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Each morning at 8:30 the chronic pessimist, impeccably geared, comes down to a dietary breakfast of one boiled egg and a bit of fruit, served by Jose, his Filipino batman; having melted years ago to a svelte 175 Ibs.* Alsop wages unremitting war against a tendency to stoutness, rarely eats a square meal. By 10 or so, with the help of his secretary, Evelyn Puffenberger ("Miss Puff"), he has waded through required reading. By noon, on an ordinary day, he has probably insulted at least one person, an assignment he set for himself while still a young man. Scorning pipelines and corridor leaks, he gathers his news from the source, by rule-of-thumb schedules four interviews a day six days a week. A facile writer, Alsop can knock out a 750-word column in an hour.
Doom in August. The postwar period, heaping crisis on crisis, has provided a suitably gothic backdrop for the Alsopian anxiety. Times have indeed been consistently jeopardous, and the eloquent voice of Joe Alsop, amplified by syndication, has dedicated itself to the cause of scaring tranquil humanity into its wits.
But a steady shrill of terror, however real, eventually falls on deafened ears.
"I feel pretty good," said General Lauris Norstad, NATO's top military commander, after a talk with his old friend Alsop.
"Joe said the world wasn't going to hell in June after all, but August." Most knowing people concede that there are perils abroad in the world. Alsop's foible—and perhaps his basic journalistic stock trade—is that he cannot accept peril as i is but must persistently exaggerate it and its imminence, and treat it as if only he recognized and was trying to do something about it.
While his widely circulated cries of alarm may well serve to awaken some who are asleep, they also help to give the rest of the world a distorted picture of the U.S. posture and capabilities. But Joe Alsop does not concede that he is overly pessimistic. "I think I'm optimistic," he said last week, "because I think it's entirely possible to solve our problems. But nobody in his senses can look at the world we live in, with all the dehumanization of life, and be very merry and bright . . . The human race is faced with destruction."
* Commanded by his physician in 1937 to lose weight Alsop spent three reducing months in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, got down to trimness, paid the hefty medical bill by selling an article on his experience, "How It Feels to Look Like Everybody Else," to the Satcvcpost.