Veteran BBC man dies
2004-03-30 11:51
London - Alistair Cooke, a broadcasting legend in his native Britain, has died less than a month after he recorded his final Letter from America, BBC radio said on Tuesday. He was 95.
Details of the death of the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent were not immediately disclosed, but it was known that Cooke, who lived in New York, was suffering from heart disease and arthritis.
It was on doctor's orders that he aired his last Letter from America on March 6 on the BBC's domestic and World Service radio services, ending a series that ran for 58 years.
Cooke was a household name among Americans as well, both as host of the cultural programmes Omnibus and Masterpiece Theatre, and for his 1970s TV history of their country, titled Alistair Cooke's America.
Letter from America was a fixture of the BBC's domestic and World Service schedules since it first went out in March 1946, five years before the debut of the public broadcaster's inexhaustible soap opera The Archers.
It was easy to imagine Cooke at the microphone in the book-lined study of his New York apartment, looking out over Central Park, as he patiently tried to make sense of the vast, often bewildering land that lied beyond.
True to Cooke's erudite character, Letter from America ran the gamut from high intrigue in the corridors of power in Washington to the significance of serving cranberry sauce with turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
Of being a Brit among Yanks, he told his biographer Nick Clarke: "It is a great privilege for anyone who knows both countries well to be able to watch two different kinds of human beings."
Only three times did Cooke miss filing a Letter, most recently last weekend when his flagging health got the better of him. Regular listeners could hear the pain in his voice; many wondered how he could ever finish a broadcast.
Cooke's mellifluous voice belied his origins as an iron-fitter's son from the working-class English seaside resort of Blackpool, his years at Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, and the US citizenship that he took out in 1941.
He was in New York in 1946, covering the newborn United Nations for the Manchester Guardian newspaper (now The Guardian), when he badgered a penny-pinching BBC for a weekly radio slot.
American Letter, as it was first titled, was supposed to run just 13 weeks, 26 at the most - but as Cooke liked to quip, BBC brass in London somehow "forgot" to cancel it.
Cooke arguably made his best broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s, including his eyewitness account of the June 1968 killing of presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy by a gunman in the pantry of a Los Angeles hotel.