In his profession Columnist Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. is a distinct success. From his column, "Matter of Fact," which appears four times weekly in the New York Herald Tribune and is syndicated in 200 newspapers here and abroad, and from the books and other articles he writes, he receives an income handsome enough to surround himself with the trappings of the luxurious life. These include suits faultlessly hand-tailored on London's Savile Row, and what he calls the "excessive comfort" of a plush bachelor's house on Dumbarton Avenue in Washington's Georgetown. He is respected, if not loved, by federal officialdom, which he frequently treats with the loftiness of the master ordering his vassals into line. "Admiral," he once said frostily, rising and thereby terminating an interview with Lewis Strauss, then special assistant to the President on atomic-energy matters, "you have wasted half an hour of my time."
But Joe Alsop is not happy. He is incorrigibly gloomy, an inveterate prophet of perdition, forever firing literate messages of despair at what he deems to be a complacent multitude of 35 million readers. His columns bong with death-knell words and phrases: "hair-raising," "chaos," "crisis," "the slippery brink of disaster," "in these dark times," "the edge of the abyss." Should hope well feebly in his breast, he is inclined to stifle it: "It is still too early to say that the worst result is already inevitable."
In 1950, tasting catastrophe, he warned of an "iron half-century" in which everything—"from television to partisanship, from jukeboxes to self-delusion"—must surrender to the "stern requirements of independence and survival." "All is lost." he cried at a 1954 New Year's party to a friend offering him felicitations of the season. In The Reporter's Trade, a collection of Alsop columns—some authored or co-authored by his younger brother Stewart —which will be published Nov. 19, he sinks up to his foulard tie in despond.
"It is not easy to write amiably," he writes, "when, as it were, you have the ugly future burning in your belly." The big question is: "Can the free societies survive, and if so, how?" In 15 years at the trade, Alsop has never said that they can't. On the other hand, he has never said that they can.
Toward Pessimism. Nothing in Alsop's upbringing, or, for that matter, in his early newspapering years, suggests his role as a soothsayer of doom. Born 48 years ago in Avon, Conn., son of a well-to-do tobacco raiser, Joe Alsop idled, read and ate his way through adolescence. Groton and Harvard, emerging a 5 ft. 9 in., 245-Ib. magna cum laude dandy addicted to French cuffs and French pastry, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the decay of ancient civilizations—Egypt, the Mayans, Greece and Rome. By then it was clear that Joe had no real interest in the law, which was the career his parents had decided on, and he was dispatched to the New York Herald Tribune.