Alistair
Cooke, the son of a art metal worker, was born in Salford on 20th
November, 1908. He won a scholarship to Jesus
College, Cambridge, where he studied
under Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. While at university he edited Granta.
In
1930 he moved to the United States. While studying at Harvard
University he met Charlie Chaplin
who offered him a job as assistant director on the film Modern
Times. He refused as he wanted to write about the subject
and in 1934 became a film critic for the British
Broadcasting Corporation. He also wrote about the United
States for The Times and the
Daily Herald.
In
1946 Cooke began his radio series, Letters
From America. He was given 15 minutes to talk about anything
that interested him. Originally it was devised as a 13-week series
but eventually ran for over 55 years.
After
the war the Manchester Guardian
employed him as its United Nations correspondent.
Soon afterwards he became the newspaper's chief US correspondent.
This included covering the trials of Alger Hiss.
A staunch opponent of McCarthyism, Cooke
published A Generation on Trial
in 1950. During this period he also be came a close friend of Adlai
Stevenson.
He
covered all the main political events and won praise for his coverage
of the assassinations of John
F. Kennedy,
Robert
Kennedy and
Martin Luther King.
Cooke
also appeared regularly on television. He was employed by WGBH to
provide introductions for classic British shows (1971-1992). His 1972
his series, America, was a great
success. Comprising of 13 episodes, it was shown in 30 different countries.
The accompanying book, America,
also sold in great numbers and is still in print. He was also the
author of Six Men (1977).
Alistair
Cooke
died on 30th March, 2004.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Alistair Cooke, Trial of Alger Hiss, Manchester
Guardian (1st June, 1949)
The trial
will be haunted at every turn by the great political issue that bedevils
the conscience and well-being of every responsible citizen of a democratic
country. Has a democrat the right to be a communist and to keep his
job and a good opinion of society?
Across the square in which
Mr Hiss will be tried, the trial of 11 communist leaders goes on to
try to establish for the first time a court test of whether a communist
is ipso facto a man dedicated to overthrow by force the government
of this country. In the public mind the two trials set up a riptide
in the ocean of fear and distrust that washes across all American
discussion of communism. It is the sense of this embroilment in a
conflict of belief that is happening to lesser men now suspect in
their fields of scholarship or government, and the degree of mystery
that surrounds the personal relationship of two brilliant young men,
that has made this trial fascinating to people uninterested in the
legal issue and made it read so far like an unwritten novel by Arthur
Koestler.
(2)
Alistair Cooke, The
Civil Liberties Struggle, Manchester
Guardian (7th June, 1950)
The supreme court of the
United States handed down yesterday a decision on race relations as
historic as anything since the famous case of Dred Scott versus Sanford,
which was - among other things - one of the causes of the civil war.
In its last decision of the spring term, the supreme court held that
the segregation of Negro students in white universities, and of Negroes
in railway dining-cars, is unconstitutional in that it denies Negroes
the "equal protection of the law" due to all citizens of
the United States and guaranteed to them in the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution, which in 1868 proclaimed the citizenship of Negroes,
by defining citizens as "all persons born or naturalised in the
United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof ..."
Some states have already
given notice that they will defy the court's ruling and seek a rhetorical
and more acceptable interpretation of the 'separate but equal' doctrine.
Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia announced in Atlanta yesterday:
"As long as I am your governor, Negroes will not be admitted
to white schools." In the end, Talmadge and his like will lose.
But between the opening of the floodgates of new test cases and the
peaceable end of segregation, the old South might well make a final
and bloody stand.
(3)
Alistair Cooke, Smoking
and Cancer, Manchester Guardian
(15th February, 1954)
For thirty years or more
the scandal sheets have printed articles on "The Tobacco Habit"
as a mild variation on their standard high-voltage treatment of such
shockers as prostitution, political graft, and the traffic in dope.
