Speechification

I’ll admit that by the end of his 58-year Sunday morning reign I was thoroughly bored of Alistair Cooke, droning on as he had for all of my remembered years plus about another twenty. Reading his unending bloody series of bloody letters, all from bloody America (did he never go anywhere else?). Now, though, revived for one week only, four years after his death (and all that nastiness with the stolen body), I hear something quite different—and it’s a real joy. It’s his language, of course: so courtly but also relaxed, effortless. He was an extraordinary communicator.

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, has picked five letters, each from a different US election campaign, going all the way back to 1948. Here’s number two, which is about an incident in Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign at the height of the Vietnam War. The other programmes are here. but you’ll have to get a move on: the clock is ticking and they’ll be replaced by next week’s Book of the Week… er… next week.

This entry was posted by by Steve Bowbrick on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 10:15 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.