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Man of letters who captivated millions dies UK Cooke Nightlead

   LONDON, March 30 - Broadcaster Alistair Cooke, a legend in his native Britain and adopted United States, has died at the age of 95, less than a month after he recorded his final Letter from America for the BBC.

   True to Cooke's erudite nature, the Letter from America radio series ran the gamut from high intrigue in the corridors of power in Washington to the significance to Americans of of serving cranberry sauce with turkey on Thanksgiving Day.

   Only three times did Cooke miss filing a Letter, but in recent months regular listeners could sense his flagging health in his voice. Many wondered how he could ever finish a broadcast.

   Cooke's mellifluous voice belied his origins as an iron-fitter's son from the working class English seaside resort of Blackpool, his university years at Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, and the US citizenship he took in 1941.

   British Prime Minister Tony Blair paid warm tribute to the broadcaster.

   "He was really one of the greatest broadcasters of all time," Blair said.

   Generations have grown up, married and raised their own families to the sound of Cooke's genteel account of life in the United States.

   What he said was never as important as the way he said it.

   The show was supposed to run for only 13 weeks but Cooke's honeyed tones as he murmured "Good evening" across the airwaves, captivated his audience and he became a permanent fixture.

   The BBC believed it was the longest running radio show in history. Certainly, it established Cooke as Britain's preeminent observer of American life.

   He had an unerring eye for pinpointing the idiosyncrasies of his adopted country and conveying its atmosphere to his millions of listeners.

   And to Americans the silver-haired gentleman appeared to be the quintessential Englishman and he helped explain the eccentricities of his native land.

   It was easy to imagine Cooke at the microphone in the book-lined study of his Manhattan apartment, looking out over Central Park, as he patiently tried to explain to his listeners the vast, often bewildering land that lay beyond.

   His voice was his hallmark: that calming, gently insistent, elegant voice touched with the lilt of a transatlantic accent which came across in a confiding, personal tone.

   But there was a hidden sharpness beneath the surface, borne out in his newspaper and broadcasting journalism, his 20 books and perhaps most of all in his award-winning television series America.

   Cooke was born in Salford in 1908. His mother, though she came from Lancashire, was from a Protestant Irish line.

   Cooke won a scholarship from Blackpool Grammar School to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a First in English. It was during his student years that he developed his interest in the theatre and learned to love jazz.

   He founded the Cambridge University acting group The Mummers, which survives to this day, and also edited The Granta.

   His love affair with America began when he won a Commonwealth Fund Scholarship, going to Yale to study drama and it was here he shared his love of jazz with the young Vincent Price.

   Cooke moved on to Harvard, where he studied a graduate course on the English language in America which he later said had opened the United States to him as "a new-found land".

   At just 24 he wrote to J L Garvin at The Observer: "I happen to be travelling to Hollywood and I am prepared to interview Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Lubitsch and other stars for your paper".

   The Observer's film critic was sick at this time and Garvin gave him the commission.

   Charlie Chaplin found the Cooke charm irresistible. He commissioned him to write a script about Napoleon and offered him a job as an associate producer on his film Modern Times, but Cooke turned down the opportunity because of his scholarship.

   When his studies were over, he had to start looking for work and on seeing a news-stand "BBC fires PM's son" - Stanley Baldwin's son had been the BBC's film critic - he sailed home and was given the job.

   He joined the BBC in 1934 and was film critic for both The Listener and Sight and Sound. From 1936-37 he became London correspondent of the American National Broadcasting Company, as well as film critic for The Spectator.

   But the draw of America was strong and in September 1937 he resigned from the BBC, sailing back to America as an immigrant.

   He had married American Ruth Fermoy in 1934 and he became an American citizen in 1941, shortly before the birth of their son John. That relationship was short-lived.

   With war waging in Europe, this was not an ideal year for a well-known Englishman to take American citizenship.

   "The British Establishment took a very bleak view of it," said Leonard Miall, later the BBC's first Washington correspondent.

   "They thought he had decided that Britain was done for. The embassy cold-shouldered him, which was a little unfair because Alistair had applied for citizenship several years before. It hurt him, and he didn't recover until 1973, when the Queen gave him an honorary KBE," he said

   Cooke worked for NBC for a year as a broadcaster and then became the film commentator for WQXB, New York City.

