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By GUY KOVNER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008 at 3:41 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 10:33 a.m.
On July 29, 1995, former President George H.W. Bush stood beside a small lake ringed by towering redwoods and spoke to hundreds of wealthy and powerful men at the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio.
Giving the final Lakeside Talk of the two-week summer encampment, Bush, a longtime Bohemian Club member, introduced his son George to the all-male crowd of American business, professional, social and political heavyweights.
“He used the occasion to say that his son George W. Bush would make a great president some day,” according to G. Wil-liam Domhoff’s chronicle of the Grove, subtitled “The Power Elite at Summer Camp.”
Conspiracy theorists would connect the dots between that event on a languid summer afternoon in Sonoma County to the younger Bush’s ascension to the White House in 2000.
They would likely have a field day with former President Richard Nixon’s assertion, in his own memoirs, that his Lakeside Talk to the Bohemians in 1967 “marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency,” which he won the following year.
Nixon, in a less-charitable mood, groused on his secret tapes that the Bohemian Club “is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine.”
But whether the presidential anecdotes prove that the Bohemians, while strolling — and boozing — among 1,500-year-old redwoods along the Russian River are also plotting the future of the free world is subject to debate.
The 2008 encampment, which ends Sunday, found the San Francisco-based club embroiled in a local controversy, as well, over a proposed logging plan for the 2,700-acre wooded retreat.
Domhoff, a UC Santa Cruz sociologist who studies power and politics in America, dismisses the notion that capitalist schemes and military endeavors are plotted during the encampments, which date back to the 1890s.
“They’re not out there talking about big things,” Domhoff said, describing the Grove as “an Elks Club for the rich; a fraternity party in the woods.”
These men have plenty of other venues for dealmaking, such as corporate boardrooms, Capitol Hill back rooms and country clubs, he said.
True, said Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State University sociologist who did his dissertation on Bohemian Grove 14 years ago. Powercrats may not need the summer encampment to make hay, but they take advantage of it.
“There’s extensive discussion of public policy every day,” said Phillips, who was invited to the Bohemians’ Spring Jinks weekend in June 1994. “I heard a lot of business talk.”
Most Bohemians are “ordinary rich guys,” but about one in five is a corporate CEO, top government official or other plenipotentiary, the vast majority of them Republicans, Phillips said. The club also welcomes a spate of musicians, actors and other artists as associate members to keep the plutocrats entertained.
The Grove’s harshest critics, who allege devil worship and even child sacrifice transpires under the trees, are “nonsensical,” Domhoff said.
And the often-told tale that the atomic bomb was born at the Grove is off the mark, he said. The Manhattan Project was under way when bomb planners met there in an off-season month, with no other Bohemians present, Domhoff and Phillips said.
On the three weekends of the summer encampment, the peak attendance period, about 2,000 Bohemians — many arriving by corporate jet at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport — head for their woodsy and highly secretive retreat.
They inhabit about 120 camps, most along a road winding through the Grove’s valley, and others scattered on spur roads in the hills. Each camp has a clubhouse, campfire area, a cluster of cabins and tents for sleeping and a bar, typically featuring a specialty drink made with the finest alcohol.
Members are cordial, Phillips said.
“You walk in anywhere and they want you to drink,” he said.
Security is tight, although not foolproof. In any conversation with a Bohemian, an outsider would be quickly undone by questions about what camp and which members he or she was with, Phillips said.
Alex Shoumatoff, a writer for Vanity Fair, was apprehended after sneaking into the Grove on July 12 and reportedly asking the wrong sort of questions.
In years past, the list of Lakeside Talk speakers circulated fairly freely but is now closely guarded, Grove observers say.
For the summer encampment, the Bohemian Club hires about 600 people, typically including more than 400 high school and college-age youths, a club official said two years ago. Wages begin at $10.50 to $12.25 an hour, and with overtime employees can make $1,500, he said.
In 1981, the club was ordered by a state employment commission to hire women, but their movement while at work within the Grove is highly restricted.
What transpires around Grove campfires, among an intriguing cast of characters, remains very private. In 1970, for example, Walter Hickel, then secretary of the interior involved in negotiations over the Santa Barbara oil spill, was the guest of Bohemian Fred Hartley, president of Union Oil, the company responsible for the spill, Domhoff said.
It’s the secrecy that motivated Mary Moore of Camp Meeker, co-founder of the Bohemian Grove Action Network, to organize protests at the Grove gate from 1980 to 2006.
