The best known broadcaster of his age, Alistair Cooke was also the most accomplished practitioner, at least in a studio in front of the microphone. His Letter from America, which went out weekly from 1946 until this month, was easily the longest running BBC programme. It spanned the history of America, from the days of recovery after the Second World War, through the McCarthyite period of the Cold War and the turbulent 1960s, when Cooke personally witnessed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the second gulf war.

Letter from America had its critics — who regarded it as altogether too bland and soft in the predominantly rosecoloured view it presented of the United States — but even among its detractors there was no denying the sheer professionalism with which it was done.

Cooke’s technique — and this was true also of his written journalism — was always to approach his subject at a tangent, moving from some far-off periphery to the core of what he wanted to say. On the air this turned him into a natural storyteller, the master of the pause and the deliberate hesitation, with the matchless gift of sounding entirely spontaneous when he was, of course, reading from a prepared script.

This was a facility that did not serve him quite so well on television, where he could appear rather measured and mannered. His 13-part series America, for the BBC in 1972, was an enormous commercial success but did not enjoy anything like the critical acclaim accorded to Kenneth Clark’s celebrated Civilization: on the contrary, it was heavily attacked, by academics in particular. Nevertheless, the secondary television sales from it, and the accompanying book, which sold 2.8 million copies in hardback, made Cooke’s fortune.

His consequent renown also brought him an invitation to address a joint session of the US Congress as part of American Bicentennial celebrations in 1974. The previous year he had been appointed an honorary KBE (he had been an American citizen since 1941) on the nomination of Edward Heath.

What faithful British listeners to Letter from America seldom realised was that its sole author and originator enjoyed an almost equal fame in the country of his adoption, though there it was based on television appearances rather than on radio. From the early 1950s to the early 1960s when he presented Omnibus — a kind of Panorama of the arts for the CBS network — to the 22 years from 1971 to 1993 when he topped and tailed Masterpiece Theatre for PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service), Cooke was a familiar face to generations of cultivated Americans. He was the prototype mid-Atlantic man: perceived in Britain as the best sort of sophisticated American and in the United States as the very model of an English gentleman (only the more quizzical of his friends occasionally wondered whether this constituted something of an identity crisis).

Alfred Alistair Cooke — as he became when he added “Alistair” to his formerly single Christian name, by deed poll on his 22nd birthday — was the son of a Lancashire Methodist lay preacher and an Irish mother and, although born in Salford, was brought up largely in Blackpool, to where his parents (both of whom suffered from lung trouble) had moved to take advantage of the sea breezes.

He broke free of the strict Nonconformist constraints of his family background — no alcoholic drink was permitted in the house and no games were to be played on Sundays — by winning a scholarship to what became Blackpool Grammar School. The headmaster there was a tremendous snob but also had a genuine regard for English literature. It was largely thanks to his influence and inspiration that the young Cooke won an exhibition to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he came under the competing influences of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and I. A. Richards.

On one occasion Cooke read an essay on the Romantic poets as Quiller-Couch was dressing for dinner. He was proud of the piece, and slightly disconcerted to have Q walking in and out in search of his clothes. When he had finished, Q pronounced in his too-contrived style: “Cooke, you must learn to murder your darlings.” After a while he did, so that although his undergraduate writing often tried too hard to keep up with William Empson, who also wrote theatre, book and film reviews in Cambridge, Cooke’s later writing was admirably straightforward.

He took a first in Part I of the English tripos and a second in Part II, a disparity perhaps to be explained by his editorship in his last year of Granta — where he worked with William Empson, Jacob Bronowski and Michael Redgrave — and his part in founding a university drama company, the Mummers. He got an early foothold, too, in professional journalism when in 1929 he was appointed Cambridge drama critic of The Manchester Guardian. He also wrote for both The Nation and The Athenaeum (both of them later incorporated into The New Statesman).

In 1931 he organised a visit to Germany by a group of friends calling themselves the Oxford and Cambridge Players, and saw Hitler in full spate outside the Braunhaus. But Cooke was so politically naive that he was more interested in Hitler’s rhetorical devices than in his message.

He was in no way afflicted by diffidence, and wrote to the BBC asking to be put before the microphone to give talks on theatre, literary criticism or poetry even before he was 23 (perhaps redeemingly, in the same letter he also suggested that he might draw caricatures for Radio Times). The BBC, however, declined the offer of his services at that stage, so he spent a year at teaching college in Cambridge. “Has skill as an actor, a facile pen, and is a good draughtsman. Literary tastes, but eclectic rather than original. Could be of great service to a school if he could control his egoism,” read his assessor’s report.

Then, in 1932, the course of his whole future life was determined when he was selected as one of the Commonwealth Fellows annually sent by the Harkness Fund to the United States.

While in America, where he studied drama at Yale and linguistics at Harvard, Cooke met Charlie Chaplin, who took a great shine to him. They worked together on a film script about Napoleon, and although the project was abortive, the association did Cooke’s standing no harm. In 1934 it probably played its part in persuading the BBC to appoint him its film critic.

To the annoyance of the cinema trade, which thought he was much too high-brow, Cooke held the post for nearly three years. It was not, however, in delivering weekly film reviews that he made his first serious impact. That came when he presented a series of eight programmes called I Hear America Singing on the BBC’s Home Service. A compilation of American jazz records (some of which he had mysteriously managed to borrow from the Library of Congress), this hit series first fully revealed Cooke’s natural gifts as a fluent, impromptu-sounding broadcaster.

