Cooke's Tour

The Manchester Guardian's Alistair Cooke has one of the hardest one-man jobs going: the entire U.S. is his beat. Frequently Cooke's tours are too fast to be anything but flashy; but sometimes he displays flashes of real insight. A few appeared last week in his reports on Republican hopefuls--Dewey, Stassen and Taft. (He notably omitted any mention of Vandenberg.) Excerpts:

P: "A sceptical visitor to the Governor's mansion at Albany is shocked to find that the Governor's lieutenants are not party hacks but men of national, even international reputation . . . That Dewey picks brains to flank his throne is obvious by now. That he wins them to enthusiastic loyalty is barely public knowledge.

"For there is a public image of him that not even his loyal lieutenants . . . [can] erase. It is of a foxy, withdrawn man, who labours after the one human quality that cannot be laboured: friendliness, intimacy, humility. Americans are extraordinarily quick to reject a man's valuation of himself and sense his inner misgivings . . .

"He has gone after the Presidency with the humorless calculation of a certified public accountant in pursuit of the Holy Grail. At times it has not been a winning spectacle . . . He has a trick of hasty recovery, which makes many people feel that he is guided by no convictions but first wets his finger to the wind and then sticks his policies together, piece by fashionable piece. . . Fondness for the Churchillian sweep . . . is the showiest of his weaknesses. It ridicules his gift to learn and grow, which lately he has shown by his farming policies in New York, his shedding of an elocutionary manner, and his human admission that he wishes he were two inches taller . . . Though he would look foolish in Roosevelt's cape, he would be a far finer administrator than Roosevelt ever was."

P: "Stassen's blood is thick enough to be stagnant. Maybe it is what gives him the appearance of heavy dependability. To any questioner, whether it is a farmer, a twitching clubwoman, a Catholic priest . . . he gives the identical neutral treatment--a "grave, unhurried, unsentimental courtesy . . . His enemies, who are significantly often his former admirers, say Stassen will cure anything by seeming urgent, talking plain, and acting roundabout . . ."

P: "Robert Taft offers the blessed refreshment of an ambling, yet indestructible honesty. He is constitutionally incapable of enthusiasm, of dissembling, of eyeing the main chance . . . Such a dry, glamourless man, with his plain suits, his grapefruit-guileless face, his galoshes in case it rains, is the despair of campaign managers . . . Ask him . . . for his stand on any measure that is loaded with popular passion . . . 'Haven't made up my mind,' he will say, lugging home a small library of books . . . He is a rare type in Congress . . . the able professional man, pursuing the life of reason, horned out of his slippers and into social duties by a gregarious and witty wife . . . He is the classic conservative, in the wrong century, and perhaps in the wrong country."

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