The Seductions of Washington Society

...In the last two years, she has edited one book of essays about Thomas Jefferson and put together another collection about life in 1876...

...In the charming acronym of society ladies, they were NOCD (Not Our Class, Dearie...

...Paul Mellon, and Mr...

...he remained essentially naked, no matter how much power he acquired...

...But it was still easier to become a cultural mandarin than to get away with changing your name to Saltonstall from Schwartz...

...Washington has its own combinations, even more subtle in admixture...

...But the acclaim that greeted Frances FitzGerald when her first words saw print seemed inexplicable in any normal way...

...My daddy always told me,’ Johnson once remarked, ‘that if I brushed up against the grindstone of life I’d come away with far more polish than I could ever get at Harvard or Yale...

...Johnson didn’t realize that there had to be a little mobility into the intellectual and cultural elite, because its whole reason for being was to circumvent the old-line aristocracy of birth, money, and name, which admitted no new members after the moment of conception...

...But these intellectual insecurities are only half the story...

...Louis Auchincloss, and then turns to plain old Jason Epstein and a score of other non-Mr...

...Fame and Mutual Flattery Our current princess is Lally Weymouth, the daughter of Katharine Graham...

...Have ou dreamed of Here is the editor of the magazine that used to leave you cowed, now asking your considered judgment about Carter’s new populism...

...The books are perfectly respectable, the building blocks of a professional career...

...There, at the corner table, is the man who was a big shot in the Truman years...

...There is a further delicious subtlety, which is that many of these new friends will be genuinely loyal...

...Class, Politics, and Condescension As part of the whole package, Stevenson engaged in casual antiSemitism...

...It is the many worlds of culture all in one place, and how mutually flattering it is to everyone involved...

...And when one solid, respectable, Social Register name is put under the same yoke with a member of the intellectual creme, you have a team that can outpull anyone else around...

...Although the Astors and Cabots have seen more glorious days, old-fashioned class snobbery is far from dead...

...Well come right here, and meet the directors of the Washington Junior League...

...they celebrated at 21...

...one is judged, often enough, by the quality of one’s friends, and with friends that are the best in town, there is small reason to offend gratuitously...

...Four years, eight years, may seem like forever when the administration is new, but all around are reminders that this glory too will pass...

...Wellborn, who hhppens to own a bank, may help you out with your mortgage...

...California and Missouri and Texas might have been enough before, ton...

...One is that they lose interest in challenging the group that offers them so much...

...The Seductions of Washington Society by James Fallows “Too many have had to suffer at the hands of a political and economic elite who have shaped decisions and never had to account for mistakes nor to suffer from injustice...

...In the dark recesses of the heart, one suspected that something else was going on...

...While, insofar as it affects me personally, I am disappointed in his complete indifference, I am far more concerned with the implication of thoughtless disregard of long-range party welfare.“The attitude of to hell with hi& and the east end of the ward is a brief and eloquent answer to the famili+question as to why more men like . yourself [and myself, he might as well have said] don’t take an active part in our municipal politics...

...I certainly am glad that I came in by exams and am a real Princeton man, Although it is very dif%dlai Stevenson of Illinois...

...When the public schools are inferior or torn by strife, their children go to exclusive private schools...

...the action was in Washington...

...It is possible, too, that his aides will work 20 hours a day for his cause and have no time left over for frivolity or socializing...

...its goal is to make the lower orders believe in their own inferiority...

...Margot Hahn, a prominent local hostess, gave Rosalyn Carter hints on where to find the right dresses in New York, so that she would not run the risk of being embarrassed at the convention...

...Hamilton Jordan has already tried (and as of the convention had failed), to get a book contract and extend his fame to the world of the intellect...

...It was just a little mobility, of course, and progress was much harder for sons of the Bible Belt than for those who had sat at the tables down at Morey’s...

...Vincent Astor, Mr...

...For instance whenever ‘Old Nassau’ or any of the other Princeton songs are sung, the non-regular men are not allowed to sing and have to stand at attention...

...When he deigned to enter the world of politics, Stevenson did it with the same barely veiled condescension with which Averell Harriman presented himself to the voters of New York...

...Have you silently chafed because your accent is bad and your college degree worse...

...They didsometimes for good reasons, quite often for bad...

...After reporting one of his subject’s many anti-Semitic wisecracks, Martin says, “The remark about Jews just noted was not an isolated instance...

