penolakan. Namun ayah selalu menambahkan,” Akan tetapi (Bible) itu tetap kata dari Tuhan yang diilhamkan kepada manusia.” Begitulah.
Mencari Tuhan
Bila dewasa dan telah berkerja sendiri, akhirnya saya “menyerah”. Saya tidak mungkin jadi seorang pendeta. Saya takut menjadi hipokrit. Saya belum boleh menerima tentang konsep Tuhan itu satu namun pada saat yang sama Dia menjadi “Tiga” atau Trinitas. Saya selalu bertanya-tanya, jika Dia “Tuhan Bapa” bagaimana mungkin pada saat yang sama juga menjadi “Anak Tuhan?”

Selama bertahun-tahun saya mencuba mencari Tuhan dengan berbagai cara. Saya pelajari dan meneliti dalam agama Buddha, Hindu metafizikal, Taoisme, Yahudi dan banyak lagi. Bertahun-tahun saya pelajari hingga mendekati usia ke-50 saya belum menemukan siapa Tuhan yang sebenarnya. Lalu saya mencuba bergaul dengan banyak kalangan, termasuk dengan para mubaligh Kristian dan penganut Injil yang punya pengalaman di berbagai tempat dan negara. Kami sering melakukan perjalanan jauh. Namun tidak ada jawaban yang memuaskan. Tidak ada yang mahu menjawab siapa yang menulis Bible sebenarnya, kenapa Bible banyak versi padahal bukunya sama, kenapa banyak sekali terdapat kesalahan versi terkini dengan versi terdahulu. Dan, bahkan, dalam berbagai versi Bible, saya tidak menemukan satu pun kata “Trinitas.”

Saya menjadi kurang yakin. Mereka masih mencari jawaban yang tepat atas pertanyaan tersebut. Akhirnya terjadi sesuatu yang memperkenalkan saya dengan Islam. Ini memberikan jawapan pada semua konsep-konsep dan keyakinan-keyakinan yang saya tanggung selama bertahun-tahun. Ia memberikan jawaban atas pertanyaan dengan cara, aneh dan ganjil.
Jumpa pemuda Mesir
Ceritanya, awal 1991 ayah mencuba menjalin perniagaan dengan seorang pengusaha dari Mesir. Ia meminta saya untuk bertemu dengan pemuda Mesir itu. Bagi saya inilah kali pertama mengadakan kontak perniagaan antarabangsa. Yang saya tahu tentang Mesir adalah piramid, patung Sphinx, dan sungai Nil. Hanya itu. Lalu ayah menyebut bahawa pemuda itu seorang Muslim.

Apa? Islam? Saya tidak percaya dengan apa yang saya dengar. Menjalin hubungan dengan orang Islam? Spontan jiwa saya menolak. Tidak, no way! Saya mengingatkan ayah agar membatalkan kontak dengan pemuda itu dengan menyebut hal-hal negatif tentang orang Islam. Orang Islam pengganas, tamak, penculik, pengebom, dan entah apa lagi. Saya sebut juga mereka (orang Islam) tidak percaya dengan Tuhan, tiap hari kerjanya mencium tanah lima kali sehari, dan menyembah kotak hitam di tengah padang pasir ( Kaabah). Tidak! Saya tidak mahu jumpa orang itu.

Ayah tetap mendesak. Ia menyebut orang itu sangat ramah dan baik hati. Akhirnya saya menyerah dan bersedia bertemu dengan pengusaha Islam tersebut. Tapi untuk pertemuan tersebut saya mengenakan “Syarat” tertentu. Antara lain; saya mahu bertemu dengannya pada hari Minggu setelah kegiatan di gereja, sehingga punya “kekuatan” kala bertemu nanti. Saya mesti bawa Bible, pakai baju jubah bertulisan “Yesus Tuhan Kami.” Isteri dan kedua anak perempuan saya juga harus datang di saat pertemuan pertama kali dengan orang Islam itu.

Sampai hari yang dijanjikan. Ketika saya masuk kedai, terus bertanya pada ayah mana orang Islam itu. Ayah menunjuk seorang laki-laki di dekatnya. Tiba- tiba saya merasa kebingungan. Ah sepertinya pemuda itu bukan si Islam yang dimaksudkan. saya terkedu. Penampilannya tidak seperti yang saya bayangkan sebelumnya. Laki-laki asal Mesir itu tidak berjanggut, bahkan tidak punya rambut sama sekali / botak. Ia tidak berserban dan tidak pula berjubah. Malah pakai vest.

Saya memandang di segenap ruang. Mengamati orang-orang yang hadir. Saya mencari-cari orang yang pakai jubah dengan serban melilit di kepalanya, berjanggut lebat serta alis mata tebal. Khas orang Arab. Namun tidak ada seorang pun yang memenuhi kriteria saya. Yang lebih mengejutkan, pemuda itu malah menegur saya dengan sangat ramah. Ia menyambut dan menjabat tangan saya dengan hangat. Namun saya tidak terkesan dengan tingkahnya itu. Terlintas di fikiran, yakni bagaimana untuk mengkristiankan pemuda Mesir itu.
Interaksi
Selepas perkenalan singkat, saya pun mulai “berinteraksi” pemuda Mesir tersebut. Anda percaya dengan Tuhan? Sebagai pembuka bicara. Pemuda itu menjawab ya. Saya mengajukan lagi dengan rentetan pertanyaan lain seperti keyakinan Islam kepada Nabi Adam, Ibrahim. Musa, Daud, Sulaiman hingga Isa Al-Masih. Saya dibuat terpesona ketika mendengar jawapannya. Ia menjelaskan Islam percaya dengan Nabi-Nabi yang saya sebut tadi. Bahkan makin ternganga kala diberitahu Islam juga beriman dengan salah satu Kitab Allah yakni Injil dan Nabi Isa adalah salah satu utusanNya.. Fantastik!

