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.'" In the same year Secretary of the Treasury David M. Kennedy visited Rudolph A. Peterson, then president of the Bank of America; and Edwin Pauley, an oilman, had Paul Rand Dixon of the Federal Trade Commission as a guest. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. 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. Theres skeet-shooting on the private range. 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. Sempervirens indeed. The best of the traditional postprandial lakeside talks was given by former Califomia Gov. He sneered too, though more deferentially, at lordly Mandalay camp, inaccessible save by written invitation by a member, luxuriously appointed and stocked with the Membership Committees most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. Many of the Boho rituals and its first play, The Triumph of Bohemia, were worked up by a real estate speculator called George Sterling who took to poesy and Boho-dom late in life and banished Care permanently in 1926 by taking strychnine in the Clubs city premises. The most dignified had arrived. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. It never rains when the encampment is on. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. 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. 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. Only one telephone line goes into the grove, and telegram is the main form of communication in or out. "I need the B-2.". "What's in this?" 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. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. Tunerville has all the members of the camp orchestra, Monkey Block many of the artists, and Sons of Toil the university faculty members. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." 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 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. andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. 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. Randy members break bounds and head for such straight cruising spots as the Northwood Lodge and Country Club where vigorously bejeweled women in their thirties are to be found. "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.". I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. The Jinks is vigorously lowbrow. Rex Greed, an effeminate gallery owner who sells toilets ("a counterpoint of mass and void"), tries to convince artist Jason Jones Jr. that his future lies in sculptures composed of garbage. Then Nelson and David Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commisssion. . ", Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." This morning we went bird-watching. Reagan was mixing it up with a bunch of old-timers a few feet away. A set of checkpoints like the Berlin Wall seemed to stretch out behind him. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. 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. It was a devilishly charming thing to say, calculated to flatter the men of the Bohemian Grove. His friend, a man in a yellow brocade vest, agreed. Members wash up in dormitory-style bathrooms and eat breakfast and dinner collectively in the Dining Circle, a splendid outdoor arena with fresh wood chips covering the ground and only the sky above. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. A friend of mine, big in Reagan time, has been on the doorstep for 15 years. Find home again in the Grove! 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). For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. 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. 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. ", "Yes, he looks radical, but he doesn't talk like one. The Club took certain measures and things are now under control. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. Art Linkletter? Bohemian Grove: Cremation of Care Ritual by Infinite Chariots, released 01 March 2023 1. . And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. 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. 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. The other two plays, called High Jinks and Low Jinks, are original stage productions produced, directed, ley, president of Union Oil, the company responsible for the spill. His new book is The Big Heat:Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. 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. 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. He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. 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.. Building a, Left and Right in Thinking, Personality, and Politics, Alternative Theories: Pluralism, State Autonomy, Elite Theory, Marxism, C. Wright Mills, Floyd Hunter, and 50 Years of Power Structure Research, Teaching about Corporate Power (London et al. 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. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. The Bohemian Grove belongs to the private San Francisco-based gentlemen's club The Bohemian Club. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. After all, this was Bohemia. Here are to be found members of the Bechtel clan owners of the largest engineering contractorship in the world, veterans of Republican Washington of the era of Gerorge Bush Sr (former Treasury Secretary Nick Brady, former Secretary of State George Shultz), souven-irs of industrial might (Leonard K. Firestone. Bohemian Grove is the place . On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. They wore bright red, blue and orange hooded robes chat might have been designed for the Ku Klux Klan by Marimekko. 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. Any Bohemian is welcome at such events. It was set at crotch level, so you had to sort of crouch. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). No one inside acted suspicious, but paranoia about the Grove seemed justified, and I brought along my own version of cyanide: Interol, a tranquilizer used by actors to counteract stage fright. Great intimacy is achieved in song. by Shurtleff, William, Publication date 2005. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. And they are leaders in communications, academic and art worlds. But he was perfectly charming, and we talked about music and the Kennedy Center for a long time.. 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. 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. Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] Dates 2000 Container box 783, folder 26 Physical Location Library of Congress All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. Notable members over the years have included Clint Eastwood, Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon, Read More There were laments. Who are the members, and how do they join the club whose reason for being is the Summer Encampment? 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. 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. 1872. It was decided, clubman Ed Bosque wrote, we should invite an element to join the Club which the majority of its members held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains, but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians. So they pulled in a few wealthy men of commerce to pay for the champagne and the rot soon set in. 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. [This is not entirely accurate; "Bohemian Grove" is labeled as such on USGS topographic maps. My first full-strength dose of Bohemian culture took place two weeks earlier, the first Saturday night, when after a long day in the Grove I took a seat on the grassy lakeside among 1,500 ocher men for the encampment's famously surreal opening ritual. One 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. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. This year Rocard's visit went unreported. 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.. I said we might have a deal for him. 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. Just as the priests set out to torch the crypt, a red light appeared high in a redwood and large speakers in the forest amplified the cackling voice of Care: "Fools! He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". 