Correspondents answered

I don't believe in all the years of Letter From America I've ever devoted a talk to doing what a distinguished newspaper columnist tells me is, for him and others in his trade a blessed relief from pontificating. Namely, doing a piece which could be entitled, 'Answers to Correspondents'.

Of the shoals of letters that slosh against my back door every morning like a herring catch, let me say that most of them are from nice people who appreciate that they are not the only people who write and who, unlike a brisk minority, do not either demand an instant reply or hope to become a pen pal.

Among the majority, it becomes a cruel necessity not even to consider replying. I'm thinking of the very many people, in many distant places, who want me to go into the American genealogy of their name, who would like to know by return of post where Ronald Reagan was born or who was the second President of the United States, or any one of a hundred other facts and figures that can be discovered by a simple trip to the local library.

Need I say, I'm going to do nothing about the gentleman in Bombay who says he likes these talks immeasurably, must come and visit me as soon as possible and please send by express airmail immediately a round trip air ticket from Bombay to New York!

But, from time to time, there are people who, very gently, correct some boner or clanger and there are others who respond hilariously to some passing remark, which I assume was taken as a joke. I have in front of me three such letters and, along with them, a letter not to me, but to the New York Times from a famous and funny man which, however, touches on a very serious topic indeed that, just now, in fact, for a month or more, has deeply grieved one whole group of Americans.

First, a clanger. Not a very noisy one, but an error. In talking the other week about dates and memorable anniversaries that are no longer remembered, I mentioned the annual ceremony at my school whereby the teacher pointed to all the big and little blobs on the map that were painted pink and asked us, 'How come?'. Or rather, in those days, when, 'how come' was forbidden by the masters as a horrid Americanism, asked, 'Why so?'. The answer was, of course, as we shouted in unison, 'Because they belong to us!' Quite right.

I put down the day of this ceremony, rightly, as Empire Day, but recalled the date wrongly as the 23rd of April. A dozen alert correspondents have told me so and corrected my memory. The 23rd of April was, of course, St George's Day and, if it's any help, I notice from my Whitaker's, the following day in 1889, Sir Stafford Cripps was born. The date I missed, Empire Day, was, as all my correspondents remarked, the 24th of May. Thank you! As the ventriloquist on the sands of Blackpool used to say, 'Thank you one and all for your kind patronage and attention'.

Next, only a week or two ago, I had hoped to pre-empt the approaching boredom of many listeners by saying I would not go into the torturous procedure of the American political primaries because, I remarked airily, explaining it to an non-American would be like explaining the stock market to the Zulus. I did add at once that I expected to hear by the first post that the Zulus have a very sophisticated portfolio and probably own 20 per cent of IBM and 30 per cent of British Petroleum.

Well, in short order, there arrived the following letter from the public affairs manager of the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa Limited. He says, 'The corporation has just embarked on one of the largest share ownership schemes' – I must pause just to throw in the warning that that word would not look well if printed in an American paper. The American word is project or enterprise. Scheme is taboo. A scheme suggests some rather sinister hanky-panky of the sort engineered by scheming men – however, 'The scheme is one', he writes, 'in which we are offering shares to some 250,000 employees in South Africa, the majority of whom are blacks, who work on coal and gold mines. Communicating the scheme to these workers has involved exactly the difficult process you elude to, explaining not just the concept of stocks and shares, but of the stock market itself. Yet,' he says, 'early results are encouraging. Eighty per cent of the workers in the coal mines have decided to take up the offer and the proportion amongst our Zulu employees is very close to 100 per cent.'

Perhaps after this successful educational exercise, the company will go on to explain the American meaning of the word 'landslide', why the American media were rocketed during the past two weeks by the news that the Reverend Jesse Jackson had won the Michigan caucus by a landslide, when, in fact, only two per cent of the qualified voters of Michigan voted.

