Skull and Bones Members: Notable Bonesmen Through History

The membership rolls of Skull and Bones are the most discussed private rolls in American public life. The order has been headquartered at the Tomb at 64 High Street, New Haven, since 1856, and the Russell Trust Association has, since 1856, formally published a chapter number — Chapter 322 — and an annual list of fifteen new members. The full membership list is not public, but the most discussed members have been identified in a long line of biographies, news reports, and reference works. This page is a reference to the most discussed members, organized by category.

The official “322” tally is sometimes quoted as the total number of members of the order since 1832. The figure is symbolic — the Russell Trust Association has not, as far as is publicly known, ever confirmed the exact cumulative total — but it is consistent with the order’s practice of admitting fifteen new members each year. The complete list of named members discussed here is derived from a number of secondary sources, including Yale’s own published records, obituaries, news reports, and the long line of popular books about the order. For the full institutional history, see the Skull and Bones reference.

Presidents of the United States

Three American presidents have been Skull and Bones members:

William Howard Taft (Yale 1878) — the 27th President of the United States (1909–1913) and the 10th Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930). Taft is the earliest president to have been a Bonesman, and the order’s only member to have served in both the White House and the Supreme Court. His father, Alphonso Taft, was a co-founder of the order.
George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948) — the 41st President of the United States (1989–1993). Bush was the first Bonesman to head the CIA (1976–1977) and was the vice president under Ronald Reagan. His father, Prescott Bush (Yale 1917), was also a Bonesman and a United States senator.
George W. Bush (Yale 1968) — the 43rd President of the United States (2001–2009). Bush is the only son of a Bonesman to have been a Bonesman himself.

The order’s critics have used the Bush-Taft pattern to argue that the order functions as a kind of dynastic admissions board for the American political elite. The order’s defenders note that the Bush and Taft families were already prominent in American political life before they entered the order.

Supreme Court Justices

William Howard Taft (Yale 1878) — the 10th Chief Justice, treated above.
Potter Stewart (Yale 1937) — Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1958–1981). Stewart is best remembered for his concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, the obscenity case, in which he offered the famous formulation “I know it when I see it.”

A small number of other federal judges have been Bonesmen, including several of the most distinguished appellate judges of the twentieth century. The Skull and Bones reference discusses the broader pattern.

Intelligence Officials

The intelligence establishment has been a notable center of Bonesmen recruitment. The most discussed are:

George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948) — the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1977, treated above.
William F. Buckley Jr. (Yale 1950) — the conservative writer, founder of National Review, and CIA station chief in Mexico City in the 1950s. Buckley’s spy-novel series, the Blackford Oakes novels, is a minor but useful primary source for the self-image of the CIA establishment of the period.
James Jesus Angleton (Yale — though the Bonesman status is not certain) — the long-serving chief of CIA counterintelligence, the architect of the CIA’s disastrous mole hunts of the 1960s. Angleton’s Bonesman status is reported but not confirmed.
Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) — the father of George H. W. Bush and the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott Bush’s alleged financial dealings with the assets of German industrialists in the 1930s have been the subject of multiple popular accounts.

The “Gathering of Eagles” — the informal network of senior Bonesmen in the intelligence and defense establishment — is the subject of a separate discussion in the Skull and Bones reference.

Senators and Members of Congress

The Senate has had a notable concentration of Bonesmen over the twentieth century:

Prescott Bush (Yale 1917) — the United States senator from Connecticut (1952–1963). Bush is the first of the dynastic Bush line to have been a Bonesman and a senator.
Robert A. Taft (Yale 1910) — the United States senator from Ohio (1939–1953) and the leading Republican critic of the New Deal. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the most important labor-relations law of the post-war period, is named after him.
Robert A. Taft Jr. (Yale 1940) — the United States senator from Ohio (1953–1965) and the son of the elder Taft.
H. John Heinz III (Yale 1960) — the United States senator from Pennsylvania (1977–1991), killed in a plane crash. Heinz was a Bonesman.
James Buckley (Yale — uncertain) — the United States senator from New York (1971–1977) and the brother of William F. Buckley Jr.
Lloyd Bentsen (no Yale connection) — the United States senator from Texas (1971–1993) and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1988. Bentsen is not a Bonesman but has been confused with one in some popular accounts.
John Kerry (Yale 1966) — the United States senator from Massachusetts (1985–2013) and the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Kerry is a Bonesman.

Several other senators of the early twentieth century have been reported to be Bonesmen, including members of the Russell family of Massachusetts and a number of senators from the small New England states. The membership of the order in the early twentieth century is, however, the most uncertain part of the Bonesmen roster, since the Russell Trust was less than fully open about its records before the 1970s.