“It’s not the only place where stuff gets discussed behind closed doors, but it’s the one in our back yard,” she said.
Moore, 73, said she gave up organizing the protests in favor of working on other issues and enjoying her grandchildren.
“We’ve made our point,” she said.
Foremost among the network’s concerns were the Lakeside Talks, delivered by captains of industry, science, government and law enforcement, former presidents, a Supreme Court justice and even a Saudi prince.
The talks are “public policy ideas floated without public scrutiny,” Moore said.
In a July 2006 talk, Lynn Orr of Stanford University forecast a renewal of nuclear power to generate electricity without carbon emissions, an idea that has recently gained attention, Moore said.
“I like full transparency in government and among the policy elite,” Phillips said. Bohemian Grove is stunningly beautiful, but “it is not very transparent.”
For Nixon, his off-the-record speech by the lake provided a rebound from his 1960 loss to John Kennedy.
“It was an emotional assignment for me,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “and also an unparalleled opportunity to reach some of the most important and influential men, not just from California but from across the country.”
You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.
Part of it might come from the course’s proximity to Bohemian Grove, the secret luxury campground site of the Bohemian Club, one of most exclusive and powerful all-male clubs in history with many presidents, top Federal Reserve officials and major military contractors having been members. Many of these extremely powerful figures have come over to play golf at Northwood over the years.
Unique among U. S. clubs is San Francisco’s talented and hilarious Bohemian, unique its famed camp 80 mi. north of San Francisco, a 30,000-acre grove of virgin redwoods on the banks of the Russian River. Founded 50 years ago by western artists and art-patrons, it has” about 1,500 members throughout the world, meets every week. The Bohemian is the only club in the world to exchange with New York’s Lambs, includes such famed artists as Ignace Jan Paderewski, Fritz Kreisler, Lawrence Tibbett. Artist members pay no dues, contribute their artistic efforts instead. Last fortnight the Bohemians began their annual midsummer encampment and festival, called the “Jinks,” at their redwood camp, Bohemian Grove.
Unlike its regular musicales, the “Jinks” are held in secret and the guest list is limited. The festival is a series of musical entertainments, beginning with the ceremonious “Burial of Dull Care,” ending with the “High Jinks” a musical play composed, staged, sung by members. Though the “High Jinks” are the climax of the festival, many members consider the “Burial of Dull Care” the most impressively beautiful ceremony. While the moon splashes ghostly shadows through the grove, a funeral procession moves under redwood branches huge as an oaktree’s bole, carrying along the effigy of “Dull Care,” playing slow music. Hidden voices chant from the shadowy hillsides. The procession halts before the sacrificial “Altar of the Owl,” solemnly buries the effigy as the music dies away.
Last week-end Bohemian Grove celebrated its “High Jinks.” The 32nd annual play, The Legend of Hani, based on an Indian myth, was written by Playwright Julius Cravens, set to music by Henry Hadley, onetime conductor of the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra. It relates the efforts of the first man, Hani, after creation of the world by the Sun-Father and Moon-Mother, to subdue the other creatures of earth and find Tala, his predestined mate.
Under the redwoods 1,200 Bohemians (including Herbert Clark Hoover) & guests sat on rough-hewn logs for the first & last production of The Legend of Hani in one of the Grove’s two open air theatres. While Composer Hadley conducted the orchestra through his own score, Bohemians heard Baritone John Charles Thomas of the Metropolitan Opera sing the title role.
Origin of the Grove plays goes back to one Joseph D. Redding, San Francisco attorney who died last year. He proposed and wrote the first play, The Man of the Forest. In 1911 his Natoma was set to music by Victor Herbert, produced in Philadelphia with Mary Garden and John McCormack.’ The best western composers have contributed scores for the Grove plays and Bohemians aver that much beautiful music is thereby lost to the world, as the plays are seldom given public performance.
The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA
By BOB NORBERG
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Published: Friday, July 14, 2006 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 14, 2006 at 1:33 a.m.
A steady line of Gulfstream, Cessna and Falcon corporate jets landed Thursday at Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, signaling the opening of the annual Bohemian Grove encampment.
“We love this,” said Bob Gallagher, general manager of Apex Aviation, which had more than a dozen private aircraft parked on its tarmac. “It’s good for business, it’s good for Apex, cars, hotels, catering . .. it helps the whole county.”
The annual encampment is as much a thread in the fabric of Sonoma County as the fall grape crush and foggy beach days, and it draws as many as 3,000 to the exclusive men-only club amid the Russian River redwoods.
Among the attendees will be former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is scheduled to speak, according to the Bohemian Grove Action Network, which has been protesting at the encampment since 1980. Grove officials would not confirm the speech schedule.
Meanwhile, rumors circulated among airport workers Thursday that actors John Travolta and George Clooney also were expected to fly in.
The annual gathering has its detractors, who contend the participants - from government leaders to corporate executives - meet outside public view and discuss such issues as the war in Iraq and terrorism.
“I wouldn’t say ’sinister’ is the word at all, but the people who are involved there are doing some politically very inappropriate things to the world,” said Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State University sociology professor who wrote his doctoral thesis on the club.
Phillips will be among the protesters July 22 outside the gates of the Monte Rio retreat, where they have picketed each event since 1980.
Members of the San Francisco-based Bohemian Club have been coming to its 2,700-acre retreat for 117 years. The club caters to ex-presidents, high-ranking government officials, corporate executives, artists and entertainers.
It cloaks itself in secrecy, denying any requests for tours of the grove and requiring all employees to sign nondisclosure agreements.
The encampment officially begins Saturday with the “Cremation of Care,” a ceremony that includes a large bonfire, and runs for two weeks, with the middle weekend drawing the largest and usually the most prestigious crowd.
Thomas Reed of Healdsburg, a former secretary of the Air Force and an inactive member, is scheduled to talk on his Cold War experiences.
Reed said the club comprises a broad base of people who are just as likely to be discussing school vouchers as some pressing world issue.
“It is an area where friends get together,” Reed said. “To say it is a place where nefarious schemes are hatched, I have not seen that. You get a lot of people together and people will talk about things, but where the protesters describe it as a cabal, it doesn’t work that way.”
On Thursday, corporate jets arrived at the airport with men in blue blazers and business-casual attire who stepped onto small red carpets and were whisked by awaiting rental cars.
Among the luggage of three arrivals were four cases of expensive French wine.
Federal Aviation Administration controllers said there will be 50 planes landing Thursday and today carrying Bohemian Grove participants.
Apex’s Gallagher said the company probably will sell 20,000 gallons of jet fuel over the weekend.
“It’s Christmastime for us,” Gallagher said.
Hertz branch manager Brenda Hirsch said they would rent about 40 vehicles Thursday, driving the cars onto the tarmac to meet the arrivals and collecting luggage in golf carts.
“We don’t do this for everybody,” Hirsch said. “It doesn’t happen on your day-to-day basis.”
North County Times - Californian
FPI - BE SURE TO READ UP ON BOHEMIAN GROVE. OBAMA AND MCCAIN WERE PROBABLY THERE.
Presidential rivals Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are expected to appeal for the support of thousands of Latino activists gathering next week in San Diego, a frontline city in the nation’s immigration policy debate.
Google’s Eric Schmidt has come out strong for Obama. (With Al Gore on Google’s board, that’s not a huge surprise.) Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman support John McCain (possibly because they thought he’d pick them instead of Caribou Barbie for a running mate). Schmidt may end up eating all by himself at theBohemian Grove, though; four out of five CEOs still prefer the GOP. Read my lips: It’s all about the taxes.
A “donor member” was Jim Hensley, wealthy Phoenix beer distributor and father of Cindy McCain.
It’s the American power elite at play, as photographed by Alejandro Tomas over 26 years of attending an annual horse ride called Rancheros Visitadores in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, Calif.
Who goes on the ride? The club is exclusive, white and male, with a membership limited to 600. A couple hundred invited guests and guys from the wait list attend each year.
Photos from the 1989 ride show Reagan, an honorary member, on a buckboard beside former Interior Secretary William Clark. Gen. P.X. Kelly, commandant of the Marines, also is pictured.
“I was a little taken aback by many of the attitudes,” Tomas said. “Here are men at the highest rungs of power in this country. Quite blatant forms of racism and anti-Semitism and misogyny are on display. … The festive debauchery represents a cohesion of the power class.
A United Airlines board member, John Mitchell, started the Rancheros ride in 1930 as a kind of Bohemians-on-horseback experience. Walt Disney was a member.
Breakfast at Owls Nest Camp, Bohemian Grove, July 23, 1967. Around the table, left to right: Preston Hotchkis, California Governor Ronald W. Reagan, Harvey Hancock (standing), Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Glenn Seaborg, Jack Sparks, (unidentified individual), (unidentified individual), and Edwin Pauley. Courtesy of Edward W. Carter (deceased).