As the American presidential election campaign enters its final stages, long-time radio listeners will again be regretting the absence from the airwaves of a distinctive and familiar voice, writes Wesley Boyd.
Alistair Cooke broadcast his first Letter from America in March 1946 and his last in March 2004, less than a month before his death. With one terse phrase he could give the listener a greater insight into the vicissitudes of American life than another commentator could with a thousand words of facts and figures.
At a Kansas City railroad station mixing with troops, waiting for hours for trains to take them westwards on the first stage of their journey to the Pacific bloodbath in the early days of the war against Japan, he observed that there were showers for the whites but none for the blacks. "We're all right to shoot at but not so cool to keep clean," he recorded a black soldier saying. A pity that this shrewd observer and elegant word-spinner is no longer with us to lay bare the bones of the McCain-Obama contest.
Many of his listeners thought he was an American, but in the US he was regarded as the quintessential Englishman. He became an American citizen in 1941, after a few years working as a journalist. "I'm still an Englishman working in America," he said. "An Irish Lancastrian, really. I don't kid myself that I'm from Arkansas."
He was born in Salford, near Manchester, on November 20th, 1908 and brought up in Blackpool where his parents ran a guest house. Like many families in the North of England they had a few dollops of Irish emigrant blood in their veins.
His father, a Methodist lay preacher, encouraged him to study and he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge where he read English. In 1932, with the aid of another scholarship , he went to the United States to study theatre at both Yale and Harvard universities. On his return to Britain he got his first broadcasting job as a film critic for the BBC. But he had developed a love affair with America and he was soon back, working as a freelance for the BBC and the Timesof London. He also collaborated with Charlie Chaplin on a projected film about the life of Napoleon and invited the actor to be best man at his first wedding - to Ruth Emerson, an American model. The bride's mother objected because, she said, Chaplin was living in sin with the actress Paulette Goddard.
Cooke became the US correspondent of the Manchester Guardianin 1945, a position he held for 27 years. As a sideline he agreed to do a weekly 15-minute commentary on American affairs for the BBC. Originally called American Letter, it was to run for 26 weeks. It lasted for 58 years. He never decided what he was going to talk about until he sat down to write the script, relying on his memory rather than notes. Most of the broadcasts were made from his apartment on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park.
It was in this apartment, shortly before his death, that his secretary discovered what Cooke had believed was a long lost manuscript. It was the story of his coast-to-coast travels in the United States during the second World War. Published in 2006 as Alistrair Cooke's American Journey(Penguin/Allen Lane) it is an extraordinary account of the impact of the war on the daily lives of American people. Cooke travelled by road and rail and talked to everyone he encountered, from farmers to miners, from labourers to industrialists.
In the Deep South he recorded a conversation between a poor Negro farmer and a Government adviser, a Mr. McDowell. The adviser asked the farmer if he will help win the war by growing peanuts. "Peanuts," the farmer shouted in disbelief. "The go'ment must sho' nuff be in te'ble shape." The adviser explained that they needed peanuts for fats and oil, and eggs, millions of them, to feed the troops. "Can you raise some hens here?" he asked. "Hens," said the farmer. "Mr McDowell, if the go'ment wanna pay me for raisin' elephants ah'll sho' make a powerful try."
Cooke was amazed at the speed at which America increased its industrial output to feed the war machine. In the state of Washington he met Henry Kaiser, a dam builder from Spokane who had turned to shipbuilding. Kaiser had never worked with steel before, much less built a ship. In 1942 it took 200 days to build one Liberty cargo ship to carry supplies across the Atlantic. Kaiser eschewed the traditional engineering methods and, using prefabrication, cut the time to 40 days. Towards the end of the war he was launching a ship every 24 hours. Without Kaiser's ships, Cooke noted, Britain could have starved.
Others also increased their output. In Los Angeles, Cooke interviewed a veteran tattooist. In the first World War soldiers came in and asked for a heart and the name of their girlfriend. Now, he told the reporter, they wanted just one word: "Mother".
He was not impressed by everything he saw on his epic journey. From Los Angeles he drove into the High Sierras to view a darker picture of America at war. In the early days of the conflict more than 70,000 American citizens, living mainly on the West coast, were rounded up and transported to 10 desolate internment camps in the mountains. They were the descendants of Japanese parents.
Most of them had never been to Japan and many could not speak the language. They were dumped behind barbed wire and armed guards herded them into shacks without heat or windows. Cooke was humbled by their reaction. They were running the camp themselves, held elections, had their own newspaper and had somehow kept their faith in America. As he drove away Cooke recorded that he was "none too proud" of his adopted country.
Even after his death at the age of 95, Cooke was still in the news. His bones were stolen by a gang peddling human body parts. What a quirky Letter from America he would have written about that incident.