The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington

Gregg Herken's The Georgetown Set sheds light on a bygone era of Washington politics when the most important political and policy decisions of the day were discussed and decided at fancy dinner parties hosted by an elite group of blue-blooded New England–bred and –educated white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men with close political ties to all of the major levers of power in Washington. Herken, a professor of histroy emeritus at the University of California, paints a rich portrait of a social scene that spanned eight presidential administrations and endured through all the major national crises that confronted the United States from the rise of the Soviet Union through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Herken paints the Georgetown dinner parties as transactional summits where Washington's most powerful politicians, administration officials, journalists, foreign dignitaries, intelligence officers, and their spouses would socialize and debate the latest political and policy issues of the day....