Rosenbaum said the death rituals of the club _ he has reported seeing initiates kiss a skull in a 2001 ceremony _ are not just mumbo jumbo. "These are guys who could ease through life with privilege and money, as George W. "What Skull and Bones does is take preppy Prince Hals and give them a sense of mission," Rosenbaum said, referring to Henry IV's seemingly directionless son, whom Shakespeare turned into the heroic King Henry V. Rosenbaum, a member of Bush's 1968 Yale class, lived next door to the Bones tomb. Ron Rosenbaum, the author of the book Explaining Hitler and a New York Observer columnist who has written about Skull and Bones for the last quarter-century as obsessively as Ahab pursued his whale (Rosenbaum's words), said he thought that the club shaped the kind of president a man becomes, at least in the case of George W. Skull and Bones has, after all, a particularly illustrious alumni roster: two previous presidents (Bush's father and William Howard Taft), Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Luce, Potter Stewart, the writer John Hersey and numerous officials in the CIA, a traditional career path for Bonesmen. The larger question is whether Skull and Bones inculcated values of leadership _ or, put another way, a sense of entitlement _ in Kerry and Bush, beyond what was already driven home by Yale. Pataki has been campaigning for Bush, but he, too, had only kind words for Kerry. "The fact that they were both in Skull and Bones is a sign of respect that their classmates held for each of them," Pataki said over the telephone on Friday. Historically, Yale's best and brightest _ only 15 a year _ were tapped for Skull and Bones. Pataki of New York, a member of the Yale class of 1967 who knew Bush and Kerry in college, took an equally high road in an interview last week. "I have had conversations with the president about John Kerry, and he has the utmost respect for him," said Donald Etra, a Los Angeles lawyer who was in Skull and Bones with Bush.Īs for why Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had been vigorously attacking Kerry for what he called his weak record on national security, Etra seemed to shrug over the phone. The two crossed paths at Yale, where Kerry was the ambitious president of the Yale Political Union and Bush was the somewhat less ambitious president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, otherwise known as the Animal House. "Rest assured, there are no pictures of them dancing together naked," said David Wade, Kerry's spokesman. The answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is no, at least not as far as anyone knows or admits. Second, it raises tantalizing questions: Did Kerry, class of '66, and Bush, class of '68, know each other at Yale? More to the point, did they ever participate together in a Skull and Bones rite in the club's windowless crypt?
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