Letter from another America: Justin Webb on Alistair Cooke

In his final Letter from America, Alistair Cooke mused on the impact of the Iraq war on the 2004 presidential election. He finished with a quotation from the Democratic nominee, John Kerry: “George Bush must be driven from the White House and I’m the man to do it.”

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It was the end of the world’s longest-running speech radio programme. Over 2,869 broadcasts and 58 years, Cooke offered wry, piercing observations of American society to Britons via the BBC.

“Radio 4 is a national monument,” its former controller Michael Green declared. “And Alistair Cooke is one of its best-known gargoyles.”

Cooke died a few weeks after his last broadcast, aged 95. Having reported on the second world war, witnessed the assassination of Robert Kennedy, followed Watergate and been in New York on 9/11, he might have been forgiven for thinking America had few surprises left up its sleeve.

So much for the end of history. Cooke never got to see America elect its first Black president, Barack Obama, then lurch to its first president without political or military experience. He did not see Donald Trump fumble a pandemic and spur an insurrection.

What would Cooke, who bashed out his letter on a typewriter every Thursday, have made of Trump, a carnival barker and demagogue reminiscent of 1930s Europe?

“He would have been fascinating about him because he would have broadened the conversation,” says Justin Webb of the BBC, who has written a foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the book Alistair Cooke’s America.

“He would have been enormously sympathetic not to Trump but to Trump’s supporters. He would have grasped absolutely and clearly the things that led decent, ordinary Americans who had voted for Barack Obama then to vote for Donald Trump.

“He would have explained to people in Britain the multiple reasons why there was such disillusionment and he would have understood the kind of brutal, undiplomatic and un-PC language that saw Trump through the election that he won and thrilled so many people in distressed previously industrial places, in particular the north-east of America, and made them think, ‘He’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.’

“They didn’t particularly view him as a nice person but he articulated something. All of that, Cooke would have been thrilled by.”

At first it might seem hard to picture Cooke, a patrician figure who entertained celebrities in his 15th-floor Manhattan apartment, amid the rusting factories of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Webb, 62 and a former BBC Washington correspondent, insists Cooke would have been more in touch with so-called Trump country than the elites of today.

“He would have seen it coming more than a lot of journalists who regard themselves as less patrician but in the modern era are sealed off from reality. Yes, Alistair Cooke was patrician. Yes, he lived in New York. Yes, he flitted between the coasts and a lot of the book is written from the point of view of those coasts.

“America and journalism was different in those days. You could, and he did, go by train. You could, and he did, make road trips. American journalists of great status in the modern era, the TV icons, just don’t and they’re so wealthy they’re completely sealed off from society.

“Since Cooke’s time, people in positions of journalistic power and power generally – the professional managerial upper classes – have sealed themselves off from ordinary life. For all that he was a patrician and quite snooty about the diners, he would have understood and he probably would have still gone to them because, in those days, there wasn’t that huge gap between that sealed-off upper class and the rest.”

‘I’d put him right of centre’

Cooke was born in Salford in northern England in 1908. After graduating from Cambridge and studying theatre at Yale and Harvard, he worked in Hollywood for Charlie Chaplin, broadcast letters from London for the American network NBC in 1936 and moved to New York in 1937, first as a correspondent for the Times and then for the Guardian for 25 years.

He was most familiar to US TV audiences as host of Omnibus and Masterpiece Theatre. He received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for his 13-part BBC series America: A Personal History of the United States, which concluded: “America is a country in which I see the most persistent idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.” The accompanying book sold more than 2m copies and is now reissued by Amberley and Quiller.

In its new foreword, Webb, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme and a host of the podcast Americast, says Cooke would have been dismayed by both major political parties in 2023.

He writes: “Identity politics, so beloved now of so many Democrats, he would see as a psychological weakness, an aspect of the decadence he so feared.”

Speaking from Camberwell, south London, Webb elaborates: “He was a great believer, however huge its problems were, in the unique enterprise of America, this bringing together of everyone, this genuine melting pot, albeit a hugely imperfect one. He saw the struggle between the dignity of America and its meretriciousness. He saw it walking this tightrope between the hopelessness and uselessness of the place and the glory of its sense of purpose.

“Reading the book again, it struck me he has an awareness of that tightrope which is still walked today. Nothing in that has changed hugely since the days he was talking about. He’d be very leery about the modern progressive left. I don’t think he’d think much of AOC [Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and her pals. But he’d be absolutely disgusted by Trump: the meretriciousness, the boastfulness.”

Joe Biden is fond of saying this is not your father’s Republican party. It’s not Cooke’s either.

“I don’t think [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis would have necessarily charmed Alistair Cooke. That whole illiberal democracy [Viktor] Orbán approach would not hugely have impressed him because he was a broader, more inclusive figure and he naturally cleaved towards people who followed norms.

“He was a country club guy when it came to the Republicans and the modern party would really distress him. He was a conservative with a small ‘c’. Just reading the book, you get the sense that this man felt probably safer in what used to be Republican white picket fence America, although he liked and admired some Democrats. I’d put him to the right of centre.

“But when you look at people involved in January 6 and the way they got involved, he would have found that absolutely beyond the pale. I don’t think he would have had any truck with them at all. He would have been coruscating about the way in which senior Republicans in Congress failed to stand up to them and failed in the days since to stand up to them.

