Since 1980, Moore and as many as 400 other demonstrators . Why, for example, areat least 80 percent of the Bohemians in a state of intoxication so advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the ferns, gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last? He was a goateed giant with massive shoulders and a beer gut. Walter Cronkite. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." "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. -- GWD.] The Bohemian Grove hires young men. Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. They played golf, swam and went skeet shooting. But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. 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? 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. In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. 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. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. 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. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. Some said all the big decisions were taken in England, at Ditchley, not so far from the Appeasers former haunts at Cliveden and only an hour by Learjet from Davos, which is where jumped up finance ministers and self-inflating tycoons merely pretend they rule the world. Only one telephone line goes into the grove, and telegram is the main form of communication in or out. A guest card was out of the question: club bylaws have stated that a member-sponsor's application "shall be in writing and shall contain full information for the guidance of the Board in determining the merits and qualifications of the proposed guest." 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.. 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." LOL that is some good fucking eyes wow he was so skinny then. The meal (tournedos of beef) was festive and communal. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. There were owl figures everywhere, notably a silver owl ice bucket on the bar whose head tilted off cleverly. The moderator studied the page and asked who I was and what camp I was in. After that I began working a dead West Coast relative's promise to have me out to the Grove one summer into a shaggy-dog story about my invitation. 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. One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging. Being from New York was fine; the Grove limits retreat guests to out-of-staters (though clamoring by well-connected Californians to visit the forest has resulted in the rise of the June "Spring Jinks" weekend). At certain times of the year women are allowed to enter the Grove -- but only under "chaperonage," according to a 1980 statement by the club president. 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. The club's famed annual gathering has been held for more than 100 years at the 2,700-acre Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. "Bill Simon had room on his plane." Later I heard a Bohemian on the River Road saying it had been brave of Reagan to take on all comers, But another Bohemian pointed out it really hadn't been a big risk. 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. see that two of the bit actors appearing as dock workers were Casper Weinberger, former Secretary of Health; Education and Welfare who is now chief counsel for the Bechtel Corporation, and Mr. Clausen, president and chief executive officer of the Bank of America. "You can't," he said. 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. 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. Those who attended included Art Linkletter, who was master of ceremonies, for one of the shows, Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, among the entertainers; A. Robert Abboud; John Diebold, the consultant; Edgar F. Kaiser Sr. of Kaiser Industries; Richard Cooley, former president of Wells Fargo Bank; Allan Sproul, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Emmet Solomon, former president of the CrockerCitizens National Bank, and Louis B. Lundborg, retired chairman of the Bank of America. 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. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. 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. This is not the first time Clinton, Powell or Kissinger have been linked to the Bohemian Grove. Great intimacy is achieved in song. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II > Series V. Photographs > General > Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove includes correspondence. They come by limousine through the woods or by corporate jet to the tiny Sonoma Airport, where they are met by waiting cars. In 1953, when he was vice president, Nixon led a ceremony honoring Herbert Hoover's 40th year as a Bohemian. 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. There were laments. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. Bohemian Club literature is pious on this score. There's all the redwood talk. Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. 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). "We had rope trick. Also, he's not as tall as he looked in office. MONTE RIO, Calif.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 Grove near this sleepy hamlet of 997 last month, did they make decisions that will shape America's destiny, or was It merely the greatest men's party on earth?. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." 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. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. It draws in notables such as former President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Dow Chemical Chairman . Care went up in blazes. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. There is at least one officer or director from 40 of the 50 largest industrial corporations in the country, and an officer or director of 20 of the top 25 banks in the country, according to G. William Domhoff, author of The Bohemian Grove: A Study in the Ruling Class Cohesiveness.. They sang from a small stage in front of a redwood on which was hung a framed nineteenth-century engraving. (Another rule forbade cameras outside one's own camp. The Proposed TikTok Ban Goes Too Far. He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. The priests turned in desperation to the owl. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. "David Jr.'s going into the family business now. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. European leaders travel discreetly to the Grove to ad-dress the American elite. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. The club's "men of talent" (i.e., artists and writers) included writers of a populist bent: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry M. Stanley. The owner of the lotion sighed. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. If the avenging posses mustered by the Bohemian Grove Action Network manage this year to burst through the security gates at the Bohemian Grove, they will (to extrapolate from numerous eyewitness accounts of past sessions) find proofs most convincing to them that here indeed is the ruling crowd in executive session: hundreds of near-dead white men sitting by a lake listening to Henry Kissinger, plus many other near-dead white men in adjacent landscape in a state of intoxication so advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the ferns, gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last. 