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A thrilling history of the Office of Strategic Services...)
A thrilling history of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s precursor to the CIA, and its secret operations behind enemy lines during World War II.
Born in the fires of the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was the brainchild of legendary US Maj. Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, designed to provide covert aid to resistance fighters in European nations occupied by Germany’s Nazi aggressors. Paratroopers Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden—both of whom would become important political columnists in postwar years—became part of Wild Bill’s able collection of soldiers, spies, and covert operatives. Sub Rosa is an enthralling insider’s history of the remarkable intelligence operation that gave birth to the CIA.
In Sub Rosa, Alsop and Braden take readers on a breathtaking journey through the birth and development of the top secret wartime espionage organization and detail many of the extraordinary OSS missions in France, Germany, Dakar and Casablanca in North Africa, and in the jungles of Burma that helped to hasten the end of the Japanese Empire and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s powerful Reich.
As exciting as any international thriller written by Eric Ambler or Graham Greene, Alsop and Braden’s Sub Rosa is an indispensable addition to the literary history of American espionage and intelligence.
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A poignant memoir of a full life and an impending death...)
A poignant memoir of a full life and an impending death, written by one of America’s foremost journalists during his battle with terminal cancer.
For three decades, from the end of World War II well into the Watergate era, internationally renowned newspaper and magazine columnist Stewart Alsop was a fixture on the Washington, DC, political landscape. In 1971, the respected journalist was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, marking the beginning of his courageous three-year battle with the terrible cancer that ravaged his body but could not damage his spirit or slow his facile and brilliantly incisive mind.
A passionate social critic and peerless political analyst who hobnobbed with presidents from FDR to Nixon, and enjoyed the respectful fellowship of such notable figures as Winston Churchill, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Henry Kissinger, Alsop insightfully chronicles the course of his medical history without a trace of maudlin self-pity while celebrating his family, friends, colleagues, and an extraordinary life well lived.
Stay of Execution is Stewart Alsop’s moving, powerful, and inspiring memoir of his terminal illness and his life before—an unforgettable true story of courage and accomplishment, trials and tragedy from one of the most revered American journalists of the twentieth century.
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A fascinating analysis of two of the most important fig...)
A fascinating analysis of two of the most important figures in 1960s American politics, written during their battle for the GOP presidential nomination.
Richard Milhous Nixon was one of the most controversial politicians in America’s history: a California congressman, senator, vice president, and president who was forced to resign his position as US Chief Executive because of his role in the scandalous Watergate affair. Nelson Rockefeller was the scion of a phenomenally wealthy American family and longtime governor of New York State. In 1960 they were the leading contenders to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States, one of whom would face the Democratic challenger, Senator John F. Kennedy, in November’s general election.
Written by acclaimed journalist Stewart Alsop during the heat of the political race to the Republican Convention, Nixon & Rockefeller provides a revealing, often surprising dual portrait of two giants of twentieth-century American politics. Alsop, an acknowledged Washington, DC, insider and one of the most esteemed political analysts of his era, explores the backgrounds, mindsets, and distinct personalities, as well as the strengths and failings of these two candidates vying for the highest office in the country.
The author’s intelligent and insightful views on the nature of a Nixon presidency versus a Rockefeller presidency make for fascinating reading in light of the political outcome that ultimately was and one that might have been.
The Center: People and Power in Political Washington
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A portrait of Washington politics during one of the mos...)
A portrait of Washington politics during one of the most turbulent eras in American history by the twentieth century’s premier US government insider.
During his three decades as a journalist and political pundit for the New York Herald Tribune and Newsweek magazine, Stewart Alsop covered many of the defining historical events of mid-to-late twentieth-century America, from the post–World War II boom and the Red Scare to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. In The Center, Alsop provides a perceptive, provocative, and marvelously erudite insider’s view of the American political landscape of the 1960s, reporting from the beating heart of Washington, DC, the power center of the Western world.
With an unblinking eye and razor-sharp intellect, Alsop cogently explores an arena of unbridled political power and influence that spans from the White House to Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court. He offers remarkable insights into the motivations and very human foibles of the key figures behind some of the century’s most momentous events: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director Richard Helms and Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, among many others.
The Center is a must-read for anyone interested in American politics and how the system got us to where we are today.
Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop was an American journalist and political analyst.
Background
Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop was born on May 17, 1914 in Avon, Connecticut, United States, the son of Joseph Wright Alsop, Sr. , an insurance executive and public official, and Corinne Douglas Robinson, a legislator. Alsop was raised on a genteel farm.
Education
Alsop graduated from Groton School in 1932 and from Yale with a Bachelor of Arts degree four years later.
Career
Alsop worked as an editor at the publishing house of Doubleday Doran in New York. He went to England in 1942 to join the Sixtieth Regiment, King's Royal Rifle Corps. Commissioned in the British Army in 1943, he saw action in North Africa and Italy, for which he was commended.
