henry kissinger bohemian grove

Art Linkletter? Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! 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. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. "My father said if you have a choice between an angry woman and a rabid dog, take the dog," Jason Jones Jr. said. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. This was about the highest security I saw inside. Q33. 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. Merv Griffin. Then an old friend came up and snagged his attention. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. Title. 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. Though he was no career man at the Grove Tom had al-ready taken on a caustic loyalty to his camp. The simulacrum isnt half bad. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. Wooziness was pervasive. 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? Report Abusive Post. In the end I entered by stealth. 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. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. 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. I wanted to ask Reagan about efforts to desegregate the club. The productions, involving hundreds altogether, are estimated to cost upwards of $30,000 each. 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. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. 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. Reagan was mixing it up with a bunch of old-timers a few feet away. Bohemian Grove Dates 1991 Container box 778, folder 5 Physical Location Library of Congress Conditions Governing Access. After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. 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. "He really put the balls into it. Came the reply: "Now, don't be modest, George." The Current TikTok Ban Doesnt Go Far Enough. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. The friend and I leaned closer. director John McCone, and Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, one writer grumbled. Why, for example, areat least 80 percent of the Bohemians 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? In midsummer the phones are often crowded. Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. There's no end to the pee-pee and penis jokes, suggesting that these men, advanced in so many other ways, were emotionally arrested sometime during adolescence. 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. A friend of mine, big in Reagan time, has been on the doorstep for 15 years. The initiation fee for regular voting membership is said to be $8,500, and dues are set at more than $2,000 a year. As the magic hour of 9:15 approached, a helicopter from a network newsmagazine circled frantically far above the darkened forest, searching out a spectacle lit at that point only by the hundreds of cigars whose smokers had ignited them in defiance of the California Forest Service's posted warnings. Hookers came to a certain bar in Monte Rio at ten each night, he said. 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. (The CIA agent denies involvement first in a calamitous ship disaster, then in Chernobyl." The owner of the lotion sighed. Bohemians rhapsodize endlessly about towering shafts and the inspiration they give men. 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. 1872. The traditional 7:00 a.m. gin fizzes served in bed by camp valets set the pace. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. Rim rides, the tours were called. Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. 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). Bilderberg mastermind Henry Kissinger is also a reported regular at the event. The getup stood out because it was so fastidious among men who had let themselves go. 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." Everything in the encampment is sheltered by redwoods, which admit hazy shafts of sunlight, and every camp has a more or less constant campfire sending a soft column of smoke into the trees. Participants drank 4,000 bottles of wine, carefully chosen, and almost as much liquordespite the special Bohemian Club labels, the bourbon was real ly Jim Beam and the gin really Beefeaters. "My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. German chancellor Helmut Schmidt (not to be confused with Club members Chauncey E. Schmidt or Jon Eugene Schmidt) strolled its paths with club member Henry Kissinger, as did French socialist leader Michael Rocard. ", At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. Why so many games of dominoes? On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. At 9:15 p.m. a procession of priests carrying the crypt of Mr. Dull Care came out of the trees on the east side, along the Grove's chief thoroughfare, River Road. But what, in the end, does the member get for his pains? Over the years the Jinks has become the leading entertainment at the encampment, surpassing the mannered and ponderous Grove Play, which is performed the next weekend. Theres skeet-shooting on the private range. (This joke is funny because Kissinger was famous for saying that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."). By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. It turned out to be only a deer lick. It was posted in a locked glass case during the day, and was removed every night. ", "Come out Bohemians! Edgar F. Kaiser), 1970s retro (Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger) and foreign bric-a-brac (Andrew Knight of The Economist). Who are the members, and how do they join the club whose reason for being is the Summer Encampment? It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. The popular redwoods between the Dining and Camp Fire Circles now reeked of urine and wore what looked to be a permanent skirt of wet, blackened soil. On the first weekend, for instance, Associated Press president Louis Boccardi, addressing his listeners as men of "power and rank," gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers about the plight of Terry Anderson, the Middle East correspondent held hostage since 1985. LOL that is some good fucking eyes wow he was so skinny then. Three other men discussed a friend of theirs who had left early that morning for New York. The missing girl's co-workers told Ani in Episode 1 that she left to work the "club circuit" somewhere in Sonoma County. "You got it too late." 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.. In fact, the encampment has always had political significance. 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. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." ", "My son was in Santiago, and David sent him letters of introduction to seven leading bankers in seven countries. 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. 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. 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. I never liked Kissinger when he was in office, said one guest. 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. William F. Buckley Jr. and Malcolm Forbes held court. