Special relationship especially warm

I suppose we are just about coming to the peak of the tourist season, whether we are thinking of the family from Newcastle on the Costa Brava or a German filming the advertisements plastered along the Appian Way or the family from the north of France picnicking, for a change, in the south of France. What I'm thinking of, of course, is the American girl from Chadron, Nebraska padding through Oxford or the retired policeman from Kensington I ran into a month ago who had sworn for twenty years to take a bus ride across America and is now doing it.

In about, I should say, the past year or two, there has been a noticeable and, to me, heart-warming increase in popular mutual affection between the British and the Americans. Listening to the echo of that sentence as you do sometimes on a badly rigged transatlantic telephone call, I must say that sounds like a dreadful, cornball remark but I think I know pretty well how the mutual regard waxes and wanes across the Atlantic and to give you one example only, the most vivid I can think of, and I hope you don't think this self-serving, I can only goggle when I look back on the English press reception nearly four years ago to the first one or two programmes of a television series I did on the history of America. And the reception, in the same quarters, to the repeat of the same series this spring. I'm not thinking of the general, popular press whose reactions tend to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Both times the response was, to put it modestly, gratifying. 

But in 1972 the intelligentsia press in London and in Washington was on its guard against any whitewashing of the dreadful continent that seemed so busy slaughtering Asian peasants abroad and killing or beating up students at home. 'Where...' one paper asked, after looking at my history of the Spanish settlements of North America, 'Where was there any mention of Vietnam or the banning of DDT or the lettuce boycott led by the Californian, Cesar Chavez?' Well, once a criticism appears in print, it's too late to say: hold it, chum – the conquistadors had never heard of Vietnam. Coronado, on his exhausting and fruitless trek through Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, Kansas and back again would have been very grateful for DDT but the records, which I have searched exhaustively, reveal no trace of DDT in the Spanish marches. And Kent State University had not been founded in 1540, nor even Harvard. 

The Washington Post lamented that Mr Cooke was busy blinding himself to all that was rotten in the state of Nixon and tying up America in pink ribbons. But once the series was repeated, the same papers found untold sense, sensibility, even – I blush to say – grandeur in the series. Now, all that had happened was Vietnam was all over, the universities had cooled and I myself wouldn't dare to say whether they have cooled for keeps or are living in the dead centre of a hurricane that will come hurling itself at us one day from another direction. Anyway, while very many intelligent Americans are grateful that the bicentennial orgy is now beginning to wane, I see where a London journalist has just been over to America and is doing a series of articles you couldn't possibly have read in a European paper five, six, seven years ago. 

'America' – it says here – 'is experiencing a new mood of optimism, idealism and a passionate belief that the system can still work. After more than a decade' – it goes on – 'when everything went tragically wrong, America has embarked on a renaissance that, to an Englishman, seems enormously enviable.' And this fervent Englishman winds up with the astonishing sentence, 'The great moral debates in America seem immeasurably more exciting than our own stale, ceaseless struggle about who is to have what share of the shrinking cake.' 

I don't think you could have read a sentence like that since the middle 1930s when Englishmen were in the habit of making odious comparisons between their own floundering or timid leaders and the drive and dynamism of Saint Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Mr Hastings of the London Evening Standard rightly emphasises the almost incredible repentance of Eldridge Cleaver, the most uncompromising, the most terrifying of the Black Panthers, who boasted in his book of having raped a white woman as an almost necessary assertion of black dignity. And Mr Cleaver, as we might have guessed, de-camped, in fact, fled, from criminal charges to Africa where we assumed he would find not only that black is beautiful but, understandably to a black man, that life had for him more self-respect and decency than it held for his race in the United States. Well, Mr Cleaver who had been very free with the word 'fascist' at home, found himself living in places that take a dim view of the big mouth and the free speech. Living abroad, even as an admired martyr, he began to find all sorts of virtues and strengths in his own detested homeland and, amazingly, he voluntarily returned and gave himself up to a prison term. 

