STOP BIG BEN:

Not enough Cookes: Britain's best-known radio voice hangs up his headphones (The Economist, Mar 4th 2004)

ALISTAIR COOKE delighted listeners just as he frustrated his BBC bosses, who thought his weekly 15-minute talks were well past their prime in both form and content. But now his fans and critics will have to turn their attention elsewhere. After 2,869 editions of “Letter from America”, on every important subject in post-war history, Mr Cooke, aged 95, says he is too old to continue. [...]

Mr Cooke's talks, which began in 1946 by describing his return to America by sea with 2,000 GI brides, exemplified the trinity of journalistic virtues: factually correct, well thought-out and elegantly expressed. They were a blast of nostalgic thoughtfulness from a more leisurely age. Admittedly, they became patchy towards the end. The reporting zeal that had enabled him to witness such events as Robert Kennedy's assassination was shackled by age. There were too many anecdotes, usually but not always interesting. His views on race and sex seemed gratingly old-fashioned to some.

To both British and American fans, he represented what was best about the BBC, but not much of that is left. The days of unhurried radio talks and graceful prose are, sadly, gone. Replacing him is unlikely to work. Mr Cooke survived into the era of the sound bite because of his stature. Any lesser figure trying to do what he did would stick out more like a sore thumb than a broadcasting giant.

His Letter from America was nearly enough to single-handedly redeem the BBC. Masterpiece Theatre has stunk without him and the Beeb sure as heck won't be improved.

MORE:

Freedom and the Soldier (ALISTAIR COOKE, Summer 1995, Parameters)

If there is one thing I learned from 30 years as a correspondent--roaming around every corner of this country and talking one day with a senator and then with a trucker, with a hospital orderly or a Mafia chieftain, with an oil expert in Oklahoma, a tattooist in San Diego, a sheep-sluicer in west Texas--I learned at first hand that no profession is as simple as it seems to an outsider and that a free society is a great deal harder to run than an authoritarian one, if only because of the great range of citizen opinion, prejudice, and self-interest, and the difficulty of disciplining these lively feelings in the general interest.

Time and again in our government, we see the votes in Congress decided not by a free judgment of the majority, but by the successful pressure of a minority interest: that is, by the self-interest of a powerful lobby, which is yielded to because every congressman hopes that next time he can get a majority vote for his favorite lobby. Some people deplore this as a new and dangerous tyranny, a tyranny of factions, of special interests. But James Madison, even before political parties were invented in this country, looked on the conflict of factions as a healthy sign, as indeed the essence of representative government. He insisted only that there be plenty of different factions attached to the interests of different parts of the country. "In government," he said, "ambition must be made to counter ambition."

The most effective way to cut through the babel of competing voices and interests is to get strong leadership, of course. And we hear a great deal today, and always in an election year, of the need, the hunger, for a strong leader. It is a mischievous longing. For it is one of the permanent contradictions of a democratic society that strong personal leadership is only possible during a war, when many democratic liberties (the First Amendment, for example) have to be suspended.

Of course, one might question the notion that democratic liberties have practical application to the soldier. After all, he lives in a closed society and has chosen at the start to abide by a system of rules and taboos that are not required on the outside, that, in fact, millions of Americans might regard as denials of freedom itself. But such a question arises only because we are living in a time when "freedom" is given a definition so boundless that a whole generation wallows in the notion that the First Amendment gives Americans a license to do anything they want, at any time, in any place. This generation seems to echo the words of a famous English political leader: "Real freedom means good wages, short hours, security in employment, good homes, opportunity for leisure, and recreation with family and friends." That sounds like a universal prescription. It is what every politician--whether Republican, Communist, Liberal, Democrat, Socialist, or Conservative--is offering us, what, indeed, television advertising is all about. I wonder if the applause for that sentence would continue if we reveal its author. He was Oswald Mosley, announcing the true faith as leader of the British Fascist Party! These promises have nothing to do with freedom. One can have "good wages, short hours, security in employment, good homes, opportunity for leisure, and recreation with family and friends" in a nation in which a personal opinion, a dissenting speech, a disturbing scientific discovery, the booing of a public speaker, is a passport to exile, a labor camp, a prison, a psychiatric hospital, or a firing squad.

Freedom is a good deal more than general comfort, and much more demanding. It may be news to some people to hear that liberty demands anything. But, for one thing, it demands voluntary acceptance of limits on freedom itself. Many people today, however, have adopted the maxim: "I can do what I like provided it doesn't seem to hurt other people." Over 80 years ago, the greatest of American jurists, Mr. Justice Holmes, commented aptly on such people. "The liberty of the citizen," he wrote, "to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same has [become] a shibboleth. . . . [But] it is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable whether he likes it or not."

