Stewart Alsop

Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop (May 17, 1914 – May 26, 1974) was an American newspaper columnist and political analyst.

Early life

Alsop was born and raised in Avon, Connecticut from an old Yankee family, Alsop attended Groton School and Yale University. His parents were Joseph Wright Alsop IV (1876–1953) and Corinne Douglas Robinson (1886–1971). Through his mother, he was a grandnephew of Theodore Roosevelt.

Career

After graduating from Yale in 1936, Alsop moved to New York City, where he worked as an editor for the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran.

World War II

After the United States entered World War II, Alsop joined the British Army, because his high blood pressure precluded his joining the United States Army.

A month after the wedding, Alsop was allowed to transfer to the U.S. Army, and was immediately sent on a mission planned by the Office of Strategic Services. For the mission, Alsop was parachuted into the Périgord region of France to aid the French Resistance. Alsop was later awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm for his work on that and other wartime missions. Alsop worked with and for the OSS for the rest of the war.

Journalism

From 1945 to 1958, Stewart Alsop was co-writer, with his elder brother Joseph Alsop, of the thrice-weekly "Matter of Fact" column for the New York Herald Tribune. Stewart Alsop usually stayed in Washington and covered domestic politics, while Joseph Alsop traveled the world to cover foreign affairs. In 1958, the Alsops described themselves as "Republicans by inheritance and registration, and [...] conservatives by political conviction."

After the Alsop brothers ended their partnership, Stewart Alsop went on to write articles and a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post until 1968, then a weekly column for Newsweek from 1968 to 1974.

He published several books, including a "sort of memoir" of his battle with an unusual form of leukemia, Stay of Execution. He wrote during this time: "A dying man wants to die like a sleepy man wants to sleep." At the end of his battle with cancer, he requested that he be given something other than morphine to numb the pain because he was tired of morphine's sedative effect. His doctor suggested heroin.

Family

On June 20, 1944, Alsop married Patricia Barnard "Tish" Hankey (died 2012), an Englishwoman, he met while training in England. Together, they had six children:

• Joseph Wright Alsop VI
• Ian Alsop
• Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, a children's book author
• Stewart Alsop II, investor and pundit
• Richard Nicholas Alsop, a missionary with FamilyLife
• Andrew Alsop.

In Avon, Connecticut, Stewart had a 53-acre (210,000 m2) public park named after him called Alsop Meadows.

Books

• Sub Rosa : The O.S.S. and American Espionage (1946, with Thomas Braden)
• We Accuse! The Story of the Miscarriage of American Justice in the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1954, with Joseph Alsop)
• The Reporter's Trade (1958, with Joseph Alsop)
• Nixon & Rockefeller : A Double Portrait (1960)
• The Center : People and Power in Political Washington (1968)
• Stay of Execution : A Sort of Memoir (1973)