Cooke's Tour

"He is a nuisance," Britain's Guardian wrote of its U.S. correspondent, Alistair Cooke. "He telephones his copy at the last moment. He says that he will be in Chicago and turns up in Los Angeles. He discards the agreed subject to write about something which has taken his fancy. If all his colleagues were like him, production of this paper would cease." But, the Guardian con ceded, "we think he's worth it."

Most of Alistair Cooke's readers and listeners seem to agree. A nuisance he is to conventional thought, both in his column for the Guardian and in his Sunday evening broadcast from New York for the BBC. (His 1,000th broadcast was what provoked the Guardian's praising with faint damns.) Cooke, 59, takes obvious delight in confounding the usual cliches about the U.S., in praising what is denounced, in minimizing what's exaggerated, in try ing to persuade his audience to give up the "easy joys of righteous indignation."He is a master of the unexpected, whether it is defending Douglas MacArthur or Lyndon Johnson when Europeans are screaming for their scalps, or whether it is dismissing Kennedy assassination theories as nonsense. Since his BBC broadcasts are beamed to stations throughout the world, he is one of the world's most influential commentators on U.S. affairs.

Between Two Worlds. "I'm not a 'Whither America?' man myself," Cooke says. Rather, he is a once-over-lightly man who hovers at ease between two worlds. Though he has lived in the U.S. since the late 1930s and became a U.S. citizen in 1941, he has resisted total Americanization, and maintains a reasonable facsimile of a British stiff upper lip. He has lost much of his Brit ish accent, but then it is not American either; it has been dubbed a "NATO accent." Always keeping an eye cocked for"what's American in America," he brings an outsider's enthusiasm to the U.S. scene, putting old landmarks in a new light. "On a cold foggy night," he wrote of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, "the bridge struts wail like the witches in Macbeth."

Cooke focuses on minutiae. As he sees it, they tell more about a culture than the big issues that engross most journalists. Reverence for the flag, for instance. Outside of the emerging na tions of Africa, he recently wrote, scarcely any other country shows such a high regard for that symbol. U.S. laws, he was surprised to find, prohibit use of the flag for ornamentation. So when he once looked for a box of candy with a flag on it to send to his mother in Britain, storekeepers regarded him as "some kind of pervert."

Ethnic Distinction. Cooke tries to get behind the image of public figures and humanize them for his audience. "Robert McNamara," he reported, "brushes his hair straight back, in the style of, better brace yourself, Jack Pickford or the late Douglas Fairbanks. The fact that I have to reach back four decades to describe his hairdo will only stress the curiously old-fashioned look of him. Some men dash into a room, some gallop, others float, burgeon, slide, pad, lope or glide. McNamara's entrance is something between a creep and a stroll."

He also captures the subtleties of racial and ethnic distinctions. He reported that a group of Negroes were picketing the revival of Gone With the Wind. Some were carrying signs protesting Hattie McDaniel's stereotyped portrayal of a colored nanny. Without any sense of contradiction, others were demanding that Hattie be given top billing alongside Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. The only "safe formula" to avoid racial offense, Cooke discovered, was adopted by a New York progressive school, which staged The Merchant of Venice. "Every boy or girl in the cast was Jewish. Except Shylock. His real name was Cynthia Adams."

For his 1,000th BBC broadcast, celebrated with considerable fanfare both in London and New York, Cooke broke his own rules and devoted his full 15 minutes to Viet Nam. Yet, as he remarked on the air, he would rather discuss the coming of spring or children at play. "Whenever things look the least bit good," he says, "I'd much rather talk about the American phenomenon of summer bachelors than Viet Nam." Because of this attitude, Cooke's critics charge him with reporting only the "smiling face of America," of "fiddling while Rome burns." To which Cooke once replied: "It is a crime for any generation to take the crisis of the world so solemnly as to put off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place."

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