...At a typical gathering there might be one member of the White House staff, a liberal Democratic congressman, the editors of two respected magazines, a film director, and representatives ‘ of the city’s old-rich and rich-rich elements...

...But before explaining it all you must remember that all the fellows who are here in the freshman class are not freshmen, but only those that entered by examinations, as I did...

...A sneer from the mandarins brought out Johnson’s worst side, and made sure that, if there was such a thing as a good side to Nixon, we never saw it at all...

...during those years and in those places and among those people, such utterances were simply made heedlessly...

...I wanted to believe him, but somehow I never could.’ ” If Johnson had known his enemy better, he would have realized that he had it slightly wrong...

...One real life example may serve: a lawyer for a corporate firm holds salons, where the distinguished from several walks of life get together...

...one first-rate reporter got a publisher’s advance for a book about Washington’s mighty figures, and several years later had to mail it back because the subjects had become his friends...

...The man who ran for President because he lost his awe for the competition is not the one to need reassurance and flattery...

...The hard-boiled men of the lit-biz were eager to see sparkles around this princess in its midst...

...John Bartlow Martin...

...is Some of them are obvious...

...Also, the cultural elite wasted no time distinguishing itself from the great unwashed, using phrases such as the currently fashionable “tacky” to identify those of inferior taste...

...In a nation nominally free of hereditary rank and privilege, the power of class rests on a kind of voluntary bondage...

...In other words, all the fellows that came in on certificate, etc., to join the military organizations are not ranked as Princeton men and are not included in the class of 1922...

...Perilous Friends If Carter’s people do embrace the social groups, there are several dangers at hand...

...It is both a matter of civility and a question of status...

...Lally Weymouth is fea-tured as a Famous Author in People magazine...

...Bauler dismissed him with a snort, which caused Stevenson to lick his wounds in a letter to his go-between: “You more than did your part, and I appreciate it...

...John Bartlow wartin’s new biography of Adlai Stevenson* provides a rich portrait of the snob at work and play...

...But if history and common sense are any guide, the Carter aides may find that they need some of the things that Washington’s higher society can provide...

...There was no religious test for membership in the cultural upper class that flowered after World War I1 -the Baptist Willie Morris and the Jewish Norman Podhoretz followed essentially similar paths to success...

...In his youth he was a gadabout dandy who got gentleman’s Cs, flunked out of Harvard Law School, p d thought that going to Princeton was the most ’marvelous thing that could happen to a fellow...

...Here are six famous professors, who are obviously flattered to be talking to you...

...The latest one is an alternate selection of the Book of the Month Club...

...Every member of such a group gets a little and gives a little as he rubs elbows with the wonderful, The White House staffers-the Jody Powells and Hamilton Jordans of the future-give the most, in terms of power and prestige, but they also get the most, in fulfillment of long-smothered dreams...

...But in the case of Lally Weymouth they have been a pre-fab mansion of success...

...She began life as aristocrat, heiress of the Massachusetts Peabodies, daughter of Marietta Tree (who was herself one of Adlai Stevenson’s aristocratic intimate friends...

...In considering it, one must remember that Stevenson was, like us all, a product of his time and his place...

...When deprivation results from a confused welfare system, they never do without food or clothing or a place to sleep...

...Southwest Texas State was not really the fatal flaw...

...They thought it would last too...

...When unemployment prevails, they never stand in line looking for a job...

...Was your wife frozen out by the Junior League in Atlanta...

...Through an intermediary who had one foot in the rich society of Chicago’s Gold Coast and another in the Democratic machine, Stevenson proposed a deal...

...But as one surveys the wreckage of all the bright idealists who came to the capital determined to change it and never left because they had been seduced, one fears that there may be a few more obstacles than Carter has considered...

...Richard Nixon, who in his moments of bitter jealousy could be an acute social critic, caught the spirit of the thing when he talked about “The arts, you know-they’re Jews, they’re leftwingin other words, stay away...

...But long before that book appeared, when her collected oeuvre consisted of one or two magazine articles, she was being hailed as one of the great journalists of the clay...

...That man, holding his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose, had the town at his feet when Kennedy was in the White House...

...At this point in her career, we may agree or disagree with that judgment-we at The Washington Monthly gave her book our annual Political Book Award...

...It is possible that Jimmy Carter is immune to all blandishments...

