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A little-known fact unites Democratic frontrunner John Kerry and US President George W. Bush: they are both members of the secretive Skull and Bones group, which has been described as “the most influential secret society in the nation”.

      Senator Kerry and President Bush belong to the 172-year-old society based at the prestigious Yale University, which aims to get its members into positions of power. The next US presidential election seems destined to become the first in history to pit one Skull and Bones member against another.

      Steven Sora, author of Secret Societies of America’s Elite: From the Knights Templar to Skull & Bones (available from New Dawn Book Service), remarks that “the odds of one member of such a small secret society running against another member for president cannot be calculated.”

      The Skull and Bones is the most exclusive organisation at Yale. Members have ranged from President William Taft to Henry Luce, the founder of the Time-Life magazine empire, and from Averill Harriman, the businessman and diplomat, to the first President George Bush.

      The Bones alumni roster is flush with CIA officials, business moguls, congressmen and Supreme Court justices. The club owns a secluded 40-acre island retreat on the St. Lawrence River.

      Alexandra Robbins, a Yale graduate and author of a book on the Skull and Bones, Secrets of the Tomb, said: “It is staggering that so many of the candidates are from Yale, and even more so that we are looking at a presidential face-off between two members of the Skull and Bones. It is a tiny club with only 800 living members and 15 new members a year.”

      “Bones don’t care who wins,” says Robbins. “If Kerry wins, it’s still a Bones presidency.” Robbins calls the group “probably the most secretive and successful club in America,” and adds, “It’s also pretty bizarre.”

      Every year, 15 Yale juniors are tapped for the club, which holds meetings twice a week in a crypt-like building known as the “Tomb.”

      Robbins described the interior, replete with skulls and skeletons, as a cross between the “Addams Family” and a slightly shabby English men’s club.

      According to the US investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum, there are definite links between the origins of Bones rituals and those of notorious 18th century European Freemasonic groups.

      The rituals performed inside the society are in fact very closely related to Freemasonic ceremonies. Take, for example, the ritual called “Connubial Bliss”. The initiate must surrender all their intimate secrets to the society, which effectively breaks the individual down to a point where he can be built up again as a member of the society. The bond that is manufactured between the individual and Skull and Bones is unbreakable and forever.

      Kerry was tapped for the club in 1968, two years after Bush, whose father and grandfather were also Bonesmen. Kerry’s brother-in-law from his first marriage, David Thorne, was Bones. So was the late husband of Kerry’s current wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

      Curiously, two other candidates who ran for the Democratic nomination – Senator Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean – also attended Yale during the 1960s, but neither are Bonesmen.

      They all studied history and political science and had some of the same professors and academic mentors.

      Robert Dahl, the then head of the political science department, said: “Many of us had the sense we were preparing future leaders, but I don’t think any of us had any idea we were teaching so many presidential candidates.”

      Senator Kerry is remembered as “running for president since freshman year”. One of his contemporaries said: “He was obsessed by politics to the exclusion of all else. At that age, it’s a bit creepy.”

      He dated Janet Auchincloss, the half-sister of Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady, won the presidency of the Yale Political Union, and was initiated into the Skull and Bones before joining the United States Navy for service in Vietnam.

      In laid-back contrast, George W. Bush achieved only a “C” grade academically and took little interest in politics. He joined a “sports jock” fraternity and followed his father into the Skull and Bones.

      36 years after he was initiated into what has been called the “ultimate old boy network,” Senator Kerry is ever wary of breaking the ultra-exclusive club’s strict secrecy code.

      He laughed nervously when questioned about his and George W. Bush’s membership on television. “You both were members of the Skull and Bones; what does that tell us?” he was asked. “Yup. Not much,” Senator Kerry replied.

      If Senator Kerry is elected as President of the United States, then to describe the powers that be as a “ruling cabal”, as Steven Sora wrote in New Dawn No. 78, “is no longer an exaggeration.”

(Source: “The Secret Society That Ties Bush And Kerry”, by Charles Laurence, The Telegraph – UK, February 1, www.telegraph.co.uk; “Kerry made his Bones in secret club – like Bush”, Boston Herald, May 15, 2003)