Alistair Cooke, a broadcasting legend in his native Britain and adopted United States, has died, less than a month after he recorded his final Letter from America, BBC radio said on Tuesday.
In a brief statement, the BBC said Cooke — who had been suffering from heart disease and arthritis — passed away at about midnight local time on Monday at his home in New York.
”His daughter Suzy Cooke contacted his biographer, Nick Clark, with the sad news,” it said.
It was on doctor’s orders that Cooke aired his last Letter from America on March 6 on BBC domestic and World Service radio, ending a weekly series of 15-minute essays that ran for 58 years.
Cooke was a household name among Americans, too, both as host of the cultural programmes Omnibus and Masterpiece Theatre, and for his 1970s television history of their country, titled Alistair Cooke’s America.
”Alistair Cooke was one of the greatest broadcasters ever in the history of the BBC and an outstanding commentator of the 20th century,” said BBC acting director general Mark Byford.
”His insight, wisdom and unique ability to craft words enabled millions of listeners in the United Kingdom and around the world to understand the texture of the US and its people,” he said.
”All of us at the BBC are saddened today.”
Letter from America was a BBC fixture ever 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 Manhattan apartment, looking out over Central Park, as he patiently tried to explain to his listeners the vast, often bewildering land that lay beyond.
True to Cooke’s erudite nature, 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 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, but in recent months regular listeners could sense his flagging health 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 college 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.
”There was suddenly a banging repetition, of a sound that — I don’t know how to describe — not at all like shots, like somebody dropping a rack of trays,” he told his listeners.
”There was a head on the floor, streaming blood and somebody put a Kennedy boater [a rimmed straw hat] under it and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an ice cake…”
”Down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes, and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.”
Cooke is survived by his wife and two daughters. — Sapa-AFP