Most of these pieces, furtively hinting at heart trouble and even
tuberculosis, were about as medically convincing as the "Methodist"
credo that smoking stunts the growth. The tobacco companies paid only
sidelong heed to them, with bold hints that, on the contrary, a cigarette
was a relaxant, a soothing syrup, and a social grace. The manufacturers
were not much better than the Puritans in their respect for the known
scientific facts about tobacco and have tended to meet every impromptu
accusation with an equally flip defence. In the social history of
our time, it may well be that the "Reader's Digest" will
come to claim a decisive part in dating the fashion of cigarette smoking.
Although three separate
reports were published here in 1949, suggesting a plausible relationship
between smoking and cancer of the lung, they were folded away inside
the pages of medical journals. But a year later the "Digest"
ran an article with the resounding title "Cancer by the Carton."
This started a lot of talk in America and a noticeable adjustment
of cigarette advertising to remind the customer that the tobacco companies
keep a 24-hour laboratory watch on every chemical intruder that might
possibly sully his breath, tickle his throat or otherwise impair his
health and comfort. A few of the tobacco companies had in truth been
financing quiet research, but it was concerned with heavier matters
than a sore throat or an acrid taste. And, since Americans went on
buying cigarettes by leaping billions, the manufacturers maintained
their code of contemptuous silence, which is almost as rigid as the
taboo of a Victorian dinner-table on the mention of the female leg.
Two years later the "British Medical Journal" published
a weightier study and it began to look as if the cigarette manufacturers
would never be shut of the nuisance.
Last November their long
golden age - twenty years of continuously soaring sales - exploded
in a bombshell prepared by Dr. Ernest Wynder of New York and Dr. Evarts
Graham of St Louis. They reported that they had produced skin cancer
in 44 per cent of the mice they had painted with tobacco tar condensed
from cigarette smoke. This study was hardly as comprehensive as the
British study of nearly fifteen hundred human lung-cancer patients,
but it was piquant. It sprouted the joke that "It only goes to
show: mice shouldn't smoke." But the newspapers sat up and took
notice, in their heartless disinterested way, when the Institute of
Industrial Medicine of this city, an incomparable branch of the New
York-Bellevue Medical Center, examined all the tumours reported in
the Wynder-Graham study and declared them to be malignant.
Last December 9 the papers
carried the report of two speeches made by Dr. Wynder and Dr. Ochner,
Chief of Surgery at Tulane University School of Medicine, before a
meeting of New York dentists.
Dr. Wynder quoted thirteen
American and foreign studies, to conclude that "the prolonged
and heavy use of cigarettes increases up to twenty times the risk
of developing cancer of the lung." Dr. Ochner was bolder still.
He foresaw that the male population of the United States might be
decimated within fifty years by this type of cancer if cigarette-smoking
increases at its present rate. Within an hour of the opening of the
Stock Exchange that day big blocks of tobacco stocks were up for sale.
One stock, which opened at 65 3/4, dropped to 62. Others lost between
two and three points. By the first of this year the horrid truth was
out that the sale of cigarettes in the first ten months of 1953 was
off 2.1 per cent. It seems a negligible fraction in the face of the
triumphant record that in the past twenty years cigarette sales have
gone up from 100,000 millions to over 400,000 millions. But nothing
gets to feel so normal as unrelieved luxury, and a desperate tobacco
executive reflected that if every American smoker used "one cigarette
less a day, our sales would drop by 5 per cent," which is to
say three million packs a day, or an annual loss of $255.5 millions.
(4)
Alistair Cooke, Castro
in Control of Cuba, Manchester Guardian
(3rd January, 1959)
All of Cuba to-day was
under the precarious control of Fidel Castro, the 31-year-old rebel
whom the Batista Government pictured to its graceless end as a ragamuffin
hiding in the scrub hills of Oriente Province.
Castro to-day chose his
birthplace, Santiago de Cuba, as provisional capital until such time
as he could safely install in the Presidential palace at Havana the
man he has proclaimed provisional President. He is Manuel Urrutia
Lleo, a 58-year-old judge unknown to fame until, after 31 years on
the bench, he faced last year 150 youths charged with inciting to
revolt. He set them free on the brave principle that the Batista Government
had left Cubans no other means to defend their constitutional rights.
