US: Alistair Cooke, the silver-haired BBC broadcaster whose measured tones and wisdom made him a much-loved institution on both sides of the Atlantic, announced his retirement yesterday, aged 95, writes Peter Murtagh
Letter From America, his weekly conversation with BBC Radio 4 listeners, lasted an astonishing 58 years, amounting to 2,869 individual broadcasts. The series was originally scheduled for just 13 weeks.
Letter From America was the world's longest-running speech radio programme. Cooke missed just three broadcasts - including last week's due to illness - and decided to retire on the advice of his doctor.
"Throughout 58 years I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks and hope that some of it has passed over to the listeners, to all of whom I now say 'thank you' for your loyalty and 'goodbye'," Cooke said in a statement.
The BBC plans to mark his retirement with a selection from the archives, A Celebration Of Alistair Cooke's Letter From America, which will be broadcast over the next few months on Radio 4 and the World Service.
Cooke was born in Salford, northern England, in 1908. He joined the BBC in 1934 as a film critic and was London correspondent for the US NBC network in 1936-37. He began a lengthy career with the Guardian, then the Manchester Guardian, as the paper's UN correspondent from 1945 to 1948, and later its chief US correspondent until 1972.
But it was as a writer of elegant spoken prose that Cooke became an international star. "A professional," he once remarked, "is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it." But Cooke never seemed not to feel like it.
He bore witness to some of the most dramatic and tragic events of the 20th century, including the assassination of Robert Kennedy, but most of his broadcasts were about day-to-day American politics, sporting and cultural life, or matters of law.
He communicated information with a clarity and simplicity of diction that belied the depth of knowledge behind his explanation of often complex events or workings of government.
As a journalist he was not above the occasional theatrical flourish. Forced to record one Letter From America before a televised speech by President Nixon during which his resignation over Watergate was widely expected, Cooke was unable safely to assume anything the president might, or might not, say.
Cooke reported accurately everything right up to a few hours before Nixon's broadcast and then ended his own by saying: "...and the rest you know".
By the time BBC listeners heard that week's Letter From America, everyone was talking about Nixon's resignation.
Cooke became as famous in the US as he is in Britain. Widespread fame came after 1971 when, and for 22 years after, he introduced Masterpiece Theatre for PBS television. In 1973, he broadcast simultaneously there and in the UK Alistair Cooke's America, a 13-part television history of the United States.
In a 1997 speech to television executives, Cooke said: "I discovered very early on that broadcasting is the control of suspense. No matter what you're talking about - gardening, economics, murder - you're telling a story. If you say a dull sentence, people have a right to switch off."
Few people did once Cooke began talking.
He lived for many years on Long Island, New York. Today, he has an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, where he lives with his wife.