Joseph Alsop
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Joseph Wright Alsop V (October 11, 1910 – August 28, 1989) was an American journalist and syndicated newspaper columnist from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Alsop was born into a socially prominent WASP family in Avon, Connecticut; the son of Joseph Wright Alsop IV (1876-1953) and his wife Corinne Douglas Robinson (1886-1971). Through his mother's family, he was a close relative of both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Alsop was educated at Groton (class of 1928) and Harvard (class of 1932). After graduating from Harvard, Alsop became a reporter, then an unusual career for someone with an Ivy League education. He began his career with the New York Herald Tribune, which after three years sent him to Washington, D.C. to cover the Senate.
Because of his close family ties to the Roosevelts, Alsop quickly became well-connected in Franklin Roosevelt's Washington. His access to powerful politicians led to he and fellow journalist Turner Catledge getting a contract in 1936 to write joint articles about politics for the Saturday Evening Post. Two years later, the North American News Alliance contracted Alsop and Robert E. Kintner to write a joint daily nationally syndicated column. In 1940, the duo moved from NANA to the New York Herald Tribune.
The following year, when it became clear that the United States would soon enter World War II, Alsop and Kintner decided to suspend their column and volunteer for the armed forces. Alsop entered the Navy, and used his political connections to be assigned to Claire Chennault's headquarters with Chiang Kai-shek in Kunming, China. Aside from a brief period of Japanese internment (Alsop had been in Hong Kong when the Japanese overran it in 1941), Alsop served with Chennault for the rest of the war.
After the war, Alsop began his column again, this time partnering with his brother Stewart Alsop on a thrice-weekly column called "Matter of Fact". Stewart Alsop usually stayed in Washington and covered domestic politics, while Joseph Alsop traveled the world to cover foreign affairs. In 1958, the Alsops described themselves as "Republicans by inheritance and registration, and [...] conservatives by political conviction."[1] Their partnership lasted from 1945 to 1958, after which Joseph Alsop wrote the "Matter of Fact" column alone until his retirement in 1974.
Alsop was an early supporter of the presidential ambitions of John F. Kennedy, and became a close and influential friend during Kennedy's administration.
During the Vietnam War, Alsop was a vocal supporter of the American involvement, which led to bitter breaks with many of his liberal friends and a decline in his influence as a columnist.
Alsop, a closeted homosexual[2], married once, from 1960 to 1972, to Susan Mary Patten, the widow of a close friend. They had no children.
[edit] Publications
- The 168 Days (1938) [with Turner Catledge]
- Men Around the President (1939) [with Robert Kintner]
- American White Paper: The Story of American Diplomacy and the Second World War (1940) [with Robert Kintner]
- We Accuse! The Story of the Miscarriage of American Justice in the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1954) [with Stewart Alsop]
- The Reporter's Trade (1958) [with Stewart Alsop]
- From the Silent Earth: A Report on the Greek Bronze Age (1964)
- FDR, 1882-1945: A Centenary Remembrance (1982)
- The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared (1982)
- "I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs (1992) [with Adam Platt]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Alsop, Joseph W. with Adam Platt. "I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs. New York : W. W. Norton, 1992.