Yang membuatkan saya seronok adalah tatkala mengetahui ternyata Islam juga percaya dengan Al-Masih (baca: Nabi Isa). Dalam Islam ternyata Isa diimani; sebagai utusan Tuhan dan bukan Tuhan, lahir tanpa seorang ayah, ibunya adalah Maryam. Ini sudah lebih dari cukup bagi saya untuk mempelajari Islam lebih lanjut. Kenapa selama ini saya sangat benci dengan Islam. Kini saya harus mempelajarinya?

Akhirnya kami jadi sering bertemu dan berbincang terutama tentang keimanan. Pemuda ini sangat lain. Ramah, tenang, dan pemalu. Ia mendengar dengan serius setiap kata-kata saya dan tidak memprotes sedikit pun. Lama kelamaan saya jadi menyukai pemuda itu. Namun masih terfikir bagaimana cara untuk mengajaknya masuk Kristian. Orang ini sangat berpotensi menurut saya.
Menjadi rakan kongsi perniagaan
Saya akhirnya setuju untuk menjalin perniagaan dengan pengusaha Mesir itu. Kami sering mengadakan perjalanan perniagaan di sepanjang kawasan Utara Texas. Sepanjang hari kami berbincang hal keyakinan Islam dan Kristian disamping masalah perniagaan. Kami bicara tentang konsep Tuhan, makna hidup, maksud penciptaan manusia dan alam serta isinya, tentang Nabi, dan sebagainya

Satu ketika saya dapat khabar Muhammad bermaksud pindah rumah. Selama ini ia tinggal bersama dengan seorang temannya. Ia merancang untuk tinggal di masjid selama beberapa waktu. Saya dan ayah mengajaknya tinggal di rumah kami saja. Ia pun setuju.

Suatu hari seorang teman saya –seorang pendeta- mengalami serangan jantung. Kami membawanya ke rumah sakit terdekat dan tinggal seketika di sana. Saya menjenguknya beberapa kali dalam seminggu. Muhammad sering saya ajak serta. Rupanya teman saya itu tidak begitu suka. Bahkan ia dengan nyata menolak membincangkan apa pun tentang Islam. Hingga satu hari datang pesakit baru. Seorang pemuda yang kemudian tinggal satu bilik di rumah sakit dengan teman saya. Ia menggunakan kerusi roda. Saya berkenalan dengan pemuda itu. Sekilas tampaknya pemuda itu seperti sedang mengalami masalah kewangan

Pemuda di kerusi roda mencari Tuhan
Akhirnya saya tahu pemuda itu kesepian dan mengalami masalah kewangan serta memerlukan teman dalam hidupnya. Jadilah saya mencuba mengingatkan dia tentang Tuhan. Saya kisahkan tentang Nabi Yunus yang hidup dalam perut ikan. Sendirian dalam gelap namun masih ada Tuhan bersamanya.

Selepas mendengar kisah itu, pemuda berkerusi roda itu mendongakkan kepalanya seraya meminta maaf. Ia menceritakan bahawa ada sedikit masalah yang melandanya. Selanjutnya ia ingin mengakuinya kesalahannya itu di hadapan saya. Saya menjelaskan bahawa saya bukan seorang pendeta. Pemuda itu justeru menjawab; “Sebenarnya saya dulu seorang pendeta.”
“Apa? Saya baru berceramah dengan seorang pendeta ? Saya benar-benar seronok kala itu. Kenapa jadi begini? Apa yang terjadi dengan dunia ini sebenarnya?

Rupanya pendeta itu –namanya Peter Jacobs- adalah bekas mubaligh yang menjelajah di sekitar Amerika Latin dan selama 12 tahun. Kini ia mengalami tekanan dan perlukan istirahat. Saya menawarkannya untuk tinggal di rumah kami. Dalam perjalanan ke rumah, saya berdiskusi dengan Peter tentang Islam. Saya sungguh terkejut kala diberitahu para pendeta Kristian juga belajar tentang Islam, malahan ada memiliki taraf doktor di bidang itu. Sudah tentu ia merupakan perkara yang baru saya ketahui..

Sejak itu, Muhammad, Peter dan saya sering terlibat diskusi hingga larut malam. Satu ketika masuk ke masalah kitab-kitab suci. Saya takjub kala Muhammad menceritakan bahawa dari pertama diturunkan hingga saat ini atau selama 1400 tahun Al-Quran hanya ada satu versi. Al-Quran dihafal oleh jutaan Muslim di seluruh dunia dengan satu bahasa iaitu Arab. Sungguh mustahil. Bagaimana mungkin kitab suci kami boleh berubah-ubah dengan berbagai versi sementara Al-Quran tetap terpelihara?
Sang pendeta masuk Islam!
Satu hari pendeta Peter Jacobs ingin melihat apa yang dilakukan orang Islam di Masjid. Ia pun ikut Muhammad. Sepulang dari sana saya bertanya pada Peter ada kegiatan apa di sana. Peter menyebut tidak ada acara apa-apa di masjid. Mereka (orang Islam) cuma datang dan bersembahyang saja. Tidak ada acara istiadat . Apa? tidak ada ceramah atau nyanyian ?

Beberapa hari kemudian Peter minta ikut lagi ke masjid. Namun kali ini lain. Mereka tidak pulang-pulang hingga larut malam. Saya khuatir sesuatu terjadi terhadap mereka. Akhirnya Muhammad kembali dengan seorang pemuda berjubah. Saya sungguh terkejut dengan laki-laki yang datang bersama Muhammad itu. Ia mengenakan jubah dan kupiah putih. Ah rupanya si Peter. Ada apa dengan kamu tanya saya. Jawaban Peter bak petir di siang hari. Ia menyebut sudah bersyahadah. Oh Tuhan! Apa yang terjadi? Pendeta masuk Islam?

