Cold War Sources: Joseph Alsop and Vietnam

As Lyndon Johnson prepared to ignore his counsel and escalate America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, an exasperated Walter Lippmann watched Secretary of State Dean Rusk on television defend the administration’s policy. “He’s a very intelligent stupid man,” Lippmann said of Rusk later. “He doesn’t examine his premises. His reasoning is based on misplaced historical analogies, like what happened in the 1930s or in World War II. He’s like Joe Alsop in that respect.” ¹

Alsop, the other “very intelligent stupid man,” was Lippmann’s rival and in many ways professional opposite. In the early 1960s, Alsop came as close as anyone other than James Reston of the New York Times to challenging Lippmann’s position as the nation’s leading syndicated columnist. Henry Brandon, an English correspondent in Washington, described two journalistic salons in the federal city: one dominated by Lippmann, the other by Alsop. ² Although the two men tended to share a liberal-center ideology, ³ they frequently clashed over foreign affairs. And their approach to interpretive journalism could not have been more different. Alsop and his brother Stewart, his collaborator between 1946 and 1958, lived by what they dubbed “the rule of the feet.” Lippmann possessed the analytical powers to write a news analysis “from the vantage-point of his own desk.” The Alsops’ columns, in contrast, were to be based on at least three or four interviews, in person and not by telephone. ⁴ Alsop, in that respect, resembled columnists like Reston, who defined themselves as reporters. As a result, day-to-day occurrences and bureaucratic agendas informed his columns; they lacked the detachment that the best interpretive journalism, by definition, provided.

This is not to dub Alsop’s approach stenographic. He was too arrogant merely to record a newsmaker’s remarks. And within the Washington journalistic culture of the 1940s and 1950s, he was too atypical. Most Washington correspondents had attended a state university, most likely in the Middle West, and came from the lower middle class. ⁵ Not Alsop. He was old money, a Harvard graduate, and related to both President Roosevelts. Like a later generation of elite reporters, he regarded himself as equal — if not superior to — those he covered. He felt no need to cloak his views in the professional robe of “objectivity.” Alsop, Reston recalled, “seldom allowed the facts to interfere with his prejudices.” ⁶ Alsop never disguised his deeply help opinions about the Cold War. They colored literally everything he wrote on American foreign policy between 1946 and his retirement in 1974.

As Washington Post columnist Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., notes in his new and immensely disappointing biography, Alsop insisted that America remember the “lessons” of the interwar years. It must not come to resemble Great Britain under Stanley Baldwin and others in the 1930s, neglecting its defenses while hoping for a negotiated peace with Hitler. Any battlefield compromise with Communists, as in Korea in 1953 or Indochina a year later, was another Munich. America had to check communist expansion anywhere in the world. He took pride in claiming authorship of the “domino theory.” An early and ardent proponent of U.S. rearmament after World War II, Alsop dismissed any hesitancy toward massive defense expenditures as “Baldwinism.” In 1958, he publicized the charge that the Soviet Union would soon overtake the United States in intercontinental ballistic missiles. The “missile gap” never existed. As late as August 1959, “the CIA had not yet spotted a single ‘operational’ Soviet ICBM,” Yoder writes. And “the missile-gap outcry was to serve as an object lesson in the limitations of journalistic perspectives” (p. 171).

Yoder finds much more to admire in Alsop’s duels with...