The man who was the voice of America

Alistair Cooke Broadcasting on BBC
Alistair Cooke Broadcasting on BBC 1 February 1946 Photograph: British Broadcasting Corporation/ BBC/CORBIS

Alistair Cooke reported on America for the BBC for 58 years. He completed his 2,869th weekly Letter From America in 2004, just weeks before his death from cancer at the age of 95. Here was a man who made intelligent, honest sense of decades of assassinations, scandals, elections, boom times and broken dreams. This volume, celebrating the centenary of his birth last week, provides an indispensable record of 20th-century American culture.

Cooke learned his trade long before the era of the 24-hour news channel, and his delivery is effortlessly graceful. As his daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, remarks in her introduction, 'the English language, beautifully presented, was balm to his soul'. Even at the sharp end of events - he was just a few feet away when Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968 - Cooke could combine brutal honesty with poetry: '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... I have no doubt that this experience is a trauma, because of it, several days later, I still cannot rise to the general lamentations of a sick society.'

The book's 88 letters and articles are divided into decades, each with a brief, candid introduction by his daughter, affectionately revealing the great man's flaws: the hypochondriac, the man of impeccable prose who didn't notice Ovaltine stains on his clothes.

Cooke was at his peak from the Sixties on, and faded a little after 9/11. His reports on JFK, Vietnam and the 1965 LA riots are particularly strong. But even his first letter sparkles, reporting from a ship bound for America filled with tearful GI brides: 'The handkerchiefs fluttered in an unbroken line like washing day in Manchester or Leeds.'

Cooke was quirky, old-fashioned and distinctly of his time. Paranoia about the 'chess-playing' Soviet threat continually looms, though counter-balanced by strong opposition to McCarthyism. The liberal Cooke supported the Vietnam War and eyed 'hippy protesters' with suspicion, but in 1968 admitted: 'America is not invincible ... an elephant can shake the earth but not the self-possession of the ants who hold it.' Washing his hands of Nixon, ashamed of Clinton and dismissive of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars ('One day he's the screaming eagle, the next he's a purring dove'), he was somehow still strangely deferential to presidential office, assuming the best intentions.

His most heartfelt respect, however, was not for the elite, but for the common taxpayer, who paid for war and for 'three men to pluck a bag of rocks and dust from the Moon'. Farewell, then, to a citizen and a star.