Alexander Cockburn once explained to me the three basic requirements for success as a professional journalist: always read the publications for which you write; make a point of getting to know the people in the accounts department; and never publish anything once if it can be published twice or, preferably, three times. In light of the latter, Cockburn, who died in July 2012, would surely have celebrated this compendious selection of his articles and correspondence spanning the Clinton, Bush and first-term Obama presidencies.
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A Colossal Wreck provides ample evidence for Cockburn's standing as one of the left's most perceptive and entertaining commentators. Arriving in the US in 1972 from London, where he worked for the TLS and the New Statesman (and hung out on the Kings Road dressed in a "dark navy velour overcoat, velvet trousers, borsalino hat [and] chiffon scarf"), Cockburn's unconventional and outsider eye was able both to penetrate the tangled artifice of American politics and at the same time appreciate the richness of the subcontinent's quotidian culture.
"I love scrubby old state highways, warm with commercial life," he writes, en route from Florida to visit John Sinclair, the erstwhile manager of MC5 and leader of the White Panther party, living in New Orleans. Subsequently exploring nearby bayou country our protagonist stops at a sign advertising "Live crab at 4pm". The crab is so inexpensive that Cockburn feels it only polite to pay for a dozen large ones and subsequently boils them up in his room at the Sunset Motel at the edge of Lake Charles, "on an electric plate stored in the Plymouth Belvedere for just such purposes".
Food is a recurrent theme, whether it's bemoaning the tastelessness of farmed trout, taking issue with the chef Alice Waters for over-brining meat, or insisting on the advantages of a messy kitchen that allows the colonisation of wild yeasts, so important in bread making: "The dough-encrusted towel, the unsterile bowl – all play their part."
But politics has always been Cockburn's principal concern and, in the main, he is admirably clearsighted about it. He is particularly effective when skewering the progressive pretensions of American liberalism. "I've never heard a politician so careful not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright," he writes of Barack Obama back in 2006, two years before the Illinois senator won the White House. Indeed Cockburn often sounds more caustic about liberals than the followers of the populist right.
One senses the strain imposed in seeking common cause with the regular folk of the heartland, however. It leads Cockburn into fulsome appreciation of the conservative populist Ron Paul, "a principled fellow who's won passionate support for ordinary Americans," and admiration for the Tea Party: "contrary to a thousand contemptuous diatribes by the left … a genuine political movement." His enthusiasm for the second amendment and the right to bear arms sees him suggesting that the risk of school massacres would be best reduced by allowing "appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons". This stance might make for easier conversation at the gun fairs Cockburn evidently enjoys visiting but it sits oddly with his progressive agenda.
So, too, does his querying of human responsibility for climate change, "warmist doctrine" he calls it, a scepticism it's hard not to trace back to his enduring affection for old American gas guzzlers. Cockburn tells us that he has "lived in every quadrant of the United States and has driven across it maybe forty times". He would like us to believe that his departures from conventional progressive politics are more libertarian than simply contrarian. Citing Jonathan Miller's celebrated response when asked if he was a Jew, Cockburn describes himself as Marx-ish.
But, in the end, this distancing from the coterie of comrades is less than convincing. Unlike his fellow émigré and Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, a frequent target here, including in a knockabout play script set at the gates of heaven, Cockburn's questioning of the socialist programme never descends to apostasy. His opposition to the neoliberalism and imperial adventuring that cloud the two decades covered in this book is too instinctive and heartfelt for that. Here he is, for instance, on 12 September 2001, reflecting on the consequences of the disaster of the preceding day: "The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects: rogue states (most of which, like the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, started off as creatures of US intelligence). The target at home will be the bill of rights."
Cockburn's rootedness in the left was surely reinforced by his family. His brothers, Andrew and Patrick, are both significant voices of progressive journalism. And his most important influence is evidently his father, Claud, who Cockburn describes as "respectfully edging his way out of the Communist party" in 1948. One can sense a yearning to fill the paternal shoes when, writing of Claud on what would have been his 100th birthday in April 2004, Cockburn describes his father as "the greatest radical journalist of his age" whose "prose could be light, ironic, also savage".
Cockburn senior, who reported for the Daily Worker in the Spanish civil war and contributed extensively to Private Eye, also founded an influential antifascist newsletter, The Week, which Alexander drew on as an inspiration when launching his own widely read website, Counterpunch. There was certainly irony that a writer who, long after the arrival of the internet, remained attached to his typewriter (subsequently mounted atop a column on the road outside his ranch house in Petrolia above the legend "The Columnist's Column") should be among the first to set up an online newsletter, an early herald of the media revolution to follow.
For that precursor, and for his example of resoluteness in difficult times for the left, Cockburn owed a debt to Claud which, in A Colossal Wreck, is fully acknowledged. Some years ago I visited him at his home in northern California. He took me into the extensive garden he had built alongside Conklin Creek Road and pointed to the large rocks erupting as features from the lawn and flower beds. "They only look right," he explained, "because two thirds of them are buried under the ground." The same precept holds true, in a manner of speaking, for these fine dispatches.