The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club

Atria

Chapter One

The White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Supreme Court immediately come to mind when considering the major spheres of influence in the nation's capital, but the true seat of power in Washington, D.C., may well be Georgetown, a tiny, picturesque, eighteenth-century village cozily nestled in the oldest section of the city. Lyndon Baines Johnson, while serving in the Oval Office, noted that "every student of Washington's political process ought to know that the business of government is often transacted during evening hours, sometimes over a drink and sometimes over a meal - but almost always in Georgetown."

What President Johnson did not say is that these evening transactions are largely conceived, created, produced, and directed by women. On the pages that follow I attempt to trace and chronicle the evolution, over the last fifty years, of female power in Georgetown through the public as well as the personal lives of five women - Katharine Graham, Evangeline Bruce, Lorraine Cooper, Pamela Harriman, and Sally Quinn - and through the lifestyles of a sizeable constituency of supporting players - both male and female.

This is the story then of a group of highly motivated and independent women who all happened to reside in the same place at roughly the same time. They pursued common goals and common interests. Their paths frequently intersected and overlapped. They socialized with many of the same people. They were married to well-educated, successful, power-driven men whose careers in almost every instance took precedence over the careers of their wives. Marriage and children aside, these women were bound together not only by their hard-won successes and victories but also by their losses and defeats. At the center of each of their lives can be found secrets so deep and dark that they threaten to destroy everything these women worked so long and diligently to achieve. What these Georgetown ladies ultimately share is their ability to maintain a public pose, to protect the image they sought to create, no matter what the cost, no matter what the burden.

"The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club" was actually a term coined by none other than Ronald Reagan to identify an elite corps of prominent and powerful Washington women whose connections, courage, wealth, vision, intelligence, and ambition afforded them an abundance of social and political clout in a town traditionally and historically run by men. Richard Nixon, brought down by one of them, referred to all as "a shadow conspiracy of women." The description is biased but apt. The ladies in question emerged from the shadows into the light. Their parties, their personalities, and their presence forged change and lent shape to the human drama of the twentieth century and are still being felt in the twenty-first century.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club by C. David Heymann Copyright © 2003 by C. David Heymann. Excerpted by permission.
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