[MUSIC FROM MASTERPIECE THEATRE UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oh, let's not. [MUSIC OUT] Look: I loved Masterpiece Theatre, and especially I loved Alistair Cooke's courtly introductions to British Lit. transmuted into television. But, as Cooke himself observed, he was merely head waiter to those TV feasts, there to explain what's on the menu and how those dishes were composed. He was not the chef. But he was, in fact, a master chef. For an astonishing 58 years on BBC Radio, he dished out complex and savory servings of America to an eager and curious world. He died this week at the age of 95, after chronicling a nation in continuous evolution. His first Letter from America offered this description of a long line of customers for nylon stockings in post-war New York.

ALISTAIR COOKE: People get afraid they'll miss their assigned pair of stockings, so a woman queues up for one pair, and her husband nonchalantly disguised, for another. Need I say there are also in these queues smooth-looking gents and crummy-looking youths with fake ration certificates who have no personal use for nylons and no wife or girlfriend to be a hero for. They're just doing the rounds of the queues by way of running their own modest black market.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Decade after decade, he sent missives filled with vivid description, historical context and his own fascination with his adopted country. But in truth, though he was in America, he was not of America, and therein lies the loss for most of us. We never had the chance to see ourselves in his eyes. Usually, he saw us at a distance, albeit a short one, but once he found himself a mere ten feet from an American tragedy, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he captured the moment like a camera lens.

ALISTAIR COOKE: There was a head on the floor streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy, Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on a nice cake. There were flashlights by now, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping the young man, and he was saying "Listen, lady -- I'm hurt too." And 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.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Then he viewed the emotional fallout with the same sharp focus and shook his head.

ALISTAIR COOKE:Five days later I still cannot rise to the general lamentations about a sick society. I, for one, do not feel like an accessory to a crime, and I reject almost as a frivolous obscenity the sophistry of collective guilt --the idea that I or the American people killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy. I said as much as this to a younger friend, and he replied, "Yes, but - and I too - I don't feel implicated in the murder of John or Bobby Kennedy - but when Martin Luther King is killed, the only people who know that you and I are not like the killer are you and I." It's a tremendous sentence. It exposes, I think, the present danger to America. The more people talk about collective guilt, the more they will feel it, and after 300 years of subjection and prejudice, any poor Negro or desperate outcast is likely to act as if it were true that the American people are not their derelicts -- are the villains.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Alistair Cooke's staunchly conservative principles were sometimes out of step with his adopted nation and with his native Britain, but even when he departed from the views of modern America, even when he couldn't quite fathom them, his was a bracing perspective, the product of a first class mind. As Prime Minister Tony Blair observed this week, "millions found wisdom and comfort in Cooke's Letters from America." But toward the end perhaps no one needed them as much as he, himself, did. Friends say they literally kept him alive. And indeed, he died just a few weeks after resigning in late February.

ALISTAIR COOKE: Just recently a British journalist who seemed to have a gift for making mischief where he couldn't find it, asked me if anybody in the BBC had ever asked me to retire, and was I going to do so anyway. I said the answer was no, and no. I've noticed if you retire, you'll keel over. The day of retirement from this assignment, which was given to me 50 years ago by the BBC official who bore the grand title of Director of the Spoken Word, the day of retirement is up to the Lord of us all, the great Timekeeper in the Sky, the true director of the spoken word.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:A sampling of his Letters from America can be found at the BBC website. It's a chance to hear a little more of what we've missed, the real masterpieces of the person known to most of us as merely a host in an armchair, the late, great Alistair Cooke. [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, staged stings of presumed pedophiles, plus men who hate shirts and the programs that love them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS]