United States | News & Politics

The Bohemian Grove also serves as a place for these buttoned-up generals turned defense executives to let loose. While the rule of not talking business is widely ignored, another unwritten rule is that “everyone drink — and that everyone drink all the time.” Longtime member and musician Peter Arnott wrote that every camp in the Grove is “competing to pour drinks down your throat” in a summer 2009 edition of the club magazine. RS reached out to many of the national security officials who are members of the Bohemian Grove, but none responded to a request for comment. Aside from the “revolvers” between government and national security, the Bohemian Grove offers summer solace to plenty of defense contractor executives and financiers. Military tech investor Eric Schmidt, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, co-chairman of the defense-focused private equity firm Carlyle Group David Rubenstein, and several members of the Bechtel family all participated at the 2023 camp. Tex Schenkkan, the former director of National Security Innovation Capital, also made it to the 2023 celebration after years overseeing a DOD office that funds dual use defense/consumer startups. In 1967 President Nixon gave a lakeside talk at the Bohemian Grove that he would later claim was instrumental to launching his bid for the presidency. Before the assembled club members comprised of moneyed elite and aristocratic four-stars, Nixon made clear that it was they, and not the American public, who were the rightful masters of America’s destiny: “Never has a nation had more advantages to lead. Our economic superiority is enormous; our military superiority can be whatever we choose to make it. Most important, it happens that we are on the right side—the side of freedom and peace and progress against the forces of totalitarianism, reaction and war.”