The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington by Gregg Herken (review)

Gregg Herken's The Georgetown Set sheds light on a bygone era of Washington politics when the most important political and policy decisions of the day were discussed and decided at fancy dinner parties hosted by an elite group of blue-blooded New England–bred and–educated white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men with close political ties to all of the major levers of power in Washington. Herken, a professor of histroy emeritus at the University of California, paints a rich portrait of a social scene that spanned eight presidential administrations and endured through all the major national crises that confronted the United States from the rise of the Soviet Union through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Herken paints the Georgetown dinner parties as transactional summits where Washington's most powerful politicians, administration officials, journalists, foreign dignitaries, intelligence officers, and their spouses would socialize and debate the latest political and policy issues of the day. The dinner parties were strictly formal and premised on the norms of Anne Squire's Social Washington, a social etiquette manual similar to Roberts Rules of Order (p. 20). Herken reveals that the guests at the parties would customarily drink dry martinis, eat dishes of leek pie, and terrapin soup, and then split into gender-segregated groups (where the men would smoke cigars and drink scotch), before departing exactly on the dot at 11 pm.

The Georgetown dinner parties oftentimes were hosted by syndicated political columnist, and founder of Matter of Fact, Joseph Alsop. They were regularly attended by a tight-knit group of politically connected friends and confidants. These individuals included Frank Wisner (an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency), Phil Graham and Kay Graham (owners of The Washington Post), Chip Bohlen (a Soviet expert at the State Department), George Kennan (a diplomat and author of the containment doctrine), Llewellyn Thompson (former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union), and Alsop's junior writer (and brother) Stewart Alsop. Herken does an exemplary job of tracing the careers of each of these individuals throughout the duration of the Cold War. He is careful not to lionize some of the more notable regulars on the Georgetown set and places a great deal of emphasis on highlighting the character flaws of each of the main protagonists in the book. Among the more notable names making appearances on the Georgetown set over the years are John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin.

Herken devotes a large portion of his book to developing the character of Joseph Alsop, born to the niece of Theodore Roosevelt and educated at Groton and Harvard. His familial and political connections propelled him into a career in journalism that began in earnest when he became a syndicated columnist for The New York Herald Tribune. Alsop was a firm believer in American exceptionalism. He genuinely cared about the prestige and influence of the United States during the Cold War. He volunteered his services to sway media coverage in favor of the intelligence agencies' preferred candidate, Ramon Magsaysay, in the 1953 presidential elections in the Philippines (p.178). Alsop was so worried about the prospects of U.S. failure in Vietnam that he confronted Lyndon Johnson in person and urged him to escalate the war in mid-June 1964 in order to avoid defeat (p. 298). Alsop's biggest flaw was that he was deeply wedded to his beliefs on the Vietnam War. Herken reveals that Alsop "admits to a fellow journalist that Vietnam cost him his health, figure and reputation" (p. 374). Alsop's fall from grace was swift, his last column written on 30 December 1974. His final years were spent as a broken man, a shell of the person he once was when his dining room was the epicenter of Washington high society.

The conversations that took place at Georgetown dinner parties were of great interest to actors both foreign and domestic. "The...