Includes index.

Introduction / by Susan Cooke Kittredge -- 1946-1959. Coming home ; The GI bill ; Harry S. Truman ; Joe Louis ; New Year's Eve, 1951 ; A year of no lynchings ; President Eisenhower ; Cancer and smoking ; Revulsion against McCarthy ; Bikini Island detonation ; The untravelled road ; Humphrey Bogart ; The USA vs. the State of Arkansas ; Castro in control of Cuba ; Hawaii : the fiftieth state ; A Catholic as candidate? -- 1960-1969. Mr. Kennedy takes over ; Fiasco in Cuba ; Gary Cooper ; Glenn home and dry ; Marilyn Monroe ; Meredith registered ; Ultimatum to USSR ; Questioning the president ; President Kennedy assassinated ; The assassination ; L.B.J., the thirty-sixth president ; Coming through ; The Los Angeles riots ; Walt Disney ; Muhammad Ali's challenge ; The permissive society ; Harvesting the grapes of wrath ; The cost of the Vietnam War ; The death of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; A mule cortège ; At the Ambassador Hotel ; Nixon hits the TV networks ; Change in the White House ; Shooting for the moon ; Chappaquiddick -- 1970-1979. Louis Armstrong ; Anti-hijacking plans ; Vietnam ; Leaving Vietnam ; Sincere according to truth ; Kidnapping of Patricia Hearst ; Nixon resigns ; President Ford ; Fall of Saigon ; President Carter ; New York "blackouts" ; Three Mile Island -- 1980-1989. A fiasco in the desert ; American extremes ; John Lennon and handgun laws ; President Reagan ; Attempted assassination of President Reagan ; Clear and present danger ; Ronald Reagan vs. Darth Vader ; Chicago ; Invasion of Grenada ; Hype ; Jesse Jackson in Cuba ; TWA hostage crisis ; Explosion of Challenger space shuttle ; Gorbachev and Reagan playing chess ; Iran-contra hearings ; New anxieties ; The new, new Bush ; San Francisco earthquake ; The Berlin Wall -- 1990-2004. Reagan's achievement ; Fighting for oil ; The passing of the blue blazer ; The O.J. Simpson case ; Microsoft and monsters ; Bill and Monica ; Our long holiday from history is over ; 'These are my times and I must know them' ; Rosa Parks ; Y2K alert ; The scandal of pardons ; 9/11 America's day of terror ; Iraq and foreign policy ; Temperatures drop ; Was Saddam a threat or not?

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Alistair Cooke, the greatest of all twentieth century reporters of life in America to the rest of the world. To celebrate, we are publishing Reporting America - a magnificent new volume of previously unpublished Alistair Cooke reportage on the events that shaped modern American history, from the end of the Second World War through to the assassination of John Kennedy and of Bobby Kennedy (Cooke was actually present), the moon landings and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Almost all the material is previously unpublished in book form - transcripts of his legendary Letters from America, long-forgotten reports in the Guardian (whose correspondent in New York he was for 25 years) and other freshly discovered writings. The book is illustrated throughout in full colour with iconic photographs of the events Cooke is describing, and contains a very moving introduction by his daughter, Susan Cooke-Kittredge."-- Publisher description