Saya benar-benar seronok dan semalaman tidak boleh tidur memikirkan hal itu. Saya ceritakan kejadian tersebut kepada isteri. Isteri saya justeru menyatakan ia juga ingin masuk Islam, karena itulah yang benar. Oh Tuhan! Saya benar-benar tidak percaya. Saya turun ke bawah dan membangunkan Muhammad seraya minta waktu diskusi dengannya. Sepanjang malam hingga subuh kami bertukar pendapat. Muhammad minta izin solat Subuh. Ketika itu saya mendapat firasat, kebenaran telah datang. Saya harus membuat pilihan. Lalu saya keluar rumah. Persis di belakang rumah, saya memungut sepotong papan. Lalu saya letakkan papan itu menghadap ke arah orang Islam solat. Saya pun bersujud menghadap kiblat dan meminta pertunjukNya.
Sekeluarga masuk Islam
Yusuf Estes Father
Pagi itu, pukul 11, saya bersyahadah di hadapan dua orang saksi, bekas pendeta Peter Jacobs dan Muhammad Abd. Rahman. Alhamdulillah, di usia ke-47 saya jadi seorang Muslim. Beberapa minit kemudian isteri saya juga ikut bersyahadah. Ayah baru memeluk Islam beberapa bulan kemudian. Sejak itu saya dan ayah sering ke masjid terdekat di kota kami. Ayah mertua saya akhirnya juga mengikuti kami. Di usianya yang ke-86 ia memeluk Islam. Mertua saya meninggal persis beberapa bulan selepas bersyahadah. Semoga Allah ampuni dia. Amin.
Adapun anak-anak saya pindahkan dari sekolah Kristian ke sekolah Islam. Setelah sepuluh tahun bersyahadah, mereka telah mampu menghafal beberapa juz Al-Quran.

Sejak itu saya habiskan waktu hanya untuk Islam. Saya berdakwah ke mana-mana, hingga ke luar Amerika. Banyak sudah yang memeluk Islam. Baik dari kalangan birokrat, guru, dan pelajar dari berbagai agama. Dari Hindu, Katolik, Protestan, Yahudi, Rusia Ortodoks, hingga Ateis. Saat ini saya juga mengelola sebuah website yakni Islamalways. com yang punya moto terkenal, ” where we’re always open 24 hours a day and always plenty of free parking.” (kami buka 24 jam sehari dan banyak tempat parkir percuma).

Islam telah mengubah cara saya melihat kehidupan ini dengan lebih bermakna. Semoga Allah pelihara hidayah yang sudah ada pada kita dan sebarkan hidayah itu ke seluruh alam. Amin.
Diolah semula dari versi Indonesia.

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This entry was posted in Agama and tagged Adam, Al-Quran, Amerika, ancaman, Arab, Bible, Britain, Buddha, Daud, doktor, Florida, Hindu, Indonesia, Injil, Isa, Islam, Jerman, kewangan, Kristain, Maroko, Masjid, Mesir, mubaligh, Muhammad, Musa, Muslim, Nabi, Ohio, pendeta, perniagaan, rabbi, solat, Sulaiman, Texas, Turki, universiti, Yunus, Yusuf Estes. Bookmark the permalink.
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wasp

Entry: Opini di Sinar Harapan Nov 18, 2006







Sabtu, 18 Juni 2005
O P I N I

No. 5027

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Tentang SH







“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”



Oleh Iwan Sulistiawan

Dalam penelitian-penelitian yang menggunakan konsep dan teori mengenai suku bangsa yang berkaitan dengan hubungan antara suku bangsa dan kesukubangsaan dengan keyakinan keagamaan, dapat disimpulkan setiap konflik antaretnis dipastikan muatan keagamaan ikut terserap di dalamnya. Konflik antaretnis terlahir dari dan ada dalam wadah hubungan antarsuku bangsa.
Dalam konflik antarsuku bangsa, corak kesukuan individual perorangan berubah menjadi kategorikal. Yang akan dihancurkan bukan lagi orang per orang, bukan pula kelompok, melainkan kategori etnis suku bangsa, termasuk keyakinan keagamaan yang dipeluknya. Dalam setiap konflik antaretnis, terserap muatan emosi dan keyakinan keagamaan para pelakunya (Suparlan 2004).
Harold R. Isaacs (1993) memberikan ilustrasi yang cukup lengkap tentang konflik antaretnis dan antarbangsa di seluruh dunia di mana keyakinan keagamaan turut terserap di dalamnya. Isaacs menyatakan saling membunuh seringkali terjadi dan melanda luas daerah-daerah yang sebelumnya belum pernah bentrok dan hal ini merupakan kapasitas penyebar kematian yang lebih besar dari yang disebabkan oleh kedahsyatan teknologi.
Isaacs menggambarkan konflik-konflik tersebut sangat mengerikan. Saling bunuh antara orang Hindu dan Islam di India; perang suku di Nigeria, di Kongo, Chad, dan Sudan; orang India membunuh orang Nagas di timur laut Assam; orang Indonesia membunuh orang Cina di Indonesia; orang Cina membunuh orang Tibet di Tibet; bangsa Tutsi dan Hutu saling bunuh di Burundi; orang Katolik dan Protestan saling bunuh di Ulster.

