‘The Columnist’ portrays Fourth Estate giant from times past

From the New Deal days of the 1930s, until the waning years of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, Joseph Alsop was one of the most influential, widely syndicated columnists in America, whose work appeared in 300 newspapers nationwide.

He covered everything from the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, the convicted Lindbergh baby murderer, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unsuccessful effort to “pack” the Supreme Court. After serving in the Pacific during World War II (and subsequently teaming with his brother, Stewart Alsop, also a journalist), he traveled the world, commenting on foreign affairs throughout the Cold War. At times he even used his position as a foreign correspondent as a cover for intelligence-gathering activities for the CIA. And he became an unofficial adviser and friend to President John F. Kennedy.

Yes, the times were radically different for the Fifth Estate during Alsop’s heyday. And it certainly did not hurt that he was the quintessential WASP insider both by birth and by tuning. (Not only were his parents involved in Republican politics, but through his mother he was related to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and James Monroe, with Eleanor Roosevelt a distant cousin.)

All this, along with a compromising incident that occurred during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1957, could easily peg Alsop as the natural subject for a play. And so he is in “The Columnist,” a somewhat fictionalized account penned by David Auburn, the University of Chicago alum who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Proof.” The play, which debuted in New York in 2012, is now receiving its Chicago debut by American Blues Theater, in a production directed by Keira Fromm and starring Philip Earl Johnson as Alsop.

As it happens, Auburn came to Alsop by indirection.

“I got the idea of writing about journalists after the Iraq War, when Judith Miller [the former New York Times reporter] became embroiled in a controversy after her coverage of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ and was so widely discredited. I tried to figure out what was going on with all that, and played around with it for a while, but it never came to anything. At the same time I also was doing a lot of reading about the Vietnam War [Auburn was born in 1969, so that war is history for him], and Alsop’s name just kept popping up. He seemed to have led a Zelig-like life throughout much of the 20th century.”

There also was a bit of scandal. For during a trip to Moscow in 1957 Alsop engaged in a hotel-room encounter with a young man who turned out to be a KGB operative. This was, of course, at a time when homosexuality was kept in the closet, and seen as an easy route to blackmail, although Alsop went directly to the U.S. Embassy to report the incident. (His marriage to Susan Mary Jay Patten, which lasted from 1961 to 1978, also is dealt with in the play.)

“I would like to think I was incredibly prescient,” quipped Auburn, when asked about how the rumors of a compromising Russian video spinning around the current president, as well as his attitude toward the press, might color “The Columnist.” “But I am curious to see what audiences think of the play now, in this bizarre, unprecedented time.”

“Alsop’s politics don’t really map onto our contemporary descriptions of left and right,” Auburn said. “But while he remained socially liberal until the 1960s — opposing Joe McCarthy and supporting civil rights — he was a Cold War-era hawk who championed the concept of Soviet ‘containment.’ And having come through World War II he believed that with the commitment of American military power you couldn’t fail. ”

When the newer generation of journalists like David Halberstam exposed many of the failures in the Vietnam War, and student activists raised opposition to that war, he couldn’t deal with it and seemed suddenly out of touch.

“Things just changed so rapidly in the 1960s,” said Auburn. “Alsop didn’t die until 1989, but he lost a moderating influence when his journalistic partnership with his brother Stewart came to an end in 1958, and in a sense his life ended with the assassination of Kennedy in 1963. Yet reading his best work on microfiche I realized what a great stylist he was — funny, insightful, seductive — a man who knew everyone, and made you feel as if you were hearing the news from a gossipy friend.”