   Spells as US correspondent for both The Times and the London Daily Herald followed until in 1945 he became UN correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, now The Guardian, and continued working for the paper until 1972.

   During this time he resumed work for the BBC as a commentator on US affairs and did countless wartime broadcasts.

   But 1946 was to be a milestone year for him. He married again - to war widow Jane Hawkes, a painter. They had a daughter, Susie.

   In January and February he made a series of broadcasts based on a short tour of Britain at the invitation of the BBC.

   The next month he started his weekly talk, then entitled American Letter - it was changed to Letter From America in 1950.

   It started as a pilot series of 13 broadcasts - and it lasted well over half a century.

   Cooke became something of a celebrity and gradually became a law unto himself, refusing to allow his producers to see the script in advance for fear that his work would be distorted. This certainly created problems when he made factual errors.

   Until recently, he rarely missed a Letter from the time the program began going out to millions, not only on Radio 4's precursor, the Home Service, but on the World Service as well.

   He made no notes during the week, preferring to rely on memory when he would type his script on an old Smith Corona. He also said that within a few years of doing the Letter he learned not to set himself up as a pundit.

   "The thing is to say what comes to mind: pure free association. It's really a diary and therefore it can go on and on."

   Part of the charm of his broadcasts was that he recorded it as if talking to just one or two people.

   But his journalism was not necessarily approved of by everybody. Anthony Howard, the political commentator, used to say Alastair Hetherington, the then editor of the Manchester Guardian, for whom Cooke was writing from 1945 to 1952, was growing exasperated by him.

   "He was writing soft mood music about what a lovely summer it was on Martha's Vineyard, while failing to understand the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement. Cooke is a remarkably good story-teller, but the notion that he is a serious commentator on American affairs is faintly absurd."

   By 1951 Cooke's Letter >From America and his Guardian coverage were thought to be so conducive to good Anglo-American relations that the British ambassador in Washington told him he was on the Foreign Office list for a knighthood.

   But Cooke said he was an American citizen and it was not until 1973 that he was given his honorary knighthood.

   His work varied from music programs, such as Alistair Cooke at the Piano, to the Ford Foundation's television program, Omnibus, and then a UN television program called International Zone.

   >From 1971 to November 1992 he took up the role of introducing the American TV program Masterpiece Theatre, for which Americans most associated him in later years.

   In 1972 he wrote and narrated America, a personal history of the United States for BBC Television. The program and Cooke between them received 11 awards for the series.

   He also received four Emmys, the 1972 Peabody Award for meritorious services to broadcasting, the 1972 Writers' Guild of Great Britain award for best documentary, and the following year the Dimbleby Award from the Society of Film and TV Arts.

   His standing in America was such that in 1972 he addressed a joint session of the US Congress on its 200th anniversary.

   Although sometimes criticised for fence-sitting, he saw that as part of his role as a reporter.

   But he did have very strong opinions which meant that, for example, in the McCarthy witch-hunting era he had his phone tapped for two years. It was also known that he abhorred the shallow patriotism of the Reagan era.

   But whether he was talking about primaries, prairies, the weather, the New York subway or his daughter, he won admiration for his clarity and wisdom, taking the hysteria out of heated subjects.

   He summed up his talent as "associating something quite tiny with something big. In other words just looking at the way human beings behave".

   In 1997, at 88, Cooke was fitted with a heart pacemaker. Within two days of the operation at the New York Hospital he was back at his Fifth Avenue apartment, banging away at his typewriter.

   In his 90s, Cooke was acutely conscious - and highly critical - of changes in the modern media.

   "The big change in journalism is that even the serious papers are going tabloid," he said in 1999.

   "If the old traditions had been kept up, we would never have heard of Bill Clintons, well ... Just as we never knew about John Kennedy.

   "At some point the taboo broke. We never discussed illness. It was taboo. Cancer was not for print. It was for the family.

   "It's a jungle. We go scratching for pornography and it overrides so many more important things. It's impossible to ruin a career now.

   "It used to be a disgrace to go bankrupt, now it's a useful contrivance. It's such a strange world to me now."

   During his long career, more than one attempt was made to drop his weekly letter. But none of them succeeded.

   Reuters AFP PA  cjh