“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”
Helen Watson dan Jack Boag (2000) menyatakan agama sering menjadi elemen mendasar konflik-konflik antarsuku bangsa. Watson dan Boag yang banyak mengambil contoh dari konflik berdarah di Balkan antara orang Serbia yang Kristen Ortodoks, orang Kroasia yang Katolik dan orang Albania yang Muslim, mengatakan sangat sulit memisahkan konflik antaretnis dan konflik yang disebabkan oleh faktor agama.
Dalam konteks Amerika, konflik antara orang Irlandia Katolik dengan orang WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) dapat memberikan gambaran menyeluruh konflik antarsuku bangsa yang melibatkan keyakinan keagamaan masyarakat suku bangsanya. Pada abad ke-19, Amerika menjadi surga bagi para imigran. New York pun menjadi melting pot, tempat tinggal masyarakat dari berbagai suku bangsa dengan berbagai kebudayaannya.
Masyarakat New York pada masa itu didominasi golongan atau masyarakat suku suku bangsa WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), suatu golongan masyarakat Amerika asal Belanda dan Inggris yang beragama Protestan, yang merasa sebagai penduduk asli Amerika. Golongan mayoritas dan sekaligus dominan ini mempunyai kedudukan yang tinggi dalam struktur politik, sosial dan ekonomi. Maka gelombang imigrasi besar-besaran memicu kekhawatiran golongan WASP tersebut.
Mereka takut dominasinya direbut oleh para pendatang ini lalu menyebarkan gerakan nativisme, gerakan menyebarkan kebencian kepada masyarakat suku bangsa pendatang, yakni para imigran. Di saat-saat Amerika mengalami kesulitan seperti depresi ekonomi, atau keadaan menjelang, dalam, dan sesudah perang, golongan WASP sering menjadikan kaum imigran sebagai kambing hitam dari masalah tersebut.
Golongan WASP bahkan membentuk the American Party yang lebih dikenal dengan nama the Know-Nothing Party. Dua hal yang menjadi tuntutan partai ini adalah menghalang-halangi para imigran dari golongan etnis pendatang memperoleh posisi penting dalam bisnis dan mengusulkan para pendatang tidak diberi hak suara dalam pemilihan umum sampai mereka berada di Amerika selama 21 tahun. Semboyan terkenal dari partai nativis ini adalah “America for the Americans”.
Yang paling menjadi sasaran kebencian golongan WASP di New York adalah etnis pendatang dari Irlandia yang beragama Katolik. Mereka datang ke Amerika saat Irlandia mengalami bencana kelaparan tahun 1830-an dan 1840-an akibat kegagalan panen kentang. Pada masa itu, sebagai pendatang, imigran Irlandia Katolik mengalami diskriminasi dari golongan suku bangsa WASP yang dominan yang ingin mempertahankan penguasaan sumber daya atau sumber rezeki.

“Gangs of New York”
Thomas Sowell (1989) mengatakan golongan WASP yang merasa sebagai penduduk asli menganggap para imigran Irlandia pemabuk, pembuat kerusuhan, dan tidak bertanggung jawab. Mereka juga membuat larangan kerja seperti yang ditunjukkan oleh slogan “No Irish Need Apply” atau “Orang Irlandia Tidak Usah Melamar” yang ditempel pada pintu-pintu rumah atau bahkan pada iklan-iklan lowongan pekerjaan di surat kabar the Tribune atau the New York Times , sehingga yang diperoleh orang Irlandia adalah pekerjaan yang berat, kasar, kotor, dan terlalu bahaya bagi orang lain.
Penindasan tersebut diperparah oleh rezim penguasa dan penegak hukum yang tidak dapat bertindak adil. Penguasa Tammany Hall, “Boss” William Tweed, misalnya, adalah seorang Protestan yang memanfaatkan orang Irlandia Katolik untuk kepentingan politiknya. Ia memimpin organisasi pemadam kebakaran sukarela orang Irlandia sambil mempertahankan orang Irlandia Katolik tetap berada dalam posisi sosial ekonomi yang rendah.
Terjadilah kemudian konflik yang di dalamnya keyakinan keagamaan turut memperkuat kesukubangsaan masing-masing pihak yang bertikai, yakni agama Kristen Protestan untuk WASP dan Katolik untuk Irlandia pendatang. Konflik etnis yang kemudian mengikutsertakan keyakinan agama di dalamnya ini lalu mencapai puncaknya dengan konflik fisik berdarah yang mengerikan yang tergambar jelas dalam “Gangs of New York” (Miramax, 2002), sebuah film yang disutradarai oleh Martin Scorsese yang dibuat berdasarkan sejarah terbentuknya Kota New York.
Agar konflik etnis tidak berkembang menjadi konflik agama, diperlukan kesadaran dari setiap masyarakat etnis untuk melihat bahwa dalam sejarah, agama seringkali dipakai demi memenangkan persaingan ekonomi atau politik dalam rangka kepentingan individu atau kelompok tertentu. Di sisi lain, para pemimpin agama, meminjam istilah Ma’arif Jamuin (2004), harus mendampingi masyarakat pemeluk agama untuk memahami teks ajaran secara kritis dan kontekstual. Potensi bergesernya konflik etnis menjadi konflik agama akan sangat berkurang jika tercipta masyarakat-masyarakat etnis yang cerdas dan kritis dalam beragama.

Penulis adalah mahasiswa S2 Kajian Wilayah Amerika UI.







Copyright © Sinar Harapan 2003





















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by Paul Goldstein and Jeffrey Steinberg

April 1991

from Parascope Website

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Introduction

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The Order of Skull & Bones

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Initiation and Ritual

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The Spartan Model

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Henry Stimson: Master Bonesman

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Stimson’s Kindergarten and the Cold War

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Vietnam: The Bonesmen’s Debacle

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Bush in Profile

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The Order’s Network

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The New World Order

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The Persian Gulf War

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Implications for Japan

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Bibliography

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Some Prominent Members

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Selected Quotations

Return to The Bushes and The New World Order

Return to Temas / Sociopolitica

Return to Skull and Bones



















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.

George H. Bush (left of clock) with the Skull and Crossbones group at Yale University, New Haven, CT circa 1947



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 rivalries 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.


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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:

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Scroll & Key
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Book & Snake
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Wolf’s Head
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Eliahu
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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:

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Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880).
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William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President of and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.
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Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).
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Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert Walker Bush
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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- ).
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John Thomas Daniels, agro-industrialist, founder of Archer Daniels Midland.
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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:

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Cabot
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Coolidge
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Forbes
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Higginson
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Sturgis
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Lodge
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Lowell
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Perkins
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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:

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Harriman
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Rockefeller
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Payne
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Davison
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Pillsbury
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Weyerhauser

A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to the United States during the 18th and 19th 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.


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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.



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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 19th 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.



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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:

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Theodore Roosevelt
*

William Howard Taft (a fellow Bonesman)
*

Woodrow Wilson
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Calvin Coolidge
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Herbert Hoover
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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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."

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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:

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



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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.



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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.



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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:

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Lord Day Lord
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Davis Polk Wardwell
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Simpson Thacher Bartlett
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Debevoise Plimpton Lyons & Gates
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Cravath Swaine & Moore
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Covington & Burling
*

Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods
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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.



