Fact or Fiction: Alsop and the KGB

We've had a number of people ask about the KGB aspect of the story. That piece is mostly true. From a piece from the Sydney Morning Herald:

On April 1, 1957, CIA director Allen Dulles wrote a "SECRET EYES ONLY" memo to Hoover, enclosing a nine-page confession by Alsop, Washington socialite and conservative journalist, detailing that he was homosexual and that, consequently, eight weeks earlier he had been framed by the KGB in Moscow when men burst into a hotel room, catching him in "the act" with a young Russian "pleasant-mannered fellow". This was not an April Fool's day joke, this was the hard-core side of the Cold War. So sensitive was the matter it took 42 years for the confession to become unclassified. Alsop initially became suicidal when caught by the Russians, who tried, but failed according to Alsop, to get him to change sides. He was helped by US ambassador Charles Bohlen in Moscow (himself subject to rumours of homosexuality and an appointment opposed by McCarthy). Initially, Hoover and Dulles accepted Alsop's abject mea culpa and self-described "folly". A memo to Hoover marked "top secret" indicates Dulles was still suspicious: "I am not at all satisfied with the subject's evaluation of his own situation or his refusal to co-operate more fully in the interview." 

Nevertheless only six years later, Alsop is recorded in tapes three days after John F. Kennedy's assassination strongly urging, in a subtle blend of insistence and grovelling, that Johnson set up a blue ribbon commission that would "carry unchallengeable convictions".

The transcript of that LBJ phone call has been released and you can read it in its entirety here.  From this it sounds like Joe Alsop was basically the guy behind the Warren Commission. Who knew?

Fact or Fiction: JFK's Inauguration Night

One thing we've been asked a few times by folks who've seen The Columnist is - did President John F. Kennedy really come to the Alsop house on inauguration night? 

The answer, reportedly, is yes. Here's what a piece from the Washington Post says:

The president stayed about 90 minutes, enjoyed champagne and some terrapin soup, and perhaps -- according to several memoirs of the time -- a brief liaison with one of the young women present that night. The details and guest list of the party have been muddied by decades of revisionist spinning. But this was Alsop's triumph: an acknowledgment by the president on this, of all nights, that Alsop and the liberal elite who gathered in these historic old houses mattered. 

"The long, festive night and the Kennedy visit reflected for Joe the transformation of Washington," writes Robert Merry in "Taking on the World," a biography of Alsop and his brother, Stewart. "There was a new spirit in the city, a political and social ferment, as well as the prospect of imaginative leadership in the executive branch. Georgetown was once again fashionable."

Kennedy's inaugural address is routinely mentioned as one of the best in American history. Not only was it the first presidential inaugural address televised in color, but it stands as one of the most memorable and oft quoted speeches in America history. In case you missed it the first time, here's a great recording of it:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
—John F. Kennedy, inauguration address, January 1961.

Meet the Players: David Halberstam

David Halberstam was born in New York City on April 10, 1934. HIs father was a surgeon in the US Arm so the family moved a great deal during World War II until they settled in Yonkers, New York in the 1950s. Halberts attended Harvard University where he became the managing editor of the student-run newspaper The Harvard Crimson until he graduated in 1955. Upon graduating Harvard with a degree in journalism, Halberstam took at job at the Daily Times Leader of West Point, Mississippi as he wanted to be in the South to cover the civil rights struggle. He eventually moved to Nashville to write for their large daily newspaper The Tennessean. 

In 1960 Halberstam joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times where he covered the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Later that year he published his first book, The Noblest Roman, a “novel of political skullduggery” in the Deep South. The Times soon sent him out as a war correspondent to cover the independence struggle raging in the Congo.

In September 1962, the Times reassigned Halberstam to its Saigon bureau to cover the escalating conflict in Vietnam. The official Pentagon and State Department statements declared that the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies were winning a war against a ragged band of Communist rebels. However, Halberstam found another story when he followed the troops into the field. The insurgents, backed by the Communist government in the North, enjoyed widespread support in rural Vietnam, where the U.S-backed Saigon government was deeply unpopular. His reports were denounced by Kennedy’s supporters as dishonest, if not disloyal, but Halberstam continued to report the story as he saw it. In 1963, he received the prestigious George Polk Award for his reporting from Vietnam, and at age 30 he was awarded the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The following year he published The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era. 

