The leading lights of the Eastern establishment-in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman pays Bones’s tax bill), in blue-blood law firms (Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment-the people who have shaped America’s national character since it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in that crypt over there. You could ask … but I think you get the idea. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it’s true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security for life. (“Spook,” the Yale slang word for secret-society member, is, of course, Agency slang for spy.) You could ask J. after leaving Bones-or George Bush, who ran the C.I.A.-whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. You could ask Bill Bundy or Bill Buckley, both of whom went into the C.I.A.

You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pile as part of his initiation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. You could ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart if there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a skeleton suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside the tomb. You could ask Averell Harriman whether there’s really a sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce lay down naked in that coffin and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to fourteen fellow Bonesmen. In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be concealed about anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank tombstone walls could be holding the last secrets left in America. For nearly a century and a half, Skull and Bones has been the most influential secret society in the nation, and now it is one of the last. It’s the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. Unlike members of other societies, Bonesmen pay no dues, though patriarchs receive an annual letter requesting a 'voluntary contribution to the Russell Trust Association.' In truth, Skull and Bones has never been wealthy.Take a look at that hulking sepulcher over there.

The fading of Deer Island exemplifies the dwindling finances of Skull and Bones, which can no longer claim the largest society endowment at Yale. 'It's basically ruins.' Another Bonesman says that to call the island 'rustic' would be to glorify it. 'Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings,' a patriarch sighs.

But although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes.

The forty-acre retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to 'get together and rekindle old friendships'. Lawrence River - Deer Island, in Alexandria Bay. Skull and Bones doesn't own an opulent island hideaway like the one depicted in The Skulls. The land on the island is densely overgrown, with a small lodge on the southern corner of the island. tour vessels that operate in the local waterways. The island lies near Boldt Castle and can be seen up close from several Canadian and U.S. It is owned entirely by the Russell Trust Association and is used as a Skull and Bones retreat. It lies between mainland Canada and United States, within the Saint Lawrence River, in the Town of Alexandria, close to Alexandria Bay, New York. Deer Island is one of the American Thousand Islands.

Skull and bones society