Just before Bill Gates faced the accusation of being a monopolist at a historic U.S. Senate hearing, he beckoned to breakfast at the Willard Hotel a hulking fellow who often has bashed him.
“We talked about the hearings and my own testimony that Gates will be the sole vendor of operating systems software worldwide,” said Stewart Alsop Jr., so overshadowed by Gates that his appearance on the same panel went unmentioned in most press accounts the next day.
Gates demurred, said Alsop, and claimed his dominance is actually threatened by others. “I
said, `Who? IBM?’ I mentioned others, and Gates then conceded, `Yeah, we’ll probably do pretty well.’ “
Translation: Yes, Microsoft will control all that software.
“That breakfast,” not the later Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “is the reality,” Alsop said.
The fact that Gates and the Senate sought out Alsop was a mark of distinction for a journalist-turned-venture capitalist. It also was fitting that the Washington native’s return home from California thrust him into such heady company.
For sure, he made brief mention in his testimony of how his uncle, whom he did not name, testified before the odious Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.
Similarly, he made fleeting mention of how his uncle and father took vigorous stands against Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “destructive demagoguery.” But, again, he did not cite either’s name.
He should have because last week’s friction-filled confrontation between the cultures of American politics and technology have no better analyst than Alsop, tagged a “high-tech Buddha” in a recent profile.
“As I sat at that green felt table, next to these billionaires, I sat next to a transition in power, with power now being invested in technology,” he said by phone after returning to California.
“I saw the senators, the political system, as dinosaurs. Except for Sen. (Patrick) Leahy (D-Vt.), they had no idea what’s going on. They were so superficial. They don’t understand the power and progress of technology and the power of the logic of a Gates.”
The senators groped to sound savvy as they read the smart questions prepared by their staffs, but they betrayed their ignorance, Alsop found. The technology culture seated next to him came away only confirmed in condescension toward the politicians.
The critique seems all the more severe since Alsop, 46, was to the manor of political influence born–even if he early on exhibited an unpatrician bent for the unruly.
His father, Stewart, and uncle, Joseph, were Washington columnists and among the most potent Cold War journalists. Joseph’s widely syndicated newspaper column ran from 1937 to 1975 and for 12 years Stewart co-wrote it with him. Stewart became Newsweek’s back-page columnist in 1968 and died six years later.
The brothers were “total New Dealers” and deeply tied to an old, Eastern elite that emerged after World War II to “take America into the world,” notes Robert Merry, author of “Taking On the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Guardians of the American Century” (Viking).
Their maternal grandmother was Teddy Roosevelt’s sister, and they were part of “the old Anglo-Saxon elite” who went to Ivy League schools and ran the country.
Their chums included Averill Harriman, Dean Acheson and John McCloy. “Access to that elite constituted power and was what they (the Alsops) relied on,” said Merry, editor and publisher of Congressional Quarterly.
Indeed, Stewart Jr. recalls lots of big shots at dinners and parties at his family’s or his uncle’s homes. For example, there was the night Sens. Hubert Humphrey and Thomas Eagleton drank brandy and smoked cigars with the CIA director in the uncle’s plush study.
But Stewart Jr., one of six siblings, had a less than contented upbringing. His dad was not affectionate and even signed a copy of his own memoirs that he gave the son “Stewart Alsop.” The son ruefully admits having learned much about his own dad through Merry’s book.
Stewart Jr. did not make it to the Ivy League. He struggled through two prep schools, then attended Occidental College near Los Angeles. He stumbled into being a formidable hybrid of journalist and businessman.
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A bombastic chain-smoking Pepsi guzzler, he became editor of Inc. Magazine in the early 1980s, at the start of the personal computer revolution. He wrote provocative analyses of Apple’s Steve Jobs and others, along the way infuriating people but generally gaining their respect.
He also got canned as editor, moving to California to edit Info World, a soon-to-be hot Silicon Valley trade journal. But his own techie staff revolted at his smoking and Eastern ways, with one future New York Times reporter telling the San Jose Mercury News that Alsop was viewed as a “Darth Vader come to tell us our revolution was over.”
Circulation boomed but ad revenues dropped, and he again was dismissed. Then he really made his mark by starting what became an influential newsletter, PC Letter, and organizing snappy, high-priced ($2,300 plus hotel) annual conferences where the industry’s top dogs could debate.
Alsop would challenge industry titans, even belittle them.
He combined a sophisticated sense of products and strategies with nerve, a populist skepticism and an entertainer’s flair (to juice up the gatherings, he studied Johnny Carson monologues).
Gates, Jobs and others might bristle, but they returned his calls and read the newsletter.
Now he has turned into a venture capitalist, investing in companies he may well dissect as a columnist for Fortune Magazine. It’s a juggling act ethically, but he remains brash and respected, as exemplified by the invitation to join the Senate lineup.
Alsop has come to deeply distrust, even disdain, government. He truly doubts that it should or can do anything about Gates, who he believes “will own the technology business, the operating systems business.”
He does not think that such a development is necessarily good for consumers and progress.
No doubt, technology is befuddling even to cognoscenti like Alsop.
When I called him he was trying to watch a rerun of his Senate appearance with Gates on C-SPAN’s Web site. But the audio was crackly and the video not much better.
It will take five to 10 years before such kinks are ironed out, the industry sage predicts. “It involves many incremental changes by many companies,” he told ignorant me.
“No one person can make it happen, not even Bill Gates.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.