The most striking prop in The Low Jinks was a sculpture of a female torso whose breasts and buttocks had both been attached to the front, an improvement that looked vaguely hostile. The mood is reminiscent of high school. I waited till my last day to bring one in.) Just the same, the club needed such "men of use" to support their activities. Meese, by the way, is about the only major Reaganite who didn't end up as a member. Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller a virtual who's who . This summer, for example, attendees saw several plays. 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. The bust came right after a Lakeside Talk by William Webster, then the FBI director, and the timing suggested it was his doing. '", The only surprises came when he took questions. PodClips brings you the best podcast clips All clips from this episode: https://podclips.com/e/edz?ss=y___Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/podclip. Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes who used to hunt rabbits in the nearby hills, remembered a fire road leading into the site near the Guerneville waste-treatment plant but said they'd spot me sneaking in. Comments by Ronald Wilson Reagan, said placards on the wooden signboards. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton, and then William Ritschel, Jo Mora, Arthur Putman, William Keith, Xavier Martinez, Edwin . 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. Then the beer brewer himself came out to sing: "Mandalay," the song based on the Kipling poem. For a good half hour the band warmed up the audience, playing the fight songs of many California colleges and the armed services and culminating with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. Any Bohemian is welcome at such events. "It would screw everything up, excuse the pun," said an old-timer sipping a drink by the river. It never rains when the encampment is on. "There'd be a lot more preening and peacocking than there already is," a big gay Bohemian told me. "Bill Simon had room on his plane." Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) He got rousing applause when he called for greater regulation of the media. Eddie Albert is there, and United Technologies chieftain Harry J. 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. 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 used my real name. "He bought some apple juice company for $1 million and he was fearful he would have to dip into his capital"). Cremation of Care, they fear, means the death of caring. If he fails, he must wait three years to try again. 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. 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. "We had rope trick. There's a feeling of both great privilege and rusticity. Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good.". A guest card was out of the question: club bylaws have stated that a member-sponsor's application "shall be in writing and shall contain full information for the guidance of the Board in determining the merits and qualifications of the proposed guest." Nonetheless, the ideal of equality is comforting. 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." I would like to make the two-year congressman's term four years, to reduce the number of elections that we have, because I think that's one of the reasons that only about 53 percent of the people vote. Every spring for many years now, Bohemian Club presidents have formally summoned such men to the Grove with great effusion: "Brother Bohemians: The Sun is Once Again in the Clutches of the Lion, and the encircling season bids us to the forest -- there to celebrate the awful mysteries! But best of all, there are the talent revue and the play. A set of checkpoints like the Berlin Wall seemed to stretch out behind him. The walled camps are generally about 100 feet wide and stretch back up the hillside, with wooden platforms on which members set up tents. The productive drunk is the bane of all moralists. "Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia grant us thy counsel!". The long-range planning commit-tee of the club decided to buy a grove some sixty miles north of the city near the town of Monte Rio. Tipping the help is strictly forbidden, but so is reprimanding them. Two of the buses bore vanity license plates commemorating the 1989 presidential inauguration -- they had the words Kinder and Gentler stamped on them. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn, which he said almost sotto voce. The avenging posses may find some puzzling elements within the Grove. You know how many times we've been in someone's home, and we've wanted to go to the powder room, and we've maybe said, 'Excuse me, I've got to powder my nose.' 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 sensibility of the Grove recalls an era before the surgeon general's report on smoking, before the death of God and duty, before the advent of cholesterol and Sandra Day O'Connor (whose husband, John, bunks in Pelicans camp). And Rex Greed said, "The only difference between rape and rapture is salesmanship." "Your secretary, I got to tell you, she's 110 percent," a dark-haired man said to an older fellow. He had a keen geographical sense and a girlfriend who described a plan to seed magic crystals at the Grove gates to make them open of their own accord so that Native American drummers could walk in. When a character describes modern art as "the talentless being sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered," the crowd's roar seemed to contain the grief of hundreds of businessmen who have shelled out for headquarters art they do not understand. The rest of the questions were about the world outside the Grove. There are increasingtly popular science talks at the Bohemian Groves museum. I might last three hours before they put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. But the club's newspapermen were also socially ambitious, aiming to chronicle California's rise in the arts and sciences. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. I said when we got back we'd talk about it. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. Inside the Grove there is a feeling of mournful inevitability about the day women will join the encampment. The first thing I noticed was that he had finally let his hair go gray. "No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him." 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. 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. I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. 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. As dinner began that night, people were already sitting down on the redwood benches at the main stage for the Grove play (despite the poster, a humorless enactment of the destruction of Pompeii). There are few rules, the most famous one being "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" -- in other words, don't do business in the Grove. "What's in this?" The best of the traditional postprandial lakeside talks was given by former Califomia Gov. Hacked pictures of Powell partying with elites and actors at the top-secret resort were leaked by the original Guccifer in 2013. As Oscar Wilde once remarked after a visit there, I've never seen so many welldressed, (although dress ranges from casual wear and athletic gear to suits and ties] wellfed, businesslikelooking Bohemians in the whole course of my life.. 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. A week after the encampment, a Washington correspondent for a French paper insisted to me that the last time the prime minister had visited the U.S. was a year and a half ago. He was waiting to be asked to give a Lakeside Talk, but the club wasn't going to invite him until he had shown them the respect of visiting Cave Man camp for a weekend or so. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. "Owner slash developer," a man dictated to his secretary one morning. He got the pa-pers San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Wine gets passed around (though members must sign for the bottles on a chit). 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! In midsummer the phones are often crowded. The simulacrum isnt half bad. That did it. Informed sources discount these stories somewhat. Burn CARE and hurl his ashes, whirling, from our glade! Jones said a lot of shit yesterday, especially past the 1:30:00 mark when he started to get lit. One of the speakers this year was Defense Secretary Harold Brown. Colin Powell pictured at the Bohemian Grove in a photo hacked by Guccifer By such standards, San Francisco businessmen surely looked crude. Separating the Red and Blue. Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. They sang from a small stage in front of a redwood on which was hung a framed nineteenth-century engraving. One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging. 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. Hes spared the heftysign-up fee of around $10,000 and annual membership duesm and only has to pony up when hes invited, which is every two or three years. Everyone talks about it. I said we might have a deal for him. Amid somber music, horses carrying caped riders gallop through the trees. "Honey, I lost my ring and I want to sell the house," the third one said, mocking a homecoming speech. Music sounded softly. I'd made it in that day for breakfast at the Dining Circle, the most lavish meal of the Bohemian day, an experience redolent of moneyed western ease. ", Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." The priests turned in desperation to the owl. 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. 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. 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.