This is, it must be said at the outset, a wonderful book. As someone who was no fan of Joseph Alsop's column and would have been hard-pressed to agree with him on the time of day, I found myself reading these memoirs as if in the company of a wise, modest, and above all, marvelously entertaining old uncle.

I am wholly unfamiliar with the work of the late Mr. Alsop's collaborator, Adam Platt, but if indeed, as he claims, Alsop left him "the rescue, reorganization, and retelling of the past" before he died in the summer of 1989, then Mr. Platt is a genius. By 1974, when Alsop belatedly hung up his pundit's uniform, having been spectacularly and obnoxiously wrong about both Vietnam and Watergate, he had become, in his own words, "a monster with a commitment." So full of gloom, doom, and bile, Alsop drove away old friends with his intransigent apocalyptism.

Yet the man who wrote these memoirs is generous to his adversaries, appreciative of his own good fortune, and quite willing to admit that he may have been wrong in many important instances. It is almost as if he had been infued by the spirit of another late, great Washington institution -- that of investigative genius I. F. Stone.

But while Stone spent his five decades in Washington at the periphery of Insiderdom, Alsop spent his four at its epicenter. His career seems all the more remarkable in the retelling. A distant cousin of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Alsop was the only pundit in the cold war debate whose political and intellectual influence could begin to approach that of Walter Lippmann. He cut his political teeth on the New Deal and maintained his column and his impressive influence for most of the next forty years.

Alsop arrived in Washington in 1935. He had been hired out of Harvard by the New York Herald Tribune as a favor to his family. City editor Stanley Walker, Alsop writes, described him as "a dreadful result of Republican inbreeding." But despite his aristocratic WASP lineage and Spenglerian demeanor, Alsop possessed a talent for reporting along with an unquenchable relish for the game of insider politics.

His Georgetown dinner parties were legendary. Often on hand as a kind of living family heirloom was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Uncle Teddy's daughter. Mrs. Longworth admitted that she knew that "whenever I go over to Joe's house I am working for him. I don't mind a bit. I know Joe uses me. Good heavens, he uses everyone." In between the exquisite food and wine, Alsop would ask his guests for a bit of "general conversation" before launching forth on his Subject, the American position in the world. Later in the week, the speech would appear, in slightly amended form, in Alsop's column.

Together with Robert E. Kintner from 1937 until the war, with his brother Stewart from 1946 to 1958, and alone thereafter until 1974, Alsop wrote a highly literate column that relied, in equal parts, on his erudition, his ideological fixation, his dinner party guest lists, and his considerable legwork. On the night of June 24, 1950, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Under Secretary of the Air Force John McCone, State Department Director of Policy Planning George Kennan, and Justice Felix Frankfurter were all located by their underlings at Alsop's dinner table, to be informed that the North Korean Army had crossed the 38th parallel into the southern zone. They had been discussing the Romanian threat to Yugoslavia at the time. At another party, in October 1962, John F. Kennedy argued incessantly with his appointed ambassador to France, the Soviet-specialist/Wise Man Charles Bohlen, trying to convince him to delay his trip to Paris while the president grappled with thetill-secret information that the Soviets were placing nuclear-equipped missiles in Cuba.

Alsop's influence during the cold war derived in part from his dinner parties but even more from the civilized manner in which he incorporated the foreign policy worldview of the far right into polite society. He was obsessed with what he saw as the nation's need to prove its collective manhood and was forever wondering whether this or that president was "man enough" to stop the Reds at some critical juncture.

Unlike many fervent anticommunists at the time, however, Alsop's obsession stopped at the river's edge. His record during the depths of the 1950s Red Scare was a distinctly honorable one, particularly when compared to the relative silence of Lippmann and his peers. Alsop defended the patriotism of McCarthy's victims in the State Department's China bureau, despite the fact that hevehemently disagreed with their assessments of the relative merits of Chiang and Mao at the time they were proffered. He and his brother Stewart launched a crusade on behalf of Robert Oppenheimer, when Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss and the hawkish physicist Edward Teller were smearing the atomic scientist in an attempt to remove his security clearance. The Alsops wrote a book in defense of Oppenheimer, which Strauss -- whose influence at the time probably rivaled that of J. Edgar Hoover -- determined would receive no mention in any important mainstream forum. In 1951, when Henry Wallace was called in to testify befe McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, Alsop spent al day on the phone trying to find a lawyer willing to defend the former vice-president.

