Read The Family for Free Online

Yale” in their four years there: Harry William LeGore won with 129 votes; Prescott S. Bush placed second with 36 votes. “Most Popular” was Spencer Armstrong Pumpelly, with 174 votes; Prescott S. Bush placed fifth with 21 votes. “Most to Be Admired” was Spencer Armstrong Pumpelly, 108 votes; fourth was Prescott Bush, 30 votes. Prescott was not mentioned in the categories of “Best Natured,” “Best All-Around Athlete,” “Most Scholarly,” “Most Brilliant,” or “Most Likely to Succeed,” but he did win “Most Versatile,” with 70 votes.
    “There’s a difference, a big difference,” said Stuart Symington Jr., “between going to Yale and scaling Yale. The hierarchy of Prescott Bush’s Yale began with excelling in sports. With that achievement you could qualify for the next step—a fraternity, then an honor society—all a staging area for the senior societies, the final step up the ladder. The senior societies held the greatest prestige, and of them nothing mattered more than Skull and Bones. Scaling that world of Yale was more important than getting the college education or degree of Yale.”
    In May 1916, Prescott reached the summit; he was one of fifteen men tapped for Skull and Bones. These names—Alfred Raymond Bellinger, Prescott Sheldon Bush, Henry Sage Fenimore Cooper, Oliver Baty Cunningham, Samuel Sloan Duryee, Edward Roland Noel Harriman, Henry Porter Isham, William Ellery Sedgwick James, Harry William LeGore, Henry Neil Mallon, Albert William Olsen, John Williams Overton, Frank Parsons Shepard Jr., Kenneth Farrand Simpson, and Knight Woolley—would anchor Prescott’s life, the lives of his two sisters, who would marry Yalies, and his brother, also Skull and Bones, as well as the lives of his children and his children’s children. These Bonesmen became one another’s best friends, confidants, colleagues, business associates, golfing partners, investors, and clients.
    Skull and Bones has been called “the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known” because its members have presided at the highest realms of American business and political life. Former Bonesmen hail from some of America’s most prominent families: Bundy, Coffin, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, Whitney, and, of course, Bush.
    A Yale student named William H. Russell started the secret organization in 1832 in an effort to create a new world order that would place the best and the brightest at the helm of society. A wealthy elitist, Russell believed that the most important decisions should only be made by those who are bred to make them, so he created an environment that would shape the characters of the men who would shape the world. He called his group the Brotherhood of Death or, more informally, the order of Skull and Bones, patterned after a secret society founded in Germany, also in 1832. Since then, Skull and Bones has maintained its “tomb”—the basement of its headquarters—on the Yale campus in a windowless house on High Street just off the Old Campus and has selected fifteen men, and later, women, too, in every junior class to be admitted to its elite ranks. These men, who automatically include the captains of the football and baseball teams, the editor of the
Yale Daily News
, the president of the student council, and the head of the Political Union, are all sworn to lifetime secrecy about their rituals and commit themselves to helping each other scale life’s summits.
    Within Skull and Bones, all Bonesmen are called “Knights,” and members refer to the rest of the world as “Barbarians.” When writing to one another, each Knight is addressed as “Pat” or “Patriarch” to signal his dominant role at life’s table. In the tomb deep within the ivy-covered house, the Knights swear allegiance to each other until death renders them nothing more than skull and bones. This allegiance gives all Knights a leg up in the Barbarian world, for members are always willing to