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. As time went on, however, the club became too elite for its own founders. Bohemian GroveWhere Big Shots Go to Camp, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html. On Wouk's acceptance, for instance, he was put to work writing a history of the club. He looked bewildered and hung over, and I figured Bohemians were warmly and mysteriously saying to him what they were saying to me: "I can tell this is your first Grove.". ), Zweigenhaft on Teaching about Class & Social Change, Interlocks and Interactions Among the Power Elite, http://whorulesamerica.net/power/bohemian_grove_spy.html. Since 1980, Moore and as many as 400 other demonstrators . 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. They all got a big kick out of this. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. 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.". When they reached the water, they extinguished their torches. Henry A. Kissinger papers, part II > Series V. Photographs > General > Kissinger as "Soul Man," Bohemian Grove includes correspondence. He didn't ask Reagan my question, of course. More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. 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. When Seymour Hersh Strained to Keep Up With CounterPunch, Nichole Stephens, Administrative Assistant. Hugh said that an old college friend came to stay in Bohemia and took over the mixing of the drinks. 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. 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. My first full-strength dose of Bohemian culture took place two weeks earlier, the first Saturday night, when after a long day in the Grove I took a seat on the grassy lakeside among 1,500 ocher men for the encampment's famously surreal opening ritual. 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. Great intimacy is achieved in song. And all the talk about male fellowship often sounds just like a college freshman's version of No Gurls Allowed, an institutional escape from women, from their demands, aggressions and vapors. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. 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. There were owl figures everywhere, notably a silver owl ice bucket on the bar whose head tilted off cleverly. 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. 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. They'd built special platforms in the trees for men with binoculars. At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." The first, called Cremation of Care, is a bizarre production on the opening night of every encampment, a ritualistic ceremony involving hundreds of participants. The state has established a beachhead at the Grove's front office, a hundred yards outside the main gate, where, under legal pressure, seven women have been employed. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. 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. Bohemian Grove is the place . These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. After being nominated by two sponsors, a prospective member must fill out an application form that puts F.B.I. 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. "Oh, I've had my hand off it for two minutes now," Richard protested. From its beginning, in the year Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Two Bohemian Grove is a restricted 2,700-acre (1,100 ha) campground located in the forest of Monte Rio, California. 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. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. Reagan said that it was good to be back. Also, he's not as tall as he looked in office. 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. Henry Kissinger? And membership comes dear. These men were interested in something more than pseudo-Druidic rituals. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. 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). Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. Rumor had it that Reagan was going to give the next day's Lakeside Talk. Bohemians talk about how much it will muddle things. So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover. 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. Theres Not Being At Home with the wife. 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. "What do you call this?" 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. ", "Bohemians come! Only one telephone line goes into the grove, and telegram is the main form of communication in or out. ", One reason for the Bohemian Club's poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. [ link to imgur.com (secure)] Quoting: Ninbit. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! The weirdest approach I experienced came from a tall redhead in western wear, a fourth-generation Californian. In the 1990s the Groves reputation as the site of Secret Government was in eclipse. "I got slightly inebriated -- slightly! One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging. AI Chatbots are Even Scarier Than You Think, DeSantiss Educational Policies Come Right Out of the Fascist Playbook, Erase the Memory to Erase a People? 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. 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 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. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. 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. "I am a warrior and that is how I come to you today," he said. Just the same, a man on his own often gets invited back to camps by gay Bohemians. 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. ", "They're always an the periphery of radicalism. 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. Then the organist struck up "America the Beautiful" and Reagan left in a red truck, waving. 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. Canada. Toms day began at 5:30 a.m., preparing for break-fast. ", 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 wanted to visit the former president. This rule is strictly adhered to. It was at the grove that Gov. "It's more than it's cracked up to be. Another, unwritten rule is that everyone drink -- and that everyone drink all the time. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was invited this summer and, according to club officials, had planned to attend, but he canceled. 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. And former California governor Pat Brown has said publicly, many times, that the presence of women would keep Bohemians from enjoying their hallowed freedom to pee. Here Henry Kissinger made a bathroom pun on the name of his friend Lee Kuan Yew, who was in attendance -- the sort of joke that the people of Singapore, whom Lee rules with such authoritarian zeal, are not free to make in public. 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. 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. Walter Cronkite. Bohemian Grove is a campground owned by the Bohemian Club. 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. 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 avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. European leaders travel discreetly to the Grove to ad-dress the American elite. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. 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.

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