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Steve Shepherd reports on the Bohemian Club’s annual retreat at Bohemian Grove, a private, all-male gathering near San Francisco. More than 2,000 members descend on roughly 2,700 acres of redwood forest for two and a half weeks in July, staying in dozens of small camps with Mandalay the most prominent. The Grove is described as a secluded summer retreat where club members and guests from across America come to relax, socialize, and engage in various activities.
Membership is by invitation based on social standing, occupation, and connections. Privacy is highly valued; members may not photograph, record, speak, or write about activities at the retreat, and the press is a distinctly unwelcome guest. Outsiders have limited access, though some researchers, including sociology professor William Dumhoff, have studied the Grove.
Notable members and attendees come from business and politics. Among the camps’ members are Leonard Firestone, Edgar Kaiser, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, William French Smith, and George Shultz. President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and Defense Secretary Weinberger are associated with other camps. Richard Nixon is a bohemian, and high-ranking executives from Eastern Airlines, Standard Oil of Indiana, and Bank of America are mentioned. The Grove hosts prominent guests such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and this year’s speakers include presidential counselor Edwin Meese; CIA director William Casey is scheduled as a guest of John McCone, with Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn invited by Peter O’Malley.
Activities at the Grove include two plays with major sets, orchestral music, and elaborate costumes, as well as swimming, hiking, sunbathing, drinking from the Grove’s own spirits, and other leisure activities. The group performs a ritual known as the cremation of care, in which the body of dull care symbolizing woes is burned on an alder in front of a large owl statue, after which participants cheer and toast with beers. The Grove’s symbol is a fierce-looking owl, and its patron saint is Saint John of Naplemuck, a thirteenth-century Bohemian canonized for his sense of honor.
The Grove is instrumental politically, with historic speeches by Nixon and Eisenhower noted as significant moments. Discussions in the 1930s are credited with contributing to the development of nuclear power and the atomic bomb. In addition to policy discussions, annual guests engage in informal exchanges. The retreat also faces occasional challenges: anti-nuclear demonstrators near the entrance and a California lawsuit over the Grove’s refusal to hire women. Despite these tensions, Herbert Hoover once called it the world’s greatest men’s party, and a long list of powerful individuals continues waiting to enter.