Letter From America

One of my favorite BBC Radio features is Alistair Cooke's Letter From America, a delightful series of timely commentaries that he has been doing since 1946. He is now 95, and still going strong. Here's one letter--I will post more from time to time:



The appetite for war

• A year or two after the end of the First World War - I should say by the mid 1920s - a phrase came into popular usage which today sounds frightful, incredibly callous, but at the time was not even thought cynical.
  
  It was a jocular remark, usually about a friend who'd had the luck to be well out of combat, assigned to a base camp or perhaps to an army post overseas in a city far beyond the noise of shot and shell.
  
  I think of an old friend of mine who had such an assignment during the Second War and when I asked him where he'd served, he replied with this old familiar phrase: "Well, I had rather a good war really."
  
  How could we, only a year or two after the First War over, how dare we even whisper such a phrase, in the knowledge of eight million dead and 20 million wounded?
  
  Ah, but there's the point - in the knowledge - we didn't have the knowledge. We had no idea of the appalling numbers, of the enormity of the slaughter.
  
  We, the people at home, even the people living on the South Coast of England, friends in Kent for instance, who could hear the booming din of the guns when the wind was right, even they had only two sources for a guess at the number of casualties in any given battle, the constant sub-title in the morning paper - "heavy casualties on both sides" - and the evidence of their own eyes when they came to notice, in the weeks after an end or a pause in a battle, to notice how many young women out on the streets were wearing black, how many middle-aged and old men had black armbands.
  
  An old friend of mine, a very sophisticated man, when I told him that we never read or otherwise knew about the number of casualties in any engagement, he astonished me by being astonished.
  
  "But why?" he said.
  
  This little exchange came on the heels of a running discussion of whether we, the people of the United States, could maintain our support of the war, of any war, since we abolished the ban on military information that has been maintained in all wars before Vietnam - namely strict, absolute, frontline censorship.
  
  Add to that the most decisive factor of all today in the public judgement of any political event: the existence of television.
  
  Back in the First War we saw no corpses, no wounded children, no bombing of houses. We had no TV, no radio, only the papers.
  
  And the Second War too, we had an iron censorship - no television.
  
  The only pictures we had of war were the movie theatre newsreels and, though we saw long shots of desolate, tree-broken landscapes, we did not see hundreds of bodies skewered on stretches of barbed wire.
  
  We saw surrendering Germans of course but mostly we saw men huddled in trenches putting their thumbs up for the cameras, or scenes of marching men lighting cigarettes and singing in cheerful unison: "As long as you've a Lucifer to light your fag smile, boys, that's the style."
  
  So while the other day a national poll found that to 70% of the American people a casualty list in Iraq of over 500 dead is "unacceptable", we found that in the Battle of the Somme, when there were 20,000 of our men dead after the first night's fighting and 400,000 at the battle's end, these figures were "acceptable" because we never knew about them until five or six years after the whole war was over.
  
  And when the official figures were first published the human horror of them spawned in Britain and Germany, especially, a literature of bitterness and disillusion, which in time came to be tempered by hope in the newly-created League of Nations, which the good President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George assured us offered a blueprint, a road map, to perpetual peace.
  
  And we all, for a decade or so, clung desperately to this Utopian hope in spite of the League's having no international force to stop any war.
  
  Fifty years after the creation of the League of Nations - which was successively humiliated by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin - the United States found itself deep in a war, which France had abandoned, against Communist guerrillas in Vietnam.
  
  During the 58 years since the founding of the United Nations - which also, without possessing a pop gun, was created in its own words "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" - there have been over 250 wars and the United States now finds itself in a burgeoning war against a worldwide enemy of terrorist guerrillas.
  
  Six months after President Bush pronounced the Iraq mission accomplished, we've discovered that the war was not the war, but only the first battle of the war.
  
  The widespread disillusion this time has frozen the public reaction into two or three over-simple, unhelpful, public attitudes.
  
  And I'm not using the word public about America only. By now the American public shares the disappointments, the anxieties and the large population of the war's opponents as the rest of Europe, if not the wholesale detestation of the United States which we're reliably told infests the Muslim world.
  
  Surprisingly it came out the other day that - after his whirlwind world tour to talk foreign policy, to test nuclear intentions, to discuss trade, to beg for allies from several nations - the surprising word from the White House official who went along with him was that Mr Bush was astonished to hear that, in much of the world, America is unpopular as never before.
  
  Which left some American correspondents abroad, and those of us who depend on them, reeling with disbelief.
  
  Where had Mr Bush been? Well the answer is, I'm afraid, not hard to seek.
  
  When he's abroad he's fenced off from the inhabitants, embedded in a shoulder to shoulder regiment of bodyguards.
  
  If it's Thursday, he must say, it must be London.
  