In 1944 Alsop transferred to U. S. Army intelligence with General William ("Wild Bill") Donovan's elite Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Shortly after D day Alsop parachuted behind German lines and successfully contacted the French underground. This dangerous work earned Alsop the French croix de guerre with palm. Alsop and Thomas Braden described OSS methods and operations in Sub Rosa (1946).
The quiet, contemplative Alsop resigned his commission in 1945 to join his gregarious older brother, Joseph W. Alsop, Jr. (1910-1989), already an established journalist, in writing a political column called "Matter of Fact" for the New York Herald Tribune. Their first joint effort appeared on December 31, 1945, and the column was soon widely syndicated.
Basing themselves in Washington, the brothers became near neighbors in Georgetown, and each hosted memorable dinner parties that helped make the neighborhood fashionable. The Alsops shamelessly exploited family ties, including cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Joe's ability to uncover a political story matched Stew's capacity for analysis. Each traveled extensively, refusing to write about any country or its leaders without a visit. Both wrote lucidly, with Joe's bite complementing Stew's wit. Their column helped shape the political landscape at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s. They correctly and shrewdly predicted the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union's Berlin blockade, and the vulnerability of South Korea to attack.
Incensed by the Atomic Energy Commission's humiliation of the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, they published a rebuttal entitled We Accuse! (1954).
In the mid-1950s the Alsops drifted apart. While Joe remained a fervent anti-Communist and, amid the prosperity of the 1950s, lost interest in Roosevelt-style reforms, Stew, the restless intellectual, found anti-Communism sterile, feared nuclear holocaust, and worried about the public's desire to ignore domestic issues.
In 1958 the brothers ended their joint column. Neither ever exerted as much influence alone as the two had together. In 1958, Stewart became a contributing editor at the Saturday Evening Post. He eventually wrote a popular column on a regular basis, but the Post was dying, and in 1968 Alsop moved his column to the more liberal Newsweek, where it remained a biweekly fixture until near his death.
Alsop's columns often packed a punch. Having abandoned anti-Communism, Alsop in 1964 warned against an American war in Vietnam, but he did not oppose President Lyndon Johnson's troop escalation in 1965 because he believed that differences over foreign policy were best aired in private. Like others, Alsop later rued his failure to speak out and believed that his silence had served Johnson poorly. When he did attack the war, he traced its inconclusiveness to Vietnamese disdain for American culture and to military mismanagement, noting that only one-seventh of American soldiers in Vietnam served in combat, that 88 percent of combat soldiers were draftees, and that draftees died at twice the rate of regular army personnel. His factual observations sidestepped the debate over the war, and even those who disagreed with his conclusions, like his hawkish brother Joe, found his information instructive.
In 1969 he pointed out how student deferments had both muffled protest by protecting the influential middle class from the draft and created fear and resentment on college campuses. By 1970 he argued that only the abolition of the draft could restore prestige and morale to the army. In 1973 the Watergate scandal alarmed Alsop, who stated that if the corruption and cover-up involved Richard Nixon, then the president would have to resign. Readers found this attack of Yankee conscience startling, and Nixon grew nervous, but Alsop was merely stating a political reality, that a discredited president could no longer govern.
In 1971 Alsop suddenly took ill and was diagnosed with a rare, incurable leukemia. Through experimental treatments at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he died, his cancer went into remission for a time. He wrote his last book, Stay of Execution (1973), about that experience.
In 1974, as a powerful treatment overwhelmed him, Alsop one day found himself in a dream. He was on a train, and the conductor called out "Baltimore, " but Alsop decided not to get off. When he work up, he realized that he had consciously decided not to die. Ever the loyal Washingtonian, he knew that Baltimore symbolized death.
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.
Alsop died on May 26, 1974 and was buried in Middletown, Connecticut.
Although his parents were Republicans, Alsop admired both President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, his mother's cousin. Alsop, like President Harry Truman, wanted a vigorous federal government that would pursue reform at home while containing communism abroad. He favored both the Marshall Plan's massive economic assistance to Europe and military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At the same time he defended Dean Acheson and Henry A. Wallace against Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's repeated charges that Communists occupied high places in the government. He found no evidence to support such claims.
Having abandoned anti-Communism, Alsop in 1964 warned against an American war in Vietnam, but he did not oppose President Lyndon Johnson's troop escalation in 1965 because he believed that differences over foreign policy were best aired in private. Like others, Alsop later rued his failure to speak out and believed that his silence had served Johnson poorly.
Personality
Alsop combined rare political insight with ruthless integrity and hard-boiled factual analysis.
Connections
On June 20, 1944, Alsop married Patricia Hankey in London. Only later did Alsop learn that his wife was in the British intelligence. They had six children.