Bush popularity ensures party sweeps to electoral gains

The closing sentence of the most famous of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America was, “And the rest you know.”

For more than 55 years the late broadcaster filed a weekly radio talk from the United States for the BBC.

Cooke once explained how in August 1974 he had to record one of these weekly radio talks in San Francisco. That was the week when, after months of media and congressional investigation into the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was under intense pressure to resign or face likely impeachment.