City Desk: Hard Copy

Within a year of his arrival, Cooke was shooting back dispatches on Hollywood for the London Observer, one of which occasioned a lasting friendship with Charlie Chaplin. Later he freelanced for the London Times. But these jobs weren’t sustaining; the Times, he later said, merely “kept you in cigarettes.” Cooke needed a real job, and one virtue of this new biography lies in the spadework of Nick Clarke—himself a host and commentator for the BBC’s Radio Four—in documenting Cooke’s struggle to gain a footing in his chosen profession; success, as it often does, dripped from a slow faucet.

Then, quite without design, Cooke landed in radio. After marathon days of broadcasting for NBC from New York on the constitutional crisis attending Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, Cooke had found his métier. His easy conversational manner served well such an intimate medium. By 1946, the war over, BBC Radio approved a short weekly program of commentary to be written and presented by Cooke, who was by now an American citizen, and the Better from America was born. (Winston Churchill never missed it.) This job, coupled with a foreign-correspondent’s post for the Manchester Guardian, defined his professional life for the next half century. He would be at ease before both the typewriter and the microphone.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Within a year of his arrival, Cooke was shooting back dispatches on Hollywood for the London Observer, one of which occasioned a lasting friendship with Charlie Chaplin. Later he freelanced for the London Times. But these jobs weren’t sustaining; the Times, he later said, merely “kept you in cigarettes.” Cooke needed a real job, and one virtue of this new biography lies in the spadework of Nick Clarke—himself a host and commentator for the BBC’s Radio Four—in documenting Cooke’s struggle to gain a footing in his chosen profession; success, as it often does, dripped from a slow faucet.

Then, quite without design, Cooke landed in radio. After marathon days of broadcasting for NBC from New York on the constitutional crisis attending Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, Cooke had found his métier. His easy conversational manner served well such an intimate medium. By 1946, the war over, BBC Radio approved a short weekly program of commentary to be written and presented by Cooke, who was by now an American citizen, and the Better from America was born. (Winston Churchill never missed it.) This job, coupled with a foreign-correspondent’s post for the Manchester Guardian, defined his professional life for the next half century. He would be at ease before both the typewriter and the microphone.