Re: johnkerry.com the more you learn the more you trust
Yuck. Try those childish propaganda lines on someone other than me.
I'm currently trying to get some real information on the implications of John Kerry's membership in Skull & Bones.
The candidate himself is silent on this secret society, and his publicist says that the topic is "off the table".
Why is that, American Spirit? How American is that Spirit of Secrecy?
democracynow.org
Thursday, January 22nd, 2004
Skull & Bones: The Secret Society That Unites John Kerry and President Bush
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A little-known fact unites Democratic frontrunner John Kerry and President Bush: they are both members of Yale's secret society Skull and Bones. We speak with the author of "Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power" that reveals details about the secret society and its members. [includes transcript]
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The New Hampshire primary is just a few days away and Howard Dean's status as the frontrunner has almost totally dissipated. The latest Boston Herald poll now shows that John Kerry holds a 10 point lead - a major surge for the Massachusetts Senator. Still reeling from his victory in Iowa, Kerry is starting to act like the frontrunner, shifting his focus from comparing himself to the other Democrats to putting his record up against President George W. Bush, saying he is the only candidate who can beat Bush and who represents a real difference from the current occupant of the White House.
But there is a fact about Kerry's past that brings him closer to Bush than any of the other candidates. Both Bush and Kerry are members of a secretive society dating back to their respective days at Yale University - Skull and Bones. This fact has not been widely reported but when Kerry's campaign spokesperson was asked about it, she said, "John Kerry has absolutely nothing to say on that subject. Sorry."
Alexandra Robbins, is the New York Times bestselling author of Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power who was formerly on the Washington, DC staff of The New Yorker magazine. She is a 1998 graduate of Yale and was the first reporter to publish George W Bush's transcript from Yale when he was a student there.
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TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to and watching Democracy Now, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country. The New Hampshire primary is just a few days away, and Howard Dean's status as a frontrunner has almost totally dissipated. The latest "Boston Herald" poll now shows that John Kerry holds a 10-point lead, a major surge for the Massachusetts senator. Still reeling from his victory in Iowa, Kerry is starting to act like the frontrunner, shifting his focus from comparing himself to the other Democrats to putting his record up against President George Bush, saying he's the only candidate who can beat Bush and who represents a real difference from the current occupant of the White House.
AMY GOODMAN: But there is a fact about Kerry's past that brings him closer to Bush than any other candidate. Both Bush and Kerry are members of a secretive society dating back to their respective days at Yale University. It's called “Skull and Bones.” This fact has not been widely reported, but when Kerry's campaign spokesperson was asked about it, she said, quote, “John Kerry has absolutely nothing to say on that subject. Sorry.” In a moment, we'll be joined by Alexandra Robbins, the “New York Times" best-selling author of, "Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power." But first, we turn to an interview that I did with Kevin Phillips, the author of “American Dynasty, Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics Of Deceit in the House of Bush." When I asked him about the significance of that Yale secret society, Skull and Bones.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, I hate to overdo the secret societies because the average person has no idea of this. I went to Harvard Law School, and Harvard has these secret societies, too, but the ones at Yale, I think, if anything are more influential, and it's sorta hard to cold turkey right in and say, my god, Skull and Bones, this is virtually like a diplomatic or international business piracy. You can almost see the pirate flag, but they all take it very seriously, because Admiral Harriman, instead of going to Harvard and getting involved in the “Porks,” so to speak, which was the big club up at Harvard, he went to Yale and did Skull and Bones. There was a crowd of people who were involved in operations like National CitiBank and Guaranteed Trust and just a whole lot of people who were major players in finance were Skull and Bones. And the crowd that was at W.S. Harriman was full of Skull and Bones people, and Prescott Bush was Skull and Bones. A lot of these people who were Skull and Bones wound up in the intelligence services, or they were assistant secretaries for aviation and the war department and things like this. It was a whole network.
