Media beginnings Cooke's first visit to the United States was in 1932 on a two-year
Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (now
Harkness Fellowship) to Yale and Harvard, where his acting and music skills came to the fore with visits to
Hollywood. Cooke saw a newspaper headline stating that
Oliver Baldwin, the Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin's son, had been sacked by the BBC as film critic. Cooke sent a telegram to the Director of Talks, asking if he would be considered for the post. He was invited for an interview and took a
Cunard liner back to Britain, arriving twenty-four hours late for his interview. He suggested typing out a film review on the spot, and a few minutes later, he was offered the job. Cooke replaced
Oliver Baldwin as the
BBC's film critic on 8 October 1934 and gave his first BBC broadcast: "I declare that I am a critic trying to interest a lot of people into seeing interesting films", he told his audience. "I have no personal interest in any company. As a critic I am without politics and without class." He sat on a BBC Advisory Committee headed by
George Bernard Shaw for correct
pronunciation. In 1935, Cooke also became London Correspondent for
NBC. Each week, he recorded a 15-minute radio dialogue for American listeners on life in Britain, under the series title of
London Letter. In 1936, he intensively reported on the
Edward VIII abdication crisis for NBC. He delivered several talks on the topic each day to listeners in many parts of the United States. He calculated that in ten days he spoke 400,000 words on the subject. During the crisis, he was aided by a twenty-year-old
Rhodes Scholar,
Walt Rostow, who would become
Lyndon B. Johnson's national security advisor.
Move to the United States Cooke stated that, on a visit to New York in 1936, he had been impressed at how freely newspapers and journals were able to report on the abdication crisis whilst all comment was still censored in London. Very soon, in 1937, he immigrated. He became a United States citizen and swore the Oath of Allegiance on 1 December 1941, six days before
Pearl Harbor was attacked. Shortly after immigrating, Cooke suggested to the BBC the idea of doing the
London Letter in reverse: a 15-minute talk for British listeners on life in America. A prototype,
Mainly About Manhattan, was broadcast intermittently from 1938, but the idea was shelved with the outbreak of
World War II in 1939. During this time, as well, Cooke undertook a journey through the whole United States, recording the lifestyle of ordinary Americans during the war and their reactions to it. The manuscript was published as
The American Home Front: 1941–1942 in the United States (and as ''Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War'' in the UK) in 2006. The first
American Letter was broadcast on 24 March 1946 (Cooke said this was at the request of Lindsey Wellington, the BBC's New York Controller); the series was initially commissioned for only 13 instalments. The series came to an end 58 years later in March 2004, after 2,869 instalments and less than a month before Cooke's death. Along the way, it picked up a new name (changing from
American Letter to
Letter from America in 1950) and an enormous audience, being broadcast not only in Britain and in many other
Commonwealth countries, but throughout the world by the
BBC World Service.
Journalist In 1947, Cooke became a
foreign correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian newspaper (later
The Guardian), for which he wrote until 1972. It was the first time he had been employed as a staff reporter; all his previous work had been freelance. In reporting on the
Montgomery bus boycott, begun by
Rosa Parks and led by
Martin Luther King, Cooke expressed sympathy for the economic costs imposed on the city bus company and referred to Mrs. Parks as "the stubborn woman who started it all ... to become the
Paul Revere of the boycott." Martin Luther King complained about Cooke's "biased and hostile reports", which motivated philosopher
Michael Dummett to write his own refuting report, which
The Guardian refused to publish. In 1968, Cooke was only yards away from
Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated, witnessing the events that followed.
Omnibus In 1952, Cooke became the host of
CBS's
Omnibus, the first U.S. commercial network television series devoted to the arts. It featured appearances by such personalities as
Hume Cronyn,
Jessica Tandy,
Gene Kelly and
Leonard Bernstein.
Jonathan Winters was the first comic to appear on the show.
Mid to later years , September 25, 1974;
Barbara Jordan addresses the joint Houses of Congress. In 1966 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the
Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "The Jet Age and the Habits of Man". In 1971, he became the host of the new
Masterpiece Theatre,
PBS's showcase of quality British television. He remained its host for 22 years, before retiring from the role in 1992. He achieved his greatest popularity in the United States in this role, becoming the subject of many parodies, including "
Alistair Cookie" in
Sesame Street ("Alistair Cookie" was also the name of a clay animated cookie-headed spoof character created by
Will Vinton as the host of a video trailer for
The Little Prince and Friends), and Alistair Quince, portrayed by
Harvey Korman, who introduced many episodes in the early seasons of ''
Mama's Family''.
America: A Personal History of the United States (1972), a 13-part television series about the United States and its history, was first broadcast in both the United Kingdom and the United States in 1973, and was followed by a book of the same title. It was a great success in both countries, and resulted in Cooke's being invited to address the
joint Houses of the
United States Congress as part of Congress's bicentenary celebrations. After the series was broadcast in Ireland, Cooke won a
Jacob's Award, one of the few occasions when this award was made to the maker of an imported programme.
Final years On 2 March 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Cooke announced his retirement from
Letter from America—after 58 years, the longest-running speech radio show in the world. Cooke died at midnight on 30 March 2004, at his home in New York City. He had been ill with heart disease, but he died of
lung cancer, which had spread to his bones. He was cremated, and his ashes were clandestinely scattered by his family in
Central Park.
Theft of bones On 22 December 2005, the
New York Daily News reported that several of Cooke's bones, and those of many other people, had been surgically removed before cremation by employees of
Biomedical Tissue Services of
Fort Lee, New Jersey, a tissue-recovery firm. The thieves sold the bones for use as
medical-grade bone grafts. The cancer from which Cooke was suffering had spread to his bones, making them unsuitable for grafts. Reports indicated the people involved in selling the bones altered his death certificate to hide the cause of death and reduce his age from 95 to 85. Michael Mastromarino, a former New Jersey–based
oral surgeon, Mastromarino was sentenced on 27 June 2008, in the
New York Supreme Court, to 18 to 54 years' imprisonment. The entire story of the theft was featured in a documentary aimed at educating the public about modern-day
grave robbery. ==Personal life==