Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1995 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

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.

I regret that Yoder does not tell us more about Stewart Alsop, a notable writer and gentleman in his own right. And I would have wished that Yoder carried his account through the Vietnam recriminations, a time in which Joe, but not Stewart, severed relationships (temporarily) with old friends like me. But one can be grateful for a thoughtful and appreciative memoir of a formidable, irascible, and curiously lovable man.