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. "We had rope trick. 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. Kissinger at the Bohemian Grove in 1991 with A-1 Steak sauce right behind him. Their names follow the imaginative arc of American industrialists and financiers over the past hun-dred years, from Druids to Hillbillies (George Bush, Walter Cronkite, William F. Buckley), Isle of Aves (John E. Du Pont), Meyerling, Owls Nest (Eddie Albert, Ronald Reagan), Silverado Squatters, Totem Inn (which has actually boasted a writer, Allen Drury), Woof (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III), Wayside Log (which has boasted another writer, Herman Wouk), Ye Merrie Yowls, Zaca. In 1984 folk singing demonstrators tried to quarantine the Bohemians inside the Grove because they were so dangerous to the outside world. 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. These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. 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. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. "He's dead." This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. 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. "David Jr.'s going into the family business now. By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a more than two-week encampment of some of the masters of the universe. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. 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. The grove is divided into 127 camps, each with its own members. User ID: 78001158. At this point some hamadryads (tree spirits) and another priest or two appeared at the base of the main owl shrine, a 40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel at the south end of the lake, and sang songs about Care. 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. 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. Dick Cheneys a Grover. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. He was a goateed giant with massive shoulders and a beer gut. One day a member asked if I was related to a Bohemian named Jack Weiss. Art Linkletter? One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. Bohemian Grove is the place . It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. When Gerald R. Ford, Henry A. Kissinger and A. W. Clausen joined 2,000 of the richest and most powerful men in the country at the annual ritual known as the "Summer Encampment" at Bohemian . "There's a lot of wasted time.". Find home again in the Grove! The priests turned in desperation to the owl. This is the most gloried-in ritual of the encampment, the freedom of powerful men to pee wherever they like, a right the club has invoked when trying to fight government anti-sex discrimination efforts and one curtailed only when it comes to a few popular redwoods just outside the Dining Circle. There are lakeside talks. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. The speeches are presented as off-the-record -- one of the absurdities of Grove life, given that they are open to several thousand people. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. There's a kind of emotional experience with an election year, that between state elections, local elections, and besides, with a two year term, a congressman gets elected and the next day he starts campaigning for the next election." 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. . Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? The screens get pretty fine. Ronald Reagan reportedly met with Mr. Nixon in 1967 and agreed to stay out of the Presidential race unless Mr. Nixon faltered. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. 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. Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. The media's anti-elitist mood, never all that ferocious, was spent. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. He served up the fruits, juices, eggs and bacon and listened to captains of commerce start their days chat about business affairs. ", With that, Care spat upon the fires, extinguishing them. There were laments. 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). He said, 'What are you talking about?' Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. The most dignified had arrived. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. On hikes I'd taken, my impression had been that the only people patrolling the ten miles of Grove perimeter were a guy at the Guard House on Smith Creek Road who spent a lot of time whittling a walking stick and ancient Bohemians taking the daily 10:00 a.m. open-backed bus tour. In his memoirs Hoover wrote that within one hour of Calvin Coolidges announcement in 1927 that he would not run again, a hundred men-edi-tors, publishers, public officials and others from all over the country who were at the Grove, came to my camp demanding that I announce my candidacy. Hoover was at the Grove again the following summer, as he had been with some considerable regularity since 1911, when news came that Republicans had chosen him for their candidate. Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. His friend, a man in a yellow brocade vest, agreed. Over the years, though, the artists' patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership.. 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. director John McCone, and Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. The fairy unguents were wearing off; after two weeks the place stopped looking so magical and began to seem as ordinary as a tree-house. 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.". Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. Another, unwritten rule is that everyone drink -- and that everyone drink all the time. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. Teddy Roosevelt was a member. Today they were offering Alaskan cod, sauted lamb kidneys, eggs, French toast, bacon, sausages. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. It urged its followers to form "Boho Clubs" to study members so they could be "held accountable by the American People" for participating "in the maintenance of the process of plutocratic patriarchy which threatens the planet Earth with omnicide from the nuclear menace." Just the same, a man on his own often gets invited back to camps by gay Bohemians. checks to shame. ", One reason for the Bohemian Club's poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. Voyage to Sonoma County and muster against Secret World Government which, lets face it, isnt exactly secret. For me, the trick was getting in. Nudity was more common then. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information. Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. "Honey, I lost my ring and I want to sell the house," the third one said, mocking a homecoming speech. 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. . 