In Praise of a Bygone Era

A friend lent me a copy of a new book, My Three Fathers, a page-turner that chronicles a now-lost era of drawing room Washington socializing and respectful secrecy about the private sexual and other foibles of highly public figures. It's by Bill Patten, the father of the best man at my Almaty wedding, Sam Patten (and the lender of the book).

Flipping through the index after reading this and that personal account of JFK, FDR and other American aristocrats, I came upon a fascinating passage on page 203. It recounts a 1957 frolic in Moscow by Joe Alsop (one of the three fathers in the title), the staunch and powerful anti-Communist columnist. O and G readers are familiar with Moscow's surveillance methods, and no doubt Alsop was, too. Yet there he was, caught on camera "cavorting in a hotel room with another man." The Soviets attempted to blackmail Alsop -- Patten doesn't say what exactly they wanted from him -- but he "refused to cooperate." Alsop had gone to Harvard with Chip Bohlen, who at the time was the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. Bohlen got Alsop out of the country fast, and though the Soviets funneled the pictures to The Washington Post, an editor there "simply threw [them] in the trash." As Patten writes, "This degree of respect for privacy seems almost unimaginable today."

I heard Patten speak at the bookstore Politics & Prose. As the title suggests, he has a captivating personal story. (For those interested, the other two fathers of the title are William Patten, who until 1995 the author thought was his father, and the British aristocrat Duff Cooper, who his mother, Susan, finally confessed actually was.)