They're going to have Pavarotti there in November. At least six inches." "David Jr.'s going into the family business now. Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, William Buckley, Bing Crosby, Phil Harris and William Randolph Hearst Jr. belong, as do the presidents of the Wells Fargo Banks, the First National Bank of Chicago, the Southern Pacific Railway, The Los Angeles Times, Pacific Gas and Electric, Levi Strauss, Stanford University and the University of California, among others. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death. The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions In The U.S. Interlocking Directorates in the Corporate Community, The Power Elite's Foreign Policy in WWII & Vietnam, The Rise and Fall of Diversity at the Top, 2005-2015, Can Corporate Power Be Controlled? . As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. One day a member asked if I was related to a Bohemian named Jack Weiss. So, as noted, was Herbert Hoover. A few years ago KGO radio, out of San Francisco, had an interesting talk show in which callers with first-hand Grove experience told their tales. It looked as though Richard Nixon would once again not show. The deck's railing posed a dilemma. For a while, in the early 1980s, Moore and BGAN thought they might actually liberate the redwoods. By the time I got back into the central camp ground, they'd announced the next day's Lakeside Talk. Moore was the 1953 San Luis Obispo County Fiesta queen, but by 1980 she had become, she says, a "woman-identified woman," and the Grove's thunderous maleness and what she calls its "closedness" disturbed her. Early Bohemians were hungry for exaltation and grabbed on to any tradition they could find to dignify their exile in the vulgar West. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. 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. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. 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). Two weeks later he plunged into Sir James Goldsmith's battle to take over B.A.T. 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. Of course you must be with us," I heard his summons, too. 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.". The most dignified had arrived. 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. "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. All day long there is music in the Grove, and at night in some camps there are programs of entertainment: comics, singers, actors. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." The cremation took place at the man-made lake that is the center of a lot of Grove social activity. To be quite frank, replied the Bohemian Club member who had disclosed that Mr. Ford had spoken, he put me to sleep.. 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. 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. At 33, 1 was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. come out and play, come with all the buoyant impetuous rush of youth!". The media's anti-elitist mood, never all that ferocious, was spent. The Owl Hoots, which are poster-size cartoons racked up each day near the Camp Fire Circle, are filled with pissing pictures. When one character; a PR executive, expressed a desire to make his mistress an honest woman, she objected, reminding him of an old Bohemian saying: "If it floats or flies or fools around, don't buy it, rent it." In its obsession with the encampment, BGAN has unwittingly taken on Bohemian traits, becoming a kooky mirror image of the Grove. Reagan said that it was good to be back. But if publishers are allowed in, reporters are kept outan irony considering the club's antecedents. In the end I entered by stealth. 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. Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . "You can't," he said. To quote the sacred script of the grove's notorious Cremation of Care ceremony, which includes the requisite summer-camp assembly of robed men, a 40-foot . 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. By the time the talk was over, the posters had all been lifted by souvenir-seeking Bohemians. There's a kind of emotional experience with an election year, that between state elections, local elections, and besides, with a two year term, a congressman gets elected and the next day he starts campaigning for the next election." Title. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. The salt has been washed out of the Club by commercialism, one writer grumbled. The woman on the line now asked about the friend. When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? "There's a lot of wasted time.". There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. "One of the contemporary myths about the Bohemian Club is that it is a gathering and decision-making place for national and international 'power brokers,"' the club's then-president said in 1980. "Oh, I've had my hand off it for two minutes now," Richard protested. The moderator studied the page and asked who I was and what camp I was in. In one, The Eldorado, if viewers looked closely, they could. see that two of the bit actors appearing as dock workers were Casper Weinberger, former Secretary of Health; Education and Welfare who is now chief counsel for the Bechtel Corporation, and Mr. Clausen, president and chief executive officer of the Bank of America. Then the organist struck up "America the Beautiful" and Reagan left in a red truck, waving. One day in the Grove, I tipped a camp valet and he offered some unsolicited information. It's another Bohemian wee-wee word, something you haven't heard since you were 14. Why so many games of dominoes? 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. 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.". 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. Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices at places where the Grove abuts Monte Rio, and helicopters patrolling the "ridge roads" that traverse the 1,000-foot hills and form the Grove's perimeter. The members prefer to mix their own martinis. Some said there were Secret Service men guarding the roads and the perimeter. There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. Membership in the Bohemian Club is by invitation only, and no women are allowed, either as members or guests, except for an occasional picnic for club wives. Late in the Low Jinks the elevator doors opened and a man came out wearing a rubber Henry Kissinger mask. Simon was Treasury secretary in the Ford administration and today is a major savings and loan conglomerateur, active in takeovers. When they reached the water, they extinguished their torches. The reporters that Mary Moore had helped spirit into the Grove for hours at a time had come out with vague, watered-down versions of what went on, or their news organizations had suppressed the accounts. 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. The Bohemian Grove belongs to the private San Francisco-based gentlemen's club The Bohemian Club. Bohemian reminiscences describe such bizarre initiation rites as escorting new members to the redwood at which one of the founders "did his morning ablutions." And David Rockefeller too. Many older men die waiting. 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. It takes place on the Field Circle stage, which is wedged in between two camps, Pink Onion (notable for its pink sheets) and Cave Man (notable for big-deal right-wingers and a plaque commemorating Herbert Hoover). The Bohemian Club's waiting list, which had first appeared away back in the 1920s, grew to ridiculous lengths. "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. On Wouk's acceptance, for instance, he was put to work writing a history of the club. 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. Reagan also came out in favor of four-year terms for congressmen. A college kid well call Tom the arm of the Secret Government is, after all, far-reaching worked at the Bohemian Grove each summer for three years in the middle 1990s. The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. 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. 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. Some said all the big decisions were taken in England, at Ditchley, not so far from the Appeasers former haunts at Cliveden and only an hour by Learjet from Davos, which is where jumped up finance ministers and self-inflating tycoons merely pretend they rule the world. It was a good time to visit the Grove. "My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. Fifty people were arrested. "Simon doesn't know he doesn't have money.". 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. Tom fixed the early morning gin fizzes and kindred cobweb banishers. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer 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. He said Reagan would love it and motioned with an open hand toward the deck. In the first 50 years of the club's existence the Bohemian Grove was comparatively accessible to outsiders, but in the 1930s, as the club gained influence and its redwoods provided a haven for Republican presidents, it grew quite secretive about its rituals and membership -- you won't even find the Grove on public maps. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. Dick Cheneys a Grover. After General Chain's talk, the usual quiet business chatter went on. Will California Save the Iconic Joshua Tree? He says he likes it that way. Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. It would seem that this year's encampment was useful to him. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. 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. He is probably worrying about the cut of his tutu for the drag act for which he has been rehearsing keenly for many months. 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. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. 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.". 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. 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. Larry Kramer is a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. No one inside acted suspicious, but paranoia about the Grove seemed justified, and I brought along my own version of cyanide: Interol, a tranquilizer used by actors to counteract stage fright.