Alistair Cooke - America Observed: From the 1940s to the 1980s

ALISTAIR COOKE

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America Observed

From the 1940s to the 1980s

Alistair Cooke

CONTENTS

Preface

Alistair Cooke and I worked together for several years in the 1980s on America Observed. I did extensive research in the archives of the Guardian, in London, which at that time were not accessible electronically. I selected the reports from the original newspapers, then made photocopies, which I had a student assistant type up. Alistair had some typescripts, but we werent sure they accurately reflected what had been printed in the newspaper. Max Reinhardt of Reinhardt Books, our British publisher in the first instance (later editions were with Penguin in the United Kingdom and Knopf and Macmillan in the United States), was very encouraging about the book, but he wanted a smaller collection of reports than we had initially delivered. Of course, Max prevailed, in his gentle and genial way. The final selection was therefore painstakingly chosen from a first cull of a collection some twenty times larger.

We did not think of these pieces as being the best of the best of Alistair Cooke. They are more an overview of his reporting for the Guardian. As would be expected, they are indeed very good, and are fully representative of what Alistair filed for the paper in his twenty-six years as the American correspondent. It was not the intention to establish his legacy as a reporter or anything like that. So, I can only try to imagine what he might have thought about this twenty-sixth-anniversary edition being published ten years after his death at the age of ninety-five in March 2004. He would certainly be pleased that there was still interest in pieces written over several decades and published in this collection first in the 1980s, and he would have been enthusiastic about the new technology of ebook publishing applied to this edition.

Alistair Cookes writing has certainly stood the test of time. There are, of course, always some contexts that have shifted, so readers will need to use some historical imagination in reading these chapters. But many of the pieces speak to the enduring themes that contribute to an understanding of America. Can anyone, for example, who has lived through the elections and presidency of Barack Obama doubt that race remains one of the major issues in American society? Reading afresh Alistairs 1956 report The Untravelled Road from Montgomery, Alabama, is a reminder of the significance of that tumultuous period of the evolving civil rights movement. He provides an appealing introduction, recounting the music of the blues, that great creative contribution African Americans gave to America, and the world. He then follows those wanting integration to a rally in a church, and observes them using a bus boycott to advance their cause. We sense the intense heat and humidity of that summer night in the Deep South, and the perseverance of those black Americans who had been shut out for so long. He sees them leaving the church, ready for a new day of the struggle, knowing they will have to walk to work, not ride the buses: The good people came down the church steps and went home to bed, to strengthen themselves against an early rising [and] the determination never to faint or yield in upholding the Rev. King, staying off the buses, and so giving glory to God.

Then, in our time having witnessed the rising again of a radical movement from the right wing of the Republican Party, we read about the relevant career of Joseph McCarthy, and we note the long heritage of the sort of almost apocalyptic thinking that envisions conspiracies in high places, especially in Washington, DC. But Alistair did not leave it there. Later on, there is a piece on Ronald Reagan, that now-iconic president who made conservatism respectable, even mainstream, again. Alistairs sympathetic report nevertheless views Reagan as heading a movement that may not have understood the complexities of modern American society.

Alistair was also the master of the character study, and of the perceptive, insightful obituary. Readers of this edition will be rewarded, and even moved, by his essays on, for example, Martin Luther King Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, and John F. Kennedy. He was the master of the style in which the subject of the piece is not named until the last line what he called the man who a style engagingly used in his piece on Ava Gardner.

Finally, a new readership will be struck by the prescience of the observations Alistair made in the interview he gave me in 1987, which is quoted in the introduction to the book. It is the only such interview of its kind he ever gave. In 1972, at the conclusion of his highly successful television series Alistair Cookes America, he said that in this country a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism the race is on between its decadence and its vitality. So, some ten years on I felt compelled to ask him the question, Hows it going? His nuanced answer took many paragraphs to tease out. Americans and (as Thomas Jefferson might have said) a watching world are still trying to sort out the meaning of a nation that is at once the most powerful and the self-appointed guardian of world democracy. Alistair Cooke may be a voice from the past, but his insights still ring true, and his observations remain relevant.