Alsop's clout was symbolized by the fact that on a cold and snowy January night in 1961, the president of the United States, just hours into the job, dropped by after the inauguration festivities to get something to eat. The two men had been great friends during Kennedy's service in the Senate, though the senator had generally declined the columnist's dinner invitations because of the lack of "pretty young girls" on the guest list. (As president, however, Alsop says Kennedy would make it a point of come over for dinner at least once every six weeks.) It was Alsop who convinced candidate Kennedy of the existence of a phantom "missile gap" with the Soviets, a notion he conjured up on the basis of wholly manufactured, or perhaps imaginary, evidence; and it was Alsop who, together wtih Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, convinced the Democratic nominee to offer the vice-presidency to his rival, Lyndon Johnson. Alsop also says he helped Kennedy choose his top people, recommending Dean Rusk, Douglas Dillon,verell Harriman, and George Kennan for their respective positions in the administration.

If the stories told in these memoirs cause alarm bells to ring down at headquarters of the journalistic ethics police, this will be all to the good. Alsop defends his shameless interventions into the political process on the familiar basis of his being a "citizen" as well as a journalist, though he cheats a little bit by bringing up the issue only with regard to his morally exemplary behavior during the McCarthy scare. But of course, however worthy the cause may have been, the problem is considerably more complex than Alsop allows. For a journalist to intervene in the matters he covers, pulling strings behind the scene and using his column to reward and punish those who either do or do not play along, is to corrupt his relationship to his reader, as well as to abuse the power that a daily column in a major metropolitan newspaper imparts. We are all citizens, yes, but being a journalist -- even a columnist -- implies that in order to enjoy certain rights and privileges denied to the rest of the population, wmust forgo others except in the most extreme cases. Alsop's view accurately reflects the World War II/pre-Watergate journalistic zeitgeist, but it is one that is better consigned to history.

Like Lippmann, Alsop did much to elevate the level of public discourse within Washington. Also like the generally dovish Lippmann, however, his effectiveness fell victim to the body counts in Vietnam.

Alsop's views on Vietnam grew directly from his understanding of China. His views on the latter were so extreme that he could not bear to discuss the issue with a reporter as famously moderate as Theodore H. White, lest, he recalls here, "one or the other of us [would grow] apoplectic and seek to do physical harm." Alsop recalls his China years as the most exciting adventure of his life. He served there during the Second World War, where he first assisted General Claire Chennault and his "Flying Tigers," then got himself interned by the Japanese as a journalist rather than as the active soldier he was at the time, and returned to mastermind Chiang Kai-shek's ultimately successful offensive against the commander of American forces there, General Joseph Stilwell. Alsop admits that "with full conviction" he suggested to Chiang and his advisers that they "declare General Stilwell persona non grata and blame him, in large measure, for China's feawrful situation." Alsop also suggested General Albert C. Wedermeyeas Stilwell's replacement and drafted the telegram Chiang sent to Roosevelt expressing these sentiments, along with another from Vice-president Henry Wallace in support of the original from Chiang.

Following Chiang's defeat, however, Alsop became obsessed with the Communist takeover and soon professed to see the hand of Maoist manipulation behind every turn of events on the Asian mainland. This was particularly true of Vietnam.

A consistent critic of what he believed to be unconscionable weakness of the Eisenhower administration in the face of the ever-growing communist menace, Alsop demanded that U.S. forces be committed to support of the French. He compared the 1954 French defeat at Dienbienphu to the battle of Yorktown.

Once U.S. forces finally did enter the conflict, Alsop's inability to let go of his obsession eventually destroyed his effectiveness within the the insider debate. His wildly optimistic reports of U.S. military progress there seemed ridiculous and pathetic in light of the gruesome reports of the reporters in the field. Alsop began predicting the enemy's imminent collapse as early as June 1964 and never let go. Following Tet, when much of the establishment was looking to extricate the nation from the Vietnam debacle, Alsop could only conclude that those who failed to support the war "had gone collectively insane." Should the United States withdraw, he promised, McCarthyism would run rampant and "the American future would hardly bear contemplation." In the war's aftermath, David Halberstam could write of the once-respected columnist that he had been "wrong in almost everything he said or wrote."

Alsop continued writing his column through 1974, but he had forfeited the fear and respect he once engendered by his fanatical devotion to the failed war effort and the men who lied about it. While Alsop never apologized for his obsession with Vietnam and, indeed, carried it with him to his grave, he did become aware in his later years that he "could no longer understand what was happening in America, perhaps because I had finally become an old man, frozen in the viewpoints of the past."

It is safe to say, however, that for all of Alsop's arrogance and misguided passion, his mistakes were almost always honest ones. Judging by these memoirs, Washington is not likely to see another insider pundit with such dedication to his profession or with such verve and enthusiasm for his craft.

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