Joseph Alsop was born in Avon, Connecticut on 11th October, 1910. After graduating from Harvard University in 1932 he joined the New York Herald Tribune as a staff reporter. He began a political column in 1937 under the title “The Capital Parade”. It was later renamed “Matter of Fact.”
After the Second World War Alsop became an important political journalist. Alsop lived in Washington where he associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials that became known as the Georgetown Set.
This group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Stewart Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.
Alsop's articles appeared in over 300 newspapers. Alsop was a Cold War warrior but was a critic of Joseph McCarthy. In 1957, during his first and only visit to the Soviet Union, Joe was entrapped by the KGB in a Moscow hotel room in a compromising situation with another man. Photographs were taken but were never used.
Alsop held liberal views on domestic issues but was a conservative on foreign issues and supported the war against Vietnam. He was also the author of FDR: 1882-1945: (1982).
Joseph Alsop died in Washington on 28th August, 1989. His autobiography, I've Seen the Best of It, was published posthumously in 1992.
(1) Katharine Graham, Personal History (1997)
Senator Kennedy was one of the people we knew much better than we normally would have because of Joe Alsop, who had decided very rapidly that he was all for Kennedy. Phil and I had seen the Kennedys at big parties, looking glamorous and handsome, but I never took him seriously. I remember exclaiming to Joe when he said - sometime around 1958 that he thought Kennedy would be president one day, "Joe, surely you're not serious. You don't really think Kennedy could be president, do you?" Joe said, "Darling, I think he will certainly be nominated and quite probably be elected."
(2) Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine (20th October, 1977)
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America’s leading news organizations.
(3) Katharine Graham, Personal History (1997)
Phil and I flew to California early, five days before the Democratic Convention was to open on July 11. I was already committed to Kennedy. Phil remained loyal to Johnson until he lost the bid for the nomination, but he was entirely realistic, and he, too, admired JFK...
Phil called on Bobby Kennedy and got from him confidential figures on his brother's strength, numbers that showed JFK very close to the number of votes needed to win the nomination close enough so that the Pennsylvania delegation, or a big chunk of it, could put him over. On Monday, Pennsylvania caucused and announced that the state delegation would give sixty-four of its eighty-one votes to Kennedy, which made Phil and the Post reporters write that it would be Kennedy on the first ballot.
At that point, Phil got together with Joe Alsop to discuss the merits of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy's running mate. Joe persuaded Phil to accompany him to urge Kennedy to offer the vice-presidency to Johnson. Joe had all the secret passwords, and the two men got through to Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary, in a room next to his dreary double bedroom and living room. They took a seat on one of the beds and nervously talked out who would say what, while they observed what Joe termed "the antechambers of history." Joe decided he would introduce the subject and Phil should make the pitch.
When they were then taken to the living room to see JFK, Joe opened with, "We've come to talk to you about the vice-presidency. Something may happen to you, and Symington is far too shallow a puddle for the United States to dive into. Furthermore, what are you going to do about Lyndon Johnson? He's much too big a man to leave up in the Senate." Then Phil spoke "shrewdly and eloquently," according to Joe - pointing out all the obvious things that Johnson could add to the ticket and noting that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble.
Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterwards. "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down, but to offer the VPship so persuasively as to win Johnson over." Kennedy was decisive in saying that was his intention, pointing out that Johnson could help not only in the South but elsewhere in the country.
Phil told the Post's reporters they could write that "the word in L.A. is that Kennedy will offer the Vice-Presidency to Lyndon Johnson."
(4) Noam Chomsky, letter to New York Review of Books (21st August, 1969)
In his column of July 16, Joseph Alsop announces his discovery that there is a severe repression underway in the Soviet Union. Further, he explains that Academician Sakharov has been "viciously disciplined" and may face prison, while American draft resisters, free from any danger of imprisonment, are probably studying theology in the Yale Divinity School. He wonders whether I will have the integrity to ponder these matters, and also lets loose a blast against the New York Review.
If Mr. Alsop were actually to read the journals he attacks he would have learned about the Soviet repression long ago, for example, in an article of mine in the New York Review of January 2, where he would have found these sentences: "In the grim atmosphere of the Soviet Union, resistance can barely be contemplated. All the more, then, must we honor those who do make their voices heard: Pavel Litvinov, Mrs. Larisa Daniel, and the others of the 'Moscow Five,' or ex-general Pyotr Gigorenko who has publicly denounced the 'totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy' and called upon his fellow-citizens to fight 'the damned machine,' and who has had the courage to stand up and say that 'Freedom will come! Democracy will come.' " If he were to turn to the written word, rather than indulge in private fancy, he could also discover my actual views regarding Russian totalitarianism and its roots in Bolshevik ideology, a matter that I have discussed more than once, in some detail. As to the many hundreds of draft resisters in American prisons, and the thousands in exile, they will no doubt be relieved to hear that Alsop has granted them amnesty.
