Alistair Cooke

Alistair Cooke

Alfred Alistair Cooke KBE (20 November 1908 – 30 March 2004) was a British/American journalist, television personality and broadcaster. Outside his journalistic output, which included Letter from America and Alistair Cooke's America, he was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theater from 1971 to 1992. After holding the job for 22 years, and having worked in television for 42 years, Cooke retired in 1992, although he continued to present Letter from America until shortly before his death. He was the father of author and folk singer John Byrne Cooke.

Read more about Alistair Cooke:  Early Life, Media Beginnings, Move To The United States, The Staff Reporter, Omnibus, Mid To Later Years, Later Life and Death, The Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism, Bibliography, Media, Reviews

Famous quotes by alistair cooke:

    It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.
    Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)

    Washington’s birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
    Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)

    All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.
    Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)