Old Sentiment and New Honesty - 17 December 1999

Unfortunately, as Alistair Cooke is unwell, he has been unable to record a letter this week. In its place here's a vintage edition of Letter from America, which was first broadcast in December 1967.

Coming out of a theatre the other night - I'd just seen a play, brilliant, raw, funny, sad and so full of four letter words that, as Michael Flanders said: "There will soon be none left over for special occasions." - I ran into a friend who had liked it too but, like me, was one of those people who still cannot get used to the social revolution, that in only three years has gone from thinking Virginia Woolf daring to seeing, on the screen and on the stage, just about everything anybody ever thought of doing in private.

Well we talked and we agreed that it was diverting and like most middle-aged people we wouldn't dream of finding anything disgusting or outrageous for fear we'd be thought stuffy or old hat.

It strikes me, as a passing thought, that the more outrageous of the young are profiting greatly at the moment by the sheer cowardice of the middle aged - all right don't get me started on what a bloodshot young San Francisco poet has called "the great crusade for total honesty, total freedom" - I certainly pray not to be around when we have total freedom.

My friend and I, I say, exchanged rather melancholy courtesies and as he moved away and waved a limp hand he said: "Well, I suppose I'd better wish you an obscene Christmas and a filthy New Year."

There's something in it, I find with some of the more "in" young people that it's not a good idea to mention Jesus Christ, except in an expletive, because it might remind somebody of an obscene story.

Well I'm going to assume that most people present are old enough to remember what Christmas is supposed to be about.

There was a time, not too many years ago but it now seems like a century, when I even took the time off at this time of year to tell a Christmas story.

Well let us try and stay on the middle ground between the old sentiment and the new honesty between, you might say, the sky and the gutter.

It's been, on the whole, a dark year in America and the prospects for the next one are darker still but let me stop you from leaning over and switching off - I'm not going to dwell on the dark themes.

Equality, if not liberty, still flourishes in small places. The other morning around 10 o'clock a New York cop - Patrolman Vincent Santo - was ambling along East 35th Street and he saw a car parked on the uptown side of the street. It was not an uptown day - by which I mean that we have, what they call, an alternate parking system, this means you can park on one side of the street one day and the other the next. It was the downtown day.

Officer Santo strolled over and looked at the licence plate and by all the traditions or maybe the legendary traditions of the New York police he should have whistled, pocketed his pencil and wad of parking tickets, and beat it - for the licence plate carried the awesome inscription - US Senate 1.

The car could belong to only one man - the senior senator from New York the eminent Senator Jacob Javits who, as any cop in his right mind can tell you, is the greatest vote-getter in the history of New York elections. Last time Senator Javits didn't win a million votes, he had a million-vote majority.

But patrolman Santo was unfazed by this knowledge, he took out his book, detached a green ticket and hung it on the windshield - the windscreen, excuse me - wiper.

It now costs $25 for a parking violation. Patrolman Santo had done his duty and he moved on.

But Senator Javits's car was parked in a so-called tow away zone, so only minutes later along came another cop driving his tow truck. He hooked the Senator's front fender on to his rear - so to speak - and was on his way with it to the city pound at Pier 96 on the Hudson River.

It took the senator's secretary three hours to find out what had happened to the car. Then she went off to the city pound, paid $25 for the parking fine and another $25 tow charge and drove it to the garage.

Seeking the tag or moral of this story all that was required of a reporter was to call police headquarters and a fine Irish voice replied: "What's good enough for our citizens is good enough for our senators."

The line was quoted on the leader pages as a proof that something is right with old New York. The odd thing, to me, about this story is that it should be printed at all.

A moment's reflection will tell you that the cops ran absolutely no risk in doing their duty on a United States senator. He's a public official. He holds his office by the votes of the people. He or his secretary would have had to be out of their minds to try and fix a cop.

I'd say that next to the car of the President of the United States the car of a United States senator is just about the safest thing you could tag with a parking ticket.

Not so with a thousand other cars in New York whose licence plate you don't identify on sight. It might be the car of a shyster lawyer or a tycoon on good terms, shall we say, with a police lieutenant or a member of the Mafia whose connections had better not be aroused.

