Bill Moyers Journal; 130; A Conversation with Alistair Cooke

Produced in New York by WNET. Ever since they first started coming here, Europeans have been trying to tell the people they left at home what America is all about. The first letter Columbus sent back to his family in Cordova at the end of his first voyage to the New World was lost by the city fathers. Fortunately the letters this correspondence in home to England were not saved but broadcast to millions. America in fact has probably never had a wittier, more obeying and more enlightened interpreter. His name is Alistair Cook and he liked the country he described in his letter so much that he cast his lot with us and became a citizen. Recently we visited at my home on Long Island and this evening

you'll hear Alistair Cook once again on his favorite subject. Alistair Cook came to America in 1932 to study drama at Yale University but the whole theater of American life seized his fancy and in 1937 he settled as a journalist to live in New York City. He began that year the weekly radio talks to Britain called letters from America, now the longest running radio series ever. He became a naturalized citizen in 1941, a correspondent for the London Times and then for 24 years the chief U.S. correspondent for the Manchester

Guardian. For nine years he was master of ceremonies for omnibus, a kind of definition of early television programming. On an average Sunday afternoon Alistair Cook introduced 19 to 20 million viewers to a kaleidoscope of arts, letters and show business. This is Alistair Cook again and the third volume of omnibus. Now if I knew come as I should tell you that omnibus is simply comes from omnice, something for everybody. But he's best known in this country for his more recent triumph, America, a personal history of the United States. The 13-week series won for Mr. Cook for him is his second Peabody Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award of the Royal Society of Arts. It also brought him a large audience fascinated as he's been for over 40 years with the American experience from places like Mount Vernon and Valley Forge to Catherine Kansas, big bone lick Kentucky and New Harmony Indiana. Now Alistair Cook has produced a book, his most important. It's based

in part on the television series but ranges beyond into other insights and discoveries this omnibus Englishman has made in almost half a century of exploring his adopted land. In your own words much has happened to the smiling face of America since you first got here in 1932. What's been the most conspicuous change? Well it's odd you know that you should use that phrase which was Henry James' phrase I think about the smiling face and I was criticized in England. Oh from my radio talks as early as the late 40s for tending to look on the smiling face. Well of course that smiling face got certain agonized expressions later on. I would think that I can't say the main changes but I can't say what to me was the dividing year. America seemed to me to be going developing very much along the same lines until well really about 1965 I guess after the assassination but 68 was the black year. Now it may have

been that I was covering everything and I had them as fortunate to be in on literally you know appalling scenes in in primary rallies and obscenities and riots and and I was present at the in the pantry with Bobby Kennedy and so I really went to a trauma but I had not seen anything in American political and convention the whole convention game which I used to love like 1968 suddenly it got very ugly. Was there any single trait about this country that attracted you in 32 that has disappeared in the intervening years? A peculiarity American trait although so many but the main thing was the the well the directness the warmth of people the the availability of public officials with something I was a young journalist was quite new to me. I remember for instance later on in fact in 1941 going through Nevada and Hawthorne

Nevada was the naval naval reserve naval ammunition reserve and I thought I've never been in the way I'd buy this time you see I'd been here nine years on and off and I thought well I've never been to the naval ammunition depot so I'll go and when you try to do this in England I mean even to talk to the foreign office they they despise newspaper but here you could get anything you wanted you know that you want to see you go to Ruth Nevada you want to see the copper pit they'll tell you how the copper works they'll take you all over the place and they took you into the naval ammunition depot and it's often amused me to think that they only other people there that day were three Japanese with cameras this was in about March 1941 and I found this everywhere I went the accessibility and of course as you know especially with politicians which is getting tighter and tighter now other than the decline of accessibility have you seen any significant changes in the the meaner of American politicians it's awfully hard now to generalize it all because I

think we're all at least I am baffled and bewildered by the what I think is really a decline in we've had it before but there is undoubtedly a decline in simple ethical standards I mean we've got now is in the 1880s Mark Twain 1890s was ready to leave America because he said that the place was so corrupt but the thing that disturbs me most is a kind of moral numbness that seems to have I think overtaken the country you think it's peculiar to America no of course I think America is always ahead in the good in the bad things as well as the good it's it's maybe typical of Western Western society what we call the Western will but the idea that people are really much more concerned about the price of beef than the fact that in my view in the last two three years four years we have had operating in the White House of Politburo you know an autonomous secret government defying the the Constitution breaking the

