In 2012, The Columnist, a play based on the life of Joseph Alsop, opened on Broadway. In their reviews, critics felt compelled to explain to readers who the main character was. One described him as “a once-feared political pundit,” another as “the most powerful journalist that everyone’s forgotten.”
Readers who followed Alsop’s trenchant, fact-fueled journalism at any point from the 1930s to 1974 might have been taken aback by this steep fall into obscurity. In his distinguished, decades-spanning career, Alsop didn’t only report on American policy; he helped steer it. Furthermore, he was not alone. In The Georgetown Set, Gregg Herken reveals how, after World War II, that exclusive Washington enclave was home to a coterie of wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected diplomats, reporters, and spies who “inspired, promoted, and—in some cases—personally executed America’s winning Cold War strategy.” High-level discussions and resolutions took place at riotous cocktail parties and dinners. At one soirée, a prominent member of the set, Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Philip Graham, toasted his neighbors and made clear that “more political decisions get made at Georgetown suppers than anywhere else in the nation’s capital, including the Oval Office.”
Herken’s book takes us through the Cold War and charts how this close-knit community contributed to winning it. From 1945, Joseph Alsop and his brother Stewart began writing their thrice-weekly column, “Matter of Fact,” for the New York Herald Tribune; as early as their third column, they were warning readers about the dangers posed by former ally Russia and the atomic bomb. Herken argues that the Alsop brothers’ early advocacy of the Marshall Plan, with the aim of a rebuilt Europe acting as a buffer against Soviet aggression, put them way ahead of their journalist rivals.
Enter “cranky and controversial” Soviet expert George Kennan, who arrived at the State Department and became a regular at Alsop’s Sunday night “zoo parties.” Increasingly, though, Kennan found his host at logger-heads with him over his policy of containment. Then there was Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, and his fellow spymaster and “Republican-in-exile” Allen Dulles, both of whom sought to stymie Russian expansionism with a covert war of propaganda, subversion, and a raft of dirtier tricks.
Those who were less discreet with their broadsides incurred Soviet wrath: In 1948, the vociferously outspoken Alsops were branded “warmongers and militarists” by Pravda. Four years later, after likening his Moscow diplomatic posting to his wartime internment in Nazi Germany, Ambassador Kennan was declared persona non grata by the Kremlin. Wisner escaped censure from the Soviet Union but discovered enemies on his own side.
There was further mudslinging when Alsop and Graham joined forces to unseat Senator Joseph McCarthy, with Alsop comparing him to Joseph Goebbels and Graham worrying that McCarthy’s popularity might give rise to “something like a native fascist party.” McCarthyism prospered, and as more milestones follow (the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate), we note that, despite Herken’s attempt to present all this as an ensemble piece—right down to a map indicating where his dramatis personae once dwelled—it is really Joe Alsop who is the star of the show. His type of elite journalism was, Herken writes, “almost wholly dependent on news leaks and privileged entrée to Washington policy makers,” and, as a result, Herken’s highlights center upon Alsop hobnobbing and copy-gathering. Indeed, Alsop was privy to so much insider information that J. Edgar Hoover kept a close watch on him.
Although Herken shows Alsop reporting from the fighting fronts in Korea and Vietnam, we get a more illuminating portrait when we witness him at play. He was the sort of person who refused to eat in certain Parisian restaurants for fear that the vibrations from the nearby Métro might impair the sediment of his vintage wine. In Moscow, his naïveté and recklessness led to his ensnarement in a KGB honeytrap. Only once do we catch a glimpse of him stunned, his unflappable guard down: With the Cuban missile crisis mounting in the background, he smokes postprandial cigars under his loggia with John F. Kennedy, only for the president to casually drop into the conversation that the chances of a nuclear conflagration within the next decade are 50-50.
Herken studs his book with snippets of Alsop’s journalism, which is at its best when critical. He dismisses Harry Truman as “an average man in a neat grey suit.” Adlai Stevenson is too “genteel” to be president. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, looks like “a frost-bitten quince.” Following the famous televised debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Alsop remarks that Nixon “looked like a suspect who was being questioned . . . in connection with a statutory rape case.” Post-Watergate, Nixon is “the armpit of humanity.”
Herken also emphasizes how difficult it could be for the Alsops to endear themselves to new administrations: After enjoying special freedoms during the Roosevelt era—the brothers were distant cousins of Eleanor Roose-velt—Alsop feared his standing with the Eisenhower White House would be “lower than a snake’s belly.”
If Herken allots Joe Alsop and his journalism top billing, then Frank Wisner and accounts of intrigue and derring-do come a close second. There are genuinely thrilling chapters devoted to Wisner’s efforts to destabilize Communist Albania, as well as to CIA involvement in the war in Korea, the 1954 coup d’état in Guatemala, and the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union in Hungary. When Herken returns to Georgetown and its cozy salons, it is something of a bathetic plunge to learn that “Wisner would be banished after complaining that a juniper-berry-stuffed chicken was too dry.”
Such minutiae pop up from time to time, and there are pages given over to forensic descriptions of Georgetown houses and their décor. Fortunately, Herken realizes that the grand designs we hanker for are not of these buildings but their occupants, and he quickly gets back on track. More problematic is his erratic nomenclature. Philip Graham is always “Phil,” but George Kennan is, every time, “Kennan.” As befits a book about a select clique, we get a correspondingly clubbable tone, with Herken writing as a member of the gang. The younger Alsop is “Stewart” or “Stew,” Frank Wisner is “Wisner,” “Frank,” or even “the Wiz.” J. Robert Oppenheimer goes either by his surname or by “Oppie.” None of this is inherently bad or incorrect, but when Herken’s cast go by different names in the same sentence, the inconsistency jars: “Helping Wisner recruit new members for OPC was Allen Welsh Dulles, Frank’s old OSS boss in Germany.”
But these are minor infelicities. Towards the end, the pages become infused with a somber tone: Joseph Alsop’s column shows him to be increasingly out of step with the country, and with his times. There are suicides, and careers die slow deaths. There are parties with lower-wattage luminaries in attendance, and then fewer parties. The handsome Georgetown mansions still stand today, but the “set”—one that could influence presidents and formulate stratagems over martinis and canapés—has long been consigned to history.
Malcolm Forbes is a writer in Edinburgh.