These dim suspicions are stirred by a scandal that has just broken over the head of Mayor Lindsay that could cost him any further political ambition. One of his commissioners, the water commissioner - a handsome young man, efficient and loyal to the mayor, with apparently an impeccable background and married to one of the most awesome and blue-blooded families of New England - started out as an unpaid worker in the Lindsay administration, then moved into the $30,000-a-year job as water commissioner and moved also into the mayor's confidence and affection.

A thunderbolt hit the mayor and the city government last week when this young man was arrested and arraigned after being indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy. The charge being that he had awarded a contract to a firm to clean a city reservoir - $850,000 was the going price - on the understanding that he would get a kick back of $18,000. The grand jury believes that he did get it.

The trial will certainly be the most absorbing and could be the most damaging to a city administration since James J Hines, one of the top Democratic bosses of the city, a man always represented as a kindly philanthropist who cherished and succoured the immigrant poor - since Hines was discovered to be the chief protector of the infamous Luciano gang and its prostitution and dope and other rackets.

This conviction doomed the Democrats, elected La Guardia and did something else for the successful prosecutor in the Hines case. A small, wiry, brown-eyed young man with a toothbrush moustache, name of Thomas Edmund Dewey.

The implications of the new case are just as disturbing for also indicted along with the water commissioner is the man who is at present thought to be the local head of the Mafia.

The mayor has an investigation going, so does the district attorney's office, so does the federal government.

The city is stirred at the thought that maybe the Mafia has dug deep into other corners of the city government.

It's too early to say but this unhappy episode, while it gives stimulating breakfast food to New Yorkers, gives second thoughts also to Republicans across the country who have toyed with the idea of the dashing and handsome John Lindsay as a possible future president.

Now to be truthful there is no Lindsay movement, either popular or contrived. He's not right now being considered as an element in the coming fight for the Republican nomination.

But many a wise old politician has reflected that the old maxim, which says that although the mayor of New York has the second most demanding executive job in the country, the mayoralty leads only to the grave - perhaps this old maxim is out of date.

Nowadays the really frightening problems of American government are found in the cities. And if the country could find a mayor who was able to master them he would look like Daniel come to judgement. Lindsay had looked like that man.

It may not be his fault that he appointed a commissioner without checking his background. It was a slip admittedly. It might be the slip that dashes the golden cup from his mouth.

On second thoughts I will, after all, tell you a Christmas story.

It's about a large house occupied at various times by a family from California, a family from the Hudson Valley and, when this story begins, by a family fresh from the Midwest.

By the time they arrived the staff of this mansion had a well-prescribed routine. There was a coloured steward and a butler and an upstairs maid and a downstairs maid, a laundress, a seamstress and a chauffeur.

The custom of the earlier owners of the house had been to have Christmas dinner at about eight in the evening, but when the man from the Midwest came in and Christmas was approaching he took aside the coloured steward and asked him what the custom was, and he was told.

The Midwesterner said: "But what happens to you people, when do you get home to your families for your own Christmas dinner?"

The steward thought this a touching but naive question.

"Why sir," he said, "we don't, the question has never come up."

"Well," said this bantam rooster from the Midwest, "it's coming up right now. In Missouri we have Christmas dinner at noon and I'll compromise with you. We'll have it at 2pm but I want to see every member of the household staff out and off to their homes by 4 o'clock."

"But," the steward got in, "how about supper?"

"My wife and I," said the man from Missouri, "have been raiding ice boxes since before you were born. So now you slice up some cold turkey and see that the box is stocked with the salad and the ice cream and all the rest and we'll fix our own supper."

Three other families have moved into the house since then and none of them has had the nerve to change the understanding set by this man from Missouri. His name, by the way, is Harry Truman and the house is, of course, the White House.

He's a very frail old man these days and walks the streets no more. But when I read that the Johnsons will dine at 2pm I thought of the staff clanking the dishes and sweeping up the kitchen and whisking out in the dusk to their own Christmas parties.

"It is," as Scrooge said, "a small matter." Pardon me, I'm not so sure.

A last minute shoppers' bulletin for anybody intending to buy the original Christmas presents. I see that frankincense has gone up a penny-ha'penny a pound, myrrh fourpence a pound, and by the grace of God and General de Gaulle, gold is steady at $35 an ounce.

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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