Mr. Justice Holmes wrote this opinion at a time when nobody seriously questioned the sense or necessity of school laws, or Post Office regulations, or the need to be taxed to maintain state or municipal institutions. But there was then, as now, a popular rhetoric of freedom which blinds otherwise intelligent people to the parts of life that have to do with freedom and the parts that do not. Well into this century it was taken for granted that a doctor, or a policeman, or a fireman would always be on hand. When the police of Boston, in 1919, following the example of the police of London and Liverpool, organized in a union to press as a body for decent wages, they astounded the nation by going on strike. After an ugly 24-hour bout of looting, the Army was called in. Calvin Coolidge, the Governor of Massachusetts, made an announcement which to the rest of the country had the force of Holy Writ: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." This recital of the obvious, and it was obvious in those days, brought him a wire of congratulations from President Wilson; the next year, the vice-presidential nomination of his party; and two years later (by the grace of God's disposal of Warren Harding) the presidency.

I do not think today it would bring him anything but defiance and uproar. In Coolidge's time, society had the positive restraints of institutional religion, and the negative restraints of the general unthinkability of many forms of outrageous behavior. Together, these checks disciplined, or at worst cowed, the vast majority of people into socially acceptable behavior. Today, religion has lost its restraining power, even in predominantly religious nations; obedience to constituted authority is widely confused with authoritarianism; and almost anything is thinkable, including frequent assertions of the rights of citizenship which implicitly deny that citizenship carries any duties at all (such as being counted in the census or submitting to registration for military service).

Some time ago, there was a parade in Princeton of young protesters against the idea of draft registration. One sign carried the slogan: "There is Nothing Worth Dying For." That seems to me to be the witless end of Know-Nothingism. If enough Americans felt that way, this nation would long ago have succumbed to dictatorship.

But this feeling, too, is nothing new. It is a feeling that disrupts most societies in the exhaustion of a long war. We had our draft riots during the Civil War, race riots during the Second World War, and an unprecedented outcry against the war in Vietnam. In the middle 1930s, the memory of the enormous slaughter of the First World War was still so green that, when Hitler went on the rampage, the prospect of war actually stimulated, in millions of Europeans, a longing for peace at any price. This disillusion suppressed the recognition that some things have to be fought for. So much so, that there was a powerful and popular slogan that helped Britain put its head in the sand. It was "Against War and Fascism," a cry about as sensible as "Against Hospitals and Disease." It was chanted most fervently by people who were willing to do absolutely anything to get rid of Hitler, except fight him. This muddled thinking persisted until it was almost too late. The Munich agreement may have been, as Churchill said at the time, "a total and unmitigated defeat," but, because the popular mood had impressed itself on the Conservative Government in the form of believing that if you do not re-arm you will not have to fight, Munich became an essential, a very necessary, surrender. Britain did not have the power to protect the freedom of Czechoslovakia, or its own. London had two antiaircraftguns.

It will be no news to soldiers that their profession is not popular. It rarely has been in the United States. Today it is a profession especially despised by morally superior people, whose sense of moral superiority is, in fact, made possible by the soldier's existence. Of 55 nations that can lay claim to being "free," many of them allied to us, the United States is one of the few that have no system of military conscription. And yet, the volunteer Army is not working because there are not enough high-quality volunteers. The Chief of Naval Operations recently announced that the poor pay of skilled petty officers is stripping the Navy of enough men to run its ships.

I am not advocating military conscription. I am saying that it is not a sign of our superior freedom that we do not have it, only of our superior optimism. Perhaps it is a sign of our general feeling that, in view of the Soviet and American possession of the thermonuclear bomb and the well-publicized stalemate of a "balance of terror," a conventional war is impossible (in spite of the glaring fact that, precisely because the use of the bomb is unthinkable, there have been more conventional wars in the past quarter century than in all the 19th century).

I think, too, that our strong resistance to any compulsory service proposed by the national government is a sharp reflection of what I believe to be our striking preference for equality over liberty; if all men are created equal, then I'm just as good as you, whoever you are, and probably better. At any rate, I should not like to see the results of a national survey of honest opinion about whether we cherish liberty more than equality, or comfort more than either. It was a very comfortable, self-indulgent, and wealthy author, Somerset Maugham, who saw the French refugees in 1940, rich as well as poor, trudging the roads in flight from the oncoming Nazis on their way, no doubt, to Maugham's own luxurious villa in the south of France. He found himself saying something that most of his readers would not have expected from his lips: "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose those too."

In our time, then, when we see comfort, and anarchy, and even violence, being claimed as expressions of freedom, and when many peaceable and well-meaning people seem unaware that individual liberty has its limits, what is the effective form of social discipline? Plainly, it is no longer church or even appeals to the sanctity of the law. The only safeguard, as I see it, is the safeguard of what most people feel they ought not to do, a voluntary belief in what I might call a code of accepted taboos.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2004 6:21 PM