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that only Bush himself had bailed out and that Bush’s plane was never on fire. “No smoke came out of his cockpit when he opened his canopy to bail out . . . I think he could have saved those lives if they were alive. I don’t know that they were, but at least they had a chance if he had attempted a water landing.”
     
    In interviews with other papers over the next few days, Mierzejewski, also a recipient of a Distinguished Flying Cross, would say that he was inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt until he realized the extent of the inconsistencies. 20
     
    Perhaps this problem with story discrepancies, a problem that would resurface time and again in Poppy’s life, so often it became a virtual theme, explains why Poppy Bush never penned a comprehensive autobiography. 21 There were too many secrets, too many different stories to keep straight.
     
    More than half a century later, when he was seventy-two years old, Poppy again began parachuting out of planes, ostensibly as a birthday celebration. He would continue this show of bravado and virility into his eighties. “The reasons behind this are strictly personal,” Jim McGrath, Bush’s assistant, said when the 1997 jump was announced. “It has to do with World War Two. When it happens, we’ll explain it.” But when the time came, no satisfying explanation emerged. Poppy treated his skydive as a novelty and a thrill—and never clarified what happened on September 2, 1944.
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    Viva Zapata
     
    I N 1945, WITH THE END OF THE WAR, George H. W. “Poppy” Bush entered Yale University. The CIA recruited heavily at all of the Ivy League schools in those days, with the New Haven campus the standout. “Yale has always been the agency’s biggest feeder,” recalled CIA officer Osborne Day (class of ’43). “In my Yale class alone there were thirty-five guys in the agency.” 1 Bush’s father, Prescott, was on the university’s board, and the school was crawling with faculty serving as recruiters for the intelligence services. 2 Most notable was Norman Holmes Pearson, a professor of American studies who had headed wartime counterintelligence in London and was instrumental in setting up systems after the war for recruitment and vetting of potential agents. 3
     
    The school’s secret societies helped to make it a happy hunting ground. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, who wrote a book-length study of Skull and Bones, describes how these groups serve as a “social pyramid, because the process successively narrowed down the elite of a class.” 4 Yale’s society boys were the cream of the crop, and could keep secrets to boot. And no secret society was more suited to the spy establishment than Skull and Bones, for which Poppy Bush, like his father, was tapped in his junior year. Established in 1832, Skull and Bones is the oldest secret society at Yale, and thus at least theoretically entrusted its membership with a more comprehensive body of secrets than any other campus group. Bones alumni would appear throughout the public and private history of both wartime and peacetime intelligence; names such as William Bundy, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Richard Drain, and Evan Galbraith would be associated with the fledgling CIA. And these spies would regularly return to the Skull and Bones tomb, writes Robbins, where “they would speak openly about things they shouldn’t have spoken about.” 5 Famous spies would also emerge from other Yale secret societies and from the general campus population. 6
     
    Bush and his friends weren’t quite the Edward Wilson character portrayed in the 2006 movie The Good Shepherd , which shows a Yale poetry student and Skull and Bones member being wooed at every turn by the Office of Strategic Services. But they weren’t far off. 7
     
    One of the OSS recruiters was James Burnham, a philosophy instructor and covert operations adviser whose catches included a young Connecticut oil scion named William F. Buckley Jr. in 1950.