It’s a topic I have taught for almost 40 years. I wanted to write a book about the history of the Cold War. Did you write the book you intended to write? You started writing the book with a focus on Joe Alsop, Philip Graham and Frank Wisner, and then expanded out to some other people. He spoke recently to Kirkus Reviews about his new book, Cold War espionage, and the trend in recent histories toward characters and stories. In his new book, The Georgetown Set: The Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, Herken writes about the Cold War from the perspective of the policymakers and journalists whose relationships-trustworthy, collegial, social-would be unrecognizable in the more transactional present-day Washington. Herken is a professor emeritus at the University of California and former historian for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “The major difference between then and now,” historian Gregg Herken says, “is that people back then did tend to talk to each other even if they disagreed politically.” During the Cold War years, social lines and party lines were more mixed, and opposing political views were no obstacle to the dominant social event of the time, which was the dinner party. The major social forum in official Washington today is the cocktail party, where federal staffers, journalists and lobbyists, often Democratic-friendly or Republican-friendly to the exclusion of the other, catch up over drinks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |