Word: alsop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SINCE NIXON himself only talks about politics in relation to football, we have to look at what other Americans with political views similar to those of the President have said about their trips to China. Joseph Alsop, the war hawk columnist, recently returned from China with praise for the Chinese experiment similar to the celebrated commendation of fascist Italy made forty years ago: "The trains run on time...
...Alsop wrote: "Rather than thanking God to be crossing the border...we wished we could have had several months more. So why?...The best answer, so far as we could figure it out, is that this new Chinese society works...
...whether it works," says Alsop. "You don't have to change your mind about Mao." Indeed, his 25 columns on the China trip suggest that Reporter Alsop checked Advocate Alsop's preconceptions at the border: "I didn't interest myself in the moral aspects of the state. By any standard, it is very immoral and unfree." Instead of fulminating, he visited areas he had known as an aide to the Flying Tigers during World War II, and dug into mundane but fascinating areas of Chinese life. "There was hardly any sightseeing," he recalled. "It was going...
...Alsop has been privately irked by suggestions that his highly favorable columns on China signaled a new-found admiration for the Communist system. In a letter to the Washington Post, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith asked in mock wonder whether the "distinguished columnist, Mr. Chou En-alsop" was related to "Captain Joe Alsop," who for years had dismissed Chinese Communists as simply an "appendage" of the Soviet Union...
Such diligence paid off. Alsop's description of the economic base of a provincial commune or production methods at a small rural factory provide some of the freshest Western reporting yet from China. He even found evidence of humor in the seemingly stolid Communist leadership. At the start of a three-hour interview, Chou En-lai asked him, "Would you like to know what I really think, or would you like another of those boring public interviews...