Reagan didn't get the question the first time around. It was set at crotch level, so you had to sort of crouch. 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. 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. Oh, just a little orange juice," the host repeated, smiling. 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. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . 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. Dole wasnt even a member and with Bill and Hillary in office, journalists dashed off each year to the Carolina coast to write about the Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head where the idiom was of the 1990s self-awareness, being in touch with your inner self, networking rather than the 1890s making merrie, getting drunk and us-ing the Old Boy Net. Tunerville has all the members of the camp orchestra, Monkey Block many of the artists, and Sons of Toil the university faculty members. 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 . I outfitted myself in conservative recreational wear -- a pressed plaid shirt, PermaPrest chinos, Top Siders, a sport jacket -- I always carried a drink, and I made it a point to have that morning's Wall Street Journal or New York Times under my arm when I surfaced (though television is against the rules, newspapers are sold at the Grove Civic Center). 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. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left. 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. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. 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? Well, a man did that at a party, and his hostess said, when he came back, she said, 'You must have the longest nose in the world.' Here are to be found members of the Bechtel clan owners of the largest engineering contractorship in the world, veterans of Republican Washington of the era of Gerorge Bush Sr (former Treasury Secretary Nick Brady, former Secretary of State George Shultz), souven-irs of industrial might (Leonard K. Firestone. 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.". Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. 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. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. "He's dead." ", One reason for the Bohemian Club's poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. 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. During the day there are enviro-strolls with some biologist from Stanford or Berkeley lecturing his retinue on successional stages in redwood regenera-tion. "There'd be a lot more preening and peacocking than there already is," a big gay Bohemian told me. "My grandmother always said, 'You can find sympathy in the dictionary,'" a guy with a cigar said, walking on the River Road. director John McCone, and Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In my informant's opinion, there was bad blood; Nixon's resignation 15 years ago had offended the club's honor -- it had been so un-Bohemian. LOL that is some good fucking eyes wow he was so skinny then. Fifty people were arrested. "Your agricultural policy.") 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. Of course, just about anybody could hate the Grove. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. No wonder this year's guest list included the two biggest congressional bagmen of recent years: Representative Tony Coelho, former chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, and Representative Guy Vanderjagt, his counterpart on the Republican committee. It was the sort of analogy I was to hear often in the nearly 60 hours I spent inside the Grove. In the end I entered by stealth. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. It took place at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a room piled with redwood bark and branches shipped to Manhattan from the Grove. 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. Amid stentori-an chants, a blare of music and leaping flames, Care is finally cremated. 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. "It's more than it's cracked up to be. One of the speakers this year was Defense Secretary Harold Brown. The rule is widely ignored. Reagan himself had been a guest at the Bohemian Grove since at least 1967 and an official member since 1975 , coincidentally a place also annually visited by David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger , as well as Nelson Rockefeller since at least the 1940s and descendants of J.P. Morgan and a handful of other East Coast elites. From time to time law enforcement has tried unsuccessfully to bring cases against local procurers, and the Bohemian Grove Action Network circulates testimonials by a former paid mistress of a club member ("I only saw him troubled by one thing," she wrote. So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover. 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. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. 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. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. 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. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. 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). 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. And David Rockefeller too. This morning we went bird-watching." "Who was going to offend the president?" Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! . By the time of the first encampment, in 1878, many of the San Francisco high social class were members. "Are you going to show it?" 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. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". Several of the Hoots jokes were at the expense of the homeless. When they got up to go to dinner, one hugged another around the middle from behind and trudged up the bank with him that way, laughing. One old-timer said that Nixon was feuding with the board of directors. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. 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. The contours of the Republican Party had changed, in a manner not entirely suited to the Club. "We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men's club," a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. 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. By 1988 the gauntlet of hippies and solarheads and woman-identified women whom the Bohemians had been forced to maneuver their Jags and limos around to get to the gate had disappeared. The jokes fit right into the Grove's Ayn Rand R&R mood. Members have cited their privilege to walk about in "various states of undress." Bohemian Grove is a campground owned by the Bohemian Club. The participants seem to enjoy the isolation and the opportunity to let their hair down in some way. Thus equipped, I came and went on 7 days during the 16-day encampment, openly trespassing in what is regarded as an impermeable enclave and which the press routinely refers to as a heavily guarded area. The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. 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. 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. 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. It wove spidery webs of string across Bohemian Avenue to block the way in. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove.
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