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Compromising Photos of Joseph Alsop and the Washington Estaldithment's Response to Them May MIS() Said As Much About the Latter As the Fernier

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Compromising Photos of Joseph Alsop and the Washington Estaldithment's Response to Them May MIS() Said As Much About the Latter As the Fernier THE WASMNGTON POST Compromising photos of Joseph Alsop and the Washington Estaldithment's response to them may MIS() said as much about the latter as the fernier. Magazine awards: Choosing the best of '95 The Family Filmgoer. 'A Goofy Movie' THE HAWK AND THE VuLTvx Columnist Joe Also]) Had a Secret. Somehow, It Stayed That Irby. years smce he had heroically refused to be By David Streitfeld Wasliogtoo Post Staff Witter blackmailed. He had written more than a thousand columns in that time, many of n 1970, political columnist Joseph them castigating the Soviets, ahvays know- Alsop saw his worst fear come true. ing he could be betrayed at any moment. It wasn't just that his enemies At first known only to a few, the basics learned his darkest secret. Much of the 1957 incident gradually trickled out. more painfully, some of his friends By Alsop's death six years ago, it had found out too. reached the stage of cocktail party fodder, ICharles Bartlett, for example. A colum- a gossipy footnote to the Cold War. nist here for the Field Syndicate, Bartlett It was a story that drew attention to the- opened his mail one day to find photos of a ways Washington had—and had not— • much younger Alsop and another man. changed. Forty years ago, this was a much Both were naked. Even now, talking pub- less forgiving town. If Alsop had been ex- licly about the pictures for the first time, posed as a homosexual, his career as a Bartlett declines to describe them precise- power. broker would have been abruptly ly. "I owe that much to Joe," he says. over. _ , Around the same time, humor columnist Art Buchwald was unsettled to find himself But if Alsop was intensely vulnerable, the recipient of a similar package. "It the tight political world of those decades scared the hell out of me," Buchwald says. also offered a peculiar shield. Washington I'm not comfortable with getting photo- was then run by an elite group of middle- graphs of people in compromising positions aged white men, a firmly entrenched Es- in the mail." tablishment. Alsop was part of it, and this How many other Washingtonians got gave him certain privileges. Its members the same pictures remains a matter of con- would protect him. jecture, but if the mysterious sender ex- Most of them, anyway. Two new books pected publicity he must have been disap- offer evidence that at least one membei of pointed. No one wrote about the photos, the Establishment was eager to see the even in a veiled way. Once again, Alsop world more fully informed about Alsop's had escaped exposure. "propensities." And the Soviets, of course, It had been 13 years since the columnist weren't bound by any gentlemanly rules. had committed the monumental blunder of It's astonishing that Alsop's secret re- 1NE WO.94111GTON PCGT letting himself be entrapped by the Soviet mained intact for decades. But as the 1970 a may have said as much about the latter as the former. secret police in a homosexual tryst, and 13 See AMP, tZ CoL 1 ALSOP, From Cl should have known they would be after photos prove, if he was never ruined, him. it wasn't because no one tried. While many of the facts remain Murky, what is known about the inci- • When Joseph Wright Alsop Jr. went dent is summarized in a new book "Joe on his fateful trip to Moscow, he was *op's Cold War," by syndicated col- 46 and at the crest of his career. His umnist Edwin Yoder Jr. "I wasn't eager Column, "Matter of Fact," written then t4 bring this episode in, but I realized it in alternation with his brother Stewart, vas an integral part of the story and appeared four times a week in more lihd to be told," says Yoder, who teach- ep journalism at Washington and Lee 'than 200 newspapers, including the ■■■ New York Herald Tribune and The University. Washington Post : His treatment is circumspect and Alsop was a vibrant social presence Wet saying only that Alsop .met "an as well. With its fine wines, elegant fur- agent provocateur from the secret po- nishings and stellar guests, his Dum- hp," had sex with him in his hotel barton Avenue home was one of Wash- ington's A-list salons. On June 24, 1950, to take a routine example, his guests included assistant secretary of pate Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Ar- my Frank Pace, Undersecretary of the Air Force John McCone, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and lbading Soviet expert George Ken- nan—the first three of whom had to cut the evening short after learning that North Korea had just invaded South Korea. If the columnist's work blended smoothly into his entertaining, his