The New Idler
A Web Periodical
http://www.the-idler.com
March 31, 2004

---

Alistair Cooke, American
By Laurence Jarvik

WASHINGTON, DC, March 31, 2004— The passing Alistair Cooke at age 95 marks the end of an era. Perhaps more than any other figure in post-war America and Europe, he represented a civilized and sophisticated way of life. His American public image, reserved, calm, and unflappable, was set in the 1950s for American audiences, as the host of Omnibus, the Ford Foundation sponsored program of cultural uplift that was the precursor to PBS.

His British reputation was based on over half a century of “Letter from America,” weekly chats that were also letters from Alistair.

As biographer Nick Clark points out in his magisterial biography of the man, Cooke’s suave and debonair on-camera persona was not the whole story. He was not English, but American, giving up his British passport in 1941, as bombs rained down during the Blitz. For this act, some in the BBC never forgave him. He loved America passionately, and saw it as an open and optimistic alternative to the grim class-bound world he had left.

Alistair Cooke had a calm exterior, but he loved controversial and colorful personalities, as any good journalist would. They not only made good copy, they were stimulating. Cooke, unlike many in his field, was not afraid of controversy or novelty.

His first attraction was to Charlie Chaplin, another expatriate Englishman, eventually driven from America by his politics. He worked as Chaplin’s personal assistant. The Little Tramp was best man at Cooke’s first wedding. And they had a famous falling-out, which ended with Cooke’s return to England. But he soon made his way back to the United States, his first love.

Cooke’s lliterary idol was H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist and author of The American Language—not English language, of course, since he was a Germanophile —whose career came to an ignominious end when he found himself unable to shift with changing times and values as the United States entered World War II. Cooke’s dedication to Mencken was sincere, and he befriended the outcast journalist whom time had passed by, editing his writings, seeking to preserve his home, and bravely defending his pre-war writing against changing currents of taste and opinion.

And then, in A Generation on Trial, the story of Alger Hiss, Cooke again took a contrary position. He did not maintain Hiss’s innocence. Rather, he examined what happens to an individual who personifies a time and place, when the conventional wisdom of one generation is repudiated by another. As with H.L. Mencken, who as a man of the 1920s found himself dashed against the rocks of the late 1930s, Hiss’s perfectly conventional 1930s-era sympathy for the Soviet Union, an ally of the US during World War II, found itself out of favor by the late 1940s, as America confronted a new enemy following the defeat of Hitler. While Cooke shows sympathy for Hiss, he also shows sympathy for his accuser, then a young congressman from California, Richard Nixon, described in the text as “handsome.”

In the end, Cooke took the media to task for drumming up hysteria, for stoking heat rather than spreading light, and calls for a more objective examination of the facts and motivations on both sides of the conflict over communism. History has proven his analysis to have been farsighted.

After that, Cooke’s work on Omnibus made him a household name. Every Sunday afternoon he would bring culture to the masses. At the time, he smoked a pipe and had a New York accent. His sophisticated demeanor would be imitated by the likes of Hugh Hefner, William F. Buckley, and a generation of 50s Americans. This was Cooke’s heyday. And America had never seen it so good. Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Agnes DeMille, the greatest lights of stage and screen were on Omnibus, and Cooke was there, fulfilling his theatrical ambitions in a way not possible since he had been a gopher for Chaplin.

Alas, the party ended, the last martini glass clinked, and the sophisticated and intelligent and witty 1950s gave way to what Cooke called in one essay, “the ghastly 60s.” For Cooke, this was a nightmare of crudity, riot, and anti-intellectualism. His show cancelled, replaced by the likes of the Beverly Hillbillies, Cooke took a job as a spokesman for the United Nations, and faded from sight…

It was only in the 1970s that Cooke emerged from his American retreat. With President Nixon in the White House, and a changed attitude by the powers-that-be, Cooke was recalled to the pulpit, first as a champion of America for commercial television. His mini-series America for NBC and the BBC made him a millionaire, and returned him to public view. And of course, his hosting job for Mobil’s Masterpiece Theatre returned him to the Sunday night slot he occupied during Omnibus. Once again, he was bringing sophistication and uplift to American audiences. He suggested stability and reason at a time of crisis and despair in American politics and culture. The enlightened and gentle air of his television persona was a tonic for viewers reeling after a generation of assassinations, riots, and military debacles that ended in the resignation of President Nixon. But Cooke survived magnificently, manning the cultural barricades, keeping the barbarians at bay for some two decades on PBS.

Cooke was finally let go in 1992, because he looked too old for television, according to the powers that be. He did not leave happily. His replacement, Russell Baker, was no Alistair Cooke. And the chemistry of the series gradually disappated. American culture in the Clinton era returned to the lowest-common-denominator approach which apparently had little room for uplift. He faded from public view.

Luckily, the BBC kept his series on the air, and loyal listeners around the world continued to enjoy his personable cocktail-party chatter until last February, when again he was let go in a less than well-mannered fashion.

But no slights could mar his reputation by now. At 95, Cooke was an institution. An American original.

He will be missed.