Interpreter of the U.S.

Most foreign correspondents are attracted to Washington as irresistibly as iron filings to a magnet. Not so Alistair Cooke, 42, author (A Generation on Trial) and chief U.S. correspondent of England's famed Manchester Guardian. ". . . Washington may be the best place to watch how the Government sees the foreign news," Cooke wrote recently, "[but] it is possibly the worst place to watch how America sees the world."

For a better vantage point, Correspondent Cooke, who makes his own headquarters in Manhattan, was packing his bags this week for his twelfth trip across the U.S., a custom which has already taken him to the highways & byways of all the states. Says Cooke: "In Britain, I bear the 48 states on my shoulders."

Cooke bears them so well that to millions of Britons he has become a semiofficial interpreter of the U.S. He has a reporter's eye for the lighter moods & manners of the U.S., a good ear for its idioms and a graceful, often witty, style that does equally well with a New York street scene, the Fourth of July in a small town, or the look of the Kansas prairies. Britons have come to depend on his daily Guardian dispatches and his weekly recorded 15-minute BBC broadcasts ("Letter from America") for their knowledge of U.S. life outside the stereotypes (Chicago gangsters, Hollywood divorces, Senator Claghorns) purveyed by most of Britain's popular press. Cooke used the occasion of the recent atomic bomb tests to discuss mining and farming in Nevada, which most Britons knew only for Reno and gambling. For an Easter story this year, Cooke is assuming that England knows about Manhattan's Fifth Avenue parade, plans to tell about the Easter rituals of the Ute and Yaqui Indians.

Discovering America. Manchester-born Reporter Cooke's interest in the U.S. dates from 1932 when, just out of Cambridge, he came to study drama at Yale on a British fellowship. He became fascinated by U.S. dialects and folklore, gave up the idea of becoming an actor and went on to Harvard for more study of the U.S. He went back to England for 2 1/2 years (1934-37), then returned to do a general commentary for NBC, worked in his spare time as a string correspondent for the Times of London. By 1941 his Americanization was so complete that he became a citizen. BBC hired him as a U.S. correspondent in World War II, and by 1945 Cooke was so well known that he got a cable "from a man I'd never heard of"-Editor A. P. Wadsworth of the Manchester Guardian--asking him to cover the San Francisco Conference. He has been with the Guardian ever since.

In newsprint-starved Britain, whose press does an indifferent-to-bad job of covering the U.S., probably only the Guardian would have given Cooke the elbow room for his leisurely essays on everything from Tom Dewey ("a certified public accountant in pursuit of the Holy Grail") to Babe Ruth's death ("He was Hercules with bat in hand, but he was Hercules done by Disney") and the suppressed Briticisms of Anglophobe Robert R. McCormick ("Still talking with a trace of British accent, taking afternoon tea, wearing a wrist watch on each hand, and being forever to his friends known as Bertie. Freud, thou shouldst be living at this hour . . .!").

Test Matches. Cooke makes no attempt to be a political oracle, is not regarded as such in Britain. Ordinarily he avoids political predictions, sticks to interpreting what has happened, and, in doing so, usually leans toward the Administration line. But his shrewd wit can often knock an overblown issue down to its true perspective. When other correspondents wrote of a 'Rising tide" of anti-British sentiment in 1949, Cooke observed: "Senator Kem of Missouri . . . has never constituted a rising tide."

Cooke is at his best in interpreting American customs to the British. In 1949 he described the World Series ("the American Test Matches") in cricket terms. "The pitch is known as the diamond, and the bowling of the ball is known as the pitch . . . First-base [is] an anthill at cover-point. The second-base ... is roughly at long-on. The third base is at square leg. The object of the game ... is to hit the ball and run around all the bases and back to the wicket ... If you hit a six, you are presumed to have gone full circle."

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