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.)

Becoming Like the Soviets

So now we torture. We imprison without charges, contact with the outside world, or trial. We can't manage a credible national voting system. Our president has aspirations to be General Secretary, and the self-certitude to be one.

But must we have ear-splitting music at restaurants, airports, Starbucks, convenience stores, and supermarkets?

You know what I'm talking about. I'm on the West Coast on the book tour, headed today from UCLA to Google, and I'm led to dark memories of those restaurants and cafes in Tashkent, Almaty, Baku, Moscow and Tbilisi, not to mention St. Petersburg and Yerevan, where it was impossible to hold a civilized conversation because of the pounding music.

And how we would tut-tut when Aeroflot so much as touched down in those same cities, and the entire plane of passengers damned the safety, and stood up with the plane still moving.

And how -- unlike us considerate westerners -- the Soviets forced the entire line of boarding passengers to wait while they painstakingly stored their sacks of onions in the overhead.

Historians say that national fiber is strengthened by adopting the best of all nations. But people, standing in the aisles on American and Southwest while the plane is moving is not progress.

Dick Cheney favors a Politburo. Fine. But can my wife and I please drink our brew in peace?


Photo by Darkpatator
Rights: Creative Commons