He became a revolutionary hero and today he has his reward. His first
act was to declare a general strike so as to curb the rioting and
to demonstrate, through the patrols of the revolutionary militia,
that Castro is indeed the Government in fact.
The Batista Government
and most of its lackeys are already in the United States or in one
of several Caribbean havens. A plane load of 92 of them landed at
Idlewild last night and a Cuban merchant ship sailed for the Dominican
Republic, where Batista is safe in the embrace of his former ward
and enemy, the dictator Trujillo.
The last act of Batista's
abortive junta was to tell the Government troops to lay down their
arms. They appear to have done so, but Castro broadcast to-day an
order to his forces everywhere to go armed and fire on sight at all
looters, agitators, and pockets of resistance.
Most Cubans, and certainly
the onlooking dictators of Nicaragua, Paraguay, Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, find it hard to believe that Batista's domain could be conquered
by an angry, though wealthy young man, whose first putsch against
the island on December 1, 1956, left him with only twelve of the original
force of 93 men.
Castro may doubt it too,
but he is taking no chances. The mob, which yesterday tooted and rejoiced
through the streets, betrayed him in an outbreak of pillage and rioting.
This morning the streets of Havana were reported to be empty, except
for the Castro patrols, cruising in the cars that were chasing them
only two days ago.
But by midday a radio dispatch
said that the city was taking on again "a dangerously lively
air." Units of rebel militia were ordered to the Manzana de Gomez
block of buildings, where groups of followers of Senator Rolando Masferrer,
a leading Batista supporter, were hiding. Fighting went on for two
hours, watched by crowds of spectators.
To-day in Ciudad Trujillo,
Batista admitted the absurdity of his rout by an amateur but said
that the first men sent to wipe out the rebels were "soldiers
of the rural guard who were not prepared for guerrilla warfare. When
the rebels extended their operations and met the army in open battle
they were well armed and their weapons were superior to ours."
The last excuse is doubted
by Latin American experts and business men who say that up to the
end Batista was receiving planes and arms from Big Powers. What doomed
him, they agree, was the treachery of his own leaders, widespread
desertions in the Army, and the final dash for safety of men bound
to him only by bribery.
Late this afternoon one
of Castro's lieutenants took over the Havana remnants of this faithless
army and passed the cue to Castro to begin his triumphal entry into
the capital city. If he subdues it without much bloodshed he must
quickly repair the heavy damage to the railroads, highways, and sugar
farms in three provinces, set the economy flowing again, and keep
the people quiet until he can arrange free elections.
Then he must answer the
question that confronts all resting heroes who have raised their flags
in the capital and put the tyrants to flight: how free dare the elections
be? Castro has advertised an elaborate and drastic Socialist programme.
He proposes to nationalise all utilities; to give their working land
to tenant farmers, who make up 85 per cent of the farming population;
to distribute to the employees of every business in Cuba 30 per cent
of the profits; to confiscate all the property of "corrupt"
(i.e. former) Government officials; to modernise the island's industries
and begin a huge rural housing and electrification project.
In a country where Army
officers on the winning side instantly inherit palaces, where there
is little experience of parliamentary government, and where the idea
of a loyal Opposition is tantamount to treason, Castro may, like others
before him, come to demand a rubber stamp and permit only token opposition.
At the moment, though,
all is joy and glory. The liberals among the South Americans in the
United Nations are toasting the great day and calculating the present
arithmetic of tyranny in Latin America. The present score seems to
be, as one man put it, "four down and four to go."
(5)
Alistair Cooke, President
Kennedy Assassinated, Manchester
Guardian (23rd November, 1963)
President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot during
a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas this afternoon. He died
in the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital 32 minutes
after the attack. He was 46 years old. He is the third President to
be assassinated in office since Abraham Lincoln and the first since
President McKinley in 1901.
In the late afternoon the
Dallas police took into custody a former Marine, one Lee H. Oswald,
aged 24, who is alleged to have shot a policeman outside a theatre.