Now anybody, who had in 1970, say, predicted this, would have been laughed off as a jingo or a wishful thinker of the most babyish kind. Having watched for quite some time the ebb and flow of popular feeling between our two countries, I am, myself, always cagey about some big, dramatic swing, either away from admiration to contempt, or away from scorn to enthusiasm. But since the woeful, and it seemed to me justifiable, decline in British respect for America during the dreadful days of the malodorous Joe McCarthy, I don't remember a time when Britons took a fairer overall view of America, or when Americans, well aware of the sinking pound, the rising unemployment, the staggering economy and all the rest of it, have had a more sensible and generous respect for Britain. 

I read with pleasure in our papers that Britain is enjoying just now a tourism bonanza that surpasses even the wildest predictions of the tourist agencies, that eight million visitors will have come and gone by the fall and that the boom will be worth to Britain £200 million more than anyone had forecast. The total take from tourism in 1976 is now expected to be over one thousand million pounds. What will come out of this it would be fascinating to know – I mean, by way of correcting or adjusting the foreigner's view of Britain. Of one thing I am sure. Several million Americans are going home to tell their countrymen that the picture of Britain as a dank, green land in the temperate zone is an outrageous lie. Britain, they have just learned, is as browned off as central Texas in August and is hotter than Calcutta. I even ran into a beautiful American woman who had completely wiped out the memory of two previous visits to England and came to two downright conclusions: that London is more insufferably humid than New York in mid-summer and that Britain is essentially tradition-ridden and un-progressive because it lags so far behind in air-conditioning. 

Well, I went on about this a couple of weeks ago, and will go on no more, but I did use on this woman the simple, and it appears to me, sensible argument that nothing would be wilder, more profligate than for Britain to invest billions in general air-conditioning and then find next year that thing's were back to normal and what you should have invested in was raincoats, indoor heaters and flood control. It had no effect. But then nobody in his right mind is going to pick a fight, even a reasonable one, with a beautiful woman. There are other things more important than setting beautiful women right about logic. It's a waste of emotion and the raw material. 

One of the predictable things about visiting a foreign country is to assume that you will right away appreciate the foreignness of it by noticing that the newspapers are agitated by totally different happenings from the ones that engross you at home. That's obvious, isn't it? But the obvious surprise is so obvious it never gets said, which is that very often what's interesting and exciting the French or the Spanish or the Germans or whoever is what's exciting the Mancunian and the Glaswegian. If you'd been in America this week, it's true, you would have looked over the headlines and seen reports on local matters you'd certainly, as a tourist, decide to skip, such as that after Watergate the Senate has voted to create a permanent special prosecutor independent of the Department of Justice, that there's a legal fight over the will of the late head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover (by the way, if you're smart, you'd notice that in America 'late' doesn't mean 'former', it means 'dead') or that the Mississippi delegation to the Republican national convention is thinking of switching its allegiance from Ford to Reagan. 

But I have to tell you that these matters are not at all what was on everybody's lips and eyeballs. Americans were sickened by the murder of the British ambassador to Dublin. They were staying home in the late afternoon and early evening to inflate their chests over the doings of the American swimming team in Montreal and they were gasping and gurgling over the gymnastic flips of the little pixie from Romania, where four years ago they were gasping and gurgling over the pixie from Russia. They were telling each other how like an old, Italian movie, and then some, was the (consummate) robbery of that bank in Nice. 

The best shock of this kind I ever had as on my first long stay in Spain. The first night, I was to meet a Spanish film producer and I'd boned up on the Spanish film industry and tried to memorise the names of the Spanish film stars he might go on about. Well, sir, he talked all evening about the Spaniards' favourite film star, the incomparable 'Hamez Esdayart'. I felt very guilty that I was unacquainted with this great man. I must have looked very shifty all evening till the truth dawned. Yes indeed! An actor mas formidable! 

Good old 'Hamez Esdayart! Good old James Stewart!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.