  And when he's at home he's most of the time in the gilded cocoon of the White House - that elegant American Versailles inhabited only by deferential courtiers and by one or two realists (Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld comes to mind) who break the bad news gently and reluctantly.
  
  Surely Mr Bush has access to the polls? And lately his stock has been going down slowly but cruelly. There is still a majority in favour of trying to stay there and stabilise Iraq but it withers a little every day.
  
  As you'll have noticed, it has been the burden of this and earlier talks to wonder how long the American people - not to mention the British, the Polish, the Spanish, the Italians and the Australians will stay the course if war means what it has normally meant: 20,000, 30,000 even 100,000 casualties.
  
  Is such stamina possible for America and Western Europe in which now three generations have seen no war, no hard times, no need to sacrifice, have lived by a constitution that is all about rights and nothing about duty, nations that have found peace and comfort not only agreeable but normal?
  
  I notice that more and more friends of mine who originally supported going into Iraq alone now say they were really against it from the start.
  
  They had the good fortune not to be journalists and so have no printed record to refute them.
  
  During the past month or so I've been asking people of many sorts - including a top United Nations delegate, a philosopher, people who were against the war - what would they have done if they'd had a vote on the Security Council. What would they have done other than going it alone or accepting a UN resolution to send in inspectors for three months more and warned Saddam, as we've done 16 times before, to obey or face serious consequences? They all said: "Back to the UN."
  
  So 250 United Nations inspectors would have gone back - if Saddam had let them. As it is, the United States went in and after six months it has had 1200 inspectors at work.
  
  Rarely, I believe, has an American president approached such a heartbreaking visit to Europe and never, surely, to an ally.
  
  For Mr Bush - this imagined conqueror and bully who covets not an acre of land - is truly naïve enough to believe deeply that democracy can be planted in the alien cultures of Arabia.
  
  I had an odd, touching phone call two days ago from a London reporter.
  
  What was the president going to say?
  
  I hadn't the remotest idea.
  
  What would I say? - presuming, I suppose, that I was his speechwriter.
  
  I was not trapped.
  
  But I think I would say: Be of good heart and remember, if you value peace over freedom, you will lose.
  
  And as a famous British author wrote, fleeing his luxurious French estate as the Nazis swept in: "If it is comfort or money that you value more, you will lose that too."

First broadcast on Friday, 14 November, 2003 on BBC Radio 4.

Had to add his Thanksgiving 2003 letter...


Healthy eating

• "Being thus arrived and in good harbour in safety they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element."
  
  How often I wonder in the past half century have I warmed to this talk about the last Thursday in November, which since a proclamation by Lincoln has been celebrated as a day of national thanksgiving.
  
  
  Abraham Lincoln declared the last
  Thursday in November a day of
  national thanksgiving
  
  The first proclamation came from the Yorkshireman I've quoted - William Bradford - who had led that storm-battered voyage from Southampton to Cape Cod.
  
  After losing half his 100 settlers to a winter of starvation, misery and violent cold, the following November produced a first harvest and Bradford decreed it should be celebrated every year by a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayer for the colony that was now pretty sure to survive.
  
  When they landed in 1620, their rejoicing was short-lived for Bradford goes grimly on: "They had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain and refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses much less towns to seek for succour, and ahead of them a desolate wilderness with wild beasts and wild men.
  
  Some of them petitioned to go back over the "vast and furious ocean".
  
  But the tougher ones foraged among the grasses of the Cape and came on patches of three crops: a crop of maize - later throughout the Americas known as corn - and bogs of cranberries, and the potato.
  
  And by the following spring the resident Indians had become sufficiently friendly to show them the use as high cuisine of a wild animal that was not in fact wild in action but easily taken, quietly slaughtered and cooked into a delicious dish: the turkey.
  
  Last Thursday, the staple meal throughout the United States of this family feast (and Thanksgiving is, more than any other day, the day of the family) is roast turkey or smoked turkey, corn - maize - pudding, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.
  
  Incidentally, grace is recited in more than 75% of all families sitting down, usually at about two in the afternoon.
  
  Most of them will have seen on television the president's brave, if alarming, speech in Iraq.
  
  But this year it would not be surprising to learn that very many Americans wonder what they have to be thankful for.
  
  And just to spoil even the Thanksgiving dinner itself, here at home there is a new compassionate campaign being mounted by greens - or you might better say animal lovers - a campaign to banish the Thanksgiving turkey itself from the board.
  
  It's the same argument which is certainly hard to meet or ignore as the one advanced by people who've been put off by the knowledge of how cattle and pigs are bred for human consumption.
  
  The cramped, medicinal lives of calves has been lamented for generations but even lovers of birds who campaign passionately to stop shooting them tend to look the other way when delicious veal is mentioned.
  
  The protest is not against the family farmer - a type that is, by the way, beginning to vanish - but against the big corporation farms and what is deplored as the industrial production of turkeys that is fast, cruel and leaves little time in a turkey's life to trot around and take the air.
  
