Thursday, February 08, 2007 AD
The rest you know
A few months ago, I came across a secondhand copy of a book by the late Alistair Cooke entitled "The Americans", a collection of fifty of Cooke's "Letters from America" from between 1969 and 1979. I enjoyed listening to Alistair Cooke in his later years, and it has been a delight to read these letters from his golden age.
A number of the letters, unsurprisingly, cover the Watergate affair. Dramatic irony has not been kind to the first of these, from September 1972, in which Cooke takes a lofty view towards "the Watergate caper", before predicting that the American people would quickly become bored with the whole business ("Do I sense the first polite suppression of a yawn?").
Well, as you may recall, things didn't quite work out that way, and the later letters are a fascinating record of how the whole "caper" unravelled. They end with a gripping account of the final days of the Nixon presidency, when "suddenly ... the missing link fell into place as audibly as the lock clanking on a prison door" with the discovery of "incontrovertible proof" that the President had lied.
The letter was broadcast the day after Nixon's resignation, and in the final paragraph of his letter, Cooke summarises the options with which Nixon had been faced following the Judiciary Committee's vote to impeach him:
This had been particularly pertinent in the "days and nights" of Watergate, when "cataclysms were routine":
Not that he got any credit for it at the time:
A number of the letters, unsurprisingly, cover the Watergate affair. Dramatic irony has not been kind to the first of these, from September 1972, in which Cooke takes a lofty view towards "the Watergate caper", before predicting that the American people would quickly become bored with the whole business ("Do I sense the first polite suppression of a yawn?").
Well, as you may recall, things didn't quite work out that way, and the later letters are a fascinating record of how the whole "caper" unravelled. They end with a gripping account of the final days of the Nixon presidency, when "suddenly ... the missing link fell into place as audibly as the lock clanking on a prison door" with the discovery of "incontrovertible proof" that the President had lied.
The letter was broadcast the day after Nixon's resignation, and in the final paragraph of his letter, Cooke summarises the options with which Nixon had been faced following the Judiciary Committee's vote to impeach him:
So now. He could resign and assure himself of $156,000 a year in pension and allowances. Or he could be impeached, convicted and have $18,000 pension as an old Congressman and an old sailor. He could still face criminal prosecution, once he was restored to ordinary citizenship. He might bargain for immunity, as Vice President Agnew had successfully done. He might beg for a pardon from the incoming President. He might go on believing against all the omens that he would somehow salvage one-third of the Senate. These were the alternatives he faced, as three or four of the leading conservatives in the Senate were meeting to decide whether to tell him he had to go. The rest you know.Great stuff, but 110 pages later my enjoyment of Cooke's prose turned into slack-jawed admiration as he described (in a letter from a quiet news week in 1978) something of the logistics of producing his letters: "the taping, the air-mailing of the tape, the passage through customs three thousand miles away, the first transmission...", all the time with the risk that "something cataclysmic" had happened in the intervening period of some days between recording and broadcast.
This had been particularly pertinent in the "days and nights" of Watergate, when "cataclysms were routine":
I remember having to re-do my talk several times so that some listeners around the globe wouldn't think I'd been asleep during the previous twenty-four hours."The cagiest sentence I ever spoke"? Oh, come now, Alistair, you're too modest. That wasn't "caginess": that was genius.
Even then, Mr Nixon's final decision to abdicate came about thirty-six hours after my deadline for recording the talk. As I sat before the microphone, people were either saying, "He's bound to go" or "Of course, he'll brazen it out." I therefore had to contrive a final sentence which, if you will allow me, I now believe to have been the cagiest sentence I ever spoke into a microphone.
Faced with the on again-off again desperation of the man in the White House, all I could do was report as dispassionately as possible the known events of the week up to the moment the mike was turned on. At the end of this recital, I said - with cryptic solemnity - "The rest you know". By the time you heard it, in London or Melbourne, you did.
Not that he got any credit for it at the time:
No critic, no listener, no official of the BBC, apparently paused to figure out the impossibility of my recording those words four full days before the roof fell in. The most sceptical, the most sophisticated listener believes without a second thought that what is being said is being said at the moment he hears it.The closing section of Cooke's Watergate letter can be heard here (in - meh - Real Audio; for this I pay my licence fee?). There is some difference between this and the text version: "The rest you know" is not the final sentence, as the last two paragraphs are transposed. I don't think that diminishes Cooke's achievement in how he handled this broadcasting conundrum.
Labels: alistair cooke, genius, letters from america, watergate
