An early follower of President Juan Perón, Cooke went on to form part and lead the revolutionary leftist wing of the Peronist movement.

His father, Juan Isaac Cooke, was a prominent politician of the Radical Civic Union who served as foreign minister during the presidency of Edelmiro Farrell, who rose to power in the 1943 coup d'état.

Cooke's impassioned speech at the Chamber of Deputies labeled the newspaper of having "gone against [our] nationality", and acting as an "obstacle against all proletarian demands in Latin America".

[11] He would later go to Cuba to join revolutionary efforts in the island, participating in active combat at the Bay of Pigs Invasion on 17 April 1961 alongside his wife, professor and essayist Alicia Eguren.

Among his best-known works is Apuntes para la militancia, published in 1964, in which he analyses the complex situation of Peronism in the aftermath of the 1955 coup d'état, identifying the movement's main adversaries, and the basic strategies laid out by the Peronist resistance.

In it, Cooke calls Peronism "the cursed fact of the bourgeois nation" (Spanish: el hecho maldito del país burgués).

The scattering ceremony was attended by his friend, Carlos Lafforgue, and Eguren's son by her second marriage, Pedro Catella, as well as numerous Peronist politicians and sympathisers.