...They’ came into the world fully clothed...

...The values of the WASP aristocracy had always included a generous portion of anti-Semitism, and Jews who hoped for social parity saw that educational, cultural, artistic, and intellectual power might be their route to the top...

...Nowhere is it better illustrated than in the proudest hero of our liberal imaginations...

...John Winthop Aldrich, Mrs...

...The Carter men will learn that it is a much longer trip from Washington to Georgia than it seemed on the way up...

...There is no doubt no insecurity so painful, so deep, that someone in the group cannot at least temporarily assuage it...

...His place was the Midwest, plus Eastern schools attended largely by the sons of the wealthy, white, Protestant, and well-born...

...They are the people who will not let you down, when the dark hour arrives and it is time to go home again...

...In Washington, the process is somewhat more delicate, since it is a minuet performed among different layers of the national upper class...

...She gives her generous thanks to Mr...

...I~ .__.__ James Fallows is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...In the introduction to her book, Lally Weymouth shows that she knows her Ps from her Qs...

...Much as the Public Broadcasting System bowed down in embarrassing adoration when Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to President Ford, much as the “intellectual” programs like Civilisation required the plummy accent of Kenneth Clark rather than Howard Cosell’s, much as every classical music station in the country has an announcer who learned to speak somewhere between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England, the intellectual world gave its heart to Good Breeding once again...

...We need look no farther back than the reign of Lyndon Johnson to see the devastation wrought by intellectual snobbery-or rather, by snobbery about intellectual styles and Ivy League pedigrees...

...The career of Frances FitzGerald has always seemed a marvelous demonstration of this point...

...Averell Harriman, Mr...

...And when the bureaucracy is bloated and confused the powerful always manage to discover and occupy niches of special influence and privilege...

...Have you lived in the valley and yearned for the house on the hill...

...It was not for nothing that Johnson and Nixon thought the intellectuals scorned them...

...ficult to maintain all the old college customs, etc., the difference between the regular Princeton men and the Others is very obvious...

...But one of the most important, and least frequently discussed, is the power of social class...

...Doubleday, $15...

...As Doris Kearns says in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, “The sad and poignant thing was not his anti-intellectualism itself, but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned . . . . The man’s feelings toward CUTture [were] subdued awe and blatant bitterness, a sense that he, unlike the Eastern intellectuals, had none of those ridiculous and precious tokens, an Ivy League education and a facility for words...

...It flawed Stevenson’s attitudes for years...

...But he wore hisOxford honorary-degree robe whenever he could, and never seemed to forget thqt neither Truman nor Johnson possessed a Princeton necktie...

...He would organize the Democratic voters in the Gold Coast, all six of them, if the party boss, Matthias “Paddy” Bauler, would give him a place in the delegation to the 1936 convention...

...Bill Moyers, after all, had been a member of the North Texas State class of 1956, and now, barely 15 years after his arrival in the capital, he is as pure a member of the intellectual upper class as you could ever hope to find...

...It was the Jews who first saw the light...

...But over the years, the city’s upper crust has proved itself marvelously adept at using this weapon...

...Whatever impediments of ambition or insecurity that the Carter men bring into Washington, there are those in town who can give them relief...

...At the convention, they trooped around with Hunter Thompson...

...But it did not last, and when it was over they did not want it to end for them...

...the sense of belonging to the class that caused events, rather than reacting to them, could only be found here, or in the metropolis stretching north to Boston, Walter Jenkins went home, and so did Bob Finch, but they were the exceptions...

...In his later years, Stevenson wajs too kind a man to scorn Johnson an@ Truman for having been to bad colleges or lacking a middle name, and his anti-Semitism was brought under tight control...

...These days she is, on the strength of Fire in the Lake, a widely respected leader of her trade...

...It is the power of those on the top to prey on the social and intellectual insecurities of those on the bottom...

...Stevenson was the grandson of a Vice President and the son of an upper-class dilettante...

...and Mrs...

...Of course, no one really cares about the Social Register any moreno one, that is, except those who are not in it...

...That is what Jimmy Carter says he’s going to change in Washington, and God bless him for it...

...Bauler’s reply is, I presume, a characteristic commentary on our current municipal politics...

...It has happened to good men before...

...As he wrote to his mother after his first days on campus, “Yesterday was quite a gala day here for the freshmen...