WGBH Journal; Alistair Cooke Interview

Many Americans complain that we must depend on British dramatic productions for top flight presentations. Why is it that that seems to be so? Well I really don't know it does seem to be so. And I can only guess that the British are now reaping the harvest of their repertory system which certainly came to fruition during the war and afterwards where young people do not start to try and go to Hollywood. They go off into Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Scotland, work in repertory companies. They play 50 parts before they get to London. And the ones who are any good just come to the top. And they do seem to have about six or seven hundred first rate actors. That and the fact that they, they have directors who match them, who are quite ruthless about bad performances, and poor acting, so that they have a great deal to go to. Hew Wheldon, who formerly was the head of BBC television, says that the British are just great natural actors. And he says whenever you want to have, you know, 10 grocers, and two kings, and three

lawyers you just snap your fingers and they come. There they are. They're first rate. James Reston of The New York Times in reviewing your latest book, Six Men, said, "I have always suspected perhaps because I am guilty myself (Reston), that Cook is a literary thief, a stockpiler of anecdotes, historical analogies, memorable phrases and outrageous comparisons." Is this true? Well I think I should say that Scotty Reston's a great friend of mine and he said that by way of compliment, that the book was studded with what he called, you know, rich fruitcake of anecdotes, and so on. It's absolutely untrue. I mean the fact that Reston is so barren of anecdotes of his own doesn't mean that everybody like him has to steal them. You have, of course, along with James Reston, been a journalist over the years and perhaps what is so stunning about your introductions of the PBS Masterpiece Theater series, is that you lend them a certain sense of credibility, as only a journalist could. Sometimes journalists seem to be presenting

parodies and melodramas in their formal reportage. How do you feel about the similarity of these two roles that you play? Absolutely none at all. Most journalists if you put it in front of a camera twitch and are intensely self-conscious and think they've got to be making profound remarks. This entirely comes from my background, really, in acting and directing actors, and learning when I was quite young a great deal about what's involved in telling a story. That's why the best thing I do is my weekly 50 minute talk which goes around the world everywhere except this country. Letter From America and it is really, you telling stories, whether it's about politics or the weather or anything. And that's where I learned about timing, and taking it easy, and relaxing and being yourself, which is the hardest thing to be. You had collaborated with Charlie Chaplin, who of course has just died, and got to know him well. You lived with him for a summer. What is Chaplin's legacy.

Well an awful lot of words have been said about it. I said that, um, he ah- he parodied the tradition of the, that he, sort of punctured the tradition of the gentleman by parodying it on behalf of the dispossessed. Now that's a rather pompous way of saying that he made people all over the world see themselves in him and see the possibility of there being something very special because the great thing about Chaplin is because he's a dancer. W.C. Fields said that he's a goddamn ballet dancer. He's not a comedian. But he took all the social situations in which he's the lower than the low, and he's always the gentleman. I think this had enormous appeal everywhere. It's the poor little man who is never going to make it. But in Chaplin he does make it and we see ourselves make it. I have a final question for you. I hope it's not embarrassing. No doubt it's on the minds of many of your Masterpiece Theater viewers. How is it that you know everything about everything impeccably? Well I don't. I do a lot of work, and reading. But I do happen to have a pretty

good flypaper memory. And I think that's something the journalist - well, first of all, he must have, especially if he's a foreign correspondent. You see, if you're a domestic reporter you eventually, if you're good, settle on a specialty: on sports, or the White House, or the Supreme Court, or the Senate or whatever. when you're a foreign correspondent, you have to cover everything, from Mohammad Ali to the Supreme Court. And so you really have to get to know quite a little about a lot of things. And you have to, ah, also learn to, ah, get it down fast, because you've got a deadline. But also to check quickly, and a good memory is a big help. A robin appeared in Cambridge today as if to announce that February's end tomorrow will close out the month of Storm, siege, and isolation that's limited our lives. But we've known bright sunny days for more than a week now. The sun has leveled the snow mountains by half in the last few days. The rhythm of our

temperature's now arising above freezing daytime then dropping at night has begun to stir the sap preparing for March. The sunlight itself has a different quality, Hal Borlan wrote, in his last report on the season before his death last week. "It's the sun itself that marks the time unmistakably," he wrote. "Its shadow's now definitely point toward spring. You can feel it even when the wind forgets the date. The New York Times Sunday included Borland's augury of spring in its obit of him carried in the same space at the bottom of the editorial column where his report from outdoors had run weekly for 35 years. Our Correspondent in the Universe," the paper called him. He discovered all of life in his own valley. It was on his Berkshire farm beside the Housatonic River. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the eight tenths percent price rise, it reports for January, a cause of concern. It was double the

December rate. Of course the 37 percent wage increased for coal miners, in the settlement the administration pressed for, is more built in inflation. Environmentalists found some comfort in the weekend news. The President's issued an order adding a million and a third acres to wilderness areas in 10 states. The largest addition since 1964. He urges Congress to act this year to expand Alaska wilderness areas before he says the most spectacular scenery becomes endangered. And 62 nations have joined an agreement aimed at curbing oil spills that have been so disastrous to beaches. The Carter administration is preparing for the first international radio conference in 20 years to be held next year to deal with the problem of keeping communications open. Many countries seek to control it. Some claiming protection of privacy, others to prevent influence on their closed political systems. Some obviously to protect their domestic communications industries

computers and so on, by keeping out the flow of data from the more developed countries. The President's appointed professor, Glenn Robinson of University of Virginia, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission, to head the American delegation. The Harvard faculty are preparing for debate in two weeks on a plan to introduce a core curriculum in place of the broad freedom of the electives, under the general education program that was adopted in 1945. Dean Rosovsky, in circulating his plan says that electives have gone so far, that a student can now practically write his own curriculum with the result, he says, that to be an educated person doesn't mean anything. The core will require mathematics, writing and a foreign language. The student may still choose courses at random for a quarter of his program. Half would be in his major field, but a quarter would call for at least one mathematics, one writing, and one foreign language course. President Bok, supporting the dean, emphasizes that developments since 1945 increased the importance of ability to deal

with quantities, that's math, and of communication, that's the writing. The foreign language requirement is important, he says, in view of the change in America's role in the world. Harvard students are almost certain to spend a portion of their lives working, living, and traveling abroad, or engaged in some sort of activity involving other cultures. Dean Rosovsky says the aim is that Harvard graduates will possess, quote, basic literacy and major forms of intellectual discourse, end quote. other liberal arts colleges are re-evaluating their programs just as Harvard's adoption of general education in 1945 led other colleges to follow suit. So it's decision now is expected to influence priorities very generally. Perhaps the most distinct change is the emphasis given math. This is the requirement brought, of course, by the computer age. Returns from the first of five states of India that held elections Sunday show Indira Gandhi carrying the big southern state of Karnataka by the big margin she had formerly enjoyed.

A win there over Prime Minister Desai's Janata Party was expected. His strength has been in the north. But she surprised by sweeping away almost all the old Congress Party in her new Indira Congress party. Returns from the other big southern states will test how far Desai's party has succeeded in extending its strength into the south. Gandhi's defeat in last year's national election was ascribed in part to the drastic birth control measures of her government. But the Karnataka vote seems to discount that. The demographer Nick Eberstadt, in a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said, "My own impression was that her campaigns were not that effective." And he discounts a backlash now to her sterilization campaigns. He predicted that the decline in India's growth rate will continue as a result of better standards of living and a more even distribution of income, which he said effects also, other poor countries. The decline in the world birthrate, he said has gone down, from a 1970 peak,

of one and nine tenths percent a year to one and seven tenths percent. And he thinks the population will stabilise soner than expected.