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Obituaries

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #450 on: November 23, 2017, 02:32:42 pm »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

CALIFORNIA RETROSPECTIVE

Remembering Manson's victims

3:00AM PST — Tuesday, November 21, 2017

The victims of the Manson family’s rampage in Benedict Canyon on August 9, 1969: Voytek Frykowski, left, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring and Abigail Folger. The next night, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were slain in their Los Feliz home. — Photographs: Associated Press.
The victims of the Manson family’s rampage in Benedict Canyon on August 9, 1969: Voytek Frykowski, left, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring
and Abigail Folger. The next night, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were slain in their Los Feliz home. — Photographs: Associated Press.


IN THE NEARLY FIVE DECADES since the notorious murders stunned Los Angeles, there has been endless fascination and revulsion surrounding Charles Manson and his cult “family”.

Manson did not fade quietly during his decades behind bars but continued to make headlines with interviews, bad conduct in prison and, more recently, health issues.

Manson's victims have sometimes gotten lost in the shadows of the mass killer's attention.

Here's who they were:


Benedict Canyon murders

August 9, 1969: The nighttime quiet of Benedict Canyon is broken by screams and gunshots. Police find a chilling scene: On the lawn lies a man's body, stabbed, bludgeoned and shot. Nearby is the body of a woman. “PIG” is written in blood on the front door. Inside are the bodies of Sharon Tate, the pregnant actress who rents the house with husband Roman Polanski, and hairstylist Jay Sebring. A fifth body is found outside.

The victims:

Sharon Tate, 26: An actress best known for her role in “Valley of the Dolls”, she was married to film director Polanski. She pleaded with the killers to spare the life of her unborn child, due in two weeks.

Jay Sebring, 35: A Hollywood hairdresser and former boyfriend of Tate's. Among his clients was David Geffen, head of Geffen Records, which recently released a Guns N' Roses album with a song written by Manson.

Voytek Frykowski, 32: A friend of Polanski's, he came from a wealthy Polish family and was staying with Polanski and Tate.

Abigail Folger, 25: The heir to the Folgers coffee fortune, she was romantically involved with Frykowski.

Steven Parent, 18: Visiting the resident of a guest house on the estate, he was just leaving as the murderers arrived and became their first victim.


Los Feliz murders

August 10, 1969: At a Los Feliz house the next night, another nauseating murder scene. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca have been stabbed. “DEATH TO PIGS” is scrawled in blood; on the refrigerator is the misspelled title of a Beatles song: “HEALTER SKELTER”. The writings eventually help police link the slayings.

The victims:

Leno LaBianca, 44, and Rosemary LaBianca, 38: Owners of a chain of L.A. grocery stores. Their house was chosen by Manson, who tied them up, then left the killing to others.


Other murders

July 31, 1969: Musician Gary Hinman is found stabbed to death in his Old Topanga Road home. The phrase “POLITICAL PIGGY” is scrawled in blood on his wall. Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil is arrested driving Hinman's Volkswagen bus.

Gary Hinman, 34: A musician who befriended the Manson group. Family members tortured him for two days at his Topanga home before killing him in a dispute over money.

August 25, 1969: Donald “Shorty” Shea, a horse wrangler at the Spahn Movie Ranch near Chatsworth, is slain. It's believed Manson's followers killed him for fear he was a police informant.

Donald “Shorty” Shea, 35: An aspiring actor and a ranch hand. His dismembered body was found eight years later.


The aftermath

October 1969: Raids on the remote Barker Ranch near Death Valley link some of the killings to a band of young, hippie-looking petty criminals.

Manson, a fledgling songwriter who knew Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, had been to the Benedict Canyon house when the group's producer lived there.

June 15, 1970 — January 25, 1971: After their arrests in 1969, Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel are tried for murder. All are found guilty and sentenced to death.

October 1971: Charles “Tex” Watson, tried separately, is found guilty and sentenced to death.

February 18, 1972: The death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Now the convicts are eligible for parole hearings.


The killers: Where are they now?

Patricia Krenwinkel was a secretary when she met Manson at a party. She quit her job the next day and joined Manson's family.

She was found guilty of seven counts of murder in the killings, including stabbing the LaBiancas to death and writing “DEATH TO PIGS” on the wall in the victims' blood.

Krenwinkel, along with Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten, later condemned Manson and urged young people not to think of him as a hero.

After Atkins' death, Krenwinkel, now 69, became California's longest-serving female inmate. According to state prison officials, Krenwinkel is a model inmate involved in rehabilitative programs at the prison.

She is being housed at the California Institution for Women in Corona. Late last year, state parole officials postponed a decision on setting Krenwinkel free after her attorney made new claims that she had been abused by Manson or another person. The inquiry into the allegations took nearly six months. On June 22, parole commissioners again denied parole for Krenwinkel.

Leslie Van Houten: A jury found that the former homecoming princess was guilty of holding down Rosemary LaBianca in her Los Feliz home while an accomplice stabbed her. She was convicted of murder and conspiracy in 1978 at her third trial for the crimes, just months after she'd been released on bail after a hung jury verdict.

Van Houten said she was introduced to Manson by a boyfriend and came to view him as Jesus Christ, believing in his bizarre plan to commit murders and spark a race war.

She is serving her life sentence at the California Institution for Women in Corona, prison officials say, and has been disciplinary-free her entire sentence.

Van Houten, 68, told a parole board in 2002 that she was “deeply ashamed” of her role in the killings. “I take very seriously not just the murders but what made me make myself available to someone like Manson.”

A state review board recommended parole for her in April, but Governor Jerry Brown reversed that decision. She had previously been denied parole 19 times.

In September, the board again recommended parole.

Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson's self-described right-hand man was sentenced to death for his part in the killings but was later given life in prison after the death penalty was overturned.

In prison, Watson married, divorced, fathered four children and became an ordained minister.

Watson, 71, is housed at the Mule Creek Prison in Ione, California, about 40 miles outside Sacramento, where he works as a janitor and attends Bible studies and services in the prison chapel, according to the ministry's website. He has been denied parole 17 times. His most recent parole hearing was held on October 27, when a panel once again found him unsuitable for release from prison for at least five more years.

Susan Atkins, a former topless dancer who became one of Manson's closest disciples, died in prison in 2009 at age 61.

Atkins, called the “scariest of the Manson girls” by a former prosecutor, confessed to killing actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, who was stabbed 16 times as she pleaded with the killers to spare her unborn son, and then hanged.

At Atkins' sentencing, at which was condemned to death, she taunted the court, saying, “You'd best lock your doors,” and “watch your own kids.”

Her sentence was later converted to life in prison.

In prison, Atkins embraced Christianity and apologized for her role in the crimes, and prison staff advocated unsuccessfully for her release in 2005.

She was denied parole 13 times.

Bruce Davis, 75, was convicted in 1972 for taking part in the killings of Gary Hinman, an aspiring musician, and Donald “Shorty” Shea, a stuntman and a ranch hand at the Chatsworth ranch where Manson and his followers lived.

Both murders occurred before the Tate-LaBianca killings, in which Davis did not participate.

Hinman's body was found in his home, with the words “POLITICAL PIGGY” drawn on the wall with his blood.

In January 2016, Goveror Jerry Brown rejected his parole, the third time a governor has done so, saying that Davis remains a danger to public safety. In his decision, Brown said that the “horror of the murders committed by the Manson family in 1969 and the fear they instilled in the public will never be forgotten.”

Davis has been denied parole 30 times.


The final word

“People are saying that this should be some kind of relief, but oddly enough it really isn't. While Charlie may be gone, it's the ones that are still alive that perpetrate everything, and it was up to their imaginations for what brutal things were going to be done. In an odd way, I see them as much more dangerous individuals.”

— Debra Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate, in an interview with ABC News


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« Reply #451 on: November 23, 2017, 02:50:19 pm »


from the print edition of the Los Angeles Times....

EDITORIAL: Let the Manson obsession die

The infamous cult leader became a pop culture fixture.
It is long past time for the world to move on.


By the LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD  | 4:00AM PST - Tuesday, November 21, 2017

CHARLES MANSON's bizarre plan to ignite a race war was unknown to Los Angeles in August 1969, as were his pathetic collection of young, rapt followers, his bizarre misinterpretation of Beatles lyrics, and Manson himself. What L.A. knew at the time was that seven people had been brutally murdered in two homes, apparently by invasion-style killers who left little clue as to motive. Crime was up nationwide, the turbulent 1960s were nearing their finale and the world seemed to have lost its mind. The city was terrified.

The closest modern comparison may be disco-era New York, eight years later, when a killer who called himself Son of Sam stalked the streets with a .44 caliber revolver, shot 13 people and wrote mocking notes to police.

David Berkowitz did his own killing (although he has claimed that cultists or demons were partly to blame) and Manson did none of his, instead sending his hangers-on to do his grisly work.

In both cases, though, the killers instigated urban panic, gained media notoriety before being caught and, afterward, cemented their presence in the public mind and popular culture, assisted by endless news stories, books, documentaries and dramas.

Manson and Berkowitz were rank amateurs by the murderous standards set by more recent killers, who acted in single spasms of violence — without cultish followings and with motives varying from marital spite (as in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Rancho Tehama, California, shootings) to religio-political (as in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack) to the still-unknown (as with the Las Vegas mass shooting in October). But in the near future the names of those killers will be recalled only sporadically, perhaps with the help of a quick Google query and a check of Wikipedia. The Son of Sam nickname may linger in New Yorkers' memory, but the name David Berkowitiz is fading.

But we will remember Manson.

Why is that? After the murders and the trial, Manson did nothing but sit in prison — as befits someone who misused his odd power over others by directing them to commit multiple murders. He forfeited his freedom and died an inmate.

But the rest of us have kept him alive. While some media organizations (although not this newspaper) have made a point not to repeat the names of suspected mass killers in the belief that doing so gives them unwarranted fame, there is no such decorum with Manson. He is a fixture in the popular imagination, a point underscored in the film Natural Born Killers, itself a send-up of the intimate link between mass murder (or serial killings or spree killings or one of the other carefully categorized distinctions) and pop culture. “Yeah, it's pretty hard to beat the king,” admits Woody Harrelson's clearly envious Mickey Knox in the 1994 movie. Guns N' Roses recorded a middling song Manson wrote. Pop act Marilyn Manson named himself partially after the killer.

It's hard to argue that Manson's notoriety did him any good. Although he was sentenced to death, he was spared after a court ruling striking down California's death penalty statute. But he never got parole, despite repeated pleas for release.

Neither did any of his followers. Susan Atkins died in prison. Patricia Krenwinkel remains locked up, as does Charles “Tex” Watson. A parole board ruled in favor of Leslie Van Houten earlier this year, but it remains to be seen whether Governor Jerry Brown will reject the decision, as he did a year ago.

The place of the Manson killings in the public mind may help ensure that none of the surviving murderers is ever paroled, leaving this nagging thought: If these killings had not resonated as they did, and were just seven scattered murders, would the five have been released long ago? Is parole actually granted or withheld based on the crimes themselves and on evidence of remorse and rehabilitation, as it should be, or instead based on the publicity that can be marshaled for or against the inmates?

