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. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. "Honey, I lost my ring and I want to sell the house," the third one said, mocking a homecoming speech. 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. Bohemian Club literature is pious on this score. At Sundodgers camp there is a motto on the mantel: The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. Rim rides, the tours were called. This amalgam of pop Druidry, Klan kitsch and Fraserian mumbo- jumbo stems from the nineteenth-cen-tury passion for ancient ritual. Two thousand miles away, at the other end of the continent, the same impulse produced Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with its Mystick Krewe, its Elves of Oberon and the tribute paid by Rex to Comus. We talked about his guest days at the Grove, before he became a member in 1975 (two months after he left the California governorship, a week after George Shultz joined). 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? In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. 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. 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. 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 encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. My bags were packed -- a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. 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. He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." 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. Wooziness was pervasive. 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. 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. The papers are open for research. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." 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. Music sounded softly. The scene brought to mind the reputation for prostitution that hangs around the Grove. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! 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. Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford 2d, Robert Trent Jones, the golf course architect, and former California Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke have all been stage hands, and actors have included Bing Crosby, David Niven, Ray Bolger, Edgar Bergen, Phil Harris and Dan Rowan. 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. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins. 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. Find home again in the Grove! Just the same, a man on his own often gets invited back to camps by gay Bohemians. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." This same caller moved from shots in the arm to shots in another location. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. Impotence is on many people's minds. The country was still steeped in the aw-shucks authoritarianism of the Reagan years, and if there is any place to study the culture of our ruling class it is here among the Grove's benevolent, string-tie aristocracy. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. 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. I used my real name. So are Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon -- though club directors are said to be miffed at Nixon, a longtime Bohemian Grover, who's still listed as sleeping in Cave Man, one of the Grove's 119 curiously and sometimes appropriately named camps. It's like great sex". "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? I waited till my last day to bring one in.) In 1981, for instance, Dan Rostenkowski, Ed Meese and former president of CBS News Van Gordon Sauter attended (Sauter as the guest of former California governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, Jerry's father). They talk business here all the time. In 1982 reporters followed German chancellor Helmut Schmidt co the Grove gates, and the front page of the Christian Science Monitor termed the Grove "the West's hidden summit." The grove is divided into 127 camps, each with its own members. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. You can't describe it," he explained. Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. The Bohemian Club is set up along frat house lines. 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 Bohemian Grove belongs to the private San Francisco-based gentlemen's club The Bohemian Club. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good.". It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. 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. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. And David Rockefeller too. That did it. "You can't," he said. 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. 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 owner of the lotion sighed. 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. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 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. When the wheeling and dealing was over, the club owned 2,700 acres of redwoods a grove of the mightiest of thou-sand-year-old Sequoia sempervirens: We are grown men now, a piece of club literature announced in the early 1920s, but each year in the hard procession of our days there comes, thank God, to us Bohemians, a recess time it is upon us. It was a transparent plea for help. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. In sending his regrets by telegram, Mr. Nixon reportedly told the president of the club to continue to lead the people into the woods, while he, Mr. Nixon, would continue to lead the rest of the people out of the woods. And inside the Grove the guest list was well guarded. Indeed, when confronted with a sex-discrimination suit a few years ago, the Bohemians indignantly asserted that theirs had to be a Men Only institution precisely because any woman entering the clubs precincts would see nothing but men occupied in this crude pastime. These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. 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.". In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. 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. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. 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." A waiter in a red jacket dropped an uneaten chunk of the bright red cod into a waste bin, and the Bohemians at my table talked about presidents. "Your secretary, I got to tell you, she's 110 percent," a dark-haired man said to an older fellow. "We had rope trick. The meal (tournedos of beef) was festive and communal. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." The deck's railing posed a dilemma. 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. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). "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. Here Nicholas Brady examined the history of the Jockey Club. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. So what are you responsible for," the KGB asks him. Politicians say there is no place like the Grove to help get a campaign rolling. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). 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. 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. 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. Reagan said that it was good to be back. By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. He says he likes it that way. 