Masters of the Universe Go to Camp: Inside the Bohemian Grove.

Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. Its only landmark is a kick-ass bar called the Pink Elephant, but a half-mile or so away from "the Pink," in the middle of a redwood grove, there is, strangely enough, a bank of 16 pay telephones. In midsummer the phones are often crowded. On July 21 of this year Henry Kissinger sat at one of them, chuffing loudly to someone -- Sunshine, he called her, and Sweetie -- about the pleasant distractions of his vacation in the forest.
"We had jazz concert," Kissinger said. "We had rope trick. This morning we went bird-watching."
Proudly Kissinger reeled off the names of some of his fellow campers: "Nick Brady and his brother is here." (Brady was the U.S. Treasury Secretary at the time.) "Tom Johnson is here." (Then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who had copies of his newspaper shipped up every day.) "That Indian is here, Bajpai." (He meant Shankar Bajpai, former ambassador to the U.S.) "Today they had a Russian."
The Russian was the physicist Roald Sagdeev, a member of the Soviet Supreme Council of People's Deputies, who had given a speech to Kissinger and many other powerful men too. George Shultz, the former secretary of State, wearing hiking boots, had listened while sitting under a tree. Kissinger had lolled on the ground, distributing mown grass clippings across his white shirt, being careful not to set his elbow on one of the cigar butts squashed in the grass, and joking with a wiry, nut-brown companion.
The woman on the line now asked about the friend. "Oh, Rocard is having a ball." Kissinger was sharing his turtleneck with Rocard, for nights amid the redwoods grew surprisingly cool. The two of them were camping in Mandalay, the most exclusive bunk site in the encampment, the one on the hill with the tiny cable car that carries visitors up to the compound.
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.'" Rocard was Michel Rocard, the prime minister of France, and this was a secret trip. 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. And David Rockefeller too. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. Merv Griffin. Walter Cronkite.
No one was supposed to know that Rocard himself would be speaking the next day down at the lake, under the green speakers' parasol. As orange dragonflies coupled dazzlingly over the water, as bullfrogs sounded, Rocard would lean forward and say, "Because you are such an astonishing group of men, I can speak privately." It was a devilishly charming thing to say, calculated to flatter the men of the Bohemian Grove.
Every summer for more than a century, the all-male Bohemian Club of San Francisco has led a retreat into a redwood forest 70 miles north of the city, four and a quarter square miles of rugged, majestic terrain that members consider sacred. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. 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.
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. [This is not entirely accurate; "Bohemian Grove" is labeled as such on USGS topographic maps. -- GWD.] This has been especially true in the last ten years as Bohemia's stunning roster has waxed ever more statusy, as Kissinger and Rockefeller and Nick Brady have joined, drawing the attention of left-wing protesters, scholars of elites, and reporters. Th encampment has become the primary watering hole for Republican administration officials, defense contractors, press barons, old-line Hollywood figures, establishment intellectuals and a handful of German speaking men in lederhosen. What the Bois de Boulogne was to the ancien regime, the Grove is to America's power class. Ronald Reagan and George Bush are members. 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.
Today the Grove is stocked with Reaganites. Former Defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former attorney general William French Smith and former Transportation secretary Drew Lewis are all members. 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). James A. Baker III, the current secretary of State, is also a member, but he couldn't make it this year. The right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford attended in full force and brought along the president of Washington's Heritage Foundation. William F. Buckley Jr. and Malcolm Forbes held court.
Big business shows up: Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, billionaire John Kluge of Metromedia. Former Bank of America chairman Samuel Armacost brought IBM chairman John F. Akers, Bechtel chairman S. D. Bechtel Jr. brought Amoco chairman Richard Morrow. Noted and hoary writers and personalities are members: Herman Wouk, Art Linkletter, Fred Travalena. 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. More.