I never liked Kissinger when he was in office, said one guest. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. 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.. 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. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. 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.. 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. And they all sat around the lavish dinner circle feasting on lamb, salmon, steaks and assorted delicacies each night. Richard Nixon, like Hoover a mem-ber of Cave Mans camp inside the Grove, got a raptur-ous reception in 1967 and pressed forward to the nomi-nation and the White House. The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. Waiters and servants are brought up from San Francisco for the sessions, but many members insist on bringing their own servants and in some cases cooks. 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. For a good half hour the band warmed up the audience, playing the fight songs of many California colleges and the armed services and culminating with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Other references aren't so subtle. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. The best of the traditional postprandial lakeside talks was given by former Califomia Gov. 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. The most dignified had arrived. 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. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. 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. Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. 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. 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. Nearby, a young member of the cast dressed as a woman pulled apart purplish gossamer robes to pee. ", 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 walked over to the Secret Service guy and asked if it was okay to meet the president. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. Who are the members, and how do they join the club whose reason for being is the Summer Encampment? These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. In 1953, when he was vice president, Nixon led a ceremony honoring Herbert Hoover's 40th year as a Bohemian. Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. For me, the trick was getting in. It's only a matter of time before the club gets sued under either California's civil rights act or San Francisco's civil rights ordinance, both of which bar sex discrimination in business establishments. Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a three-week . At 33, 1 was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. 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. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, was originally composed of journalists and musicians ("bohemians"). By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. They all got a big kick out of this. Rudyard Kipling, romantic colonialist and exponent of the masculine spirit, is, naturally, one of the Grove's heroes, and "Mandalay" is a triumphant white man's-burden song. 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. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." 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. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. 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. Then everyone hushed as a column of hooded figures carrying torches emerged solemnly from the woods 100 yards away, bearing a corpse down to the water. Bohemians talk about roughing it, but at a privy in the woods near the river, there is a constantly renewed supply of paper toilet-seat covers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. In the Grove's Club Med-like plan, the meals are covered in the fee for the encampment, which, judging from schedules I'd seen from two years back, ran about $850 on top of annual dues. The Russian was the physicist Roald Sagdeev, a member of the Soviet Supreme Council of People's Deputies, who had given a speech to Kissinger and many other powerful men too. 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. Bohemian Club literature is pious on this score. 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. The sexism and racism of the Jinks were of a peculiar sort. 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. Indeed, when confronted with a sex-discrimination suit a few years ago, the Bohemians indignantly asserted that theirs had to be a Men Only institution precisely because any woman entering the clubs precincts would see nothing but men occupied in this crude pastime. Inside Bohemian Grove - FAIR ", With that, Care spat upon the fires, extinguishing them. The members prefer to mix their own martinis. Bohemian Grove is a place where men who grew up with their names on buildings can pee on trees and perform bacchanalian rites, unfettered by the pesky presence of women, unlanded gentry or any. It wove spidery webs of string across Bohemian Avenue to block the way in. 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.. "My grandmother always said, 'You can find sympathy in the dictionary,'" a guy with a cigar said, walking on the River Road. Was every Republican President since 1923 a Member of the Bohemian Grove? A waiter in a red jacket dropped an uneaten chunk of the bright red cod into a waste bin, and the Bohemians at my table talked about presidents. Is Bohemian Grove the Real-Life Secret Society Behind True Detective For the Rally and Line of Shame, be at the Monte Rio parking lot across from the Rio theater at 2pm, July 14, For further details, call the Bohemian Grove Action Network, whose Mary Moore has been chivvying the Grovers for twenty years, at 707-874-2248 or check out http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org. The walled camps are generally about 100 feet wide and stretch back up the hillside, with wooden platforms on which members set up tents. "Most of it. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". It was the sort of analogy I was to hear often in the nearly 60 hours I spent inside the Grove. The most striking prop in The Low Jinks was a sculpture of a female torso whose breasts and buttocks had both been attached to the front, an improvement that looked vaguely hostile. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good.".