In June, the Alsops dined with the Johnsons and their close friends Clark Clifford, Jack Valenti, and their wives. It was a pleasant evening—the heavy summer humidity had not set in yet—so they took a stroll on the South Lawn. Susan Mary noticed a black suitcase the size of a large radio being carried around by two strapping secret security officers and wondered with curiosity if it was the button. A hundred feet away, the men were discussing Vietnam.
Joe’s opinion on Vietnam was in line with his beliefs about the global war against Communism. He felt America had obligations toward South Vietnam, a small, fragile state deserving foreign assistance. He also felt strongly about the danger of Communism spreading in Southeast Asia, all the more as China had already fallen in 1949. At the time, Joe had criticized the United States for letting China go, and now, according to him, the situation in Vietnam required vigorous action. It was a matter of honor and prestige, not to mention America’s position in Asia and the world in general. Joe had returned from Vietnam in May 1964 and sounded a rallying cry, but it was an election year, and Johnson did not want to show his hand or be pushed into engagement. In December, Joe went back to Saigon and became even more alarmed. He started making comparisons to Kennedy’s behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which annoyed the president. For Joe, the stakes and the solution were the same as they had been in Cuba: America had to deploy force and use it, if necessary. Courage and virility were called for. Cunningly, Joe played on Johnson’s fear of appearing weak in the eyes of history, and his loud editorials maintained pressure.
Joe’s access to the White House was gradually reduced, but to his credit, this did nothing to change his convictions. All that mattered were the results of his persistent hammering. In the spring of 1965, the decisions he had been vehemently demanding began to be made. On February 13, Johnson ordered the bombing of a North Vietnamese military camp; a few weeks later, he granted General Westmoreland’s request and sent two battalions of marines to Vietnam on a security mission to protect the Da Nang Air Base. American military involvement in the region quickly escalated. On July 28, the president held a press conference to announce that he would raise the number of combat troops in Vietnam to 120,000 men. It was much less than what the general staff was asking for, but they would soon be getting nearly all the recruits they wanted.
For the entire length of the war, one that was never formally declared, the field officers in Saigon had Joe on their side. From 1965 to 1972 he made one or two trips a year to Vietnam. “General Alsop,” as the president called him when he was feeling charitable, received VIP treatment, staying with the ambassador or at the Hotel Majestic. From these bases, he descended on his prey—diplomats, military men, and other journalists—and went into the field. While his detractors disapproved of his modus operandi, the means of transport that were made available to him (planes, helicopters, jeeps), and his privileged access, they never attacked his courage and endurance. High on the heady fumes of war’s grit and fraternity, Joe relived his war days in China and Korea. He liked staying in Saigon, where the service was impeccable and the evenings on the colonial terraces so pleasant. He admired the generals, found the soldiers intrepid, and called the young university graduates who were working to pacify the locals, such as Frank Wisner, the son of his friends Frank and Polly, the new Lawrences of Arabia. In contrast to these heroes, he viewed the young journalists who dared challenge the army’s reports as despicable miscreants. In his eyes they were either stupid or unpatriotic, and, in any case, off-limits.
Lined up like the payload of a B-52 bomber, his editorials fell hard on Washington. They seemed more bent on convincing readers than informing them. Targeting a president who Joe wished were more resolute, they effectively rephrased Westmoreland and DePuy’s military bulletins into catchy one-liners. According to Joe, the United States was on the verge of victory, it just needed to make a last effort; the enemy was overwhelmed by the superior moral and military force of the American army; every North Vietnamese attack was the last; a light was shining at the end of the tunnel.
