Alistair Cooke lived from 1908 to 2004, and from the 1930s until his death he was a regular and prominent figure on radio and television both in the United States and in his native Great Britain. Throughout his many writings and broadcasts, Cooke referred to aspects of his life, but he left no thorough volume of autobiography. Not until 1999 and a biography by a British journalist, Nick Clarke, could Cooke’s admirers find in one book a coherent narrative of his long life. As Clarke wrote, Cooke “was a private man with a tendency to prickliness,” although when they first met, Cooke “was courteous to a fault.”

For the last five years of Cooke’s life, the record finds rounding out in various obituaries. One of the more readable and insightful was by his old friend, William F. Buckley, Jr. “He did everything,” Buckley recalled of the man with whom he had lunch every quarter for thirty years, “with that wry, amiable, but firm-handed assurance that made him the ideal host on large-scale television enterprises.”

Born Alfred Cooke in Salford, near Manchester, England, he changed his name to Alistair while still a student at the University of Cambridge. After Cambridge, where he had studied English Literature, Cooke had a Commonwealth Fellowship to study drama at Yale; his desire was to become a theatrical director. Part of the terms of his fellowship required buying a car and over the summer touring the United States. On that extensive and solitary drive around the country in a used Ford, Cooke fell in love with America, seeing its many facets, from majestic vistas to squalid slums, from serpentine corruption to naïve kindness.

As he prepared to return to England, he heard that the BBC needed a new film critic. He applied for the job and became its movie reviewer. He found that a lot of the time he was interpreting American culture, as depicted by Hollywood, to British audiences. In 1938, the BBC sent him to the United States as a foreign correspondent.

While he reported by radio on Depression-era and wartime America for the BBC, he also wrote a daily column for a British newspaper, The Manchester Guardian (now simply The Guardian). When he was nearing eighty, Cooke and an American historian, Ronald A. Wells, collected more than fifty of those columns into one volume. It remains Cooke’s handiest book for bedside reading or prolonged peregrinations, and topics include Billy Graham preaching in Madison Square Garden, the Roman Catholic Church’s role in desegregation, cricket matches between Harvard and Yale, the end of a long-running television show, M*A*S*H, and obituaries of personages as different as Frank Lloyd Wright, Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, and Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1941, Cooke became a naturalized American citizen. He and his wife made their home in Manhattan, and the BBC saw him as a useful man to know in New York. After some negotiations, what developed was Letter from America. From 1946 to 2004, Cooke broadcast on BBC radio more than two thousand weekly “letters,” fifteen-minute musings on whatever in American current events interested him. A master of that format, Cooke became one of the most perceptive and prolific essayists in the English language.

To American audiences, Cooke came across as an erudite Englishman, and to British audiences, he seemed to be an urbane American. His heyday still had numerous Americans, from radio newsmen to politicians of both political parties, who spoke with a Mid-Atlantic accent. A now fading phenomenon, that accent was for many years a big help to Hollywood casting directors. They could hire English actors like Cary Grant or Sydney Greenstreet to play Americans of the eastern seaboard, and they could hire Americans like Helen Hayes or Katharine Hepburn to play English characters.

In his obituary of Cooke for the Financial Times, Nick Clarke noted Cooke’s “tireless curiosity about his adopted home and his encyclopaedic [sic] memory about every nook and cranny of American life,” so that “the most complete expression of his accumulated experience came with the BBC televisions series, America.” It premiered in Britian and in America at the same time in November, 1972, and it was often rebroadcast. At the time of its first airing, Cooke himself wrote, “If I can reawaken Americans to the best of their story, and remind them of the worst, if we succeed in shaking up in your mind the myths and sentimentalities of your high-school textbook, we’ll feel it was well worth doing.”

Cooke then agreed to host a new program, Masterpiece Theatre. It would air one night a week and present literary works that had been adapted as series for British television. For twenty-two years Cooke presented series based on novels by Henry James and P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers and Joseph Conrad. Sunday nights with Cooke in a leather armchair talking with quiet authority about what viewers were about to see became a fixture of public television. One of its more enduring and endearing accolades came in the form of a good-natured parody, Sesame Street’s zany Muppet, Cookie Monster, appearing as Alistair Cookie and hosting Monsterpiece Theatre.

Late in life Cooke weighed the good and bad in America. As he had done fifteen years before at the conclusion of his America, he recalled Edward Gibbon, in the late eighteenth century in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noting the internal causes of Rome’s demise, not least “freakishness pretending to originality, enthusiasm masquerading as vitality.” Cooke continued, “I’d say that the conservative sin is secret greed (holding on to what you’ve got); whereas the liberal sin is self-righteousness (“Why aren’t you more like me?”).” In his America he added a further diagnosis, “the great desire to live off the state, whether it is a junkie on welfare or an airline subsidized by the government.”

All the same, Cooke was reluctant to pass definitive judgment. He said that his Christian upbringing drove home to him the need to be careful by what standard one measures other people, and oneself. “So dogmatic opinions,” he explained, “were always shadowed by what I later learned was called ‘the cloud of unknowing’,” and he admitted that “this may be a character flaw, though religious people say it’s the steady companion—or, guardian, perhaps—of Faith.” There spoke the ripeness of much long experience.

 

Condensed from the 2024 issue of Conversatio.