Slightly surprisingly, in the wake of this great success, he immediately decided to return to the United States. In 1934, while still on his Commonwealth Fellowship, he had married his first wife, Ruth Emerson (a great-grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson); but he seems also to have shrewdly spotted a gap in the journalistic market. While working as the BBC‘s film critic, he had broadcast a regular Letter from London for the American network NBC, and almost from the start he appears to have aspired to do the same in reverse for the BBC. At first he had to be content with being merely one of the contributors to an already running feature known as American Commentary, and although he formally suggested the notion of a weekly “American Letter” as early as 1940, it was not accepted until February 1946. (For the first three years it went under that title, before becoming Letter from America).

The intervening years were not the happiest in Cooke’s career. He did some written journalism as a special correspondent for The Times between 1938 and 1941, and when that came to an end he became a US-based feature writer on the Daily Herald as well as doing some tabloid journalism for the Daily Sketch. The truth was that he was not at that time a very popular figure, at least among English people and Anglophiles in New York. Inevitably, questions were raised about an able-bodied young man in his early thirties choosing to work in a neutral country abroad when back at home his countrymen were under direct threat; and these questions were amplified in 1941, when at one of the lowest points of the war, Cooke took out naturalisation papers as an American citizen.





For a time he became something of a pariah, and the official British Information Services were even instructed to withdraw all assistance from him. In retrospect, such treatment may seem harsh, but then Cooke was not uncalculating: as early as 1938 he had advised a young man who worked with him on I Hear America Singing to emigrate to the United States as soon as possible on the ground that “there is going to be a terrible war in Europe”.

In the event, largely as a result of America’s own entry into the war in December 1941, the cloud passed. Cooke undertook a tour of the US in 1943 to report on the effect of war on various trades and professions, and became a mainstay of the BBC’s American Commentary. The only criticism of him back at Broadcasting House in London arose from what was officially called his “tendency to be allusive and glib”. He was, of course, deliberately pioneering a new style of broadcasting, speaking as if in conversation, and this inevitably involved a certain inconsequentiality — which was later to become his trademark.

In 1945 Cooke was given an opportunity to relaunch his career as a fully fledged print journalist. A cable from the Editor of The Manchester Guardian to his hotel in San Francisco, where he had gone for the BBC to cover the birth of the United Nations, asked him to file also to that great liberal voice of provincial England. Cooke, who had been without a newspaper connection since his contract with the Daily Herald expired in 1944, was delighted to accept, and soon — since the creation of the UN was of great interest to The Manchester Guardian’s idealistic readers — he found himself filing up to 4,000 words a day. It was the beginning of an association that was to endure, though not without its troubles, for 27 years. In 1948 Cooke became the paper’s chief American correspondent at a salary of $14,000 a year. The figure was reliably reported barely to have changed by the time he laid down his burden in the autumn of 1972, and he once wryly remarked that there were two British institutions (The Guardian and the BBC) for which no one worked unless they were totally indifferent to money — and he, in his innocence, had joined both.

By the mid-1940s, however, Cooke was already fairly prosperous. His first marriage had broken up, and in 1946 he married a widow, Jane Hawkes, with two children. She was a talented painter and soon he was able to move back into the apartment block on Fifth Avenue that he had left on his divorce in 1944. His real break, however, came in 1952 when in New York he was given a Peabody Award, recognising the contribution he had made to international understanding, through the first six years of Letter from America.

So charmed was his largely media audience by his witty and urbane speech of acceptance that in no time the American television networks were competing for his services. CBS won with its invitation to host the weekly arts programme Omnibus, which he did for a decade and more.

Television fame almost immediately brought him remunerative invitations to join the American lecture circuit, and this was an art-form in which, with his undergraduate actor’s background, he was thoroughly adept. Although he did not become really rich until the publication of Alistair Cooke’s America in 1973, his account of the Hiss case, A Generation on Trial (1950), established his reputation with the American public as a serious writer. He subsequently published a succession of books — though most of them were no more than potboilers (many of them collections of his Letters from America). Among the best of his books was Six Men (1978), a slim collection of half a dozen essays on individuals he respected, including Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson (in some ways his ideal of the civilised man in public life) and H. L. Mencken (the Baltimore Sun columnist whom he regarded as his journalistic mentor). Another such collection, Memories of the Great and the Good appeared in 1999.

Politically, Cooke seemed to move to the right as he grew older. The young man who had been drawn to America by his admiration for Franklin Rooselvelt and the New Deal ended up by being fêted in the Reagan White House. He took up golf in the 1950s, and since he tended to play with rich and prosperous business executives, this may have had its impact on his political attitudes.

But the real criticism of his broadcasting output was that he had a habit of ignoring things that upset him. No one listening even regularly to Letter from America would have been able even to tell how badly the fabric of American society was torn by the Vietnam War, to sense the passions involved in the civil rights struggle (which he criticised as ill-thought-out) or to appreciate the tensions that provoked the race riots of the late 1960s. His favourite viewpoint — and once or twice in his more reflective speeches he came close to admitting this — was that of the benign onlooker sitting under the trees watching the people dance.

Perhaps it was symptomatic of a general failing when at the end of 1996, in his 89th year, he stumbled into controversy by casually remarking in a broadcast that he found it surprising that only 4 per cent of American women military personnel complained of being subjected to attempted or actual rape — adding, for good inconsequential measure, that “96 per cent of the men showed remarkable restraint”. Even in a less politically correct society than America, this provoked indignant criticism: the proverbial storm promptly broke over Cooke’s head.

Again, it was probably symptomatic that the burden of his defence was that he had been brought up in the tradition of gallantry, and that he was now too old to change his ways.

The storm passed, though, and his slightly weary, slightly wheezy tones continued to be heard each week by an admiring audience until three weeks ago, when the BBC announced, apparently rather to his chagrin, that his last Letter had been broadcast. He was speaking, it sometimes seemed, not only from another continent, but from another age.





Alistair Cooke, journalist and broadcaster, was born in Salford on November 20, 1908. He died in New York at midnight on March 29-30, 2004, aged 95.