Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, by Gregg Herken, is about the social and political elites who crafted U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War over their dinner parties and cocktails in the historic, tony neighborhood of Washington, D.C. But it’s also, if unconsciously, about the apex and decline of America’s WASP aristocracy, whose wisdom laid the groundwork for survival and victory against the Soviet Union. The story concludes with by then aging columnist Joseph Alsop resignedly admitting that the class that his own New England family embodied had become irrelevant.
Alsop, whose famed dinner parties for Washington policy makers were center stage for Cold War social and political life, is Georgetown Set’s central character. A grand nephew to Teddy Roosevelt and cousin to First Lady Eleanor, Alsop authored for decades a nationally syndicated column focused on foreign policy that was robustly anti-Communist and often apocalyptic in its pessimism about American survival. His dinner parties, always begun with terrapin soup, often erupted into shouting matches over U.S. policies, with Alsop denouncing any hint of softness towards the Soviets. Apology notes were typically exchanged the next day, and the cycle of dining and dispute among the Georgetown Set would resume.
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