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He introduced the future conservative intellectual to a CIA officer named E. Howard Hunt. The latter was already on a career trajectory that would include a supporting role in the toppling of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, more central participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and Watergate in 1972. Buckley, who was inducted into Skull and Bones and finished Yale shortly after Bush, went to work in the CIA’s Mexico City station under Hunt, something Buckley did not acknowledge until 2005, though their friendship had long been recognized. 8
     
    When Bush entered Yale, the university was welcoming back countless veterans of the OSS to its faculty. Sherman Kent, a member of the research and analysis division of the OSS, played a major role in the pipeline. Bush, with naval intelligence work already under his belt by the time he arrived at Yale, would have been seen as a particularly prime candidate for recruitment.
     
    Bush’s Proving Ground
     
    Out of Yale, Bush went directly into the employ of Dresser Industries, a peculiar, family-connected firm providing essential services to the oil industry. Dresser has never received the scrutiny it deserves. Between the lines of its official story can be discerned an alternate version that could suggest a corporate double life.
     
    For roughly the first half century of its existence, the S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Company had been a small, solid, unexceptional outfit. By the late 1920s, the children of founder Solomon Dresser wanted to liquidate the company in order to finance their high-society lifestyle. They found eager buyers in Prescott Bush’s Yale friends Roland and W. Averell Harriman— the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman—who had only recently set up a merchant bank to assist wealthy families in such endeavors. At the time, Dresser’s principal assets consisted of two very valuable patents in the rapidly expanding oil industry. One was for a packer that made it much easier to remove oil from the ground; the other was for a coupler that made long-range natural gas pipelines feasible. Instead of controlling the oil, Dresser’s strategy was to control the technology that made drilling possible. W. A. Harriman and Company, which had brought Prescott Bush aboard two years earlier, purchased Dresser in 1928.
     
    Prescott Bush and his partners installed an old friend, H. Neil Mallon, at the helm. Mallon’s primary credential was that he was “one of them.” Like Prescott Bush, Mallon was from Ohio, and his family seems both to have known the Bushes and to have had its own set of powerful connections. He was Yale, and he was Skull and Bones, so he could be trusted.
     
    A quiet, modest, balding man, Mallon remained a bachelor until his sixties and became essentially a chosen member of the Bush family. Poppy would name his third son Neil Mallon Bush, after this “favorite uncle.” Evidence of the special relationship appears in a November 23, 1944, letter Ensign George H. W. Bush sent from the aircraft carrier San Jacinto to his parents:
     
Here is something which pleased me. Today I got a package of Xmas presents from Neil Mallon. There were some books, a knife set, couple of games, picture frame and some little soap pills. A fine present and it made me very happy. I shall write Neil this afternoon—he has always been such a good friend to us children, hasn’t he?
     
    Hiring decisions by the Bonesmen at the Harriman firm were presented as jolly and distinctly informal, with club and family being prime qualifications. The way one Harriman partner, Knight Woolley, a Yale and Bones confrere of Prescott Bush’s, tells it, Mallon simply wandered into their offices at the precise moment they were deciding who should run the newly acquired Dresser. 9 Mallon was flush from a recent six-month mountaineering holiday in the Swiss Alps when he stopped in for a visit. 10 Roland Harriman turned and pointed at Mallon, then uttered the