From History today By ;- Will Garbett Edited by :- Amal Udawatta Eighty years ago the BBC tried to remedy postwar Anglo-American friction with Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America On 1 March 1946 the RMS Queen Mary arrived in New York from Southampton. Among the 2,420 passengers were Mexican diplomats, hundreds of GI brides, and Alistair Cooke, a BBC journalist on a new assignment. In the first months of peacetime a mutual distrust between Britain and America, put to bed by the war, had re-emerged. British officials recognised that they would require American support, but there was a real fear that the US would return to isolation; the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, would remark in later life that only the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 reassured him that the Americans were committed to Europe in the long term. Attlee’s concern was not unfounded. In a September 1945 cabinet meeting, an unnamed official ask...