  I doubt it will have any more long-term success than similar, brave campaigns against beef cattle and pigs.
  
  But there was held last week in New York city a conference, a protest conference, by an unlikely group, practically a summit meeting of - wait for it - bread bakers protesting against a recently-revealed fact of American life among the young.
  
  During the past year, a government survey was published revealing an appalling statistic: 40% of all American children, teenagers most of all, suffer from obesity.
  
  "A national disease of epidemic proportions" is the sort of headline that has entitled surveys and laments in every sort of publication through the medical journals, parents' magazines, newspapers and down to the tabloids, finally being deemed so serious a national problem that many, very serious papers have abandoned the national love of Greek and Latin and come out in plain English: "Our children are too fat!"
  
  Well, the result of this study has been a far-reaching government campaign, not to change its long-standing recommendations for healthy eating - little saturated fat, less fried food, fewer carbohydrates, lots of fruit and vegetables - but to try to arrest the landslide of junk food, that constitutes in life, the actual diet of too many children.
  
  The insistence on eating less saturated fats has already affected the big, fast food chains, so as to cause them to promise to reduce the fat content of their burgers.
  
  But the recommendation that hurts a much larger industry is the urge to reduce carbohydrates.
  
  The charge that set off the bread bakers' summit was the advice of government health men, the medicos, the parents' groups, to have their children eat less bread, less pasta. Less pasta? - what an outrageous demand!
  
  For the past decade, maybe two decades or more, if there's been a national obsession, it has been pasta.
  
  In a national popular food guide, which lists every sort of restaurant from the most expensive French to a chain of coffee shops there are three Afghan restaurants, 35 Indian, 250 French, four English - and 600 Italian.
  
  And along comes a blithe doctor and says: "Hey, gumba - cut out the pasta, cut out the pizza." If those bakers ever catch him, his life won't be worth an angel's hair.
  
  But the bakers had a right to be alarmed. The message of the government and the medicos and the parents has got across, and at this conference, ominous figures were quoted about the number of bread bakers who have gone, or are about to go, out of business.
  
  The dread sentence was not, in my report, ever spoken. But behind the loud assertions that bread is the stuff of life, was a still small voice saying: "Perhaps at last the craze for pasta is going the way of the previous fad for croissants - remember?"
  
  I've not mentioned for some time our old bugbear, another and a continuing national obsession - cholesterol - a very complex alcohol that is known about and controlled and worried about by everybody as a perilous cause, not of obesity, but of heart disease.
  
  Some time in the last year, I took not a galloping poll but a stealthy questioning of friends and acquaintances.
  
  I asked guilelessly how long ago, when do you suppose, did this popular obsession with cholesterol get started? Most everybody thought - oh I'd say 10, 15 years maybe.
  
  Well, I've now discovered the text of a lecture I gave to the American Heart Association in Boston over 40 years ago when I remarked: "The word cholesterol gibbers through the land as the word 'unclean' used to herald the approach of a leper."
  
  At the time there was a tremendous to-do about the lethal snags created in the bloodstream by carbohydrates and animal fats.
  
  But then the medical profession had decided that cholesterol was as fatal as silt along a riverbed.
  
  Since then nothing has changed about the cholesterol warnings except the public awareness that there are two kinds: the low-density lipoproteins, known as the bad cholesterol, and the high-density lipos, known as the good.
  
  This is too complicated for most people and what they fear is that their total count of good and bad will go, by our scale, much over 200 points.
  
  This seems to be a fear of all types of all ages. Every American, from a bishop to a truck driver, knows his cholesterol count. Every woman from a cleaning lady to a psychoanalyst, knows hers.
  
  Americans are astonished to discover when they go abroad that the French don't bother with the cholesterol count. And in Britain, in the code they print on packaged foods, protein is big, but often no mention is made of the deadly cholesterol.
  
  So many other chemicals have come to be identified as having an effect on the heart that I heard myself a month or so ago saying to my cardiologist: "I won't be here to see it but I'll bet 10 years from now some other bugbear will have replaced cholesterol."
  
  "I shouldn't," he said, "wonder."
  
  He felt even more sceptical when I told him the true story of a friend of mine in San Francisco who's in his mid 80s and follows no diet.
  
  His combined cholesterol count - now remember 200 is safe, normal - his count varies between 625 and 650.
  
  Two doctors have warned him that he's a walking time bomb.
  
  My friend's secret, it seems, is that his grandfather came from an ancient village in Greece where some gene in the tribe produced men with huge cholesterol who all lived to be about 100.
  
  My friend gives every sign of continuing the family tradition.
  
  Meanwhile, as for the two doctors who warned him he was a walking time bomb: both are dead.

This programme was first broadcast on Friday, 28 November, 2003 on BBC Radio 4.

