June 28, 1984 

In recent years there have been leaks of vital information from the Bohemian Grove Encampment. It is in the National Interest that the Committee set the record Right on these matters, lest the public be fueled by Potentially Exaggerated “Facts.”

The Bohemian Club is a group of average private citizens that exerts its Constitutional Right, not to say Duty, to decline membership to women and the middle and lowered classes. It vacations annually, as it is entitled to by labor law, in a Redwood Grove just outside Monte Rio, California, in resource-rich Sonoma County. The two-week party is a fun-filled affair, known best to the public as the party at which public figures empty private parts against the Sequoias. Of course, if you’ve peed on one Redwood you’ve peed on them all, but we do pee on them all anyway in order to avoid forming a pee queue. Thus does the Grove become one great WC, standing in mute testimony to the trickle-down theory.

Problems do not arise unless people do.

Each summer the Grove plays host to most of the luminaries of our Republic, and even a few Democrats. But one must not engage in political activity at the camp; the watchword is “weaving spiders come not here.” Any deals which may have been closed during this annual down time have been minor ones, such as the government decision in the early 1940’s to fund Ernest Lawrence and some friends in a humanitarian research effort called the Manhattan Project, and the agreement to run Richard Nixon for the Presidency in 1968.

The vacationers themselves are a varied bunch of guys, with representatives of groups both over and under the $200,000 income line. Liberals are represented by David Rockefeller; the radical standpoint was represented in 1983 by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who stated that “Europe knows war first hand, unlike the U.S., and wants no more,” implying uncouthly if not unfairly that the U.S. does want more. His speech bore an inflammatory title which revealed its extremist bias: “Europe from a European’s Perspective.”

The powerless and displaced have been spoken for by Gerald Ford, with equal time provided to the heads of the Federal Reserve Board and the World Bank. The Humanitarian view is presented by Edward Teller, who opposes improper uses of non-conventional deterrent hardware at the wrong times, whenever possible.

There are numerous educational activities during the holiday. In the 1982 Lakeside Chat, Caspar Warburglar lectured campers on the need to re-arm America. In a fit of pluralism, Henry Killinger disagreed. He said we must re-arm the world. Mr. Killinger has himself Chatted at the Lakeside, saying that the United States should not consider moral questions when establishing foreign policy but should only consider whether the government in question is friendly to the United States. Actually there are no longer any moral questions since we obtained the answers on the free market; problems do not arise unless people do.

Attendees bunk in one of 122 camps within the Camp. The most civilized of these is Mandalay. On the road to Mandalay you are liable to run into a Bechtel, Schultz, Firestone or Kaiser. A little more rustic is the Hillbilly Camp, which houses the head of the World Bank and other humble citizens. In more primitive times one could amble along the quiet paths and encounter Richard Nixon discoursing with a Hoover—not the Hoover, of course, just Herbert.

I began these remarks by warning of an information effluence, but so far a sense of fair play on the part of the media has prevailed over reporters. Time correspondent Bob Boderi, who penetrated security at the Grove to take a leak of state and class secrets, fortunately was reined in by a Time-honored tradition at the magazine, and the story was not run. And since Time owns the story and associated pictures, it cannot be run anywhere else either—a small but inspiring example of the victory of property rights over random public babbling, for bitter or worse. (A National Public Radio reporter also made tapes, for the public, but management ruled they could not be used because the Grove Encampment is not an affair for the public to be concerned with.)

As to the protestors at the gate, the response of campers has been one of mild bemusement, with one Moderate suggesting politely, “Nuke ‘em till they glow.” Well, to each our own, I always say.