Alistair Cooke correspondence sheds light on reporting dark days of 1968


Letters between Alistair Cooke and his editor – interactive
Alistair Cooke






Tensions between the Guardian and Cooke – Hetherington doubted his correspondent's grasp of race issues – have become legendary, some of it documented in Nick Clarke's biography of Cooke. A later Guardian editor, Peter Preston, who joined the paper in 1963, has said much of the legend of Cooke as a "nuisance" was just that. Here, anyway, is Hetherington on the day of publication of the Kennedy piece sending warmest thanks: "The Ambassador hotel must have been a terrible place to be but you've conveyed the sense and feeling of the occasion excellently."

Later that month Hetherington apologises for non-delivery of an earlier letter that went astray, congratulating Cooke on his 1,000th Letter from America, aired in March 1968. In this broadcast Cooke had talked of the "realisation that America which has never lost a war is not invincible and the very late discovery than an elephant can trumpet and shake the earth but not the self-possesssion of the ants who hold it".

The editor, after discussing the nuts and bolts of covering the continuing US presidential race, revives an idea that had already been floated for months: that of Cooke writing "some of your discursive and thoughtful comments" for the Guardian, even if "what can be a conversational piece on the air would not necessarily read well in print". Aware of the previous unhappy postal failure, Hetherington repeats his thanks for the Kennedy coverage. Despite what must have been a gruesome experience, from a cold-blooded newspaper point of view, the Guardian had been admirably served by Cooke and other reporters, Hetherington said.

Cooke's reply the following month expresses ambivalence over a more discursive column for the Guardian, but in March the following year one appeared, soon to be titled Alistair Cooke's America. This title would appear again, in 1973, on the book that followed his landmark television series America. By then Cooke had resigned from the paper.

Cooke's letter to Hetherington then turns to political coverage, reflecting Cooke's estimation of himself and the paper's reporting compared with that of rivals with their "bits of colour" and "flash dubious hard news". The Democratic convention would, it turned out, provide plenty of hard news.

His concluding sentences warn Hetherington that the Guardian must not "bore the reader", however. "My fanmail on Letter from America is very instructive here. It is overwhelmingly against saturation by American politics. And most of the protesters are obviously intelligent people."

By 25 September 1968, Cooke is reflecting on "drastic changes" in political campaigning as TV begins to dominate electioneering, and asserting that Britons, who see less of such coverage, need his interpretation of events on the ground. "The balance of the political social situation is something you can't see on television."

Cooke now wants a holiday. "I am pretty pooped (strangely, it took me a month or more get over the nervous trauma of the Bobby Kennedy horror) what with ML King, the conventions, Chicago and the rest. I badly need a break."