[Monte Smith]

Post #1 is humane and nuanced. I concur with most of its sentiment.

Another Letter from Alistair Cooke

Chinese textile tariffs

• T

• he scene, as they say in theatre programmes, is a small newspaperman's office in the National Press building in Washington DC.
  
  The time is a bright, hot morning in the spring of 1940.
  
  This small room has one well-worn easy chair, a small desk bearing a towering old manual typewriter of the earliest model.
  
  There's a small bookshelf with a dozen or less reference books slumping against each other.
  
  The door of the office is half open and once you enter through it you're aghast at the most characteristic feature of the office and its tenant.
  
  There's a mountain of unread newspapers wobbling on a slapping tide of unanswered, indeed unopened cables from London.
  
  All of them are from the foreign editor of the London paper of which we're poking into the Washington office: the Washington headquarters of The Times, irreverently called by Americans "The London Times".
  
  At the time I was the second string to both the Washington and the New York correspondents, living in New York and doing odd pieces for the New York man but on call when need be by the chief, the great man of British journalism in America then, Sir Wilmot Harsent Lewis - known to everybody in the press building as Old Bill Lewis until he'd been knighted.
  
  On that spring morning in 1940 Sir Wilmot had summoned me to Washington.
  
  "I have," he said over the telephone in his rolling baritone, "something for you."
  
  So now we enter that tiny office and face its giant inhabitant - giant by comparison with his surroundings.
  
  He was well over six feet, he stood as straight as a grenadier normally and spoke like an archbishop, at least as archbishops used to speak, in a form of magisterial southern educated English with the articulation of a classical Shakespearean actor. Back in those days John Gielgud would have made a very good archbishop.
  
  When I arrived he was sitting tapping away at this monstrous typewriter. Like all the best reporters of those days he used four fingers, at most, to type with.
  
  At that moment he turned stiffly round - apparently he had a bad back. With one hand he waved me to the easy chair, his right hand picking up his smouldering cigarette.
  
  He said in his most Episcopal manner: "What do you hear from the mob?"
  
  In a moment, a sentence you see, he was able to puncture his austere façade.
  
  He was in fact the most relaxed, informal, wittiest cynic I ever knew. He turned towards me his craggy, long face with small, hooked nose, the high forehead, the neat parted hair, but it was his eyes - gooseberry green, mischievous, with a hint of malice - that told you volumes about his past, present, disposition, most of all his built-in resistance to any form of pressure or persuasion from what he called "official sources".
  
  In those far off days the two or three top British correspondents had easy access to senators, congressmen, governors. They all loved to have a mention, a good press, in England.
  
  I should remind any puzzled younger listeners that at the time London was the capital of the British Empire and the British Empire owned between a third and a quarter of the globe.
  
  Because of his position as The Times reporter, because of his formidable bearing but most of all because of the quality of his dispatches and the potential effect they could and often did have on British policy towards the United States, Wilmot Lewis had confidential access to the president himself.
  
  And one or two presidents were not beyond suggesting the correct interpretation of some bill or policy they were pushing hard.
  
  Now, 10 years before that spring morning, in June 1930, the Senate had passed a bill which Wilmot Lewis privately thought was the worst thing that had happened to America in his time.
  
  It was a tariff bill, composed by two senators whose ill fame still resounds through Washington - Senator Smoot and Senator Hawley.
  
  It was known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. And in spite of public protest and a petition to President Hoover of over a thousand American economists, it raised tariffs to the highest level in history.
  
  The bill had been written on the inspiration of an encouraging rally in stock prices, which regained between a third and a half of the dreadful low to which they'd fallen the previous October 1929 - the month of the terrible Wall Street crash.
  
  Senators Smoot and Hawley persuaded the Senate and President Hoover that a stiff, high tariff barrier for all but a favoured country or two would halt the Depression and fortify the economy against another slump.
  
  Wilmot Lewis's despatch to The Times was an objective report but he included in it the fears of some senators and that army of economists that the bill would produce a wave of retaliatory tariffs.
  
  At a White House party one evening President Hoover moved up close to Lewis and questioned his interpretation.
  
  "Why, Bill," he wondered, "couldn't you have seen it more from the White House's view? What have you got to lose?"
  
  Green eyes gleaming: "My virginity, Mr President," he said.
  
  It could have been the curtain line to a fine old melodrama and I'd not be surprised if he hadn't waited for an occasion to use it.
  
  Wilmot Lewis was a Welshman born, who in his youth found himself, as he put it, in the Far East where he did a variety of jobs including newspaper work and some unspecified financial advising to some unspecified oriental tycoon or provincial ruler.
  
  And at one time he admitted he'd been a roving, not very affluent, actor. From two of these occupations you could infer two of his characteristics - his steady scepticism about Wall Street expertise and his love of what you might call theatrical pronouncements.
  