During his travels, Halberstam was staying in Warsaw, Poland, where he met and then married Elzbieta Czyzewska, a Polish actress. They stayed in Poland for a few years to allow Elzbieta to continue her career, but Halberstam’s criticism of Poland's communist dictatorship caused the government to expel the couple from the country in 1967. The pair made a new home in New York City, where she resumed her career. They divorced in 1977. Halberstam married Jean Sandness Butler in 1979.

After the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, Halberstam continued to write a number of books about the Vietnam War and Washington politics. Halberstam's reputation as a major historian was firmly established with his best-seller The Best and the Brightest (1972), in which he traced the path by which a gifted and promising team of political and military experts had led the nation into the greatest foreign policy disaster in its history. The book was a number one best-seller and has had a pervasive influence on many Americans' thinking about foreign policy for over a generation. 

Halberstam next turned his attention to the growing concentration of influence in the hands of a few very large media corporations in his 1979 book, The Powers That Be. 

In the 1980s he switched gears and turned to sports, a personal passion. He traveled with the Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team in the 1979 season and wrote a book about this experience. Over the next two decades, a number of Halberstam's books evoked the drama of professional sports to mirror larger movements in American society. He wrote more than 20 books throughout his career and was a reporter until the end. 

Halberstam died on April 23, 2007 at the age of 73 in a car accident in Menlo Park. He was in town chasing a story - he was headed to an interview football player Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, often called football's greatest game. The car Mr. Halberstam was a passenger was in was broadsided by another car while making a turn onto Willow Road. Halberstam was pronounced dead on the scene. The car was driven by Kevin Jones, a UC Berkeley grad student who was a journalism student and had volunteered to drive Mr. Halberstam. Jones pled no contest to a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charge and was sentenced to 5 days in jail, with a recommendation that the time be served in the San Mateo County Sherriff’s Office work program rather than behind bars, and was ordered to complete 200 hours of community service, 2 years of probation, and had his license temporarily revoked. The book that Halberstam was writing was completed after his death by Frank Gifford, a player on the losing 1958 Giants team and was titled The Glory Game.

Meet the Players: Susan Mary Alsop

Seated in the front row: on the left is Jackie Kennedy and on the right is Susan Mary Alsop

Susan Mary Jay was descended from John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and grew up as one of America’s most privileged daughters. This daughter of a diplomat was born in Rome and grew up in South American and Europe. Her mother attended the wedding to Russian royalty - Nicholas and Alexandra - in 1894. 

As a young woman, she had Sunday night suppers with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. As a teenager, she had tea with Edith Wharton.

Susan Mary took a job at Vogue as a receptionist, model, and writer in 1939. In October 1939, at the age of 20, she married a man named Bill Patten. After World Ware II, she joined him in Paris where he held a job at the American Embassy. She as known for the entertaining dinners she held for European, British and American social and diplomatic luminaries that had a serious underlying intent: to strengthen European-American ties. She was often seated beside British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ("He has decided I am . . . French . . . and nothing will deter him from speaking French to me.") when she wasn't drinking champagne with Noel Coward and the Duke of Windsor. Bill and Susan Mary had two children - a son name William Jr. and a daughter named Anne. Bill Patten died in 1960 of emphysema. 

Susan Mary returned to the United States and she married Joe Alsop, Patten’s college roommate, in 1961. Susan Mary and Joe divorced in 1973 but continued to remain great friends. They continued to host joint dinner parties for the political luminaries of the time and helped raise their grandchildren. After the divorce, Susan Mary started to write. She published several books and became a contributing editor at Architectural Digest. 

After her death on August 18, 2004 of complications from pneumonia her son Bill discovered through a DNA test that he and his sister had different fathers. It’s now believed that William Jr’s father was Duff Cooper, the British Ambassador to France.