It is very much a live question, as California re-envigorates its parole system in response to last year's Proposition 57. For Manson himself, though, there never was much of a question at all. He was such a troublemaker in prison that he was almost certainly never going to be released. He's been effectively dead to the world for more than 40 years, except to the extent that we insisted on keeping him alive in print, on television, in pop music and film. It would be nice if now, finally, we would just let him die.


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« Reply #452 on: December 20, 2017, 10:01:51 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston archbishop at center of church
sex-abuse scandal, dies at 86


He resigned in 2002 amid the darkest crisis to face the Catholic Church in the modern era.

By EMILY LANGER | 1:55AM EST — Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Cardinal Law speaks at a Mass of healing at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston in 2002. — Photograph: Matt Stone/Reuters.
Cardinal Law speaks at a Mass of healing at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston in 2002. — Photograph: Matt Stone/Reuters.

CARDINAL BERNARD F. LAW, the Boston archbishop who became one of the most influential Catholic leaders in the United States before resigning in 2002 amid revelations that he and other prelates had known for years of rampant child molestation by parish priests, a scandal that has been called the church's darkest crisis of the modern era, has died at 86.

The Vatican announced in a statement that Cardinal Law died “after a long illness,” without offering further details. He had been recently hospitalized in Rome.

For more than half a century, Cardinal Law dedicated himself to the church, an institution that became his home after his itinerant upbringing as the son of a commercial and military aviator. As he rose from parish priest to Boston archbishop — the steward of one of the most Catholic American cities — he promoted traditional Catholic doctrine and envisioned the church as a guarantor of social justice in the 20th century.

He began his ministry in segregated Mississippi, where he used his authority as editor of a diocesan publication to denounce racism. Later, as a bishop in Missouri, he made room at a seminary for about 200 Vietnamese men religious who had left their home after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Law's theology transcended scripture to encompass affordable housing and literacy education. Poor countries, like poor parishes, he argued, at times deserved debt forgiveness from their creditors. Years before Pope John Paul II began his historic efforts to mend the church's scarred relationship with the Jewish community, Cardinal Law sought interreligious dialogue.

On matters of theology, he shared John Paul's doctrinal conservatism. He became one of the pope's “point men” in the United States, said David Gibson, an authority on the Catholic Church, as John Paul sought to reshape its ranks by identifying like-minded priests and installing them as bishops, archbishops and cardinals.

But controversy engulfed Cardinal Law in the early 2000s, when a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by The Boston Globe, later dramatized in the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, led to revelations that church officials had covered up sexual abuse in the priesthood for decades by shuffling alleged offenders among parishes.

Cardinal Law was never accused of committing sexual abuse, and he denounced the offense as a “terrible evil”. But for many Catholics as well as non-Catholics, he became a symbol of the church's failure to protect the young from priests who exploited the trust that traditionally accompanies their role.

“While I would hope that it would be understood that I never intended to place a priest in a position where I felt he would be a risk to children,” Cardinal Law said in an apology in November 2002, “the fact of the matter remains that I did assign priests who had committed sexual abuse.”

In the course of legal proceedings arising from the scandal, Cardinal Law was called to give depositions in several civil cases and, in February 2003, appeared before a criminal grand jury considering potential indictments of him and other high-ranking Boston-area prelates.

Later that year, then-Massachusetts attorney general Thomas F. Reilly concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the Boston archdiocese or its leaders. But his office released a report on the matter, declaring that “the mistreatment of children was so massive and so prolonged that it borders on the unbelievable.”

Although not bearing sole responsibility for the wrongdoing, Cardinal Law, the report found, “had direct knowledge of the scope, duration and severity of the crisis experienced by children in the Archdiocese; he participated directly in crucial decisions concerning the assignment of abusive priests, decisions that typically increased the risk to children.”

Among the most notorious offenders in the Boston area was Father John J. Geoghan. Church documents unearthed as the scandal was uncovered showed that Cardinal Law had known of accusations against Geoghan and still permitted the priest to continue his pastoral work. In all, Geoghan would be accused of abusing 150 children, mainly boys, over decades and in numerous parishes.

Another priest, Peter J. Frost, was removed from active ministry in 1992 and later described himself in a letter to Cardinal Law as a “sex addict,” also revealing that one of his victims had committed suicide.

In later correspondence, Cardinal Law told Frost he hoped the priest would one day “return to an appropriate ministry, bringing with [him] the wisdom which emerges from difficult experience.” Frost was ultimately removed from the clerical state.


Cardinal Law, center, appears in Boston's Suffolk County Superior Court in 2002 for a hearing in the Geoghan case. — Photograph: George Martell/The Boston Herald.
Cardinal Law, center, appears in Boston's Suffolk County Superior Court in 2002 for a hearing in the Geoghan case.
 — Photograph: George Martell/The Boston Herald.


In a 2002 civil deposition related to the case of Paul R. Shanley, a priest who was later defrocked and then convicted in 2005 of child rape and other charges, Cardinal Law presented himself as a leader who had delegated many personnel matters to his subordinates.

He attributed the shroud of secrecy about abusive priests to concern for victims and their privacy. A victims' lawyer pressed him on the point, suggesting that “there have been other focuses, have there not, Cardinal Law?”

“There have been and there are,” he replied, according to an account in The Globe.

“One of those has been to avoid scandal in the church?” the lawyer asked.

“That's correct,” Cardinal Law said.

As reports mounted of coverups in dioceses around the world, some church leaders argued that they had been ignorant of the trauma of sexual abuse and that they had treated offending priests not as criminals, but as sinners deserving of mercy. That defense was insufficient for many victims and other critics, who charged that church officials — exemplified by Cardinal Law — had guarded their ranks at the expense of children.

“Many could read his career as a cautionary tale about the perils of power in the church,” said Gibson, a national reporter for the Religion News Service and author of The Coming Catholic Church (2003). “He became a creature of and a victim of the clerical culture…. There were bishops right, left and center who did the same things that he did.”

Cardinal Law stepped down as archbishop on December 13th, 2002, and later moved to Rome, where he served, until shortly before his 80th birthday, as archpriest of a basilica. His stature, achieved after years of ecclesiastical leadership, made his downfall particularly painful for the faithful who continued to love the church while recognizing that it had grievously erred.


An itinerant childhood

Bernard Francis Law was born on November 4th, 1931, in Torreón, Mexico. His father, a pilot, was Catholic; his mother was Presbyterian before converting to her husband's faith.

As a youth, Cardinal Law made frequent moves with his parents, including to Colombia, Panama and the Virgin Islands. In St. Thomas, he was elected president of his mostly black senior class, according to a biographical sketch in the book Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness (2002).

He studied medieval history at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1953. After completing his religious training at St. Joseph Seminary in Louisiana and the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio, he was ordained in 1961.

His first assignment was in the Natchez-Jackson diocese in Mississippi. Amid boiling racial hatred, the young priest helped found and then led an interfaith council on human relations. A Unitarian minister who served with him was shot, according to the biographical sketch, and the home of a rabbi was bombed. Cardinal Law reportedly received death threats.

Later, in Washington, he joined the organization now known as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and led a committee on interreligious understanding. He served as bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri before succeeding Humberto Medeiros as archbishop of Boston's 2 million Catholics in 1984. The next year, he was elevated to cardinal, a prince of the church.

In Boston, Cardinal Law was credited with helping to ease race relations during the divisive court-ordered busing for public schools. He urged voters to make abortion, which the Catholic Church opposes, “the critical issue” in elections. Politically well-connected, he spoke as frequently as once a month with George H.W. Bush during his presidency, The Boston Globe reported.

In international affairs, Cardinal Law became a visible envoy for the church. He met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro eight years before John Paul's historic visit to the Communist country in 1998, traveled to Vietnam, and led humanitarian relief efforts after natural disasters in Latin America.


Cardinal Law was pursued by reporters as he arrived in Rome in April 2002. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Cardinal Law was pursued by reporters as he arrived in Rome in April 2002. — Photograph: Associated Press.

In 2002, as the sexual-abuse scandal intensified, The Washington Post interviewed Thomas H. O'Connor, a historian at Boston College who had followed Cardinal Law's career. Reflecting on his accomplishments, O'Connor paraphrased a line from Shakespeare's tragedy “Julius Caesar”.

“There's going to be a lot of good,” the historian said, “interred with his bones.”


‘Betraying the sacred trust’

Cardinal Law's public response to sexual abuse within the clergy could be traced at least to 1992, when he was confronted by claims that a former Massachusetts priest, James R. Porter, had molested dozens of children in the 1960s. Cardinal Law decried “the tragedy of a priest betraying the sacred trust of priestly service” but described abusive clergy as “the rare exception”.

In 1993, Porter was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. Three years later, a Waltham, Massachusetts, woman filed the first in what would be a raft of lawsuits against another priest — Geoghan — whom she said had abused her three sons.

Through a lawyer, Cardinal Law admitted that, as archbishop in September 1984, he was advised of accusations that Geoghan had molested seven boys. Geoghan nonetheless was transferred to another parish, where he was permitted to lead altar boys. Reports of abuse continued.

“It is most heartening to know that things have gone well for you and that you are ready to resume your efforts with a renewed zeal and enthusiasm,” Cardinal Law wrote to Geoghan in 1989, as reported by The Boston Globe, after moving the priest to his new parish. Church records showed that Geoghan had been medically cleared for work.

In 1998, under Cardinal Law's leadership and with John Paul's approval, Geoghan was defrocked. He was strangled in 2003 by a fellow inmate at a correctional facility in Massachusetts, where he was serving a prison sentence for fondling a boy at a pool.

The Boston archdiocese reached settlements with many of Geoghan's reported victims. Such settlements, made in dioceses across the United States, were estimated to have cost the church more than $2 billion.

In January 2002, Cardinal Law issued a public apology for his reassignment of Geoghan. In the same announcement — belatedly, to many critics — he said that priests would be required to notify law enforcement authorities of alleged sexual abuse.

In the ensuing months, Cardinal Law came under growing pressure to resign. His public expressions of remorse culminated with his remarks in November 2002, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, where he said that “the forgiving love of God gives me the courage to beg forgiveness of those who have suffered because of what I did.”

He acknowledged the “devastating effects of this horrible sin” — substance abuse, depression, in some cases suicide — and sought to assuage the sense of shame many victims suffer by assuring them that the perpetrators were to blame. He urged anyone living “with the awful secret of sexual abuse by clergy or by anyone else to come forward so that you may begin to experience healing.”

“No one is helped by keeping such things secret,” he said. “The secret of sexual abuse needs to be brought out of the darkness and into the healing light of Jesus Christ.”

His resignation came the following month. Cardinal Law later was a chaplain at the Sisters of Mercy of Alma convent in Clinton, Maryland, and maintained posts on Vatican committees, including the one that nominates bishops.

He assumed his post at the papal basilica of Saint Mary Major in 2004. After John Paul's death in the next year, Cardinal Law participated in the conclave that selected Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, as the new pope.

Cardinal Law had no known immediate survivors.

In his apology at the Boston cathedral, he reflected on the priests whom he had known in his youth, and who had made an enduring impact on his life.

“They represented all that was good to me,” said Cardinal Law. “Like countless others, I placed great trust in them.”


• Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. She has written about national and world leaders, celebrated figures in science and the arts, and heroes from all walks of life.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/cardinal-bernard-law-boston-archbishop-at-center-of-church-sex-abuse-scandal-dies-at-86/2017/12/20/8e679e8c-e533-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html
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« Reply #453 on: February 01, 2018, 12:11:22 pm »


from STUFF/Fairfax NZ....

Auckland journalist Pat Booth dies aged 88

By HARRISON CHRISTIAN | 4:18PM — Wednesday, 31 January 2018

Veteran journalist Pat Booth. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.
Veteran journalist Pat Booth. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.

AUCKLAND JOURNALIST Pat Booth has died aged 88.

Booth was known for his stories about the “Mr Asia” drug syndicate in the 1970s, and his coverage of the Arthur Allan Thomas case in the same decade.

He was assistant editor of the Auckland Star when he attended Thomas' retrial in 1973, and became concerned about the police case.

Thomas was wrongfully convicted of the murders of Harvey and Jeannette Crew after police fabricated evidence against him; one of the first cases of major public erosion of trust in police.

Booth wrote a book, “Trial by Ambush”, campaigning for Thomas to be pardoned.

The campaign was ultimately successful, with Thomas receiving a Royal Pardon and compensation of $950,000 for his nine years in prison.

A Royal Commission report stated officers had used a rifle and ammunition taken from Thomas' farm to fabricate evidence against him.


Pat Booth talks to Allan Thomas and Ray Thomas, family members of Arthur Allan Thomas.
Pat Booth talks to Allan Thomas and Ray Thomas, family members of Arthur Allan Thomas.

It was also Booth who dubbed Kiwi drug trafficker Marty Johnstone “Mr Asia” in a series of stories for the Auckland Star in 1978.

He uncovered Johnstone's international drug syndicate and pursued it for more than a year — a crusade that led to death threats and break-ins at his family home.

Booth died in a Kumeu rest home on Wednesday.

Fairfax Media's former head of Auckland suburban newspapers, Matthew Gray, worked under Booth when he was editor-in-chief, and was mentored by him before taking on the role himself.

He said Booth was a stalwart of his community and a formidable investigative journalist.

“He was a man of superior intellect and wit, and it was a privilege to work with him and to benefit from his wisdom,” said Gray.

“He certainly led the way in New Zealand journalism and it was great to see him in action and just be a part of the whole Pat Booth world, and it's a great shame that he's passed on; there will never be another one like him.”


Pat Booth's legacy will be long remembered, former colleagues say. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.
Pat Booth's legacy will be long remembered, former colleagues say. — Photograph: Fiona Goodall.

PJ Taylor, news director for STUFF's Eastern Courier and Papakura Courier, described Booth as a “pioneering journalism legend”.

“People often struggle to remember the names of journalists in New Zealand, but Pat Booth was one that stuck,” said Taylor.

“It was a sign of respect for his integrity and impartiality that Pat Booth was probably the only journalist in Auckland that could hold a senior journalism job and be a people's elected representative, at the same time.”

“That was during the early 2000s, when Pat was a much-admired East Auckland resident and chairman of the Howick Community Board, in the former Manukau City Council jurisdiction, while being our editor-in-chief at Suburban Newspapers Ltd.”

Outside of the general news rounds, Booth was also an avid sports fan and penned a biography about the All Black Don “The Boot” Clarke, which was a national best-seller, Taylor said.

“His passing is really the end on an era for the pioneering campaigning journalist.”

More than 60 years after he started as a rookie reporter at the Hawera Star, Booth was a columnist for Fairfax Media in his later years. He was also a member of the Waitemata District Health Board for more than a decade.

The DHB's chief executive Dr Dale Bramley said Booth's legacy would be long remembered.

“Pat always had the community at heart. He was a great New Zealander who always got to the truth of the matter and endeavoured to make things better for his fellow man.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Off Pat — The world of Pat Booth

 • Waitemata DHB says goodbye to renowned journalist


https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/101049609
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« Reply #454 on: March 14, 2018, 06:26:05 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power
of the human mind, dies at 76


Hawking overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries
of the cosmos and become one of the planet's most renowned science popularizers.


By JOEL ACHENBACH and BOYCE RENSBERGER | 12:01AM EDT — Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York April 12th, 2016. — Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters.
Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York April 12th, 2016.
 — Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters.


STEPHEN W. HAWKING, the British theoretical physicist who overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become a globally celebrated symbol of the power of the human mind, has died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

His family announced the death but did not provide any further details.

Unable to move a muscle, speechless but for a computer-synthesized voice, Dr. Hawking had suffered since the age of 21 from a degenerative motor neuron disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he found the strength to complete his doctorate and rise to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.

Dr. Hawking eventually became one of the planet's most renowned science popularizers, and he embraced the attention, traveling the world, meeting with presidents, visiting Antarctica and Easter Island, and flying on a special “zero-gravity” jet whose parabolic flight let Dr. Hawking float through the cabin as if he were in outer space.

“My goal is simple,” he once said. “It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” He spent much of his career searching for a way to reconcile Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics and produce a “Theory of Everything”.

He wrote an international best seller, A Brief History of Time (1988), which delved into the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. He deliberately set out to write a mass-market primer on an often incomprehensible subject.

Although the book was sometimes derided as being dense, and had a reputation for being owned more than read, it sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 20 languages, and inspired a mini-empire of similar books from Dr. Hawking, including “The Universe in a Nutshell and A Briefer History of Time.

With his daughter, Lucy, he wrote a series of children's books about a young intergalactic traveler named George. His blunt 2013 memoir, My Brief History, explored his development in science as well as his turbulent marriages. In addition, Dr. Hawking was the subject of a 1991 documentary, A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris, and countless newspaper and magazine articles.

With the aid of a voice synthesizer, controlled by his fingers on a keyboard, he gave speeches around the world, from Chile to China. He played himself on such TV programs as “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons”, the latter featuring Dr. Hawking telling the show's lazy animated patriarch, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is interesting, Homer. I may have to steal it.”

He insisted that his reputation as the second coming of Albert Einstein had gotten out of control through “media hype”.

“I fit the part of a disabled genius,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “At least, I'm disabled — even though I'm not a genius like Einstein…. The public wants heroes. They made Einstein a hero, and now they're making me a hero, though with much less justification.”

His scientific achievements included breakthroughs in understanding the extreme conditions of black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.

His most famous theoretical breakthrough was to find an exception to this seemingly unforgiving law of physics: black holes are not really black, he realized, but rather can emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary, and can potentially evaporate. Scientists refer to such theoretical emanations as “Hawking radiation”.

This revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.

Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics — achieving a kind of physics trifecta.

“Black holes ain't as black as they are painted,” Dr. Hawking once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. “They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside, and possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out.”

He also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that so far they haven't be discovered. “This is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel prize,” he joked.


Early life

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8th, 1942 — the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death, he liked to point out. His father was a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active in the Liberal Party.

Both parents were Oxford-educated, and Stephen — the eldest of four siblings — grew up surrounded by books. But he did not show particular academic promise, despite an obvious streak of brilliance that caused his friends to nickname him “Einstein”.

“I always wanted to know how everything worked,” he told Omni magazine. “I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn't often go back together.”

He was a bit lazy, and a bon vivant, as he later would admit. After being admitted to the University of Oxford, he skimped on his studies and enjoyed carousing with fellow members of the Oxford Boat Club, for which he was a tactically savvy coxswain. He graduated in 1962 and did just well enough on his final exam to earn admission to the University of Cambridge to pursue a doctorate.

“Physics was always the most boring subject at school because it was so easy and obvious. Chemistry was much more fun because unexpected things, such as explosions, kept happening,” Dr. Hawking wrote in his memoir. “But physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.”

Then came what he later referred to as “that terrible thing.” He'd noticed at Oxford that he'd become increasingly clumsy and would sometimes stumble and fall for no obvious reason. Tests revealed motor neuron disease; he could not expect to live more than a couple of years.

After a period of despondency in which he holed up in his room and listened to Wagner, he attended a New Year's Eve party at which he met a young student named Jane Wilde. Their courtship spurred his will to live. They married in 1965.

“We had this very strong sense at the time that our generation lived anyway under this most awful nuclear cloud — that with a four-minute warning the world itself could likely end,” Jane Hawking later told the British newspaper The Observer. “That made us feel above all that we had to do our bit, that we had to follow an idealistic course in life. That may seem naive now, but that was exactly the spirit in which Stephen and I set out in the Sixties — to make the most of whatever gifts were given us.”

They would have three children before his condition deteriorated to near-complete paralysis.

He received a doctorate in 1966 and became a post-graduate research physicist at Cambridge, where he hoped to study under the celeberated astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Instead, he was assigned to Dennis Sciama — a disappointment, at first.

But, as he later wrote, “This turned out to be a good thing. Hoyle was abroad a lot and I wouldn't have seen much of him. Sciama on the other hand was there, and was always stimulating.”

A few years later, while on the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, he formed a close collaboration with Cambridge colleague Roger Penrose. They developed a theorem that the universe has not always existed.

The two showed that if the theory of relativity is true, the universe must have sprung into existence, out of what appeared to be nothing, at a specific moment in the past and from a place where gravity became so strong that space and time are curved beyond recognition — what is known as a “singularity”.

At the remarkably young age of 32, Dr. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the most prestigious in theoretical physics. He joined the Cambridge faculty in 1973 as a research assistant in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics; he was promoted to professor of gravitational physics in 1977.


Early fame

While at Cambridge, Dr. Hawking began to question the big-bang theory, which by then most people had accepted.

Perhaps, he suggested, there was never a start and would be no end, but just change — a constant transition of one “universe” giving way to another through glitches in space-time. All the while, Dr. Hawking was digging into exploding black holes, string theory and the birth of black holes in our galaxy.

Dr. Hawking was known to weigh in rather playfully on grand cosmological questions. He once suggested that if the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, time would run backward. He later said that he'd changed his mind on that.

He gained headlines when he declared that humans should colonize other worlds to hedge their bets against the possible destruction of this one.

In an updated, illustrated (easier to handle) version of “A Brief History of Time”, he added a chapter on wormholes — back-alley cosmic tunnels that might conceivably let someone travel back in time. Prancing on the edge of the plausible, he nonetheless stuck to what science can tell us.

“He thought about the deep and important questions in novel ways,” said David Spergel, Princeton University's chairman of astrophysics. “Hawking's important contribution was identifying new ways to answer those questions and formulating mathematically sophisticated ways of connecting general relativity and quantum mechanics.”

Dr. Hawking had sought to come up with a so-called Theory of Everything that would essentially put an end to theoretical physics by answering all the outstanding questions. But whether such a theory can ever be found is unclear.

Dr. Hawking said our universe might not be the only one there is — that many more may be popping into existence all around us. He suggested that “cosmic wormholes” briefly link those universes to ours and that subatomic particles may travel from one universe to another through them, accounting for some of the strange behavior of particles that physicists observe.

The power of Dr. Hawking's celebrity was measured at times by the tabloid coverage he drew for his complicated personal life. His wife Jane spent hours every day bathing, washing and feeding Dr. Hawking, who required constant nursing care. He developed pneumonia in 1985 on a trip to Geneva, and Jane battled doctors who wanted to turn off his life support.

