Alistair Cooke Reporting America reviewed in the FT

The first thing that strikes one about this collection of newspaper and radio pieces that Alistair Cooke filed for the BBC and The Guardian over several decades is that he popped up everywhere.

He observed the inaugurations of Truman and Eisenhower, listened to Edward Murrow's denunciation of Joseph McCarthy, went to Montgomery, Alabama to hear Martin Luther King preach, and was near Robert Kennedy when the latter was assassinated.

The 1977 blackout in New York was about the only big event of postwar US history Cooke missed, although he lived there. He happened to be out of town in London at the time and so avoided hearing, from his apartment overlooking Central Park, the sound of looting.

Cooke was always an elegant writer. This year's presidential election has sparked a debate about the importance of words, since Barack Obama is so eloquent. Cooke was definitely on the side of the wordsmiths, from John F Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.

No journalist, or "reporter", as Cooke always wanted to be known, could fail to envy his ornate yet precise writing, such as the closing sentences of his article about Marilyn Monroe's drug overdose in 1962: "She never could learn to acquire the lacquered shell of the prima donna or the armour of sophistication. So in the end she found the ultimate oblivion, of which her chronic latecomings and desperate retreats to her room were tokens."

There is an American expression for pretentious vocabulary: the "10-dollar word". Cooke had a stash of 10-dollar words that he flashed about whenever he was ambivalent about the topic of the day. On the big occasion, however, he used them beautifully. Reporting America also reminds us how conservative he was. In the introduction his daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, offers an unusually frank and perceptive, although affectionate, portrait of Cooke. She points out that her father repeatedly put himself on the wrong side of history.

He opposed protests against the Vietnam war, as well as the more aggressive elements of the civil rights movement. He was "impatient and dismayed" at hippies in the 1960s and, later on, irritated by political correctness. Instinctively, he was attached to the established order.

He was notably sympathetic to Ronald Reagan, whom he interviewed when he was governor of California in 1968. Cooke described Reagan as "a decent, deadly serious, baffled, middle-class professional man" with obvious fellow feeling.

But Cooke was also clearly a pain, as well. His daughter does a good job of displaying his appealing and amusing side but, overall, he comes across as a depressive, irritable, opinionated, self-involved writer who treated his family and his editors as a supporting cast.

Cooke was happy when his daughter's marriage to her first husband broke up because he wanted her undivided attention. "My father was not an egotist, one inclined to exaggerate one's self-worth, but he was by nature egocentric, wrapped up in himself," she writes.

It is as well that he was so consummate a professional well into old age, as it compensated for these flaws. Whatever his personal views, he did not let them affect his empathy with those he reported on, or his cold, brilliant depictions of scenes such as Robert Kennedy's death.

"There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake. There were flashlights by now, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned into cinders," he wrote.

"She was slapping a young man and he was saying, 'Listen lady, I'm hurt too'. And 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."

John Gapper is an FT columnist based in New York

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