Lowdown Lloyd Grove
Yale Bones connect Bush, Kerry
Never mind Iraq, terrorism and the economy.
For some conspiracy-minded voters, the real issue of the 2004 presidential campaign is the allegedly sinister influence of Skull and Bones.
Both President President Bush and his all-but-certain Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, were members of the elite and secretive club that meets in a windowless mausoleum on the Yale campus in New Haven.
Both Kerry, Class of '66, and Bush, Class of '68, are extremely reluctant to discuss their common ties to what Skull and Bones expert Ron Rosenbaum calls "the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system."
Back in August, "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert gave Kerry the third degree on his Bones connection.
"What does that tell us?" Russert demanded.
"Not much, because it's a secret," Kerry parried.
"Is there a secret handshake? Is there a secret code?"
"I wish there were something secret I could manifest there."
On the Feb. 8 installment of "Meet the Press," the President was similarly uncommunicative.
"It's so secret we can't talk about it," he told Russert.
"What does that mean for America?" Russert pressed. "The conspiracy theorists are going to go wild."
"I'm sure they are," Bush agreed with a nervous giggle.
Since its founding in 1832, Skull and Bones has had fewer than 2,000 members, including three Presidents - Bush, his father and William Howard Taft - and such powerbrokers as W. Averell Harriman, Henry Stimson and Henry Luce, who all engaged in what Rosenbaum calls "certain occult rituals of the ruling class."
Bonesmen tend to help other Bonesman. The current President has staffed his administration with such Bones brothers as Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson, Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum, Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago Roy Austin and Edward McNally, general counsel to the Office of Homeland Security.
Skull and Bones investigator Alexandra Robbins, author of the book "Secrets of the Tomb," told Lowdown yesterday that the society is positively gleeful over the Bush-Kerry contest.
"Individual Bonesmen will sway according to their personal affiliations," she said, "but the Bonesmen I've spoken to have said it's a win-win situation."
In what might be eerie coincidence or further disturbing evidence of a scheme for world domination, The Washington Post has assigned Bonesman Dana Milbank to chronicle the battle between Bush and Kerry.
"I have been assigned to monitor all secret hand signals during the debates," Milbank told me - half in jest but wholly in earnest?
"I have it on good information that if this one gets tied up in a recount, [late Supreme Court Justice and Bonesman] Potter Stewart will return from the grave to write the majority opinion."