But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? Bohemians rhapsodize endlessly about towering shafts and the inspiration they give men. Title. The state has established a beachhead at the Grove's front office, a hundred yards outside the main gate, where, under legal pressure, seven women have been employed. "Hey, knock it off, this is Bohemia," Hugh had to tell him. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] Dates 2000 Container box 783, folder 26 Physical Location Library of Congress When Gerald R. Ford, Henry A. Kissinger and A. W. Clausen joined 2,000 of the richest and most powerful men in the country at the annual ritual known as the "Summer Encampment" at Bohemian . Gray, who this year had brought along Union Carbide boss Robert D. Kennedy. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. "My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. Politicians say there is no place like the Grove to help get a campaign rolling. Nearby, a young member of the cast dressed as a woman pulled apart purplish gossamer robes to pee. Hugh said that an old college friend came to stay in Bohemia and took over the mixing of the drinks. Canada. "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. 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. They come by limousine through the woods or by corporate jet to the tiny Sonoma Airport, where they are met by waiting cars. No pee pee here! 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. At the encampment last July, Al Haig was there, along with three other former secretaries of State: Kissinger, Shultz and William P. Rogers (Rogers as a guest of former national security adviser William P. Clark's). The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? on a piece of Grove stationery and went up to the fellow taking questions from my section, by the giant owl. No one was supposed to know he was peering up at ospreys and turkey vultures and hearing Soviet speakers along with former American secretaries of State and the present secretary of the Treasury. Kissinger's crusty performance was not appreciated by the men he'd cut in front of in line. 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. Chaperonage for adult women. The rough wooden tables were piled with perfect fruit. On July 21 of this year Henry Kissinger sat at one of them, chuffing loudly to someone -- Sunshine, her called her, and Sweetie -- about the pleasant distractions of his vacation in the forest. The media's anti-elitist mood, never all that ferocious, was spent. 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. 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 friend and I leaned closer. The reporters that Mary Moore had helped spirit into the Grove for hours at a time had come out with vague, watered-down versions of what went on, or their news organizations had suppressed the accounts. 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. 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. The cremation is intended to put the busy men of the club at ease and banish the stress of the outside world, but it arouses critics of the encampment because they interpret it to mean that Bohemians literally don't care about the outside world. Early Bohemians were hungry for exaltation and grabbed on to any tradition they could find to dignify their exile in the vulgar West. Why so many games of dominoes? 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. 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. The papers are open for research. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. It is here at a campground in Monte Rio, California surrounded by redwood trees where the secretive boy's club for the rich and powerful, whose members have included Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, have an unusual ceremony. 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. My bags were packed -- a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. "David Jr.'s going into the family business now. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. The camp has a false outer door and two overlapping walls that form an S-shaped entry. 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. Who are the members, and how do they join the club whose reason for being is the Summer Encampment? 09/16/2019 04:05 PM. Over the years the Jinks has become the leading entertainment at the encampment, surpassing the mannered and ponderous Grove Play, which is performed the next weekend. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. (The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl." 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. Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. 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.. Its mem-bership was dignified by Jack London, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and other literary roustabouts who had fetched up in the city after the Gold Rush. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. 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." No one would be surprised. 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. ", "Come out Bohemians! Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who spoke on the history of the state water problems and the creation of such programs as the Central Valley Project. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. No, Section 8, Article XVIII was too fine a screen for me. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. Everything in the encampment is sheltered by redwoods, which admit hazy shafts of sunlight, and every camp has a more or less constant campfire sending a soft column of smoke into the trees. There were laments. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. For me, the trick was getting in. "It's more than it's cracked up to be. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. 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. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. But comes next July 14 and every self-respecting member of the Secret World government will be in a gloomy grove of redwoods alongside the Russian river in northern California, preparing to Banish Care for the 122cnd time, prelude to three weeks drinking gin fizzes and hashing out the future of the world. The encampment's rules about dealing with waiters reinforce the heartless but egalitarian values of the Grove. I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. Bilderberg mastermind Henry Kissinger is also a reported regular at the event. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. In 1984 folk singing demonstrators tried to quarantine the Bohemians inside the Grove because they were so dangerous to the outside world. They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. "What's in this?" 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.'" Any Bohemian is welcome at such events. For a while, in the early 1980s, Moore and BGAN thought they might actually liberate the redwoods. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. a Camp Meeker activist who runs the Bohemian Grove Action Network. 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.. 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. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. From its beginning, in the year Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Two Bohemian Grove is a restricted 2,700-acre (1,100 ha) campground located in the forest of Monte Rio, California. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. (Another rule forbade cameras outside one's own camp. Art Linkletter? 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. 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. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. 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. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. Some anthropologists of Boho culture even believe that the Grove is now encircled with gay resi-dential suburbs that have inevitably sprung up to ac-commodate these migrants. In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. It's only a matter of time before the club gets sued under either California's civil rights act or San Francisco's civil rights ordinance, both of which bar sex discrimination in business establishments. -- GWD.] That's right, the Bohemian Grove. But he was perfectly charming, and we talked about music and the Kennedy Center for a long time.. But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. Everyone talks about it. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. 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.' In years past speakers at the lakeside chats have included Dwight D. Eisenhower, before he was President; Robert F. Kennedy, when he was Attorney General; Arnold Palmer, the golfer; Nelson A. Rockefeller; former Chief Justice Earl Warren; David Sarnoff, former chairman of RCA; Herman Wouk, the writer; Dr. Wernher von Braun of the space program; Neil Armstrong, an astronaut, Richard M. Nixon, who is a club member, and Mr. Kissinger. It was a good time to visit the Grove. Rudyard Kipling, romantic colonialist and exponent of the masculine spirit, is, naturally, one of the Grove's heroes, and "Mandalay" is a triumphant white man's-burden song. It takes place on the Field Circle stage, which is wedged in between two camps, Pink Onion (notable for its pink sheets) and Cave Man (notable for big-deal right-wingers and a plaque commemorating Herbert Hoover). Down by the lake I saw three men lying on the ground, talking. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. 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. It turned out to be only a deer lick. I said we might have a deal for him. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. "Your agricultural policy.") 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. He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. 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 . The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. But what, in the end, does the member get for his pains? Voyage to Sonoma County and muster against Secret World Government which, lets face it, isnt exactly secret. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. 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." It was a devilishly charming thing to say, calculated to flatter the men of the Bohemian Grove. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good; they'd sniff me out quickly. Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. This has been especially true in the last ten years as Bohemia's stunning roster has waxed ever more statusy, as Kissinger and Rockefeller and Nick Brady have joined, drawing the attention of left-wing protesters, scholars of elites, and reporters. Tom Watson, the builder of IBM, once took a long weekend off from his retirement job as US ambassador to Moscow to fly to San Francisco to dine with a Bohemian Grove board member and discreetly lobby for membership. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. As I sat down a great glistening arc of melon was slid before me. Secret World rulers spend a good deal of time in the air, whisking from Davos to APEC meetings somewhere in Asia, to Ditchley, to Sun Valley, Idaho, though mercifully no longer to the Clinton-favored Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He wandered up with a beer in his hand as I sat reading on a bench and, pausing for emphasis, pronounced, "In the beginning the Lord created -- cunts.". 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. On the River Road you heard some small business talk. Hes spared the heftysign-up fee of around $10,000 and annual membership duesm and only has to pony up when hes invited, which is every two or three years. 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. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. 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. Lobbying is pathetically fierce. Bohemian Grove, 1991. . When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." Theres Not Being At Home with the wife. (This joke is funny because Kissinger was famous for saying that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."). It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". I wrote "How do you feel about government and legal efforts to force the Club to admit women?" So what are you responsible for," the KGB asks him. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . There's no end to the pee-pee and penis jokes, suggesting that these men, advanced in so many other ways, were emotionally arrested sometime during adolescence. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." Come out, Bohemians. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. 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. Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. "That Indian is here, Bajpai." At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. A week after the encampment, a Washington correspondent for a French paper insisted to me that the last time the prime minister had visited the U.S. was a year and a half ago. 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. "Do it counterclockwise, Dickie, that's best," the captain called out. It was a transparent plea for help. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. One day a member asked if I was related to a Bohemian named Jack Weiss. They wore bright red, blue and orange hooded robes chat might have been designed for the Ku Klux Klan by Marimekko. 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. This year Rocard's visit went unreported. This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. 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. One camp, called Aviary, is composed entirely of members who were, or are, singers. 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. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer We're just overdoing it. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. I asked him whether it was true that it was at the Grove in 1967 that he, then the new governor, had assured Nixon that he wouldn't challenge him outright for the Republican nomination in 1968. This summer, for example, attendees saw several plays. They played golf, swam and went skeet shooting. ", At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. 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. Where else could such men hope to chat privately with the head of IBM, a cou-ple of Rockefellers, bankers galore, a Justice of the US Supreme Court and Charlton Heston? Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. 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