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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 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had ended.

On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of Germany.

At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany’s plan of unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance.

In the Far East, Japan’s continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a threat to Washington’s desire to retain superpower status. If President Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy, their British "cousins" were quick to pick up on the parallels between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical international situation that existed 100 years earlier.

In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade.

Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson’s old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great Depression were the consequences of that interference.



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THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

It was against this historical backdrop that President Bush, invoking the World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson, went to war against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was personally instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have emphasized that a two-hour private meeting between the president and Margaret Thatcher in the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S. Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2, 1990 helped finalize Bush’s decision to immediately deploy military force.

Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel between Bush and FDR, who was greatly influenced by Stimson. According to the writer, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East.

As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States is in the process of establishing a string of permanent military bases throughout the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led by Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military presence to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is effectively captured by Washington. American bankers aided by U.S. gunboats now are setting world oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the Persian Gulf War is that the United States now has an oil weapon -- pointed principally at Germany and Japan. Ironically, America’s two chief economic rivals have paid out a total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush administration military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington’s hand.

Another telling example of how the Order’s man in the Oval Office intends to administer a crumbling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout of the majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American commercial banks on the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System to be "too big to fall." The stock purchase amounted to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of Citicorp, using the increased profits being enjoyed by the House of Saud as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil production since the beginning of the Gulf crisis in August 1990.

There points up a striking difference between the role of the United States in World War II and the Bush administration’s handling to date of the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went through a genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel Huntington described it as a "neo Hamiltonian" policy, a reference to the first United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Beginning in 1939, America became a major supplier of military and industrial goods under the Lend-Lease program to the European states fighting Hitler. At the same time, the federal government began issuing low-interest credits to revive the nation’s manufacturing base which had been gutted by a decade of economic depression. The industrial buildup accelerated once the United States formally entered .World War II, leading to the establishing of entirely new industrial sectors, such as aerospace and petrochemicals.

This time around -- at least to date -- there has been no such marshaling of the U.S. domestic industrial base. Despite moderate increases in the production of certain high-tech weapons systems, the U.S. economy continues its gradual slide into what could be a new depression. Unemployment is greater than at any point in the last decade. Some sociologists fear that the complete disintegration of America’s urban centers could produce new race-riots as early as the summer of 1991.

The single greatest challenge to George Bush and the Order is: Can they capitalize on the current revival of the American spirit to reverse the disastrous post-industrial society dogmas, and launch their own version of the World War II neo-Hamiltonian industrial recovery? So far, some doomsayers claim, it appears that Bush and his administration plan instead to direct their efforts at looting and blackmailing the rest of the world -- especially the gulf oil sheikdoms, Japan and Germany -- into bailing out the bankrupt U.S. financial houses and federal government and financing the posting of American-led foreign legions at every corner of the globe where there are large deposits of strategic raw materials. If this policy is not altered, George Bush may soon find himself presiding over a new disaster that will make the Vietnam debacle appear insignificant in comparison.

The politics of the New World Order appear to be borrowed largely from the pages of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Political columnist Patrick Buchanan, an early vocal opponent of the Bush Persian Gulf strategy, warned as early as August 1990 that the White House was falling into the trap of British "balance of power" politics, the very politics that left Great Britain on the scrap heap of world powers at the close of World War II, and put Winston Churchill, the architect of World War II and the Cold War, out of a job.

Since the crushing military defeat of Iraq by a technologically far superior American-led coalition, the Bush administration has vacillated on a postwar policy for the region. It has pursued a pragmatic power balancing game which is rife with potential problems. The two key elements of the American balance-of-power politics in the region are the preservation of a weakened but territorially whole Iraq to offset the other would-be regional-powers Iran and Syria. At the same time, it is tilting toward a nominally more "pro-Arab" position with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While the harsh reparations terms being imposed upon a war-devastated Iraq are probably, in the mind of Bush, aimed at dissuading any future regional military power from launching-cross-border aggressions, they amount to the slow, excruciating extermination of the population of that country. As one seasoned observer noted recently, earlier air wars had caused greater immediate losses of life, due to the inaccuracy of bombs and rockets, but had generally left basic infrastructures intact. The precision bombing of Iraq’s entire infrastructure has caused what a United Nations team has called an "apocalypse." The greater loss of life will occur in the aftermath of the combat as a country with 16 million inhabitants is suddenly thrown into a "pre-industrial" state with no electricity, no water or other necessities. American humanitarian aid, administered by occupying troops, will not offset this apocalypse -- especially if harsh war reparations and asset seizures deprive Iraq of the financial resources needed to begin a rebuilding process.

Regardless of the fact that the United States has not thrown the full weight of its military presence behind the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, the shortsightedness of the present Bush policy may very well lead to a Lebanon-type protracted civil war in Iraq. Such a war could potentially spread throughout the region.



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IMPLICATIONS FOR JAPAN

Throughout this short study of the Order of Skull & Bones, emphasis has been placed on the philosophy, the rituals and the modus operandi of the Bonesmen who have devoted their post-Yale careers to world politics. This particular emphasis was chosen in order to provide the Japanese reader with an insight into how the Bush presidency views the rest of the world, so that it will be possible for Japan to better understand what it faces in the post-Persian Gulf War strategic environment.

The implications of Skull & Bones domination over American policymaking under the Bush presidency are enormous. Japan must be prepared to meet what amounts to a fundamentally new challenge. Few of the postwar experiences in U.S. Japanese relations will have prepared the Japanese government and the leaders of Japanese industry and finance for-what they now face.

In the recent past, the policy of Washington toward Japan has been simply to use political leverage, mostly related to Japan’s regional security concerns, to exact compromises and concessions in the economic and financial sphere. But the United States, under its policy of free trade, privatization of the monetary and credit mechanisms, and the transition to post-industrial service-oriented forms of economic activity at home, has suffered a gradual but steady decline over the past 20 to 30 years. Japan, meanwhile, has prospered under a more protectionist and industry oriented policy.

