andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. During the day, idleness is encouraged. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death. Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good; they'd sniff me out quickly. Near the end of the last century the cult of the redwood grove as Natures cathedral was in full swing and the Boho-businessmen yearned to give their outings a tinc-ture of spiritual uplift. A college kid well call Tom the arm of the Secret Government is, after all, far-reaching worked at the Bohemian Grove each summer for three years in the middle 1990s. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. Holding meetings in the back room of a San Francisco Barbary Coast bar called The Jolly Corks, the club later extended membership to artists of all kinds, but the club symbol, to this day, is an owl, typifying the nightworking journalists, as well as wisdom. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. Old friends move among the tables, kissing one another, and a ruddy Bohemian gets up on a bench and, as his friends cheer him on, removes his cap and opens his mouth to sing. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. The guest list can be revealing as well. And former California governor Pat Brown has said publicly, many times, that the presence of women would keep Bohemians from enjoying their hallowed freedom to pee. Voyage to Sonoma County and muster against Secret World Government which, lets face it, isnt exactly secret. It was decided, clubman Ed Bosque wrote, we should invite an element to join the Club which the majority of its members held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains, but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians. So they pulled in a few wealthy men of commerce to pay for the champagne and the rot soon set in. The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. Every year since 1879, the club holds its two-week Annual Summer Encampment, dubbed by President Herbert Hoover "the greatest men's party on earth." The gathering takes place on the exclusive. (The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl." Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. Every summer for more than a century, the all-male Bohemian Club of San Francisco has led a retreat into a redwood forest 70 miles north of the city, four and a quarter square miles of rugged, majestic terrain that members consider sacred. And the sand at the Russian River beach is traversed by coconut-fiber mats and rich figured squares cut from the carpets in the "City Club," the five-story brick Bohemian building in downtown San Francisco. This summer, for example, attendees saw several plays. He wore western gear all the way, a gray-blue checked western shirt, a white braided western belt, cowboy boots and, in his left breast pocket, an Owl's Nest pin with an owl on it. I was told that if a Californian is not admitted before he is 30, he can despair of membership unless he achieves commercial or political prominence. Participants drank 4,000 bottles of wine, carefully chosen, and almost as much liquordespite the special Bohemian Club labels, the bourbon was real ly Jim Beam and the gin really Beefeaters. One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. And all the talk about male fellowship often sounds just like a college freshman's version of No Gurls Allowed, an institutional escape from women, from their demands, aggressions and vapors. The long-range planning commit-tee of the club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city near the town of Monte Rio. It never rains when the encampment is on. As the Soviet Sagdeyev said in his speech, "There is no glasnost here.". More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. A few years ago KGO radio, out of San Francisco, had an interesting talk show in which callers with first-hand Grove experience told their tales. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!". Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. The younger members brown-nose shame-lessly, making contacts. By midmorning its another day in Bohemia, with Toms hands never idle as he runs up Old Fashioneds and Manhattans. In his memoirs Hoover wrote that within one hour of Calvin Coolidges announcement in 1927 that he would not run again, a hundred men-edi-tors, publishers, public officials and others from all over the country who were at the Grove, came to my camp demanding that I announce my candidacy. Hoover was at the Grove again the following summer, as he had been with some considerable regularity since 1911, when news came that Republicans had chosen him for their candidate. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians ("bohemians"). When all is said and done, the way the beleaguered American male asserts his personhood, defies convention, hails the American dream, is to piss against a tree. It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. a Camp Meeker activist who runs the Bohemian Grove Action Network. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. No, Section 8, Article XVIII was too fine a screen for me. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." Reagan himself had been a guest at the Bohemian Grove since at least 1967 and an official member since 1975 , coincidentally a place also annually visited by David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger , as well as Nelson Rockefeller since at least the 1940s and descendants of J.P. Morgan and a handful of other East Coast elites. Shultz, George and Stephen Davison Bechtel with Kissinger at Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] 1 of 6: 2 of 6: 3 of 6: 4 of 6: Download PDF (3.23 MB) Full Folder View; Collection Information. It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. The simulacrum isnt half bad. That's right, the Bohemian Grove. It boasts that the Cremation of Care ceremony derives from Druid rites, medieval Christian liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespearean drama and nineteenth-century American lodge rites. Black jokes are out because there are a handful of black members -- though one day near the Civic Center I did hear a group of old-timers trying to imitate Jesse Jackson. "There'd be a lot more preening and peacocking than there already is," a big gay Bohemian told me. I didn't want to disagree. "You can't," he said. Reporters seeking to write about the Grove had rarely been inside, and then usually for only a few hours at a time, but I was determined to have a good, long look, so I took care to blend. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. The Jinks is vigorously lowbrow. We were a few feet from the Lamp of Fellowship, and after looking me over he said he didn't know, this was pushing it. But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. Along with its most definitely closet contingent, the club also has about 2,000 heterosexuals cooped up for the summer retreat, with no women officially on the premises except for a daily minibus of female cleaners the consequence of a lawsuit brought by feminists a few years ago which can go no farther into the Grove than the Camp Fire circle, 400 yards from the Main Gate. It was at the grove that Gov. She said, 'Your fly's open. Henry Kissinger in a pink tut getting rammed up the old dirt road by Chuck Connors? Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." Its members have included Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian who was known to fellow campers as the Chief'; Mr. Nixon; Lowell Thomas; Eddie Rickenbacker, and Eugene Pulliam, an Indianapolis newspaper publisher. According to the guest list, this year's attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. I worked hard to respond in kind (I invented an infant son named Ronald Wilson Weiss). Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). The Bohemian Club is set up along frat house lines. And David Rockefeller too. At 9:15 p.m. a procession of priests carrying the crypt of Mr. Dull Care came out of the trees on the east side, along the Grove's chief thoroughfare, River Road. Bohemian Grove, a secluded campground in California's Sonoma County, is the site of an annual two-week gathering of a highly select, all-male club, whose members have included every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge. A tenet of Grove life is noncompetitive egalitarianism: all men are equal here. Tunerville has all the members of the camp orchestra, Monkey Block many of the artists, and Sons of Toil the university faculty members. Music sounded softly. Three other men discussed a friend of theirs who had left early that morning for New York. Come out, Bohemians. Everywhere you hear what is Bohemian and what isn't Bohemian, One night I wandered into Fore Peak camp and got a lecture from a man named Hugh about Bohemian values as they concerned Fore Peak's famous drink, a mixture of rum and hot chocolate. The sense that you are inside an actual club is heightened by all the furnishings that could not survive a wet season outdoors: the stuffed lion on top of Jungle camp; the red lanterns in the trees behind Dragons camp at night, which add to the haunting atmosphere; the paintings of camels, pelicans and naked women that are hung outside; the soft couch in the doorway of Woof camp, and everywhere pianos that, when the encampment is over, go back to the piano warehouse near the front gate. That leaves women and Hispanics as targets for jokes -- such as the one about Bubbles's protg Raoul, who painted Puerto Rican flags on the backs of cockroaches. The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. Reagan said that it was good to be back. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. "Most of it. Then Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel was negotiating reparations for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill when he attended the 1970 encampment as the guest of Fred L. Hart preparation for the three major stage events at each Summer Encampment. The woman on the line evidently objected to the joke, for Kissinger said, revealing a dovish streak, "Maybe the KGB did write it, but it is not a sign of strength.". ", "They're always an the periphery of radicalism. Rumor had it that Reagan was going to give the next day's Lakeside Talk. For a while I thought the bar of salt bracketed on one tree by the lake was an experimental effort to neutralize uric acids before they hit the roots. "There's a lot of wasted time.". Canada. At that time (and we doubt things have changed) the basic wage for the very ample force required to assist in the banishing of Care is not handsome $5 to $6 an hour. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. In this way I managed to drop in on the principal events of the encampment, right up to the final Saturday, July 29, 12:30 p.m., when I attended a Lakeside Talk whose giver was, intriguingly, the only one not identified in the program of events. Its only landmark is a kick-ass bar called the Pink Elephant, but a half-mile or so away from "the Pink," in the middle of a redwood grove, there is, strangely enough, a bank of 16 pay telephones. This rule is strictly adhered to. Today AIDS has put a damper on the Grove's River Road pickup scene, which Herb Caen used to write about in his San Francisco Chronicle gossip column. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. "My grandmother always said, 'You can find sympathy in the dictionary,'" a guy with a cigar said, walking on the River Road. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. Particularly in the more sumptuous camps even this takes plenty of money, sharing bills for retinues of uniformed servants, vintage cellars, master chefs and kindred accouterments of spiritual refreshment. You can't describe it," he explained. On the River Road you heard some small business talk. While president he had avoided the Grove, a custom Nixon cemented in 1971 when he canceled a speech planned for the lakeside in the secret encampment after the press insisted on covering it. Was there one secret government or two? Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . Bohemians talk about roughing it, but at a privy in the woods near the river, there is a constantly renewed supply of paper toilet-seat covers. The two of them were camping in Mandalay, the most exclusive bunk site in the encampment, the one on the hill with the tiny cable car that carries visitors up to the compound. One of the waiters had heard whorehouse piano music coming from Owl's Nest, and he said Ronald Reagan liked that kind of music. Find home again in the Grove! Separating the Red and Blue. He looked bewildered and hung over, and I figured Bohemians were warmly and mysteriously saying to him what they were saying to me: "I can tell this is your first Grove.". Larry Kramer is a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. The encampment's rules about dealing with waiters reinforce the heartless but egalitarian values of the Grove. Fifty people were arrested. club (so we are told in official mainstream media sites and networks) but case in fact the Rituals and goings on at Bohemian Grove are based in something much more freaky and strange than one would dare to imagine. The Jinks jokes about women were straight out of an old joke book. [ link to imgur.com (secure)] Quoting: Ninbit. Merv Griffin. Wooziness was pervasive. Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. ", "Bohemians come! He says he likes it that way. The men of Faraway had captured the rearranged-woman's-torso sculpture from the Low Jinks and now displayed it against a wall, having wedged a fern leaf in "her" crack. Individual melted into group, but what a group: George Shultz was seated below me, and word in the camp was that a year and $75,000 or so had been spent for a production that would be seen just once, just by them. Mr. Nixon also noted that while anyone could aspire to be President of the United States, only a select few could aspire to be president of Bohemian Grove. There were laments. Moore was the 1953 San Luis Obispo County Fiesta queen, but by 1980 she had become, she says, a "woman-identified woman," and the Grove's thunderous maleness and what she calls its "closedness" disturbed her. Activists from truthaction.org have obtained the official guest list for Bohemian Grove's 2008 midsummer encampment along with a map of the Grove's facilities. The weirdest approach I experienced came from a tall redhead in western wear, a fourth-generation Californian. AI Chatbots are Even Scarier Than You Think, DeSantiss Educational Policies Come Right Out of the Fascist Playbook, Erase the Memory to Erase a People? "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." ", Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Over the years, though, the artists' patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership.. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. The Monte Rio caller added that at least this quotient of Secret Government included good tippers, doling out splendid gratuities to their companions. Although the talent shows put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the like. The priests turned in desperation to the owl. My bags were packed -- a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. The club was founded in 1872, just three years after the transcontinental railroad was completed, by a group of newspapermen and artists who plainly felt social anxiety about their surroundings. One camp, called Aviary, is composed entirely of members who were, or are, singers. Why so many games of dominoes? But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. Boho-member Wouk once got off a sententious paragraph about the Grove being the site of that purest of loves, the friendship that men can nourish between each other in noble surroundings. Bohemian Grove is the place . The Bohemian Grove belongs to the private San Francisco-based gentlemen's club The Bohemian Club. The Russian was the physicist Roald Sagdeev, a member of the Soviet Supreme Council of People's Deputies, who had given a speech to Kissinger and many other powerful men too. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. Only one telephone line goes into the grove, and telegram is the main form of communication in or out. You know how many times we've been in someone's home, and we've wanted to go to the powder room, and we've maybe said, 'Excuse me, I've got to powder my nose.' Alexander CockburnsGuillotined! When they got up to go to dinner, one hugged another around the middle from behind and trudged up the bank with him that way, laughing. Bohemian Grove Dates 1991 Container box 778, folder 5 Physical Location Library of Congress Conditions Governing Access. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. Cutting in line is distinctly un-Bohemian behavior. The popular redwoods between the Dining and Camp Fire Circles now reeked of urine and wore what looked to be a permanent skirt of wet, blackened soil. In 1971, when the press corps forced him to cancel his speech at the Grove, President Nixon had wired the club to say, "Anyone can be president of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming president of the Bohemian Club.". He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. Politicians say there is no place like the Grove to help get a campaign rolling. The site's annual secretive meeting takes place for two weeks in July, with Powell writing that he was present at last July's event. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. "Bill Simon had room on his plane." But two insistently anonymous sources have disclosed that: William Buckley played Bach on an outddor piano while a New York cocktail pianist, George Feyer, played Mendelssohn concerto instead of Putting on the Ritz.. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. It urged its followers to form "Boho Clubs" to study members so they could be "held accountable by the American People" for participating "in the maintenance of the process of plutocratic patriarchy which threatens the planet Earth with omnicide from the nuclear menace." He must include the names of business or professional connections, wife's maiden name, and musical, oratorical, literary, artistic or histrionic talents.. Then the organist struck up "America the Beautiful" and Reagan left in a red truck, waving. Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. Also, he's not as tall as he looked in office. Care went up in blazes. But a long, hard look at the Bohemian Club, its members and appurtenances, sug-gests that behind the pretense of Secret Government lies the reality of a summer camp for a bunch of San Francisco businessmen, real estate plungers and lawyers who long ago had the cunning to recruit some outside megawattage (e.g., Herbert Hoover, a Rockefeller, Richard Nixon) to turn their mundane frolicking into the simulacrum of Secret Government and make the yokels gape. At least six inches." When BGAN resurrected Care, it chanted its own hymns: "On a day much like this five score years ago, the first hideous fire was lit in Monte Rio, and sweet Care was banished from this lovely land, and Bohemians reveled upon their shifting sand.". The salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, one writer grumbled. The first, called Cremation of Care, is a bizarre production on the opening night of every encampment, a ritualistic ceremony involving hundreds of participants. Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. "His method was to seize a large horse bucket, throw a hunk of ice into it, pour in several bottles of gin and a half a bottle of vermouth, and slosh it all around," goes one Grove recipe. 1872. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. I'm admitting for the first time in my life having no willpower," a man was saying to his wife on one of the public phones. The fairy unguents were wearing off; after two weeks the place stopped looking so magical and began to seem as ordinary as a tree-house. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. They talk business here all the time. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, reads a plaque left by a Bohemian at the base of a 301-footer. I wrote "How do you feel about government and legal efforts to force the Club to admit women?" The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions In The U.S. Interlocking Directorates in the Corporate Community, The Power Elite's Foreign Policy in WWII & Vietnam, The Rise and Fall of Diversity at the Top, 2005-2015, Can Corporate Power Be Controlled? Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. In the end I entered by stealth. Though I regularly violated Grove rule 20 ("Members and guests shall sign the register when arriving at or departing from the Grove"), I was never stopped or questioned. Throughout the skeet-shooting, the domino-playing and the museum talks, right up through the "afterglows" that follow each evening's entertainment, everyone is perpetually numbed and loose, but a clubbish decorum prevails just the same. So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. On hikes I'd taken, my impression had been that the only people patrolling the ten miles of Grove perimeter were a guy at the Guard House on Smith Creek Road who spent a lot of time whittling a walking stick and ancient Bohemians taking the daily 10:00 a.m. open-backed bus tour. Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, William Buckley, Bing Crosby, Phil Harris and William Randolph Hearst Jr. belong, as do the presidents of the Wells Fargo Banks, the First National Bank of Chicago, the Southern Pacific Railway, The Los Angeles Times, Pacific Gas and Electric, Levi Strauss, Stanford University and the University of California, among others. This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. Many years ago a doctor called it a Nembutal, and the name stuck, so much so that one Fore Peak camper wears a stethoscope and a white lab coat with Dr. Nembutal stitched on it. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, retired Gen. Colin Powell, former House Speaker Newt . In the first 50 years of the club's existence the Bohemian Grove was comparatively accessible to outsiders, but in the 1930s, as the club gained influence and its redwoods provided a haven for Republican presidents, it grew quite secretive about its rituals and membership -- you won't even find the Grove on public maps. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. And Rex Greed said, "The only difference between rape and rapture is salesmanship." The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. His friend, a man in a yellow brocade vest, agreed. Thus equipped, I came and went on 7 days during the 16-day encampment, openly trespassing in what is regarded as an impermeable enclave and which the press routinely refers to as a heavily guarded area. Tacked to one of these haplessly postprandial trees is a sign conveying the fairy-dust mixture of boyishness and courtliness that envelops the encampment: Gentlemen please!