pri- Vate life was kept obscured. Friends and colleagues interviewed for this sto- ry said they had few clues about the longtime bachelor's sex life. "I do not golumnist Edviln Yoder Jr.: "I wasn't believe that Joe was a very active ho- eager to bring this episode In, but I mosexual in Washington during those rindlzed It ... had to be told." years," says Congressional Quarterly • Executive Editor Robert Merry, who is riom, and "was soon confronted with Working on a biography of the Alsop the photographs and the threat of brothers: "His sexual inclinations came blackmail and was urged—unsuccess- td the fore when he was traveling ' fQlly—to become an undercover In those less prying times, questions agent." of sexual identity weren't easily By one account that Yoder heard, broached. With. Alsop it would have Alsop was "crushed and distraught" been unthinkable: A distant relative of aid contemplated suicide; by another, •FDR and Teddy Roosevelt, the Grot- 1* reacted with his usual bluster and on- and Harvard-educated columnist btavado." In either case the U.S. am- had a mannered, patrician air accompa- bassador, Alsop's old friend Chip Boh- nied by an abrasive style that, even his len, quickly got the columnist out of friends agreed, could be off-putting. tlie country. „" As a young man he reportedly set Alsop would have been a prize catch telf the goal of insulting at least for the Soviets. 'They thought, 'If we one person by noon, and on many days can nail him, he'll be useful to us and Probably succeeded. A celebrated an- tell us what's going on in Washing- &dote has Alsop terminating an inter- tdn,' " says former CIA director Rich- view with Lewis Strauss, chairman of ard Helms. "Espionage is not just turn- the Atomic Energy Commission, with ing_ up deep dark secrets. It's also * reproach, "Admiral, you have wast- keeping informed about public things." ed half an hour of my time." •Aad who better to keep you informed While a longtime critic of Joe Mc- than the man who knew everyone in Carthy and his wild charges that the official Washington? State Department was overrun with "It was standard operating proce- Reds, Alsop was also a committed anti- dure—any tourist was potentially vul- Communist who had been denounced nerable, any embassy staff employee by the Soviet Young Communist or foreigner was targeted on some lev- League. This makes his behavior in el " says Hayden Peake, a respected in- Moscow particularly inexplicable. He telligence analyst "Alsop wasn't the first to have been caught, but he's cer- columnist consulted with CIA higher- tainly the best known." up Frank Wisner, another old friend. more or less the same thing I didn't (Alexander Mikhailov, spokesman He prepared, as instructed, a detailed know about Alsop and, even if I had, it for the Federal Counterintelligence history of both the incident and his sex wouldn't have mattered. Gentlemen Service, the successor to the KGB, life. The CIA, following standard pro- ran the world back then. checked the agency's files at the re- cedure, then forwarded the material Harold Stassen, special assistant to quest of this newspaper. Mikhailov said onto FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. the president for disarmament, put it he found nothing relating to Alsop.) By March 29, 1957, only about a most forcefully: "We respected the If the columnist considered suicide, month after the blackmail attempt, the right of people to write critical things. the thought was evanescent. His col- FBI had prepared an eight-page sum- Eisenhower was not thin-skinned." unms from those weeks give no indica- mary memo about the Alsop brothers, Stassen was adamant that no one in tion- anything momentous had hap- detailing previous investigations into the administration would have used Al- pened. His last Soviet dispatch, printed the columnists' publication of suppos- sop's homosexuality against him: "Ei- on Feb. 24 from the mining town of edly classified information as well as senhower never did engage in that Kemerovo, is upbeat, noting, "I have various "allegations of homosexuality" kind of consideration or tactic." enjoyed almost every moment of this involving Joe. Herbert Brownell, the attorney gen- Siberian journey." By March 1, he was In his book, Yoder all but accuses eral in 1957, concurs: "All. I heard was back in Paris, calmly offering measured Hoover of sleaze-mongering, writing gossip. I did not verify it." Instead, he assessments of Khrushchev. that the director "quickly grasped the says, he dismissed it. As for Alsop's The same seems true of his work material's possibilities for ingratiating writing, "I think he was very support- over the longer term. Yoder says he ive, in general, of Eisenhower's foreign found no evidence that the columnist policy." either hardened or weakened toward himself with members of the Eisen- It's a pretty picture, but another the Soviets.
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