Comments on: Alistair Cooke

By: VJ

VJ — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 09:13:08 +0000

I still say ‘yer all wet, and that few of you here have listened to him recently with an ‘American ear’. Yes, he wrote beautifully, fine. But to me, it came out sounding so damn… well, Republican as in the party of theocrats and autocrats. That turned me off for good after hearing that type of condescension for years. Give him a medal for past service, but he certainly stayed too long at the party. We all remember grand-dad fondly, but knew he was crackers when he went on about how swell Hitler looked in his uniform and how he only wanted ‘better’ for Germany. I don’t need any more damn apologists for a cravenly runious Republican agenda to take over the world by force of arms or crony finance. We mint more than enough of our own damnable apologists!

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 00:37:15 +0000

He is a great man who loves a great country. A thing of rarity in these ‘modern’ times…

By: JX

JX — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:21:55 +0000

My grandfather is much more reactionary than Alistair Cooke and I still indulge him. And Alistair Cooke is much more charming.

By: harry

harry — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 13:32:09 +0000

I’ve been fascinated by American politics since my teens, and if, hypothetically, one had such an interest and was for some reason unable to find something more conventionally adolescent to do on a Friday night, one might imagine that Cooke’s letters, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8:45 PM, would be something to look forward to and to savour Tom, what you don’t consider is the possibility that if you were already addicted to listening to the radio aged 3 your subsequent interest in American politics might have been caused by listening to AC. I’m sure that’s the case with me. I listened to the Sunday morning broadcast, along with the Archers, On Your Farm, and the programme for Asian listeners (I must never have seen my family on Sunday mornings). From about age 3 till I left England at 22. For the US. I think his doctor is giving him spectacularly bad advice, btw.

By: Dave F

Dave F — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 10:35:07 +0000

vj: What an ageist, pompous, patronising and meanspirited comment. Still, perhaps before you’re 95, you’ll be compulsorily silenced by euthanasia. Bad cess to you from an old fart still talking, and not requiring any welcome by you to do so.

By: VJ

VJ — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 09:56:49 +0000

The man was well past his prime and going on fumes for the last few years. That was obvious. Yes, he still consistently wrote well. What he wrote about was usually reasonably interesting. His perspective was universally crabbed, conservative to the core, pedantic, and typically ‘cootish’. He was the old coot he had become sometime during the Reagan era. He hated the Clintons, loved the Bushs and admired most of the Repug. agenda over here. Needless to say these are neither ‘enlightened’ nor ‘liberal’ viewpoints. He may have once been a ‘war liberal’ during WW11, but then again so was Reagan. I had stopped listening to him years ago for his consistent old fashioned fartishness. Clearly a man who over stayed his welcome by some 20 years here.

By: neil

neil — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 07:03:46 +0000

It’s disappointing to hear that Cooke is at last retiring. On the other hand, I chose him in a dead pool for 2004. and this appears to make it more likely that I’ll win a point.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 04:55:19 +0000

I seem to remember Cooke getting a great deal of credit for helping build a friendship between America and Britain before America entered the war. I have even heard him described as having help save Britain. Maybe we are all too young to remember. As an American, I somehow feel I owe him for our best friend in the world.

By: teebolt

teebolt — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 02:51:27 +0000

Back in the day, I think, his Letter from America gave not simply a wonderful view of the U.S. but one uniquely filtered through his immense experience. I remember him flittering from one subject to another, ending on some obscure experience he had during the Bank Holiday of 1933, etc. It was a truly worthwhile program. Nevertheless, in the past year or so, he has kind of hardened in his approach and politics—it’s hard to say where he stood politically prior to this. Now there’s no doubt and it overwhelms much of what he still has to communicate. This is unfortunate. The BBC needs someone without the usual ideological brassness to put all things American in their proper context. Unfortunately, it’s no longer AC. I wish him well. teebolt

By: JX

JX — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 02:38:54 +0000

Have the Hamptons sunk into the sea? No? Then yes, there are still summer bachelors in New York City. IIRC, there was a feature on it in the New York Times only a few years back.

By: Mr Ripley

Mr Ripley — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 02:13:39 +0000

Oh, dear—it’s important to have “the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby”? I’m sorry, but three out of the last four are beyond me —I consistently miss the ball and drop the baby, whereas the birds in the tree I sit under never miss me with what they drop. Now I know why I think too much about politics instead.

By: Tom Runnacles

Tom Runnacles — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 01:04:01 +0000

Agreed that Cooke’s views clearly placed him in a different age by the time he signed off for the last time… But I actually rather valued that: right to the end he was incredibly smart, and obviously well-intentioned, and if you read enough of his stuff you know that he was, in his guts, a liberal. So I couldn’t write him off as any kind of flack or fool: I had to think through what the guy had to say. One way of putting it would be to say that Cooke was the best possible spokesman for a generation whose sensibility I for one would otherwise find pretty incomprehensible.

By: keef

keef — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:56:05 +0000

I, too, am saddened that Alistair Cooke has departed the BBC. His elegant distillations of American mores and moods were the most intriguing parts of BBC as played on New York public radio (WNYC), even in recent years. His letters after September 11 were simply beautiful. And, during the trans-Atlantic tensions surrounding the Iraq war, he seemed to describe to Brits (and Europeans) aspects of the American national character that I needed related to me, too—and I am a born and raised American. And, he could even raise my interest about things I cared not a whit. For instance, I could care less about golf, but his rendering of the life of Bobby Jones which I heard not long ago has stuck with me. He was occasionally a bit out of step with the times, but that he could step at all at his age is the amazing thing. Godspeed to you Alistair Cooke. K (PS: On a side note, I believe some of the upper crust may still have wife and kids bundled off to summer homes while the husband stays in the city during the summer, but it’s much more common for the middle class Manhattanites to have weekend places or summer vacations they share together. Things are different from 1955, when the movie The Seven Year Itch used summer disappearances by wife and kids to place Marilyn Monroe in conjunction with a temporarily solo Manhattanite.)

By: nick

nick — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:45:05 +0000

I’ve always been a little ambivalent towards Cooke; in part, because of the increasingly crabby and reactionary sensibility on display in his later years. Admittedly, at his age, it’s unsurprising; but I can remember him discussing the campaign to admit women to the Augusta National, and realising that his gofers’ love of that old bastion of prejudice quite blinded him to modernity. Ah well.