laws having complete contempt for the people and apparent indifference to Congress now as you know there've always been kitchen cabinets but there were always politicians and they were they were very wary of the voter and the Congress and this is a very alarming thing to me that people are not more alarmed will you watch the evolution of the presidency for 30 some odd years in this country didn't you see did you see this coming no I should have seen it coming and the only man I know who did see it coming was was the English writer and scholar and subsequently politician Richard Crossman who said right after the war the most attractive most dangerously attractive thing that the British and the Americans invented was the OSS was the whole Cloak and Dagger business and it did attract of course psychopathic types who were well screened out but the idea of being a secret plotter gave you a kind of status and especially in Washington now the British liquidated it and I think

in the in the invention of the CIA this was I suppose necessary but it had sinister possibilities which I think have been unfortunately fulfilled the cliche that one here's in Washington today is that if Watergate had occurred or you'd an aspect of Watergate had occurred in a parliamentary system such as that and used in England the government would have fallen long ago that night oh I really do think that so you see that's the that is a point that when I was in England during some of the worst part of Watergate when it was first being shown when it was first when the select committee was first being exposed on television and no prime minister could possibly have carried because he carries responsibility for anybody and so you know as you know the Macmillan government nearly collapsed not because perfumal had gone to bed with somebody but because he lied to the prime minister and the prime minister didn't know and gave his assurances to the house now they don't say that Mac Macmillan is Simon

pure but if he can be deceived by an underling he's no man to be there and he damn near collapsed what effect has this had on Americans that you meet as you travel around to a new harmony and Catherine Ken's a lot of a lot of wildest guys despair an awful lot of people are bewildered they think you know who think they have the old values that of which I knew was such an eloquent spokesman I mean you know decency and thrift and the old American values a lot of people think they they have them but they are bewildered to see that they don't operate in Washington evidently and then they begin to expect maybe it doesn't work in our state capital law maybe the in the in the county and so on so there's a lot of fear around a lot of fear and a lot of as I say something close to despair in many places when you first started the safaris that you've taken across continent 16 and all I think if I remember you found a lot of diversity well you saw a regional diversity you know that you

could never possibly mistake a small town in Nevada for a small town in Maine now the split-level ranch bungalow you know the split-level ranch house on the freeway is absolutely standard and I think that is a sort of prefabrication thing or it's a it's the fact that we can produce them quickly and the flour the developers were the first people who set the style and now you see them Victoria Kansas could just as well be West Orange New Jersey which hurts when you saw it when I saw it you want to vote that America at one time was a magic word and the prospect of a better life a millions of Europeans do you think that's changed I do I mean that has been so of course ever since Columbus is a second voyage when everybody deserted town just as the as they as they did on the west coast when they heard about gold I mean even the the garrison deserted Monterey and that went on I suppose until maybe 20 years ago and of course they do still come but I do think the magic has gone the idea that

America is as a girter said it's better you have things better over there your tendency in the 18th century when there was profound dissolution in the whole western civilization all the philosophers of France and England and they decided that America was no good anymore and then they had to go into the Pacific and of course Bougain v wrote this delirious account of Tahiti and they all decided that's the place where there's natural morality natural nobility none of the corruptions of civilization and so we all go to Hawaii and we keep going further and further west the west has always been the thing hasn't it I mean first you get to America and then you start moving west and now the president's gone to China and maybe China is the west what do you mean by that that term of that expression you used when you talk about the stark historical contrast between the great American dream and the new American reality what do you mean by that the reality you know the dream of the better life which

was for so many thousands and a few millions of people for 10 millions between 1890 and 1915 and now those the tenements that we have in New York are the tenements that were built for those people they're still the same tenements but they're in a terrible shape the cities you see is the biggest we all know it's a cliche but you can look at it in other ways the city's not being the place of promise it used to be the to farmers of course it was the west and the homestead act and the fact you could have a hundred and sixty acres and if you made a go of it in five years it was free that was inconceivable to European peasants so of course they came in their millions all that has gone and what's taken its place or has anything I don't know to be a good car salesman I don't know what's taking his place and I think that once all I can say is I simply don't know but I do know that the young don't seem to have any excitement about the development of the system this is very dangerous is this relatively new

