A Decade of the Alsops
KRAFT, JOSEPH
A Decade of the Alsops The Reporter's Trade. By Joseph and Stewart Alsop. Reynal, 377 pp. $5.00, Reviewed by Joseph Kraft Contributor, "Saturday Evening Post," N.Y. "Times Magazine" JOSEPH...
...There is weighty reason now to suppose that, unless changes are made in American programs, the Soviet Union will enjoy a decisive advantage in the capacity to deliver the bomb...
...But far from recklessly courting risks, they tend to move only when local opportunities make a move fairly safe...
...The price" was "the Middle Eastern catastrophe . . . the division of Indochina...
...But if a quick coup had succeeded, who would have taken Gamal Abdel Nasser's place...
...Even in a collection of already published pieces, they bring to light new and important material...
...With extreme reluctance, pointing out the risks involved and the blow to his own prestige that would result from a subsequent withdrawal, the General yielded to this American pressure...
...And 18 months later: "If the Soviets are the first to create an operational ICBM system, they could, then, in a surprise attack, destroy the American capacity to retaliate decisively...
...Inevitably, going full-tilt into weapons development robs us of something, be it schools or opportunities for disarmament or disengagement...
...the shaky situation in Malaya, the still worse situation in Indonesia...
...The situation may need curing, but naked force is no specific...
...Times Magazine" JOSEPH AND STEWART ALSOP are among our finest journalists...
...But the Alsops have been far too quick to jump from missile figures to political conclusions...
...Secretary Dulles and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd," the Alsops claim in the summer of 1957, made "an agreement to support an invasion of Syria by the Iraqis and Turks...
...Diem and Achmed Sukarno have all survived to fight the Communists—and with steadily increasing vigor...
...weak though they may be...
...Indonesia or the Middle East would not have deteritjrated...
...the "American Government placed the severest pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to occupy these alarmingly exposed positions in real force...
...says a column in September 1955...
...The Soviets may try blackmail, but it hardly goes hand-in-hand with surprise attack...
...In the same vein he wrote off the Middle East, asserting—after the Damascus "coup" of August 1957—that in the Arab world "the Kremlin can pretty well call the tune, and even Nasser must dance with the rest...
...After Suez, Secretary Dulles "addressed the following question to the first important British official he saw: 'I think you did the wrong thing at Suez...
...For lovers of incongruity there is a story about Joseph Alsop going to the White House armed with material showing that General Eisenhower had "coddled Communists" while occupation chief in Germany...
...they claim, "saw the Korean settlement for what it was, a concealed defeat for the West, and a solid victory for the Communists...
...the Soviets will enjoy a decided superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles...
...They virtually invented intelligible defense reporting, the fitting of technical military data into the foreign policy puzzle...
...A psychological factor thus enters into the deterrent principle...
...The counterpart of over-estimating: the efficacy of bullets is to underestimate the ability of local nationalists...
...today in most parts of the world are not only alien to such means, but aggravated by them...
...Destructive power is now so great that any strike hazards everything...
...And with what results...
...Joseph Alsop made what he gracefully acknowledges "to be one of the worst of our mistakes" in discounting Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, to the point of recommending suspension of American aid...
...All Asians...
...But they represent a far sturdier reed than Western puppets propped up by Western troops...
...After the Soviet A-bomb explosion, the Alsops took up the cudgels for the hydrogen bomb...
...America today is just beginning to live with the consequences of Forrestal's defeat by littler men...
...Joseph Alsop wrote that "the successful manufacture of atomic armaments will restore to the Soviet leaders the military confidence which they now lack...
...but once you had done it, why on earth didn't you finish the job...
...Their regimes, to be sure, may crumble...
...There is crude optimism in the view of Joseph Alsop, writing from Baghdad in the days of Nuri as-Said, that "if Iraq abandons her pro-Western orientation, nothing but naked force will cure the situation in the Middle East...
...By 1954...
...On one crucial question—the role of military strength in world affairs—they proved dead wrong...
...troops could have reached the "narrow waist" if operations had not been suspended when truce talks began in 1951...
...From 1946 through 1957, when the partnership ended, no serious muddle passed into major crisis without an Alsop on the spot...
...They have brains and connections which they are not afraid to use, great powers of presentation, good instincts and a will to work, to travel and to wring conclusions from doughy fact...