But the marriage grew strained, in part because of her Christian faith and his adamant atheism, and in part because of what she called his remote and stoic temperament. She described him as an “all-powerful emperor” who seemed blind to how demanding his illness became for her as she also took care of their young children. He refused measures that would have made life easier for her, and she felt it was “too cruel” to coerce him to see it her way.

They grew apart and, in 1990, just shy of their 25th wedding anniversary, separated when Dr. Hawking left Jane for his nurse, Elaine Mason. He married Elaine five years later after his divorce from Jane became final. Dr. Hawking called his second marriage, which also ended in divorce, “passionate and tempestuous”.

Survivors include his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim.

Dr. Hawking's offices were filled with photographs of him standing with admirers ranging from popes (he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) to the late Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov.

The theoretical physicist once described his heroes as “Galileo, Einstein, Darwin and Marilyn Monroe”. The last was of particular appeal to the scientist who hung posters of her and collected Monroe-related bric a brac.

“My daughter and secretary gave me posters of her, my son gave me a Marilyn bag and my wife a Marilyn towel,” he once said. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the universe.”


__________________________________________________________________________

• Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk at The Washington Post. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990.

• Boyce Rensberger is a former Washington Post science writer and editor.

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from The New York Times....

Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe
and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76


A physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Hawking did not allow his physical limitations
to hinder his quest to answer “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”


By DENNIS OVERBYE | Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Stephen Hawking became a leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes. His work led to a turning point in the history of modern physics. — Photograph: Terry Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Stephen Hawking became a leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes. His work led to a turning point in the history of modern physics.
 — Photograph: Terry Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.


STEPHEN W. HAWKING, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University.

“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku,  a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.

Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything”, was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.

Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.

What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He was given only a few years to live.

The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.

He went on to become his generation's leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.

That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.

Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first — that particles could be coming out of a black hole. “I wasn't looking for them at all,” he recalled in an interview in 1978. “I merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.”

That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title Black Hole Explosions?, is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.

The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.

“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don't think he will survive it.

“On the other hand,” he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”


Dr. Hawking pushed the limits in his professional and personal life. In 2007, when he was 65, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727. — Photograph: Zero Gravity Corporation/Associated Press.
Dr. Hawking pushed the limits in his professional and personal life. In 2007, when he was 65, he took part in a zero-gravity flight
aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727. — Photograph: Zero Gravity Corporation/Associated Press.


Dennis W. Sciama, a cosmologist and Dr. Hawking's thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking's thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”

Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: “Trying to understand Hawking's discovery better has been a source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still feels new.”

In 2002, Dr. Hawking said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.

He was a man who pushed the limits — in his intellectual life, to be sure, but also in his professional and personal lives. He traveled the globe to scientific meetings, visiting every continent, including Antarctica; wrote best-selling books about his work; married twice; fathered three children; and was not above appearing on The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation or The Big Bang Theory.

He celebrated his 60th birthday by going up in a hot-air balloon. The same week, he also crashed his electric-powered wheelchair while speeding around a corner in Cambridge, breaking his leg.

In April 2007, a few months after his 65th birthday, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting periods of weightlessness. It was a prelude to a hoped-for trip to space with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company aboard SpaceShipTwo.

Asked why he took such risks, Dr. Hawking said, “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”

His own spirit left many in awe.

“What a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal of England and Dr. Hawking's longtime colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination.”


Studies came Easy

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day, he liked to point out, after the death of Galileo, who had begun the study of gravity. His mother, the former Isobel Walker, had gone to Oxford to avoid the bombs that fell nightly during the Blitz of London. His father, Frank Hawking, was a prominent research biologist.

The oldest of four children, Stephen was a mediocre student at St. Albans School in London, though his innate brilliance was recognized by some classmates and teachers.

Later, at University College, Oxford, he found his studies in mathematics and physics so easy that he rarely consulted a book or took notes. He got by with a thousand hours of work in three years, or one hour a day, he estimated. “Nothing seemed worth making an effort for,” he said.

The only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt with “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”


Dr. Hawking and his first wife, the former Jane Wilde, in 1990. The couple married in 1965. He said the marriage gave him “something to live for”. — Photograph: David Montgomery/Getty Images.
Dr. Hawking and his first wife, the former Jane Wilde, in 1990. The couple married in 1965. He said
the marriage gave him “something to live for”. — Photograph: David Montgomery/Getty Images.


Upon graduation, he moved to Cambridge. Before he could begin his research, however, he was stricken by what his research adviser, Dr. Sciama, came to call “that terrible thing.”

The young Hawking had been experiencing occasional weakness and falling spells for several years. Shortly after his 21st birthday, in 1963, doctors told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They gave him less than three years to live.

His first response was severe depression. He dreamed he was going to be executed, he said. Then, against all odds, the disease appeared to stabilize. Though he was slowly losing control of his muscles, he was still able to walk short distances and perform simple tasks, though laboriously, like dressing and undressing. He felt a new sense of purpose.

“When you are faced with the possibility of an early death,” he recalled, “it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do.”

In 1965, he married Jane Wilde, a student of linguistics. Now, by his own account, he not only had “something to live for”; he also had to find a job, which gave him an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate.

His illness, however, had robbed him of the ability to write down the long chains of equations that are the tools of the cosmologist's trade. Characteristically, he turned this handicap into a strength, gathering his energies for daring leaps of thought, which, in his later years, he often left for others to codify in proper mathematical language.

“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” Dr. Hawking said. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”

By necessity, he concentrated on problems that could be attacked through “pictures and diagrams,” adopting geometric techniques that had been devised in the early 1960s by the mathematician Roger Penrose and a fellow Cambridge colleague, Brandon Carter, to study general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity.

Black holes are a natural prediction of that theory, which explains how mass and energy “curve” space, the way a sleeping person causes a mattress to sag. Light rays will bend as they traverse a gravitational field, just as a marble rolling on the sagging mattress will follow an arc around the sleeper.

Too much mass or energy in one spot could cause space to sag without end; an object that was dense enough, like a massive collapsing star, could wrap space around itself like a magician's cloak and disappear, shrinking inside to a point of infinite density called a singularity, a cosmic dead end, where the known laws of physics would break down: a black hole.

Einstein himself thought this was absurd when the possibility was pointed out to him.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and other sophisticated tools of observation and analysis, however, astronomers have identified hundreds of objects that are too massive and dark to be anything but black holes, including a super-massive one at the center of the Milky Way. According to current theory, the universe should contain billions more.

As part of his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, Dr. Hawking showed that when you ran the film of the expanding universe backward, you would find that such a singularity had to have existed sometime in cosmic history; space and time, that is, must have had a beginning. He, Dr. Penrose and a rotating cast of colleagues went on to publish a series of theorems about the behavior of black holes and the dire fate of anything caught in them.


Dr. Hawking in his office at the University of Cambridge in December 2011. His only complaint about his speech synthesizer, which was manufactured in California, was that it gave him an American accent. — Photograph: Sarah Lee/London Science Museum/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
Dr. Hawking in his office at the University of Cambridge in December 2011. His only complaint about his speech synthesizer, which was manufactured
in California, was that it gave him an American accent. — Photograph: Sarah Lee/London Science Museum/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


A Calculation in His Head

Dr. Hawking's signature breakthrough resulted from a feud with the Israeli theoretical physicist Jacob Bekenstein, then a Princeton graduate student, about whether black holes could be said to have entropy, a thermodynamic measure of disorder. Dr. Bekenstein said they could, pointing out a close analogy between the laws that Dr. Hawking and his colleagues had derived for black holes and the laws of thermodynamics.

Dr. Hawking said no. To have entropy, a black hole would have to have a temperature. But warm objects, from a forehead to a star, radiate a mixture of electromagnetic radiation, depending on their exact temperatures. Nothing could escape a black hole, and so its temperature had to be zero. “I was very down on Bekenstein,” Dr. Hawking recalled.

To settle the question, Dr. Hawking decided to investigate the properties of atom-size black holes. This, however, required adding quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules of the atomic and subatomic world, to gravity, a feat that had never been accomplished. Friends turned the pages of quantum theory textbooks as Dr. Hawking sat motionless staring at them for months. They wondered if he was finally in over his head.

When he eventually succeeded in doing the calculation in his head, it indicated to his surprise that particles and radiation were spewing out of black holes. Dr. Hawking became convinced that his calculation was correct when he realized that the outgoing radiation would have a thermal spectrum characteristic of the heat radiated by any warm body, from a star to a fevered forehead. Dr. Bekenstein had been right.

Dr. Hawking even figured out a way to explain how particles might escape a black hole. According to quantum principles, the space near a black hole would be teeming with “virtual” particles that would flash into existence in matched particle-and-anti-particle pairs — like electrons and their evil twin opposites, positrons — out of energy borrowed from the hole's intense gravitational field.

They would then meet and annihilate each other in a flash of energy, repaying the debt for their brief existence. But if one of the pair fell into the black hole, the other one would be free to wander away and become real. It would appear to be coming from the black hole and taking energy away from it.

But those, he cautioned, were just words. The truth was in the math.

“The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe,” Dr. Hawking said.

It also meant that black holes had a temperature and had entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of wasted heat. But it is also a measure of the amount of information — the number of bits — needed to describe what is in a black hole. Curiously, the number of bits is proportional to the black hole's surface area, not its volume, meaning that the amount of information you could stuff into a black hole is limited by its area, not, as one might naïvely think, its volume.

That result has become a litmus test for string theory and other pretenders to a theory of quantum gravity. It has also led to speculations that we live in a holographic universe, in which three-dimensional space is some kind of illusion.

Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist, said of the holographic theory, “If it's really true, it's a deep and beautiful property of our universe — but not an obvious one.”


Dr. Hawking in 1979. The only subject at University College, Oxford, that he found exciting was cosmology because it dealt with what he called “the big question: Where did the universe come from?” — Photograph: Santi Visalli/Getty Images.
Dr. Hawking in 1979. The only subject at University College, Oxford, that he found exciting was cosmology because it dealt
with what he called “the big question: Where did the universe come from?” — Photograph: Santi Visalli/Getty Images.


To ‘Know the Mind of God’

The discovery of black hole radiation also led to a 30-year controversy over the fate of things that had fallen into a black hole.

Dr. Hawking initially said that detailed information about whatever had fallen in would be lost forever because the particles coming out would be completely random, erasing whatever patterns had been present when they first fell in. Paraphrasing Einstein's complaint about the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics, Dr. Hawking said, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can't be seen.”

Many particle physicists protested that this violated a tenet of quantum physics, which says that knowledge is always preserved and can be retrieved. Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who carried on the argument for decades, said, “Stephen correctly understood that if this was true, it would lead to the downfall of much of 20th-century physics.”

On another occasion, he characterized Dr. Hawking to his face as “one of the most obstinate people in the world; no, he is the most infuriating person in the universe.” Dr. Hawking grinned.

Dr. Hawking admitted defeat in 2004. Whatever information goes into a black hole will come back out when it explodes. One consequence, he noted sadly, was that one could not use black holes to escape to another universe. “I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans,” he said.

Despite his concession, however, the information paradox, as it is known, has become one of the hottest and deepest topics in theoretical physics. Physicists say they still do not know how information gets in or out of black holes.

Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Dr. Hawking's, said the present debate had raised “by another few notches” his estimation of the “stupendous magnitude” of Dr. Hawking's original discovery.

In 1974, Dr. Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific organization; in 1979, he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. “They say it's Newton's chair, but obviously it's been changed,” he liked to quip.

Dr. Hawking also made yearly visits to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which became like a second home. In 2008, he joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, as a visiting researcher.

Having conquered black holes, Dr. Hawking set his sights on the origin of the universe and on eliminating that pesky singularity at the beginning of time from models of cosmology. If the laws of physics could break down there, they could break down everywhere.

In a meeting at the Vatican in 1982, he suggested that in the final theory there should be no place or time when the laws broke down, even at the beginning. He called the notion the “no boundary” proposal.

With James Hartle of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Dr. Hawking envisioned the history of the universe as a sphere like the Earth. Cosmic time corresponds to latitude, starting with zero at the North Pole and progressing southward.

Although time started there, the North Pole was nothing special; the same laws applied there as everywhere else. Asking what happened before the Big Bang, Dr. Hawking said, was like asking what was a mile north of the North Pole — it was not any place, or any time.

By then string theory, which claimed finally to explain both gravity and the other forces and particles of nature as tiny microscopically vibrating strings, like notes on a violin, was the leading candidate for a “theory of everything.”


Dr. Hawking married Elaine Mason in 1995. — Photograph: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press.
Dr. Hawking married Elaine Mason in 1995. — Photograph: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press.

In “A Brief History of Time”, Dr. Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe, “it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.”

He added, “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist.”

“If we find the answer to that,” he continued, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

Until 1974, Dr. Hawking was still able to feed himself and to get in and out of bed. At Jane's insistence, he would drag himself, hand over hand, up the stairs to the bedroom in his Cambridge home every night, in an effort to preserve his remaining muscle tone. After 1980, care was supplemented by nurses.

Dr. Hawking retained some control over his speech up to 1985. But on a trip to Switzerland, he came down with pneumonia. The doctors asked Jane if she wanted his life support turned off, but she said no. To save his life, doctors inserted a breathing tube. He survived, but his voice was permanently silenced.


Speaking With the Eyes

It appeared for a time that he would be able to communicate only by pointing at individual letters on an alphabet board. But when a computer expert, Walter Woltosz, heard about Dr. Hawking's condition, he offered him a program he had written called Equalizer. By clicking a switch with his still-functioning fingers, Dr. Hawking was able to browse through menus that contained all the letters and more than 2,500 words.

Word by word — and when necessary, letter by letter — he could build up sentences on the computer screen and send them to a speech synthesizer that vocalized for him. The entire apparatus was fitted to his motorized wheelchair.

Even when too weak to move a finger, he communicated through the computer by way of an infrared beam, which he activated by twitching his right cheek or blinking his eye. The system was expanded to allow him to open and close the doors in his office and to use the telephone and internet without aid.

Although he averaged fewer than 15 words per minute, Dr. Hawking found he could speak through the computer better than he had before losing his voice. His only complaint, he confided, was that the speech synthesizer, manufactured in California, had given him an American accent.

His decision to write “A Brief History of Time” was prompted, he said, by a desire to share his excitement about “the discoveries that have been made about the universe” with “the public that paid for the research.” He wanted to make the ideas so accessible that the book would be sold in airports.

He also hoped to earn enough money to pay for his children's education. He did. The book's extraordinary success made him wealthy, a hero to disabled people everywhere and even more famous.

The news media followed his movements and activities over the years, from visiting the White House to meeting the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and reported his opinions on everything from national health care (socialized medicine in England had kept him alive) to communicating with extraterrestrials (maybe not a good idea, he said), as if he were a rolling Delphic Oracle.

Asked by New Scientist magazine what he thought about most, Dr. Hawking answered: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”


Dr. Hawking saw space exploration as essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war,” he said in 2007. — Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images.
Dr. Hawking saw space exploration as essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk
of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war,” he said in 2007. — Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images.


In 1990, Dr. Hawking and his wife separated after 25 years of marriage; Jane Hawking wrote about their years together in two books, Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking and Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. The latter became the basis of the 2014 movie The Theory of Everything.

In 1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since his bout of pneumonia. She had been married to David Mason, the engineer who had attached Dr. Hawking's speech synthesizer to his wheelchair.

In 2004, British newspapers reported that the Cambridge police were investigating allegations that Elaine had abused Dr. Hawking, but no charges were filed, and Dr. Hawking denied the accusations. They later divorced in 2006.

His survivors include his children, Robert, Lucy and Tim, and three grandchildren. His children released the following statement:


Quote
“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love’. We will miss him forever.”

‘There Is No Heaven’

Among his many honors, Dr. Hawking was named a commander of the British Empire in 1982. In the summer of 2012, he had a star role in the opening of the Paralympics Games in London. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize, and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”

Dr. Hawking was a strong advocate of space exploration, saying it was essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of,” he told an audience in Hong Kong in 2007.

Nothing raised as much furor, however, as his increasingly scathing remarks about religion. One attraction of the no-boundary proposal for Dr. Hawking was that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.

In “A Brief History of Time” he had referred to the “mind of God,” but in “The Grand Design”, a 2011 book he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, he was more bleak about religion. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”

He went further in an interview that year in The Guardian, saying: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Having spent the best part of his life grappling with black holes and cosmic doom, Dr. Hawking had no fear of the dark.

“They're named black holes because they are related to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up,” he once told an interviewer. “I don't have fears of being thrown into them. I understand them. I feel in a sense that I am their master.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Haag, Matt Stevens and Gerald Jonas contributed reporting to this obituary.

• Dennis Overbye's reporting can range from zero-gravity fashion shows and science in the movies to the status of Pluto, the death of the Earth and the fate of the universe. He joined The New York Times in 1998 as deputy science editor, resuming a newspaper career that had been disrupted in the ninth grade when he lost his job as editor of the junior high paper after being in a classroom after hours where erasers were thrown. In the meantime, he graduated from M.I.T. with a physics degree, failed to finish a novel and worked as a writer and editor at Sky and Telescope and Discover magazines. He has written two books: Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, The Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe (HarperCollins 1991, and Little, Brown, 1999), and Einstein in Love, A Scientific Romance (Viking, 2000). As a result of the latter, there are few occasions for which he cannot rustle up a quotation — appropriate or not — from Albert Einstein. In 2001, realizing that the reporters were having more fun and got to take cooler trips than editors, he switched to being a reporter. He has been covering the universe for more than 30 years, but lately he professes to be amazed that a huge chunk of his work is devoted to two topics that did not exist only a decade or so ago: the proliferation of planets beyond our own solar system; and the mysterious dark energy that seems to be souping up the expansion of the universe and spurring metaphysical-sounding debates among astronomers and physicists. He lives with his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Mira, in Morningside Heights. In their house, he reports, Pluto is still a planet.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • New York Times topic: Stephen W. Hawking

 • SLIDE SHOW: The Expansive Life of Stephen HAWKING

 • VIDEO: Stephen Hawking, Pop Culture Icon

 • VIDEO: Directing ‘The Theory of Everything’

 • 6 Memorable Cultural Moments Inspired by Stephen Hawking

 • Stephen Hawking, in His Own Words

 • An Earthling's Guide to Black Holes

 • Stephen Hawking speaks: Life and the Cosmos, Word by Painstaking Word

 • Scientist at Work: Stephen W. Hawking; Sailing A Wheelchair To the End Of Time


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephen-hawking-dead.html
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« Reply #456 on: June 18, 2018, 12:55:44 pm »


from The New York Times…

Reinhard Hardegen, Who Led U-Boats to America's Shore, Dies at 105

“We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war
a German soldier looked upon the coast of the U.S.A.”


By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN | 3:48PM EDT — Sunday, June 17, 2018

The American passenger freighter Robert E. Lee was sunk by a German submarine in 1942 in the Gulf of Mexico. U-boats, like the one commanded by Captain Reinhard Hardegen, sank or crippled dozens of merchant vessels off the American coast as part of a German operation called Drumbeat. — Photograph: C & C Technologies, Incorporated.
The American passenger freighter Robert E. Lee was sunk by a German submarine in 1942 in the Gulf of Mexico. U-boats, like the one commanded by
Captain Reinhard Hardegen, sank or crippled dozens of merchant vessels off the American coast as part of a German operation called Drumbeat.
 — Photograph: C & C Technologies, Incorporated.


REINHARD HARDEGEN, a leading German submarine commander of World War II who brought U-boat warfare to the doorstep of New York Harbor in the winter of 1942, died on June 9. He was 105.

His death, evidently in Bremen, Germany, where he was born and raised, was confirmed in the Bremen news media on Thursday by Christian Weber, the president of the Bremen State Parliament.

Soon after the United States went to war with Japan and Germany, Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German submarine service, sent six U-boats to attack oil tankers and freighters in American and Canadian waters before they could head overseas. The mission, code-named Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), was aimed at further disrupting Britain's precarious supply lifeline and demoralizing the American home front.

Captain Hardegen provided Drumbeat with some of its most stirring exploits when his U-boat sank two ships off Long Island and brought him close enough to New York City to see the glare from Manhattan's skyscrapers in the night skies.

“It was a very easy navigation for me,” he told Stephen Ames, a filmmaker, in a 1992 interview, recalling how his approach was aided by the lights along the shoreline.

Approaching the entrance to New York's Lower Bay on the evening of January 14, 1942, Captain Hardegen climbed to the bridge of U-123 and beheld an illumination that thrilled him.

“I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great,” he wrote in a war memoir published in Germany in 1943. “I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked upon the coast of the U.S.A.”

By the time Captain Hardegen's two war patrols to America had concluded in May 1942, he had sunk or crippled 19 merchant vessels, according to Michael Gannon, the author of Operation Drumbeat (1990).

He did so despite suffering a severe leg injury in a crash while serving in Germany’s naval air arm in the 1930s.

Captain Hardegen's marauding and the sinkings carried out by fellow U-boat captains led the Navy to organize convoys of merchant vessels escorted by warships along the coastlines. The Army ordered lights along the East Coast to be doused or shielded to lessen the silhouetting of ships offshore that had made them easy prey for U-boats. That “dimout” put Times Square in shadow, its signature neon advertising signs gone dark.

And Captain Hardegen's exploits evidently inspired the German home front.

A photographer carried aboard U-123 to shoot propaganda pictures was unable to get any clear shots of nighttime Manhattan. But fabricated still photos and movies purporting to show New York's lights as captured from U-123 were shown in German movie theaters, according to Clay Blair's Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942 (1996).

“Although the fabrications were amateurish, German audiences accepted them as authentic,” Mr. Blair wrote.


Captain Hardegen in an undated photo. He is credited with sinking or crippling 19 merchant ships in American waters. — Photograph: Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.
Captain Hardegen in an undated photo. He is credited with sinking or crippling 19 merchant ships
in American waters. — Photograph: Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.


Reinhard Hardegen was born on March 18, 1913, in Bremen, Germany. He joined the German Navy and visited New York City in 1933 on a cadet training cruise, going up to the Empire State Building's observatory to gaze at the night skies over the city.

He transferred to the submarine branch in 1939, took command of U-123 in May 1941 and was chosen for Drumbeat after sinking several ships off West Africa, his rank of kapitänleutnant the equivalent of a lieutenant in the United States Navy.

