Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)

In 1977, during his Village Voice years (1973-84)

"Alexander reveled in being a troublemaker, and his provocative, polemical, elegant style usually engaged us and his reporting and analysis opened windows onto under-unreported news. I often felt I wasn't doing my job right if we didn't get a dozen or so subscription cancellations as a result of some Cockburn column."

-- Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation,
in an e-mail to the L.A. Times, quoted in the Times obit

"His legacy was his commitment to truth, his disgust at the pretense of objectivity, his belief that every piece of writing had an ideological slant, and that you had to admit it."

-- Nation contributing editor Amy Wilentz
(also from the L.A. Times obit)

by Ken

We surely have to take some note of the passing of that most stalwart of left-wing journalists Alexander Cockburn on Saturday, at age 71, following what is now revealed to have been an extended and apparently grueling battle with cancer. As his partner at CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair, explained to readers:

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.

Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.

In one of Alex’s last emails to me, he patted himself on the back (and deservedly so) for having only missed one column through his incredibly debilitating and painful last few months. Amid the chemo and blood transfusions and painkillers, Alex turned out not only columns for CounterPunch and The Nation and First Post, but he also wrote a small book called Guillotine and finished his memoirs, A Colossal Wreck, both of which CounterPunch plans to publish over the course of the next year.

That raises the grimness level of the news, but doesn't have anything to do with its complications for me.

My friend Paul, who stays on top of these things, passed along a bunch of obits and remembrances, which I've been sifting through.

I can't overstate how important Alex's weekly fuck-the-bullshit journalism was for me in, roughly, his first two decades in the U.S. (beginning in 1973), first at the Village Voice, then at The Nation. In the pre-Internet age, I don't know that anyone reached me as regularly and forcefully with the message that the media are feeding us sanitized (or worse) BS, and that self-proclaimed left-leaners aren't necessarily more trustworthy than the roster of unapologetic establishment whores, and arguably less so in that they pretend to be other-than-whores.

Here's Jeffrey St. Clair again:

Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn’t tolerate it in his own life. Alex was my pal, my mentor, my comrade. We joked, gossiped, argued and worked together nearly every day for the last twenty years. He leaves a huge void in our lives. But he taught at least two generations how to think, how to look at the world, how to live a life of joyful and creative resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

I suppose the rift that developed between the Scottish-born and Irish-raised Cockburn and the British-born Christopher Hitchens, for whom he served as something of a "sponsor" when he invaded these shores in the '80s, also had a powerful influence on me. Colin Moynihan recalls in his N.Y. Times obit that "Mr. Cockburn did not mince words in a remembrance on CounterPunch" when Hitchens died of cancer last December:

He courted the label "contrarian," but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair.

BUT THEN, I DRIFTED AWAY FROM COCKBURN TOO

The memorialists are writing in terms like this, from the deck on the L.A. Times obit: "His views didn't always jibe with those of his allies."

Which is a polite way of saying that a lot of people who found in him a champion on a whole range of issues were anywhere from mystified to horrified by what he had to say on other issues. The most conspicuous example, as Carolyn Kellogg puts it in the L.A. Times obit, "was his denial of global warming, which brought him a measure of public attention in 2007." But I often found, on occasions when I read something he wrote from the '90s on (usually by referral from a friend or colleague), that I didn't know quite what to make of it. Was it the fire-breathing truth-teller who had once inspired me so, or was it a hobby-horse-riding crank who had perhaps been living too long inside his own head?

So there was really no point in my seeking out his writing, and I'm sure in those later couple of decades I missed a fair amount of it which would have gotten my juices going and pointed me in directions I needed to explore. I never developed any grand theories about it; I just accepted it, regretfully. Others apparently drew a larger life lesson. This is from Colin Moynihan's NYT obit:

In recent years, Cockburn had receded from his previously prominent place in the public forum. "He had the intellectual firepower to do anything he wanted," said writer Marc Cooper, a former colleague who had a falling out with Cockburn. "He forfeited becoming a very influential writer in favor of becoming a mud-throwing polemicist."

In 1994, Cockburn helped found Counterpunch, a newsletter and website, which spoke directly to those who shared his beliefs. Some, like Cooper, saw this as a rhetorical and intellectual dead end. Cockburn continued to co-edited Counterpunch with Jeffrey St. Clair.

This isn't a very happy note on which to conclude a remembrance of someone I really do think filled a crucial role in American journalism over a period of a couple of decades. But then, didn't I tell you this wasn't going to be easy?

BEST THING I LEARNED FROM THE OBITS

I had no idea that the actress Olivia Wilde, most familiar to some of us as House's Thirteen, is Alex Cockburn's niece, the daughter of his middle brother, Andrew, the widely admired journalist and author on international affairs. (Youngest brother Patrick is also a journalist, the longtime Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times and then The Independent.) The photos that accompany Jeffrey St. Clair's CounterPunch remembrance, like the one below of "Alex and Jasper," were taken by "our friend Tao Ruspoli," who I see is Olivia's husband.

Alex and Jasper (photo by Tao Ruspoli)

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