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And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. 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. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. Henry A. Kissinger Papers, Part II (MS 1981). 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. "You got it too late." He got the pa-pers San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. In 1953, when he was vice president, Nixon led a ceremony honoring Herbert Hoover's 40th year as a Bohemian. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. I used my real name. 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. Find home again in the Grove! The encampment became controversial in the early Reagan years when reporters, still suffering the hangover of Carter populism, questioned club executive appointees about the club's sexist practices. 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. That's the picnic scene at Russian River, where whitecaps and condoms meander down the foul brown estuary swirling amongst filthy young men who entertain disgusting Old Jew Pervs from Fire Island, Key West and West Hollywood. I repeated myself, and he said, "Yes, yes, that's true," in the famous furry voice. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. "Tom Johnson is here." Tycoons vie eagerly for the privilege of shifting a stage prop or securing the bestcomputerized lighting system that money can provide. One day a member asked if I was related to a Bohemian named Jack Weiss. Degrowth or Debunk: Do Degrowth proponents have a strategy? 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." The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. 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. 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 . Of course there are gay waiters and gay bohemians too, discreetly cruising River Road, but it seems that it was back in the 1970s things got somewhat out of hand. A man finished his call, and Kissinger, ignoring a half-dozen men in line, took the booth and proceeded to retell to a woman, evidently his wife, the Russian speaker's joke about the KGB's interrogation of a CIA agent. This button displays the currently selected search type. I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. It ends with the symbolic burning in effigy of a wooden skeleton in a coffin that represents the end of the cares of the world. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. This year Rocard's visit went unreported. 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. ", Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? 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. These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. He said Reagan would love it and motioned with an open hand toward the deck. He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. The Bohemian Club 's mascot is an owl, here cast in masonry, and perched over the main club entrance at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco. ", At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. 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. It was a transparent plea for help. In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. The younger members brown-nose shame-lessly, making contacts. By midmorning its another day in Bohemia, with Toms hands never idle as he runs up Old Fashioneds and Manhattans. The Bohemian Grove hires young men. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. 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. Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? In 1981, for instance, Dan Rostenkowski, Ed Meese and former president of CBS News Van Gordon Sauter attended (Sauter as the guest of former California governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, Jerry's father). 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.. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. Kissinger's crusty performance was not appreciated by the men he'd cut in front of in line. 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. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. "He's dead." Q33. Bohemian Club literature is pious on this score. "This is for the campless, not the homeless," he was saying. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. ", Amid wild applause one man removed a heavily chewed cigar to say, "If that don't send a chill up your spine, you ain't a Bohemian." The club'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. Came the reply: "Now, don't be modest, George." Come out and play! Soon the ancient redwoods, hated by the Pomo Indians of the area as clammy and sepulchral, rang to the laughter of the disporting men of commerce. This morning we went bird-watching. 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. 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. 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." 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. Alexander CockburnsGuillotined! When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. 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. No radios or television sets are allowed. 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. -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. In November 1916 Roy joined the prestigious and exclusive Bohemian Club and remained an active lifelong member. When a character describes modern art as "the talentless being sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered," the crowd's roar seemed to contain the grief of hundreds of businessmen who have shelled out for headquarters art they do not understand. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Rim rides, the tours were called. For three weekends every summerthis was the 99ththe club's nearly 2,000 members and their guests, most of them business and political leaders, join educators, scientists, artists and entertainers at this retreat in a red wood grove on the winding Russian River. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. 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. Other references aren't so subtle. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." -- GWD.] 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 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." Three other men discussed a friend of theirs who had left early that morning for New York. The papers are open for research. 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. One featured a spurious design for a commemorative stamp of club member U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank relieving himself on a redwood. Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. 1872. ", "They're always an the periphery of radicalism. 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. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. "He really put the balls into it. Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. 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 . Many an empire has of course been run by drunken men wearing make-up. Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, reads a plaque left by a Bohemian at the base of a 301-footer. ", "You know, they've got a lot of liberal faculty. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. Why so many games of dominoes? 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. Tom Watson, the builder of IBM, once took a long weekend off from his retirement job as US ambassador to Moscow to fly to San Francisco to dine with a Bohemian Grove board member and discreetly lobby for membership. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a more than two-week encampment of some of the masters of the universe. Over the years, though, the artists' patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership.. 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. When all is said and done, the way the beleaguered American male asserts his personhood, defies convention, hails the American dream, is to piss against a tree. "Who was going to offend the president?" Mr. Nixon was scheduled to give a second talk in 1971, which would have made him the first President to have spoken while in office, but he canceled when the White House Press Corps insisted on following him into the strictly guarded campsite. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. The woman on the line evidently objected to the joke, for Kissinger said, revealing a dovish streak, "Maybe the KGB did write it, but it is not a sign of strength.". 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. In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. Former Bank of America chairman Samuel Armacost brought IBM chairman John F. Akers, Bechtel chairman S. D. Bechtel Jr. brought Amoco chairman Richard Morrow. 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. No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. Today the Grove is stocked with Reaganites. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." 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. A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show. 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. He said, 'What are you talking about?' 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. 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. Any Bohemian is welcome at such events. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. No one was supposed to know he was peering up at ospreys and turkey vultures and hearing Soviet speakers along with former American secretaries of State and the present secretary of the Treasury. [ link to imgur.com (secure)] Quoting: Ninbit. Theres Not Being At Home with the wife. It was at the grove that Gov. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. He said it was a big shot in the arm for Monte Rios ailing economy. 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." 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. (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". 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. . And they do talk to each othersometimes ignoring the injunctive to leave business behind. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. 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. It turned out to be only a deer lick. 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. The owner of the lotion sighed. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). 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. I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. Bohemian Grove, 1991. There were laments. 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. checks to shame. Who are the members, and how do they join the club whose reason for being is the Summer Encampment? No pee pee here! The Field Circle seats are steeply canted; sitting in one feels like being inside a megaphone. "What do you call this?" This summer, for example, attendees saw several plays. One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. He even went into the drunken depression stage and started claiming he's going to die in his 50s from a heart attack. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. The club's "men of talent" (i.e., artists and writers) included writers of a populist bent: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry M. Stanley. The waiting lists for membership are so long it takes years for the novitiate to be admitted. And this year, when president George Elliott wrote, more drably, "Around campfires large and small, warm hospitality awaits you. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. Chaperonage for adult women. 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. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. Here, of an evening, Grovers can hear a banker or a Treasury official wend his way through the intricacies of Third World debt rescheduling, or listen to a European leader who will offer himself up for inspection. If the avenging posses mustered by the Bohemian Grove Action Network manage this year to burst through the security gates at the Bohemian Grove, they will (to extrapolate from numerous eyewitness accounts of past sessions) find proofs most convincing to them that here indeed is the ruling crowd in executive session: hundreds of near-dead white men sitting by a lake listening to Henry Kissinger, plus many other near-dead white men in adjacent landscape 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. 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). We're just overdoing it. Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. "My father said if you have a choice between an angry woman and a rabid dog, take the dog," Jason Jones Jr. said. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. There are less elaborate stagings by the individual camps, which really exist as separate societies with members of each paying for their facilities. 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). 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. Anyone can read what you share. 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. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. 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. 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.