In the early hours of January 14, 1942, he brought U-123 east of Long Island and sank the Norwegian-manned oil tanker Norness some 150 miles from New York City.

He kept his sub underwater during the daylight hours that followed. At nightfall, aided by tourist guidebooks to New York he had brought along, he surfaced and followed the southern shore of Long Island and Queens, glimpsing the lights of homes and cars in the Rockaways and the illuminated Ferris wheel at Coney Island.

After getting to the outer reaches of New York Harbor, he returned to deeper waters off Long Island, where he sank the British oil tanker Coimbra about 100 miles from New York.

The sinkings of the Norness and the Coimbra, a day apart, made for front-page headlines. Captain Hardegen then headed to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where his submarine sank three more ships before he returned to his base at Lorient, France.

On his second war patrol to America, between March and May 1942, his toll including the American oil tanker Gulfamerica off Jacksonville, Florida. But his boat was nearly sunk off St. Augustine, Florida, by a destroyer's depth charges before he managed to get away.

After leaving the submarine service in May 1942, he held a naval training position and worked on the development of advanced submarine torpedoes. In the winter of 1945, with German forces reeling, he was transferred to land warfare and became a battalion commander.

Soon after Germany surrendered, he was arrested by the British, who mistook him for a someone with the same last name who had been a member of the Nazi SS forces. He was held for 16 months before he convinced them that he was a career Navy officer.

“I was not a Nazi,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a 1999 interview. “I did my duty for my country, not for Hitler.”

Returning to Bremen after the war, he founded a marine oil company and was a long-time member of its Parliament.

In confirming Mr. Hardegen's death and remembering his service in Bremen's postwar Parliament, Mr. Weber, its president, said “he continued to be very open” about his wartime submarine service.

Mr. Hardegen and his wife, Barbara, had four children: Klaus-Reinhard, Jorg, Ingeborg and Detlev, according to the book Operation Drumbeat. A list of survivors was not immediately available.

Captain Hardegen had earned a reputation for audacity at sea that brought him the prestigious Knights Cross. His fearlessness was on full display when Hitler extended his personal congratulations over a vegetarian dinner in May 1942 after he had completed his final war patrol.

As Captain Hardegen told it, he responded to Hitler's accolades by scolding him for failing to develop a wartime naval air arm, leaving Hitler red-faced with anger. Afterward, a mortified General Alfred Jodl, who was at that gathering, sharply reprimanded Captain Hardegen for “impertinence”. He retorted: “Herr General, the Führer has the right to hear the truth, and I have the duty to speak it.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Richard Goldstein was born in 1944 and is a former New York Times editor and obituary writer; he still writes obituaries for the newspaper although long since retired from the staff. He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife, Nancy Lubell, a clinical psychologist, and their three dogs. His most recent book, Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II, was published in April 2010 by Free Press.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/obituaries/reinhard-hardegen-who-led-u-boats-to-americas-shore-dies-at-105.html
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« Reply #457 on: July 01, 2018, 03:09:39 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Gudrun Burwitz, ever-loyal daughter of Nazi
mastermind Heinrich Himmler, dies at 88


She never renounced her father and later helped provide support for Nazi war criminals.

By MATT SCHUDEL | 6:47PM EDT — Saturday, June 30, 2018

Gudrun Himmler Burwitz in 1938 with her father, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Gudrun Himmler Burwitz in 1938 with her father, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. — Photograph: Associated Press.

GUDRUN BURWITZ, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died on May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.

Her death was first reported by the German newspaper Bild, which also confirmed that Mrs. Burwitz had worked for two years in West Germany's foreign intelligence agency. The agency's chief historian, Bodo Hechelhammer, told the newspaper that Mrs. Burwitz worked as a secretary under an assumed name in the early 1960s. The agency does not comment on current or past employees until they have died.

Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.

At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.

The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.

Gudrun, who was Himmler's oldest child and only legitimate daughter, was exceptionally devoted to her father. Himmler and his wife later adopted a son, and had two other children with his mistress.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father's polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates.

When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.

Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.”

“And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”

As the Third Reich was collapsing in May 1945, 15-year-old Gudrun and her mother fled to northern Italy, where they were arrested by American troops. Himmler was seized by Russian forces on May 20, 1945, and transferred to British custody. Three days later, he killed himself by biting on a cyanide capsule he had concealed.

Gudrun and her mother were held for four years in various detention facilities in Italy, France and Germany. She refused to believe that her father's death was a suicide and maintained that he had been killed by his British captors.

She was present at some of the war-crimes trials of her father’s associates in Nuremberg, Germany.

“She did not weep, but went on hunger strikes,” Norbert and Stephan Lebert wrote in My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders — An Intimate History of Damage and Denial, their 2002 book about the children of Nazi leaders. “She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing.”

After their release, mother and daughter settled in the northern German town of Bielefeld, where Gudrun trained as a dressmaker and bookbinder. She found it hard to hold a steady job with her family history.

In 1961, she joined the German intelligence service as a secretary under an assumed name at the agency's headquarters near Munich. She was dismissed in 1963, when West German authorities were reviewing the presence of former Nazis in the government.

In the late 1960s, she married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, a writer who became an official in a right-wing political group, and settled in a Munich suburb. They had two children.

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.

She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika.

She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe”, or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.

The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.

Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.

Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014.

“She was surrounded all the time by dozens of high-ranking former SS men,” Roepke said, after attending one such gathering. “They were hanging on her every word … It was all rather menacing.”

Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon”, and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Malloth was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in the Czech Republic, but Mrs. Burwitz reportedly helped arrange for him to stay at a retirement facility outside Munich on land once owned by Nazi official Rudolf Hess.

“I never talk about my work,” she said in 2015 when British journalist Allan Hall confronted her at her home. “I just do what I can when I can.”

“Go away,” her husband said. “You are not welcome.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He has degrees in English from the University of Nebraska and the University of Virginia and has never taken a course in journalism. He worked for a now-defunct book division of U.S. News & World Report and was a copy editor for The Post's Book World and Style sections before moving on to journalism jobs in Raleigh, North Carolina; New York City; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has been a feature writer, magazine writer, jazz critic and art critic and has covered a wide variety of topics, including murder cases, wild armadillos and the space program. He is the author of a photo-biography of Muhammad Ali's years in Miami and the ghostwriter of the autobiography of civil rights photographer Flip Schulke. He likes writing obituaries because there is nothing more interesting than people's lives.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/gudrun-burwitz-ever-loyal-daughter-of-nazi-mastermind-heinrich-himmler-dies-at-88/2018/06/30/6d57d42a-7c76-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html
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« Reply #458 on: July 29, 2018, 11:52:33 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Mary Ellis, wartime volunteer who flew Spitfires, dies at 101

She flew fighters, Wellington heavy bombers and other aircraft, usually solo, during World War II.

By PHIL DAISON | 4:15PM EDT — Saturday, July 28, 2018

British World War II pilot Mary Ellis with a Spitfire at Biggin Hill Airfield, England, in 2015. — Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Press Association/Associated Press.
British World War II pilot Mary Ellis with a Spitfire at Biggin Hill Airfield, England, in 2015. — Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Press Association/Associated Press.

AT THE height of World War II, 26-year-old Mary Wilkins, all 5  feet 2 inches of her, helmet-less and with curly blond hair, climbed down a ladder from the cockpit of a mighty twin-engine Wellington bomber at a combat-ready Royal Air Force base in England.

“Where's the pilot?” someone on the ground crew asked.

“I am the pilot!” she responded.

As a volunteer pilot for Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary, her job was to deliver warplanes — Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, the famous Wellingtons (nicknamed Wimpys), Lancaster bombers and more than 70 other types of military aircraft — from factories to scramble-ready male pilots at bases of the RAF and the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm. She had delivered the Wellington — solo, although built for a five-man crew — from its factory.

“Well, they didn't believe me,” she wrote in her memoir, A Spitfire Girl. “One or two of them still decided to clamber on up the ladder to check the aeroplane for the ‘missing’ pilot…. They just could not believe women could fly these aeroplanes.”

The death of Mary Ellis, nee Wilkins, on July 25 at 101 — a year older than the RAF itself — was confirmed by Graham Rose, chairman of Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary Association. The organization works to ensure that the ATA's pilots, men and women — including its chairman’s own mother, Molly Rose — are remembered.

Mrs. Ellis died at her home, next to a runway at Sandown on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. No specific cause was provided.

Mrs. Ellis was one of the last surviving female pilots of the ATA. Only three are thought to be alive.

The “Attagirls,” as they were nicknamed, almost always flew solo and always without compass or radio assistance, guiding themselves via maps and following rivers or railway lines. Mostly British, but including several American, Canadian and other Allied volunteers, they did not fly in combat but faced the daily danger of attack by Luftwaffe fighters and collisions with the huge barrage balloons floating around southern England as obstacles to low-flying enemy planes.

Mrs. Ellis once had to take evasive action to avoid a deadly Nazi flying bomb known as a “doodlebug” or “buzz bomb” because of its noise. With her plane unarmed, she could do nothing to stop it reaching its target in London or elsewhere.

In her 2016 memoir, co-written with journalist Melody Foreman, she recalled flying over Pershore, Worcestershire, when a Luftwaffe fighter plane with black Swastika markings flew alongside her.

“With one hand I waved at this pilot to move away and get out of my sight,” she wrote. “I can picture his grinning face now. Then he cheekily waved back again and again — and then suddenly he was gone. I wondered if it was my blonde curls that caused him to stare as I never ever wore a helmet during my whole career with the ATA. What was the point of a helmet when we couldn't speak to anyone? It didn't do much for the hairstyle either.”

She was once shot at over Bournemouth, in southern England, by “friendly fire” from the ground (“not an experience I ever wanted to repeat”) and had a near miss when landing in thick fog at the same time a combat Spitfire landed on the same runway from the opposite direction. Among her female comrades, that episode won her the nickname “the fog flyer”.

She also survived a crash landing when her Spitfire's landing gear jammed. During the war, the ATA delivered more than 309,000 aircraft using 1,152 male pilots and 168 women. It lost 159 men and 15 women in accidents, usually because of bad weather or failing to find highly camouflaged air bases.

One of those killed was Mrs. Ellis's good friend, the renowned English aviator Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly alone from England to Australia. Her Airspeed Oxford plane, on an ATA delivery flight, crashed into the Thames Estuary near London in 1941.


Portrait of Mary Ellis from the autobiography “Spitfire Girl”. — Photograph: Pen & Sword Books.
Portrait of Mary Ellis from the autobiography “Spitfire Girl”.
 — Photograph: Pen & Sword Books.


One thing for which the ATA has rarely been praised is being the first branch of the British armed forces to gain equal pay for women, a massive crack in what later became known as the “glass ceiling” for women.

In all, Mrs. Ellis, latterly with the ATA rank of first officer, flew more than 1,000 warplanes of 76 types — including 400 Spitfires — among more than 200 British airfields from 1942 to the end of the war in 1945.

The middle of five siblings, Mary Wilkins was born on February 2, 1917, on her family's 1,000-acre farm near the village of Leafield.

