It never rains when the encampment is on. 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. 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. He said he stocked his cabins with plenty of booze as well as syringes of a potency drug re-cently approved by the Food and Drug Administration which furnishes four to six-hour erections. 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. "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. The Bohemian Grove is unique in American clubdom because it puts 2,000 to 3,000 mostly elite men together in the forest for up to sixteen days every summer, Phillips wrote. The mood was American and bellicose. by Shurtleff, William, Publication date 2005. 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." 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. 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 . Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. 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. Tunerville has all the members of the camp orchestra, Monkey Block many of the artists, and Sons of Toil the university faculty members. Separating the Red and Blue. Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . The media's anti-elitist mood, never all that ferocious, was spent. 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. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. Theres Not Being At Home with the wife. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. The salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, one writer grumbled. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show. The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." Any Bohemian is welcome at such events. For me, the trick was getting in. The Club took certain measures and things are now under control. Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] Dates 2000 Container box 783, folder 26 Physical Location Library of Congress Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. ", "Come out Bohemians! User ID: 78001158. Summer after summer BGAN stoked Grove conspiracy theories by getting hold of the guest list. 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. Now and then, though, a Bohemian sits down in the ferns and passes out. All have a main cabin with kitchen, dining room, shower, bathroom and bar, but the sleeping facilities vary from camp to camp, ranging from tents to elaborate dormitories. Cremation of Care, they fear, means the death of caring. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. 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. 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? This is not the first time Clinton, Powell or Kissinger have been linked to the Bohemian Grove. 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.". One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. ", "Bohemians come! In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. Lobbying is pathetically fierce. 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! My neighbor suggested that someone ought to "shoot the fucker down," flashing the press hatred that prevails in Bohemia. Larry Kramer is a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. 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. 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. It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. They wore bright red, blue and orange hooded robes chat might have been designed for the Ku Klux Klan by Marimekko. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. 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). 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. Find home again in the Grove! "What do you call this?" Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. 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. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer Two weeks later he plunged into Sir James Goldsmith's battle to take over B.A.T. The speeches are presented as off-the-record -- one of the absurdities of Grove life, given that they are open to several thousand people. 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. 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. To quote the sacred script of the grove's notorious Cremation of Care ceremony, which includes the requisite summer-camp assembly of robed men, a 40-foot . "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. 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). Theres skeet-shooting on the private range. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. . No radios or television sets are allowed. 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. Moore's answering machine message asking friends not to call her at her vintage-clothing store in the town of Sebastopol included a denunciation of the Cremation of Care. 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. "I am a warrior and that is how I come to you today," he said. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. "Hey, knock it off, this is Bohemia," Hugh had to tell him. Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. The cremation is intended to put the busy men of the club at ease and banish the stress of the outside world, but it arouses critics of the encampment because they interpret it to mean that Bohemians literally don't care about the outside world. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. But he was perfectly charming, and we talked about music and the Kennedy Center for a long time.. 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. The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. As I sat down a great glistening arc of melon was slid before me. 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. So what are you responsible for," the KGB asks him. The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. Owl's Nest is sort of an old Hollywood-corporatist camp. He cleaned up the mess left by the Bohos nocturnal revels. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . It wove spidery webs of string across Bohemian Avenue to block the way in. And David Rockefeller too. They all got a big kick out of this. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. 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). 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 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. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. 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. The CIAs Changing Take on the Climate Emergency, Emancipation, Hollywoods Best Civil War Film Ever. . "I need the B-2.". He did take a crack at toilet humor: "You know, I got to take a second to do something naughty here, since this is an all-stag arrangement. Amid somber music, horses carrying caped riders gallop through the trees. Many older men die waiting. Fifty people were arrested. A set of checkpoints like the Berlin Wall seemed to stretch out behind him. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. In this way I managed to drop in on the principal events of the encampment, right up to the final Saturday, July 29, 12:30 p.m., when I attended a Lakeside Talk whose giver was, intriguingly, the only one not identified in the program of events. This same caller moved from shots in the arm to shots in another location. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch. 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. It takes place on the Field Circle stage, which is wedged in between two camps, Pink Onion (notable for its pink sheets) and Cave Man (notable for big-deal right-wingers and a plaque commemorating Herbert Hoover). 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? Thus equipped, I came and went on 7 days during the 16-day encampment, openly trespassing in what is regarded as an impermeable enclave and which the press routinely refers to as a heavily guarded area. Report Abusive Post. 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.. The owner of the lotion sighed. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? I walked over to the Secret Service guy and asked if it was okay to meet the president. ", One reason for the Bohemian Club's poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians ("bohemians"). The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) In the first 50 years of the club's existence the Bohemian Grove was comparatively accessible to outsiders, but in the 1930s, as the club gained influence and its redwoods provided a haven for Republican presidents, it grew quite secretive about its rituals and membership -- you won't even find the Grove on public maps. Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad. 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. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. Teddy Roosevelt was a member. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. He said, 'What are you talking about?' Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. My imposture included misrepresenting myself in conversation with other campers, and my story kept changing as I learned more about how life inside was organized. 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. ", At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". Industries PLC of England, a deal that could give Simon a toehold in Europe. 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.. From time to time law enforcement has tried unsuccessfully to bring cases against local procurers, and the Bohemian Grove Action Network circulates testimonials by a former paid mistress of a club member ("I only saw him troubled by one thing," she wrote. I waited till my last day to bring one in.) The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. 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. Along with its most definitely closet contingent, the club also has about 2,000 heterosexuals cooped up for the summer retreat, with no women officially on the premises except for a daily minibus of female cleaners the consequence of a lawsuit brought by feminists a few years ago which can go no farther into the Grove than the Camp Fire circle, 400 yards from the Main Gate. 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. 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. 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. Rocard was Michel Rocard, the prime minister of France, and this was a secret trip. (Then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who had copies of his newspaper shipped up every day.) One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. The final blow to the hacks came soon thereafter. "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.". "There's a lot of wasted time.". "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". ", Then the crypt of Care was poled slowly down the lake by a black-robed figure in a black gondola, accompanied by a great deal of special effects smoke. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. Waiters and servants are brought up from San Francisco for the sessions, but many members insist on bringing their own servants and in some cases cooks. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. 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. Though he was no career man at the Grove Tom had al-ready taken on a caustic loyalty to his camp. 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. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." He must include the names of business or professional connections, wife's maiden name, and musical, oratorical, literary, artistic or histrionic talents.. 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. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. The best of the traditional postprandial lakeside talks was given by former Califomia Gov. 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. 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. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. Great intimacy is achieved in song. Down by the lake I saw three men lying on the ground, talking. The Bohemian Club is set up along frat house lines. The long-range planning commit-tee of the club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city near the town of Monte Rio. 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. But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. This morning we went bird-watching." He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. They told of how a man's heart is divided between "reality" and "fantasy," how it is necessary to escape to another world of fellowship among men. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. 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. Merv Griffin. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, retired Gen. Colin Powell, former House Speaker Newt . 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. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." Rim rides, the tours were called. After all, this was Bohemia. He had a keen geographical sense and a girlfriend who described a plan to seed magic crystals at the Grove gates to make them open of their own accord so that Native American drummers could walk in. At his Lakeside Talk, Malcolm Forbes said that Khrushchev knows the Soviets "are in over their heads," and even as the name Gorbachev was murmured throughout the audience, Forbes rambled on, dotty and heedless, 25 years out-of-date. 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. 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. Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html.