He is said to have remarked only, "It is all over now."
He is the chairman of a group called the "Fair Play for Cuba
Committee," and is married to a Russian girl. He is described
at the moment as "a prime suspect."
The new President is the
Vice-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a 55-year-old native Texan,
who took the oath of office in Dallas at five minutes to four at the
hands of a woman judge and later arrived in Washington with the body
of the dead President.
This is being written in
the numbed interval between the first shock and the harried attempt
to reconstruct a sequence of fact from an hour of tumult. However,
this is the first assassination of a world figure that took place
in the age of television, and every network and station in the country
took up the plotting of the appalling story. It begins to form a grisly
pattern, contradicted by a grisly preface: the projection on television
screens of a happy crowd and a grinning President only a few seconds
before the gunshots.
The President was almost
at the end of his two-day tour of Texas. He was to make a lunch speech
in the Dallas Trade Mart building and his motor procession had about
another mile to go. He had had the warmest welcome of his trip from
a great crowd at the airport. The cries and pleas for a personal touch
were so engaging that Mrs Kennedy took the lead and walked from the
ramp of the presidential plane to a fence that held the crowd in.
She was followed quickly by the President, and they both seized hands
and forearms and smiled gladly at the people.
The Secret Service and
the police were relieved to get them into their car, where Mrs Kennedy
sat between the President and John B. Connally, the Governor of Texas.
The Dallas police had instituted the most stringent security precautions
in the city's history: they wanted no repetition of the small but
disgraceful brawl that humiliated Adlai Stevenson in their city when
he attended a United Nations rally on October 24.
The motorcade was going
along slowly but smoothly three muffled shots, which the crowd first
mistook for fireworks, cracked through the cheers. One hit the shoulder
blade and the wrist of Governor Connally who was taken with the President
to the hospital, where his condition is serious.
The other brought blood
trickling from the back of the sitting President's head. His right
arm flopped from a high wave of greeting and he collapsed into the
arms of Mrs Kennedy, who fell unharmed. She was heard to cry "Oh,
No" and sat there all the way cradling his head in her lap. As
some people bayed and screamed and others fell to the ground, and
hid their faces, the secret service escort broke into two groups,
one speeding the President's car to the hospital: and another joined
a part of the heavy police escort in wheeling off in pursuit of a
man fleeing across some railroad tracks. Nothing came of this lead.
The President was taken
to the emergency room of the Parkland Hospital and Governor Connally
was taken into the surgery. Mrs Kennedy went in with the living President
and less than an hour later came out with the dead man in a bronze
coffin, which arrived shortly after two priests had administered the
last rites of the Roman Catholic Church.
The body was escorted by
Generals Clifton and McHugh, the President's chief military and air
force aides, to the Dallas Airport and flown thence to Washington.
Within an hour of the President's
death, the Secret Service had found a sniper's nest inside the building
from which the first witnesses swore the bullets had been fired. It
is a warehouse for a school text book firm, known as the Texas School
Depository, on the corner of Elm and Houston Streets.
In an upper room, whose
open window commanded the route of the Presidential motorcade, the
Servicemen found the remains of a fried chicken and a foreign-made
rifle with a telescopic sight. Alongside it lay three empty cartridges.
(6)
Alistair Cooke, Robert
Kennedy Assassinated,
Manchester Guardian (7th June, 1950)
An hour or so before midnight,
it was already clear that a wake was setting in at the Beverley Hilton
Hotel, where the youngsters for McCarthy roamed in great numbers in
and around the grand ballroom.
The percentage gap between
McCarthy's lead over Kennedy was shrinking every quarter hour or so,
as the returns form Los Angeles County began to overtake McCarthy's
anticipated strength in Northern California. It was a young and doughty
crowd, gamely but hopelessly trying to keep its spirit up.
In this country, at any
rate, only the very pure in heart love a loser. And it seemed a good
idea to move on to the victory boy at the Ambassador. Wilshire Boulevard
is one of the longest of the long straight avenues that bisect the
huge east-west spread of this city, and at such a time it seemed as
long as a Roman road. The hotel's driveway was a miniature freeway
in a traffic jam, and the human traffic inside the foyer was almost
worse.
But at last, through the
strutting cops and guards and the elated crowd and the din of whistles
and cheers, it was possible to reach the north ballroom, a bone-white
glare of light seen at the far end of the lobby.
Security is a fighting
word at the Kennedy headquarters anywhere, and not without reason.
You had to have a special Kennedy press card to acquire the privilege
of being suffocated in the ballroom, and no other credentials for
a reporter would do. I had only a general press card, a McCarthy badge,
a driver's licence, and such other absurdities. So I turned back and
thought of fighting the way back home.
But just alongside the
guarded entrance to the north ballroom was another door, around which
a pack of ecstatic faces, black and white, was jostling for some kind
of privilege view. There was a guard there, too, and a Kennedy man
who recognised me, caught in the general wash, squeezed me through
into an almost empty room. It was like being beached by a tidal wave.
The place was no longer
than about 40 feet. It was a small private dining room, fitted out
as a press room. There was a long trestle table against one wall loaded
with typewriters and telephones and standing by were a few middle-aged
lady operators taking a breather.
In one corner was a booming
television set switching between the rumblings of defeat at the McCarthy
hotel and the clamour of victory in the adjacent ballroom. A fat girl
wearing a Kennedy straw hat sucked a coke through a straw. There were15
or 20 of us at most, exchanging campaign reminiscences and making
the usual hindsight cracks at the Kennedys.
Kennedy's press secretary
had promised that once the Senator had saluted his army he would go
down from the ballroom stage and come to see us through the kitchen
that separated our retreat from the ballroom.
It was just after midnight.
A surge of cheers and a great swivelling of lights heralded him, and
soon he was upon the rostrum with his eager, button-eyed wife and
Jessie Unruh, his massive campaign manager. It took minutes to get
the feedback boom out of the mikes but at last there was a kind of
subdued uproar and he said he first wanted to express "my high
regard to Don Drysdale for his six great shut-outs." (Drysdale
is a base pitcher whose Tuesday night feat of holding his sixth successive
opposing teams to no runs has made him legend.)
It was the right, the wry
Kennedy note. He thanked a list of helpers by name. He thanked "all
those loyal Mexican Americans" and "all my friends in the
black community." Then he stiffened his gestures and style and
said it only went to show that "all those promises and all those
party caucuses have indicated that the people of the United States
want a change."
He congratulated McCarthy
on fighting his principles . He hoped that now there might be "a
debate between the Vice-President and perhaps myself." He flashed
his teeth again in his chuckling, rabbity smile and ended, "My
thanks to all of you - and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there."
A delirium of cheers and
lights and tears and a rising throb of "We want Bobby! We want
Bobby! We want Bobby!"
He tumbled down from the
rostrum with his aides and bodyguards about him. He would be with
us in 20 seconds, half a minute at most. We watched the swinging doors
of the kitchen. Over the gabble of the television there was suddenly
from the direction of the kitchen a crackle of sharp sounds. Like
a balloon popping.
An exploded flash bulb
maybe, more like a man banging a tray several times against a wall.
A half-dozen or so of us trotted to the kitchen door and at the moment
time and life collapsed. Kennedy and his aides had been coming on
through the pantry. It was now seen to be not a kitchen but a regular
serving pantry with great long tables and racks of plates against
the wall.
He was smiling and shaking
hands with a waiter, then a chef in a high white hat. Lots of Negroes,
naturally, and they were glowing with pride, for he was their man.
Then those sounds from somewhere, from a press of people on or near
a steam table. And before you could synchronise you sight and thought,
Kennedy was a prone bundle on the greasy floor, and two or three others
had gone down with him. There was an explosion of shouts and screams
and the high moaning cries of mini-skirted girls.
