President Truman holding the infamous issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune
America Observed
By Alistair Cooke
Knopf, 233 pages, $19.95
`When he was a haberdasher he bought at boom prices and sold at depression prices. His shop failed, but he is not a despondent man and one can admire the sigh and the plucky grin with which he has, throughout his life, tried to learn by his mistakes. Unfortunately, it is too late to learn in the White House, and Americans who admire this hard-luck story in their neighbor will not tolerate it when the neighbor is raised to `the elective kingship.`''
The Chicago Tribune was not the only newspaper to jump the gun on the presidential election of 1948. The above quotation appeared the day before the election in the Manchester Guardian-in a column titled ''Harry Truman: A Study of a Failure,'' written by the Guardian`s chief American correspondent, Alistair Cooke.
Cooke was not, of course, reporting the results in advance, only explaining why Truman`s defeat at the hands of Thomas E. Dewey was inevitable. It would be interesting to read a subsequent column-there must have been one- in which he explained his explanation. Quite likely it bore the Cooke trademarks of grace and wit, if perhaps a touch more humility and a little less condescension. However, one can scarcely complain about this rewarding collection: 58 articles-daily dispatches, he calls them-from Cooke`s more than a quarter century of reporting on the American scene....
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