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. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Also, he's not as tall as he looked in office. ", "Come out Bohemians! ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. Other references aren't so subtle. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. 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. 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.. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!". -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. He wandered up with a beer in his hand as I sat reading on a bench and, pausing for emphasis, pronounced, "In the beginning the Lord created -- cunts.". George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. Bohemian Grove: Cremation of Care Ritual by Infinite Chariots, released 01 March 2023 1. . "Bill Simon had room on his plane." 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. 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. Typical attendees range from high-profile big boys like former Nixon cabinet member Henry Kissinger to powerful corporate chieftains whose names wouldn't draw a twitch of recognition from most folks on the street. At such times -- at many such times, among strong leaders, deep in the forest -- the Grove takes on a certain Germanic bermenschlich feeling. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch. Title. PodClips brings you the best podcast clips All clips from this episode: https://podclips.com/e/edz?ss=y___Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/podclip. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. In my informant's opinion, there was bad blood; Nixon's resignation 15 years ago had offended the club's honor -- it had been so un-Bohemian. The simulacrum isnt half bad. "You can't," he said. The Monte Rio caller added that at least this quotient of Secret Government included good tippers, doling out splendid gratuities to their companions. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. I never liked Kissinger when he was in office, said one guest. Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford 2d, Robert Trent Jones, the golf course architect, and former California Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke have all been stage hands, and actors have included Bing Crosby, David Niven, Ray Bolger, Edgar Bergen, Phil Harris and Dan Rowan. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. 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. 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. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. 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. Great intimacy is achieved in song. The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl's face so that its beak seemed to move. In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. 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. Anyone can read what you share. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. Many older men die waiting. After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. With its dense concentration of extravagant war- and money-mongers, it's an easy object of protest, and 72 left-wing groups eventually joined Moore to form the Bohemian Grove Action Network. 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. This morning we went bird-watching. START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? Started for the promotion of good fellowship among journalists and the elevation of journalism to that place in the popular estimation to which it is entitled, the club initially banned membership to publishers. 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. "I am a warrior and that is how I come to you today," he said. Moore was the 1953 San Luis Obispo County Fiesta queen, but by 1980 she had become, she says, a "woman-identified woman," and the Grove's thunderous maleness and what she calls its "closedness" disturbed her. "We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men's club," a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. On Wouk's acceptance, for instance, he was put to work writing a history of the club. And this year, when president George Elliott wrote, more drably, "Around campfires large and small, warm hospitality awaits you. Why, for example, areat least 80 percent of the Bohemians in a state of intoxication so advanced that many of them had fallen insensible among the ferns, gin fizz glasses gripped firmly till the last? During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. 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. 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. For a while, in the early 1980s, Moore and BGAN thought they might actually liberate the redwoods. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. I was told that if a Californian is not admitted before he is 30, he can despair of membership unless he achieves commercial or political prominence. He said Reagan would love it and motioned with an open hand toward the deck. So are Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon -- though club directors are said to be miffed at Nixon, a longtime Bohemian Grover, who's still listed as sleeping in Cave Man, one of the Grove's 119 curiously and sometimes appropriately named camps. (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) ", "Yes, he looks radical, but he doesn't talk like one. 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. 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. It was the sort of analogy I was to hear often in the nearly 60 hours I spent inside the Grove. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. 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. 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. 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. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. On the first weekend, for instance, Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, addressing his listeners as men of "power and rank," gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers about the plight of Terry Anderson, the Middle East correspondent held hostage since 1985. 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." Former President Ford told us what he would do to save the country. How? 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! He projects an automatic, almost druggy congeniality. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. 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. 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. The friend and I leaned closer. The participants seem to enjoy the isolation and the opportunity to let their hair down in some way. 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." Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! The Grove was still there. 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.
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