Alistair Cooke and the art of reading America

The late Alistair Cooke, KBE, was a voice. For an epic 58 years he spoke every week on the BBC for roughly 14 minutes about the country where he lived and which he had adopted, the United States of America. His voice – warm, engaging, wry and utterly unhurried – reached hundreds of millions inside and outside the US and shaped their view of the world’s most powerful and, as he gently illustrated each week, least understood country.

It seems now a staggering presumption that any one person, let alone a Briton, would seek to present America to the world, and baffling that his thoughtful, personal reflections would be so influential. But he did, and they were. His mail bag, he noted, had letters from Scotland to Malaysia and they wrote to him, to his puzzlement, as a higher power who might influence what they saw as the failings, and they were many, of America.

As a child in the 1960s I was one of the hundreds of millions who listened to him with, in my case, a mixture of happy hypnosis at those rich cadences and his magnificent pauses, and played a game of waiting for that inevitable, knowing chuckle.  Above all I loved his sign-off. It came suddenly and without any flourish or fidget, elegant as a cavalry officer’s dismount. It summarised his complete mastery of his form, the essay which, above all, must have a cadence.

Quite how Cooke managed each week to opine and entrance his global audience was a mystery. It is ironic that a man whose first love had been theatre and the moving image will be best remembered for his audio work. He left an extraordinary archive of film footage he had compiled of his life in America and his first break came through a successful ruse to gain an interview with Charlie Chaplin. That interview became a friendship and immersed Cooke in the glamour of Hollywood and the silver screen. In his later career he worked extensively on TV as a host and presenter, but it was as a voice that he forged a unique professional identity and left his greatest legacy. There is an intimacy and collusion in his presentation on radio which was hard, even for him, to replicate on the screen: by the fireside of a radio talk, his celebrity status was left at the door.

The quirkiness of Cooke’s subject matter was a large part of the charm. He dealt with high and low politics (Watergate, at length, but also the death of a satirist, haircuts, freak shows) in the same compelling register. He eschewed statistics, cut through the propaganda and self-promotion of politicians with a flensing knife and focused quietly, but also ruthlessly, on behaviours. His letter on the personal habits of presidents, in need of an update, is as valuable a window into the nature of administrations as any policy analysis. He could wield a stiletto, which he did, against the outrages of inequality, corruption, discrimination he observed, but he could hand it, too, to the hands of the countless Americans with whom he spoke and to whose right of going first, or not at all, he politely deferred. You will have to search very hard for anything approaching a rant from him.

Which brings us to the enduring value of his style: it was perhaps that he always seemed both passionate and imperturbable. Few countries and few periods can have provided as much ambient noise, drama, excitement and violence as the long second half of the previous century. Cooke arrived as a scholar at Yale during the Great Depression, a calamity which branded itself deeply on his view of the US. He went on to chronicle the political agonies of Vietnam, which played out against a backdrop of permanent and mounting anxiety over nuclear conflict with Russia. One president, and then his brother, were assassinated and another was driven from office. Nothing was immune, not even America’s life-blood, gasoline; a global energy crisis in the 1970s saw fuel rationing in the US.

Throughout this ceaseless, operatic drama, which drove US politics to the point of hysteria, Cooke remained poised. As an American, which he became in 1941, in an act whose timing was controversial, Cooke was invested in America’s crises. He was closer emotionally to the fate of America than his global audience and close professionally to the centre-stage. He was one of the last people to speak to Robert Kennedy before he was assassinated. But neither cost him his perspective. He remained uninfected by the contagions of partisanship and outrage. This led to a transcendent but also occasionally bathetic tone as if he were wrapping up a genial chat in a bar. ‘In the end’, he concluded on Nixon and those tapes, ‘it may turn out that Nixon’s fatal error was that he forgot the microphone was on.’ You can hear his listeners murmur, ‘Yeah, right’, before suggesting one for the road.

Politeness, which won him friends and access across a startling range of Americans across the Continent, was a trademark. I remember asking my father whether Cooke was American or British. Like, I imagine, many of Cooke’s listeners he didn’t know or couldn’t tell. The confusion came perhaps from Cooke’s understated manner which it was impossible to associate with the America that erupted brashly and overpoweringly into British popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. His lilting, hybrid accent added to the confusion. He was what we might call, but Cooke would have put more elegantly, bi-cultural.

