Word: alsop
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...talks with Kissinger have been indispensable to reporters in an otherwise hostile Administration. Yet sometimes a Kissinger briefing edges closer to what is known in White House parlance as "stroking." During the Viet Nam War, for example, Kissinger would tell Hawkish Columnist Joseph Alsop that the North Vietnamese understood only force, and Eastern Liberal James Reston that he was straining to keep the Pentagon hawks at bay. Aboard his Air Force 707 on an early round of his Middle East peace shuttle, Kissinger would shuffle to the press cabin in the rear to tell the 14 reporters in his entourage...
Combative Partnership. There was always an element of gallantry about Stewart Alsop. During World War II the U.S. Army turned him down because of asthma and high blood pressure, but he arranged to join the British army and fought in Italy and Africa. He eventually got transferred to the American OSS and was stationed in England, where he courted his future wife Patricia ("Tish") Hankey. The OSS promptly parachuted him into occupied France to help the Resistance. After the war, he left a job with a New York City publishing house to join Joe in Washington...
Stewart described the Alsop brother act as a "combative partnership." Joe was the brilliant polemicist; Stewart the steady fellow and, among other things, a more conscientious legman than his brother. "Joe can play the organ of doom better than I," Stewart conceded. After twelve years, in 1958, Stewart and Joe agreed to "an amicable divorce." Stewart was offered a job with the Saturday Evening Post, and soon established a persona all his own. Shortly before the Post folded he became a columnist for Newsweek. In his separate status, he split with belligerent Joe over Indochina. (Stewart: "It is not practical...
...over her pretty little hands." On governmental censorship, he complained that the Administration was suffering from "Daddy-knowsbestism-telling us not to ask questions or Daddy spank." Or on Watergate, recalling his own service in the OSS and his close study of the techniques of other spy services, Alsop could write with coldly measured indignation: "Politicians have played tricks on each other since politics was invented. But this is not politics; this is war ... a genuinely terrifying innovation ... Any person proven to have used these techniques should not only be punished by the law; he should be banned forever from...
Shortly before his death, Alsop was visited by TIME'S Art White, who reported: "His wife Tish sat near him, jumping up now and then to check that the antibiotic was flowing properly into Stew's arm. We talked about his book. Why did he write it? 'For money mostly. But if you're told you're going to die in a year and a half at the most, you want to leave something of yourself behind.' We talked about his brother Joe, who had given him some 40 transfusions of platelets...