News timing

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I am taping this several days ahead of time because I'm flying to San Francisco and by the time I get there it'll be too late to do it and have it arrive in England in time to be heard at the regular hour which, for people bored by or tired of television, is on Friday evenings and, for the rest of the club, is Sunday breakfast – or what a Scottish friend of mine calls 'kedgeree time'. 

The listener in Australia or Ethiopia or Uganda will be even farther removed from the date of the original taping since they put it out on their own time during the following week. 

You think I jest when I talk about listeners in Ethiopia and Uganda? Well, the last time I arrived at Kennedy Airport, I was waiting for my baggage – and getting dizzy from the slow circling of the carousel – when a neat, very dapper, black gentleman with a briefcase came up to me and wanted me to know that he set his alarm clock, 'So', as he put it, 'I can always catch you at the regular time in my native land, Ethiopia'. This accost encouraged a kindly old lady, an Englishwoman as it turned out, to approach me also and say, 'The same thing is true for me. I live in Uganda. You're one thing he hasn't stopped yet.' 

I go into the logistics of broadcasting, taping, airmailing, retransmitting these days because the main hazard of these talks, the silent prayer I send up when I do one several days before it'll be heard, is that nothing cataclysmic will happen in the interval. During the Watergate days and nights, cataclysms were almost routine and I remember doing several talks over one weekend so that some listeners around the globe wouldn't think I'd been in a coma during the previous 24 hours. Even then, Mr Nixon's final decision to abdicate came about 36 hours after my deadline for recording the talk, so that I had to contrive a final sentence which, in all humility, I now believe to have been the most cagey and also the most pregnant sentence I have ever spoken into a microphone. 

All I could do, faced with the desperation of 'will he'/'won’t he' was to report the events of the week up to the moment the mike was turned on and, at the end of the recital, say with cryptic solemnity, 'and the rest you know'. So by the time you heard it, you did! No critic, no listener, no official of the BBC paused to figure out the impossibility of my knowing nearly two days in advance that the roof would fall in. 

In other words, in this game, a reputation for knowingness, for being on the ball, depends perilously on things not happening too late. I remember very well the 1 November 1950, sitting in the lounge of the National Press Club in Washington. I was a working newspaper man then, a journalist in the only true sense of the term, that is, one who writes every day. I had filed two stories for my paper, my absolute deadline was always three o'clock which was then, and still is, 8 p.m. London time. 

Well, as I say in that November day in 1950, it was four o'clock. Suddenly, the lazy horsehair-stuffed calm of the press lounge was violated, like Fred Astaire doing that tap dance in the reading room of a London club. Violated by a man I knew, a reporter, from, I think, a Chicago paper – it may well have been that old friend I've mentioned before, the one who looks like an admiral in a Jerome Kern musical comedy and a man too easy-going ever to violate any calm, least of all his own – he positively clattered into the room, his eyes bulging and his breath coming in surges like the sea on a beach. 'Harry Truman,' he bawled, 'has been shot!' 

It was not, as it turned out after several frantic plunges for the news ticker, it was not true. But it was true that two men, members of a Puerto Rican nationalist movement had tried to shoot the president when he appeared at the window of Blair House where he was living at the time because, some of you may remember, the roof of the White House was literally about to fall in. We didn't really straighten out the plot and the way it had failed until about 4.30, by which time I was back in the lounge with another friend recovering from the shock with a beaker of barley wine. 

While this recovery was going on, another man came darting in. He was the Washington chief of Reuters, also not an habitual darter but extremely competent and always on the verge of the breaking news. He stopped in his tracks and glared at me. 'Haven't you heard?' he screamed, 'There's been an attempt to assassinate Harry Truman. What are you doing there?' 'Too late,' I said, 'they should have done it a couple of hours ago.' The fact, as you'll deduce, was that it would never have made my paper. 

I learned this cynical lesson – I had learned it long ago – most memorably on the Monday December 8, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the Second World War. The first, wild hint of this preposterous and, as it seemed at the time, impossible event, came while the New York Philharmonic was tuning up for its regular Sunday afternoon broadcast concert. An announcer broke in to pant out, 'The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor!' 

Most of us, I should guess, had to drag out an atlas to discover that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii and was the main base of the American Pacific fleet. It was now about 2.30 and I dashed off with a friend I was visiting, another newspaper man, to the White House where we drifted impatiently with a tide of reporters and waited and waited for a confirming word, which came first from secretary of state Cordell Hull. By the time I got to my office, which was that of the London Times, it was 6 p.m., too late to file anything. Next morning, about 20 hours after Pearl Harbor, my paper came out with its first edition, certainly, carrying a single-column despatch from Washington written on the Saturday, bearing the authoritative headline, 'The President’s Reply to the Emperor Hirohito'. 

The most professional, if gruesome, response I've ever known to the habit of diplomats, kings and big bugs of dying too late or invading too late came from my incomparable guardian editor, A. P. Wadsworth. A tiny Lancashire man with spiky hair, wily eyes and a refusal to be excited by any eager beaver, whether a president or a messenger boy. 

Well, my great friend and guru, and the most famous American journalist of his time, H. L. Mencken, one November night in 1948 was stricken with a massive stroke. The hospital in Baltimore told me that it was doubtful he would last through the night. It was typical, by the way, of his bilious view of the medicos that he lasted another seven years. 

Anyway, I was grateful to my doctor friend at John Hopkins and I sat down and wrote through the night an obituary stretching to 4,000 words. I finished at dawn and cabled it without pausing to consider that most Britons had never heard of Mencken and that, just then, British newspapers were the pinched victims of austerity, our paper, for example, being allowed only four pages on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays and six pages on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I got an acknowledging cable back from Wadsworth which said, 'Many thanks Mencken. Stop. Hope he dies Monday, Wednesday or Friday'. 

Surely I've mentioned before the sentence which, when I die, they will find inscribed on my gall bladder. It was a weekend – how many innocent years ago, before the Space Age, as we call it, long before President Kennedy made his, at the time, absurd boast that we will put a man on the moon before the 1970s. It was a weekend as slack as any I've known. I riffled through four or five newspapers trying to find anything that could possibly interest people in Brighton or Glasgow, let alone Ethiopia or Uganda! In the end I sat down and thought of things happening near at home. My home. Tiny things that might still touch human beings whereas a report on the latest farm subsidy or a row in the Senate would positively not. 

I did my talk. I recorded it, according to custom. According to custom, it was flown off and passed through the British customs as non-contraband material. It was played first in those days on Sunday evening and then again on Monday morning. A few days later, The Listener, the BBC's distinguished house organ, came out and unfortunately the radio critic had chosen that weekend to review my talk. He knew by then – he would have had to be a sloth or a terminal case not to know – that, on the previous Sunday, the Russians had rocketed Gagarin round the earth, the first human to circle the globe in space. An enormous event, of course! I knew it, I bet I knew it sooner than the Listener's critic, but even veteran radio and television critics are as hypnotised by the medium as the simplest listener is. They believe that what they are hearing, what they are seeing is happening now. 

So the man wrote, 'There's one thing you can say for Cooke, when the last, the final bomb has dropped on us all, he'll still be there waffling away.' Now you will understand I've been 'vamping 'til ready' all this time. I am not going to be caught out by a new war or the death of kings. I shall know as soon as you. I'm sticking to what has happened, not what might happen. 

Very well then. On the first Saturday in May, the Kentucky Derby or 'Darby' was won by Affirmed. 'Up', as they say, was the wonder boy of all racing history, the just 18-year-old Steve Cauthen and, by the time you hear this, he will probably have won ten more races, bringing his total in two years up to 400 and some. 

As for American politics, Mr Carter, the progress of inflation – I can only say, 'the rest you know.'

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.