Georgetown Gentry.

• Author: Rosen, James
• Position: Book review

Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 512 pp., $30.00.

I really hate this city," wrote Joseph Alsop, the legendary newspaper columnist and Washington bon vivant, in the spring of 1974. And with good reason: the capital in which Alsop and his brother and coauthor, Stewart, had for twenty-five years exercised outsized influence--as hosts to, and confidants of, the nation's elite politicians, generals, spymasters and fellow journalists--had quietly vanished.

In its heyday, the Alsops' world was a cloistered place, not untouched by rancor or partisanship but still governed by old-school wasp manners and aspirations for postwar America that were broadly shared across the ideological spectrum. It functioned as an unusual hybrid of court society and literary commune, its denizens given to elegant Sunday-night dinners, decades-long debates about international affairs and democratic values, and petty personal feuds resolved by the penning of heartfelt letters of apology, mailed to recipients who might have lived all of six blocks away.

This is the bygone kingdom, as fabled and dead as Atlantis, to which Gregg Herken returns us in The Georgetown Set. A gifted historian, Herken is the author of several well-regarded books about the politics and science of the atomic age. His progression to this terrain seems natural, if not inevitable. Surely no one is better suited to the material; the source notes include entries like "Author interview with Paul Nitze, July 12, 1984."

In assaying the chummy crowd of accomplished and vainglorious Washingtonians who consorted with the Alsops inside their Dumbarton Street maisonettes, and who in turn fed the brothers' hawkish columns, Herken conjures with skill and style those fretful years when America's nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union lurched from containment to confrontation, and the heightened stakes overseas plunged the nation's political classes into paranoia at home. Authoritative and reverential, The Georgetown Set joins the ranks of other accomplished "group portraits" of the Cold War, a genre distinguished by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson's The Wise Men, Burton Hersh's The Old Boys and Thomas's The Very Best Men.

The fact that so much of this ground has been covered before--in histories of the Cold War and the CIA, and in biographies like Robert W. Merry's definitive study of the Alsops, Taking on the World, and John Lewis Gaddis's Pulitzer Prize--winning George F. Kennan: An American Life--is not the principal flaw of this volume. Rather, it is in the "group" construct itself, which, at least in these pages, leads to a scattered approach: a narrative only loosely held together by lines of friendship so tangled and overlapping that they confuse rather than clarify. Indeed, The Georgetown Set is probably the best-researched and best-written Bad Read I've ever read. The gang's all here, to an extent that some paragraphs induce vertigo:

Tom Braden, former Jedburgh and Stewart Alsop's close friend and co-author, had joined the agency in 1950 as a patriotic response to the Korean war. Braden was made head of the CIA's International Organizations Division, which secretly funneled money to trade unions and freedom committees overseas. Another Jed veteran, and Frank Wisner's former law partner, was Tracy Barnes. Wisner put Barnes in charge of psychological and paramilitary warfare. Shortly after Korea, the ex-marine Phil Geyelin also joined Wisner in opc's...