...It was somewhat grimly suggested that it would be better for the German story to be published in our column at once than to let McCarthy make a nine-months wonder later on...
...They may hold what they have with an iron fist...
...The Chinese Nationalists originally made little serious effort to hold the islands off the Chinese mainland, but in 1953, according to the Alsops...
...Pieces d’occasion with a vengeance, the columns vividly tell the tumultuous story of a tumultuous time...
...The word "egg-head" owes its currency to their column...
...And if in the interval the West has not surrendered, and no understanding has been achieved between the West and the Soviet Union, war will then be almost certain...
...As a third consequence of the military emphasis, the Alsops have tended to regard the cold war through the narrow optic of the arms race...
...Strong portraiture has always featured their work, as in the description of William Rogers, before he moved up to take Herbert Brownell's place, as the "Attorney (General's special assistant for political intrigue...
...There is also the reasonable proposition that it is usually an awful waste...
...Moreover, the Alsops emphasize the weapons race without counting costs...
...The German facts," the Alsops write, "were laid before Adams...
...For one, they consistently magnified the fruits to be reaped by military strength...
...But were they right or wrong...
...John Foster Dulles, in spite of his curious maneuvering, was essentially right...
...But assuming the "narrow waist" could have been reached, and ignoring the fact that continued fighting after the Communist truce offer would have gone deeply against the American grain, there is little reason to suppose that North Vietnam could have been saved, or that the situation in Malaya...
...James B.] Forrestal," they write, "seems the tragic hero of the postwar years...
...The best of all this is included in The Reporter's Trade, a collection of columns strung together by explanatory connecting material and prefaced by an introductory essay...
...The Soviet Union," they wrote in 1952, "is currently outproducing the United States, and by an incredibly wide margin, in modern combat planes...
...The trouble is not with the Alsop estimates...
...Long before most liberals were in arms, they denounced paid informers in loyalty cases and the system of non-confrontation of witness and accused...
...No military strike, even if temporarily successful, can alter the basic reality of the withering of Anglo-French political influence in the area...
...On the Suez expedition, the Alsops stick by the conventional wisdom that it was a mistake to launch the operation, but that once in progress it should have been carried through to triumphant conclusions...
...Failure to take that advantage, the Alsops hold, was disastrous...
...But the opportunities for blackmailing the United States into accepting a super-Munich are obvious...
...In September 1946...
...Yet while the Alsops spread gloom vehemently, there is no excuse for not paying heed to what they say...
...With H-bomb parity established, they began sounding the alarm on means of delivery...
...But Forrestal's theme was preparedness and gunboat diplomacy...
...Adams was then asked, point-blank, whether the Administration now meant to fight McCarthy all out, in which case, it was added, there was no reason to publish the German story...
...Neither missiles nor soldiers could save Nuri or bring back his likes again, or for that matter make India self-sufficient or rid Ceylon of its minority problem...
...they were trying to plug the missile gap, "In 1960-65...
...to resist Communist pressure...
...And, right or wrong, the Alsops continuously informed events with a sense of their consequence...
...Distaste for spending money on military hardware springs not only from pacifist yearnings or from an obsession with balanced budgets...
...After a long silence, Adams swore that the White House now meant to fight McCarthy without giving or asking quarter...
...On Korea, the Alsops share the widely-held professional military view that U.S...
...The Alsops proclaim with what seems to be positive glee that "we are entering an iron decade, perhaps an iron century, in which all our accustomed pleasures from television to partisanship, from juke boxes to self-delusion must be sacrificed to the stern requirements of independence and survival...
...No one can judge whether they might actually do so...
...The American mistake lay not in stopping the expedition, but in the failure to seize the occasion for pushing through the United Nations settlement...
...Indonesia is cited three times as "a semifinal resuh" of "the pressure of the Chinese mass to the north upon more or less fragile Southeast Asian political structures...
...The problems confronting the U.S...
...If there is no alternative, it is a matter for grief, not rejoicing...
...Alsop, fearing the material might be used by Senator Joseph McCarthy, had requested an interview with Sherman Adams...
...Though it is scant cause for confidence, the Russians have not shown themselves to be great gamblers...
...In fact...
...Exaggerated at all times by both Alsops, the emphasis on the military calculus yielded extrapolations which carried the brothers astray in three fields...
...After a further silence, he inquired: 'Do you believe in God ?'" The answer was: " I believe in the United States...
...Nasser...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 9