  His polite refusal to take the administration line on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill was, as it turned out, judicially taken.
  
  The bill had hoped to boost the stock market, the spring rally, and help write the obituary of the winter Depression. It had the exactly opposite effect.
  
  The rally proved to be not a rally but what Wall Street calls "a dead cat bounce".
  
  Britain responded with a policy of what was called Empire free trade, excluding the dominions from new tariffs imposed against other countries.
  
  Throughout the summer of 1930 many countries followed suit. The stock market went into an uninterrupted decline.
  
  World trade kept in falling step with the market. Production dropped everywhere.
  
  In the United States alone 1300 banks closed their doors. The country's unemployment rose to an unprecedented four and a half million.
  
  By the winter of 1930-31 even the perpetual optimists admitted that a general worldwide economic depression had set in.
  
  President Hoover's two-year-old boast that America had reached a plateau of permanent prosperity became a bitter mockery.
  
  This memory of Wilmot Lewis and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was inevitably called to mind when President Bush announced this week that he would follow up his long-lamented tariff on steel by limiting the huge amount of imports of Chinese clothing fabrics - shirts, blouses, dressing gowns, bras and those many exquisite little shoes and slippers that cost so little in this country.
  
  Mr Bush yielded months ago to the pleas of unemployed American steel workers with that whopping 30% tariff and now of course he's protecting the work - and the votes next November - of the struggling American textile workers.
  
  There's another presidential candidate who is eager to secure and likely to get the Democrats' presidential nomination.
  
  He's a former governor of Vermont, a professed liberal. He nevertheless has swung into line with the new liberal line which is protection. Protection had always been a Republican monopoly.
  
  He received this week with much joy the endorsement of the largest industrial union in the country.
  
  So what has all this to do with Wilmot Lewis and my summons to Washington?
  
  Flashback to that spring morning in 1940.
  
  After we shared a Washington pleasantry or two, Sir Wilmot put his hand into an inside pocket and produced what might have been a small deck of cards.
  
  He dealt them to me one at a time like a careful poker player.
  
  They were all his correspondent's passes - to the Senate, to the House, to the White House and - glory be - his two press credentials to the coming Republican and Democrat presidential conventions.
  
  I felt like a young baseball fanatic who has been given a privileged seat at the World Series.
  
  "This is wonderful," I said, "but - but, Bill, why?"
  
  He heaved a sigh.
  
  "Because, dear boy," he said, "I have decided that what happened today happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow."
  
  For too long since the Boer War he'd watched the cycles of war and peace, war and peace, boom and bust.
  
  From now on he would do the big authoritative pieces, no more daily grind. He lifted himself stiffly from his chair:
  
  "Now for the treatment," he said.
  
  He tottered to the door, chuckled at the litter of unopened cables and stood in the door like Henry V and said:
  
  "Not Caligula nor the courts of Genghis Khan ever devised a torture so exquisite as the bi-monthly massaging of the prostate gland. Goodbye, my boy."

This programme was first broadcast on Friday, 21 November, 2003 on BBC Radio 4.

[walto]

Great piece. Thanks for posting that, Chris.

Yet another...

...two years old, but they age well.

Monday, 8 October, 2001, 10:51 GMT 11:51 UK

Civil rights and censorship

• O

• ne evening some time after the Second World War, I was sitting with an old friend sharing, as we often did, the twilight wine of Scotland.
  
  He was a famous historian, both of France and the United States. He was a short, pawky, bloodshot, humorous Scot, a professor of history at Cambridge University.
  
  He had an incomparable gift for recalling the most academic historical fact and illustrating it with, say, a line from Cole Porter or the Gershwin brothers.
  
  We were talking about differences between English and American usage in language, politics - I can't recall - but as I poured myself a splash of the fizzy stuff we call soda, I remarked: "Do you know something? It took me about 40 years to stop asking, especially in the Middle West, for Scotch and soda."
  
  The waiter would come back and say something like: "What sort of soda would that be, sir?" - suggesting it might be a lemon or an orange drink soda.
  
  I learned, as I say, rather late in the day, in a part of the country settled mainly by Germans or Scandinavians, to say "with seltzer".
  
  Today and for the past 15, 20 years I'd guess, seltzer is now universal - printed on the soda water bottles.
  
  My friend chuckled and said: "Well, I suppose you and I know as much American social history as any single American but when you're not born in a country you will find the only mistakes you make are elementary ones."
  
  How true. I discovered this week that since the disaster of 11 September I've been suffering, unknowingly, from - not a mistake so much as a misapprehension, a false assumption, say, about British and American concerns for civil rights.
  
  It has to do with the fears I had a week or two ago about the radical left here, which is small but rowdy and in the colleges disproportionately powerful among the faculties. Let me say over what I had to say only a week ago.
  