The next letter, if I were a mean type I should frame or paste it into an album of American presidents. A month or two ago when the question was coming up about whether a black man was electable as president, many older people recalled the very bitter and, in the Baptist South, the very ugly, presidential fight of 1928, when the Democrats had the audacity to nominate the governor of New York, Al Smith, the first Catholic ever to be chosen as a presidential candidate. He lost to Herbert Hoover, mainly because the solidly Democratic south, in those days, split and the region resounded with dire predictions that very soon the Pope would, in effect, be running the United States and yet, 32 years later, there was a Catholic President Kennedy.

And, today, I doubt that one American in two could tell you the religion of any of the candidates, other than that of the Reverend Jackson.

Well, I'd been talking this over with my lawyer who knows more Jewish law, heartbreaking and side-splitting, than anyone I know and he turned to me with a chuckle, and he said, 'Of course, remember being president is not every mother's ambition for her son.' The story he told me was one with which I ended my next broadcast. It was about the inauguration of the first Jewish President of the United States. The chief justice administered the oath and then turned and said to the new president's mother, 'Mrs Ginsberg, I congratulate you on your son.' And Mrs Ginsberg said, 'Huh! But my other son's a doctor!'

Well, I did get a letter or two from a few, sweet, honest folk asking to have their memory nudged, but the precious letter came from an indignant Londoner. 'I have looked up,' he wrote, 'the entire list of succession of all the American presidents since George Washington and I just want to tell you there never has been a Jewish president. Mr Cooke, I am surprised and shocked at a man of your experience and supposed knowledge. What a clanger!' Exclamation point.

Well, that letter served as a sharp reminder that one of the problems of radio broadcasting is the listener can't see a deadpan and you just have to hope that the tone of voice conveys the poker face. Evidently in one house it didn't, but surely it would be a very limp end to any broadcast to say, as I'd tried to whisper on a postcard – very tiny writing – to this gentleman, 'It was a joke, son!'

The last letter is not funny or happy, though since it's from Woody Allen it cannot help being wry in a regretful way. 'I am not,' he began, 'a political activist. If anything, I'm an uninformed coward. I prefer to sit around and grouse to loved ones privately about social conditions. There have been a few times that I've taken a public stance. I came out vehemently against the colourising of movies without the director's consent. The moral indignation I thought would follow was not quite equal to the ire aroused when a person gets in front of you at the bakery.'

But now, he says, a situation has arisen on which he feels he must take a stand. 'I am appalled beyond measure at the treatment of the rioting Palestinians by the Jews. I mean, fellahs, are you kidding? Beating of people by soldiers to make examples of them? Breaking the hands of men and women so they can't throw stones? Am I reading the newspapers correctly? Were food and medical supplies withheld to make a rebellious community uncomfortable? Are we talking about state sanctioned brutality and even torture?'

The response to this piece was swift and furious from, of course, some of Mr Allen's fellow Jews. Some; the ones who are likely to back Mr Shamir to the end, but if, which heaven forbid, the Times had asked all the one and a quarter Jews in this city to write in, I'm pretty sure a vast number, if not an actual majority, would have shared Woody Allen's confusion and disbelief.

Strangely, there have not been, in this city of all cities, many eloquent statements of Israel's position or much reporting from Gaza, in particular, that have told the tragic story of the Israeli efforts there, in the past 20 years, since Israel offered Gaza back to Egypt after the Six Day War, was turned down and has since met with little help from the Arabs by way of United Nations contributions or offers to rehabilitate the refugees.

I have in front of me a review of the world's press and it bears the title, 'Rage Against Israel' and this past Sunday's New York Times entitled its magazine cover story, 'Arab Rage Inside Israel'.

Yet nobody should interpret this sense of shame or rage to signify that the United States, under any foreseeable president, would end support for Israel and I don't believe any new administration would set down conditions other that the ones that Mr Shultz has heroically been trying to make acceptable as the minimum conditions a negotiation, namely to find a body of Palestinians that has the authority to speak for its people in Gaza and the West Bank and one which declares, at the start, as the PLO will not, that the State of Israel is sovereign and has a right to exist.

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.

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