Starred review from September 15, 2014
Cold War America was largely shaped by a close-knit group of individuals known as the “WASP ascendancy”: well-off, well-educated journalists, politicians, and socialites who lived in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Herken (Brotherhood of the Bomb), professor emeritus of American diplomatic history at the University of California, goes into exacting detail in this excellent account, which focuses on the players themselves—their backgrounds, relationships, rivalries, scandals, and opinions on the policies and events that defined the era. Two principal players were the highborn brothers Joe and Stewart Alsop, whose newspaper column, “Matter of Fact,” appeared in more than a hundred newspapers across the United States. Joe’s dinners, dubbed “zoo parties,” served as alcohol-fueled salons for a tribe which regularly included such figures as George Kennan, Phil and Katherine Graham, and the CIA’s Frank Wisner. Herken covers, among a host of post-WWII milestones, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the founding of the CIA, McCarthyism, the Korean War, Vietnam, and Watergate. The skill with which he describes the players in Georgetown is not to be missed. Agent: Emma Patterson, Brandt & Hochman.
September 15, 2014
Herken (Emeritus, Modern American Diplomatic History/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, 2002, etc.) takes a rather clever idea promising titillating gossip among neighbors Joseph Alsop, Phil Graham and John F. Kennedy during the 1950s and '60s and amplifies it into a spiraling delineation of the official American response to the perceived Soviet threat. Anti-Soviet crusading journalist Alsop was one of the first of the "WASP ascendancy" to inhabit the stylish, old political village of Georgetown on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Returning from World War II (where he enlisted in the U.S. effort to bolster Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists) with a vigorous anti-communist bent, Alsop started a long-running, influential column with his younger brother, Stewart, in the New York Herald Tribune, assiduously cultivating political connections-e.g., with Georgetown neighbors Phil and Katharine Graham, publishers of the Washington Post. Alsop's Sunday dinners were notorious for loud, boisterous and somewhat terrifying political discussions; from these, he would glean his next column. Other Harvard alumni who shaped the alarmist anti-Soviet tone of the postwar era and served as Alsop's sources were Charles "Chip" Bohlen and George Kennan, both of whom served as ambassador to the Soviet Union and both of whom, along with former OSS officers Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles, would be instrumental in setting up the U.S. covert operations program. Tracing the thread of Alsop's columns through these harrowing years, including his early denouncement of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Herken helps guide readers through the intimate murk of espionage detail, moving from events in North Korea to Berlin to Cuba. Alsop's vehement, unrepentant support of the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon, however, threw him out of sync with a new American generation. An intricate study of the personalities that shaped U.S. Cold War policy.
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October 1, 2014
Herken (emeritus, diplomatic history, Univ. of California, Merced) offers a fascinating, faintly nostalgic inside look at Washington's Cold War-era elites who defined America's foreign policy while hosting exclusive cocktail parties in upscale Georgetown. Within this monograph are wonderfully evocative portraits of participants in this coterie: Frank Wisner, the manic-depressive CIA boss whose airdrops of spies into "Pixieland" (Soviet satellite country Albania) always ended badly; Phil and Kay Graham, the contentious Washington Post publishing power couple; and Joe and Stewart Alsop, larger-than-life brothers who exploited their dinner-party connections to publish scoops in their syndicated columns. Hardest to shake is the image of George F. Kennan, revered architect of America's Cold War doctrine of containment, pacing his offices while weeping uncontrollably under the strain of diplomacy. Moscow gay "honey traps," dinners devolving into fisticuffs, and other scandals appear with startling and entertaining frequency. Herken humanizes Georgetown's self-described "WASP establishment" to the point of obscuring larger tragedies--the Vietnam War, for instance--behind the melodrama. VERDICT Dense and scholarly with over 1,100 endnotes, this work will delight committed lay readers and scholars interested in political and diplomatic history, biography, and old-fashioned high society scandal.--Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 1, 2014
A meticulous Cold War historian (Brotherhood of the Bomb, 2002), Herken here dissects the social and political interconnections of prominent spies, diplomats, and journalists of Cold War Washington. His cast numbers about two dozen men and their wives (most of whom have been biographical subjects). He depicts their returns from service in WWII, congregation in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, and commencement of three decades of balls, cocktails, and dinners. With this boozy social whirl as background, Herken foregrounds the Georgetown set's role in American foreign policy vis--vis communism. Finding it often crucially influential on presidents, Herken locates the set's main stage for martinis and policy debates at the house of journalist Joseph Alsop, who hosted Sunday-night dinners and whose guests come and go throughout Herken's narrative, often sending one another morning-after apologies for drunken arguments. Combining the social gatherings of the Georgetown elitethe Eastern Establishment in concentrated formand the serious matters it impacted, such as CIA operations, the arms race, and Vietnam, Herken provides an intimate perspective on Washington salons of power. A solid, readable addition to Cold War scholarship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)