Spies, Bombs, and Beyond

Book excerpt: From Indigenous quarries through superpower competition to conspiracy theories like #pizzagate, Washington DC's Tenleytown has offered a microcosm of the nation's history. Mozart's connection with Masonry and a young Lutheran's flight from Latin school setting him on a path to becoming a Revolutionary War hero figure into the neighborhood that gave a home to both Henry Kissinger and Kermit the Frog. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dickens wrote about the town long before its streets and corridors were thick with spies. The city's history of racial and gender discrimination is increasingly relevant to 21st Century struggles for equality.Exploring 70 sites, Spies, Bombs, and Beyond walks readers through the neighborhood, connecting the local to the global and the past to the present. Mark Fitzpatrick examines how diplomacy works and how espionage (sometimes) fails by exploring nearby embassies and the residences of ambassadors and traitors. Consider John F. Kennedy's 1963 American University commencement speech presaging the current push for a comprehensive end to nuclear testing - even today, the residue of chemical weapons disposed near the campus stands as a powerful testament to the need to ban such weapons.