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| Sunday, 18 April 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Alistair Cooke - the unrepentant reporter by Lucien Rajakarunanayake
Over the crackle of shortwave radio his voice had a compelling rasp and a tone that was avuncular and captivating. I began listening to him in the early sixties and continued as often as I could, very often putting aside some other work or pleasure, till almost the end. Tuning in to the BBC's World Service on short-wave radio to listen to Alistair Cooke had almost become a habit, wherever I was. When he died in New York City on March 30 last, aged 95, it was just a month after he broadcast his last "Letter from America" on BBC the 2,869th edition of the programme, breaking all broadcasting records. His final letter due a week after February 20 could not be broadcast, because the BBC had already announced that the series would end, as Alistair Cooke had informed that he had finally decided to take his doctor's advice and abandon his typewriter. He was the quintessential journalist having worked for 25 years for the Guardian and for more than 50 years of his life for BBC. His "Letter from America", which started on March 24, 1946 as a 13-week series, continued uninterrupted until he gave up in February this year. As each week, month and year passed by he kept on getting more and more people from all over the world, listen to his softly said but yet gripping glimpses of the real America. Both a Guardian journalist and BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke never abandoned his principle of objective reporting. He had neither sacred cows nor special icons to safeguard. He related the truth as he saw it and understood it, and was often prophetic in his pronouncements. It has been said of him that if journalism was his life, America was his beat. And what a wide and fascinating beat it was. In his first broadcast for BBC was as a film critic. In the first dispatch over the crackle of radio in October 1934 (before the Letter series began) he said: I declare that I am a critic trying to interest a lot of people into seeing interesting films. I have no personal interest in any company. As a critic I am without politics and without class." It was the importance of objectivity in reporting that he never abandoned, confirming it with each of his now celebrated letters. Alistair Cooke was born in Salford, England in November 1908, and became an American citizen in 1941. He migrated to the US in 1937, after being fascinated by the country following a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1932. Of careers he had many. In addition to broadcasting, he became a household name in the US as host of television's "Masterpiece Theatre". His book, "A Generation on Trial" (1950), combining his reports to the Guardian on the trial of Alger Hiss, a senior state department official under President Franklin Roosevelt, charged with betraying American secrets to communists, was marked for its objectivity and good analysis, which foretold the emergence of the McCarthy era in American politics and social life. The collections of his "Letters from America" were always best-sellers. The abdication of Edward VIII gave him the big break in broadcasting he needed. NBC asked him to explain the story of the developing crisis to eager American listeners. In 10 days he wrote and broadcast on poor transatlantic phone lines not less than 40,000 words. The fees he earned helped Cooke settle down comfortably with his second wife. Cooke and the then "Manchester Guardian" came together in 1945 at the founding conference on the United Nations. He was first appointed UN Correspondent and later Chief US Correspondent for the newspaper, the predecessor of today's "Guardian". All the praise he won for his coverage of the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963, was overshadowed by his reporting of the later assassination Robert F Kennedy, as a result of his being at that time at the same Los Angeles hotel where the murder took place. His handwritten reports of scenes where the tragedy took place rank among the most powerful reports Alistair Cook ever filed. Commenting on this he said: "Only by the wildest streak is a reporter, after many years on the hop, actually present at a single accidental convulsion of history." Colourful and eventful as his life was, as we now learn more about, what hooked me on to him were his unforgettable "Letters from America". Every week he would present his listeners with vivid accounts of the manners, the passions, the styles, the politics and many things of the often little heard of aspects of America and its people. His humour was as rich as his criticism could be acerbic, but never with malice. His view of America and the American people was wide-eyed and kaleidoscopic, where blinkers of any sort had no place. He gave us opinions on jogging, just as of newspaper jargon, Presidential proclivities towards women, sports as the Americans knew and enjoyed it, and captivating cameos of great men and women. He had an admirable and rarely comparable awareness of the benefits of clear and simple writing, which came out so well when he spoke what he wrote for radio, reaching out and creating an empathy with listeners in so many countries the world over for so long. He gave us the story of Watergate and Nixon in several Acts with a compelling sense of the drama unfolding. The beginning of a "Letter" would hardly give a hint as to what was to follow, or what its subject was, but yet kept one spellbound, cursing the static that would sometimes drown his voice. This is very well shown by his "Letter from America" of May 31, 1974. This is how the introduction came: "When it is finished" says the guidebook, "it may well be the largest cathedral in the world." I am always leery of sentences that contain the phrase "may well be". But it is certainly a very large cathedral: namely the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side in New York City. Its foundations were laid in 1892. They've been building it ever since, and the end is not yet. "On Monday, the 27th of May, 1974, St. John the Divine housed a ceremony that would have flabbergasted its architect and its early worshippers. Every pew was filled, and the aisles were choked, and there were several thousands listening to loudspeakers out on the street. And when the 10,000 people inside were asked to stand and pray, there was a vast rustling sound as awesome, it struck me, as that of the several million bats whooshing out of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico at the first blush of dawn. "It is not the size of the crowd that would have shocked the cathedral's founders (they might have taken it jubilantly as a sign of a great religious revival). It was what the crowd was there for. A crowd that ranged through the whole human colour scale, from the most purple black to the most pallid white, come there to honour the life and mourn the death of a man who had become supreme in an art that began in the brothels of New Orleans. The art is that of jazz, and the practitioner of it they mourned was Edward Kennedy Ellington, identified around the world more than any member of the royal family as the Duke." (From Alistair Cooke "The Americans" Letters from America 1969 to 79 Penguin). Those were the first three paragraphs of his 18-paragraph "Letter" on Duke Ellington, a classic anecdotal piece, as was his wont, on the Duke and jazz, as on any other topic he chose to speak about. Who would have guessed the subject till he mentioned the name? That was Cooke's own style of radio mystery of the spoken word that captivated so many millions over so many years. As Nick Clarke wrote in the Obituary to Alistair Cooke in the "Guardian Weekly" of April 8 to 14, 2004: Only once did he try to encapsulate his own attitude to life, in a magazine called Living Philosophy. He had been criticized, he said, for being a jack of all trades, constantly distracted by some new interests. "The most practical conclusion," he [Cooke] wrote, "appeared to be to make a profession of observation, to become a reporter simply, a profession easily damned as that of a fence-sitter, a moral coward unwilling to take a stand. To these strictures, I can only reply that every four years at least I take a stand: I vote. And immediately afterward return to my reporting habits and the continuing discovery that in life the range of irreconcilable points of view, characters, flaws, idiosyncrasies and virtues is astonishing." Those who value good journalism must now suffer the silence of this unrepentant reporter whose last "Letter from America" was heard in February this year. The world of journalism and broadcasting is very much the poorer for his absence. Acknowledgments: Alistair Cooke "The Americans" Letters from America 1969 to 79, - Penguin; and Nick Clarke, "Guardian Weekly" April 8 14, 2004. |
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