Wasp Party Animal

...When Catledge turned down his invitation to co-author the column, Joe recruited in his stead another plebe, a workaholic Herald-Tribune reporter from Swarthmore named Robert Kintner...

...Intellectuals have suggested that this is because it is less interesting than other seats of government, but the truth may be that the American capital has no need to fictionalize itself...

...After suffering the early torments of a fat bookworm (230 lbs...

...Joe repaid FDR with sympathetic coverage in the Herald-Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post...

...Those who succumbed, if they were eminent enough, were treated to gushing morning-after letters of thanks from the host...

...Joe's Grandmother Robinson, noting his flair for words, thought that he might make a journalist...

...Grottlesex and the Ivy League, like the English public-school types on whom they were modeled, rattled around in the second and third drawers from the top...

...Instead, he has written a resonant, brilliantly reported account of the last days of the old-family, old-money Anglo-Saxon elite that regarded itself as "a dedicated, intelligent, and honest aristocracy" whose mission on earth was to run the United States of America...

...She had a word with her friend Helen Reid, whose family owned the New York Herald-Tribune, and Joe was hired as a cub reporter at $18 a week...

...Merry, a onetime Wall Street Journal reporter who is now executive editor of the Congressional Quarterly, has resisted what must have been a strong temptation to let Joe run away with his book...

...Joe is interesting not for what he knew but for whom he knew...

...Much else that Stewart wrote toward the end of his life remains worth reading...

...In due course, naturally, he became the ridiculous yet lethal thing he pretended to be, a sort of Falstaff-as-Pimpernel who "divided people into two groups-his friends, for whose friendship the price was never too high, and all others, for whom he had little time or courtesy...

...Joe moved into a house in Georgetown, furnished it with antiques from the family attics, and-establishing another lifetime pattern-"pursued lively dinner guests with the zeal of an ardent suitor...

...The Roo-sevelts' famously awful food was a condign misery for the burgeoning gastronome who later in life refused to eat in any restaurant along the Champs Elys?es because, he explained, the underground trains of the Paris Metro agitated their wine cellars...

...If the rest is not exactly history, it is certainly the stuff of legend...

...Soon 60 papers were carrying the new team's "The Capital Parade...

...Nixon's, but a fine liberal ox...

...Joseph R. McCarthy had given good work a bad name...

...Not for Joe was Emerson's description of the Times of London in 1848 as an institution "in antagonism with the feudal institutions, mak[ing] the public a more terrible spy than any foreigner...

...as a 5-foot-10 senior at Groton), he was admitted to Harvard largely on the strength of a dazzling entrance-exam essay and "began to accentuate the things that made him distinctive-his theatrical mannerisms, the tossed-off witticisms, and the diction of the British upper classes with elongated vowels and clipped consonants...

...This new self that Joe let loose- fop, snob, sycophant, wild talker and quirky thinker-amused the circle of top people to which he wished to belong, and in his sophomore year he was tapped for the Porcellian Club...

...Nevertheless, as Merry points out, well-to-do Americans with English surnames were, as a class, great Tories...

...The question was, At what...

...Sent to Washington by the Trib, young Joe looked up Cousin Eleanor...

...This early collaboration led to a book contract with Doubleday, whose vice president, Joe's Uncle Ted Roosevelt, felt sure that the resulting volume would win next year's $2,500 Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Book Award...

...One 18th-century forebear had refused to sign the Declaration of Independence on grounds that it was a treasonous document...

...Their father was a gentleman farmer and insurance man who grew tobacco and dairy cattle on a 150-acre place in Avon, Connecticut...

...It might be said of Joe Alsop, a determined enemy and almost-victim of McCarthy, that he did the opposite by making himself the creature of the milieu he was describing to the world...

...Worldly Wiseman, Despair, Great-heart, Foul Fiend, et al...

...But occasionally a minor character invents himself...

...On the side Alsop and Kintner contributed magazine pieces, including a worshipful article in Life entitled "Roosevelt Family Album" that included such subheads as "FDR: Child of a Vanished Race...

...Writing in the full heat of Watergate, he said, "The time may come when the ox to be gored is not the detested Mr...

...FDR (who was not tapped for the Porc when he was at Harvard) succumbed to Joe's power to amuse, and soon this bizarre young cousin was a regular at family dinners, including Christmas dinners, in the White House...

