April 7, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 10

By Richard M. Langworth


Game Called. Upon the field of life
the darkness gathers far and wide,
the dream is done, the score is spun
that stands forever in the guide.
Nor victory, nor yet defeat
is chalked against the player’s name.
But down the roll, the final scroll,
shows only how he played the game.
—Grantland Rice

Last December my wife and I visited Alistair Cooke and his wife, Jane White Hawkes. “I have been housebound for eighteen months,” AC had written, “but I do set aside a half hour in the evening for entertaining friends.” Two hours later we finally left, Alistair virtually ejecting us: “I must eat at a set time every night, or everyone gets upset.”

He was still the man we remembered, stooped and tottery now, but with the same witty, brilliant mind, the same grasp of events, the same vivacious wife, 91 herself but looking more like 70. An accomplished artist, Jane had set down her brushes —”at the moment I’m into full-time maintenance.”

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We had known them since 1988, when AC addressed the Fifth International Churchill Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Explaining to 400 ardent Churchillians why World War I made Churchill’s rearmament campaign so unwelcome in the 1930s, Mr. Cooke recalled: “Every little village in England has its war memorial, every one its long list of names of the dead.” Then, fixing his audience with a steely eye: “The British would do anything to stop Hitler, except fight him. And ladies and gentlemen, if you had been there—if you had been alive and sentient and British in the 1930s—not one in ten of you would have been with Churchill.”

Everyone looked at each other, and I could imagine them thinking: “He must mean you.”

None of our conversation in December was what one might expect with a 95-year-old, nothing of medicine or doctors or advancing age. Alistair Cooke spoke of history, past and current—the election campaign; the Howard Dean phenomenon; prospects for Mr. Bush; what will happen in Iraq; how Iraq was formed (with the assistance of Churchill); whether it was formed well; how certain figures are perceived by a journalist eight decades on the scene—discussed with panache, and with much less reticence than he might express in public. It was probably material he was mulling over for his next BBC “Letter from America,” about which Jane made a prescient observation: “He lives only for the Letter. If he ever has to give it up he will die.”

Not three months later we heard his announcement: “Throughout fifty-eight years I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks and hope that some of it has passed over to the listeners, to all of whom I now say thank you for your loyalty and goodbye.”

Alistair Cooke was saying goodbye forever. William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the regular visitors at his flat, related that Churchill College, hearing that he had “put his feet on the desk,” had invited Alistair to become one of its Trustees. AC responded: “Thank you for your invitation. In about two months, I will put my feet up on the desk permanently.” Cooke thought this “very funny, which indeed it was,” Buckley wrote, “very nearly, though not quite, dispelling the gloom in his visitor’s heart.”

One assumes the Letter from America dies with him—after 2,869 editions and 700 hours of broadcast time, he can hardly be replaced. Yet that was just a fraction of the Cooke corpus. There were the other radio shows; his path-breaking television series “Omnibus”; his inimitable introductions to “Masterpiece Theatre”; his score of books on the Good and the Great, from a modest biography of Douglas Fairbanks to his best-seller, Alistair Cooke’s America. A Briton become a naturalized American, he was to his adopted country a faithful but not uncritical friend, recalling the old phrase “A friend is someone who knows all about you, but likes you.”

His old paper, The Guardian, knew him best: “Was he a great journalist? Just read his coverage of Kennedy in Dallas: the question answers itself. He could reach heights few others could aspire to. But did he—for all the millions around the world who tuned in for decade after decade—reflect any America but his own, a mix of nostalgia, Mencken and Rockwell reheated? That is a harder question…. In extreme old age, the laughing cavalier could do so much more than remember. He could reach back, reach forward: and make the connections. He was always, triumphantly, in touch.”

Which for me makes his death no less easy to accept. Churchill wrote similarly of Arthur Balfour: “I felt also the tragedy which robs the world of all the wisdom and treasure gathered in a great man’s life and experience and hands the lamp to some impetuous and untutored stripling, or lets it fall shivered into fragments upon the ground.”

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