The JFK Inauguration

Spending the night with the nuns

In January 1961, on the eve of John F Kennedy’s inauguration, a huge snowstorm hit the capital city. I was a 12-year-old student in the sixth grade at Stone Ridge, a Sacred Heart school in Maryland, a good 45 minute drive from my home in Washington. When the snow started to look serious, my mother decided she had to come pick me up, but halfway there, our ancient station wagon slid into a ditch. She ended up spending the night in a gas station in Bethesda while I was told I’d be bedding down in the convent. Stone Ridge was a day school that took in some boarders, especially girls who came from far away like Ecuador or Europe so for that one night, I'd be joining them. When I recounted some of my memories of that night to a friend I’ve known since the fourth grade, she shook her head. “You couldn’t have seen the nuns undressing. They were on a different floor.” Wasn’t I woken up by a nun asking me to say the Domine non sum dignus? (It’s called the Prayer of Humble Access which I can still recite from beginning to end in Latin.) “Nope,” my friend said. “They were probably just telling you it was time for breakfast.” Beware the inventive fiction writer remembering backwards. That said, a memoir writer can capture the emotions of the moment even if she isn’t clear on the specific dialogue or events. I remember that night as a strangely mysterious one, sleeping in an upstairs room with girls I barely knew, near the nuns’ quarters, a part of the convent school normally off limits to day students.

My mother managed to get to the school early in the afternoon. We slipped and slid all the way home, arriving just in time so that she could dress for the inaugural ball.

Growing up in Washington as the daughter and niece of the Alsop brothers was a unique experience which I’ve written about in a short Kindle piece called Don’t Knock Unless You’re Bleeding. Since I published Daughter of Spies, Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a full-length memoir focused on my mother, people have suggested I consider a book about my father. It’s easy for me to say no to that idea. First of all, my father, prompted by his cancer diagnosis at the age of 57, wrote his own memor, Stay of Execution, Books and plays have been written about his career, his political connections, his membership in the Georgetown Set, a group of influential Washingtonians who met informally to argue policy over dinner and many bottles of wine.

I couldn’t add anything of interest to those books because my childhood memories of Washington have little to do with my father’s knowledge of policy decisions or the famous people he and my mother entertained or the articles he wrote, and that’s what readers would be looking for. I was simply a girl squashed in the middle of five brothers trying to survive a complicated family with more than enough personal drama to keep me focused, not on the machinations of government or politics, but simply on getting through every day.

A number of people have sent me an article from today’s news about billionaires buying up Washington houses. “Scott Bessent, the nominee for Treasury secretary (his financial disclosure statement shows he is worth in excess of $700 million) has looked at a $7 million Federal-style house on N Street in Georgetown, once the home of the syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop.”

New administrations always bring new buyers to the D.C. real estate market, but this is the first time we’ve seen such a plethora of billionaires nominated for cabinet positions.

I expect Uncle Joe is turning over in his grave.