This raging optimism had a shrinking audience in a country that still supported the war effort but where opposition was growing on college campuses and in important newspapers, such as the New York Times. Without being as categorical as Joe, Susan Mary still believed that the war could be won and that America did not have the right to let South Vietnam down. But she also listened to the dissenting voices who spoke in favor of negotiations, like that of their friend Senator John Sherman Cooper. She closely followed the February 1966 televised hearings held by J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Still, Joe’s rants drowned out Susan Mary’s murmured and nuanced observations. He roared at what he took to be a betrayal by the intellectual elite, not even sparing his friends Arthur Schlesinger and Bobby Kennedy when he saw their positions begin to waver. In June 1967, the Six-Day War brought an intermission to Joe’s obsession. “The heaven of not talking about Vietnam night after night,” wrote a weary Susan Mary in a letter to Marietta. “Now that the Middle East smoulders instead of flaming, I suppose we will be back floundering in that poisonous bog that seems to infect the healthiest conversation as dangerously as a tropical fever.”21
The Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968 was a brutal wake-up call. America was appalled to discover the power of the enemy. Mistakenly thought to be at bay, the North Vietnamese had come out of the jungle to strike urban targets, forcing Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to flee the residence in his pajamas. A month later, Walter Cronkite declared in an editorial report on CBS that the United States was at an impasse. The only way out was to negotiate with Hanoi. A defeated President Johnson, who had once hoped to realize his Great Society reforms, announced he would not run for reelection.
It was a dark year for Joe Alsop. The nation was undergoing a social and cultural shift that upended the values, principles, and institutions he held dear. America’s youth was calling the war in Vietnam immoral, rejecting authority, and spitting on the flag. Even girls from good families, like Frankie FitzGerald and Elizabeth Alsop, Stewart’s daughter, were swept up in the movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. unleashed the violence King had managed to keep under control; Bobby Kennedy’s subsequent death, which badly traumatized Joe, broke apart the Democratic Party and allowed Nixon, that phoenix of American politics, to take the presidential election in November. Joe’s friends Bundy and McNamara had thrown in the towel long before, and Joe now felt he was carrying the cause for the war in Vietnam on his own. He became the object of a polemic, with articles in the New Republic and Harper’s denouncing his political positions, mannerisms, and eccentricity.
Isolated and ridiculed, Joe refused to surrender and fought back blow for blow. The war was his life. He wasn’t discouraged by bad news from the front; it only stirred up his pugnacious nature. His columns were no longer a sufficient outlet for the fury that welled inside him, ready to pour out at any moment at the slightest provocation. Nobody was safe, apart from Billy and Anne, whom he adored. Friends remained faithful, but they came to dread his dinner parties. When his temper flared too high, Susan Mary would intervene, “Come Joe, calm down.” Then he would lash out, rough and insulting, and she knew she was beaten.
VIII
Anatomy of a Marriage
It’s Worth It
And you know, Avis, looking at the elephant grey lives of so many of the friends we both were brought up with, cela vaut la peine.1
—Letter from Susan Mary to Avis Bohlen, October 1968
Life with Joe had ups and downs. When her husband was in a good mood, Susan Mary counted her blessings. The children got along well with their generous and attentive stepfather, who had helped them adapt to America. He supervised their studies (Anne was now in middle school and Billy was at Harvard) and showered them with gifts and advice. He encouraged them in their first romantic relationships and tolerated their adolescent awkwardness better than their mother did. Joe also
brought Susan Mary financial security, taking care of her and planning for her future. She enjoyed being part of the welcoming Alsop clan and liked her comfortable house. Her friend the French diplomat Bobby de Margerie approvingly said it was starting to look as though a Noailles lived there. Her chaste companionship with Joe did not bother her; it was compensated by privileges like regularly playing hostess to a brilliant cast of characters such as Ted Heath, I. M. Pei, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Moshe Dayan, and George Cukor. Although she did not care much for big receptions, she liked embassy parties and made it to New York to attend the dinner given by Marietta before Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
Still, Joe was the boss. Experienced though she was in social matters, she agreed to this and had quietly given up the idea that she might help him with his work. Susan Mary came from a generation whose intelligent women gracefully accepted their place as satellites orbiting masculine suns. In the perfunctory role that was left to her, she expected little praise from her husband—and hardly got any.
