1884–1980 · Washington hostess, political operator and celebrated wit
The eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt, born in 1884 and orphaned of her mother two days later, Alice was a celebrity First Daughter who smoked on the White House roof and married Representative Nicholas Longworth of Ohio — later Speaker of the House — in a White House wedding in 1906. She outlived the marriage, her father’s party and most of her targets, running a Dupont Circle salon for six decades where, as the Theodore Roosevelt Center puts it, “views were exchanged and deals struck.” Her reputation rested on the short, lethal line — after a double mastectomy she called herself “Washington’s only topless octogenarian.” She died in 1980 at ninety-six, by then nicknamed the other Washington monument.