MemeMachineGo!

George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush: not just a profiteer from illegal investments in a country the U.S. was at war with, but also a grave robber?

The grave of [Geronimo] has long been rumored to have been robbed during World War I by a small group of young military officers that included Prescott Bush, the president’s late grandfather, and other members of Yale University’s secretive Skull and Bones society.

Now a 1918 letter, newly unearthed from Yale archives, offers some intriguing new clues. In it, one Skull and Bones member reports that Geronimo’s skull and other remains had been exhumed and taken to the society’s headquarters, known as The Tomb, in New Haven, Conn. The letter is made public for the first time in the new issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

The evidence is pretty weak that Geronimo’s grave was robbed at all, let alone that Prescott Bush had anything to do with it. This part of the story is more disturbing:

Fort Sill records show that Prescott Bush was stationed at the base in 1918. Mr. Bush died in 1972. Fourteen years later, leaders of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, in Arizona, received an anonymous package containing a photo of a skull in a display case, said to have been taken at Skull and Bones headquarters. It also contained what was said to be a society log detailing the night Mr. Bush and his cohorts allegedly dug up the remains. The society has not publicly confirmed or disputed the accuracy of the documents.

Mr. Thompson says he and other San Carlos Apache leaders flew to New York several times in 1986 to talk with Jonathan Bush and other Skull and Bones members about getting the remains back. Mr. Thompson says that, at their last meeting, Skull and Bones representatives brought a skull and offered to let the Apaches have it if they would sign a paper promising not to discuss the matter publicly.

Tribal leaders refused because, among other things, the skull appeared too small to be a grown man’s. Even so, Mr. Thompson says, he was shaken emotionally for months afterward. “It was not an old man’s skull but it was there in front of me and it was somebody’s and they dug it up somewhere,” he recalls. “I didn’t touch it.”