phenomenon in your experience I mean in my experience in talking to colleges and so on one of the reasons I did this series was to because I felt there was so much ignorance there was so much good feeling among the rebel young but also enormous ignorance about the system and how it worked how it can work well it costs will work no better than the honesty of the men who who are working it this disillusionment with the young can you trace it back to the that the late nineteen sixties that had such a profound impact on you somewhere in the nineteen sixties now of course we always do my favorite non-logical trick which is the one case induction method but my own son for instance with just graduating from college and he wanted to go into the foreign service and he asked me how he should go about it and I told him and he would take an examination he started to prepare for it and Kennedy was assassinated and that was the end absolutely the end the foreign service and I said to him well now

look the time when you will have any ideological connection with the president of the United States is very remote you know you may be the third secretary in Tibet or somewhere and they won't check with you on what they should do with the Kansas farmer or the the the new nuclear missile but he said no it it it destroyed a world for him now all right this is ideological maybe he was wrong but the point is he was right for him well I'm wondering if since you did the series and it produced the book have you discovered anything about America that you wish you could have put on the television series oh well there were well there were two answers to that one yes but the the collateral answer is there were things I knew and and loved and was terribly anxious to put on the series in fact the very first notes I made I put down two men the very first two names I put down I said we'll be a big piece on Lafayette there be a big piece on Father Unipero Serra you know who founded the missions and came with the postal expedition it was a great great man and and also the the

function of the priests mostly Spanish and French and then Belgian Italian who went around the entire arc of the West just to try and with with no strings attached who were not attached to military expeditions to try and convert the the Indians who just walked and lived their entire lives here is a chapter that's not been written up to well and I took Father Serra as a perfect example and I wrote this thing up to the extent I think it was sort of six minutes on camera and the whole thing must have been 16-17 minutes and you get back to London and the producer Michael Gill says by the way don't be shocked but Father Serra is out why he didn't work that was their great television thing you know is say where's George Washington well he didn't work that's marvelous can you draw a profile of an American of an characteristic American no I don't think you can I I love to play around with my English friends

especially because I'm not sure I believe in national character I think it's the first refuge of anxious people you can always pin something on national character but I've worked Michael Gill was a marvelous subject I think they called it in psychology walking around he would say now there's a typical American I'd say yes but if you saw him in Munich he'd be a typical German and then I'd say I once assembled a group of my friends have close friends and I see when it's over well where they typically may always say absolutely typical Americans I say there's only one of them born in this country now you tell me where the others were born well of course he had the remoteest idea that this girl's parents were Romanian this guy was brought from Hungary this fellow was Irish first generation married to a girl who was who was German he was simply amazed because he would have said they're all Americans what he meant by that was all sort of spoiled English you know that's the great English delusion that Americans are Englishman gone wrong now

Germans gone wrong gone right there was an ambassador from London to Washington who used to dash off every time he could to Texas of all places because Halifax yes because he found and this is a Chamber of Commerce plug but he found the Texans models of civility well I talked to Halifax about that and of course it always shocked the English and especially his group when he got back he was a very simple man Halifax like all aristocrats landed for many generations he was a very cozy simple fella and you know he had egg stains and things that aristocrats can afford we we've got to brush up but he said well I like Texas most because the people are the most courteous and courtly people that I've ever met well of course he'd been the vice-roy of India and he'd been all and nobody would believe this I used to come along say it's absolutely true and of course I feel this in the south but especially in Texas as a kind of and of course Americans are very bad on their own regions I mean I have close friends or New Englanders and young people I know New Yorkers and

who dislike southerners on principle they know nothing about the south and southerners but you know they just think they know and of course we all know about Texas you know Texas is a horror of money and vulgarity and so on but they don't know this thing which Halifax used to rush off every time he had a weekend to Texas well if you can't define a characteristic American can you define an American characteristic is there something about us you're not Bill Buckley are you as a matter of physician in all this well yes but it's what I tried to do what excited me you see was the experience of first of all discovering this continent and then settling it and molding it to what you used to and then having to do things you're not used to because the climate won't let you I mean the fact that the plow they used to break the plains with European plow and it didn't work till John Deacon along with the steel face to break that sod because they didn't have in in Yorkshire or Normandy 115 degrees in

