“Like Vienna in 1914”: At Bob Barnett's Memorial, Washington's Power Class Peers Over the Brink

“It's like Vienna in 1914,” said James Carville in his unmistakable drawl. “It’s like the opening of The Guns of August. ” Barbara Tuchman’s classic account of the first days of World War I opens with the funeral of King Edward VII, which, for all its pomp and circumstance—nine kings arrive, followed by “five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens,” and a “scattering of special ambassadors”—marks the start of a steep descent into war.

Near Carville stood two police officers, guarding a metal detector erected outside the expansive basement ballroom of The Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC. There, a few hundred of the people who once ran the town gathered on Monday to mourn the passing of one of their own.

The memorial was for Robert Barnett, the famed W