David Dimbleby on Alistair Cooke Reporting America, The Guardian

Alistair Cooke, Reporting America 1946-2004

David Dimbleby
Saturday October 4 2008

Alistair Cooke had that most enviable of broadcaster's gifts, a seductive voice: warm, calm, intimate, measured and yet enticing. I cannot count the number of times on which I have stopped what I was doing, postponed some apparently urgent task, at the words "And now Letter from America with Alistair Cooke." The voice alone would not have been enough but the voice mattered. Compared with the tone of today's broadcasting, often so full of urgency and synthetic drama, he can seem slow, even languid. To some listeners his style, particularly in later years, was too ponderous, the voice too gravelly, but not to those of us brought up on Cooke as our introduction to the complexities of America's politics and way of life.

He was broadcasting in a different age, before the demands of 24-hour news, reporters' blogs and instant analysis had changed the way reporters ply their trade. Cooke's role was to interpret the raw stuff of news. He provided a setting into which the baffling twists and turns of American politics could be placed and better understood.

Cooke's passion was the English language. He did not just speak well; he wrote with care and precision. In the dispatches for the Guardian, the newspaper he served as America correspondent for a quarter-century, the quality of his prose shines through, the precision and clarity that laid the foundations for his parallel career as a broadcaster. Cooke's technique was well understood by his fans but was all the more delicious for its predictability. He would almost invariably open his Letter from America for the BBC with an anecdote or a description of the seasons or perhaps a reference to jazz or his favourite game, golf, "the Scottish Torture" or to the World Series. Sometimes these opening passages would last so long they reminded me of langorous days at school studying the similes in Matthew Arnold's epic poem Sohrab and Rustum and wondering, as with Arnold's long passages, where they would lead. They never disappointed, always, however circuitous the journey, finishing at some pertinent point which illustrated and so enhanced one's grasp of how the political system or culture of the United States worked.

Increasingly, his voice was heard in America, too. He became known there through television: hosting the ground-breaking arts programme Omnibus, the long running Masterpiece Theatre, and his grand history and travelogue, Alistair Cooke's America. Such was his standing that in the mid-1970s he became only the third non-citizen to be invited to address the joint houses of Congress.

The voice of Cooke that comes through so vividly in these dispatches brings back the mood of the times he lived through. He always thought of himself as a reporter not a commentator, with the job of throwing some light on how and why things seemed to him to have happened rather than interpreting or predicting the course of events, still less lecturing or hectoring.

For him the events themselves were fascinating enough, as this selection illustrates. In 1953 for instance, in a report for the Guardian, he highlights the extraordinary fact that this was the first year on record in which no black man had been lynched in America. The depths of racial discrimination was a subject his reports returned to time and again (in the 1953 dispatch, he uses the word "negro" for "black" - usage employed, as his report illustrates, by both black and white at the time, and for some years to come.) There are moving accounts of the deaths of two Kennedys and of Martin Luther King. There is a highly critical report on President Reagan's star wars proposal.

And, just to prove that the master had not lost his touch, his 2866th Letter in February 2004, near the very end of his career, "Was Saddam a threat?" suggests how George W Bush should explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. With a bathetic flourish he urges the president to follow the example of Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca. Vintage Cooke. Irreplaceable.

All articles extracted from Reporting America: The life of the nation 1946-2004 by Alistair Cooke, published by Allen Lane, The Estate of Alistair Cooke, 2008