It is easy to trace Alsop's muddle to its source. In the strange world he inhabits, it is inconceivable that a person can consistently oppose all forms of tyranny and repression. Therefore, even if he were to open the pages of the New York Review, he would be unable to comprehend what I meant, in the same article, when I wrote that "those who resist the war here are fighting the same battle as Larisa Daniel and Pyotr Gigorenko. And they are fighting a common enemy: the militarists and managers of repression on both sides of the iron curtain." Alsop knows that I condemn the criminal violence in Vietnam of which he has long been a leading advocate, and he therefore concludes, with a weird but characteristic logic, that I must be tolerant of Russian tyranny. The facts are otherwise, as I have made clear many times. But Alsop is not one to be troubled by mere fact.
I mention these facts not to enlighten Joseph Alsop, who has long since passed beyond the reach of fact or reason, but for the benefit of those who may still believe that when they read an Alsop column they are being given a glimpse of the real world.
(5) Arthur Schlesinger, book review of Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue, Washington Monthly (May, 1995)
This intelligent and engaging book is more a sketch of a memorable personality than a full account of Joseph Alsop and the Cold War. Perhaps, given the short attention span of Americans today, it is necessary to recall who Joe Alsop was. In the age of the column, an era long since passed, Joe Alsop and his brother Stewart ranked in style and influence with Walter Lippmann and James Reston. Today, I fear, Joe is largely remembered, if at all, as a voice thundering on about captured-enemy documents in Vietnam. He was much more than that, as Edwin Yoder's book makes at least partially clear.
But by making Alsop and the Cold War his subject, Yoder cannot do full justice to Alsop's role as a young and decidedly liberal reporter in New Deal Washington. And by bringing the narrative to an end at around 1960, he omits Alsop's stentorian support of the Vietnam War and the more frenetic and apocalyptic--"doomed is what we are"--chapters in Alsop's war against communism. Still, Yoder evokes Joe and the Washington of Joe's day with skill and affection. He defines and explores the apparent paradox in Joe's Cold War journalism with fine judgment.
That paradox is the alleged contradiction between Joe's hatred of communism in the world and his hatred of McCarthyism at home, as shown by his brave and undaunted defense of dissenters with many of whose policy recommendations he vigorously disagreed. But did not his passionate advocacy of the Cold War sow the seeds from which McCarthyism sprang? Were not the Alsops, Yoder asks, "fighting a fire that they themselves had helped to set"?
While Yoder agrees that the Alsops, and more especially Joe, much exaggerated the Soviet threat, he rightly calls the argument that Alsopian hyperbole contributed to McCarthyism "not persuasive." The Alsops regarded communism as a danger to America but not as a danger in America. There was no great inconsistency in being against both Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy. And, of the Joes, Stalin was far more responsible for McCarthy than was Alsop.
Yoder also writes about the long-held secrecy of Joe's homosexuality and his entrapment by a KGB provocateur in Moscow. If this episode proves anything, it disproves the old canard that homosexuals are peculiarly susceptible to blackmail. The KGB photographs did not deter Joe in the slightest; indeed, he became thereafter even more hyperbolic in his denunciations of the Soviet Union. Nor, oddly, does the KGB appear to have tried to use the evidence against him, except for a puzzling and ineffectual dissemination of the photographs in Washington a dozen years later.
(6) Katharine Graham, Personal History (1997)
Right after the election, he started talking to and writing the president-elect about appointments to the new administration. Both Phil and Joe Alsop thought Kennedy ought to appoint our friend Douglas Dillon as secretary of the Treasury. Dillon was a liberal Republican who had served as undersecretary of state in the Eisenhower administration and had contributed to the Nixon campaign, so this didn't seem like a strong possibility. Arthur Schlesinger and Ken Galbraith had dinner with us one evening, and, as Arthur noted in his book A Thousand Days, "we were distressed by (Phil's) impassioned insistence that Douglas Dillon should and would-be made Secretary of the Treasury. Without knowing Dillon, we mistrusted him on principle as a presumed exponent of Republican economic policies." But as Arthur also wrote, "When I mentioned this to the President-elect in Washington on December, he remarked of Dillon, "Oh, I don't care about those things. All I want to know is: is he able and will he go along with the program?'"
What a refreshing thought - if only more presidents felt that way! In fact, the president-elect called. Joe about the liberals wanting Albert Gore (father of the Clinton administration vice-president, Al Gore) for the position, but he told Joe that he wanted Dillon. Joe recalls Kennedy saying, "They say that if I take Doug Dillon he won't be loyal because he's a Republican." Joe responded that it would be very hard to imagine a man less likely to be disloyal than Dillon. He also added, "And if you take Albert Gore you know perfectly well, a) he's incompetent; b) you'll never be able to hear yourself think, he talks so much; c) when he isn't talking your ear off, he'll be telling the New York Times all." I'm sure this whole conversation with Kennedy was recalled in Alsopian terms, but I'm also sure that some such conversation did indeed take place.
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