There's a pretty good obituary piece by John Nichols. Cockburn's world view was shaped by his father, a communist writer for The Daily Worker who fought in Spain. Claude Cockburn was almost supernatural in his ability to foretell what the British government (and any other, for that matter) was going to do. His formula was simple and almost always right: just imagine the most treacherous, dishonest, despicable and cynical thing the state could do and odds are that's what they will do. Add to this Cockburn's clever writing and you had someone who can write "I told you so" in countless ways without ever being tiresome. His book, Corruptions of Empire is about the best book ever published for examining the entrails of the politics and hack journalism of the 1980s
He may have been fond of heckling political figures (when Clinton said he'd smoked a doobie but didn't inhale, Cockburn asked "Can't he do anything right?"), but relished slapping down establishment journalists and writers. His parody of the McNeil Lehrer News Hour (now The News Hour with Jim Lehrer) is a classic of satire. It was also years ahead of its time, ridiculing (in 1982) the "both sides" song-and-dance that pollutes journalism to this day:
While he could give a well-deserved knee in the groin for right-wing hacks like George Will ("I don't know what I did to get up his nose so, since I haven't written anything about him since his anchor to reality, Nancy Reagan left town.") and Martin Peretz ("IDF camp follower"), his best stuff was used on milquetoast liberals -or "pwogwessives", as he called them. Nothing turned his stomach like a phony leftist being little more than an ideological hall monitor, eager to snitch on lefties who were neither fakes nor sell-outs. One favorite target was fellow Nation. columnist Eric Alterman ("one quarter cheeky-chappie, three-quarters brownnoser" -I had a chance to talk to Cockburn once and told him I thought he was 25% off: he agreed). He was even harsh toward The Nation. itself, writing that a typical issue of MAD from the 1950s had more anti-establishment writing than The Nation.ROBERT MACNEIL (voice over): Should one man own another?
(Titles)
MACNEIL: Good evening. The problem is as old as man himself. Do property rights extend to the absolute ownership of one man by another? Tonight, the slavery problem. Jim?
LEHRER: Robin, advocates of the continuing system of slavery argue that the practice has brought unparalleled benefits to the economy. They fear that new regulations being urged by reformers would undercut America’s economic effectiveness abroad. Reformers, on the other hand, call for legally binding standards and even for a phased reduction in the slave force to something like 75 percent of its present size. Charlayne Hunter- Gault is in Charleston. Charlayne?
When Christopher Hitchens made his (in Hitchens' own words) "much-advertized stagger from Left to Right", Cockburn pounced. Friend or no friend, Hitchens was being an utter douche in ways that went far beyond going from opposing the 1991 Iraq War and being a cheerleader for the 2003 model.
Here are a couple of quotes that show his cynical and accurate take on what passes for journalism, though Cockburn was never one for one-liners:
Although he had been dying of cancer for a couple of years, Cockburn did not publicize his illness, nor did his writing take on a morbid tone -well aside from this column published in May, where he points out the obvious: America has become a fascist country. He also introduced Tumbril Time (selecting hackneyed phrases to be piled into the tumbril, a dung cart used for hauling convicts to the guillotine) to his weekly column.
“They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard”
"The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it."
The thing I liked most about Alexander Cockburn is that not only was he willing to say the emperor had no clothes, but the way he took great delight in mocking the emperor for having a tiny pee-pee.
