In 1948 the column-writing Alsop brothers produced an article for
the Saturday Evening Post, then the country's preminent weekly
magazine. Its title: Must America Save the World?'' Their answer
was a resounding yes. Indeed, Joseph and Stewart Alsop were there
in those heady postwar years when the country's foreign-policy
elite created what became known as the American Century. As men of
words, they served as confidants of and cheerleaders for these men
of deeds, who came largely from the country's patrician class. The
Alsop brothers were themselves sons of this class. Theodore
Roosevelt was the brothers' great-uncle. Eleanor Roosevelt was
their mother's first cousin. They grew up with members of this
Anglo-Saxon elite, whent to school with them, socializedd with
them. And they threw the considerable weight of their column behnd
the efforts of these statesmen to refashion the world. Writing four
times a week, they appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers; their
work also graced the pages of the major magazines of the time.
Thus, they wielded immense influence throughout the nation from the
victory in World War II to the defeat in Vietnam. Stewart was a
political analyst of rare acumen, and widely appreciated for his
bonhomie, while Joe, his older brother, was a curmudgeon with an
aristocratic bearing and a biting wit. He once likened a dinner at
Lyndon Johnson's to going to an opera in which one man sings all
the parts.'' On another occasion he characterized the august New
York Times, whose reporting he didn't like, as a lunatic
cathedral.'' He was a friend and confidant of John Kennedy, a
teacher of Washington ways to Jackie Kennedy. When he called people
in the highest echelons of officaldolm, they responded. The
brothers' connection with the high and mighty of Washington makes
for dramatic reading. These pages serve as a window on such
notables of American wartime and postwar history as Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, General Claire
Chennault of the wartime China theater, secretaries of state Dean
Acheson, John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, defense
secretaries James Forrestal and Robert McNamara, and various
Supreme Court justices and top-level senators. It's a human story
as well -- about the brothers' harrowing wartime experiences; about
a loving but occasionally tumultuous brotherly relationship; about
friendships made and lost; about careers that soared but also, in
Joe's case, faltered over the difficult issue of Vietnam. In Taking
On the World, Robert W. Merry, himself a Washington insider, has
fashioned an intricate and fascinating combination of biography and
narrative history. As Merry puts it, Within the lifetime of the
Alsop brothers the country was remade. And its remaking illuminates
their careers, just as their careers illuminate the American
Century.'' Robert Merry casts brilliant light on these two
remarkable men, and on one of the most tumultuous periods of the
country's history.
General
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