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help each other with financial assistance, social entrée, and political access. The Knights also pledge a lifetime tithe to the Russell Trust Association, the corporate shell of Skull and Bones and the richest corporation in the state of Connecticut. The RTA also owns Deer Island, a forty-acre retreat on the St. Lawrence River, two miles north of Alexandria Bay, New York. On the property is a lavish clubhouse that serves as a retreat for members only.
    All Knights are encouraged to “crook”—to steal something rare and valuable for the tomb, which will build up the coffers of Skull and Bones. The best crook is displayed with a plaque in the clubhouse with the crook’s name, an honor all Knights seek. The competition in this area is fierce.
    During Prescott’s years at Yale, the United States was trying to negotiate an end to the Great War in Europe while maintaining its neutrality. Students followed the progress of the European war on large-scale maps in the university library, and Yale urged its men to train for military service in the patriotic spirit of Nathan Hale (Yale 1773), whose monument on campus, always wreathed, carries his immortal words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
    American antiwar sentiment remained strong until May 7, 1915, when the Germans sank the
Lusitania
and 128 Americans lost their lives. Twelve months later Congress passed the National Defense Act and instituted the draft. President Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection with the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Opposing Wilson’s isolationist policies, Prescott and several other Knights formed the Republican Club at Yale to support Charles Evans Hughes of New York, the esteemed Supreme Court justice who felt that American intervention in the war was inevitable, desirable, and in fact admirable. President Wilson was able to ride antiwar sentiment to victory, but after German U-boats sank five American merchant vessels, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany to keep the world “safe for democracy.”
    That declaration of April 6, 1917, changed the lives of Prescott Bush and many other Yale men who immediately joined the National Guard.
    “At Yale I developed the thought that I really would like in the long run to get into politics, and with that in mind, I decided that I would go to law school after my graduation,” Prescott said in his oral history at Columbia University. “But unhappily the war broke out . . . and I immediately went into the Army and spent a little over two years in the service, getting out in May, 1919. I was a captain of field artillery. I might say that prior to that, in 1916, during the Mexican border crisis, I entered the Connecticut National Guard as a private . . . and that training was exceedingly useful to me and to many, many other Yale men who formed the so-called Yale Battalion with four batteries of field artillery, which meant about 400 men—100 in a battery—roughly speaking.”
    The “Mexican border crisis” arose after the British decoded a secret telegram from the Germans. The telegram urged Mexico to declare war on the United States and promised that once America was defeated, Germany would insist on peace terms that would force the United States to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona south of the border. The German attempt to foment fighting within the United States was nullified with the declaration of war.
    For two months in the spring of 1918, Prescott and four other Knights were dispatched to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as members of the Army’s last horse-drawn artillery unit. The unit pulled the cannons and caissons that served as ammunition carriers, and was commanded by Brigadier General Adrian S. Fleming, who placed Prescott on his personal staff because the young man continually led everyone in singing the field-artillery song: “Over hill, over dale, we have hit the dusty trail as our caissons go rolling along.”
    To Prescott and the