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I've Seen the Best of It
Memoirs
By Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt
“Joe Alsop was one of Washington’s most eminent chroniclers of American political life and international diplomacy. This fascinating posthumous memoir, written with the elegance, candor, and integrity that were his hallmark, is his reassessment of a lifetime’s observation of the world’s leaders and their grand designs. Above all, they are the personal reflections of a journalist who knew all the players and who never hesitated to express his opinion.”
—Henry Kissinger
“Joe Alsop is one of the legendary reporters of this century, and he gives a memorable portrait of a changing America in this wonderfully vivid, entertaining, and irascible memoir.”
—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)
“During the half century that I knew Joe I cannot remember ever agreeing with him on any political matter but I found his company ‘a vast joy’ (an Alsopian phrase) as I find, now, his memoir, I’ve Seen the Best of It, where for once, we do agree: we did see the best of it.”
—Gore Vidal
“Joseph W. Alsop played a unique and pivotal role in the transformation of Washington, DC, from a specialized government town…to being the center of power not only in the United States but in the world at large. . . . I’ve Seen the Best of It is the best insight into the essences of our era that has yet been written.”
—Paul Nitze (1907-2004)
Summary
Joseph Alsop (1910-1989) was raised on a gentleman's farm in Connecticut among the remnants of what he calls the "WASP" Ascendancy. Elegiacally he describes the social and culinary rituals of this vanished world.
From FDR's New Deal until the Vietnam War, Alsop became one of America's most influential journalists. A fixture in Washington society, and unusually for that society, an esthete, Joseph Alsop knew intimately everyone who mattered in American politics, including all the presidents of his day, but was especially close to John and Jacqueline Kennedy.
In addition, Alsop was well known around the world, visited Churchill in London, de Gaulle in Paris, and describes these and other larger-than-life figures. No journalist since Henry Adams had such a long and prominent career in the nation's capital or became such a social arbiter. No journalist since Henry Adams so brilliantly described the habits of the great and near-great of his day, in government and elsewhere.
About the Author
Joseph Alsop (1910-1989), born on a gentleman’s farm in Connecticut, was arguably the most influential journalist of his era. When he died, these memoirs were nearly completed.
Adam Platt is a Washington-based journalist. He has written for Newsweek, The Economist, and The American Spectator, and is a contributing writer at Mirabella magazine.