The Press: Spliffing the Alsops

After twelve years as joint political columnists, Brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop announced this week that their double-domed partnership will end March 1. Reason for the split: the Saturday Evening Post has offered Stewart Alsop, 43, newly created job that "I cannot refuse." As the Satevepost's contributing editor for national affairs, Stewart will still be based n Washington, but will travel widely on stories in the U.S. and abroad.

Brother Joe, 47, who has been the cam's Paris-based roving reporter for the past year (TIME, July 8), will keep turning out the four-day-a-week Alsop column for the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, which sells it to 200 U.S. and foreign papers. He plans to write it from Washington five or six months a year and hire an assistant to write at least one capital column a week while he makes short Forays into other world news centers. The column, he cracked, will now "get all of one Alsop instead of halves of two."

While the brothers have always given half their time to magazine articles, explained Joe, Stewart "increasingly prefers it, and I increasingly loathe it." Added the elder Alsop, who returned to the U.S. last week after writing a penetrating series of columns on Britain's "let's-stop-the-H-bomb" mood: "It's a great wrench. We just had a family reunion, and there were floods of tears, diluted with champagne." To Herald Tribune Publisher Ogden R. ("Brownie") Reid, he wrote: "I feel a little bit as though we were a species of minor Greek chorus, which was separating just as the drama approached some sort of climax. But I agree with Stew that his own career has to come ahead of the interest of being a Greek chorus."

As a one-man chorus, Joe will keep the doom-crying column's accent on tragedy. In leaving his brother with the gloomy mission, Stewart presented Joe last week with the original of a recent New Yorker cartoon showing two bearded zealots, one bearing a sign reading THE END OF THE WORLD is COMING! and saying earnestly to the other: "Have you noticed they're not laughing at us any more?"