US seen as 'Britain gone wrong': archive, 24 Nov 1964
The British had an ancient delusion that America was Britain gone wrong, Mr Alistair Cooke, chief American correspondent of the “Guardian,” said in London last night.
This he described as an extension into manhood of the impulse of every child to assume that it was the other person who was odd. No nation - except only and always the French - clung to this reflex more tenaciously than the British, who had been able to impose on the natives of India and Africa the assumption that Windsor soup and toast racks were as normal as coats and ties.
In fact, since the First World War, and more than ever since the Second, the influence of the Anglo-American in politics, social customs, literature, and American life had vastly declined.
Mr Cooke was speaking at a dinner of the Pilgrims held in his honour at the Savoy Hotel. He said that, in spite of the decline, there were still nuggets of the English legacy which were gratefully received, adding: “In the biggest cities, there is a very lively prejudice in favour of shaggy young English university wits (considered as comedians) and in favour of even shaggier females (considered as femmes fatales) who have turtles at their necks and dragons on their legs - for you have successfully managed to export, I am sorry to say, what is known as the Chelsea Look.”
Examples of British genius universally applauded by this generation of Americans were Shakespeare, Richard Burton, Terry-Thomas, and the Beatles. Mr Cooke gave Mr Wilson some advice on the Prime Minister’s coming visit to President Johnson:
“He would be well advised to seal everything negotiable on his person when he walks into the presence of our lord and master. Nothing is more touchingly innocent about the British cartoonist’s view of our beloved President than the picture of a bemused cowboy.”
The President was “an amiable, all-embracing man who combines the political insight of Machiavelli with the political instinct of Franklin Roosevelt and the outward approach of Will Rogers.”
Mr Alastair Hetherington, editor of the “Guardian,” proposing the health of the chief guest, said that Mr Cooke was a true transatlantic citizen. He was a great journalist, and more than a journalist: he was a historian at well.
When academics came to write of American life in the mid-twentieth century, of American politics, and of Anglo-American relations, it was to writing such as Alistair Cooke’s that they would turn. They would not have to do much rewriting: the record would be there, perfectly reported and perfectly presented.
Sir Christopher Chancellor, chairman of the Bowater Corporation Ltd and a trustee of Reuters Ltd, paid tribute to Mr Cooke’s work as a broadcaster, particularly in his “Letter from America” for the BBC.