The numbers junkie City Edition

• Published in: The Boston globe
• Main Author: Warsh, David
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, Mass Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC 03.03.1996
• ISSN: 0743-1791

The Alsop brothers, a pair of famous columnists of the '40s, '50s and '60s, are in the news because of a couple of recent books about them. Many readers today won't even remember their names. Yet I think that Robert Merry, author of "Taking On The World," is right in his contention that the Alsops were "the guardians of the American century." From the beginning of World War II until Watergate, theirs were the preeminent voices in a stellar choir of Washington columnists. (James Reston of The New York Times doesn't count because he was so deeply of his paper.) Merry's book is a moving and fair-minded evocation of a lost world. The Alsops' dominance arose from the fact that they were intimately connected to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment that ran the country during those years. There were many, many able journalists writing columns in those days, but the Alsops had come from the tobacco aristocracy of Connecticut, had gone to Groton and Harvard and Yale, were related by marriage to both branches of the Roosevelt family, and had become enthusiastically committed to the the New Deal -- even though they probably understood from the start that it ultimately entailed the erosion of WASP hegemony. Their roots were so deep, their work habits so good, their vision so uncompromising that they became the premier narrators of the Cold War, much as Walter Lippman had been the principal commentator of the period of both World Wars and the years in between. It is almost impossible now to imagine the trust and familiarity with which a handful of prep school chums and their affiliates ran the country in those days. In this sense, Merry's book is the journalistic adjunct to "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made," the remarkable group biography of a few years back of Robert Lovett, John McCloy, Averill Harriman, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan and Dean Acheson, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. The American response to the end of World War II -- the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the containment of the Soviet Union, the invention of the "mixed" American economy -- cannot be understood without an understanding of these lives.