  "Already," I said, "passionate upholders of civil rights are beginning to whine about what they take to be violations of their rights in the security measures taken by the Department of Justice (that's to say the FBI), by the state and city police.
  
  As I talk Attorney General Ashcroft is going before Congress to see if it is constitutional of him to ask that the legal wiretapping of regulation telephones be extended to cell phones.
  
  This, of course, has already been done in Western countries that don't have an 18th Century written constitution to tell them how to behave in every contingency of life that might upset or constrain the freedom of the individual to go where he pleases and say and do what he wants."
  
  A little harshly put perhaps but I was saying all this on the assumption that European libertarians, Britons especially, were more realistic than Americans and that they perhaps, from long experience, have learned to put up with such restrictions on personal liberty in wartime.
  
  A newspaper liberal here writes: "We are about to live in a police state. Next thing they'll be making us carry identity cards just like the Nazis."
  
  Well it was a surprise to me to learn from my favourite English magazine that there is no libertarian lobby in England. That France and Germany and many civilised European countries already require identity cards and that Britons wouldn't make much a fuss about them.
  
  This discovery of mine led to another one about this country, which is that a great number of Americans, and I'm thinking of educated Americans, had barely heard or thought of what those restrictions might be in time of war.
  
  Judging from the kind of literate people who write letters to the serious papers there's a majority who warn us all that we must preserve our civil rights and watch out that the next government doesn't impose anything like - the most dreaded word in the liberal vocabulary - censorship.
  
  I can't think of a war in history in which one of the first acts of government was not to impose a code of censorship. In this country the universal code was dramatically relaxed during Vietnam, to the eventual discrediting of the administration and the demoralising of public support for the war.
  
  How relaxed? Well you could say anything you liked about the government and the armed forces and the president, you could avoid the draft, you could urge others to do it - acts which in any previous war would have had you prosecuted and jailed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
  
  However, since, as I speak, the war has not yet begun you'd suppose that it's too early for protestors to start parading.
  
  Not at all. Last weekend huge parades were held in San Francisco and in Washington by a great assortment of types from anti-globalisation demonstrators to a small, very passionate, group called Against War and Race - a meaningless slogan if ever there was one.
  
  It reminded me instantly of a very large group of Britons, in the late 1930s, who bore a banner with the device Against War and Fascism.
  
  A national ballot carried the signatures of millions of Britons willing to do everything to get rid of Hitler except fight him.
  
  The slogan Against War and Fascism in retrospect seems about as witless as proclaiming yourself to be Against Hospitals and Disease, but such was the temper of the time that the impulse driving so many good and decent people into the cause of Against War and Fascism was simple dread - a deep fear of war that haunted all of us, young and old, who had survived, less than 20 years before, the enormous slaughter of the First World War.
  
  And I think that fear for their own skins, more than anything, is the moving force behind these mobs who are protesting the war before the war has begun, or before we even know what sort of war the future holds.
  
  However, although the protestors bulk awfully large on a television screen they are, at latest count, a tiny minority of the population.
  
  Mayor Giuliani once again speaks for what, from the national polls, appears to be the great majority when he says: "I keep telling people to do their thing, go about their lives as usual.
  
  "If I go out from this building and am killed it'll make no difference to the record of my life - how I behaved. Our national anthem says 'Land of the free, home of the brave'. OK let's go out and be brave."
  
  A stirring sight within the sound of these words was a long line - what in England is called a queue - down on 34th Street, of tourists ready to pay their way into the Empire State Building which is, once again, the tallest building in the city.
  
  It was evacuated for several days after the devastation but the lights around its towering spire were never dimmed.
  
  And the next shot we had was of interviews with tourists taking in the high, long, view of downtown and the harbour. One man said he had stayed miserable but dry-eyed throughout 11 September but shed a tear when he saw, miles away, stark and clear, the Statue of Liberty.
  
  Another old man from the Middle West said: "Well the mayor said to come to New York, look us over, we need you. We'd never been to New York but here we are doing like the mayor said."
  
  On the protection of civil rights I'd guess that not among those protesting thousands are many ageing Americans who will keep their eye on what the courts will or will not permit by way of security measures.
  
  People who remember that immediately after Pearl Harbour, the Supreme Court approved of the government's ordering 100,000 Japanese, most of them American citizens, to be taken from their homes on the coast of California and put in detention camps inland for the rest of the war.
  
  An act for which, only in the past decade, has the Supreme Court apologised and ordered financial compensation for all living descendants of the victims.
  
  This administration was very mindful of that colossal error when at the Washington Cathedral service a Muslim priest appeared alongside the usual Catholic and Protestant priests and a rabbi.
  
  I think one of the most moving single television shots I saw, apart from the scenes of death and destruction, was a close up of a pair of stockinged feet.
  