summer and 30 below zero in winter so that I think you know you died or you survived or you became a bum but on the whole a lot of people died it's astounding we always talk about the frontiersmen who triumphed but the mortality rate among the people who were conned by the Union Pacific is a polling a mortality rate of the babies on the prairie was about 3 and 4 because there were no doctors and you used in fact somebody wants to do thesis which is very plausible that a good many of the frontier children were kept alive by forgetting what the local doctor was usually not a doctor could tell him but by reverting to Indian recipes the revolutionary British the British Army in the Revolutionary War in Pennsylvania discovered the magical thing which the Indians taught them which was this black fluid that came out of the ground which was subsequent called petroleum and oil and we used for other

reasons than constipation but I could not matter I conclude that the characteristic is characteristic is luck and adaptability it's adaptability it has to be now you see what I note is in traveling around the country is less and less adaptability for instance take an example if you're going to a hotel and it's late at night and you say like I haven't eaten for eight hours and in the old days people would say well now you've got a problem now how can we fix that problem and they say well old Sam so-and-so is 10 miles up the road and his wife you know maybe has some chicken they do something I'm now talking about being on the prairie hardware now they say rum service stops at 9 o'clock to hell with you know you can staff deal tomorrow morning and it's most peculiar that there's a system in hotels especially in motels there's a system and if your needs are taken care of by the system it's fine but if you move outside that they just throw up their hands and say I'm sorry we don't have that and I

often say look I can afford to say this you're an American you know you're full of enterprise and imagination and they look at you now you know we can solve this say sorry rum service closes at 9 o'clock but Americans I know seem to think that they're still adaptable well good let's let them prove it no I think what I had in mind is that you can see it you saw it in in Britain when Queen Elizabeth was crowned and they had a big festival and they pretended that it was the second Elizabeth age and that Britain was just bouncing with creative talent and so on it was not so the Viennese think of themselves as being the original musicians and so on and it's very if we can use a word we don't use anymore into the small G a very gay capital it's one of the most depressing capitals in Europe the scots are still under the delusion that they are the center of world medicine which they were in the late 18th century you see and people tend to hang on to a national reputation and say well look at us you

know we're the great adaptable ingenious Americans but they always do it when when the impulse is gone when the when the quality is gone and that's what I'm afraid of that we just go around to barking in a in an echo chamber really telling ourselves how great we are do you think there's any parallel between the era we're going through in this country now in the post Vietnam post Imperial age if I may say so and what happened in England around the time of the end of the empire in World War II psychologically well no I don't think Americans are so resigned they're not a fatalist people you see a southerners are I think but the British are very quiet fatalists and really I almost get the impression from watching the sons of my friends that they think it was very logical and inevitable that the empire should gradually be released and that the Commonwealth should fade and so they don't have empire day and they don't have Commonwealth

day and they seem to be full of beans I think if it had happened to America it would have been much worse what I thought you was going to say is there any parallel in American history and the thing that strikes me is after the ghastly decade of the 1870s and reconstruction we then had the rubber barons come in and certainly public morality went haywire and in the period which I which Mark Twain wrote about in in raging despair for the the soul of America that it was corrupted and betrayed by by money money money money money well ever until we recovered and I think we shall recover again I don't think we're in our best period right now I think a return to not to grandeur which we keep getting told from the White House with a great new era is starting in America I forget greatness it would be nice just to be decent again I think well that brings up one of the few quotes I took verbatim out of one of your books you say politics will undoubtedly be devilish all till the day we die but even the

prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet well what's the Alistair Cook prescription for that I suppose when I wrote that which would be at the end of the forties I assumed that the American system was strong and enduring and that the good values would outweigh the bad in it that today you quote that today and that would be a very good text for doing nothing and for just shrugging the shoulders and accepting boredom and not bringing public men to public account which is what we have to do I think a minute ago you used the term soul G.K. Chesterton said that America is the only nation he knows of that has the soul of a church you think that's true well he said some strange things in his time and I think Americans were like to believe that so I don't know whether this is a family audience but the thing that's fascinating about America maybe we're coming

down to something now is that America is always its opposite you know Freud's great discovery that in the unconscious opposites are the same I've always thought that the profoundest psychological discovery of the century I believe it's true I believe America has the soul of a church and by the same token you turn the coin over and also has the soul of a hallhouse and it's the conflict between those two things that's always going on so long as there's conflict and there is indignation then I think the country will survive but if people go numb and bored it won't on that note I'd like to thank you Mr. Cook for spending this time with public television I've been speaking with Alistair Cook whose series on America can now be seen in its second repeat on commercial television it'll be repeated yet a third time next spring his new book Alistair Cook's America is also available I'm Bill Moyers