Alexander Cockburn:ALEXANDER COCKBURN, who has died in Berlin at the age of 71 after a two-year battle with cancer, had established a justified reputation as one of the most regarded, energetic, and acerbic left-wing polemicists in the US media.
His writings were widely disseminated through the investigative magazine CounterPunch which he founded and edited with his friend Jeffrey St Clair, and in columns for a wide range of publications, from the radical Nation to the Wall Street Journal.
The son of a left-wing journalist and former Irish Times columnist, the late Claud Cockburn, and his third wife Patricia Byron (née Arbuthnot), journalism was clearly in the blood – both his brothers Andrew and Patrick are highly regarded journalists, as are two half-nieces, Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders.
Alexander Cockburn was born in Edinburgh but brought up in Youghal, Co Cork. In 1978 his father moved to Ardmore, Co Waterford, where the family still gathers at their home, Rock House, most summers. Educated at Glenalmond College, an independent boys’ boarding school in Perthshire, Scotland, he went on to Keble College, Oxford.
Cockburn moved to Dublin in the late 1960s, where he became an observer of and involved in left-republican politics. He wrote his first journalistic commissions from here for the short-lived London weekly Seven Days, some of them about the leftward drift of the IRA. According to his brother Andrew, he also wrote some editorials for The Irish Times.
When the IRA briefly occupied Lismore Castle in 1970 as a protest against the Duke of Devonshire’s exclusive fishing rights, Andrew recalls that they called Alexander in London to announce the revolutionary victory and ask what they should do next. He told them to put out a press release.
He moved on to London and after a couple of years of freelancing for the Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review and New Statesman, he left for the US in 1972, with a parting shot about how sclerotic Britain had become. In 2009 he would swap his Irish for US citizenship.
He wrote periodically on Irish affairs, notably in the 1980s while campaigning against an unrealised plan by Merrell Dow Corporation to site what was seen as a toxic chemical plant in Killeagh, Co Cork, near his childhood home.
In the US he wrote for a huge range of publications ranging from the New York Review of Books, Esquire and Harper’s to the Wall Street Journal. From 1973 to 1983 he had a column with the Village Voice, but parted acrimoniously from the magazine in a row that, depending on whose side you took, was over his acceptance of an Arab-funded studies grant or the magazine’s discomfort with him because of its support for Israel. He then took on a regular column in the Nation called “Beat the Devil” (after the title of a novel by his father).
In 1994 he and colleague Jeffrey St Clair joined forces with investigative reporter Ken Silverstein in founding CounterPunch.
Unapologetic about his socialist, radical democrat politics – including his definitely un-PC scepticism about global warming – Cockburn seemed to delight particularly in inveighing against what he considered the tepidness and timidity of the US liberal establishment, not least presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
He liked to recall that among his ancestors was Sir George Cockburn, an English admiral who helped to burn down the White House in 1814. His own feelings about the US capital, he said, ran along similar lines.
As a Nation columnist, he took the magazine’s old rivalry with the liberal but deeply pro-Israeli New Republic to a new level, referring to its contents as “the weekly catchment of drivel”.
He famously feuded with Christopher Hitchens, not only another expatriate but, until he resigned over the magazine’s opposition to US intervention in Afghanistan, also a writer for the Nation.
When Hitchens died of cancer last year, Cockburn, typically, did not mince his words in a remembrance of his former friend. “He courted the label ‘contrarian’,” he said of him, “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.” That could never be said of Cockburn.
His old friend John Nichols of the Nation writes of his radical faith, indefatigable energy – even as his illness consumed him, he missed only one deadline – his sharp prose and erudition: “Alex knew how good he was. He knew that he could take readers where other writers could not, to the fields of India where Coca-Cola was stealing water from peasants, to the barricades of neglected labour battles in Austin, Minnesota, and Toledo, Ohio; to ‘The City’ of London, where the Libor scandal now unfolds . . .”
He wrote books including Corruptions of Empire, The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994 and The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, written with Susanna Hecht.
He is survived by his daughter Daisy Alice and his younger brothers, Patrick and Andrew.
Alexander Cockburn: born June 6th, 1941; died July 21st, 2012.