The BBC host, once a foreign correspondent in the US, hopes to introduce a great predecessor to a new audience – warts and all
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.
“They didn’t particularly view him as a nice person but he articulated something. All of that, Cooke would have been thrilled by.” “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.”Cooke was born in Salford in northern England in 1908.
“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.and the way they got involved, he would have found that absolutely beyond the pale.
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.
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