A learned 94 year old, Cooke seems to carry all of history in his back pocket. English born, a graduate of both Cambridge and Yale and an American citizen since 1941, he embodies the special relationship.
In this week’s despatch, the power of the phrase, Cooke talks mostly about that other special relationship which once existed between France and the United States, and traces its decline to the French sale of fighter jets to Gaddafi’s Lybia in the seventies.
Of Pompidou, the French president who authorised the sale, he says:
it must be a melancholy consolation to his old admirers that in this country his principal footnote to history will associate him not with any high deed of political derring-do but with the contemporary fashion in architecture otherwise known as the outdoor plumbing style.It is vintage Cooke. Rambling and mellifluous, he touches first on the “uranium from Africa” affair before rolling steadily on through a succession of memorable anecdotes to Lafayette and the French.
If Cooke’s sly teasing is not to your taste then you might like the lyrics to That’s why I hate the French.
