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. World affairs stood still a few seasons ago as Henry Kissinger prepared for his big moment, which was to enter, dressed as a dumpy man wearing a Kissinger mask which he duly pulled off, to reveal the ever-familiar features, while announcing in his glottal accent, I am here because I have always been convinced that The Low Jinks is the ultimate aphrodisi-ac. Puissance this is after all a mature crowd scam-pering about amid the Sequoia sempervirens is a big theme, and the drag acts are heavily overstated. 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. 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. 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. 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. There is at least one officer or director from 40 of the 50 largest industrial corporations in the country, and an officer or director of 20 of the top 25 banks in the country, according to G. William Domhoff, author of The Bohemian Grove: A Study in the Ruling Class Cohesiveness.. The brewer finished tearily, his arms high above his head, fists clenched, "Take me back to Mandalay-ah. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. He says he likes it that way. The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. That did it. by Shurtleff, William, Publication date 2005. The waiting lists for membership are so long it takes years for the novitiate . 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. Every summer for more than a century, the all-male Bohemian Club of San Francisco has led a retreat into a redwood forest 70 miles north of the city, four and a quarter square miles of rugged, majestic terrain that members consider sacred. 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. He even went into the drunken depression stage and started claiming he's going to die in his 50s from a heart attack. 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. andA Colossal Wreckare available from CounterPunch. 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. 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. He served up the fruits, juices, eggs and bacon and listened to captains of commerce start their days chat about business affairs. It was just past noon on Sunday, the middle weekend at the encampment -- the busiest weekend, with attendance approaching 2,200 men. Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W. But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. 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. 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. 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.". 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. But if publishers are allowed in, reporters are kept outan irony considering the club's antecedents. The grove is divided into 127 camps, each with its own members. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. 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. The first, called Cremation of Care, is a bizarre production on the opening night of every encampment, a ritualistic ceremony involving hundreds of participants. I wanted to ask Reagan about efforts to desegregate the club. She said, 'Your fly's open. "We had rope trick. 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. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. Bohemian Grove: Cremation of Care Ritual by Infinite Chariots, released 01 March 2023 1. . 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. Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! Oh, just a little orange juice," the host repeated, smiling. This button displays the currently selected search type. 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. Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. Even the prickly Lee Kuan Yew hastened to visit the club, only to have the mortification of being mistaken for a waiter. It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. Canada. Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller all stopped in as they geared up for their respective presidential campaigns. 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. Lobbying is pathetically fierce. The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions In The U.S. Interlocking Directorates in the Corporate Community, The Power Elite's Foreign Policy in WWII & Vietnam, The Rise and Fall of Diversity at the Top, 2005-2015, Can Corporate Power Be Controlled? Reagan said that it was good to be back. Most of the visitors to this year's encampment stayed only one or two of the three weekends, although a few stayed the entire two weeks. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. See the article in its original context from. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. I strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. 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. One of the waiters had heard whorehouse piano music coming from Owl's Nest, and he said Ronald Reagan liked that kind of music. "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. I didn't want to disagree. Walter Cronkite. . But here we are in the Bush II era, and the Bush Clan is pure Secret Government, all the way from the old Rockefeller connection, to Skull and Bones and the Knights of Malta. Indeed, I was able to enjoy most pleasures of the Grove, notably the speeches, songs, elaborate drag shows, endless toasts, pre-breakfast gin fizzes, round-the-clock "Nembutals" and other drinks -- though I didn't sleep in any of the camps or swim naked with likeminded Bohemians in the Russian River at night. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. 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.". The physical aspect of Bohemian male bonding can't be overlooked. In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. Another, unwritten rule is that everyone drink -- and that everyone drink all the time. The simulacrum isnt half bad. 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. I worked hard to respond in kind (I invented an infant son named Ronald Wilson Weiss). Bohemian Grove is one of the most secretive places in the world, a Northern California campground that's a play land for the rich and powerful, with lore that claims it holds Illuminati meetings . Former Bank of America chairman Samuel Armacost brought IBM chairman John F. Akers, Bechtel chairman S. D. Bechtel Jr. brought Amoco chairman Richard Morrow. 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. On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. 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." The often bizarre rites have elevated what was once a provincial club for San Franciscans embarrassed by the rude manners of the Wild West into the most exclusive club in the United States, with 2,300 members drawn from the whole of the American establishment and a waiting list 33 years long. checks to shame. The mystery was over. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Meanwhile, the racked-up Owl Hoots drawings dubbed the sculpture the "statue of Piece" and pictured a Bohemian commenting that she would be "fun to dance with." Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre campground in Monte Rio, Calif that serves as a meeting place for top politicians and businessmen who are members of the Grove society. 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." 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. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. "Most of it. Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then. "Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia grant us thy counsel!". 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? Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. 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. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. On his visit to the city, Oscar Wilde gazed around at the fleshy faces and handsomely attired members and re-marked, I have never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-like looking bohemians in all my life.. 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. 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. Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." 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." More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. 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." 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. Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". This has been especially true in the last ten years as Bohemia's stunning roster has waxed ever more statusy, as Kissinger and Rockefeller and Nick Brady have joined, drawing the attention of left-wing protesters, scholars of elites, and reporters. The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. 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. on a piece of Grove stationery and went up to the fellow taking questions from my section, by the giant owl. (The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl." Come out, Bohemians. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. 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. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. 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. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. "He really put the balls into it. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. 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. It was a devilishly charming thing to say, calculated to flatter the men of the Bohemian Grove. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. "There'd be a lot more preening and peacocking than there already is," a big gay Bohemian told me. There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. Also, it seemed possible that Ronald Reagan himself might make a triumphant return to his longtime camp, Owl's Nest. 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. Henry A. Kissinger Papers, Part II (MS 1981). Since everyone is supposed to kick back and forget work, it's the fuck-up's annual revenge. The most dignified had arrived. No pee pee here! The Bohemian Grove hires young men. After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. Dick Cheneys a Grover. 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. Art Linkletter? At Sundodgers camp there is a motto on the mantel: The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. "My father said if you have a choice between an angry woman and a rabid dog, take the dog," Jason Jones Jr. said. By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. And they all sat around the lavish dinner circle feasting on lamb, salmon, steaks and assorted delicacies each night. (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) In sending his regrets by telegram, Mr. Nixon reportedly told the president of the club to continue to lead the people into the woods, while he, Mr. Nixon, would continue to lead the rest of the people out of the woods. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. We didn't do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn't quite what it's reputed to be. 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. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. Many of the Boho rituals and its first play, The Triumph of Bohemia, were worked up by a real estate speculator called George Sterling who took to poesy and Boho-dom late in life and banished Care permanently in 1926 by taking strychnine in the Clubs city premises. The screens get pretty fine. To be quite frank, replied the Bohemian Club member who had disclosed that Mr. Ford had spoken, he put me to sleep.. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. 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. Gray, who this year had brought along Union Carbide boss Robert D. Kennedy. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. Merv Griffin. The doors were used repeatedly for wrong-floor gags. This year's Low Jinks was called Sculpture Culture, and the humor was not just lame but circa-1950s college follies lame. When I got to Monte Rio, only a couple of signs of protest remained. Then, eerily picked out by torchlight, robed tycoons move slowly into a clearing with a bier supporting the effigy of Care. The weirdest approach I experienced came from a tall redhead in western wear, a fourth-generation Californian. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. I wanted to visit the former president. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking. He must include the names of business or professional connections, wife's maiden name, and musical, oratorical, literary, artistic or histrionic talents.. Bilderberg mastermind Henry Kissinger is also a reported regular at the event. 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). The Bohemians will be hard-pressed to prove that they are a purely private club that falls outside the legal definition of a business, when clearly so many members participate for business-related reasons. Black jokes are out because there are a handful of black members -- though one day near the Civic Center I did hear a group of old-timers trying to imitate Jesse Jackson. He persisted in putting in too much rum to see how many guys would pass out. 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." One afternoon, for instance, the Valhalla camp deck was crowded with men drinking Valhalla's home-brewed beer and listening to singers. 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. 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. 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). 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. I used my real name. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. 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. 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). 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. When the wheeling and dealing was over, the club owned 2,700 acres of redwoods a grove of the mightiest of thou-sand-year-old Sequoia sempervirens: We are grown men now, a piece of club literature announced in the early 1920s, but each year in the hard procession of our days there comes, thank God, to us Bohemians, a recess time it is upon us. They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. A "heifer" asked him why he was there. ", "Come out Bohemians! 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. MONTE RIO, Calif.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 Grove near this sleepy hamlet of 997 last month, did they make decisions that will shape America's destiny, or was It merely the greatest men's party on earth?. a Camp Meeker activist who runs the Bohemian Grove Action Network. Along with the big play there is the comedy revue Low Jinks for which members again rehearse with passionate anticipation. Bohemian Grove Dates 1991 Container box 778, folder 5 Physical Location Library of Congress Conditions Governing Access. Bohemian Jack London was a socialist; Bohemian Henry George, a radical reformer. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). Q33. And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. It was a good time to visit the Grove. ", It was in the phone circle that Henry Kissinger alienated some brother Bohemians on the middle weekend. The camps are decorated with wooden or stone sculptures of owls, the Grove symbol. Had a red fist painted on the back of her gown. At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". Activists from truthaction.org have obtained the official guest list for Bohemian Grove's 2008 midsummer encampment along with a map of the Grove's facilities. The Field Circle seats are steeply canted; sitting in one feels like being inside a megaphone. A set of checkpoints like the Berlin Wall seemed to stretch out behind him. A visitor once said of it: You don't just walk in thereyou are summoned.. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. 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. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. 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. 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. The owner of the lotion sighed. And this year, when president George Elliott wrote, more drably, "Around campfires large and small, warm hospitality awaits you. The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl's face so that its beak seemed to move. The play, about greedy gold miners who came to California during the middle 1800's and kicked the Spaniards off their land, was written by Lou Felder, a Bohemian Club member who plays a fraudulent consumer advocate on the new TV show Fernwood 2Night.. Why so many games of dominoes? The other two plays, called High Jinks and Low Jinks, are original stage productions produced, directed, ley, president of Union Oil, the company responsible for the spill. START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? Its only landmark is a kick-ass bar called the Pink Elephant, but a half-mile or so away from "the Pink," in the middle of a redwood grove, there is, strangely enough, a bank of 16 pay telephones.

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