Picking at Bones: Alexandra Robbins' Secrets of the Tomb
Blood, John Amos
Book Review - "Picking at Bones: Alexandra Robbins' Secrets of the Tomb" Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power BY ALEXANDRA ROBBINS Little, Brown/240 pages/525.95 REVIEWED BY John Amos Blood Back...
...The society is, as the saying goes, shrouded in secrecy, yet the shroud itself is conspicuous...
...More than 20 years of denying inconvenient facts such as those, as Ledeen demonstrates, is why we now have to fight a war that is unlikely to end in our lifetimes...
...I've supported women's rights...
...Bush's Axis of Evil, many nations—particularly Saudi Arabia—are deeply involved in training, funding and planning terrorist operations...
...The War Against the Terror Masters Why It Happened...
...Bonesman forever...
...One of the first parties he hosted in the White House, Robbins reports, was a reunion with the Bonesmen of his year...
...Though she reassures readers that "Skull and Bones did not as a society conspire to deploy the atomic bomb and invade the Bay of Pigs...
...Though Ledeen labels Iran as the "mother of modern Islamic terrorism," he debunks the idea that only Shi'ites contribute to terror and that one religious sect doesn't cooperate with terrorists of another...
...Surely no one outside the black-helicopter fringe believes that this glorified fraternity is a cabal dedicated to the New World Order...
...Contrary to the starkness of the facade, the interior turns out to be the ultimate grandmother's attic, crammed with "stuffed moose heads, candles, mannequin knights in armor, antlers, boating flags, manuscripts, medieval art-work, old photographs, a samovar, a Buddha on an elephant, a trunk full of woolen blankets and statues of Demosthenes...
...His son was never much of an habitue—perhaps because of the rule against drinking on the premises—and has not been back since graduation...
...The surveillance information on them was the reason that so many were arrested so quickly after 9/11...
...He won't tell me what it is about...
...Ledeen does this by recounting many facts we find it inconvenient to recognize and drawing from them conclusions we may find it uncomfortable to act upon...
...But Skull and Bones is not just any club...
...One of the pranksters told Robbins, "We just wanted to f*** with that p...
...No one can question my dedication to women" Weisberg turned him down anyway...
...The white male scholar, unless he is truly Old Blue, is not...
...Sessions devoted to sexual history, quaintly referred to as "Connubial Bliss," serve to break down inhibitions before the wider-ranging autobiographical talks and sometimes-harsh interrogations...
...The "hidden paths of power" line gets even more tenuous in regard to George W. Bush, who once worked briefly for a fellow member and took campaign donations from several others, but whose biggest Bones benefactors also happen to be his relatives...
...America has always responded, as we did in World War II, by gathering ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and moving out to defeat decisively some nation that has attacked us...
...One of the puzzles of 9/11 is that the terrorists were able to resist assimilation in American culture, even though some of them lived here for several years and took advantage of everything they were not permitted in their homelands, even such corrupt things as American movies...
...Their members can be found in considerable numbers across the United States and have been of passing interest to the FBI...
...Ledeen's view of Saudi Arabia sounds much like the recent Rand Corporation briefing to Pentagon officials, which the State Department and even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld felt compelled to disavow...
...Lurid rumors of what goes on inside—masturbating in a coffin, encounters with the resident `Bones Whore"—are, according to one member, promoted by the group as a "smoke screen" for its real activities...
...If it's true that he considered making Frederick W. Smith (Bones '66) secretary of defense, was it due to Smith's being a "friend of General Russell...
...Martin's Press/262 pages/$24.95...
...Society songs ("sacred anthems") and indoor soccer ("boodleball") keep the atmosphere from getting too heavy...
...It will be interesting to see if Bones' prestige holds up now that its selection criteria have changed...
...Robbins' account of formal and informal activities is convincing, as is her detaileddescription—evidently based on a surreptitious visit—of the building itself, down to the height of the walnut wainscoting in its sanctum sanctorum...
...Senator Kerry, you're a liberal," the young journalist objected...
...Even after 9/11, when it was clear that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was playing host for bin Laden and his terror gang, we knew where to apply military force...
...Here we come to the inevitable question of connections and the extent to which a small group of men and (since 1991) women push the buttons of American power...
...The first belief that Ledeen demolishes is that Islamic terrorist organizations operate separately and with little state support...
...Peter Jennings ran excerpts on World News Tonight...
...Which is not to say that Hezbollah hasn't...
...Picking at Bones Secrets of the Tomb Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power BY ALEXANDRA ROBBINS Little, Brown/240 pages/525.95 REVIEWED BY John Amos Blood Back when Slate editor Jacob Weis-berg was a Yale student interning in Washington, D.C., he once got a phone call from John Kerry's secretary...
...To the contrary, modern Islamic terrorists have constructed a global network that, though not organized like a military force with a regular command structure, does in fact cooperate regularly in training, arming and sometimes even in planning...
...He demonstrates clearly that in addition to Mr...
...Not bad for a group that takes only 15 new members a year...
...As Alexandra Robbins notes in Secrets of the Tomb, its membership roster includes three presidents of the United States—soon to be four, if Kerry gets his way—and a legion of famous politicians, diplomats, jurists and businessmen...
...Senator Kerry wants to see you in his office," the secretary said...
