I have been asked many times to consider writing a biography of my father, Stewart Alsop, a journalist who wrote a weekly syndicated newspaper column, Matter of Fact, with his older brother, my uncle Joe from 1946 to 1958. After a decade as the Washington editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Daddy moved over to Newsweek where, for the last six years of his life, he wrote the opinion piece on the back page.
But I’ve always shrugged off the suggestion that I tell his story. People would be interested in his influence on the political life of Washington, D.C. from 1946 until his death in 1974. Many writers have covered that territory in books like Taking on the World by Robert Merry and The Georgetown Set by Gregg Herken and my father’s own memoir, Stay of Execution, A Sort of Memoir. I’ve always been more interested in the emotional life of our family during the Cold War years which I wrote about that in my memoir, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies.
So, my father’s journalistic career as well his thoughts about a terminal cancer diagnosis need no further discussion or illumination from me.
However, in researching my memoir, I learned more about his war years, first his service in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, a British regiment which he joined in early 1942 when the U.S. military turned him down because of high blood pressure and asthma, his war in Italy in 1943, and finally his assignment to lead a Jedburgh commando team with the OSS.
In the summer of 1944, he left behind his 18-year-old bride of a few weeks to jump behind enemy lines in order to liase with the French Resistance. But Tish, that young British war bride who became my mother, was the subject of Daughter of Spies, so I kept the focus on her, acknowledging to myself that much more could be written about Daddy’s time in the war. Perhaps one day I would write that story.
I admit to mixed feelings when I first heard from Timothy Gay, a prominent World War II historian, that he’d like to write a piece about my father and Team Alexander, the gang of three that Daddy commanded in the months they careened around France dodging enemy tanks and carrying out guerilla missions to harass the retreating Germans.
This was a story I’d hoped to write myself, but after some consideration and other pressing deadlines, I decided this well-published, experienced WWII historian was the better person to take it on. We first connected in 2021, but Gay took the time to do deep research, the kind I might have neglected and as a result, I learned much more about my father’s war years than I knew before. The two part piece, Blue Blooded Guerilla, was just published in a UK magazine, HISTORY IS NOW and I recommend it. And here is the link to Part II of the story. As a daughter, I especially appreciated this description, one I could never have written myself.
“His facial features mirrored Hollywood matinee idol Robert Taylor’s: roguish blue eyes, an elongated patrician nose, mischievous eyebrows, and a mouth that always seemed to be suppressing a smile or a smirk. Even with a mop of brown hair hacked by military barbers, Alsop still radiated a Fitzgeraldian air of old money.”
