"Erudite" and "urbane" are not words that Americans traditionally reserve for heroes. Americans revere people of action, and we somehow suspect those who spend most of their life thinking.
Take the way the business press described Jack Welch as an example. For many years Welch was one of the most admired executives in the world. The business press told us about the results he produced at GE and why they thought he was so successful.
Frequently they mentioned Welch's combativeness, his confrontive style and how he played hockey as a boy. We hardly ever heard about his PhD or his intelligence.
Intellectuals are "people who care about ideas." They spend much of their time thinking, or as many would say, "just thinking." And sometimes they emerge from that thinking and reflecting to tell us a truth about ourselves and our world.
In the last month, we have lost two of the great thinkers and truth tellers. Daniel Boorstin, historian, social commentator, and Librarian of Congress died on February 28 at the age of eighty-nine. Just about a month later, Alistair Cooke died at his home in New York City at the age of ninety-five.
Both men were intellectuals. Those words "erudite" and "urbane" appear in their obituaries. They shared the gift of being able to take complex ideas and penetrating insights and present them in ways that the rest of us could understand. Both men loved the energy and practicality of the United States.
Boorstin, in fact, saw that practicality as a primary organizing principle of this country. The first of his two trilogies was about the history of America. He called it the Americans and he took the position that America was founded on pragmatism rather than on ideology. The final volume of the trilogy studied the rise of the "go-getters" like George Pullman and Henry Ford as role models for Americans.
Today, our world is awash in celebrities and made-for-the-media events. Boorstin saw it all coming. In 1962, he published "The Image: or, What Happened to the American Dream." The book contrasted heroes and celebrities.
"The celebrity," Boorstin told us, "is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness . . . the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, newspapers and the ephemeral images of movie and television screen. The passage of time, which creates and establishes the hero, destroys the celebrity. . ."
He went on to define what he called a "pseudo-event." We don't use that term today, but we know exactly what Boorstin meant. He called a pseudo-event something that was designed to be covered by the news. I wonder what he thought as the years rolled by and more and more of our "news" became photo opportunities, staged events and print and video press releases.
In 1974, President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to become the Librarian of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus opposed the Atlanta-born and politically conservative Boorstin. Other members of Congress worried that Boorstin's writing would take time away from his duties.
Boorstin promised to do his writing on his own time. He rose at 4 AM and wrote until 9 AM every weekday before setting out for the Library of Congress. During his years there he opened up the Library to citizens and began a series of projects that turned it into the robust institution we know today. He also completed much of the work on his next historical trilogy.
Boorstin's second trilogy was a history of the ways that human beings discovered the world around them. The Discoverers covered geographic and scientific explorers, while the Creators covered artists and the Seekers looked at religious leaders and philosophers.
Daniel Boorstin was an American intellectual for whom books were magical and important. "For each of us," he wrote, "reading remains a private, uniquely qualitative nook of our life. As readers, then, we are refugees from the flood of contemporaneous mathematicized homogeneity. With a book we are at home with ourselves." Alistair Cooke was a British-born broadcast journalist.
Cooke fell in love with America's energy in 1932 when he made a cross-country automobile trip, while he was in the US on a scholarship. In 1941 he had become a US citizen. From 1946 until just a month before his death, he produced a fifteen-minute radio commentary for the BBC called, "Letter from America."
In addition to his radio commentary for the BBC, he was the master of ceremonies of Omnibus, the award-winning 1950s arts and entertainment television series. For another twenty years, he was the host of "Masterpiece Theatre" on public television.
He engaged and charmed us. We valued the easy way that he introduced us to material that we would not have discovered on our own and to material that made us think. One of the things he made us Americans think about was ourselves.
In 1973 he put together a thirteen part television documentary called, originally. "America" but now almost universally known as "Alistair Cooke's America." It was the history of America seen from Cooke's own, unique perspective.
From the first episode, when Cooke, let us in on what fascinated him about America, through the final episode where he speculated on how the America of his time differed from the goals of the original settlers, he gave us something wonderful: his own, rich, urbane, caring and insightful view of our history. It was history all right, but not the sort of this a classic intellectual would produce.
Neither Cooke nor Boorstin was the classic academic intellectual. Cooke was a metalworker's son, who got his education on scholarship and then spent most of his life broadcasting. Boorstin was a historian without a Ph.D. who wrote history because he loved it, indeed, as he said, he was obsessed by it. Both had strong views, but expressed them with clarity and civility.
They represent a time when thoughtful commentary mattered more than it does now. I'm not sure that either one could get a job in the media today, and I shudder when I compare the commentary of Alistair Cooke or the writing of Daniel Boorstin with today's TV fare like "Hardball" or books like, "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)."
I despair that we are in an age when confrontation matters more than content and salaciousness more than scholarship. The night of my despair grows darker when I realized that now two great voices of both erudition and truth are silent forever.
