Joe Alsop. Columnist, Washington Post.
(March 29, 1965) “Johnson is angry that his erstwhile friend Joseph Alsop, the columnist, has been complaining to friends that LBJ has ordered his telephone line tapped. Johnson is especially piqued because one of the hidden weapons he believes he has against his enemy Robert Kennedy is knowledge that RFK in 1963 ordered the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr., and, as Attorney General, otherwise trampled the civil liberties of personal and political adversaries. [On March 29, 1965 LBJ told Attorney General Katzenbach: “I want them [the taps] brought to an irreducible minimum. And only in the gravest cases. I want you to authorize them, and then, by God, I want to know about them. I’m against wiretapping, period. […] I assume that in one of our friend’s [Martin Luther King] cases, from what I have seen, that that must be where the evidence comes from. I mean on [his] Hawaii jaunts and … California, and with some of the women. […] Nobody’s ever told me that’s where it comes from. And I don’t want to know. […] Joe Alsop is having a change of life […]He’s just short of the asylum now. He’s had two or three breakdowns. But he’s going around all over town saying we’ve got his wire tapped. That doesn’t amount to much because most people know he’s crazy. But … I’m his friend, and I saved him from McCarthy when McCarthy had ahold of this other stuff back there on Joe. [In the 1950’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy responded to an Alsop attack by making a thinly veiled reference to Alsop’s secret homosexuality]” (Michael Beschloss, Reaching for Glory [New York 2001], p. 251-252)
“Tijdens een reisje naar de Sovjet-Unie in 1957 was hij door de KGB in de val gelokt en in flagranti met een jongeman gefotografeerd. De poging van de Sovjets om hem tot spionage te chanteren was mislukt, maar hij had zijn gedrag aan de CIA en FBI moeten onthullen. J. Edgar Hoover had de details gedeeld met kopstukken van de regering-Eisenhower en tegen 1960 was het geheim naar de politieke en journalistieke gemeenschap doorgesijpeld. “Joe was homoseksueel, en Jack Kennedy wist ervan”, zei Ben Bradlee. (S. Bedell Smith, Stijl en macht. [Utrecht 2005), p. 90)