AMY GOODMAN: But for people who don't know what Skull and Bones is, what you are referring to.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: It's a Yale secret society. Yale has other secret societies. Another one was called “Book and Snake.” So, they came up with these names. But these people took secrecy incredibly seriously. Books that have been written about Skull and Bones - they’ve got a vault at Yale. Nobody is supposed to be able to get in there. You can’t even tell your wife about Skull and Bones. Avril Harriman, his wife received a letter that was in hieroglyphics, and she didn't know what to make of this and Avril Harriman said, “Well, that's Skull and Bones, and I have to tell you about that, and he said, no, I can't tell you about that.” If you want to know why they deal in secrecy, (a) you have Skull and Bones, and (b) so many of them were in the intelligence services and that whole side of Washington and New York.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that, the beginning of intelligence, and how the Bush family fits into the beginning of the intelligence agencies?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, this gets complicated because nobody quite agrees when the intelligence agencies started. But Yale was front and center, because the statue that's in front of the C.I.A. is Nathan Hale. Nathan Hale's statue that they copied that from appears in front of Connecticut Hall at Yale in New Haven. So, if you go back to the revolution you have Yale and the Secret Service.
AMY GOODMAN: It goes back to Andover where Bush went as well.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Andover was really in the thick of this sort of stuff. They had a secret society sort of junior grade where you practiced to be at Skull and Bones at Yale when you were in Andover. It sounds like a joke today, but it wasn't then. What happened was the crowd that was in with Prescott Bush and George H. Walker at W.A. Harriman, a number of them became prominent in the intelligence community and then when you get to the firm that was merged out of W.A. Harriman, which was Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the partners there was Robert A. Lovett, who was the son of one of the big cheeses in Harriman's railroad operation, which is how they knew George H. -- I mean, it all fits together. Robert A. Lovett was the man who came up with the blueprint for the C.I.A. after World War II, which was never acknowledged and only became public knowledge maybe 15, 20 years ago. So, he was a major player, and Prescott Bush, I have no doubt, was very close to the intelligence agencies. During World War II he was a director of two companies. One was Dresser Industries, which is now part of Halliburton, and the second is Vanadium Corporation of America. They were both involved in atomic energy projects. Prescott Bush was a friend of Alan Dulles who went on to be the C.I.A. Director, but he was also a lawyer during the 30's for some of Brown Brothers Harriman international gamesmanship, so to speak. So, they were very tightly knit into all of this. And the real thing about the Bushes is how far back they go in this loose combination of investment banking, Wall Street law, the intelligence community, international business, the State Department, and the War Department.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Kevin Phillips. He is author of the new book, "American Dynasty, Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics Of Deceit In The House of Bush." As we turn now to Alexandra Robbins, the "New York Times" best-selling author of the book, "Secrets of the Tomb -- Skull and Bones, the Ivory League and the Hidden Paths Of Power," who was formerly on the Washington, D.C. staff of the New Yorker Magazine. She is a 1998 graduate of Yale University and was the first reporter to publish George W. Bush's transcript from Yale when he was a student there. We welcome you to Democracy Now!.
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Good Morning.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Juan.
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Thanks for having me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Alexandra, I’d like to start out - in your book, you mention John Kerry several times. For those folks who might think this is something of the college days and in the 60's when Kerry was at Yale, but you mentioned an experience that Jacob Weissberg, the editor of "Slate" magazine had about 20 years later in 1986. Can you talk a little bit about that.
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Sure. Skull and Bones is really much more than a college club. In fact the year that the members spend in it, their senior year at Yale (there are 15 members tapped for Skull and Bones membership each year) is really just the beginning. Skull and Bones is a powerful alumni network, perhaps the most elite network in the country and it really focuses on life after college. What Kerry did was he tried to recruit Jacob Weissberg from his senate office in Washington to become a member of Skull and Bones. And Weissberg ended up declining the invitation, but he was shocked that Kerry was a member of the society, which so clearly exhibited a history of misogyny, and he challenged Kerry on it. Kerry sort of blew him off. He said, “Oh, well, you know, you should look at my record - for women, defending battered women, et cetera,” and Weissberg said “I can’t be a part of this,” but he was shocked that Kerry would have his secretary call Weissberg into his office in the senate in order to try to make this recruiting possible.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you actually explain that, the fact that he was an intern at the "New Republic," and he got this call, what this meant to him?
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Yeah. He got a call from Senator Kerry's office, from his secretary, and Weissberg was spending the semester away from Yale. He was spending it, his junior year in Washington. And he got the call, and the secretary said, “Senator Kerry would like to meet with you tomorrow morning.” And all sorts of things are going through Weissberg's head. He was thinking, oh, maybe he likes my writing, maybe he's going to give me a scoop. He said, “Okay, I'll be there, do you know what it's about.” The secretary said, “No, he wouldn't tell me.” He gets there the next morning, about 8:30, I think. And he's sitting in the senator's office and the senator is kind of schmoozing him and making small talk and Weissberg is wondering why (I guess he’s about 20 or 21 by then), why he is sitting in Senator Kerry's office and Kerry said, Kerry brought up Skull and Bones. Weissberg didn't know that Kerry was a member at that point.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You mentioned the organization's relationship to women. For those of our viewers who don't know about that, could you explain that -- the history of that relationship.