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." "We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men's club," a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. This year's event drew in notables such as former President George Bush, Texas Gov. Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. 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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. 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.. Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. (The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl." 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. The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information. 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. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. Visit some corporate suite in San Francisco in June or early July and if you see the CEO brooding thoughtfully before his plate-glass window overlooking the Bay Bridge, the chances are he is not thinking about some impending take-over or merciless down-sizing. But by 1985 BGAN's energies were ebbing. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. Why the evidence that a significant portion of the Secret Government appear to be involved in some theatrical production, involving the use of womens clothes and lavish application of make-up? One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. 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. 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. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. During the day, idleness is encouraged. Chaperonage for adult women. The young Christian zealots of the Newt revolution were scarcely Low Jinksters, and Newt he did give a lake-side talk in 1995 was a little too tacky in style for the gin fizz set. But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Along with the big play there is the comedy revue Low Jinks for which members again rehearse with passionate anticipation. The rough wooden tables were piled with perfect fruit. 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. To be quite frank, replied the Bohemian Club member who had disclosed that Mr. Ford had spoken, he put me to sleep.. 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 fact, the encampment has always had political significance. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch. 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 club's "men of talent" (i.e., artists and writers) included writers of a populist bent: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry M. Stanley. The Bohemians will be hard-pressed to prove that they are a purely private club that falls outside the legal definition of a business, when clearly so many members participate for business-related reasons. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Henry Kissinger? 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. Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. One day I drove up to the front gate and got a daunting glimpse of what looked like the Grove sheriff, a barrel like figure in a Smokey the Bear hat. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. Art Linkletter? The most dignified had arrived. 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. 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. 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. 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! 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? Well, a man did that at a party, and his hostess said, when he came back, she said, 'You must have the longest nose in the world.' Also, he's not as tall as he looked in office. The talent section is no doubt in acted in and staged each year by club members. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. ", "Abby, now, she's the one who raised her fist at graduation? And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. 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? Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. Q33. Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. "He bought some apple juice company for $1 million and he was fearful he would have to dip into his capital"). He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. 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. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) It was at the Bohemian Grove that Americas nuclear weapons program was first devised by physicists such as Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller, both members, meeting with other members who were then in govern-ment, all confident of the security of the redwood club-house built by Bernard Maybeck (one of our favorite American architects) in 1904. One old-timer said that Nixon was feuding with the board of directors. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. Carried by pallbearers and high priests in bright red hoods and flowing robes, the coffin burns as chants give way to a band playing There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.. The often bizarre rites have elevated what was once a provincial club for San Franciscans embarrassed by the rude manners of the Wild West into the most exclusive club in the United States, with 2,300 members drawn from the whole of the American establishment and a waiting list 33 years long. A speech to the industrial and financial titans clus-tered for one of the Groves famous lake-side talks could make or break a candidacy. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. 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." -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. Following closely in Mandalay's footsteps is Cave Man Camp. One of them seemed puzzled -- the friend wasn't the sort to get going at 7:45 a.m., he noted. I heard a 50-ish Bohemian, the "captain" of Pow Wow camp, call out one day as young George went to pee off the deck. He said Reagan would love it and motioned with an open hand toward the deck. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." And membership comes dear. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. 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. Late in the Low Jinks the elevator doors opened and a man came out wearing a rubber Henry Kissinger mask. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a more than two-week encampment of some of the masters of the universe. Meanwhile, the Bohemians' new favorite son had arrived in camp the night before. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. . -- GWD.] Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. 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. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. This rule is strictly adhered to. In the good old days when the Illuminati had a firm grip on things, it was wherever the Bilderburgers decided to pitch their tents. No wonder this year's guest list included the two biggest congressional bagmen of recent years: Representative Tony Coelho, former chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, and Representative Guy Vanderjagt, his counterpart on the Republican committee. As the magic hour of 9:15 approached, a helicopter from a network newsmagazine circled frantically far above the darkened forest, searching out a spectacle lit at that point only by the hundreds of cigars whose smokers had ignited them in defiance of the California Forest Service's posted warnings. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." 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.
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