The College received good news when Vermont governor and former presidential contender Howard Dean agreed to come to Dartmouth as a visiting fellow of the Rockefeller Center. Dean played an important role in this year's Democratic Primary. Despite his disastrous speech following the Iowa caucuses, and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's subsequent surge, strong disdain for President Bush as an individual and for the Bush administration as a whole that Dean tapped among the party faithful have had an important impact on the course of the presidential campaign thus far.
Governor Dean continues to be an important figure in the Democratic party, and thus in the national political landscape. His campaign's use of the internet to collect donations from the increasing number of wired Americans has many pundits identifying the 2004 primary season has the true birth of internet politics on a national scale.
Attracting such a visible and demonstrably intelligent national leader to Dartmouth speaks volumes of the College. For the Rockefeller Center, Dean's coming to campus represents something of an atonement for the failure to organize a major primary debate Winter term. And while it will likely be a long time before those empowered with such responsibilities see fit to make Dartmouth as attractive to politicians as do some of its peer institutions, any addition to the campus-wide political and intellectual discourse is an appreciated one. We welcome Dr. Dean and look forward to hearing what he has to say.
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Late Monday night, Alistair Cooke, the British Broadcasting Corporation radio journalist who composed and delivered almost 3,000 dispatches during the 20th century, died in his home in New York. Over the course of the century, Cooke told British audiences the news from the United States but also added his own distinct voice to the broadcasts, imbuing them with a nuanced understanding of this country and its people. In addition, through hosting Masterpiece Theater, he gave American audiences an image of Britain.
As a news organization, we owe a debt of gratitude to those such as Cooke who have set so enviable an example of insight and reliability -- he did not miss a broadcast until 1998. But on a greater scale, Cooke solidified and in some ways represented the oft-cited "special relationship" between the United States and Britain, whose common political and cultural heritage has endowed with similar visions of the world.
Today, however, that trans-Atlantic relationship has been taxed, mostly due to European reaction to American exercise of power. Men like Cooke spent the better half of the century keeping both sides of the Atlantic informed of one another, and by fostering understanding, paved the way for cooperation. The future of the Anglo-American relationship will depend on whether other great men and women emerge from the current climate of mudslinging, and show our two nations that while an ocean may divide us, our haphazard and at times ineffectual pursuit of freedom is a vision worthy enough to endure the rough patches.
