Alistair CookeAlistair Cooke, who has died at home in New York aged 95, always considered himself, above all else, a reporter.
He plied his trade for 25 years for the Guardian, and for more than half a century for the BBC. His Letter From America broke all broadcasting records, reaching its 2,869th edition on February 20th when Cooke, who had vowed never to retire, was advised by doctors to pack up his typewriter.
The book accompanying the TV series Alistair Cooke's America sold almost 2 million copies. And Cooke had become a household name in the US as host of television's Masterpiece Theatre.
If journalism was his life, America was his beat. From his first visit on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1932, he never really doubted where his heart lay. He emigrated in 1937 and took citizenship in 1941.
Born in Salford and christened plain Alfred Cooke in honour of his parents' favourite Methodist minister, his father, Samuel, was a lay preacher and art metal worker. His mother, Mary, was the grand-daughter of Protestant Irish immigrants. The family moved to Blackpool in 1917.
He won a scholarship to Blackpool grammar school and another to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. He studied under Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and never forgot the great man's belief in the benefits of clear, simple writing. Cambridge suited him and he stayed for five years, founded the Mummers, the first university drama group to admit women, and edited Granta.
At the prompting of friends, he changed his name by deed poll to the more artistic "Alistair" Cooke in 1930. Impressed by his acting and ability to improvise popular tunes on the piano, most expected him to become a new Noël Coward, a view reinforced when he arrived in the US on a two-year fellowship, and took time off from his studies at Yale and Harvard to visit Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin was so struck by him that he offered him a job on Modern Times.
Cooke had other plans. He had heard that Oliver Baldwin, son of the prime minister, was giving up his post as the BBC's film critic. On October 8th, 1934, he gave his first BBC broadcast.
By now married to an American model, Ruth (a great-niece of Ralph Waldo Emerson), Cooke was soon itching to try his journalistic luck back in the US. The abdication of Edward VIII gave him his break. NBC hired him to tell the developing story of the crisis and in 10 days he wrote - and broadcast - 400,000 words: the fees paid for a home for the couple in New York City.
He did spells as correspondent for the Times and the Daily Herald, with regular BBC appearances throughout the war. But the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945 brought together Cooke and his beloved Manchester Guardian. The editor, A.P. Wadsworth, hired him as UN correspondent, and then as chief US correspondent - a post he held until 1972.
In the late 1940s readers were able closely to follow the two trials of Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, charged with betraying secrets to the communists. Cooke, almost alone among British correspondents, recognised what was to be the prelude to the McCarthy era, a bizarre story, later retold in his book A Generation On Trial (1950).
Politics were central but never an obsession. Although he knew every president from Roosevelt to Nixon, only once did he disobey his own rule against "consorting with politicians beyond the bounds of acquaintanceship". Adlai Stevenson, three times a Democratic presidential hopeful, became an intimate. And he eschewed prediction and psephology whenever possible, having been burned in 1948 when his leader page article, "Harry S Truman: a study in failure" was followed 24 hours later by Truman's unexpected victory over Dewey.
The relationship between him and the Guardian was not always easy. Celebrating a Cooke anniversary in 1968, a Guardian editorial said, "Cooke is a nuisance. He telephones his copy at the last moment, so that everything else has to be dropped to get it into the paper. He says that he will be in Chicago and turns up in Los Angeles. He discards the agreed subject to write about something which has taken his fancy, news of the moment or not. But we think he's worth it, and we love him just the same."
Having divorced Ruth (by whom he had a son, John) in 1944, he married Jane Hawkes White, a portrait painter and daughter of a New Jersey senator, thereby acquiring two stepchildren (Holly and Stephen) and subsequently a new daughter (Susie).
The Letter from America, which started on March 24th, 1946, was originally devised as a 13-week series. His brief was to concentrate on "the springs of American life, whose bubbles are the headlines". For 14 minutes, he could talk about anything that interested him. His boast was that, until he sat down at his portable typewriter on a Thursday, he never had any idea what he was going to write about. So the Letters drew heavily on personal experiences, conversations with shopkeepers and taxi-drivers or obscure items in the media.
But the conversational style was deceptive: the Letter was meticulously plotted, complete with the pauses and asides which made it sound so natural. At no stage was there any editorial oversight.
From time to time a new BBC broom arrived at Broadcasting House, questioning the continuation of the Letter. None made a serious attempt to remove from the schedules what became an international institution which acquired through the World Service an audience of many millions.
In 1952, the Letter won him the Peabody Radio Award - radio's Oscar. His acceptance speech drew him to the attention of a young TV producer, Bob Saudek, who offered him the job of hosting the ground-breaking US documentary series Omnibus. He did it for 10 years, introducing music, drama, painting, literature, history, science and architecture.
In 1972 came the monumental BBC series Alistair Cooke's America, inspired by the success of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation . In 13 episodes, Cooke offered his own perception of American history starting - unfashionably - with the contribution of Native Americans, the Spanish, and the French. It brought to an end his Guardian association, but the series was a triumph, shown in 30 countries.
Thanks to his lawyer and close friend Irving Cohen, Cooke signed a lucrative contract both for the filming, and more importantly for the accompanying book, America. The deal made him, very much to his surprise, a rich man. But the Cookes continued to live in their rent-controlled apartment on the upper east-side of New York City with its fabulous view across Central Park, he commuting each weekend to the Long Island house where Jane spent most of the summer. They steadfastly refused to buy a new car.
There was one further career. The public TV station WGBH secured the rights to a number of classic British shows, and decided that an American audience might need a few words of explanation before programmes such as Upstairs, Downstairs. Cooke provided introductions from 1971 until he retired in 1992, at the age of 84.
He was a frequent lecturer and after-dinner speaker and a fanatical proponent of American popular music: in the 1950s he produced a record entitled An Evening With Alistair Cooke - an unlikely combination of singing, whistling and piano blues numbers. He undertook dozens of radio programmes for the BBC on musical subjects, including a series on George Gershwin.
He wrote and directed a further two films, but both were shelved. He claimed his television biography of Mark Twain was dropped by a network because of Twain's coruscating criticism of the American financial establishment. The second abandoned project was a history of his beloved game of golf.
There was occasionally criticism of his unwillingness to tackle the harsher aspects of American life. It was said that he was less than ready to write about the Vietnam war, while Alastair Hetherington, who took over from Wadsworth at the Guardian, was convinced that Cooke had a blind spot about the civil rights movement.
But such reservations did not prevent the bestowing of a large number of honours. America and Masterpiece Theatre won Emmies. Cooke accepted three honorary degrees, an honorary fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Royal Society of Arts. In 1973 he was awarded an honorary knighthood .
Perhaps his greatest distinction was to be invited to address a joint session of Congress in 1974, the 200th anniversary of its founding. He warned against the three-pronged threat facing the country - from violence in the cities, inflation and nuclear war. But this, for Cooke, was a rare foray into the role of preacher or prophet. "I am not by nature," he wrote, "a 'Whither America?' man."
Cooke is survived by his wife, two children and two stepchildren.
Alistair (Alfred) Cooke: born November 20th, 1908; died March 30th, 2004.