The Press: Alsop’s Foible

In his profession Columnist Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. is a distinct success. From his column, “Matter of Fact,” which appears four times weekly in the New York Herald Tribune and is syndicated in 200 newspapers here and abroad, and from the books and other articles he writes, he receives an income handsome enough to surround himself with the trappings of the luxurious life. These include suits faultlessly hand-tailored on London’s Savile Row, and what he calls the “excessive comfort” of a plush bachelor’s house on Dumbarton Avenue in Washington’s Georgetown. He is respected, if not loved, by federal officialdom, which he frequently treats with the loftiness of the master ordering his vassals into line. “Admiral,” he once said frostily, rising and thereby terminating an interview with Lewis Strauss, then special assistant to the President on atomic-energy matters, “you have wasted half an hour of my time.”

But Joe Alsop is not happy. He is incorrigibly gloomy, an inveterate prophet of perdition, forever firing literate messages of despair at what he deems to be a complacent multitude of 35 million readers. His columns bong with death-knell words and phrases: “hair-raising,” “chaos,” “crisis,” “the slippery brink of disaster,” “in these dark times,” “the edge of the abyss.” Should hope well feebly in his breast, he is inclined to stifle it: “It is still too early to say that the worst result is already inevitable.”

In 1950, tasting catastrophe, he warned of an “iron half-century” in which everything—”from television to partisanship, from jukeboxes to self-delusion”—must surrender to the “stern requirements of independence and survival.” “All is lost.” he cried at a 1954 New Year’s party to a friend offering him felicitations of the season. In The Reporter’s Trade, a collection of Alsop columns—some authored or co-authored by his younger brother Stewart —which will be published Nov. 19, he sinks up to his foulard tie in despond.

“It is not easy to write amiably,” he writes, “when, as it were, you have the ugly future burning in your belly.” The big question is: “Can the free societies survive, and if so, how?” In 15 years at the trade, Alsop has never said that they can’t. On the other hand, he has never said that they can.

Toward Pessimism. Nothing in Alsop’s upbringing, or, for that matter, in his early newspapering years, suggests his role as a soothsayer of doom. Born 48 years ago in Avon, Conn., son of a well-to-do tobacco raiser, Joe Alsop idled, read and ate his way through adolescence. Groton and Harvard, emerging a 5 ft. 9 in., 245-Ib. magna cum laude dandy addicted to French cuffs and French pastry, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the decay of ancient civilizations—Egypt, the Mayans, Greece and Rome. By then it was clear that Joe had no real interest in the law, which was the career his parents had decided on, and he was dispatched to the New York Herald Tribune.

There Alsop, who even then could write rings around veteran deskmen, rose like whipping cream above the city-room pack. Regally acctutered (“A newspaperman should dress like a banker; when a reporter lets himself be patronized, he’s licked”), he climbed swiftly from $18-a-week cub to the Trib’s Washington staff, went on from there to a syndicated column, “The Capital Parade.” co-authored with another ex-rn&ber, Robert Kintner (now president of the National Broadcasting Co.).

Munich jolted Alsop toward pessimism.

Profoundly disturbed by the sellout to

Hitler, he quit his job when war came, spent four years as naval officer and aide to Major General Claire Chennault in China, an attentive and dismayed witness to the Communist conquest. By war’s end he was a confirmed and chronic pessimist on the future of mankind, determined to sound the alarm for all who would listen.

Toward Calamity. The present Alsop column began in 1946 as a brother act with Stewart (“Stewart was the only writer I knew that one would not throw out of one’s rooms”). 3½ years his junior, who left an editorship with Doubleday & Co., the book publishers, to help shadow calamity in the world’s capitals. The brothers took turns journeying through Europe and the Near and Far East, dissolved their partnership last spring when Stewart joined the Saturday Evening Post as a contributing editor. An able journalist, Stew Alsop never reached his brother’s gloomy depths. Says he: “Joe can play the organ of doom better than I.”

As a columnist. Joe Alsop is several literary cuts above most of his peers. He is perhaps the only Western newsman who can read the Analects of Confucius in classical Chinese. When not specifically concerned with international crisis, his columns can take lyrical wing, are frequently larded with Biblical and historical references and pretentious words like “smarmy,” “ingeminations” and “farrago.” Few newsmen besides Joe Alsop would have the imagination, scholarship and gall to describe the Kremlin as “a particularly gay decoration by Bakst for one of Diaghilev’s earlier ballets.”

Such flights are really digressions from duty, and Alsop rarely takes them these days, except when pressing national affairs, such as this year’s elections, call him briefly away from the flames. Duty lies in exposing the dangers of the U.S. lag in the armament race with Russia, the unimpeded march of Communism, any administrative insistence on balancing the budget at what he considers the expense of security.

An Insult a Day. The dauntless prophet lets nothing deflect for long his dogged pursuit of Armageddon. Alsop is an indefatigable legman, and he trudges an international beat. But headquarters is the house on Dumbarton Avenue where Alsop lives and writes in rooms merry with the chirrups of a yellow and green parrot, four finches and two parakeets.

Each morning at 8:30 the chronic pessimist, impeccably geared, comes down to a dietary breakfast of one boiled egg and a bit of fruit, served by Jose, his Filipino batman; having melted years ago to a svelte 175 Ibs.* Alsop wages unremitting war against a tendency to stoutness, rarely eats a square meal. By 10 or so, with the help of his secretary, Evelyn Puffenberger (“Miss Puff”), he has waded through required reading. By noon, on an ordinary day, he has probably insulted at least one person, an assignment he set for himself while still a young man. Scorning pipelines and corridor leaks, he gathers his news from the source, by rule-of-thumb schedules four interviews a day six days a week. A facile writer, Alsop can knock out a 750-word column in an hour.

Doom in August. The postwar period, heaping crisis on crisis, has provided a suitably gothic backdrop for the Alsopian anxiety. Times have indeed been consistently jeopardous, and the eloquent voice of Joe Alsop, amplified by syndication, has dedicated itself to the cause of scaring tranquil humanity into its wits.

But a steady shrill of terror, however real, eventually falls on deafened ears.

“I feel pretty good,” said General Lauris Norstad, NATO’s top military commander, after a talk with his old friend Alsop.

“Joe said the world wasn’t going to hell in June after all, but August.” Most knowing people concede that there are perils abroad in the world. Alsop’s foible—and perhaps his basic journalistic stock trade—is that he cannot accept peril as i is but must persistently exaggerate it and its imminence, and treat it as if only he recognized and was trying to do something about it.

While his widely circulated cries of alarm may well serve to awaken some who are asleep, they also help to give the rest of the world a distorted picture of the U.S. posture and capabilities. But Joe Alsop does not concede that he is overly pessimistic. “I think I’m optimistic,” he said last week, “because I think it’s entirely possible to solve our problems. But nobody in his senses can look at the world we live in, with all the dehumanization of life, and be very merry and bright . . . The human race is faced with destruction.”

* Commanded by his physician in 1937 to lose weight Alsop spent three reducing months in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, got down to trimness, paid the hefty medical bill by selling an article on his experience, “How It Feels to Look Like Everybody Else,” to the Satcvcpost.