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Joseph Wright Alsop V
(October 10, 1910 - August 28, 1989) USA

Joseph Alsop

Journalist

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Joseph Alsop was born in Avon, Connecticut, to Joseph Wright Alsop IV (1876 -1953) and Corinne Douglas Robinson (1886 -1971). Through his mother, he was related to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and James Monroe. Both of Alsop's parents were active in Republican politics. His father unsuccessfully sought the governorship of Connecticut several times, his mother founded the Connecticut League of Republican Women in 1917, and both served in the Connecticut General Assembly.

Alsop graduated from the Groton School, a private boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1928, and from Harvard University in 1932. After college, Alsop became a reporter, then an unusual career for someone with an Ivy League diploma. He began his career with the New York Herald Tribune and fast established a substantial reputation as a journalist, particularly by his comprehensive reportage of the Bruno Hauptmann trial in 1934.

Alsop kept his homosexuality a closely guarded secret all of his life. Richard Helms called him "a scrupulously closeted homosexual".

In 1961, he married Susan Mary Jay Patten, a descendent of John Jay and the widow of William Patten, an American diplomat who was one of Alsop's friends. By this marriage he had two stepchildren, William and Anne. The couple divorced in 1978.

He was at work on a memoir when he died at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. He is buried at Indian Hill Cemetery, Middletown, Connecticut. The memoir was published posthumously as I've Seen the Best of It.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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