Word: cockburn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Something should be said early on, in this newly-revived column of press clips, about the dean of press clips himself, Dr. Press Clips, the successor to Hunter S. Thompson for our favorite cult journalist. We refer, of course, to Alexander Cockburn--pronounced Coeburn. For our money (and this is one of his favorite phrases), he is the best around. His weekly columns in The Village Voice have an obsessive quality, achieving for the mid-seventies what Dr. Thompson did for the violence and insanity of the Nixon years. Nixon's debacle finished Thompson--it was a final irony...
...sketchy on Waugh's early life, which is not too unfortunate since Waugh himself has left a brilliant, hilarious account of the first twenty-odd years of his life in a book called A Little Learning. Waugh came from a nexus of English intellectuals--descended from Henry, Lord Cockburn (a very prominent Scottish judge and ancestor of Claud and Alexander Cockburn), and related to Edmund Gosse and Holman Hunt. His father was managing director of a publishing firm which didn't have much to worry about as it owned the Dickens copyright. (This remarkable man gave up holding family prayers...
With that in mind, it's worth noting that the sub story isn't the only CIA news The Times has kept from the public recently. Alexander Cockburn, The Village Voice's excellent press critic, reports that President Ford told The Times's editors about two weeks ago that the CIA might have planned and even carried out assasinations of foreign leaders. The editors did not print a story about the Ford disclosure. Instead, the information leaked from Times man to Times man, and finally, to Daniel Shorr of CBS. He broadcast the story, and the next morning. The Times...
IDLE PASSION by ALEXANDER COCKBURN 248 pages. Village Voice/Simon & Schuster...
...Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive -for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space...