Among the many dispatches Alistair Cooke filed as the Guardian's chief US correspondent from 1947 to 1972, his eyewitness report of the assassination of Robert Kennedy remains one of his most compelling. Following the BBC's release online of Cooke's Letter from America archive, we are publishing for the first time, alongside his coverage of the assassination and its aftermath, letters from the Guardian's own annals between Cooke and Alastair Hetherington, the paper's editor at the timencG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2jYrumw9Joqp6qmZrAcK3LoqqtmZmneqS7zqScZqeeYsGpsYyrppudoql6rLHNp5ydsV2WwLSt0qygp5mknryv