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). 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 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. 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. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. 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. 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. 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. My neighbor suggested that someone ought to "shoot the fucker down," flashing the press hatred that prevails in Bohemia. 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. Walter Cronkite. Theres Not Being At Home with the wife. 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. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. "Your secretary, I got to tell you, she's 110 percent," a dark-haired man said to an older fellow. A Bohemian I overheard on the beach one day said that the man's genius had been in keeping vacationing families in the motel ignorant of the other business going on there, "Now, that's good management," he declared, capturing the robust laissez faire spirit of the Grove. 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 CIAs Changing Take on the Climate Emergency, Emancipation, Hollywoods Best Civil War Film Ever. According to the guest list, this year's attendees include George H. W. Bush, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and several former CIA directors. 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. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. Shultz, George and Stephen Davison Bechtel with Kissinger at Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] 1 of 6: 2 of 6: 3 of 6: 4 of 6: Download PDF (3.23 MB) Full Folder View; Collection Information. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. She said, 'Your fly's open. No one would be surprised. The participants seem to enjoy the isolation and the opportunity to let their hair down in some way. ", "They're always an the periphery of radicalism. The camp has a false outer door and two overlapping walls that form an S-shaped entry. 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. He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. While president he had avoided the Grove, a custom Nixon cemented in 1971 when he canceled a speech planned for the lakeside in the secret encampment after the press insisted on covering it. 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.". 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 good time to visit the Grove. One camp, called Aviary, is composed entirely of members who were, or are, singers. When BGAN resurrected Care, it chanted its own hymns: "On a day much like this five score years ago, the first hideous fire was lit in Monte Rio, and sweet Care was banished from this lovely land, and Bohemians reveled upon their shifting sand.". The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. 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. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. 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.". Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. Bohemian Grove is one of the most secretive places in the world, a Northern California campground that's a play land for the rich and powerful, with lore that claims it holds Illuminati meetings . Come out, Bohemians. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. The mood was American and bellicose. Another, unwritten rule is that everyone drink -- and that everyone drink all the time. 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. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. 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. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. 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.". The Bohemian Grove hires young men. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. Voyage to Sonoma County and muster against Secret World Government which, lets face it, isnt exactly secret. 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. But by 1985 BGAN's energies were ebbing. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? He was a goateed giant with massive shoulders and a beer gut. He looked bewildered and hung over, and I figured Bohemians were warmly and mysteriously saying to him what they were saying to me: "I can tell this is your first Grove.". The girls were all played by men, and every time they appeared -- their chunky legs and flashed buttocks highly visible through tight support hose -- the crowd went wild. This year's Low Jinks was called Sculpture Culture, and the humor was not just lame but circa-1950s college follies lame. "Who was going to offend the president?" Although the talent shows put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the like. The men of Faraway had captured the rearranged-woman's-torso sculpture from the Low Jinks and now displayed it against a wall, having wedged a fern leaf in "her" crack. "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". He sneered at nearby Abbey, a lowly place equipped merely with tents and believed to have a tradition of unmentionable prac-tices. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer The mystery was over. Henry Kissinger in a pink tut getting rammed up the old dirt road by Chuck Connors? The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. 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. There are less elaborate stagings by the individual camps, which really exist as separate societies with members of each paying for their facilities. The sensibility of the Grove recalls an era before the surgeon general's report on smoking, before the death of God and duty, before the advent of cholesterol and Sandra Day O'Connor (whose husband, John, bunks in Pelicans camp). This button displays the currently selected search type. 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. One of the waiters had heard whorehouse piano music coming from Owl's Nest, and he said Ronald Reagan liked that kind of music. 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. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. I worked hard to respond in kind (I invented an infant son named Ronald Wilson Weiss). 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. No one throws up. "Speaker: To Be Announced," it said, raising the question of what dignitary might be thought more important than Prime Minister Rocard, who was listed as the speaker on the middle Saturday. 09/16/2019 04:05 PM. The cremation took place at the man-made lake that is the center of a lot of Grove social activity. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. 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 . He was waiting to be asked to give a Lakeside Talk, but the club wasn't going to invite him until he had shown them the respect of visiting Cave Man camp for a weekend or so. In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. Ronald Reagan reportedly met with Mr. Nixon in 1967 and agreed to stay out of the Presidential race unless Mr. Nixon faltered. The scene was permeated by a kind of kitsch Black Forest imagery, and the setting seemed very Wagnerian -- though the music was sometimes undercut by the soft drumming of tinkling urine off the edge of the porch, where the beer drinkers went one after the other. Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. 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. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W. 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." But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? After one character called the secretaries in the show "heifers," the audience couldn't resist breaking into "moos" every time they came back onstage. The Mandalay camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the Reagan-Bush years. (This joke is funny because Kissinger was famous for saying that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."). Bohemian Grove, a secluded campground in California's Sonoma County, is the site of an annual two-week gathering of a highly select, all-male club, whose members have included every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge.