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There Alsop, who even then could write rings around veteran deskmen, rose like whipping cream above the city-room pack. Regally acctutered ("A newspaperman should dress like a banker; when a reporter lets himself be patronized, he's licked"), he climbed swiftly from $18-a-week cub to the Trib's Washington staff, went on from there to a syndicated column, "The Capital Parade." co-authored with another ex-rn&ber, Robert Kintner (now president of the National Broadcasting Co.).
Munich jolted Alsop toward pessimism.
Profoundly disturbed by the sellout to
Hitler, he quit his job when war came, spent four years as naval officer and aide to Major General Claire Chennault in China, an attentive and dismayed witness to the Communist conquest. By war's end he was a confirmed and chronic pessimist on the future of mankind, determined to sound the alarm for all who would listen.
Toward Calamity. The present Alsop column began in 1946 as a brother act with Stewart ("Stewart was the only writer I knew that one would not throw out of one's rooms"). 3½ years his junior, who left an editorship with Doubleday & Co., the book publishers, to help shadow calamity in the world's capitals. The brothers took turns journeying through Europe and the Near and Far East, dissolved their partnership last spring when Stewart joined the Saturday Evening Post as a contributing editor. An able journalist, Stew Alsop never reached his brother's gloomy depths. Says he: "Joe can play the organ of doom better than I."
As a columnist. Joe Alsop is several literary cuts above most of his peers. He is perhaps the only Western newsman who can read the Analects of Confucius in classical Chinese. When not specifically concerned with international crisis, his columns can take lyrical wing, are frequently larded with Biblical and historical references and pretentious words like "smarmy," "ingeminations" and "farrago." Few newsmen besides Joe Alsop would have the imagination, scholarship and gall to describe the Kremlin as "a particularly gay decoration by Bakst for one of Diaghilev's earlier ballets."
Such flights are really digressions from duty, and Alsop rarely takes them these days, except when pressing national affairs, such as this year's elections, call him briefly away from the flames. Duty lies in exposing the dangers of the U.S. lag in the armament race with Russia, the unimpeded march of Communism, any administrative insistence on balancing the budget at what he considers the expense of security.
An Insult a Day. The dauntless prophet lets nothing deflect for long his dogged pursuit of Armageddon. Alsop is an indefatigable legman, and he trudges an international beat. But headquarters is the house on Dumbarton Avenue where Alsop lives and writes in rooms merry with the chirrups of a yellow and green parrot, four finches and two parakeets.