The doors of the pantry
swung back and forth and we would peek in on the obscene disorder
and reel back again to sit down, then to glare in a stupefied way
at the nearest friend, to steady one boozy woman with black-rimmed
eyes who was pounding a table and screaming, "Goddamned stinking
country!" The fat girl was babbling faintly like a baby, like
someone in a motor accident.
Out in the chaos of the
ballroom, Kennedy's brother-in-law was begging for doctors. And back
in the pantry they were howling for doctors: It was hard to see who
had been badly hit. One face was streaming with blood. It was that
of Paul Schrade, a high union official, and it came out that he got
off lightly.
A woman had a purple bruise
on her forehead. Another man was down. Kennedy was looking up like
a stunned choirboy from an open shirt and a limp huddle of limbs.
Somehow, in the dependable fashion of the faith, a priest had appeared.
We were shoved back and
the cameraman were darting and screaming and flashing their bulbs.
We fell back again from the howling pantry into the haven of the pressroom.
Suddenly, the doors opened
again and six or eight and police had a curly black head and blue-jeaned
body in their grip. He was a swarthy, thick-featured unshaven little
man with a tiny rump and a head fallen over, as if he had been clubbed
or had fainted perhaps.
He was lifted out into
the big lobby and was soon off in some mysterious place "in custody."
On the television Huntley and Brinkley were going on in their urbane
way about the "trends" in Los Angeles and the fading McCarthy
lead in Northern California.
A large woman went over
and beat the screen, as if to batter these home-screen experts out
of their self-possession. We had to take her and say, "Steady"
and "Don't do that." And suddenly the screen went berserk,
like a home movie projector on the blink. And the blurred, whirling
scene we had watched in the flesh came wobbling in as a movie.
Then all the "facts"
were fired or intoned from the screen. Roosevelt Grier, a 300lb coloured
football player and a Kennedy man, had grabbed the man with the gun
and overwhelmed him. A Kennedy bodyguard had taken the gun, a .22
calibre. The maniac had fired straight at Kennedy and sprayed the
other bullets around the narrow pantry.
Kennedy was now at the
receiving hospital and soon transferred to the Good Samaritan. Three
neurologists were on their way. He had been hit in the hip, perhaps,
but surely in the shoulder and "the mastoid area." There
was the first sinister note about a bullet in the brain.
In the timelessness of
nausea and dumb disbelief we stood and sat and stood again and sighed
at each other and went into the pantry again and looked at the rack
of plates and the smears of blood on the floor and the furious guards
and the jumping-jack photographers.
It was too much to take
in. The only thing to do was to touch the shoulder of the Kennedy
man who had let you in and get out on to the street and drive home
to the top of the silent Santa Monica Hills, where pandemonium is
rebroadcast in tranquillity and where a little unshaven guy amuck
in a pantry is slowly brought into focus as a bleak and shoddy villain
of history.
(7) Alistair
Cooke, My
Lai Massacre, Manchester Guardian
(15th December, 1969)
There has been nothing
in the memory of living Americans like the massacre of My Lai. They
cannot stay for ever in the pit of horror. They must climb out of
it and find an indecent scape-goat or some bearable explanation that
can restore their self-respect. For the nightly TV interviews with
ordinary people show how pitifully the people feel that their youth
is on trial.
Now, from Saigon, comes
a brave bit of analysis from William F Buckley, the brilliant conservative
columnist who for once does not feel obliged to snatch a rightwing
argument and give it maximum plausibility.
He faces the progressively
grim alternatives by asking how many people were guilty, because an
aberration must have limits. "Jack the Ripper was not a corporation,
so that we can think of him as aberrant," which we cannot do
about "the Nazis under Hitler or the communists under Stalin".
But if 10, 20, 50 men "concerted in the act of genocide",
then we must ask why "a cross-section of young America found
itself capable of utterly barbaric behaviour".
The "preferable"
explanation is that "the guilty company relapsed into a kind
of catatonic frenzy". The second, "the horrifying"
alternative, is that "America in AD 1969 has bred young Americans
who can insouciantly murder grandmothers and little children."
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