Brother Act

Hollywood could never cast Columnist Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. in its stock role of the slouch-hatted, wisecracking newsman. He does not look the part, and he was not brought up to play it. Instead of the rough-&-tumble school of the police beat, he went to Groton and Harvard, where he wandered around with volumes of Proust and Joyce under his arm and thought politics beneath discussion. His silk shirts and tailored suits are as out of character as his high-pitched "ah there" voice. He exudes a cultivated and imperious air.

Notwithstanding his man-of-distinction look, Joe Alsop is a journalist, and a good one. His political acumen (the result of well-applied apprentice years) and his writing (a clear cut above the loose or labored journalese of many colleagues) have earned him a reputation as one of the half-dozen best commentators in the U.S.

Two for the Money. Last week the 102nd paper signed up to buy Joseph and Stewart Alsop's column of erudite background, sound and sometimes brilliant opinion, and feedbox gossip. The editors got two pundits for the price of one: while Joe was realistically sizing up Dewey and Stassen in Oregon this month, Stewart was appraising the "twilight terror" in Czechoslovakia.

Joe Alsop, now a thin-haired 37, became a journalist when his wealthy Connecticut family (kin to the Oyster Bay Roosevelts) decided that its fat and bookish son was good for nothing else. A discreetly pulled wire got him a job with the New York Herald Tribune. In its Washington bureau, where his first official appearance was at a White House party, he found politics more fun than Proust.

His reporting and writing soon won him an offer from North American Newspaper Alliance to do a column. His four-year partnership with Robert Kintner, capped by their American White Paper (TIME, April 29, 1940), ended with the war. In the course of a hectic service career Joe served under Chennault, became a young China hand, was interned by the Japanese at Hong Kong. There he made the most of the six months he waited for repatriation by learning to read the Analects of Confucius in the original.

It Pays to Reduce. Stewart Alsop, three years younger than his brother Joe, went to Groton and Yale, fought a more exciting war. He began with the British army, wound up with the French Maquis and a British bride. Until he teamed up with Joe, he had never written a news line.

Besides their two columns a week apiece, the team adds to its income (upwards of $30,000) by turning out half a dozen magazine articles a year. (In 1937 the doctors sent Joe to Johns Hopkins to reduce from a vast 240 Ibs. to a neater 175. To pay the bill, he smartly dashed off a piece on reducing, sold it to the Saturday Evening Post.)

"In my pompous way," smiles Joe, "I conceived ours as a column of information --halfway between pure opinion and what is essentially gossip. I felt there had been no formula for the use of material in this area as news or opinion."

The brothers gather their gossip and opinion by a busy round of telephoning, lunching and buttonholing sources. Then they meet to decide who writes the next column, or whether they should do it jointly. Their contacts are largely second-level Government men like Harvardman Charles ("Chip") Bohlen and ECA's Dick Bissell, an old Grottie of Joe's class. The Alsops think press conferences a waste of time, go to Harry Truman's only a couple of times a year, just "to see what the President looks like."

Joe does the heavy punditing for the team, but the quiet Stewart has the reputation of being a better legman. Nevertheless, the brother act performs smoothly. "We have no fights on policy," says Joe. "Our arguments are on points of emphasis--and on how far out on a limb we should go."

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