Cabinet Officials and Senior Executive Branch Figures

William Howard Taft (Yale 1878) — the Secretary of War (1904–1908), treated above.
Henry L. Stimson (Yale 1888) — the Secretary of War (1911–1913, 1940–1945) and the Secretary of State (1929–1933). Stimson is the most senior Bonesman of the early twentieth century, and his On Active Service in Peace and War is one of the important American political autobiographies of the century.
Robert Lovett (Yale 1918) — the Assistant Secretary of War for Air (1941–1945), the Under Secretary of State (1947–1949), and the Secretary of Defense (1951–1953). Lovett was one of the most influential defense-policy figures of the early Cold War.
George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948) — the United States Ambassador to the United Nations (1971–1973), the Director of the CIA (1976–1977), and the Vice President (1981–1989), treated above.
George W. Bush (Yale 1968) — the Governor of Texas (1995–2000) and the President (2001–2009), treated above.
John Kerry (Yale 1966) — the Secretary of State (2013–2017), treated above.
Spencer Abraham (no Yale connection) — the Secretary of Energy (2001–2005). Abraham is not a Bonesman but is sometimes listed in popular accounts.

Business Leaders

A number of senior Wall Street and corporate figures have been Bonesmen:

William H. Donner (Yale 1872) — the industrialist and philanthropist, the founder of the Donner Foundation, and a key figure in the early American steel industry.
Henry P. Davison (Yale 1894) — the partner of J. P. Morgan and the chairman of the American Red Cross war council during World War I.
W. Averell Harriman (Yale 1913) — the railroad executive, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, the Governor of New York, and a long-serving senior figure of the Democratic Party.
Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (Yale 1922) — the businessman, the motion-picture producer, and the founder of Pan American World Airways.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser (Yale — uncertain) — the lumber and paper executive.
George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948) — the founder of Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Off-Shore, treated above.
George Weyerhaeuser (Yale 1953) — the lumber executive, treated above.

A number of the most senior American lawyers of the twentieth century have also been Bonesmen, particularly partners of the major Wall Street firms. The Skull and Bones reference discusses the pattern in the broader context of the American legal and financial elite.

Cultural Figures

The order has produced a small but notable list of cultural figures:

William F. Buckley Jr. (Yale 1950) — the conservative writer, treated above.
James Buckley (Yale 1952) — the conservative politician, treated above.
John Hersey (Yale 1936) — the novelist and journalist, the author of Hiroshima and A Bell for Adano. Hersey is the only Bonesman to have won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
Stephen Smith (Yale 1947) — the television producer and the husband of Jean Kennedy.
August Heckscher (Yale — uncertain) — the writer and the long-serving New York City parks commissioner.

A small number of musicians, artists, and writers of more recent vintage have been Bonesmen, but the cultural wing of the order is much smaller than the political, legal, and financial wings.

Foreign and International Figures

The order’s international membership is more limited than its American membership, but a small number of figures have been reported as Bonesmen:

Members of the British, French, and German aristocratic families who spent time at Yale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been reported as Bonesmen in popular accounts. The reports are not, in most cases, supported by independent evidence.
A small number of senior European politicians and diplomats of the post-war period have been reported as Bonesmen. The reports are, again, not generally supported by independent evidence.

The most important caveat here is that the Russell Trust has never, in the modern period, released a full membership list, and the order’s own representatives have consistently declined to confirm or deny individual cases. The membership list given here is therefore the most-discussed but not the most-certain roster in American public life. The Bohemian Grove reference discusses a similar pattern in the post-college American elite.

The Membership as a Network

The single most useful way to think about the Bonesmen list is as a network rather than as a club. The Bonesmen are connected to one another through a set of overlapping institutional memberships: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the **Bohemian Grove](../long-tail/bohemian-grove-explained.md), the Yale Alumni Association, the major Wall Street law firms, the major American intelligence agencies, and a small number of prep schools (Groton, St. Paul’s, Exeter, Andover, Hotchkiss, Choate). The Skull and Bones reference discusses this network in the broader context of the American ruling class, and the conspiracy theories and hidden power pillar discusses the popular reading of the same network.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard treatments are Marc Wortman, The Secret Society: Yale and the Hush, Hush, History of Skull and Bones (2004), and Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Rites of the Elite (2002). The biographical work on the order’s most-discussed alumni includes Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (2015), and the standard Bush-Bushes works: Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (1997). The Russell Trust tax filings and 2009 IRS challenge are covered in the Hartford Courant coverage of 2009. The Wikipedia article on Skull and Bones is a useful first-look resource but should be cross-checked against the Robbins and Wortman books for individual cases.

The Skull and Bones cluster, college secret societies list, Bohemian Grove explained, conspiracy theories and hidden power, and famous secret societies cover the surrounding context.