henry kissinger bohemian grovenicole alexander bio

By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. The mood was American and bellicose. The camp Tom lived and worked at was thick with real estate tycoons and had a reputation for good food and comfortable appointments. There were laments. 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. The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. Moore's answering machine message asking friends not to call her at her vintage-clothing store in the town of Sebastopol included a denunciation of the Cremation of Care. See the article in its original context from. 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). The doors were used repeatedly for wrong-floor gags. 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. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. 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. Three other men discussed a friend of theirs who had left early that morning for New York. Theres endless dominoes the Groves board-game par excel-lence. Holding meetings in the back room of a San Francisco Barbary Coast bar called The Jolly Corks, the club later extended membership to artists of all kinds, but the club symbol, to this day, is an owl, typifying the nightworking journalists, as well as wisdom. Those who attended included Art Linkletter, who was master of ceremonies, for one of the shows, Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, among the entertainers; A. Robert Abboud; John Diebold, the consultant; Edgar F. Kaiser Sr. of Kaiser Industries; Richard Cooley, former president of Wells Fargo Bank; Allan Sproul, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Emmet Solomon, former president of the CrockerCitizens National Bank, and Louis B. Lundborg, retired chairman of the Bank of America. ", Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." director John McCone, and Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 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.". Gray, who this year had brought along Union Carbide boss Robert D. Kennedy. Today the Grove is stocked with Reaganites. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol the next day, the organ player broke into "California, Here I Come." 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. Other references aren't so subtle. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. If it all sounds eclectic, it is. The club's "men of talent" (i.e., artists and writers) included writers of a populist bent: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry M. Stanley. The Jinks is vigorously lowbrow. He sneered too, though more deferentially, at lordly Mandalay camp, inaccessible save by written invitation by a member, luxuriously appointed and stocked with the Membership Committees most determined stab at the pretense of Secret Government. 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. So are Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon -- though club directors are said to be miffed at Nixon, a longtime Bohemian Grover, who's still listed as sleeping in Cave Man, one of the Grove's 119 curiously and sometimes appropriately named camps. 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.. The final blow to the hacks came soon thereafter. 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.". But if publishers are allowed in, reporters are kept outan irony considering the club's antecedents. The important men come out for the Lakeside Talks, and each speaker seems to assume that his audience can actually do something about the issues raised, which, of course, it can. The pay phones were a hub of activity. The size also variesonly 10 to 15 persons can be accommodated at some, while others range up to 150. 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. After a poor reception, Nelson Rockefeller abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. Owl's Nest is sort of an old Hollywood-corporatist camp. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. The Owl Hoots, which are poster-size cartoons racked up each day near the Camp Fire Circle, are filled with pissing pictures. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? 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. 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." Some of the notable members of the Bohemian Club include former presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad. Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. It was a risk, but then it was my last hour of my first and last Grove. 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. "You know, the press conferences were adversarial bouts -- they were there to trap me in something or other.". James A. Baker III, the current secretary of State, is also a member, but he couldn't make it this year. 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. But the charges were dropped, and the man is remembered fondly in the Grove. One cartoon had a camper at Bromley turning away a filthy guy with a bag of cans. I didn't want to disagree. During the day, idleness is encouraged. Bohemian Grove is an Elite men's Only! Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good; they'd sniff me out quickly. 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. You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. Within a very few years the lowly scriveners were on their way out except for a few of the more presentable among them to lend a pretense of Boho-dom and Mammon had seized power. 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. He wore western gear all the way, a gray-blue checked western shirt, a white braided western belt, cowboy boots and, in his left breast pocket, an Owl's Nest pin with an owl on it. 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. He got the pa-pers San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. At 33, 1 was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. Bohemian Grove is the place . "Tom Johnson is here." 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. 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. He was a goateed giant with massive shoulders and a beer gut. 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." Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death. The friend and I leaned closer. In its place the flame of eternal friend-ship is ignited and three weeks of Boho-dom are underway. Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. . But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." These plays are planned five years in advance, with no expense spared. 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. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian.". Merv Griffin. 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. 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. Bohemian Grove Dates 1991 Container box 778, folder 5 Physical Location Library of Congress Conditions Governing Access. 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. In 1971, when the press corps forced him to cancel his speech at the Grove, President Nixon had wired the club to say, "Anyone can be president of the United States, but few have any hope of becoming president of the Bohemian Club.". Even 100-year-old Grove annals have a homoerotic quality, with references to "slender, young Bohemians, clad in economical bathing suits." Then Nelson and David Rockefeller horned their way in, and the spotlight moved to the Trilateral Commisssion. It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. 