“When advised to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Dulles, the son of a Presbyterian minister, icily responded that “he had long felt that no men should arrogate the power to decide that the future of mankind would benefit by an action entailing the killing of tens of millions of people.”

Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, by Gregg Herken, is about the social and political elites who crafted U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War over their dinner parties and cocktails in the historic, tony neighborhood of Washington, D.C. But it’s also, if unconsciously, about the apex and decline of America’s WASP aristocracy, whose wisdom laid the groundwork for survival and victory against the Soviet Union. The story concludes with by then aging columnist Joseph Alsop resignedly admitting that the class that his own New England family embodied had become irrelevant.

Alsop, whose famed dinner parties for Washington policy makers were center stage for Cold War social and political life, is Georgetown Set’s central character. A grand nephew to Teddy Roosevelt and cousin to First Lady Eleanor, Alsop authored for decades a nationally syndicated column focused on foreign policy that was robustly anti-Communist and often apocalyptic in its pessimism about American survival. His dinner parties, always begun with terrapin soup, often erupted into shouting matches over U.S. policies, with Alsop denouncing any hint of softness towards the Soviets. Apology notes were typically exchanged the next day, and the cycle of dining and dispute among the Georgetown Set would resume.

That Set included across the years diplomats Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles (with his spy master brother Allen), Averell Harrimon, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze, plus Washington Post owners Phil and Katharine Graham, and John and Jackie Kennedy, to whom Alsop became fanatically devoted. Although of course Catholic, the Kennedys, by virtue of their wealth, education, and charm, became virtual WASPs who gained the enthusiastic loyalty of most of the Georgetown Set. Katharine’s father, who had purchased the Post, was Jewish, but she likewise was inducted into WASPdom for similar reasons, solidified by her Protestant mother and husband.

The Georgetown Set dwelt within blocks of each other in similar brick 18th and 19th century row houses decorated in the “Episcopal style” of books, Oriental rugs, hunt scenes and paintings of illustrious WASP ancestors. Alsop rebelled against the “fakery” of the “charming but somewhat insipid Federal architecture” by building his own shockingly aberrant yellow, stuccoed cinder bloc house with steel casement windows. Old time Georgetowners protested what Alsop joked was his home’s “Garage Palladian” style, but it was there that he routinely hosted the Set, including the night of JFK’s inauguration, when JFK himself arrived, without Jackie, to decompress after an evening of galas.

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