The Georgetown Set:The Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washingtonby Gregg HerkenKnopf, 2014Gregg Herken, an emeritus professor of American diplomatic history, has struck pure gold in his latest book by turning away from the official records and memos of the diplomatic corps and the U.S. Foreign Service and concentrating instead on the sound of clinking glasses and full-throated (and fully lubricated) dinner conversation, and he's found the perfect subjects: the extraordinary group of friends who entertained each other and held informal court in the leafy Georgetown neighborhood of the United States capital. This group of friends, these incredibly smart men and women who had entree to both the corridors of power and the drumheads of the Fourth Estate, this Georgetown set, gives Herken his subject, and as he claims right at the outset, “Those who inspired, promoted, and – in some cases – personally executed America's winning Cold War strategy were not generals at the Pentagon but a coterie of affluent, well-educated, and well-connected civilians living in a fashionable Washington, D. C., neighborhood.”The Washington that forms his backdrop was still the same utterly charming place it had been for the previous half-century, at least for the wealthy and the powerful, a “parochial town said to have a reputation for northern charm and southern efficiency” that “had suddenly become the capital of the Free World.” In these postwar years, the Georgetown set that is Herken's focus consisted of a core group of friends and erstwhile schoolmates and colleagues: old Harvard alumni like Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, Charles “Chip” Bohlen (who “seemed to consider alcohol not so much a beverage as a food group”), and Joe Alsop, a star columnist along with his brother Stewart, plus an extended family of “tribal friends” like Graham's wife Kay, former head of CIA covert operations Frank Wisner, whiny political analyst George Kennan, intelligence community maven Allen Dulles, and, for a while on N Street, John and Jacqueline Kennedy (plus darker, more incongruous figures like Henry Kissinger).In the course of twenty-three garrulous, compulsively readable chapters, Herken chronicles how the major events of the postwar political world – presidential elections, a presidential assassination, Vietnam, and, like a growing shadow over everything else, Watergate – were discussed, deplored, and sometimes shaped by this group of friends and press barons and backstairs power-brokers. He's had the cooperation of some of the families involved, and he's done an amount of research that's belied by his book's chatty tone; The Georgetown Set often reads like a string of excerpts from some long-vanished society column, but there's a good deal of meat on these bones. Herken traces dozens of controversies large and small, from the Cuban Missile Crisis on the world-shaking end of the spectrum to the fallout of the Crisis in the press at the petty end. He describes the tense negotiations with Russia quite well, and he cites a Saturday Evening Post feature article written by Stewart Alsop and long-time Kennedy friend Charles Bartlett on December 8, 1962 in which an anonymous source accuses Kennedy adviser Adlai Stevenson of desperately wanting an ignominious settlement with Moscow – an accusation Stevenson hotly denied:
Yet Stevenson's public characterization of the Alsop-Bartlett account as “inaccurate and untrue” and “fallacious in every detail” was rendered hollow by Stewart's subsequent disclosure that Kennedy himself had “proof-read” the draft article before publication and requested no changes. Pointedly, the president had let stand the anonymous remark about Stevenson wanting “a Munich.” Challenged at a press conference to identify the “nonadmiring official” who was the source of the quotation, Kennedy dodge the question, saying only, “I think this matter should be left to historians.”
As Herken points out, Kennedy himself was the “nonadmiring official, and the neat juxtaposition of history and gossip is adroitly made. This book is planted firmly at that same intersection. It shares this in common with James Srodes' utterly wonderful 2012 book On Dupont Circle: the careful chronicle of a parade of personalities at just the moment when such a parade achieved actual historical significance.Herken quotes Kay Graham as stoutly maintaining, “Within Washington there's a nucleus of people who know each other and enjoy each other's company and see each other no matter what's happening politically or who is in or out of power.” And while this isn't exactly true – sometimes 'what's happening politically' could drive a wedge into even the chummiest social groups, as Herken's own accounts of both Vietnam and Watergate amply demonstrate – it captures “the Georgetown set”'s conception of itself (as does, alas, that set's typical dinner toast, “Here's to all of us!” - echoed even more fatuously in the succeeding decades by the toast Christopher Hitchens favored at his own Washington soirees: “It's good to be us”).Herken's book captures that tone as well, perfectly. The phenomenon of the 'soft power' wielded by society salons like the Georgetown one (a phenomenon very ably dissected in Linda Kelly's book Holland House) is notoriously evanescent and therefore tricky to pin down – even by the end of Herken's book, the few surviving members of the Georgetown set are looking back, confusedly grasping for the meaning of it all – but Herken has done as superb job here, and he's made it very enjoyable reading in the process.
