Mythical Georgetown

This second Georgetown was shortlived, lasting from the start of the Cold War to the end of the 1960s, but it seemed to combine high purpose–the Marshall Plan, the containment of communism–with the kind of lifestyle that Ralph Lauren could copy (as he, in fact, has). The men were veterans, often of the intelligence services, with derring-do or narrow escapes in their background and the suggestion of swagger that comes with that résumé. The women were bright and familiar with the great fashion houses. Everyone was well read.

This Georgetown, which appears nowadays in more and more memoirs, is the subject of C. David Heymann’s new book, “The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club: Power, Passion, and Politics in the Nation’s Capital,” which focuses on five of its women: Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post, looked-down-upon duckling turned publishing heiress; the elongated and elegant Evangeline Bruce; Lorriane Cooper, a senator’s wife and a Kennedy intimate; Pamela Harriman, mistress turned diplomat; and Sally Quinn, third wife of Benjamin Bradlee. Their power was great, and their parties terrific. And sometimes the price they paid was high.

Mythical Georgetown emerged at the start of the Cold War, through the merger of three different strains. One was the Central Intelligence Agency, workplace of choice for a cadre of veterans eager to use their skills and devotion to contain the new Communist threat. Many of them settled in Georgetown (where houses at the time were not too pricey). CIA head Frank Wisner moved into 3327 P Street with his hostess wife Polly (who died last year at ninety-one, still a Georgetown presence), and they soon had as neighbors a clutch of friends, including Tracy Barnes, Richard Bissell, Desmond Fitzgerald, William Colby, and Richard Helms. As Heymann writes, “If you were with the Agency or the Company, as it was sometimes called, the place to live was 2500 Q Street, a large Georgetown house subdivided into separate units. New agents . . . bought or rented houses up and down the same thoroughfare. Q Street in Georgetown became synonymous with the CIA.” As he quotes Dick McLellan, a local historian, “Georgetown was crawling with spooks.”

Crawling alongside them were a collection of journalists, with whom their ideas and careers overlapped. In 1952, Phil and Kay Graham bought a large house on R Street. Walter Lippmann lived in Georgetown, as did Scotty Reston. Stewart Alsop worked out of an office in the house on Dumbarton Avenue of his brother Joe. In 1957, Benjamin Bradlee moved back from Paris with his second wife, Antoinette Pinchot, and bought a house on N Street, a few doors down from one later purchased by Senator Kennedy. Most of these people shared a sensibility with the “spooks,” and sometimes they were the same people. As Heymann relates: “Influenced by his World War II service in Army Intelligence, . . . Phil Graham went to unprecedented lengths to employ former members of the intelligence community.”

This Georgetown set had its first regular meetings at Sunday night dinners held by the Wisners, when agents and journalists partied together, along with such people as the Bohlens and Achesons. “They were not just trifling social affairs,” the Wisners’ son explains. “All those people . . . were seated around a table making policy recommendations that more often than not got implemented.” Robert Merry, the Alsops’ biographer, claims that the Marshall Plan grew out of these meetings. Reston’s widow claims the CIA urged the Wisners to hold these soirées and dinners, and sometimes helped pay for them. “These smoke-filled living rooms and parlors were truly where the business of Washington got done.”

Another strand in the story was the career of John Kennedy, which lifted the Georgetown cabal to new heights. Kennedy was neither an agent nor a writer, but he had been a Georgetown resident almost all his political life. He had arrived there as a junior congressman in 1947 and lived there in various houses with his wife or his sister except for the few years–1955 to 1957–he lived with his wife across the Potomac in McLean, Va. In 1958, he almost literally bumped into Ben Bradlee when they were wheeling their children on N Street, and the two soon developed a friendship. (All the strands of Georgetown were knotted together in Kennedy’s affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, sister-in-law of Benjamin Bradlee and ex-wife of Cord Meyer, a power in the CIA.)

With Kennedy’s political triumphs, the Georgetown establishment went into high gear. The day of his inauguration, Kennedy went late at night in the snow to Joe Alsop’s, where he talked to the Coopers into the small hours. The first outing from the White House the Kennedys took was to the Coopers’ Georgetown home. And in October 1962, Kennedy asked the wife of Joe Alsop to give a small dinner where he could talk without public comment to two experts on Russia about troubling signs of Soviet actions in Cuba. It was in Alsop’s garden that Kennedy, in conversation with Isaiah Berlin and Chip Bohlen, received advice–that Khrushchev would back down if confronted with firmness–which he followed in the Cuban missile crisis.

Georgetown’s dissolution was even sharper than its rise. By the mid-1950s, Phil Graham and Frank Wisner were both showing symptoms of manic depression. On August 3, 1963, Graham, months after a public breakdown at a publishers’ conference, shot himself to death. A shaken John Kennedy went to his funeral. On November 22, Kennedy himself was assassinated on a fence-mending mission to Texas, and eleven months later–on Columbus Day, 1964–Mary Meyer was killed in a still-unsolved shooting as she walked in Georgetown along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

It was a stunning succession of violent deaths for a set of people so cultured and privileged, but fate was not through with them. On October 29, 1965, Frank Wisner killed himself in his Maryland farmhouse. In 1968, Kennedy’s brother was murdered while running for president. And on November 7, 1975, Sasha, the oldest child and only daughter of Evangeline Bruce and her ambassador husband, was found shot in the head on the family estate in Virginia, most likely by the man she had recently married. By this time Stewart Alsop had died of leukemia, his brother Joe had begun drinking heavily, and arguments over the Vietnam war were driving deep rifts through Georgetown society.

What dissolved along the way was the essence of Georgetown, the spirit that made many one. Kennedy, it turned out, was the first and last president to be on its particular wavelength. Johnson and Nixon were openly hostile; Ford and Carter indifferent. The Reagans established a social affinity, which did not turn into a public alliance. For the Bushes and Clintons, the mythical Georgetown scarcely existed, and the real Georgetown became merely a pleasant place filled with lovely old houses and now wildly overpriced real estate. People in Georgetown continue to exercise power, but this time as people who could live anywhere, not as a group with a shared sensibility.

Kay Graham probably surprised even herself when she managed to rise above the occasion in her newspaper’s showdown with Richard Nixon, and Pamela Harriman stunned everyone else when she became a policy wonk and then an ambassador; but these were the acts of individual women, exercising strong wills in the shrewd use of assets bequeathed them by men. No presidents would appear in the snow on their doorsteps or ask them to throw an intimate little dinner to avert a catastrophe. When Sally Quinn turned up in the mid-1980s, trying to recreate the parties she had once covered for the Washington Post, it was like turning up at a ball as the best guests were leaving.

The lure of the mythical Georgetown was the promise of having it all: the idea that one can be glamorous, dashing, and deeply historic; be at the same moment self-indulgent and serious; be deeply involved in most weighty matters and still have a roaring good time. Style did not come at the expense of substance for the men of the Georgetown contingent: They had risked their lives for the sake of the country; they were serious, brave, and most patriotic; they came down on the right sides of really big issues; and addressed the big things of their time.

That said, some of these men were addicted to risk or to women. Kennedy was courting political death with his multiple beddings of film stars and gun molls, and his failings were shared by Phil Graham, whose own flaws are so deeply entwined in the illness that killed him that one cannot tell them apart.

Others suffered from the unspoken commandment that one be always witty, soigné, and well-dressed. Katharine Graham had been for years the little brown wren to her glamorous husband (who, along with her mother, seldom missed a chance to tell her how short of his standards she fell). Something of the sort may have befallen the three children of Evangeline Bruce and her glamorous husband, whose lives were the most outwardly polished and perfect of the whole Georgetown contingent. Her children ended entirely estranged from her: a son working as a janitor, a daughter entering a line of abusive relationships that ended in violent death.

Another shot at having it all took place in the 1920s, on the French Riviera, when Gerald and Sara Murphy held court for some light-hearted heavyweights, this time not in power, but art. This too ended badly. Georgetown is the Riviera for political junkies, the destination of choice for a mental vacation, and Heymann’s book will not be the last on the subject. Georgetown at its peak feeds our belief that having the best of all worlds may somehow be possible. Its fall tells us once more that it is not.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.