Alexander Cockburn, Left-Wing Writer, Dies at 71 Alexander Cockburn, the acerbic left-wing journalist and author who though born in Scotland thrived in the political and cultural battlegrounds of the United States, died on Friday in Germany. The cause was cancer, said Jeffrey St. Clair, a friend and colleague. Mr. St. Clair announced Mr. Cockburn's death Saturday on CounterPunch, the Web site that the two men edited. Mr. Cockburn kept his illness a secret, Mr. St. Clair, added, and continued writing almost until the end of his life. "His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever," Mr. St. Clair wrote. He had regular columns in ideologically disparate publications like The Nation and The Wall Street Journal and became known as an unapologetic leftist of the sort who appeared to take pleasure in condemning what he saw as the outrages of the right and what he often considered the tepidness and timidity of the American liberal establishment. Wayne Barrett, who worked with Mr. Cockburn at The Village Voice in the 1980s, recalled him in a telephone interview as "a punishing writer." He had a remarkable mind and he could write so quickly. At The Voice, Mr. Cockburn co-wrote, with James Ridgeway, a political column. He wrote another column called Press Clips, which often condemned what he saw as the ethical failings of other journalists. But Mr. Cockburn, who often fiercely opposed Israeli policies in the Middle East, was dismissed from The Voice in 1984 after The Boston Phoenix reported that he had accepted a $10,000 grant from group that critics called pro-Arab. Mr. Cockburn said he had taken the money for a book project and had planned to return it. That particular book was never written, but after leaving The Voice, he wrote several books, including a collection of essays called "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. Mr. Cockburn grew up in Ireland and graduated from Oxford. Among his ancestors was Sir George Cockburn, an English admiral who helped burn down the White House in 1814. But his attachment to left-wing journalism and controversy was forged very early on. His father, Claud Cockburn, while covering the Spanish Civil War for The Daily Worker, joined the Republican forces. In London, Alexander Cockburn worked for The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman before becoming a permanent resident of the United States in 1973. He joined The Nation as a columnist and took that magazine's old rivalry with The New Republic to a new level. He referred to the contents of The New Republic as "the weekly catchment of drivel." After Martin Peretz, the publisher of the The New Republic, suffered a fainting spell in Paris in the late 1980s, Mr. Cockburn gleefully noted that this had occurred at an expensive restaurant where patrons were "so bloated that they have to be rubbed down with Vaseline to squeeze through the door." But when Mr. Cockburn wrote a column drastically revising downward the number of deaths attributable to Stalin, Mr. Peretz suggested that Mr. Cockburn "has a sentimental interest in this controversy but not the credentials to evaluate it." Mr. Cockburn famously feuded with Christopher Hitchens, who was not only another British expatriate but a writer for The Nation as well, over a variety of polarizing issues. When Mr. Hitchens died of cancer last year, Mr. Cockburn did not mince words in a remembrance of his former friend on CounterPunch. "He courted the label "contrarian," " Mr. Cockburn said of Mr. Hitchens, "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. Information on Mr. Cockburn's survivors was not immediately available.