  The camera panned up to the body and pleading face of George W Bush in a mosque.
  
  Which brings up, I'm sure, the question strangers of this land seem to want to have answered - how is the president doing?
  
  The overwhelming consensus is that he's doing fine. And to sceptics who think it must be the men around him I'm assured on very high authority that the men around him frequently disagree but nobody but George W calls the shots - he hasn't put a foot wrong.
  
  For a man feeling his way in the dark of the unknown, not putting a foot wrong is no mean feat.
  
  For those even more sceptical foreigners, the appalled intelligentsia, who practically went into mourning when Mr Bush became President Bush, who deplored the grammar and the seeming naivety of the new president: Remember the universal groan that went out when an unknown failed haberdasher, a provincial if ever there was one, succeeded President Roosevelt and demonstrated how leadership could triumph over grammar. His name was Harry S Truman.
  
  And how about Abraham Lincoln? He was thought so embarrassingly naïve and stutteringly provincial when he came to the White House that the London Times thought him unworthy of the presidency and went on calling him "the baboon".
  
  The first thing he did, when the civil war was on, was to suspend habeas corpus, gag the press, root out the grafters and war profiteers and take command of the Union armies.

Looking for an anniversary

Alistair Cooke finds some memorable occasions to celebrate, in this editon
of Letter from America first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 December, 2003.


Alistaire Cooke has broadcast on radio
and tv since 1934.

• On the rare occasions when a commentator is flummoxed for a topic, what does he do?
  
  He looks through history timetables for an anniversary, and this past week the New York Times got the jump on everybody with a reprinted photograph, exactly 70 years old, of a waiter pouring from a silver vase - a shaker, if the word means anything - with the smiling approval of a seated, pretty woman.
  
  The caption was a date: December 5, 1933, and the piece was headed: "When the country went wet again".
  
  The waiter was pouring - in public, in full air - a cocktail, a public act that had not been possible for 13 years after 16 January 1920.
  
  So 5 December, 1933 was the date on the tombstone of what the late President Hoover called "the noble experiment", an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited the manufacture, transport and sale of alcohol anywhere.
  
  The idea was to purify the nation of the demon rum. However, the effect of the law was to make the forbidden apple the most desired object in the garden.
  
  Secret taverns sprouted in every main street of every town. The drinking population tripled.
  
  An underground criminal industry known as bootlegging organised its own ships, rail cars, trucks, agents, spies, salesmen, the lot.
  
  Quite respectable people - bankers, judges - were bought off to ease the unenforceable law.
  
  A Bostonian businessman named Kennedy, son of a poor Irish immigrant, made a fortune from the transatlantic Scotch whisky monopoly.
  
  The release from this huge and lamentable experiment was celebrated quietly last week in a small room of an original speakeasy by three public men.
  
  One of them was former mayor Ed Koch.
  
  As he emerged into the daylight, he said aloud: "It made Joe Kennedy rich and that's how he got his son."
  
  Talking of a journalist's search for anniversaries, I think I must tell you about a producer who was crazy for anniversaries and about the most desperate search in the shortest time that ever happened to me or to any other journalist I ever heard of.
  
  Just 50 years ago - there we go again, that's just coincidental - anyway, in 1953 a regular part of my working week was absorbed in a weekly Sunday television production. It was the first 90-minute show of any kind in this country.
  
  Each programme was a mixture or collage of short features, running from a 40-minute play through a science session, a bout of music, a brief political profile, a sketch history of trial by jury, down to a 30-second motion picture X-ray of two old ladies' skeleton faces chatting over the backyard fence. (We'd been warned by the radiologist that 30 seconds was the limit of human exposure to what was then a fascinating, if rather hideous, novelty - skeleton jaws in motion.)
  
  In those far-off days there was no such thing as taping a show for subsequent broadcast. Every show - however dead as a work of creation - was live, which for quite a time redounded in our favour.
  
  The show was handsomely funded and for dramatic pieces we could have our pick - and did - of the most distinguished stage actors and actresses of the time.
  
  Note, I stressed "stage". In the beginning of television the great majority of movie actors ran a mile from live television.
  
  They were used to filming scenes lasting a minute or 30 seconds in which they were required to memorise dialogue lasting rarely longer than 40 seconds, say.
  
  On the other hand stage actors now had the new chance of a lifetime to gain national exposure without having to travel the length and breadth of America to get it. It was a godsend to theatre stars.
  
  And so we found, from the christening day of the programme on, that the most eminent stage stars in America - and quite a few from England - came begging to be on our show.
  
  By the same blessed token we had no trouble getting the metropolitan opera company to hasten in to do the first opera performance on American television.
  
  Well, one thing led to another and in no time, it seemed, everybody distinguished in their field wanted to get on our show.
  
  From the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan company to Groucho Marx.
  
  However, not to give you the idea that we ruled the roost in a rose garden - if that's possible - I may say that on live television there is always the threat of a crisis, and down nine years we had lots of crises, from a set falling down to reveal a lovemaking couple backstage, to a union boss trying to urge on us - 10 minutes before a show - two camera directors instead of one. He won.
  
  But the most hair-curling moment - two minutes in fact - of my life as a television host came in the middle of a performance, live of course, of a comedy by a French playwright, when the star American actor fell into a dose.
  
  He'd acted in a strange fashion during the dress rehearsal and in the luncheon break - we decided later - he must have consumed a little too much of his luncheon contained in a flask.
  
  In retrospect he might well have come back for the actual performance complaining, like WC Fields: "Somebody has put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice."
  
  Anyway, the star was alarmingly unsteady on his feet and the producer ordered an emergency, commanding the autocue or teleprompter man to copy, in the next hour, the actor's lines on to three separate teleprompters. One was planted upright facing a sofa and each of the other two had to be tilted sideways at each end of the sofa, suitable for a tired man to be able to read lying down.
  
  It seemed a blessed solution. The happy, if lackadaisical, star mumbled his amusing lines well enough until suddenly - none of his doing - all three teleprompters went berserk, on the fritz, haywire, all at once.
  
  They simply whizzed through, as it came out, seven minutes of dialogue, which escaped of course the other two actors as well.
  
  The wobbly star blinked and yawned and took up without a murmur when the prompters righted themselves.
  
  Still, seven minutes were lost from the programme and in those days the test of a programme's excellence, however bad in content, was that it finished after precisely 89 minutes and 50 seconds.
  
  There came a fade-out of the play for the interruption of a two-minute commercial.
  
  Never did a field marshal and his staff do more in two minutes to devise and deliver a flank attack.
  
  Within 10 seconds of the break, the producer - a spry but gentle, tall man with a John the Baptist beard - came leaping out of the wings carrying a small box he'd found in the props department.
  
  It could have been a set of engagement rings.
  
  "What," he hissed, "do you know about jewels?"
  
  I said: "I, er, er, I, I mean, well, absolutely nothing."
  
  "Too late," he cried, and he opened the box.
  
  We had one more minute of the commercial.
  
  "Here," he shouted, "are six of the world's most famous jewels - glass imitations of course - and on the inner lid is a short piece describing each.
  
  "Get a pillar!" he shouted to some stage hand.
  
  A fake cardboard pillar arrived from nowhere.
  
  John the Baptist planted the little box on it, opened the lid, said: "Take each one in turn, hold between your thumb and first finger - the camera will stay on your hand. Off-camera you'll improvise from the printed pieces. Fifteen seconds coming up, clear the set."
  
  Cough, straighten the tie.
  
  "Hold it." I shouted back at the retreating figure, "What's the hook, why today?"
  
  He hesitated for about one second.
  
  "It's an anniversary - the 100th anniversary of Queen Victoria getting the Koh-i-noor from India. You're on your own."
  
  He darted out. The floor manager counted, like the dispatcher at Cape Canaveral - six, five, four, three, two - we have lift off.
  
  Fade in. Half shot of me holding the precious box.
  
  "It occurred to us," I said blandly, "that this is a dazzling anniversary in the history of the British Empire and the history of jewels.
  
  "Just about a hundred years ago, Queen Victoria held durbar - a grand public levee on her only visit to India, and was presented with the hugest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-noor."
  
  I take it out, twist it, put the box back on the pillar and we have a glistening close up as I twist the fabulous stone.
  
  Passing it off-camera to an invisible floor manager I announce we have five other famous stones and -twirling each of them in a dazzling close-up - I go on eloquently off-screen about Evelyn Walsh McClean and the Hope diamond, the Dresden diamond, until I felt in my bones, as you learn to, that we had about 28 seconds left.
  
  Back on camera I ended with some such anecdote as I think, about the mine in Colorado that made a Mr Brown famous but not as famous as his wife, who was a heroic survivor from the Titanic and became known around the world as the unsinkable Molly Brown. Goodnight.
  
  When it was all over, general backslappings and hilarity all round.
  
  The next week I went up to our charming, persuasive producer, Bill Spear: "How did you come on 1853 and what was the Queen doing in India? She wasn't there." I said.
  
  Bill Spear was a charming man and an honest one.
  
  He looked me straight in the eye: "Well," he said, "that's what I heard."
  
  Still, after that, I never forgot one of the lessons Mark Twain said he learned from his years out West: never trust a man who looks you square down in the eye.

[frankiepop]

provided you are interested in a fascinating historical account, then i guide you to


http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

click on radio 4 'intelligent speech' and find

Letter from America

click here again

wait listen and be awed for this weeks replay....

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks, frankiepop! What a treasure was Alastair Cooke.

Are you hip to Ashley Montague, and if so, what's your view of him?