“What would he have made of Kari Lake in Arizona? Not much. He would have used his typewriter most destructively when it came to all those people.”

‘He was too pessimistic’

Cooke had blind spots. In his Guardian days he was taken to task by the then editor, Alastair Hetherington, for underplaying race in the south. Alistair Cooke’s America contains phrases that do his legacy no favours: “The question of what to do with the Blacks is one of the oldest and guiltiest of America’s problems”; “Our confusion about what the Blacks want and what they are likely to get may not be praiseworthy, but it is understandable.”

Webb argues that Cooke’s bleakly pessimistic view of racial integration has not aged well. He says: “I didn’t remember any of that and I thought it was fascinating to read and it brings you up short because it’s so different from the ultra-cautious, right-on writing about race that there is in this day and age. He just told it as he saw it with no thought that he might be cancelled or there would be any kind of blowback at all. That’s the positive side of it.

“The negative side is he was genuinely wrong. As I say in the foreword, it’s one of the areas where he was too pessimistic. He saw America in racial lumps, particularly white people. He saw it as a zero-sum game with white people necessarily losing if Black people had a better life. That is a pretty fundamental error because that’s not the way society works. It is genuinely possible, without being Panglossian about it, to say if all racial groups succeed, then absolutely everyone is living in a happier society.

“I’m not going to be over-positive about the way things are at the moment but I do think that America is a much more racially homogenised society, and a society much more at ease with itself, than Alistair Cooke thought it was going to be in the 1970s. Which is an interesting thing when you think of all the angst about race at the moment post-George Floyd and the sense among some of the progressive left that America is a fundamentally racist enterprise and the New York Times’s 1619 Project and that sense of it being set up as a project to protect one race.

“But actually what you have is most people still hoping, however imperfectly, that the cosmopolitan mixed society Alistair Cooke thought was impossible can still be achieved. I don’t think Alistair quite captured that. I don’t think in the early 70s he quite saw that happening.”

Although Cooke became a US citizen in 1941, critics of his book may regard it as a vintage case of the white male journalist as anthropologist explaining weird and wonderful foreigners to the homeland. Such a conceit is deeply unfashionable at a moment that seeks to empower people and cultures to tell their own stories. Last year Justin Smith, co-founder of the media startup Semafor, declared the era of the foreign correspondent over, explaining: “The idea that you send some well-educated young graduate from the Ivy League to Mumbai to tell us about what’s going on in Mumbai in 2022 is sort of insane.”

Webb says: “The whole shtick is of another era. You’d have all sorts of complaints now. You’d have people saying: ‘Well, if it’s about America, why isn’t he American?’ But at the deeper level I’m not sure people in the Twitter era are ready to engage with other places with that kind of degree of empathy and forgiveness of opinions that you might not agree with.

“You’ve got the whole range with Alastair. You’ve got his snobbishness about some aspects of American life; you’ve got his priggishness about decent behaviour. But you’ve also got an amazing insight into what it is like to be an American.

“I fear that in the modern world too many people hear one thing that they don’t agree with and they’d be straight on to Twitter and say, ‘I turned off Letter from America. I don’t listen to that any more.’ It’s not just that the programme doesn’t exist any more but I don’t think the listeners exist any more. In a sad kind of a way, I don’t think the audience is there.”

In short, Cooke would have been cancelled? “He would have been so cancelled!”

‘It’s relatively recent history’

Alistair Cooke’s America is unlikely to change hearts and minds. To Webb, that’s part of the point: the book is a time capsule not only of the US but its inescapably white, privileged narrator. Its very datedness is the source of its appeal.

Related: Imagine what Alistair Cooke would have to say about Donald Trump | Tim Adams

“He was absolutely 100% right not to change it and we’re 100% right to see it as a historical document about a time and a place and a certain sort of reporter. It’s not just about America. It’s also about what ‘gentleman journalism’ was like. All of those things are fascinating but they’re of their time and you either engage with that with a smile and enjoyment or you’re not willing to.”

He adds: “Although it’s history, it’s relatively recent history and it also informs in all sorts of interesting ways the present. It’s like the best history: it tells us something about the times but the way we regard it also tells us something about ourselves in good ways and bad. We’ve made some progress and we’ve also slid downhill in some respects and reading this book brings plenty of those things home to us.”

Much ink has been spilled about the special relationship and its cultural manifestations, including American-British romances in Richard Curtis films and, on TV, the arrival of coach Ted Lasso in the Premier League. Webb has long held the view that Britain gets something wrong about America: why it is so successful.

“We spend endless hours either carping about it or quite properly noticing its many faults. We spend much less time looking under the hood – as Americans would say – and examining what it is that makes pretty much everyone in the world still want to live there, that makes it such a cultural superpower, that makes it so attractive.

“One of the things that impressed me about America is they genuinely think things can be improved, whereas most of us Brits just think everything’s falling apart: we just need to fall apart as gently as we can.

“That sense of the ability of human beings to do stuff and make things better. You go all the way to Graham Greene and The Quiet American: quite often it has awful consequences. But when you see it up close in America itself, it’s fascinating as a cultural difference. I always felt that about the States and I still feel it now.”

• Alistair Cooke’s America: the 50th Anniversary Edition is published by Amberley Publishing