Despite a patrician manner, Cooke was not a child of privilege. He was born in 1908 in the northern industrial city of Salford, where he had his first, formative exposure to America in the form of billeted US servicemen in the First World War. His father was a metalworker and Methodist minister, his mother a landlady. Cooke attended the local Blackpool Grammar School and won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he immersed himself as much in amateur dramatics, music and social life as his studies. He nonetheless went on to win a scholarship to Yale and later Harvard, where his interest in and affinity to the US was sealed. Never one to advertise his privileged higher education, he retained an affection for Jesus College and recounts in an early letter how as a young journalist he dug out his college tie for moral support when invited to dinner with an intimidating US general. He had no need of it. He was supremely confident from an early age in front of his elders and celebrities.

Cooke became that most valuable of commentators: an interpreter. He educated his audience not by speaking down to them from a position of authority or at them as a lobbyist, which was remarkable given the events he witnessed, but across to them in a reasoned, dispassionate and engaging register. He would pause where he felt necessary, and his judgement was unerring. His explanations were intended to enhance, not slow the dramatic curve, as they did, for example, over the chewy subject of the role of the House Judiciary Committee in the Watergate affair. Cooke knew he had his listeners hooked and he never exceeded the appetite of readers already enthralled to know where he was going next. He loved the mischievously oblique entry. His homely description of Thanksgiving in 1969 served as a backdrop for a discussion of the impact of the My Lai massacre on the American psyche. In contrast to US media traditions, he used contrast rather than hyperbole for effect.

Cooke was good on war, and on the US at war. He explored the political impact, the human tragedies and the moral dilemmas of Vietnam, with equal insight and sympathy. He took a quizzical approach to the behaviours which the conflict sparked in the US: he was cautionary about the trial by media of those charged with the atrocities and challenged government reports of high morale in US troops by comparing them, with effortless erudition, to reports of the same among British troops in Flanders in 1917. He was arch, and became more so with age, at reminding readers of precedents. In his long career and his very long life (he died aged 95) he had seen many turns of the American wheel. He arrived during the Great Depression and died in New York during the Iraq War.

He was not always right. His early coverage of the breaking Watergate scandal began with the misjudged, contextualising comment that ‘Americans love a drama’, and concluded, as many Americans did, that it was a ‘caper’ and the whole thing would blow over. But as it became worse, he, like his readers, realised the depth of deception by Nixon and his counsel, John Dean, and he charted, in a series of still gripping essays, the horror of the constitutional crisis which then unfolded. Although instinctively uneasy about the extent to which leaks had influenced public opinion, Cooke was generous in his praise for Woodward and Bernstein, whose unearthing of the hush money paid by Nixon changed a Beltway scandal into a national crisis. Although not given to dramas, he realised quickly this was a tragedy. Something broke in Watergate for him as well as for America and he lamented it.

That other great British interpreter of the US, Isaiah Berlin, commented in his weekly reports from Washington during the Second World War that ‘we must always base ourselves on the assumption that the Americans are foreigners to us and we to them’. Doing so entails a humility and a respect which Cooke, who could pass for a native in both countries, embodied. He remained fascinated by America throughout his life and the deeper his relationship with the country, the stranger it seemed. He left us a twofold legacy: his matchless contemporary commentary and, more relevant to those who follow him, the art of watching the vast, P.T. Barnum-carnival of US life, money and politics without losing calm, humour and affection for the country.

Cooke received many honours during his life but none greater than being invited to address Congress in September 1974 on the 200th anniversary of the Continental Congress. It was a remarkable performance for its elegance, self-deprecation and unerringly pitched humour. He famously quipped that, wondering what to say, he had decided to follow the example of his predecessors who had stood where he stood and, like them, ‘was delighted to accept their nomination to be President of the US’. It was a hilariously incongruous thought that he might by accident have become the President. Yet many in Congress knew him personally and some might have wondered that, nonetheless, with that detailed knowledge of Americans, with that global fellowship and that reek of amiable decency, who knows? Cooke left the chamber to tumultuous, good-natured, cross-party applause, which is the sound of the US at its warmest best. On that grand occasion he had read the room as masterfully as, for six decades, he had read the country