The Russian was the physicist Roald Sagdeev, a member of the Soviet Supreme Council of People's Deputies, who had given a speech to Kissinger and many other powerful men too. Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. 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. Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. At 9:15 p.m. a procession of priests carrying the crypt of Mr. Dull Care came out of the trees on the east side, along the Grove's chief thoroughfare, River Road. We were a few feet from the Lamp of Fellowship, and after looking me over he said he didn't know, this was pushing it. "Are you going to show it?" "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. Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. This morning we went bird-watching. 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. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. 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. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. The mystery was over. European leaders travel discreetly to the Grove to ad-dress the American elite. Bohemian Club In the Bohemian Club at what is known as Bohemian Grove in the redwood forest of California's Sonoma county, an event that continued into the 21st century. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. Kissinger's crusty performance was not appreciated by the men he'd cut in front of in line. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. The non-famous hard-core Bohemians were more in evidence now, men who wore owls in various forms -- owl belt buckles, brass owl bolo ties, denim shirts embroidered with owls. "Tom Johnson is here." 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. Now and then, though, a Bohemian sits down in the ferns and passes out. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. Canada. The salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, one writer grumbled. The man peeled off the mask to reveal that he really was Kissinger, and he said in his familiar gravelly accent, "I am here because I have always been convinced that the Low Jinks is the ultimate aphrodisiac." 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." Throughout the skeet-shooting, the domino-playing and the museum talks, right up through the "afterglows" that follow each evening's entertainment, everyone is perpetually numbed and loose, but a clubbish decorum prevails just the same. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. And they are leaders in communications, academic and art worlds. 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. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. 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." 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. Walter Cronkite. come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!". There were owl figures everywhere, notably a silver owl ice bucket on the bar whose head tilted off cleverly. 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. 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.". 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. That did it. This same caller moved from shots in the arm to shots in another location. That day as I sat writing a letter (actually my notes) at the Civic Center, a one-story building in which various amenities (Grove stationery, laundry facilities) are available to Bohemians, I overheard a large fellow in cranberry-colored shorts on the phone, bragging to someone back at the office. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. The meal (tournedos of beef) was festive and communal. Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. He sneered at nearby Abbey, a lowly place equipped merely with tents and believed to have a tradition of unmentionable prac-tices. He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. I didn't want to disagree. This morning we went bird-watching." 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. It is here at a campground in Monte Rio, California surrounded by redwood trees where the secretive boy's club for the rich and powerful, whose members have included Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, have an unusual ceremony. "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. Within a very few years the lowly scriveners were on their way out except for a few of the more presentable among them to lend a pretense of Boho-dom and Mammon had seized power. "You got it too late." No radios or television sets are allowed. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. "You know," he said, for he started every comment with that phrase, "I haven't said this publicly before. Mr. Ford and Mr. Kissinger this year were .guests of Mandalay, whose members include Stephen Bechtel Sr., Stephen Bechtel Jr., Leonard Case Firestone and Edgar F. Kaiser, among the industrialists; former C.I.A. 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. 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). They sang from a small stage in front of a redwood on which was hung a framed nineteenth-century engraving. 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.. Some day the walls will fall, though it's hard to see why any woman would want to join a crowd of old Republicans chewing cigars and reminiscing about potency. I wrote "How do you feel about government and legal efforts to force the Club to admit women?" Bohemians rhapsodize endlessly about towering shafts and the inspiration they give men. They talk business here all the time. 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. Former Defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former attorney general William French Smith and former Transportation secretary Drew Lewis are all members. 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. I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. 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. He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. 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.". 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. Here Nicholas Brady examined the history of the Jockey Club. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. 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). 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. They wore bright red, blue and orange hooded robes chat might have been designed for the Ku Klux Klan by Marimekko. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." "My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. The Bohemian Club began as a San Francisco institu-tion in 1872, founded by journalists and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. 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. At 33, 1 was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. 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. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. 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. 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. The club has a fa-mous motto, weaving spiders not come here, meaning No shop talk, but Tom laughs. I repeated myself, and he said, "Yes, yes, that's true," in the famous furry voice. The feud was unfortunate because Nixon and the club went back a long way. She put at my service a mountain guide who demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential. Rocard was Michel Rocard, the prime minister of France, and this was a secret trip. 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? Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! Bohemian Grove: Cremation of Care Ritual by Infinite Chariots, released 01 March 2023 1. . Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good; they'd sniff me out quickly. 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. The popular redwoods between the Dining and Camp Fire Circles now reeked of urine and wore what looked to be a permanent skirt of wet, blackened soil. 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 said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. Early Bohemians were hungry for exaltation and grabbed on to any tradition they could find to dignify their exile in the vulgar West. 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. 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. Its mem-bership was dignified by Jack London, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and other literary roustabouts who had fetched up in the city after the Gold Rush. My bags were packed -- a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. Comments by Ronald Wilson Reagan, said placards on the wooden signboards. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. Chaperonage for adult women. The waiting lists for membership are so long it takes years for the novitiate . "I need the B-2.". Industries PLC of England, a deal that could give Simon a toehold in Europe. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. The grove is divided into 127 camps, each with its own members. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. Why so many games of dominoes? "Do it counterclockwise, Dickie, that's best," the captain called out. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." Former Bank of America chairman Samuel Armacost brought IBM chairman John F. Akers, Bechtel chairman S. D. Bechtel Jr. brought Amoco chairman Richard Morrow. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. ", With that, Care spat upon the fires, extinguishing them. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. The hacks soon concluded that Bohemianism, in the sense of real poverty, was oppressive. Ronald Reagan reportedly met with Mr. Nixon in 1967 and agreed to stay out of the Presidential race unless Mr. Nixon faltered. Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. A college kid well call Tom the arm of the Secret Government is, after all, far-reaching worked at the Bohemian Grove each summer for three years in the middle 1990s. "His method was to seize a large horse bucket, throw a hunk of ice into it, pour in several bottles of gin and a half a bottle of vermouth, and slosh it all around," goes one Grove recipe. Sempervirens indeed. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. The two of them were camping in Mandalay, the most exclusive bunk site in the encampment, the one on the hill with the tiny cable car that carries visitors up to the compound. German chancellor Helmut Schmidt (not to be confused with Club members Chauncey E. Schmidt or Jon Eugene Schmidt) strolled its paths with club member Henry Kissinger, as did French socialist leader Michael Rocard. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? Of the top 800 corporations in the U.S. in 1980 30% had at least one officer or director at . Had a red fist painted on the back of her gown. He was a goateed giant with massive shoulders and a beer gut. Wooziness was pervasive. 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. Larry Kramer is a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. No one throws up. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. 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. By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. But comes next July 14 and every self-respecting member of the Secret World government will be in a gloomy grove of redwoods alongside the Russian river in northern California, preparing to Banish Care for the 122cnd time, prelude to three weeks drinking gin fizzes and hashing out the future of the world. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. I waited till my last day to bring one in.) After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. Other references aren't so subtle. 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. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. Some years ago a gay writer called Ron Bluestein described his stint waitering at the Grove in a very funny pamphlet, A Waitress in Bohemia, in which he evoked the below-the-stairs homosexual culture fostered by a workforce mostly recruited from San Francisco. Art Linkletter? Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. 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. see that two of the bit actors appearing as dock workers were Casper Weinberger, former Secretary of Health; Education and Welfare who is now chief counsel for the Bechtel Corporation, and Mr. Clausen, president and chief executive officer of the Bank of America. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. [This is not entirely accurate; "Bohemian Grove" is labeled as such on USGS topographic maps. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove.