Mythical Georgetown
EMERY, NOEMIE
Mythical Georgetown Washington in the days of dinner parties. BY NOEMIE EMERY Georgetown exists in two forms. There is Georgetown, the actual place: an upscale neighborhood in northwest...
...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 resume...
...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 Bis-sell, Desmond Fitzgerald, William Colby, and Richard Helms...
...The lure of the mythical Georgetown was the promise of having it all: the idea that one can be glamorous, dashing, and deeply historic...
...Pamela Harriman, mistress turned diplomat...
...On August 3, 1963, Graham, months after a public breakdown at a publishers' conference, shot himself to death...
...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...
...Crawling alongside them were a collection of journalists, with whom their ideas and careers overlapped...
...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...
...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...
...A shaken John Kennedy went to his funeral...
...This too ended badly...
...As he quotes Dick McLellan, a local historian, "Georgetown was crawling with spooks...
...Another strand in the story was the career of John Kennedy, which lifted the Georgetown cabal to new heights...
...With Kennedy's political triumphs, the Georgetown establishment went into high gear...
...What dissolved along the way was the essence of Georgetown, the spirit that made many one...
...Stewart Alsop worked out of an office in the house on Dumbarton Avenue of his brother Joe...
...Robert Merry, the Alsops' biographer, claims that the Marshall Plan grew out of these meetings...
...Mythical Georgetown emerged at the start of the Cold War, through the merger of three different strains...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In 1968, Kennedy's brother was murdered while running for president...
...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...
...They were not just trifling social affairs," the Wisners' son explains...
...On November 22, Kennedy himself was assassinated on a fence-mending mission to Texas, and eleven months lat-er—on Columbus Day, 1964—Mary Meyer was killed in a still-unsolved shooting as she walked in Georgetown along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Georgetown at its peak feeds our belief that having the best of all worlds may somehow be possible...
...Ford and Carter indifferent...
...and their parties terrific...
...they came down on the right sides of really big issues...
...And sometimes the price they paid was high...
...As Heymann relates: "Influenced by his World War II service in Army Intelligence...
...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...
...Phil Graham went to unprecedented lengths to employ former members of the intelligence community...
...The women were bright and familiar with the great fashion houses...
...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...
...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...
...Others suffered from the unspoken commandment that one be always witty, soigne, and well-dressed...
...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...
...That said, some of these men were addicted to risk or to women...
...bought or rented houses up and down the same thoroughfare...
...The first outing from the White House the Kennedys took was to the Coopers' Georgetown home...
...Many of them settled in Georgetown (where houses at the time were not too pricey...
...Kennedy was neither an agent nor a writer, but he had been a Georgetown resident almost all his political life...
...Walter Lippmann lived in Georgetown, as did Scotty Reston...
...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...
...Johnson and Nixon were openly hostile...
...No presidents would appear in the snow on their doorsteps or ask them to throw an intimate little dinner to avert a catastrophe...
...Georgetown's dissolution was even sharper than its rise...
...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...
...And then there is Georgetown, the legend: a mythical junction of power and style, the neighborhood where grave state decisions were made at candlelit dinners...
...People in Georgetown continue to exercise power, but this time as people who could live anywhere, not as a group with a shared sensibility...
...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...
...they were serious, brave, and most patriotic...
...and Sally Quinn, third wife of Benjamin Bradlee...
...but these were the acts of individual women, exercising strong wills in the shrewd use of assets bequeathed them by men...
...These smoke-filled living rooms and parlors were truly where the business of Washington got done...
...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...
...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...
...Everyone was well read...
...Q Street in Georgetown became synonymous with the CIA...
...Its fall tells us once more that it is not...
...and addressed the big things of their time...
...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 those people...
...New agents...
...Reston's widow claims the CIA urged the Wisners to hold these soirees and dinners, and sometimes helped pay for them...
...By the mid-1950s, Phil Graham and Frank Wisner were both showing symptoms of manic depression...
...the elongated and elegant Evangeline Bruce...
...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...
...Lorriane Cooper, a senator's wife and a Kennedy intimate...
...be deeply involved in most weighty matters and still have a roaring good time...
...In 1952, Phil and Kay Graham bought a large house on R Street...
...Kennedy, it turned out, was the first and last president to be on its particular wavelength...
...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...
...be at the same moment self-indulgent and serious...
...The Reagans established a social affinity, which did not turn into a public alliance...
...Most of these people shared a sensibility with the "spooks," and sometimes they were the same people...
...were seated around a table making policy recommendations that more often than not got implemented...
...Their power was great, Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...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...
...There is Georgetown, the actual place: an upscale neighborhood in northwest Washington, filled with lovely old houses...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 13