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. Its members have included Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian who was known to fellow campers as the Chief'; Mr. Nixon; Lowell Thomas; Eddie Rickenbacker, and Eugene Pulliam, an Indianapolis newspaper publisher. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. Over the years, though, the artists' patrons assumed a larger percentage of the membership.. At dinner I sat across from a young broker who shared his wine with me and complained about his girlfriend. 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. He can be reached at:sitka@comcast.net. In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. 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. Oh, just a little orange juice," the host repeated, smiling. Rex Greed, an effeminate gallery owner who sells toilets ("a counterpoint of mass and void"), tries to convince artist Jason Jones Jr. that his future lies in sculptures composed of garbage. It boasts that the Cremation of Care ceremony derives from Druid rites, medieval Christian liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespearean drama and nineteenth-century American lodge rites. The long tables are lit by gas pipes that spring from the ears of wooden owl silhouettes three feet above the table, a half dozen of these per table. . The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. 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. 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 said when we got back we'd talk about it. Because the regular members require entertainment, "men of talent" pay greatly reduced fees. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. 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. On the blackboard near the bootblack stand there were phone messages for corporate raider Henry Kravis and Bloomingdale's chairman Marvin Traub. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who spoke on the history of the state water problems and the creation of such programs as the Central Valley Project. The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. Today AIDS has put a damper on the Grove's River Road pickup scene, which Herb Caen used to write about in his San Francisco Chronicle gossip column. No pee pee here! 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. There's all the redwood talk. 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. Henry Kissinger? The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. 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. Impotence is on many people's minds. 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. We shook hands firmly (his: small, bony) and chatted. 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. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. He did take a crack at toilet humor: "You know, I got to take a second to do something naughty here, since this is an all-stag arrangement. Two weeks later he plunged into Sir James Goldsmith's battle to take over B.A.T. 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. Bohemian Jack London was a socialist; Bohemian Henry George, a radical reformer. For Republicans the club is an antechamber to the White House. It was a devilishly charming thing to say, calculated to flatter the men of the Bohemian Grove. On the River Road you heard some small business talk. 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). Since 1980, Moore and as many as 400 other demonstrators . Bohemians sleep on cots in these tents, or, in the richer camps, in redwood cabins. Wooziness was pervasive. 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. Meanwhile, Kissinger had been offering Rocard advice: "I told him, 'Do anything you want, hide in the bushes -- just don't let them see you.'" Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . Former Defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former attorney general William French Smith and former Transportation secretary Drew Lewis are all members. It tells the productive they can drink, it tells the drunks they're productive. One Bohemian, a patrician fellow with silver hair, wheeled in rage, saying, "I'll be goddamned." 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. Come out, Bohemians. This morning we went bird-watching. And they are leaders in communications, academic and art worlds. Boho-member Wouk once got off a sententious paragraph about the Grove being the site of that purest of loves, the friendship that men can nourish between each other in noble surroundings. "It's already got a fur coat and the license is a lot cheaper." There are less elaborate stagings by the individual camps, which really exist as separate societies with members of each paying for their facilities. 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. The sudden appearance of men in striped jackets shows what a bouillabaisse of traditions the Grove is. The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. So spare yourself the expense of travelling from Quebec to the next session of the WTO. "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". In November 1916 Roy joined the prestigious and exclusive Bohemian Club and remained an active lifelong member. 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 rough wooden tables were piled with perfect fruit. The Jinks jokes about women were straight out of an old joke book. -- I mean heavily inebriated with the president of the Portland Opera last night. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. 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). "Are you going to show it?" Bilderberg mastermind Henry Kissinger is also a reported regular at the event. "It was a free ride," the other friend explained. They all got a big kick out of this. Theres skeet-shooting on the private range. 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. They come by limousine through the woods or by corporate jet to the tiny Sonoma Airport, where they are met by waiting cars. 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. The traditional 7:00 a.m. gin fizzes served in bed by camp valets set the pace. And inside the Grove the guest list was well guarded. More than 1,500 people are on the waiting list, and one man waited 10 years before becoming a member. Bohemian Grove, a secluded campground in California's Sonoma County, is the site of an annual two-week gathering of a highly select, all-male club, whose members have included every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge. The members prefer to mix their own martinis. . The Bohemian Grove hires young men. 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. This morning we went bird-watching." Instead of Deltas and Pi Etas there are camps, some 120 in all, stretching along River Road and Morse Stephens canyon. The Bohemian Club began as a San Francisco institu-tion in 1872, founded by journalists and kindred lowly scriveners as an excuse for late-night boozing. It was a transparent plea for help. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. "We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. Like all such institutions the club has its rituals, its ceremonies, its hallowed rules. ", "Abby, now, she's the one who raised her fist at graduation? The Grove had been a major factor in his "homesickness when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years." The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. The meal (tournedos of beef) was festive and communal. 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. Though he was no career man at the Grove Tom had al-ready taken on a caustic loyalty to his camp. 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. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree.

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