This image is the cover for the book Stay of Execution

Stay of Execution

A poignant memoir of a full life and an impending death, written by one of America’s foremost journalists during his battle with terminal cancer.

For three decades, from the end of World War II well into the Watergate era, internationally renowned newspaper and magazine columnist Stewart Alsop was a fixture on the Washington, DC, political landscape. In 1971, the respected journalist was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, marking the beginning of his courageous three-year battle with the terrible cancer that ravaged his body but could not damage his spirit or slow his facile and brilliantly incisive mind.

A passionate social critic and peerless political analyst who hobnobbed with presidents from FDR to Nixon, and enjoyed the respectful fellowship of such notable figures as Winston Churchill, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Henry Kissinger, Alsop insightfully chronicles the course of his medical history without a trace of maudlin self-pity while celebrating his family, friends, colleagues, and an extraordinary life well lived.

Stay of Execution is Stewart Alsop’s moving, powerful, and inspiring memoir of his terminal illness and his life before—an unforgettable true story of courage and accomplishment, trials and tragedy from one of the most revered American journalists of the twentieth century.

Stewart Alsop

Stewart Alsop (1914–1974) was a longtime political columnist and commentator on American affairs. A graduate of Yale University, he worked in book publishing until World War II. Rejected by the US Army for medical reasons, he joined the British Army and fought with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in Italy. He transferred to the US Army in 1944 to carry out missions planned by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the topic of his book Sub Rosa, written with OSS compatriot Thomas Braden. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm for his work on wartime missions in France.
 
From 1945 to 1958, Stewart Alsop was cowriter, with his elder brother Joseph Alsop, of the thrice-weekly “Matter of Fact” column for the New York Herald Tribune. He went on to become the Washington editor of the Saturday Evening Post and wrote a weekly column for Newsweek from 1968 until his death in 1974. His final book, Stay of Execution, traces the years—his last—after his diagnosis with a rare form of leukemia.