She was 8 when her father bought her a ride in a de Havilland DH-60 Moth two-seater biplane. She was hooked. As a teenager, she persuaded her father to pay for flying lessons, and she earned her pilot's license at 22 in 1939, just as war was looming.

After the Battle of Britain in 1940, when the RAF successfully repelled the Luftwaffe but at a high cost, she heard an ad on BBC radio for qualified pilots to help the war effort.

Criticism, even outrage, quickly followed. C.G. Grey, founding editor of the British magazine Aeroplane, was among the most ardent voices against women in the cockpit. “The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying in a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly,” he wrote.

Years later, Mrs. Ellis recalled: “Girls flying aeroplanes was almost a sin at that time.”

Britain badly needed combat pilots, but there were not enough of them to deliver planes as well as fight the enemy in them. Thus was the ATA founded in 1940, to allow able-bodied but not combat-ready pilots to support the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm. The mission was to deliver planes from factory to base, or often vice versa for repairs.

When the ATA was disbanded at the end of the war, Mrs. Ellis was seconded to the RAF and became one of the first women to fly Britain's earliest jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. After her discharge, she became a rally driver; at the wheel of her black Allard sports car, she won many competitions, including the Isle of Wight Rally.

Having settled on the island in the English Channel, she went on to become air commandant — basically managing director — of the Isle of Wight's Sandown airfield in 1950.

She was thought to be the first woman to run an airport in Europe, and over the next two decades, she did everything from working the control tower to running out to shoo away sheep and wave the aircraft in toward the terminal. She even cut the grass and helped the airfield grow into a busy airport handling flights between the Isle of Wight and many mainland English cities.

She married fellow pilot Donald Ellis in 1961. He died in 2009, and she has no immediate survivors.

“Up in the air, you are on your own,” Mrs. Ellis told a British TV interviewer when she turned 100. “And you can do whatever you like. I flew 400 Spitfires…. I love the Spitfire; it's everybody's favorite. I think it's a symbol of freedom. And occasionally I would take one up and go and play with the clouds. I would like to do it all over again. There was a war on, but otherwise it was absolutely wonderful.”


__________________________________________________________________________

• Phil Davison writes obituaries for The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/mary-ellis-wartime-volunteer-who-flew-spitfires-dies-at-101/2018/07/26/104b2766-90e7-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html
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« Reply #459 on: August 26, 2018, 04:09:23 pm »


from The New York Times…

John McCain, War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender, Dies at 81

A naval aviator who endured torture in Vietnam, Mr. McCain rose
to the heights of power in Washington until cancer felled him.


By ROBERT D. McFADDEN | Saturday, August 25, 2018

The son and grandson of Navy admirals who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Senator John McCain rose to become one of the towering figures in American politics. — Photograph: Zach Gibson/for The New York Times.
The son and grandson of Navy admirals who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Senator John McCain rose to become
one of the towering figures in American politics. — Photograph: Zach Gibson/for The New York Times.


JOHN S. McCAIN, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.

According to a statement from his office, Mr. McCain died at 4:28 p.m. local time. He had suffered from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017.

Despite his grave condition, he soon made a dramatic appearance in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party's drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But while he was unable to be in the Senate for a vote on the Republican tax bill in December, his endorsement was crucial, though not decisive, in the Trump administration's lone legislative triumph of the year.

A son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr. McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century. It was an odyssey driven by raw ambition, the conservative instincts of a shrewd military man, a rebelliousness evident since childhood and a temper that sometimes bordered on explosiveness.


Mr. McCain, bottom right, in 1965 with his Navy squadron. While in the Navy, he was cocky and combative and resisted discipline. — Photograph: National Archives.
Mr. McCain, bottom right, in 1965 with his Navy squadron. While in the Navy, he was cocky and combative and resisted discipline.
 — Photograph: National Archives.


Nowhere were those traits more manifest than in Vietnam, where he was stripped of all but his character. He boiled over in foul curses at his captors. Because his father was the commander of all American forces in the Pacific during most of his five and a half years of captivity, Mr. McCain, a Navy lieutenant commander, became the most famous prisoner of the war, a victim of horrendous torture and a tool of enemy propagandists.

Shot down over Hanoi, suffering broken arms and a shattered leg, he was subjected to solitary confinement for two years and beaten frequently. Often he was suspended by ropes lashing his arms behind him. He attempted suicide twice. His weight fell to 105 pounds. He rejected early release to keep his honor and to avoid an enemy propaganda coup or risk demoralizing his fellow prisoners.

He finally cracked under torture and signed a “confession.” No one believed it, although he felt the burden of betraying his country. To millions of Americans, Mr. McCain was the embodiment of courage: a war hero who came home on crutches, psychologically scarred and broken in body, but not in spirit. He underwent long medical treatments and rehabilitation, but was left permanently disabled, unable to raise his arms over his head. Someone had to comb his hair.

His mother, Roberta McCain, Navy all the way, inspired his political career. After retiring from the Navy and settling in Arizona, he won two terms in the House of Representatives, from 1983 to 1987, and six in the Senate. He was a Reagan Republican to start with, but later moved right or left, a maverick who defied his party's leaders and compromised with Democrats.

He lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, who won the White House.

In 2008, against the backdrop of a growing financial crisis, Mr. McCain made the most daring move of his political career, seeking the presidency against the first major-party African-American nominee, Barack Obama. With national name recognition, a record for campaign finance reform and a reputation for candor — his campaign bus was called the Straight Talk Express — Mr. McCain won a series of primary elections and captured the Republican nomination.

But his selection of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, although meant to be seen as a bold, unconventional move in keeping with his maverick's reputation, proved a severe handicap. She was the second female major-party nominee for vice president (and the first Republican), but voters worried about her qualifications to serve as president, and about Mr. McCain's age — he would be 72, the oldest person ever to take the White House. In a 2018 memoir, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations, he defended Ms. Palin's campaign performance, but expressed regret that he had not instead chosen Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent.

At some McCain rallies, vitriolic crowds disparaged black people and Muslims, and when a woman said she did not trust Mr. Obama because “he's an Arab,” Mr. McCain, in one of the most lauded moments of his campaign, replied: “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Analysts later said that Mr. Obama had engineered a nearly perfect campaign. And Mr. McCain confronted a hostile political environment for Republicans, who were dragged down by President George W. Bush's dismal approval ratings amid the economic crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq.

On Election Day, Mr. McCain lost most of the battleground states and some that were traditionally Republican. Mr. Obama won with 53 percent of the popular vote to Mr. McCain's 46 percent, and 365 Electoral College votes to Mr. McCain's 173.


In the Gang of Eight

Returning to his Senate duties, the resilient Mr. McCain moved to the right politically to fend off a Tea Party challenge to his 2010 re-election. He voted against the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama's signature health care plan, which became law in 2010. He endorsed Mitt Romney's losing Republican bid for the presidency in 2012.

Mr. McCain in 2013 with a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform. — Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times.
Mr. McCain in 2013 with a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform.
 — Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times.


But while he was a persistent and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, Mr. McCain had by 2013 become a pivotal figure in the Senate, meeting with Mr. Obama and occasionally fashioning deals with him. He joined a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform.

“When Mr. McCain is with the president — on immigration and in brokering the recent deal to secure Senate approval of stalled Obama nominees — they can usually trump the political right,” The New York Times said in a 2013 news analysis. “When he is against him — sabotaging Mr. Obama's plan last year to nominate Susan E. Rice as secretary of state — the White House rarely prevails.”

As Congress reconvened in January 2015 with Republicans in control of the Senate, Mr. McCain achieved his long-time goal to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with the power to advance his national security and fiscal objectives under a $600 billion military policy bill. He considered the post second only to occupying the White House as commander in chief.


Mr. McCain in 2016 before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He served six terms in the U.S. Senate. — Photograph: Drew Angerer/for The New York Times.
Mr. McCain in 2016 before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He served six terms in the U.S. Senate.
 — Photograph: Drew Angerer/for The New York Times.


With the rise of Donald J. Trump, the Republican flame thrower who steered American politics sharply to the right after his election in 2016 as the nation's 45th president, Mr. McCain was one of the few powerful Republican voices in Congress to push back against Mr. Trump's often harsh, provocative statements and Twitter posts and his tide of changes.

In his end-of-life memoir, Mr. McCain scorned Mr. Trump's seeming admiration for autocrats and disdain for refugees. “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” he wrote of the president. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

Long before Mr. Trump was criticized as setting new lows for public discourse, Mr. McCain himself had used coarse language and blunt insults, although they were far less assertive, and he often used them in jest. He called Secretary of State John Kerry, a Democrat, “a human wrecking ball,” and the right-wing Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky “wacko birds.”


Mr. McCain campaigning with Mitt Romney in 2012 in Pensacola, Florida. He endorsed Mr. Romney's Republican bid for the presidency that year. — Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
Mr. McCain campaigning with Mitt Romney in 2012 in Pensacola, Florida. He endorsed Mr. Romney's Republican bid for the presidency that year.
 — Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


Personal animus between Mr. McCain and Mr. Trump arose in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. After months of boasts by Trump about his wealth, celebrity and deal-making as qualifications for the White House, and his dismissive capsule characterizations of climate change as “a hoax” and the Iraq war as “a mistake,” Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, with standing as the previous two Republican presidential nominees, denounced Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency.

Saying Mr. Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment for the White House, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney called him ignorant on foreign policy and said he had made “dangerous” statements on national security. They warned that his election might imperil the United States and its democratic systems.

In a venomous response, Mr. Trump denigrated Mr. Romney as a “failed candidate” and “a loser” beaten by Mr. Obama. He had little to say about Mr. McCain. But months earlier, Mr. Trump, who had never served in the military (or held public office) had derided Mr. McCain as a bogus war hero and made light of his years of captivity and torture.

“He's a war hero because he was captured,” Mr. Trump said. “I like people who weren't captured.”

Mr. McCain held his fire. But the nation was shocked. An avalanche of denunciations tumbled from editorial boards and political leaders, but the outrage faded into the tapestry of Mr. Trump's provocations against Mexicans, Muslims, women and black and Hispanic people. Trump supporters, who were mostly white, said his biases showed a refreshing willingness to disregard political correctness.


A No-Show in Cleveland

As the Trump juggernaut rolled on, Mr. McCain, campaigning for re-election to his sixth six-year term, did not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but said he would support his party's nominee. (Mr. McCain withdrew that support months later after a recording surfaced exposing lewd comments about women by Mr. Trump, who bragged that his celebrity allowed him to grope them.)

Days after the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton as the first major-party female candidate for the presidency, Mr. McCain rebuked Mr. Trump for his comments about the family of a Muslim Army captain killed by a suicide bomber as he tried to save fellow American troops in Iraq in 2004. Given the podium at the Democratic convention, Khizr Khan, the father of the captain, Humayun Khan, had denounced Mr. Trump for suggesting that Muslims harbored terrorist sympathies.

With his wife, Ghazala, at his side, the father held up a pocket-size copy of the Constitution and asked if Mr. Trump had read it.

In response, Mr. Trump belittled the parents, saying the soldier's father had delivered the speech because his wife had not been “allowed” to speak. His implication, that Mrs. Khan had not spoken because of female subservience in some strains of Islam, drew widespread condemnation, led on Capitol Hill by Senator McCain.

“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” Mr. McCain said. “I challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.”

