By Mark Coultan
March 18, 2006
IF JOHN HOWARD wants to stay on the right side of the likely new US ambassador, Robert McCallum, he should avoid asking him if he knows General Russell.
That is the code used by members of one of the world's most powerful and elite secret societies, founded by General William Huntington Russell in 1823. President George Bush is alleged to have used its connections to get his first job.
Mr Bush and Mr McCallum are members of Skull and Bones, the Yale society said to have the skull of the Indian chief Geronimo, dug up by Mr Bush's grandfather, in a glass case. In 2004 both presidential candidates, Mr Bush and John Kerry, were members.
Mr Bush, in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, wrote: "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society. So secret, I can't say anything."
The Skull and Bones headquarters is in a windowless stone building on the Yale campus known as the tomb. Each year 15 Bonesmen - and since 1991, Boneswomen - are "tapped", or invited, to join, and put through a bizarre initiation ceremony. Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb, says it includes a devil, a Don Quixote figure and a pope with one foot in a white monogrammed slipper, resting on a stone skull.
New members are required to give their full sexual history to the other 14, which helps to explain and reinforce the extreme code of silence that surrounds the society.
"What I find disturbing about Skull and Bones is that it's basically the most powerful elite alumni network in the US," says Robbins. "It's essentially a form of nepotism that keeps the same people in power, over and over and over again."
She said there was "no way in hell" that George W. Bush would have been in Skull and Bones if his father, the former president George Bush, and his grandfather had not been members.
Robbins said that before she stopped counting she knew of at least 11 Bonesmen whom Mr Bush had appointed to government posts.
Australia's major newspapers are highlighting the personal relationship between the U.S.  President George Bush and his newly nominated Australian ambassador, Robert McCallum. Australian reporters Phillip Hudson of ''The Age'', and Mark Coultan of the ''Sydney Morning Herald'', have written stories examining the Bush/McCallum friendship which allegedly dates back to 39 years ago when they were inducted into the Skull and Bones society.

The Australian ambassadorship post had been vacant for 13 months, which former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer said was an "unforgivable" delay. The McCallum nomination on March 11 would replace the former ambassador Tom Schieffer who left the post in February 2005. United States President George W. Bush nominated McCallum on March 11th.,2006

McCallum is an associate attorney-general for the Department of Justice and previously represented big tobacco companies at an Atlanta law firm. He also has a master's degree from Oxford University and is a Rhodes Scholar as well as having a bachelor's degree from Yale.

The two Australian papers report on activities of Bush and McCallum in their younger years, and the ''Sydney Morning Herald'' alleges that personal connections were instrumental in the career advancements of both men. 

McCallum also made news last year when he overrode U.S. Justice Department lawyers who had been handling the government's tobacco racketeering trial for the past 5 years. McCallum ordered the lawyers to reduce the penalties sought at the close of the nine-month trial from $130 billion to $10 billion, angering some of the trial lawyers to the point where it is reported they threatened to quit their jobs. McCallum said the reduction was necessary as a matter of law.