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. My bags were packed -- a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. No, Section 8, Article XVIII was too fine a screen for me. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. 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. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. It wove spidery webs of string across Bohemian Avenue to block the way in. 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. andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. 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. Summer after summer BGAN stoked Grove conspiracy theories by getting hold of the guest list. Former Defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former attorney general William French Smith and former Transportation secretary Drew Lewis are all members. "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices at places where the Grove abuts Monte Rio, and helicopters patrolling the "ridge roads" that traverse the 1,000-foot hills and form the Grove's perimeter. 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. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. The weirdest approach I experienced came from a tall redhead in western wear, a fourth-generation Californian. 09/16/2019 04:05 PM. 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. Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. 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. Everything felt peaceful and sweet, like death, the good things they say about it: the end to striving, & sunlight-dappled heavenliness. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. He sneered too, though more deferentially, at lordly Mandalay camp, inaccessible save by written invitation by a member, luxuriously appointed and stocked with the Membership Committees most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. 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. And David Rockefeller too. You know how many times we've been in someone's home, and we've wanted to go to the powder room, and we've maybe said, 'Excuse me, I've got to powder my nose.' 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. I wanted to ask Reagan about efforts to desegregate the club. 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. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. It was a transparent plea for help. 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. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. In June there are three long weekends of Springjinks, mostly attended by Californians. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. 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. These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. 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. But by 1985 BGAN's energies were ebbing. Henry Kissinger in a pink tut getting rammed up the old dirt road by Chuck Connors? I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. The Proposed TikTok Ban Goes Too Far. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. The Mandalay camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the Reagan-Bush years. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. 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). Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. Merv Griffin. It's easy to imagine that many early Bohemians started out as laborers and had to remind more aristocratic visitors that social mobility was a cherished ideal. "He bought some apple juice company for $1 million and he was fearful he would have to dip into his capital"). These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. That's right, the Bohemian Grove. "My father said if you have a choice between an angry woman and a rabid dog, take the dog," Jason Jones Jr. said. "We had rope trick. Bohemian Grove is the place . This same caller moved from shots in the arm to shots in another location. "What's in this?" Along with the big play there is the comedy revue Low Jinks for which members again rehearse with passionate anticipation. 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. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. Individual melted into group, but what a group: George Shultz was seated below me, and word in the camp was that a year and $75,000 or so had been spent for a production that would be seen just once, just by them. 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. The Grove was still there. Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, Continuing Corporate Dominance (No, the Corporate Elite Is NOT Fractured), An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%, How Corporate Moderates Created Social Security. 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. They sang from a small stage in front of a redwood on which was hung a framed nineteenth-century engraving. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. Of the top 800 corporations in the U.S. in 1980 30% had at least one officer or director at . This rule is strictly adhered to. 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. 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. So what are you responsible for," the KGB asks him. 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. 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. 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. I'm admitting for the first time in my life having no willpower," a man was saying to his wife on one of the public phones. 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.. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. At the opening of each summer season proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque, representing the banish-ment of Care. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove [includes correspondence] Dates 2000 Container box 783, folder 26 Physical Location Library of Congress Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. - SQB Jul 12, 2018 at 11:06 Add a comment 2 Answers Sorted by: 7 One little inconstancy: elsewhere on that same site it specifies that it's every Republican president since Coolidge (1923-1929 has been a member. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad. I waited till my last day to bring one in.) 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. 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 CIAs Changing Take on the Climate Emergency, Emancipation, Hollywoods Best Civil War Film Ever. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? 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. 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.". 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 Bohemian I overheard on the beach one day said that the man's genius had been in keeping vacationing families in the motel ignorant of the other business going on there, "Now, that's good management," he declared, capturing the robust laissez faire spirit of the Grove. ", 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. -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. When I got to Monte Rio, only a couple of signs of protest remained. The papers are open for research. Reagan said that it was good to be back. The guest list can be revealing as well. Cutting in line is distinctly un-Bohemian behavior. 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. 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. (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). . We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. 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. . In 1984 folk singing demonstrators tried to quarantine the Bohemians inside the Grove because they were so dangerous to the outside world. The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. They talk business here all the time. It's like great sex". In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. "Your secretary, I got to tell you, she's 110 percent," a dark-haired man said to an older fellow. "What do you call this?" They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. 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? ", "Abby, now, she's the one who raised her fist at graduation? The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. James A. Baker III, the current secretary of State, is also a member, but he couldn't make it this year. Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. 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. Canada. This amalgam of pop Druidry, Klan kitsch and Fraserian mumbo- jumbo stems from the nineteenth-cen-tury passion for ancient ritual. Two thousand miles away, at the other end of the continent, the same impulse produced Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with its Mystick Krewe, its Elves of Oberon and the tribute paid by Rex to Comus. Scenting power, press lords skip in from all over the country: Joe Albritton, former owner of The Washington Star; Charles E. Scripps and Otto Silha of Cowles Media; the McClatchys of the McClatchy chain; and David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report all obey the Bohemian command of keeping the goings-on from their readers. 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. Then the beer brewer himself came out to sing: "Mandalay," the song based on the Kipling poem. Then Nelson and David Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commisssion. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. I'd made it in that day for breakfast at the Dining Circle, the most lavish meal of the Bohemian day, an experience redolent of moneyed western ease. 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. I felt like a member of the greatest nation ever, the greatest gender ever, the greatest generation ever. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! At least six inches." The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. A friend of mine, big in Reagan time, has been on the doorstep for 15 years. Kissinger had lolled on the ground, distributing mown grass clippings across his white shirt, being careful not to set his elbow on one of the cigar butts squashed in the grass, and joking with a wiry, nut-brown companion. 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. They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II > Series V. Photographs > General > Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove includes correspondence. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. John McCosker of San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium gave a popular talk about certain species of fish found off the Galapagos Islands that can change their sex in order to survive.