In The Georgetown Set Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (Alfred A. Knopf, $30), Gregg Herken, a historian of the middle decades of the American twentieth century, hypothesizes that a cluster of officials, diplomats, intelligence operatives, and journalists from a chic neighborhood in northwest Washington exerted major influence on the way that the United States conducted the Cold War.
However, aware that the term “set” may carry unpleasant overtones, he first takes care to distinguish the Georgetown set from its most notorious predecessor–the Cliveden set, a gaggle of British aristocrats who gathered at the country house of the American-born Nancy Astor in the years before World War II and are remembered now for seeking to appease Hitler. Herken makes clear that he believes that his Georgetown set was unlike Cliveden, in that it may have done some good. He concludes, in fact, that its activities contributed to victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Moreover, Herken sees the Washington era he describes–from 1945 to 1975–as a time of achievement, preferable to today’s bad-tempered, gridlocked capital. He vividly describes the social activities of the Georgetown set, placing at its center the loud, argumentative “zoo parties” on Sunday nights at the home of Joseph Alsop, who wrote, with his brother Stewart, a widely disseminated column of revelations and opinions. In a recent column about his book, Herken reveals the secret ingredient that he believes made the Washington of that day tolerable: “A long-abandoned Washington tradition hints at a simple remedy; one reducible to a single word, in fact: gin.” (Or vodka, he adds.)
Indeed, the gatherings of the Georgetown set seem infused with drunkenness, as well as more than a touch of madness: Two prominent participants–one from the cia, the other the publisher of The Washington Post–committed suicide after mental breakdowns. The arguments at 2720 Dumbarton were often loud, abusive, bitter and possibly incoherent. The Alsop salon had a brief episode of glory with the election of a neighbor, John F. Kennedy, who notably stopped in at Joseph Alsop’s home after attending inauguration festivities. The Kennedy era soon ended, but the partying did not.
It is the way of Washington that elite journalists and elite officials socialize. But joining the Georgetown set was of uncertain benefit to journalists, who valued access to power but had to offer something in return. In Georgetown, The Washington Post supplied the most prominent newspaper people. Alfred Friendly, managing editor until 1965, was a Georgetown neighbor of the Alsops, as was his successor, Ben Bradlee, who had become a close friend of Kennedy as Washington bureau chief for Newsweek; Bradlee wrote a book about the closeness of that relationship. After the death of the Post‘s publisher, Philip Graham, in 1963, his widow, Katharine, took over the paper and remained a devoted Alsop salonista.
Herken suggests that one result of this closeness was at least a tacit commitment to support policies favored by those in power–to take a minor example, backing some of the early cia’s frivolous initiatives, such as fomenting two-bit rebellions in eastern Europe. This closeness eventually had serious consequences for the reputation of the Post. It tends to be forgotten now that the Post, like Joseph Alsop, remained a firm supporter of the American presence in Vietnam long after it became apparent the war was heading for disaster. The Post‘s later reputation as a scourge of bad government came in large part from the work of two outsider (non-Georgetown) reporters.
Oddly, Herken throws his whole thesis into doubt with a statement near the beginning of the book: “The Georgetown set also bears no slight responsibility for the miscalculations and disasters of that era: the danger, profligacy, and waste of a runaway nuclear arms race; reckless and costly clandestine adventures overseas; complacency in the face of political reaction at home; and, not least of all, the protracted debacle of Vietnam.” Clearly, Herken is too good as a historian not to make this acknowledgment, but he undermines himself. So much for the benefits of gin.
James Boylan is CJR’s founding editor.