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. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." Of the top 800 corporations in the U.S. in 1980 30% had at least one officer or director at . ", "Bohemians come! Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. No pee pee here! I wrote "How do you feel about government and legal efforts to force the Club to admit women?" 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. Most of the visitors to this year's encampment stayed only one or two of the three weekends, although a few stayed the entire two weeks. For example, at one point a Little League team came out that included Bohemians Bob Lurie and Peter O'Malley, the real-life owners of the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, in uniform. 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. Dick Cheneys a Grover. Reagan said that it was good to be back. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. For me, the trick was getting in. 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. In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. A screen door creaked on a little house farther up the hill, and a Bohemian named Richard poked his head out, emerging from his siesta. 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. Former Bank of America chairman Samuel Armacost brought IBM chairman John F. Akers, Bechtel chairman S. D. Bechtel Jr. brought Amoco chairman Richard Morrow. "Tom Johnson is here." Fireworks went off at the lakeside, and a brass band in peppermint-striped jackets and straw boaters came out of the woods playing "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.". The screens get pretty fine. "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. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. No one would be surprised. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre campground in Monte Rio, Calif that serves as a meeting place for top politicians and businessmen who are members of the Grove society. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. I wanted to visit the former president. Why so many games of dominoes? 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. Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. The long tables are lit by gas pipes that spring from the ears of wooden owl silhouettes three feet above the table, a half dozen of these per table. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. It never rains when the encampment is on. Many older men die waiting. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". He says he likes it that way. He said it was a big shot in the arm for Monte Rios ailing economy. Some day the walls will fall, though it's hard to see why any woman would want to join a crowd of old Republicans chewing cigars and reminiscing about potency. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show. More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. The traditional 7:00 a.m. gin fizzes served in bed by camp valets set the pace. 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. They spoke of "fairy unguents" that would free men to pursue warm fellowship, and I was reminded of something Herman Wouk wrote about the Grove: "Men can decently love each other; they always have, bur women never quite understand. 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. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. It was born in the newsroom of the old San Francisco Examiner in 1872, when James F. Bowman, an editorial writer for the rival Chronicle, proposed it to some friends at the Examiner, including prominent journalist Ambrose Bierce. Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Following closely in Mandalay's footsteps is Cave Man Camp. Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins. We're just overdoing it. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. The club's nemesis here is the state of California, which keeps chipping away at the Grove's maleness, lately threatening to take away its liquor license and its tax-exempt status because it discriminates against women. 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. Richard Nixon, like Hoover a mem-ber of Cave Mans camp inside the Grove, got a raptur-ous reception in 1967 and pressed forward to the nomi-nation and the White House. ", "Abby, now, she's the one who raised her fist at graduation? 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. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. I walked over to the Secret Service guy and asked if it was okay to meet the president. The peeing is ceaseless and more than a little exhibitionistic. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. "We had rope trick. One of them seemed puzzled -- the friend wasn't the sort to get going at 7:45 a.m., he noted. 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. Meanwhile, the Bohemians' new favorite son had arrived in camp the night before. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. And they all sat around the lavish dinner circle feasting on lamb, salmon, steaks and assorted delicacies each night. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. Everyone talks about it. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. That's the picnic scene at Russian River, where whitecaps and condoms meander down the foul brown estuary swirling amongst filthy young men who entertain disgusting Old Jew Pervs from Fire Island, Key West and West Hollywood. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was invited this summer and, according to club officials, had planned to attend, but he canceled. He got the pa-pers San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. The size also variesonly 10 to 15 persons can be accommodated at some, while others range up to 150. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. This year Rocard's visit went unreported. And membership comes dear. Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes who used to hunt rabbits in the nearby hills, remembered a fire road leading into the site near the Guerneville waste-treatment plant but said they'd spot me sneaking in. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. She put at my service a mountain guide who demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. The club says it serves as a "refuge" from the strivings of the marketplace, and though it's true that actual deal-making is discouraged, I heard business being done on all sides. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Owl's Nest is sort of an old Hollywood-corporatist camp. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. To be quite frank, replied the Bohemian Club member who had disclosed that Mr. Ford had spoken, he put me to sleep.. I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. A bagpiper walked in the woods by himself squeezing out a melancholy song, a brass band played "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Cliff Dwellers camp, and in Band Camp a young guitarist and an old pianist experimented with the Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing.". As time went on, however, the club became too elite for its own founders.
