[R-G] John K. Cooley--R.I.P.

[Anthony Fenton]

Friday, August 08, 2008
John K. Cooley--R.I.P.
One of the great old hands has died. Younger readers will not know  
this, and older readers may have forgotten, but there was a time when  
the Christian Science Monitor was a giant of a paper for its foreign  
coverage. More than three decades ago, the paper was a broadsheet  
published six times weekly. In those pre-Internet days, people in the  
U.S. interested in following events in far away places would have a  
mail subscription to the Monitor. The paper never rivaled the NYTimes  
in circulation, but it had a loyal readership of informed readers. I  
remember walking through the corridors of the State Department in  
1975, when I was there on a fellowship, and outside every office you  
would see the discards of the day's papers for recycling. There would  
typically be copies of the Monitor right there in the pile with the  
Times and Post. One reason the paper was so popular was that the paper  
had great correspondents of the caliber of John K. Cooley. He was a  
Middle East hand, and wrote fairly and honestly about a range of  
topics, especially developments in the Arab-Israeli zone. His "Green  
March, Black September" is a seminal account of the fedayeen (to use  
his spelling), but his old accounts of the some of the marking moments  
of the 1970s remain invaluable.

He deserves a moment of quiet thanks for his contributions.

http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-k-cooley-rip.html


http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0808/p08s04-cogn.html