henry kissinger bohemian grove henry kissinger bohemian grove

Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad. 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. They come by limousine through the woods or by corporate jet to the tiny Sonoma Airport, where they are met by waiting cars. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. 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. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. 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. Former President Ford told us what he would do to save the country. How? Although the talent shows put on by Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter were reckoned at least in past years to be good, the plays are pretty awful, heavily freighted with double-entendres about swollen members and the like. The non-famous hard-core Bohemians were more in evidence now, men who wore owls in various forms -- owl belt buckles, brass owl bolo ties, denim shirts embroidered with owls. 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 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.". 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. The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. Henry A. Kissinger Papers, Part II (MS 1981). 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. At such times -- at many such times, among strong leaders, deep in the forest -- the Grove takes on a certain Germanic bermenschlich feeling. Comments by Ronald Wilson Reagan, said placards on the wooden signboards. 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. Bohemian Grove is a campground owned by the Bohemian Club. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. "You got it too late." And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. Industries PLC of England, a deal that could give Simon a toehold in Europe. She put at my service a mountain guide who demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential. The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl's face so that its beak seemed to move. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. And inside the Grove the guest list was well guarded. Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Another camp is aptly called Lost Angels, for it is made up of members from southern California, including Norman Chandler, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, and Andy Devine, an actor. ", At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. Just the same, a man on his own often gets invited back to camps by gay Bohemians. checks to shame. 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. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. 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. But by 1985 BGAN's energies were ebbing. 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. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. He pitched himself forward in his seat with a puzzled look, still trying to be genial. No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the "Resurrection of Care.". The club was founded in 1872, just three years after the transcontinental railroad was completed, by a group of newspapermen and artists who plainly felt social anxiety about their surroundings. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. His friend, a man in a yellow brocade vest, agreed. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. Lobbying is pathetically fierce. All have a main cabin with kitchen, dining room, shower, bathroom and bar, but the sleeping facilities vary from camp to camp, ranging from tents to elaborate dormitories. This year's event drew in notables such as former President George Bush, Texas Gov. The waiting lists for membership are so long it takes years for the novitiate . Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. 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It was the same bar-lodge-motel where the local police had arrested a man for pandering a few years back. The scene brought to mind the reputation for prostitution that hangs around the Grove. At least six inches." 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. 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). The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. "Speaker: To Be Announced," it said, raising the question of what dignitary might be thought more important than Prime Minister Rocard, who was listed as the speaker on the middle Saturday. In the afternoon I walked up Kitchen Hill Road to Owl's Nest camp. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. The following list of Bohemian Club members includes both past and current members of note. "You can't," he said. 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. "I got slightly inebriated -- slightly! Everywhere you hear what is Bohemian and what isn't Bohemian, One night I wandered into Fore Peak camp and got a lecture from a man named Hugh about Bohemian values as they concerned Fore Peak's famous drink, a mixture of rum and hot chocolate. Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. The Mandalay camp roster told the story, with its grizzled veterans of the Reagan-Bush years. Amid somber music, horses carrying caped riders gallop through the trees. Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. No one's saying for the recordthe camp:65 miles north of San Francisco operates very much in the tradition of Mark: Twain's blood brothers on the Mississippi or a college secret society. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." 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. 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." The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. 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. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch. The hacks soon concluded that Bohemianism, in the sense of real poverty, was oppressive. Title. Merv Griffin. 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. User ID: 78001158. Then an old friend came up and snagged his attention. (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) Upon arriving to the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. This summer, for example, attendees saw several plays. I repeated myself, and he said, "Yes, yes, that's true," in the famous furry voice. (This joke is funny because Kissinger was famous for saying that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."). '", The only surprises came when he took questions. Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. He served up the fruits, juices, eggs and bacon and listened to captains of commerce start their days chat about business affairs. 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. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. This button displays the currently selected search type. 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. Old friends move among the tables, kissing one another, and a ruddy Bohemian gets up on a bench and, as his friends cheer him on, removes his cap and opens his mouth to sing. Report Abusive Post. 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?. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. 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. "Bill Simon had room on his plane." A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show. Tacked to one of these haplessly postprandial trees is a sign conveying the fairy-dust mixture of boyishness and courtliness that envelops the encampment: Gentlemen please! Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! 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. 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. 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. Even one-on-one he has that habit of smiling and cocking his head and raising an eyebrow to encourage you. There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. 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.. A bagpiper walked in the woods by himself squeezing out a melancholy song, a brass band played "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Cliff Dwellers camp, and in Band Camp a young guitarist and an old pianist experimented with the Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing.". Another, unwritten rule is that everyone drink -- and that everyone drink all the time. Canada. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? And membership comes dear. At the opening of each summer season proper, on July 14 this year, there is the traditional masque, representing the banish-ment of Care. You can't describe it," he explained. For a while, in the early 1980s, Moore and BGAN thought they might actually liberate the redwoods. After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. START or Stop: Do Nuclear Weapons Treaties Matter? 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. It was at the Bohemian Grove that Americas nuclear weapons program was first devised by physicists such as Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller, both members, meeting with other members who were then in govern-ment, all confident of the security of the redwood club-house built by Bernard Maybeck (one of our favorite American architects) in 1904. Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some 120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon. "He bought some apple juice company for $1 million and he was fearful he would have to dip into his capital"). But two insistently anonymous sources have disclosed that: William Buckley played Bach on an outddor piano while a New York cocktail pianist, George Feyer, played Mendelssohn concerto instead of Putting on the Ritz.. 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. 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.. (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W. Around me the men exploded in huzzahs. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. The speech was canned and courtly. Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. At certain times of the year women are allowed to enter the Grove -- but only under "chaperonage," according to a 1980 statement by the club president. 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. He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. A poster for one Grove play, Pompeii, featured a mighty erection under a toga, modelled no doubt on the redoubtable organ in the Pompeiian fresco photographed by many a touring tycoon. He persisted in putting in too much rum to see how many guys would pass out. The Grove's keenest adversary is Mary Moore, who lives in a counter cultural shantytown in nearby Occidental. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. 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. 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. 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. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. The moderator studied the page and asked who I was and what camp I was in. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part III > Series VII. The Proposed TikTok Ban Goes Too Far. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging. Jeffrey St. Clairis editor of CounterPunch. 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. The final blow to the hacks came soon thereafter. "Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia grant us thy counsel!". Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. Wheres the fashionable rendez-vous for the Worlds Secret Government? By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old? 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 strongly suspect it is the latter that people can be a member of. Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) The club's "men of talent" (i.e., artists and writers) included writers of a populist bent: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry M. Stanley. And the sand at the Russian River beach is traversed by coconut-fiber mats and rich figured squares cut from the carpets in the "City Club," the five-story brick Bohemian building in downtown San Francisco. Everything felt peaceful and sweet, like death, the good things they say about it: the end to striving, & sunlight-dappled heavenliness. ", "Bohemians come! Every year since 1879, the club holds its two-week Annual Summer Encampment, dubbed by President Herbert Hoover "the greatest men's party on earth." The gathering takes place on the exclusive. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. 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. But a long, hard look at the Bohemian Club, its members and appurtenances, sug-gests that behind the pretense of Secret Government lies the reality of a summer camp for a bunch of San Francisco businessmen, real estate plungers and lawyers who long ago had the cunning to recruit some outside megawattage (e.g., Herbert Hoover, a Rockefeller, Richard Nixon) to turn their mundane frolicking into the simulacrum of Secret Government and make the yokels gape.