The Alsop Brothers — Journalists and Players   

Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop — Guardians of the American Century
By Robert W. Merry

Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop — Guardians of the American Century
By Robert W. Merry
Viking (a division of Penguin USA) 644 pages; $34.95

E-mail may be practical and fun to use, but it's threatening to wreak havoc in the biography business. Where, after all, will future authors find the kind of paper trail that has made possible books like Robert W. Merry's "Taking on the World," a history of the influential journalists Stewart and Joseph Alsop?

The Alsop brothers became household names as political columnists during the 1950s and '60s, back when newspapers fought to hire high-profile writers, Washington was suddenly a hot beat and political journalism was evolving into a high-powered and hazardous insider game.

The Alsops knew everybody and everything, and they wrote like maniacs. At the peak of their influence they broke major investigative stories, cranked out syndicated columns four times a week and raked in impressive sums — especially by today's standards — contributing to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. In between they gave paid speeches, wrote books and sent letters — hundreds and hundreds of letters, it seems, on topics ranging from the Cold War to last night's dinner.

And therein lie both the strength and weakness of "Taking on the World," a tome so weighty it defies reading in bed. Propped up with bricks and cracked open around page 250 — halfway through the Alsop chronology — "Taking on the World" offers a compelling look at two very strong and very different personalities, their journalistic achievements, their complex working partnership and the roiling times they lived in.

Tackled in a more conventional manner, which is to say starting on page one, "Taking on the World" is a sobering example of what happens when a compulsive note-taker gets his hands on altogether too much information and is unwilling to let any of it go.

My God, one can't help but think as the patrician Alsop parents send young Joseph and Stewart off to a proper New England prep school, will we never get out of Groton? Harvard and Yale follow, just as you knew they would, and just as you were beginning to wonder why — given the threatened collapse of serious print journalism and everything else that's going on nearly three-quarters of a century later — you are supposed to care.

By the time we get to Joseph describing himself rising at 7 a.m. one morning "to use the bathroom" and admiring the gilded window frames at "the grand old Cavendish home of Chatsworth," we are crushed to realize we are only on page 176. And then this ambitious and perceptive biography begins to pick up steam.

ýeaving together the Alsops' landmark reporting, their personal lives, and vignettes of the many rich and famous and powerful people they knew, "Taking on the World" tells the story not only of two gentlemen journalists, but of Washington's evolution from a cow town into a sophisticated cesspool of personal and professional relationships — all this at the height of America's belief in itself as a world power. The Cold War was a particularly interesting time (though have you ever heard any period in history described as "dull"?), and the Alsops' influence reached all the way into the Vietnam years.

After reeling off the names of the high and mighty who frequented Joe Alsop's Georgetown dining room — one of the few places in Washington where you could get a good meal at the time — Merry clarifies for more workaday reporters the potent mix of journalism and politics that continues to hold a grip in certain circles. Things of course were a bit different in the 1950s and '60s. President Kennedy once dropped by Joseph's house to say hello; at another point he made changes in a magazine piece Stewart sent along before publication. Supreme Court justices dined regularly at Joseph's home, as did Cabinet officers and media elites, drawn by lively conversation and bottomless highball glasses. Describing the brilliant, vituperative Joseph vying for attention in the intensely clubby, Anglophile-Ivy League world he loved, Merry almost manages to make the smell of scotch, cigar smoke and cognac rise from the page.

Women play background roles as mothers, hostesses and support systems, though occasionally the Alsops look up long enough from their Who's Who in the World to take note of a female whose grace or beauty or bloodline transcends the daily power grind. Merry's portrait of Stewart's wife, Tish, who responded to her husband's emotional distance and workaholic ways by retiring to her room with her own stiff drink, is poignant but spare. Joseph, a homosexual who ultimately married for company, was close to several women, including the young Jackie Kennedy, who once sent him an affectionate note thanking him for helping her understand the role of the political wife. Unfortunately, we don't really hear the voices of the other women in the Alsops' lives; perhaps they were so busy running households they didn't have time to write letters.

It was Vietnam that finally blindsided Joseph, who firmly believed the U.S. should wage war all over the globe if necessary to stop the spread of communism. In one of the book's more interesting sections, we see the Alsops, who had parted professional ways by this time, struggling individually to reconcile the reality of Southeast Asia with what they believed to be America's best interests.

Stewart emerges from the experience the stronger one. But as shrill as Joseph, an unrepentant hawk, became in his later years, he also left behind an extraordinary record as a tough-minded reporter who for the most part would rather make waves than friends, even when it meant risking a valuable source. Aggressive and vain, Joseph thought nothing of switching roles from supposedly objective reporter to political adviser. He wheedled, flattered, argued and, when all else failed, hectored normally intimidating men like Lyndon Johnson. When that didn't work, he slammed America's political gentry in a column that at one point reached nearly 25 million readers.

ýtewart, who took a more measured view of his beat, consistently out-reported the rest of the Washington press corps and, often together with Joseph, put out a dazzling number of groundbreaking stories on everything from defense policy to U.S. interests in the Mideast and Asia, the Cuban missile crisis and Sen. Joseph McCarthy's shameful war on "communism." Yes, from time to time the Alsops were manipulated by their sources. But for the most part they were smarter than the people they covered.

Both harped constantly about money, but they never considered abandoning journalism. To the very end, despite huge changes in American society and in journalism too, they remain wedded to the belief that an educated elite must lead the nation. Born into a New England aristocracy, they represented that elite well during the so-called American Century, which began in 1945 and ended 30 years later with the fall of Saigon — shortly after Stewart died of leukemia and Joseph retired.

It's a long book Merry has made. But it contains a lot of good war stories. Clearly the Alsops would be taken aback by what's happening in journalism today — though Joe would probably be right at home on talk TV.