I outfitted myself in conservative recreational wear -- a pressed plaid shirt, PermaPrest chinos, Top Siders, a sport jacket -- I always carried a drink, and I made it a point to have that morning's Wall Street Journal or New York Times under my arm when I surfaced (though television is against the rules, newspapers are sold at the Grove Civic Center). I repeated myself, and he said, "Yes, yes, that's true," in the famous furry voice. Since 1980, Moore and as many as 400 other demonstrators . 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. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." There are less elaborate stagings by the individual camps, which really exist as separate societies with members of each paying for their facilities. 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 moderator studied the page and asked who I was and what camp I was in. 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.. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. Then an old friend came up and snagged his attention. 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). 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. They talk business here all the time. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. Reporters seeking to write about the Grove had rarely been inside, and then usually for only a few hours at a time, but I was determined to have a good, long look, so I took care to blend. (Then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who had copies of his newspaper shipped up every day.) "You got it too late." On Wouk's acceptance, for instance, he was put to work writing a history of the club. The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl's face so that its beak seemed to move. 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. The participants seem to enjoy the isolation and the opportunity to let their hair down in some way. 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. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". 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. "We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men's club," a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. 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. ", Amid wild applause one man removed a heavily chewed cigar to say, "If that don't send a chill up your spine, you ain't a Bohemian." The club motto, Weaving spiders, come not here! is a warning to leave talk of business and world affairs at home and turn one's mind to matters of art and leisure. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. As Oscar Wilde once remarked after a visit there, I've never seen so many welldressed, (although dress ranges from casual wear and athletic gear to suits and ties] wellfed, businesslikelooking Bohemians in the whole course of my life.. The Proposed TikTok Ban Goes Too Far. 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." I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. World affairs stood still a few seasons ago as Henry Kissinger prepared for his big moment, which was to enter, dressed as a dumpy man wearing a Kissinger mask which he duly pulled off, to reveal the ever-familiar features, while announcing in his glottal accent, I am here because I have always been convinced that The Low Jinks is the ultimate aphrodisi-ac. Puissance this is after all a mature crowd scam-pering about amid the Sequoia sempervirens is a big theme, and the drag acts are heavily overstated. Then everyone hushed as a column of hooded figures carrying torches emerged solemnly from the woods 100 yards away, bearing a corpse down to the water. 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. 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. "I got slightly inebriated -- slightly! So spare yourself the expense of travelling from Quebec to the next session of the WTO. The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. 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.. He even went into the drunken depression stage and started claiming he's going to die in his 50s from a heart attack. 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." Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] Dates 2000 Container box 783, folder 26 Physical Location Library of Congress Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. 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. I never liked Kissinger when he was in office, said one guest. 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. I wanted to visit the former president. Cronkite, as the owl, said that the only way Care could be cremated was to use fire from the Lamp of Fellowship before him, an "eternal" gas flame that burns day and night while the encampment is on. Holding meetings in the back room of a San Francisco Barbary Coast bar called The Jolly Corks, the club later extended membership to artists of all kinds, but the club symbol, to this day, is an owl, typifying the nightworking journalists, as well as wisdom. 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. 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. And membership comes dear. (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". 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. In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. by Shurtleff, William, Publication date 2005. 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. Reagan said that it was good to be back. Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. The mystery was over. 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. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller all stopped in as they geared up for their respective presidential campaigns. His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. 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. The important men come out for the Lakeside Talks, and each speaker seems to assume that his audience can actually do something about the issues raised, which, of course, it can. This morning we went bird-watching." 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. 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. As dinner began that night, people were already sitting down on the redwood benches at the main stage for the Grove play (despite the poster, a humorless enactment of the destruction of Pompeii). When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Mr. Kissinger surprised everyone he did not speak, although he did spend time chatting with the members and their 200 guests (the number is strictly limited) about all manner of topics. Among other things, it permits alcoholic failures to feel equal for a few days with their workaholic cousins. Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . 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. But Tom worked for an independent con-tractor supplying food and help and got $125 a day plus tips (officially banned at the Grove) and ended up with $3,000 for his three-week stint. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. 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. Report Abusive Post. This is not the first time Clinton, Powell or Kissinger have been linked to the Bohemian Grove. 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? Although golf, skeet shooting and canoeing are available, merely relaxing in the physical splendor of the 2,700 acres of redwood trees and the camaraderie of the fraternity are sufficient entertainment for most of the grove's campers. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. Particularly in the more sumptuous camps even this takes plenty of money, sharing bills for retinues of uniformed servants, vintage cellars, master chefs and kindred accouterments of spiritual refreshment. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. On the River Road you heard some small business talk. 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. Q33. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. Rim rides, the tours were called. 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. 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. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. 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. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. 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.. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. [This is not entirely accurate; "Bohemian Grove" is labeled as such on USGS topographic maps. No one throws up. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. At Sundodgers camp there is a motto on the mantel: The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. Cremation of Care, they fear, means the death of caring. If nine of the 11 men on the membership committee favor a candidate, he may be admitted, upon payment of $2,500 initiation fee and monthly dues of $41. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. Bohemians talk about roughing it, but at a privy in the woods near the river, there is a constantly renewed supply of paper toilet-seat covers. 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. One of the waiters had heard whorehouse piano music coming from Owl's Nest, and he said Ronald Reagan liked that kind of music. I didn't want to disagree. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. The most dignified had arrived. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a more than two-week encampment of some of the masters of the universe. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Over the years, though, the artists' patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership.. No one's saying for the recordthe camp:65 miles north of San Francisco operates very much in the tradition of Mark: Twain's blood brothers on the Mississippi or a college secret society. . Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. It turned out to be only a deer lick. In November 1916 Roy joined the prestigious and exclusive Bohemian Club and remained an active lifelong member. But by 1985 BGAN's energies were ebbing. LOL that is some good fucking eyes wow he was so skinny then. 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"Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. Nearby, a young member of the cast dressed as a woman pulled apart purplish gossamer robes to pee. Then Nelson and David Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commisssion. During the day, idleness is encouraged. 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. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. Though I regularly violated Grove rule 20 ("Members and guests shall sign the register when arriving at or departing from the Grove"), I was never stopped or questioned. 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. It was a good time to visit the Grove. Early club menus offered dolled-up western dishes such as "boiled striped bass au vin blanc" and "cafe noir." He must include the names of business or professional connections, wife's maiden name, and musical, oratorical, literary, artistic or histrionic talents.. I worked hard to respond in kind (I invented an infant son named Ronald Wilson Weiss). Its members have included Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian who was known to fellow campers as the Chief'; Mr. Nixon; Lowell Thomas; Eddie Rickenbacker, and Eugene Pulliam, an Indianapolis newspaper publisher. When I got to Monte Rio, only a couple of signs of protest remained. Meanwhile, the Bohemians' new favorite son had arrived in camp the night before. There were owl figures everywhere, notably a silver owl ice bucket on the bar whose head tilted off cleverly. 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. 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.. 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. Bohemian, they agreed in their early annals, didn't mean an unwashed shirt and poetry; it signified London, the beau monde, men of eminence whose purses were always open to their friends. "What do you call this?" andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. In 1971, when the press corps forced him to cancel his speech at the Grove, President Nixon had wired the club to say, "Anyone can be president of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming president of the Bohemian Club.". 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. 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. 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. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. 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