Even a broken clock ...

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Joseph Alsop - Brief article

The Columnist, a new play about Joseph Alsop, whose observations on public affairs were a staple of op-ed pages for forty years, has attracted a lot of attention and praise for its devastating portrait of Alsop's malign influence on American foreign policy in Vietnam. I did not get to know Alsop until a decade or so later, but his arrogance was still obvious. So that and everything I heard about him from friends during the Kennedy-Johnson era combines to confirm that his portrayal in the play is accurate.

There was a time, however, when Alsop was not wrong. During the years 1940 and 1941, when the Republican presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie and Franklin Roosevelt joined in the effort to save Britain and prepare this country...