2,000TH RADIO BBC BROADCAST ON AMERICA : ALISTAIR COOKE: A MAN OF ‘LETTERS’

It was business as usual this week for Alistair Cooke, the erudite British-born elder statesman of radio, as he sat down in the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) studio here to read his 2,000th “Letter From America.”

The series--said to be radio’s longest-running by a single correspondent--began in March, 1946, when the United States and its allies were scrambling to recover from the devastation of World War II.

This weekend, his 2,000th “letter” will be broadcast to Britain and nations around the globe.

Originally, Cooke was told the BBC could only afford 13, or at most 26, of the weekly reports because it could not convert any more sterling to dollars to pay him.

More than 41 years later, the broadcast continues--and Cooke continues to be paid.

In the intervening years, Cooke’s weekly radio journal has provided listeners around the globe with vivid observations of America, ranging from the vanity of superpower summitry to a New York judge who read nursery rhymes to his jury.

Cooke deftly purged television crews and a single red rose from his studio Wednesday before settling into another verbal romp through the American scene, eloquently transforming it into what he calls his “quietly human” diary.

In a rambling 13-minute and 50-second discourse, the 78-year-old dean of foreign correspondents in New York said health-conscious Americans, obsessed with avoiding old age and death, should stay out of the sun.

He also heralded the decline of waving the American flag in television commercials to “turn everything tasty, chewable, desirable, buyable, into something exclusively American.”

But when Cooke pounded out the stream-of-consciousness script on a typewriter at home a few hours before the taping, as has been his custom, he declined to use his milestone event to speculate on the destiny of the United States.

“I was urged to deliver some missionary message. But missions are for bishops. I am a reporter,” Cooke said in the broadcast to be aired in Britain tonight and repeated on the BBC’s World Service over the weekend.

Calling himself “a hopeless prophet,” the author of a dozen books on America and Americans said, “one book I will never write is ‘whither America.”’

After the taping, he told Reuters the program’s popularity was like a barometer of good will and ill-feeling toward the United States. Now, he said, “there is an anxiety that America is behaving like a big power, not a great power.”

He said his critics, especially in Britain, had been harshest when Americans took to self-indulgent flag waving, which had sparked anti-Americanism abroad during the McCarthy era and now, again, since Reagan became President.

“As in the ‘20s and ‘30s, American flag waving was a bore to people in Europe,” he said.

“In America, the race is on between its vitality and its decadence,” Cooke said. “This happens to all great empires.”

Cooke, who became a U.S. citizen in 1941, the year of the London blitz, said “in 1946, America was top gun,” but noted that its demise “is always predicted, then it doesn’t happen.”

Cooke, known to Americans as the cultivated host of “Masterpiece Theatre” on public television, said he had refused offers to air the radio program in America.

“I would feel as if Americans were looking over my shoulder, although much of what I report about is the history of things Americans don’t know,” he said.

The Blackpool-born son of a metalworker claims that his British upbringing enabled him to “always have an eye cocked for what is distinctly American,” but claims affinity to both the United States and Britain, where he received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 1973.

He says with pride he has not missed a single week of the program, twice broadcasting from the hospital. When asked to explain how some 2,142 weeks had elapsed since the show’s first month, Cooke admits that twice, in 1963 and 1965, he traveled the globe recording a “Letter From the World.”

His 1,000th broadcast in 1968 was marked in high fashion with a banquet in London where Cooke vowed to return this year. But his wife’s illness postponed plans for a similar London celebration this week.

Instead of the pomp and ceremony of a London gala, Cooke and his staff dined on trifle, a traditional English dessert, and champagne--”the kind he likes, not from California” one staffer said in the austere BBC offices at Rockefeller Center.