Growing Up as the Daughter of WW2 Spies

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s Washington where the author’s father, journalist Stewart Alsop, grew increasingly famous, was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother’s strict Catholicism and her father’s restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door.
Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little. Today’s guest is Elizabeth, auth or of her memoir “Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies.”
She explores who her mother was, why alcohol played such an important role in her mother’s life, and why her mother held herself apart from all her children, especially her only daughter. In the author’s journey to understand her parents, particularly her mother, she comes to realize that the secrets parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This guy here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.
0:08.0	There were many heroes who fought in World War II.
0:10.6	Some were soldiers, some were spies, some were part of resistance movements like the French
0:14.8	Maki.
0:15.8	Many stories have been featured on this show, but one aspect of these stories that often
0:19.2	isn't told is what happens after the war is over.
0:22.8	What happens for those who went through traumatic experiences and they come home, and sometimes
0:27.8	bring that trauma with them into their homes, what happens to the children of these traumatized
0:32.3	warky-ros?
0:33.3	We're going to look at that aspect of the story, and we're joined by Elizabeth Winthrop
0:37.3	Alsov, whose mother was a decoding agent with MI5, and her father fought with the French
0:42.3	resistance.
0:43.3	Chico grew up in the 1950s Washington, and was a blue blood through and through, who's
0:47.5	two sides of the family where the Alsovs and the Roosevelt.
0:50.6	But she says, because her parents' marriage was created in a world of secrecy, where
0:54.9	they kept things from each other, and her father didn't even know that her mother was
0:58.2	working intelligence until the night before he parachuted into France.
1:01.5	It was a world of whispered conversations in the living room, and the truth that the
1:05.2	secret's parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their
1:08.7	children.
1:09.7	You can definitely hear the affection that Elizabeth has for her parents, referring to
1:12.7	them as mommy and daddy throughout our conversation.
	...

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