...After a lifetime devoted to making Joe complete by acting the depressive to the former's manic persona, Stewart finally broke free and before he died too young, emerged as one of the most iconoclastic reporters of his time...

...Charles McCarry is the author of Shelley's Heart and seven other novels...

...pop out of nowhere when their hour strikes, achieve great things and/or come to tragicomic ends as a result of fate, human folly, or blind coincidence, then vanish back into the mind of America until it is time for them to be reincarnated under a different name in a new edition of a tale that is always the same yet always somehow amusingly new...

...In Joe's memory, a one-week moratorium on parties should be called in Washington while every insider reads this book...

...On the evidence of Robert W Merry's remarkable new book, Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop-Guardians of the American Century (Viking, 644 pages, $34.95), the late Joe Alsop, bard of the Anglo-Saxon Ascendancy, was one of these...

...By reporting from the inside, as an honorary equal, that which had usually before been reported from the outside by newspapermen who had much more in common with cops and firemen than with Bissells and Bohlens, he became a hostage to his informants...

...It is already a living novel-a sort of never-ending Pilgrim's Progress in which Bunyanesque characters (Mr...

...another founded the Alsop fortune by shipping ice from the Connecticut River to the West Indies...

...Few were more theologically Anglophile than the Alsops, whose own name, like that of an English landmark, was pronounced in a way that could not easily be deduced from its spelling...

...His articles, while not omitting a legitimating word or two of criticism, portrayed Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court as a Homeric struggle between a selfless, heroic president and "the shabby comedy of national politics with its all-pervading motive, self-interest...

...Merry's gentle but unsparing portrait of Joe rises so vividly out of the original that the reader notices only gradually that, as in a Velazquez, the most interesting figure in the painting is the one standing slightly out of the light and a bit behind the egoist in the foreground-in this case, Joe's last literary collaborator, Brother Stewart...

...They had been in the New World for 250 years, but the family history suggests that this was a physical and not a psychological condition...

...The Saturday Evening Post article, a three-parter written with Mis-sissippian Turner Catledge of the New York Times, established a lifelong reluctance to fly solo over defended ground, and from then on Joe almost always wrote in partnership...

...Then as now, of course, the American democracy was usually governed, and its culture and commerce dominated, by nobodies from nowhere, while the products of St...

...The wholesale leaking by the secret police and the grand jury, and the eager acceptance of turncoat testimony, may then appear to liberals in a rather different light...

...Thus powerfully encouraged, he stayed with the impersonation for the rest of his life...

...The president became Joe's source, and his patronage opened doors in the administration and got him invited to parties where he met, and usually charmed, Washington's social lions...

...As Joe approached graduation from Harvard in that same year, a family council on his future concluded that he was qualified for none of the usual occupations of a gentleman...

...For a generation or two the family had been very well-off, but by the time Joseph Wright Alsop, V was born in 1910 and his younger brother, Stewart Johonnet Oliver, came into the world four years later, Alsops had to work for a living...

...Evelyn Waugh, who was turning his own obsession with his betters into art at about the same time that Joe was transmogrifying his into journalism, sourly remarked that Communist-hunting Sen...

...Very few people emigrated to the American colonies in order to escape from the wealth and position they enjoyed in the British Isles, and most of the Wasp gentry, including the Alsops, had little or no idea where or what they came from...

...Instead, Merry tells us, Alsop enjoyed the distinction of knowing everyone, of being loved by many, and of having his copy edited personally by the two presidents he admired most, FDR and JFK...

...Condescending to nearly every subject he approached, from the homeless of the Great Depression to the Lindbergh kidnapping (he compared Bruno Hauptmann to Polonius) to Henri Matisse, whose broken English amused him, he quickly made a name and a style for himself as a writer of feature stories that must have seemed lighthearted at the time but would nowadays more accurately be called heartless...

...The press, as keeper of the spirit pen, usually assigns the roles in this revolving fable...

...He might not have been happy to have his life summed up in such a commonplace, but Merry makes us understand that that was all he ever really wanted...

...It didn't, but within the year Joe was offered a syndicated column...

...The famous responded warmly to this flattery, and the Journalist-as-Party-Animal was added to the permanent cast of Washington characters...

...Their mother, a member of the rich New York Robinson family, was a niece of Theodore Roosevelt and therefore a first cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, whose husband was elected president in 1932...