"I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs [Hardcover]

Joseph Wright Alsop (Author), Adam Platt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1992

The memoirs of American journalist Joseph Alsop, which recount his service in China in World War II, his friendships with Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt, the rise and fall of Joe McCarthy, and provide sketches of such influential leaders as Charles de Gaulle and General Joseph Stilwell.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A confessed "cosseted child of privilege"--he attended Groton and Harvard and could call the U.S. First Lady "cousin Eleanor"--Alsop spent almost 50 years as a dilettantish syndicated political columnist who thrived in "dining-out" Washington and seemed to have remembered every meal he ever ate. Yet Alsop's posthumous memoirs cover a colorful era of American history (1935-74) in which he played several significant roles; he admits to using his column (always written with a partner) "to promote actively causes in which I believed." His reporting, therefore, was at times suspect. While Alsop doesn't give a knowledgeable reader much new about the era, he writes entertainingly enough to rate a limited recommendation for acquisition. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91.
-Chet Hagan, Berks Cty. P.L. System, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Undertaken during his last two years, after being told he had lung cancer, Alsop's richly human, compelling pages were smoothed over and completed by colleague Platt. Alsop (1910-89) was a Washington journalist of great wit, knowledge, and humanity. Raised on his father's 700-acre farm on the Connecticut Gold Coast, he recalls elegiacally his schooling as an ``educated gentleman'' at Groton and Harvard and his youth among the Long Island North Shore's ``WASP Ascendancy,'' the fabulously rich who produced many of the nation's leaders, especially the two Roosevelt Presidents to whom Alsop was related. This tribe, with its high-flown diction and vast dress codes, also produced the ``Wise Men'' who helped guide FDR through the New Deal and WW II. As a fresh young reporter in the New York Herald Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau, Alsop found himself leading a double life as a working reporter with a Senate beat and as a nightly diner-out among the elite, with dinner every second month with cousin Eleanor and the President at the White House. He switched to writing a column in tandem with a second reporter and eventually with his brother Stewart. In Hong Kong during WW II, Alsop went to an opium den with The New Yorker's Emily Hahn (then pregnant), then joined Colonel Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group of ``Flying Tigers'' and later became a minor actor in the recall of General Joseph Stilwell. Alsop gives us firsthand views of George Kennan, Joseph McCarthy, Charles de Gaulle, Dean Acheson, Winston Churchill, and Robert Oppenheimer, among others. His friendship with JFK becomes exhilarating. But the Vietnam War collapses his gusto, and when he retires from journalism in 1974, it is because ``I could no longer understand what was happening in America, perhaps because I had finally become an old man, frozen in the viewpoints of the past.'' Top-flight--and then some. (Photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; First Edition edition (February 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393029174
• ISBN-13: 978-0393029178
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting memories of era in Washington and wartime China, July 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: "I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs (Hardcover)

As a staunch Cold War and extraordinarily connected political columnist in Washington for forty years, Joseph Alsop has many fascinating and amusing anecdotes to relate.

Moreover, the issues of the period between 1945 and 1965 (the period of his greatest influence) were far more momentous than the mostly tittle-tattle of much of the last decade of Washington journalism: the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the recurrent Berlin crises, the creation of NATO, SEATO and CENTO.

Alsop's connections with the high and mighty (even family connections such as Eleanor Roosevelt or former Connecticut neighbor Dean Acheson sent to Groton as a boy on Alsop's father's recommendation), and others are astonishing. He had much "inside" knowledge of how the "greats" and "near greats" dealt with global issues.

Alsop is also amusing and interesting about his WASP privileged background - his education at Groton and Harvard, the anticipated dress and social etiquette.

Although Alsop's close friendship with JFK may have given him the most pleasure in writing this memoir, it is his experience in China during W.W.II, about which he writes at wonderful length, that is truly historic.

In Chungking (China's war-time capital), Alsop played a central role in the corner of famous Flying Tigers' leader General Claire Chennault and T.V. Soong (sometime Foreign Minister and Chiang kai-Shek brother-in-law) in the great feud with the Stilwell-State-War Dept. - foreign correspondents over the proper political and military strategy for China. Alsop's accounts of what occured are memorable and truly valuable. (The heated feud persisted - so that long after Stilwell's death, Chennault was testifying before Congress that Stilwell was a traitor!).

Alsop actually secretly drafted the demand for Stilwell's recall for the Chinese government! He was convinced that Stilwell harmed the American cause by his unconcealed contempt for Chiang, by a proposed Burmese campaign military strategy that would divert needed resources from the more potentially fruitful air war, an unwillingness to allocate sufficient supplies to Chennault (and later to those seeking to defend Eastern China, particularly the forward-most airfields), and too great an openness to the possibility of allying with the Communists.

The China story is fascinating - in part because these are views that are in direct contradiction to most American accounts which are quite pro-Stilwell and anti-Chiang.

The memoirs convey throughout the sadness implied by the book's title. Alsop was suffering from cancer at the time of writing - and had felt increasingly out of the mainstream of American journalism and political opinion in the early 1970s due to his more conservative views on the Vietnam War. (E.g., Alsop is mentioned mostly in derision by Vietnam correspondent, David Halberstam in his book, The Best And the Brightest, a view that seems to have been shared by other journalists in Vietnam).

Alsop seems to have been of a rare breed - born into privilege, greatly enjoying his physical comfort(his man-servant astounded the Flying Tigers pilots) and yet who seems in his memoirs to be actually without any snobbery whatever and to have been irritated when he encountered it.

Smart, loving the battle, very opinionated (the opposite of an "objective" journalist or even soldier), the memoir is highly enjoyable and recommended - even if to be read by some as the reminiscences of a great contrarian.