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Stewart described the Alsop brother act as a "combative partnership." Joe was the brilliant polemicist; Stewart the steady fellow and, among other things, a more conscientious legman than his brother. "Joe can play the organ of doom better than I," Stewart conceded. After twelve years, in 1958, Stewart and Joe agreed to "an amicable divorce." Stewart was offered a job with the Saturday Evening Post, and soon established a persona all his own. Shortly before the Post folded he became a columnist for Newsweek. In his separate status, he split with belligerent Joe over Indochina. (Stewart: "It is not practical to continue to fight a war that has no popular support at all.") With Charles Bartlett he wrote an intimate report of the intricate discussions that led Kennedy to the Cuban missile crisis, including the first use of "hawks and doves" and the unforgettable quote from Dean Rusk: "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other guy just blinked." Stewart always had an instinct for the memorable or revealing quote.
Familiar and Folksy. His style was familiar, direct and often pleasantly illuminated with scholarly or folksy references. U.S. policy in Viet Nam reminded him of Little Miss Fix-It, "who ends up with blood all over her pretty little hands." On governmental censorship, he complained that the Administration was suffering from "Daddy-knowsbestism—telling us not to ask questions or Daddy spank." Or on Watergate, recalling his own service in the OSS and his close study of the techniques of other spy services, Alsop could write with coldly measured indignation: "Politicians have played tricks on each other since politics was invented. But this is not politics; this is war ... a genuinely terrifying innovation ... Any person proven to have used these techniques should not only be punished by the law; he should be banned forever from participation in American politics. For Watergate has been an attempt to alter the very nature of the ancient American political system."
In his long sieges in the hospital, lying alongside other terminal cases, he made his own radical conclusions and offered some radical remedies: a patient suffering beyond endurance should be given the choice to end it. If the patient refuses that option, he should be allowed as much pain-killing drug as he wants, and that drug probably should be heroin, which is estimated to be four times as effective a painkiller as any alternative drug. "If a human being must die, it is surely better that he die in the illusion of painless pleasure—and heroin is very pleasurable—than in lonely agony."