Joe’s impertinence often made Susan Mary laugh. She felt protected by his unwavering self-confidence. One evening in December 1964, after the American film premiere of My Fair Lady, Joe refused to take the bus that was supposed to drive him and other guests to the British Embassy. Spying a limousine, he and his friend Marella Agnelli got in. Another couple was already sitting inside.
“Did you like the film?” Joe asked the strangers. “I didn’t. It’s not really good.”
“You’re quite right. It was lousy,” said the smiling young woman. She wore her dark brown hair in a chignon and a white silk evening gown by Givenchy.
On their way to the embassy, Joe listed the film’s shortcomings to its leading lady, Audrey Hepburn, and her husband, Mel Ferrer. “What can I say, I just didn’t recognize her,” Joe explained later. “But she agreed with me.”2
Not everything was so funny. Joe was often rude to his wife, interrupting and criticizing her in public. Anything could set him off: a dinner menu, a seating arrangement, a missing cushion, or merely a remark he felt was too banal or superficial. Whenever he drank too much he lost his temper, shouted, and raved, veering out of control; Susan Mary would go silent, looking like a virgin martyr. Sometimes, though, she struggled and tried to justify herself with the clumsy and voluble insistence of those who know they are doomed. Neither attitude did her any good. Whether she chose to be submissive or fight back, Joe remained equally exasperated.
Indifference or sheer anger might have served Susan Mary better in her arguments with Joe, but she was inexperienced in wielding such weapons. Instead, she would attempt to vindicate her husband’s behavior: he was overworked, or it was the situation in Vietnam. She never complained, but she withdrew within herself like an elegant woman, caught up in a crowd, clutches her skirts about her for fear of being knocked into. Her face hardened and her hair, blown back in a rigid bouffant, seemed as though it were cut from a single block of dark stone, each lock held tightly in place.
She never complained, not even to her closest friends, merely hinting at marital problems. Only Billy and her brother-in-law Stewart Alsop sometimes heard the truth. Often she just fled. She would spend February in Marietta’s Palladian mansion in Barbados, or she would go to Maine, or, better still, to Europe, Italy, London, Paris. Taking refuge on the old Continent, she felt at home and breathed more easily. Her many friends doted on her—“balm to the ego”3—and she could play her favorite role, that of an American woman civilized to the tips of her Vivier-shod toes. During the spring of 1969, Stewart Alsop knew Susan Mary was feeling particularly low, so he and Tom Braden, a journalist and close friend, took her traveling. She admired the crocuses in London, passed through Paris, and had a shopping spree at Balmain before going to Cairo and visiting the archaeological site of Petra in Jordan. Joe wrote her a check for expenses and gave her introductions. He thought her letters home were marvelous.
All things considered, Susan Mary hoped she could hold out. She did not want a divorce. From time to time, Joe would bring up the idea of a separation, not as a threat but as a solution to their uneasy daily life. As he told his friend Kay Graham, he had begun to feel constrained and trapped after the first euphoric months of marriage. Living with someone requires adjusting to the person’s rhythms and moods, and even with separate bedrooms, this turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined. He was still proud of his wife—always telling Billy his mother was the prettiest woman at the parties they went to—but she frequently irritated him and he was not used to holding his tongue about what he felt.