...As we move toward action against Saddam Hussein's regime, it is not at all clear that we have decided just who the terrorist enemy is, or what we have to do to defeat him...
...In Robbins' words: "The society has always demanded invisibility while simultaneously publicizing its supremacy...
...This book doesn't say what Kerry—a '66, by the way—is called, but according to Robbins, George W.'s alias among fellow Bonesmen is "Temporary...
...According to Ledeen, of the nearly 1,200 mosques in the United States, most were built in the last 15 years and mostly with Saudi money...
...Whatever this implies for the future of the society, or of society in general, the present day is certainly a Golden Age for Bones: the next presidential race could well feature patriarchs at the top of both major tickets...
...A massive sandstone building with darkened slits for windows and black iron doors 12 feet tall, the "tomb" is a campus landmark, epitomizing the double game thatall such clubs play...
...she makes a bit too much of the group's John Amos Blood is a Yalie who never got tapped...
...Or did it have more to do with his being the founder of Federal Express...
...Reading this, it's hard not to wish that Kerry had answered instead: "It's just a club, you little twit...
...Of course this was all a show for Rosenbaum, the self-styled "Ahab of Skull and Bones," who has been trying to expose the society's secrets for at least 25 years...
...Bones today, Robbins reports, "chases down minority candidates—the juniors who, rather than sitting at the top of their class, instead fill certain society niches...
...Many of the furnishings have been stolen (or in Bones argot, "crooked") by members proving their devotion to the society...
...One of the book's inside sources (all of whom are quoted anonymously) describes the ceremony as "something like a Harry Potter novel...
...Nothing about Skull and Bones is less mysterious than the success rate of its members...
...MICHAEL A. LEDEEN St...
...The Bushes are of course the most famous Bonesmen of all...
...The only common factor linking the terrorist network is the number of dedicated Islamic fundamentalists found in every Middle Eastern nation, in Europe and—in considerable numbers—right here in the United States...
...Where We Are Now...
...The next morning on Capitol Hill, the senator sat Weisberg down and invited him to become a fellow member of Skull and Bones, Yale's oldest and most prestigious senior society...
...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 Inconvenient Facts, Uncomfortable Analyses influence on such organizations as the Roosevelt War Department and the CIA...
...That's a prospect that we nonmembers ("barbarians" to them) might relish, if only in hope that the candidates will blurt out esoteric jargon under the pressure of debate...
...He writes the "Loose Canons" column for The American Prowler, and frequently appears as a military analyst on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC...
...Behind nearly all of this is money from Saudi Arabia...
...The cooperation is ad hoc, making the enemy harder to identify and locate...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...Hamas and Islamic Jihad—next to al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, the most dangerous terrorist organizations—have operated here very successfully, raising money, recruiting terrorists and even planning terrorist attacks...
...If you made a list of the 15 most ambitious and accomplished juniors at an elite university, throwing in the occasional scion of a powerful family, how else do you think most would turn out in 25 years...
...Weisberg figured it might be over an article he'd written, or one that Kerry was hoping he'd write...
...For the rest of their time in college, the members (known till they graduate as "knights," thereafter as "patriarchs") meet twice a week for dinner and a kind of group therapy...
...The place long ago ceased to be an exclusive WASP preserve (George W.'s year included a black student and an Orthodox Jew), while continuing to honor traditional standards of merit, by which the captain of the football team and the editor of the Yale Daily News were virtually assured of being "tapped...
...Ledeen says that the terror masters were confident of maintaining psychological Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration...
...That network is both wide and deep...
...Sons of the WASP elite all, the men in question clearly valued their Bones membership, but as one of many cultural, institutional and familial ties binding them together...
...Regarding the "hidden paths of power" in the subtitle, Robbins alternates her debunking with hype, as if trying to keep the subject glamorous enough to justify a book...
...Yet Bones is a network that would make the participants at Renaissance Week-end drool over their policy papers...
...How We'll Win...
...REVIEWED BY Jed Babbin Wars usually don't begin with a debate over the identity of the enemy...
...Last year the journalist Ron Rosenbaum produced a videotape of a Bones initiation ceremony, complete with simulated human sacrifice and someone in the role of George W. Bush (Bones '68) informing neophytes: "I'm gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore...
...The woman who is also gay and outspoken, and preferably Native American, is likely to be considered...
...Why do you support this organization that does not admit women...
...Notable booty includes the gravestone of the university's namesake, Elihu Yale, and what might be the skull of the Apache Chief Geronimo, supposedly removed from its Oklahoma burial place by a group including presidential father and grandfather Prescott Bush (Bones '17...
...Michael Ledeen's new book disabuses us of many wrongheaded notions about who the enemy is, and who he isn't...
...Probably the most difficult of Ledeen's conclusions for Americans to accept is that the terrorists have established a highly effective network here in the United States over a period of more than 20 years...
...The 41st president was reportedly an ardent knight and remains a devoted patriarch who still now and then drops by the tomb...
...Recent elections reflect a shift not so much of demographics as of politics...
...The real initiation, in Rob-bins' telling, is a whimsical masquerade involving the gentlest ritual abuse at the hands of members playing the Pope, the Devil and Don Quixote, among other characters...
...I've marched with battered women," Kerry replied, according to Weisberg...
...Yet George W. remains attached to the society...
...On the other hand, they might start calling each other by their secret names, which wouldn't cheer supporters of the president...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
