There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. Separating the Red and Blue. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. For a good half hour the band warmed up the audience, playing the fight songs of many California colleges and the armed services and culminating with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Under the green parasol stood General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air Command, who spoke of the country's desperate need for the Stealth B-2 bomber. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. Politicians say there is no place like the Grove to help get a campaign rolling. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. The Grove was still there. He even went into the drunken depression stage and started claiming he's going to die in his 50s from a heart attack. Inside, a plump Secret Service guy in a Members Only jacket sat near a giant wooden owl. The first, called Cremation of Care, is a bizarre production on the opening night of every encampment, a ritualistic ceremony involving hundreds of participants. One old-timer said that Nixon was feuding with the board of directors. This is not the first time Clinton, Powell or Kissinger have been linked to the Bohemian Grove. The most dignified had arrived. Why so many games of dominoes? 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. To quote the sacred script of the grove's notorious Cremation of Care ceremony, which includes the requisite summer-camp assembly of robed men, a 40-foot . The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. Industries PLC of England, a deal that could give Simon a toehold in Europe. The Mandalay camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the Reagan-Bush years. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. Kissinger had lolled on the ground, distributing mown grass clippings across his white shirt, being careful not to set his elbow on one of the cigar butts squashed in the grass, and joking with a wiry, nut-brown companion. The Club took certain measures and things are now under control. Th encampment has become the primary watering hole for Republican administration officials, defense contractors, press barons, old-line Hollywood figures, establishment intellectuals and a handful of German speaking men in lederhosen. "David Jr.'s going into the family business now. His friend, a man in a yellow brocade vest, agreed. Canada. For the Rally and Line of Shame, be at the Monte Rio parking lot across from the Rio theater at 2pm, July 14, For further details, call the Bohemian Grove Action Network, whose Mary Moore has been chivvying the Grovers for twenty years, at 707-874-2248 or check out http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org. This button displays the currently selected search type. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was invited this summer and, according to club officials, had planned to attend, but he canceled. He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. At such times -- at many such times, among strong leaders, deep in the forest -- the Grove takes on a certain Germanic bermenschlich feeling. On the River Road you heard some small business talk. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. A "heifer" asked him why he was there. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. Also, I'd tried to grab one of the free Bohemian Club walking sticks from the museum, something I could lean against my office wall with the B/C shield turned out to remind myself that this right-wing fantasia had not been just a dream. The most striking prop in The Low Jinks was a sculpture of a female torso whose breasts and buttocks had both been attached to the front, an improvement that looked vaguely hostile. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. Along with the big play there is the comedy revue Low Jinks for which members again rehearse with passionate anticipation. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. 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. But by then I'd made my connection, My driver was Mary Moore, an Earth Mother type with long silvery-blond hair who is the most active member of a distinctly Californian left-wing group called the Bohemian Grove Action Network. He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. The simulacrum isnt half bad. Indeed, I was able to enjoy most pleasures of the Grove, notably the speeches, songs, elaborate drag shows, endless toasts, pre-breakfast gin fizzes, round-the-clock "Nembutals" and other drinks -- though I didn't sleep in any of the camps or swim naked with likeminded Bohemians in the Russian River at night. "He really put the balls into it. At the Bohemian Grove, he joined the Piedmont Camp to be with his close personal friends from Piedmontthe Witters, Dollars, etc.instead of joining a business camp. Bohemian Club In the Bohemian Club at what is known as Bohemian Grove in the redwood forest of California's Sonoma county, an event that continued into the 21st century. The encampment's rules about dealing with waiters reinforce the heartless but egalitarian values of the Grove. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. In my informant's opinion, there was bad blood; Nixon's resignation 15 years ago had offended the club's honor -- it had been so un-Bohemian. In the Grove's Club Med-like plan, the meals are covered in the fee for the encampment, which, judging from schedules I'd seen from two years back, ran about $850 on top of annual dues. Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. He was surely influenced by Prime Minister Rocard's Saturday afternoon Lakeside Talk, in which he dangled the most sanguine business expectations of the new European order. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. My neighbor suggested that someone ought to "shoot the fucker down," flashing the press hatred that prevails in Bohemia. ", "Bohemians come! The play, about greedy gold miners who came to California during the middle 1800's and kicked the Spaniards off their land, was written by Lou Felder, a Bohemian Club member who plays a fraudulent consumer advocate on the new TV show Fernwood 2Night.. The guest list can be revealing as well. July 29, 2022 Back in 1984, some 300 demonstrators descended upon Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, blockading the entrance to an annual summer conclave legendary for its woodsy, all-male bacchanal.. 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.". . Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, Continuing Corporate Dominance (No, the Corporate Elite Is NOT Fractured), An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%, How Corporate Moderates Created Social Security. The girls were all played by men, and every time they appeared -- their chunky legs and flashed buttocks highly visible through tight support hose -- the crowd went wild. 1872. come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!". There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, retired Gen. Colin Powell, former House Speaker Newt . During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. And they do talk to each othersometimes ignoring the injunctive to leave business behind. Title. Great intimacy is achieved in song. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. The non-famous hard-core Bohemians were more in evidence now, men who wore owls in various forms -- owl belt buckles, brass owl bolo ties, denim shirts embroidered with owls. ", "Abby, now, she's the one who raised her fist at graduation? Membership in the Bohemian Club is by invitation only, and no women are allowed, either as members or guests, except for an occasional picnic for club wives. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. 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. Kevin McCarthy is No Edward Snowden, But He Should Find the Comparison Flattering, Assessing Nicaraguas Long Haul toward Liberation and Economic Democracy, A National Divorce? It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. My first full-strength dose of Bohemian culture took place two weeks earlier, the first Saturday night, when after a long day in the Grove I took a seat on the grassy lakeside among 1,500 ocher men for the encampment's famously surreal opening ritual. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. PodClips brings you the best podcast clips All clips from this episode: https://podclips.com/e/edz?ss=y___Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/podclip. Amid somber music, horses carrying caped riders gallop through the trees. Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices at places where the Grove abuts Monte Rio, and helicopters patrolling the "ridge roads" that traverse the 1,000-foot hills and form the Grove's perimeter. "One of the contemporary myths about the Bohemian Club is that it is a gathering and decision-making place for national and international 'power brokers,"' the club's then-president said in 1980. "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. 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. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. This year's speaker was Henry Kissinger on The Challenge of the '80s." Maclean's magazine, March 23, 1981 reported: "Each summer, for three weekends - this year's will be the 103rd - nearly 2,000 Bohemians, with guests in tow, speed in by car and corporate jet to their guarded Grove, close by the hamlet of Monte Rio (population 1,200) on the . It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. The encampment became controversial in the early Reagan years when reporters, still suffering the hangover of Carter populism, questioned club executive appointees about the club's sexist practices. The mood was American and bellicose. START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? As time went on, however, the club became too elite for its own founders. On the first weekend, for instance, Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, addressing his listeners as men of "power and rank," gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers about the plight of Terry Anderson, the Middle East correspondent held hostage since 1985. Here, of an evening, Grovers can hear a banker or a Treasury official wend his way through the intricacies of Third World debt rescheduling, or listen to a European leader who will offer himself up for inspection. Fifty people were arrested. The mood is reminiscent of high school. 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. "My father said if you have a choice between an angry woman and a rabid dog, take the dog," Jason Jones Jr. said. William F. Buckley Jr. and Malcolm Forbes held court. I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. It turned out to be only a deer lick. The speech was canned and courtly. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. The feud was unfortunate because Nixon and the club went back a long way. Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller all stopped in as they geared up for their respective presidential campaigns. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. Anyone can read what you share. They talk business here all the time. No one inside acted suspicious, but paranoia about the Grove seemed justified, and I brought along my own version of cyanide: Interol, a tranquilizer used by actors to counteract stage fright. Randy members break bounds and head for such straight cruising spots as the Northwood Lodge and Country Club where vigorously bejeweled women in their thirties are to be found. At Sundodgers camp there is a motto on the mantel: The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. 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. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. Bohemian Grove is a place where men who grew up with their names on buildings can pee on trees and perform bacchanalian rites, unfettered by the pesky presence of women, unlanded gentry or any. Reagan said that it was good to be back. Their names follow the imaginative arc of American industrialists and financiers over the past hun-dred years, from Druids to Hillbillies (George Bush, Walter Cronkite, William F. Buckley), Isle of Aves (John E. Du Pont), Meyerling, Owls Nest (Eddie Albert, Ronald Reagan), Silverado Squatters, Totem Inn (which has actually boasted a writer, Allen Drury), Woof (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III), Wayside Log (which has boasted another writer, Herman Wouk), Ye Merrie Yowls, Zaca. By 1988 the gauntlet of hippies and solarheads and woman-identified women whom the Bohemians had been forced to maneuver their Jags and limos around to get to the gate had disappeared. It was a good time to visit the Grove. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. 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. (Another rule forbade cameras outside one's own camp. "I am a warrior and that is how I come to you today," he said. 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. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. I'd made it in that day for breakfast at the Dining Circle, the most lavish meal of the Bohemian day, an experience redolent of moneyed western ease. The Bohemian Club 's mascot is an owl, here cast in masonry, and perched over the main club entrance at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco. I wanted to visit the former president. 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. 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. As orange dragonflies coupled dazzlingly over the water, as bullfrogs sounded, Rocard would lean forward and say, "Because you are such an astonishing group of men, I can speak privately." Alexander CockburnsGuillotined! I wanted to ask Reagan about efforts to desegregate the club. The weirdest approach I experienced came from a tall redhead in western wear, a fourth-generation Californian. Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some 120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon. After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. "Most of it. There's all the redwood talk. At the opening of each summer season proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque, representing the banish-ment of Care. When one character; a PR executive, expressed a desire to make his mistress an honest woman, she objected, reminding him of an old Bohemian saying: "If it floats or flies or fools around, don't buy it, rent it." The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. Meanwhile, the racked-up Owl Hoots drawings dubbed the sculpture the "statue of Piece" and pictured a Bohemian commenting that she would be "fun to dance with." The talent section is no doubt in acted in and staged each year by club members. Since 1980, Moore and as many as 400 other demonstrators . It never rains when the encampment is on. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. 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. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . Here Nicholas Brady examined the history of the Jockey Club. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. With its dense concentration of extravagant war- and money-mongers, it's an easy object of protest, and 72 left-wing groups eventually joined Moore to form the Bohemian Grove Action Network. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. Many of the Boho rituals and its first play, The Triumph of Bohemia, were worked up by a real estate speculator called George Sterling who took to poesy and Boho-dom late in life and banished Care permanently in 1926 by taking strychnine in the Clubs city premises. 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 walled camps are generally about 100 feet wide and stretch back up the hillside, with wooden platforms on which members set up tents. 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. I would like to make the two-year congressman's term four years, to reduce the number of elections that we have, because I think that's one of the reasons that only about 53 percent of the people vote. The participants seem to enjoy the isolation and the opportunity to let their hair down in some way. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. Some years ago a gay writer called Ron Bluestein described his stint waitering at the Grove in a very funny pamphlet, A Waitress in Bohemia, in which he evoked the below-the-stairs homosexual culture fostered by a workforce mostly recruited from San Francisco. The camp has a false outer door and two overlapping walls that form an S-shaped entry. Every spring for many years now, Bohemian Club presidents have formally summoned such men to the Grove with great effusion: "Brother Bohemians: The Sun is Once Again in the Clutches of the Lion, and the encircling season bids us to the forest -- there to celebrate the awful mysteries! 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. Following closely in Mandalay's footsteps is Cave Man Camp. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. Of course there are gay waiters and gay bohemians too, discreetly cruising River Road, but it seems that it was back in the 1970s things got somewhat out of hand. "I need the B-2.". I used my real name. Cutting in line is distinctly un-Bohemian behavior. He sneered too, though more deferentially, at lordly Mandalay camp, inaccessible save by written invitation by a member, luxuriously appointed and stocked with the Membership Committees most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. Impotence is on many people's minds. At this point some hamadryads (tree spirits) and another priest or two appeared at the base of the main owl shrine, a 40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel at the south end of the lake, and sang songs about Care. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. We're just overdoing it. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians ("bohemians"). Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." [ link to imgur.com (secure)] Quoting: Ninbit. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. "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. The Monte Rio caller added that at least this quotient of Secret Government included good tippers, doling out splendid gratuities to their companions. All have a main cabin with kitchen, dining room, shower, bathroom and bar, but the sleeping facilities vary from camp to camp, ranging from tents to elaborate dormitories. There's a kind of emotional experience with an election year, that between state elections, local elections, and besides, with a two year term, a congressman gets elected and the next day he starts campaigning for the next election." 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? The deck's railing posed a dilemma. Meanwhile, Kissinger had been offering Rocard advice: "I told him, 'Do anything you want, hide in the bushes -- just don't let them see you.'" According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. "He bought some apple juice company for $1 million and he was fearful he would have to dip into his capital"). -- GWD.] The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. Wandering into the clearing, he announced to the air, "I have to make two phone calls." Wooziness was pervasive. After one character called the secretaries in the show "heifers," the audience couldn't resist breaking into "moos" every time they came back onstage. 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. Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." And David Rockefeller too. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. Mr. Ford and Mr. Kissinger this year were .guests of Mandalay, whose members include Stephen Bechtel Sr., Stephen Bechtel Jr., Leonard Case Firestone and Edgar F. Kaiser, among the industrialists; former C.I.A.