In the past decade, Japan has been increasingly thrust into the role of scapegoat for the decline of American prosperity, while at the same time coming under mounting pressure to help finance the United States out of its economic mess. The pressures upon Japan to bail out its postwar big brother have caused tensions between Washington and Tokyo, but the Cold War had provided a common security interest that generally offset the occasional rough language.

Under the George Bush Skull & Bones regime at the White House all that has changed. True to the Bonesmen’s credo of constructive chaos and global political domination by the WASP Establishment, the United States is now out to dominate U.S.-Japanese relations with a degree of brutal frankness that will fly in the face of all previous American sensitivities to Japan’s honor. Gone are the days of former U.S. Ambassador Michael Mansfield, who always sought to maintain a public climate of friendship and cooperation between the two nations even when behind the scenes he was taking the toughest of stands on the most divisive issues.

Under the American-led New World Order, Japan can expect to be treated with far less respect publicly. It can expect that the Bush administration, including his coterie of former top CIA men now working directly out of the Oval Office, will be constantly interfering, covertly in the internal affairs of Nippon.

This shift in style has held sway since the Bush inauguration and the subsequent appointment of Michael Armacost as U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo. Armacost has assumed the posture of a Roman pro-consul, dictating policy to a weak satrap, rather than to engage, in diplomatic dialogue. Armacost’s performance even before the recent events in the Persian Gulf reestablished American military might as the defining factor in world affairs -- should have provided the Japanese leadership with a clue as to the shift under way in Washington’s new policy approach.

The Bush policy can best be described as a sophisticated containment policy. The new approach to Pacific affairs was telegraphed in the early days of the Bush administration when the president deployed three of his most trusted senior spooks to three critical Asian diplomatic posts: Armacost was sent to Tokyo; Bush’s vice presidential national security aide and former career CIA operator Donald Gregg was sent to Seoul; and John Lilly, another career CIA man and a fellow Yale Skull & Bones member, was sent to Beijing. The fact that three of the CIA’s most experienced clandestine field operators were assigned the senior diplomatic posts says a great deal about the Bush administration’s intentions to conduct sophisticated political-warfare and sow confusion among the three major nations of the Far East. Bush clearly intends to pursue the historic Skull & Bones mission of extending America’s dominion over the entire Pacific region. The idea of even paying lip service to equal partnership between Washington and Tokyo is over, at least for the time being.

The process of internally weakening Japan’s resistance to this overarching domination by Washington’s New World Order began with the Recruit scandal, when the Takeshita government was brought down through a U.S.-inspired secret intelligence operation. One of the primary targets of that operation was Yashuhiro Nakasone, the former prime minister and the architect of Japan’s post-1973 effort to develop independent ties to the oil-producing Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

It is important to understand that Bush’s WASP warriors, while adopting a similar approach of non-compromise and domination over Israel and the Zionist lobby inside the United States, will not hesitate to use the Jewish lobby as an instrument for bashing Japan into line. Thus, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher went out of his way to encourage the Anti-Defamation League’s leadership convention, which he addressed last year, to join with the Bush administration in pressuring Japan to submit to American free trade demands.

The Bush administration will at times encourage the Zionist lobby and Israel to mercilessly attack Japan and will at other times severely criticize Zionist "insensitivity" to Tokyo. This will all be part of the Bush strategy to dominate the Pacific Rim by playing one country or faction off against another, using hard cop-soft cop and other classic techniques of the intelligence trade.

Japan will be offered a limited junior partner status in the New World Order, while coming under mounting pressure to continue providing tribute to finance the American imperium. Above all else, Japan will be forbidden from developing any independent foreign policy toward its neighbors, the Soviet Union, the Arab world or anyone else. Such programs as the Global Infrastructure Fund, to the extent that they pose an alternative to the U.S.-dominated international regime, will be vetoed.

As a subservient junior partner in the New World Order arrangement, Japan’s financial and economic muscle will be used as the piggy-bank for U.S. imperial objectives. The $14 billion "contribution" to the U.S.-led Gulf-War coalition was another benchmark in the transition in U.S.-Japanese relations, as was President Bush’s abrupt cancellation of his long-scheduled state visit to Tokyo. When the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) attempted to visit Kuwait immediately after the gulf cease-fire in March l991, the U.S. State Department refused to grant him permission to go into the American-occupied territory. These intentional diplomatic affronts should be understood as telling signs of the new American-Japanese relationship.

On the other-hand, President Bush also suddenly scheduled a brief summit with Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu in Newport Beach, California for April 4, 1991. One purpose of the sudden meeting was to lay out clear parameters of acceptable behavior on the part of the Japanese government when the prime minister meets later in April with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Japanese Soviet relations, like all other crucial Japanese foreign relations, will be expected to conform with those of the U.S.

An essential blackmail "stick" that the Bush administration intends to hold over Tokyo is-Japanese dependency on Persian Gulf oil. As-the result of the Gulf War and the post war American military occupation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other-key oil-producing sheikdoms, the Bush administration will exert unabashed control over world oil supplies -- and prices. In the New World Order, Japan’s oil supply will be increasingly linked to concessions on a range of monetary and economic issues, including the Global Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) talks, which broke up last year as the result of largely Japanese and continental European resistance to the pure free-trade system sought by Bush and Thatcher. Assistant Treasury Secretary David Mulford, a former senior official at White Weld Securities, Inc., which restructured Saudi Arabia’s entire financial apparatus, has recently announced that he will seek to prosecute Japan for its violations of the GATT regulations that call upon Tokyo to surrender government control over interest rate policies to the international banking community.

The Bush presidency, with its ambitious drive for domination over former friends and foes alike, poses an unprecedented challenge to Japan. While this is neither the time nor the place to offer a solution to the growing dilemma, the profile of the men of Skull & Bones in this white paper should provide the Japanese reader with helpful insights into the nature of the American WASP warrior class and the secret society which spawned it.



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Bibliography

1.

"Bush Boy’s Club: Skull and Bones." Covert Information Action Bulletin, Winter, 1990.
2.

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. Random House, New York, 1969.
3.

Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1990.
4.

Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wisemen: Six Friends and the World They Made. Simon and Schuster, New York, l986.
5.

"Membership List of All Skull and Bones Members From 1833-1950." The Russell Trust Association, New Haven, Conn., 1949.
6.

Ranleagh, John. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986.
7.

Rosenbaum, Ron. "Skull and Bones: An Elegy for Mumbo Jumbo." Esquire Magazine, September, 1977.
8.

"Skull and Bones: A Short History." Executive Intelligence Review, January 30, 1980.
9.

Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy. In Active Service in Peace and War. Octagon Press, New York, 1949
10.

Sutton, Antony C. America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. Liberty Press, Billings, Mont., 1986.
11.

Winks, Robin. Cloak and Gown Scholars in the Secret War William Morrow, New York, 1987.

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Some Prominent Members of Skull & Bones

*

William F. Buckley, Jr. (Bones Class of 1950):
Founder of National Review, the leading conservative magazine in the United States. Brother James (Skull & Bones l944) is now a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals. William F. Buckley, Jr., former CIA officer in Mexico, also built the political grassroots conservative movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. President Bush and Buckley have recently split over Buckley’s strong pro-lsraelism.

*

McGeorge Bundy (Skull & Bones initiate of 1940):
Scion of the Skull & Bones Bundy family. Father Harvey H. Bundy was Skull & Bones, as was brother William P. Bundy. McGeorge served in the War Department during World War II as Henry Stimson’s assistant and later became the National Security Adviser to President Kennedy. William Bundy became a CIA official and later served in key positions at the Departments of State and Defense. McGeorge headed the Ford Foundation (1968-1980) and William chaired the Council on Foreign Relations (1972-1983).

*

George Bush (initiated in 1948):
President of the United States. Comes from a complete Bones family. Father Prescott, a Bones initiate of the class of 1917. Uncle George Herbert Walker, Bones Class of 1927. U S Federal District Court Judge John Walker is also a relative and a Bonesman.

*

Alfred Cowles (Class of 1913):
Built the Cowles Communication empire based on the Des Moines (lowa) Register and the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star and Tribune. These two newspapers play a significant role in shaping the early presidential primaries, especially in Iowa.

*

Hugh Cunningham (Bones 1934):
CIA man from 1947 to 1973. He served in top positions in the Clandestine Services, the Board of National Estimates and later as Director of Training.

*

Thomas Daniels (initiated in 1914):
Founder of the largest agro-business and grain cartel company in Minnesota -- Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM). Served in the Foreign Service and later during World War II as head of the Fats and Oils Section of the War Production Board. ADM Corporation’s new head Dwayne Andreas is one of the most powerful figures in U.S.-Soviet trade relations. Daniels’s only son, John (Bones 1943), also works in ADM. The bank which underwrites ADM stock issues is the Morgan Stanley investment bank

*

Richard Ely Danielson (Skull & Bones 1907):
Past publisher of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, one of the leading magazines for seeing which policy line on a variety of issues is coming out of the Eastern Establishment.

*

Russell Wheeler Davenport (initiated in 1923):
Fortune magazine writer and editor, made this magazine the leading authority on financial matters in the United States. Davenport created the Fortune 500 companies list.

*

Henry P. Davison (Bones Class of l920):
Key senior partner in the Morgan banking and financial trust networks. His fellow Bonesman Harold Stanley (1908) founded the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Davison and his family helped set up the Guaranty Trust Corporation which became Morgan Guaranty Thomas Cochran (1904 Bonesman) was one of the most powerful partners in the Morgan bank. The influence of the Morgan banking system can be seen in its relationship with the hierarchy of U.S. intelligence. The head of the Office of Strategic Services, Gen. William Donovan, worked as a Morgan intelligence operative in the 1920s and prepared the intelligence reports for the Morgan banking concerns on developments in Europe. F. Trubee Davison became CIA Director of Personnel in 1951 and placed key Bonesmen in the right positions inside the CIA.

*

Averell Harriman (1913 initiate):
Scion of the Harriman railroad family. His brother Roland (Skull & Bones 1917) ran the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman. Averell was one of the most powerful members of the Skull & Bones fraternity, His government posts ranged from Ambassador to Russia during World War II and various State Department positions to chief negotiator on the Vietnam Talks. Confidential adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and later Nixon and Carter. His investment banking firm is virtually a Skull & Bones bank‹nine senior partners are from Skull & Bones. President Bush’s father worked in Brown Brothers Harriman after helping to merge several companies in the United Rubber Corporation of America.

*

Winston Lord (Bones Class of 1959):
Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1983-l988). Former State Department official and CIA officer in Asia. China expert. Six members of the Lord family were Skull & Bones, including Charles Edwin Lord, former Comptroller of the Currency, Department of the Treasury. Oswald Bates Lord (Skull & Bones l926) married Mary Pillsbury of the Minnesota based Pillsbury Flour Corporation. Winston Lord is their son.

*

Robert A. Lovett (1918 initiate):
Put together the Brown Brothers Harriman merger and later organized the aviation industry mobilization for World War II. Became part of the most exclusive power group in World War II under Henry Stimson. Lovett was one of the five or six most powerful men in the United States for nearly 40 years until his death in 1986.

*

Henry Luce (initiated in 1920):
Built the Time-Life publishing empire. Became the leading publicist of the "American century" doctrine.

*

Dino Pionzio (Bones Class of 1950):
CIA deputy chief of station in Chile during the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Now works at the investment firm Dillion Read.

*

Alphonso Taft (initiated in 1833):
Secretary of War (1876), Attorney General (1876-1877) and later Minister to Austria and Russia. Co-founder of Skull & Bones.

*

Robert A. Taft (1910 initiate):
Speaker of the House of Representatives (1921-1926) and Senator (R-Ohio). Leader of the Isolationist movement in the 1930s. His son Robert A. Taft, Jr., also senator from Ohio, led the right-wing of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert A. Taft, Jr., however, was the only member of the Taft family who was not Skull & Bones.

