The Columnist as Activist   

"I've Seen the Best of It"
By Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt
W. W. Norton

"I've Seen the Best of It"
By Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt
W. W. Norton
495 pages; $29.95

Last impressions linger. So it is tempting to stereotype Joe Alsop based on the strident, hawkish columns that led up to his retirement in 1974. But, as this graceful and amiable memoir shows, Alsop's 37 years as a columnist spanned a full spectrum of actions and attitudes.

Alsop was a regular dinner companion of Franklin Roosevelt, a fierce antagonist of Joseph McCarthy (who, of course, labeled him a communist) and an effusive acolyte of John F. Kennedy.

He served with the Flying Tigers during World War II, spent seven months interned by the Japanese, and insinuated himself into numerous intrigues involving the likes of Douglas MacArthur and Chiang Kai-shek.

When he died in 1989, he was well on the way to finishing these memoirs. As completed by Adam Platt, they spin the usual yarns and war stories, but they also raise some provocative ethical issues.

A somewhat unlikely journalist, Alsop sprang from the aristocratic "WASP ascendancy" of New England, attended Groton and Harvard and landed his first job at the New York Herald Tribune after his grandmother, despairing of his prospects in law, intervened with the owners. He worked for $18 a week, but his father chipped in another $100 a month. He later used his estimable connections to land access to big shots around the world. Eleanor Roosevelt was his cousin, and it was at Alsop's posh Georgetown home that JFK wound up partying on the night of his inauguration.

Though this book may not add much to history, it can be read simply as a charming life story. And those readers who are journalists can find a bit more to chew on.

For instance, Alsop peppers the book with advice about column writing, beginning with a simple point: He always considered himself a reporter with a duty "to go and see for myself the weather in the streets." Alsop worked diligently, traveling the world, venturing into combat and trading ideas with sources to complete his syndicated column.

Alsop also resolved "not to talk to any high government official, if at all possible, with P.R. persons present." To this end, he stalked out of his first interview with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when confronted with P.R. people "waiting for me en masse."

More controversial is Alsop's eagerness to take sides and take action. When Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in 1960, Alsop "resolved to help him in any way possible to win the presidency." As he explained, "It had been my nature..to promote actively causes in which I believed."

Alsop played a fevered backstage role (along with Philip Graham of the Washington Post) in lobbying Kennedy to select Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. Earlier, he had helped coax newly confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black into publicly discussing his Ku Klux Klan connection; "demanded in print the opportunity to testify" against McCarthy; and engaged in what seems perilously close to blackmail in pressuring Dwight Eisenhower to resist McCarthy.

Alsop isn't overly introspective about these matters, and he certainly wasn't a person prone to second-guess himself. Readers, however, can both learn from his book and find plenty of opportunities for second-guessing.

Stepp is a WJR senior editor and an associate professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.