An Instinct for the Center

His was a long day's journey into night. Stewart Alsop knew that he was soon to die; he bore the knowledge gallantly and wrote about it with unpitying candor.

It was almost three years ago that Alsop discovered that he had leukemia, and doctors gave him roughly a year to live. But his disease proved atypical, and he lived beyond his allotted span. The best description the doctors could find for it was "smoldering leukemia," and between periods of hospitalization he had remissions during which he felt fine, wrote his columns and sometimes even played tennis. But he went through an ordeal of uncertainty, savagely ranging between hope and despair. Out of that ordeal he wrote his memorable book, Stay of Execution, an almost classic deathbed testament that is partly day-by-day diary of the progress and recession of a deadly disease, partly reflections and recollections of the good life he had had and was leaving. Inspired by it, people wrote Alsop from all over the world. Last week Stewart Alsop died, only nine days past the celebration of his 60th birthday.

During his career in Washington, few newsmen commanded more respect or as much affection. He first came to Washington in 1946 as the junior partner of his brother Joseph in their syndicated newspaper column "Matter of Fact." As scions of an old Republican Connecticut family, the Alsop boys were in a unique position. While more mundane journalists attended press conferences, the Alsops lunched with fellow Grotonian Dean Acheson or shot quail with then Secretary of State Christian Herter. But, unlike Joe, Stewart had no arrogance, either socially or journalistically. Said one friend: "Joe's the kind of guy who can rise from an interview with a famous source and say, 'Sir, you have just wasted 30 minutes of my time.' Stew would never do that. He suffers fools more gladly."

Combative Partnership. There was always an element of gallantry about Stewart Alsop. During World War II the U.S. Army turned him down because of asthma and high blood pressure, but he arranged to join the British army and fought in Italy and Africa. He eventually got transferred to the American OSS and was stationed in England, where he courted his future wife Patricia ("Tish") Hankey. The OSS promptly parachuted him into occupied France to help the Resistance. After the war, he left a job with a New York City publishing house to join Joe in Washington.

Stewart described the Alsop brother act as a "combative partnership." Joe was the brilliant polemicist; Stewart the steady fellow and, among other things, a more conscientious legman than his brother. "Joe can play the organ of doom better than I," Stewart conceded. After twelve years, in 1958, Stewart and Joe agreed to "an amicable divorce." Stewart was offered a job with the Saturday Evening Post, and soon established a persona all his own. Shortly before the Post folded he became a columnist for Newsweek. In his separate status, he split with belligerent Joe over Indochina. (Stewart: "It is not practical to continue to fight a war that has no popular support at all.") With Charles Bartlett he wrote an intimate report of the intricate discussions that led Kennedy to the Cuban missile crisis, including the first use of "hawks and doves" and the unforgettable quote from Dean Rusk: "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other guy just blinked." Stewart always had an instinct for the memorable or revealing quote.

Familiar and Folksy. His style was familiar, direct and often pleasantly illuminated with scholarly or folksy references. U.S. policy in Viet Nam reminded him of Little Miss Fix-It, "who ends up with blood all over her pretty little hands." On governmental censorship, he complained that the Administration was suffering from "Daddy-knowsbestism--telling us not to ask questions or Daddy spank." Or on Watergate, recalling his own service in the OSS and his close study of the techniques of other spy services, Alsop could write with coldly measured indignation: "Politicians have played tricks on each other since politics was invented. But this is not politics; this is war ... a genuinely terrifying innovation ... Any person proven to have used these techniques should not only be punished by the law; he should be banned forever from participation in American politics. For Watergate has been an attempt to alter the very nature of the ancient American political system."

In his long sieges in the hospital, lying alongside other terminal cases, he made his own radical conclusions and offered some radical remedies: a patient suffering beyond endurance should be given the choice to end it. If the patient refuses that option, he should be allowed as much pain-killing drug as he wants, and that drug probably should be heroin, which is estimated to be four times as effective a painkiller as any alternative drug. "If a human being must die, it is surely better that he die in the illusion of painless pleasure--and heroin is very pleasurable--than in lonely agony."

Shortly before his death, Alsop was visited by TIME'S Art White, who reported: "His wife Tish sat near him, jumping up now and then to check that the antibiotic was flowing properly into Stew's arm. We talked about his book. Why did he write it? 'For money mostly. But if you're told you're going to die in a year and a half at the most, you want to leave something of yourself behind.' We talked about his brother Joe, who had given him some 40 transfusions of platelets in the past year or so. Each transfusion took about three hours, and Joe's help was essential. Platelets have to be matched and blood relatives are a reliable source. Stew joked that he had become more conservative since 'getting so many of Joe's elderly platelets.' He got transfusions of hemoglobin from other donors. 'It makes you feel better at once. It's better than two martinis.'

"What was he proudest of? His book. 'And I am always proud of the part Joe and I played in bringing down McCarthy. We were the first to attack McCarthy all out. And I'm proud that my column writing has been not brilliant but sensible and fair. I have an instinct for the center. I'm not a passionate man.' When we left, Stew climbed out of bed, hitched up his blue pajamas and shook hands. Always the gentleman."

Four days later, the gentle man was dead. By his own testimony, his regret --though he had put up a memorable fight--was minimal. As he wrote in his book: "A dying man needs to die as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist."

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