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Skull and Bones has been an all-male group, was an all-male group beginning in 1832 when it started, up until 1991. And what happened was there was basically a 20-year fight between the younger members of Skull and Bones and the older more staunch old blue members. In 1991, the seniors in Bones, these are the 22-year-olds who were actually in the Tomb that year at Yale, (the Tomb is the name of their building, by the way) in 1991, the Bones seniors intended to tap women, but the alumni of the society heard about the plan, changed the locks of the Tomb and threatened to shut down the society completely. When the seniors threatened a lawsuit, Bones held a vote that narrowly endorsed admitting women, the day before initiation a group of Bonesmen led by William F. Buckley obtained a court order blocking the initiation. The group claimed that admitting women would lead to (and I’m quoting here) “date rape in the medium term future.” Eventually, Bones held a second vote that again narrowly admitted women. Both Bushes have refused to disclose which way they voted. Senator Kerry and former Senator David Born both said they voted to admit women. Once the women were initiated, several of the older members, including a former congressman who I spoke with, distanced themselves from the society.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What about George Bush on this issue? Have we ever found out how he voted on this defining moment?
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: No. Both Bushes have not disclosed the way they voted.
AMY GOODMAN: Although Bush was quoted as saying, and this was George Herbert Walker Bush, is that right, saying that women would be the downfall of Yale?
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: That's George W. Bush.
AMY GOODMAN: George W.?
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: George W. said in the 1980's, that -- to a woman who was a graduate of Yale -- that women would be the downfall of Yale. There are many other instances, some of which I point out in my book, that lead to -- lead one to assume that he voted against admitting women.
AMY GOODMAN: We just heard Kevin Phillips give us kind of a chronology of people who are in Skull and Bones, and its significance in the U.S. establishment, for example, in the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency, with Robert Lovett. Can you talk more about this, for those who would say, come on as Juan was saying before, you are talking about some college club.
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Yeah. I actually want to back way up and talk about, at least as mention exactly what Skull and Bones is, because while some people on the East Coast have heard about the society, other people across the country have no idea that we are looking right now if the polls are correct, at what would be the first Skull and Bones versus Skull and Bones presidential election. That's pretty weird. Skull and Bones is America's most powerful secret society. It's based at Yale, where it's headquartered in a building called the Tomb, and Skull and Bones has included among its members, presidents, including presidents George W. Bush and his father, as well as William Howard Taft, Supreme Court Chief Justices, C.I.A. officials, cabinet members, congressmen and senators. What makes it so staggering that we could have a Skull and Bones versus Skull and Bones, Kerry versus Bush election is that this is a tiny tiny club. There are only 800 living members. Only 15 per year. It's staggering that two of them could be facing off for the presidency and so many of them have achieved positions of prominence. One of the interesting and I think disturbing things about Skull and Bones is that its purpose is to get members into positions of power and have those members hire other members into prestigious positions. This is something we have seen with George W. Bush since his ascendancy to the presidency, he has put several Bones members into prestigious positions, such as Bill Donaldson, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The number two and number three guys in the Justice Department, the guy that puts out all of Bush's secrecy memos. His assistant Attorney General is a major Bonesman. Bonesman Frederick Smith was Bush's top choice for Secretary of Defense until he had to withdraw for health reasons. The general council of the Office of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense’s representative to Europe. The list goes on and on and on. That's something that's interesting, because George W. Bush likes to feign his distance from Yale, from Bones, from Northeastern establishment elite connections, and yet he's going ahead and following Skull and Bones to the letter.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And besides seeking to employ or promote Bonesmen, is there any other responsibility that Bonesmen are supposed to have to each other?
ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Well, there's loyalty of course, to each other. They're supposed to call each other up. I revealed the code words in my book, so I assume they have since changed them, but it used to be, “Do you know General Russell. General Russell was the founder of Skull and Bones. All a Bonesman had to do was call up another Bonesman, maybe even if they have never met, and they would cough up money or connections or a plan.
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