*

William H. Taft (Skull & Bones 1878):
President of the United States (1908-1912) and appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). Secretary of War (1904-1908). Trustee, Carnegie Institution. Part of the long line of Tafts who served in the U.S. government.

*

William Collins Whitney (initiated 1863):
Secretary of the Navy (1885-1889). Promoter of the Naval Shipyards and financier. Part of the Whitney family which sent eight of its members to Yale to become Skull & Bonesmen. Family intermarried with the Payne, Harriman and Vanderbilt clans. The Whitneys became some of Wall Street’s most powerful financiers through the Guaranty and Knickerbocker Trust Companies.

Current U.S. senators who are Skull & Bones members

*

Sen. Jonathan Bingham (D-N.M.).
*

Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
*

Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.); Former Navy Secretary and on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
*

Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.): Recently killed in an airplane crash. was a Bonesman as was his father. The Heinz family has one of the largest food-producing companies in the world.
*

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.): Formerly on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kerry is now on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


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Selected Quotations

-- During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, two Skull & Bones advisers to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert Lovett, met in the west wing of the White House to discuss strategy. According to author Godfrey Hodgson, there was a photograph of master Bonesman Henry L. Stimson, their mentor, on Lundy’s desk. "All during the conversation the old Colonel seemed to be staring me straight in the face," recalled Lovett. Finally, he said to Bundy, "Mac, I think the best service we can perform for the president is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson would."

-- At the Potsdam summit in 1946 when President Truman first met Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Stimson told the president: "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him."

-- Commenting on the plan of Robert Morgenthau, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, to deindustrialize Germany after World War II, Stimson wrote: ". . . just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate on their victims . . . a crime against civilization itself?" He added rather ironically that the plan was like "a beautiful Nazi program! This is to laugh!"

-- "They possessed a common background, common experience, and a common liking for old wines, proper English and Savile Row clothing," wrote the biographer of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. A top level diplomat and State Department powerhouse during the first half of the 20th century, Bonesman Hugh Wilson adds, "The Foreign Service [is] a pretty good club."

-- "These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations and proper clubs," wrote historian and former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "The New York financial and legal community was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations."

-- British author Godfrey Hodgson stated in an essay on the American Establishment that it was "characteristic of these men to take on the burdens of world power with a certain avidity... It reflected a grim but grand duty that was a legacy from half-buried layer of New England Puritanism."

-- Averell Harriman’s father, owner of the largest railroad company in the United States at the turn of the century, told his son: "Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility. Money must work for the country."

-- "I scoffed at Harvard’s Porcellian club. It was too smug. But to get into Bones, you had to do something for Yale, wrote Averell Harriman. He would frequently return to the "Tomb on High Street." During the Paris Peace Conference on the Vietnam War, Harriman was quite upset about not being able to attend a "Bones Reunion." In the book The Wise Men, Harriman is described as willing to talk openly about national security affairs, but "he refused, however, to tell [even] his family anything about Bones... so complete was his trust in Bones’s code of secrecy..."

-- Stimson during the liberation of France in 1944 wrote about the need for France’s reconstruction following the Nazi occupation of France: "America cannot supervise the elections of a great country like France. Consequently, we must eventually leave the execution of the State Department formula to the French themselves... where we ourselves will assume responsibility in part or more for its execution according to Anglo-Saxon ideals."

-- Stimson on Austria and Germany following World War II: "They [the British] haven’t any grasp apparently of the underlying need of proper economic arrangements to make peace stick... If they restore Austria to her position in which she was left by the Versailles arrangement 25 years ago, why they would reduce her to a non-self-sustaining state [is beyond me]... Central Europe after the war has got to eat. She has got to be free of tariffs in order to eat."

-- Stimson was "opposed to a Carthaginian Peace" in which Germany was reduced to a non functioning society. He wrote, "The Ruhr and Saarland... [must not] be turned into a second rate industrial land . . . regardless of what it means to Germany... [rather] to the welfare of the entire continent "

-- In 1948, the debate within the U.S. government over the creation of the state of Israel was reaching critical intensity. President Truman was the "dark horse" candidate to defeat the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey. Truman thought he needed the Jewish groups to mobilize in his support in order to get elected. He also believed that after so many years of suffering and persecution, the Jews deserved a homeland of their own. However, his most trusted foreign policy advisers, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett, were, according to the book The Wise Men, "all dead set against the birth of Israel... However humanitarian a Jewish homeland might seem... it posed a real risk to U.N. national security. It was absolutely vital that the U.S. maintain its pipeline to Mideast oil. Supporting the Zionist cause would only antagonize the Arabs." Lovett said, "Israel was one ally too many "

-- On Japan, Stimson and McGeorge Bundy wrote their book On Active Service in Peace and War: "Since 1937, when the Japanese attacked China, Stimson had been urging, as a private citizen, an embargo on all American trade with Japan, and this attitude he carried with him into the Cabinet [when he became Secretary of War]." Stimson prepared a memorandum in 1940 pointing out how Japan had yielded before American firmness, in her withdrawal from Shantung and Siberia in 1919 and her acceptance of naval inferiority in 1921. "Japan," Stimson wrote, "has historically shown that she can misinterpret a pacifistic policy of the United States for weakness. She has also historically shown that when the United States indicates by clear language and bold actions that she intends to carry out a clear and affirmative policy in the Far East, Japan will yield to that policy even though it conflicts with her own Asiatic policy and conceived interests. For the United States now to indicate either by soft words or inconsistent actions that she has no such clear and definite policy towards the Far East will only encourage Japan to bolder action."

-- On December 7, 1941, Stimson wrote in his diary: "When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that this country united has practically nothing to fear, while the apathy and division stirred by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging."

-- On the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Stimson wrote in an article for Harper’s Weekly in 1947: "My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face."

-- At the Truman White House in the presence of Secretary of State James Byrnes, Adm. Leahy and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, according to his biographer: "Stimson had argued consistently for a commitment to allow the Japanese to keep their Emperor, not because- with the memory of Manchuria in his mind‹he had any special sympathy for him, but because only the Emperor could persuade the Japanese to surrender and therefore save American lives."



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