Joe and Susan Mary often wrote to each other, leaving little notes around the house, especially when locked in a quarrel. In them, Susan Mary replied to Joe’s questions about their future, severely judging her weaknesses and faults: “I’m very bossy, and possessive, and tiresome.”4 Deploring her lack of energy, she noted, “It’s a tragedy that I don’t have the vitality that a wife should have to ‘keep up’ to the very gay va-et-vient of this house.”5 Emphasizing her progress, she made resolutions: “I’m going to try immensely hard to give up any efforts to change you.”6 With an unfeigned humility that, given the circumstances, might seem excessive, she opened up her heart: “I have a feeling that I’m really not much good at marriage, I am perhaps meant to be a friend or a mother, roles that I think I can play, and I feel terribly sorry for anyone who has to put up with me steadily. However I do so miss you when you aren’t around that the thought of a life without you seems to me unbearable. You are right to suggest separating if things don’t go this year, but I know that I should hate it, and I pray for self-discipline so that you will be spared scenes. Whatever happens, it’s important for you to remember how much you have given me. I love you more than anyone I have known and I’ve loved quite a lot.”7 The word love was repeated with pitiful and trembling conviction. In a letter written after a stay in Maine in July 1969 during which Billy celebrated his twenty-first birthday and made a toast to his mother of “immense charm,”8 she reaffirmed her commitment: “Yes, darling, I would like to continue to try to make a go of it.”9
Nixon, Kissinger, and China
After a long flight during which Susan Mary read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which had been a gift from Billy, she landed in Hong Kong under a misty rain that blurred the outlines of the city’s skyscrapers. The next day she and Joe were in Saigon, where the temperature was ninety degrees in the shade.
“The American presence has not the shrill loud stridency of our presence in Europe in the war and post war—it’s so low key that one almost feels that the French are still here, for the town is still a tropical copy of Arles or Nîmes—no Roman ruins, but even the same trees, their seed brought from France years ago, Byrrh and Dubonnet signs fly flecked and dusty, la grande place, la mairie—pâtisserie baroque in architecture, le Cercle Hippique, le Cercle Sportif.”10
She and Joe stayed in a villa that was “probably built by the assistant vice-president of the Banque de l’Indochine about 1900.”11 The city was off-limits to military personnel and there was not a single GI in sight, but the local officials were welcoming and relaxed. Susan Mary spent time with her cousin Charlie Whitehouse, who was in charge of pacifying the surrounding provinces. She played tennis early in the morning before the heat of the day and explored the city in the American ambassador’s Ford, which seemed shabby when compared to the British ambassador’s Rolls-Royce, but was armored and equipped with an automatic rifle, as she discovered when a bomb exploded in the street. In spite of this, she refused to wear a bulletproof vest, saying, “too hot, I preferred to die.”12 For months, she had been looking forward to seeing Angkor Wat, but the trip was ultimately canceled because the United States was preparing to send troops into Cambodia in March 1970. “Tant pis, I’m off to Northern Thailand, said to be very pretty.”13
Although she enjoyed visiting new places, Susan Mary was no ordinary tourist. Back in Washington, she let it be known that she had
been favorably impressed by American action on the ground in Vietnam, an opinion that was repeated in high places. However hostile he was to the press and ill at ease with Georgetown society, President Nixon cultivated Joe’s support of the war and knew about Susan Mary. On May 8, 1970, he sent her a note. “Your encouragements for our country’s goal in Southeast Asia mean a great deal to America’s fighting men as well as to me. I was pleased to hear from you and I want you to know how much your comments are appreciated.”14 She did not think the Republican president a very appealing man, but the letter was flattering.
While Susan Mary was extremely grateful to Joe for the trip and knew what she owed him—“all my historic moments have been with you”15—she still had to endure the continuing unpleasantness that resulted from her husband’s passionate commitment to the Vietnam War. At the beginning of 1970, the humorist and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald had a play on Broadway called Sheep on the Runway. It told the story of an American journalist’s disastrous visit to Nonomura, an imaginary principality near the Chinese border. When the journalist, Joe Mayflower, wrongly perceives a Communist threat from the inoffensive rebellion brewing in the north of Nonomura, he sounds the alarm in Washington. In less than no time, the peaceful country is wracked with fire and bathed in blood.
JOE: Stop shaking your head at me. I’ve come halfway round the world to see you. I could have been with Pompidou. I could have been with Tito. I come here to tell you there’s a threat to your little country and you keep shaking your head at me. I won’t have it. There are people all over the world begging me for the benefit of my wisdom and my advice. And, you sit there and shake your head at me. Charles de Gaulle never shook his head at me. Lyndon Johnson never shook his head at me. No one has ever done that to me.
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