I never knew Joseph Alsop was gay. Interesting profile in today's NYT.
>>>>The person who sent me the link to that recording, which was declassified in the 1990s, is David Auburn. A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Auburn has written a play about Joe Alsop entitled “The Columnist.” It opens on Broadway on Wednesday and stars John Lithgow.
“What you get from listening to that phone call,” Auburn told me the other day, “is that Alsop doesn’t think Johnson knows how things work, and he is going to explain it to him. The assumption of authority is just incredible.”
What is likely to amaze younger theatergoers — living, as many do, in a world of bloggers and anonymous critics and a fractured, often ideologically driven journalism — is that journalists ever had that kind of authority. But the great columnists of the postwar generation did. Their columns were part of the weaponry of policymaking, and they themselves were powerbrokers.
None were more overt about this than Alsop. His power stemmed less from the fact that his column appeared in 300 newspapers than from the fact that he had the ear of every important person in Washington. During the Eisenhower years, he had fought against Joe McCarthy, a courageous stance, given that he was gay — and homosexuality in that era was a potential career ender.>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/opinion/nocera-the-voice-of-authority.html?_r=1
More interesting stuff in his wiki entry.
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