Soon after Mr. McCain's statement, other Republican senators offered their own condemnations. In ensuing days, as outrage over the Trump remarks spread, Mr. Trump told his Twitter followers that Mr. Khan had “no right” to “viciously” attack him.

Seemingly impervious to criticism of any kind, Mr. Trump, who had easily won nomination, turned his guns on Mrs. Clinton. After a bruising campaign laden with Trump falsehoods and scurrilous innuendo, he defeated her in the general election, losing the popular vote by nearly three million but winning in the Electoral College.

After the election, Mr. McCain, determined to let the new administration take shape, said he would temporarily not discuss Mr. Trump publicly.

But weeks after President Trump moved into the White House and began blindsiding the public and sometimes the government with executive orders and mixed messages on immigration, foreign policy and other issues, Mr. McCain, himself newly re-elected, let loose.

At a security conference in Munich, he delivered a forceful critique of Mr. Trump's “America First” program before a receptive audience of allied officials and foreign policy experts dismayed at the administration's drift from seven decades of Western alliances.

“Make no mistake, my friends, these are dangerous times,” Mr. McCain said. “But you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out.”

As for Mr. Trump's claim that his White House was operating like a “fine-tuned machine,” Mr. McCain said, “In many respects, this administration is in disarray.”

Appearing on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” a day later, Mr. McCain punctured Mr. Trump's contention that the news media was “the enemy of the American people.”

“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” Mr. McCain, a strong defender of the First Amendment, told his national television audience. While not expressly calling the president a dictator, he said, “We need to learn the lessons of history.”

For a senator who had long backed free trade, NATO and assertive foreign policies, and who had harbored suspicions about Russian intentions, Mr. McCain's differences with Mr. Trump ran deep. He denounced Russia for “interfering” in the presidential election and called for a select Senate committee to investigate the Kremlin's cyber-activities.

His disapproval of Mr. Trump perhaps peaked in July, after the president and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met privately in Helsinki, Finland, and then participated in an extraordinary joint news conference there. Responding to Mr. Trump's performance, in which the president spoke favorably of his Russian counterpart and questioned American intelligence findings that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. McCain declared, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

Weeks later, in signing a $716 billion military spending bill named in Mr. McCain's honor, Mr. Trump did not mention the senator by name in what was widely interpreted as a deliberate snub.

Although Mr. McCain was sharply critical of Mr. Trump, especially when he thought the new president had threatened to overstep domestic or national interests, he remained broadly supportive of the administration's agenda.

After an acrimonious year-long fight over replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain joined the Senate's 54-to-45 majority to confirm Mr. Trump's selection of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice. Justice Gorsuch's installation tipped the court's balance in favor of a conservative majority that seemed destined to last for years.

Mr. McCain voted for all but two of Mr. Trump's 15 cabinet selections and eight other administration posts requiring Senate confirmation. But he also chastised Mr. Trump for comments equating Russian and American interests. “That moral equivalency is a contradiction of everything the United States has ever stood for in the 20th and 21st centuries,” he said.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing taking testimony from James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump, Mr. McCain posed confusing questions, seeming to conflate the 2016 investigation of Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state with the 2017 investigation of Russian interference in the American election. He later issued a clarification.

“What I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the president rise to the level of obstruction of justice,” he said. “In the case of Secretary Clinton's emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump — whether or not the president's conduct constitutes obstruction of justice.”

Since he had opposed the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama's signature health care law, Mr. McCain became a critical vote on the Republican bill to repeal and replace it. Written in secret, the Republicans' bill was opposed by health care and patient advocacy groups. Mr. McCain, fearing his constituents might be harmed, was non-committal. After struggling to write a passable bill and with no votes to spare, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, put off a showdown when Mr. McCain was sidelined by surgery for a cranial blood clot over his left eye in July.

Senator McCain's office disclosed that, behind the clot, his doctors had found a glioblastoma, an aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Medical experts said that such cancers may be treated with radiation and chemotherapy but almost always grow back, and that the median length of survival with a glioblastoma is about 16 months.


Days after surgery for brain cancer, in July 2017, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate to take part in the vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. In a dramatic televised moment, he voted not to replace it, turning a pivotal thumb down. — Picture: Senate TV/via Reuters.
Days after surgery for brain cancer, in July 2017, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate to take part in the vote to repeal and replace the Affordable
Care Act. In a dramatic televised moment, he voted not to replace it, turning a pivotal thumb down. — Picture: Senate TV/Reuters.


Days after surgery for the brain cancer, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate and provided a crucial vote for the Republicans to open debate on their efforts to repeal the health law. But when a last-ditch repeal vote was taken later, Mr. McCain made a stirring televised reappearance in the well of the Senate and shocked his colleagues and the nation by turning his thumb down, casting the decisive vote against it.

The seven-year Republican drive to derail the Affordable Care Act had collapsed. Some pundits called the McCain vote cold revenge for Mr. Trump's mockery of his ordeal as a prisoner of war. But the senator told colleagues that he felt compelled only to “do the right thing.” And in a later statement, he gave a fuller explanation.

“The vote last night presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh,” he said. “I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to trust each other, stop the political gamesmanship and put the health care needs of the American people first. We can do this.”

In December, Mr. McCain had been expected to be a pivotal vote in the Republican drive to rewrite the nation's tax code and cut taxes for individuals and businesses by adding up to $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit. Critics of the measure had identified him as a potential holdout against his party's legislation. Days before the vote, however, Mr. McCain returned home to Arizona for medical treatment, and he did not cast a ballot in the Senate proceedings. But he endorsed the bill, and his support was important, though not decisive, in the Senate's 51-48 adoption of the tax package.


To the Navy Born

John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, one of many posts where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., served in a long, distinguished Navy career. He was the middle sibling of three children. His mother, born Roberta Wright, was a California oil heiress. His parents eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, to marry in 1933.

With his older sister, Jean Alexandra (who was known as Sandy), and brother, Joseph Pinckney McCain II, John grew up with frequent moves, an often-absent father, a rock-solid mother and family lore that traced ancestral lineages to combatants in every American war and to Scottish clans. There were also highly dubious family claims of having descended from Robert the Bruce, the 14th-century king of the Scots.

The patriarch of the 20th-century military family was John's grandfather, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr. A pioneer of aircraft carriers, he led many naval and air operations in the Western Pacific in World War II, covering General Douglas MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy in the war's final stages. He was in the front row of officers aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the documents of surrender in 1945.


Mr. MCain, left, in 1961 with his parents, Roberta Wright McCain and John S. McCain Jr., with a plaque of Mr. McCain's grandfather, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr., the patriarch of the military family. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Mr. MCain, left, in 1961 with his parents, Roberta Wright McCain and John S. McCain Jr., with a plaque of Mr. McCain's
grandfather, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr., the patriarch of the military family. — Photograph: Associated Press.


John's father was a decorated submarine commander in World War II. In Washington, the elder Mr. McCain was influential in political affairs as the postwar Navy's chief information officer and liaison with Congress. Senators, representatives and military brass were often guests at his home. Raised to full admiral, he was the commander of American naval forces in Europe and, from 1968 to 1972, of all American forces in the Pacific, including those in the Vietnam War theater.

(Two Navy destroyers were named McCain, for the senator's father and grandfather, the first father-and-son full admirals in American naval history.)

Whip-sawed by family relocations, young John attended some 20 schools before finally settling into Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, in the fall of 1951 for his last three years of secondary education. The school, with an all-male faculty and enrollments drawn mostly from upper-crust families of the Old South, required jackets and ties for classes.

But the scion of one of the Navy's most illustrious families was defiant and unruly. He mocked the dress code by wearing dirty bluejeans. His shoes were held together with tape, and his coat looked like a reject from the Salvation Army. He was cocky and combative, easily provoked and ready to fight anyone. Classmates called him McNasty. Most gave him a wide berth.

“He cultivated the image,” Robert Timberg wrote in a biography, John McCain: An American Odyssey (1995). “The Episcopal yearbook pictures him in a trench coat, collar up, cigarette dangling Bogey-style from his lips. That pose, if hardly the impression Episcopal sought to project, at least had a fashionable world-weary style to it.”

John and a few friends often sneaked off campus at night to patronize bars and burlesque houses in Washington. He joined the wrestling team — a 127-pound dynamo, he once pinned an opponent in 37 seconds, a school record — and the junior varsity football team, as a linebacker and offensive guard. His grades were abysmal, except in literature and history, his favorite subjects. He graduated in 1954.

That summer, he followed his father and grandfather into the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He resisted the discipline. His grades were poor. He stood up to upperclassmen, broke rules and piled up demerits, though never enough to warrant expulsion. But he became a ferocious boxer, a magnet for attractive young women and one of the most popular midshipmen in his class.


In the Cockpit

Mr. McCain possessed the rugged independence of a natural leader. It came out at parties and in carousing with friends. Caught by the Shore Patrol at an off-limits bar, he led a carload of drinking buddies in a daring escape. “Being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck,” one recalled. In 1958, he graduated 894th in his class, fifth from the bottom.

Accepted for flight training, the newly commissioned Ensign McCain learned to fly attack jets at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He also had flings with a succession of young women, from schoolteachers to strippers, and once with a tobacco heiress, “often returning to base just in time to change clothes and drag himself out to the flight line,” Mr. Timberg said.

He liked flying, but his performance was sub-par, sometimes careless or even reckless. In the 1960s he crashed in Corpus Christi Bay in Texas and Tidewater, Virginia, but escaped with minor injuries — and his flying skills improved over time. Early assignments were aboard aircraft carriers: the Intrepid in the Caribbean during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the Enterprise in the Mediterranean.

In 1965, Mr. McCain married Carol Shepp, a model. He adopted her two children, Douglas and Andrew, and they had a daughter, Sidney. After a long separation, the couple were divorced in 1980. He then married Cindy Lou Hensley, a Phoenix teacher whose father owned a beer distributorship. They had two sons, John IV and James, and a daughter, Meghan, and adopted a girl, Bridget, from a Bangladeshi orphanage.


The crew on the carrier Forrestal put out a fire that killed 134 men in the worst non-combat incident in American naval history. Mr. McCain was seriously injured. — Photograph: U.S. Navy/via Associated Press.
The crew on the carrier Forrestal put out a fire that killed 134 men in the worst non-combat incident in American naval history.
Mr. McCain was seriously injured. — Photograph: U.S. Navy/via Associated Press.


Promoted to lieutenant commander in early 1967, Mr. McCain requested combat duty and was assigned to the carrier Forrestal, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its A-4E Skyhawk warplanes were bombing North Vietnam in the campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. He flew five missions.

Then, on July 29, 1967, he had just strapped himself into his cockpit on a deck crowded with planes when a missile fired accidentally from another jet struck his 200-gallon exterior fuel tank, and it exploded in flames. He scrambled out, crawled onto the plane's nose, dived onto a deck seething with burning fuel and rolled away until he cleared the flames.

As he stood up, other aircraft and bomb loads exploded on deck. He was hit in the legs and chest by burning shrapnel. At one point, the Forrestal skipper considered abandoning ship. When the fire was finally brought under control, 134 men had been killed in the worst non-combat incident in American naval history.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately provided.

Despite his misgivings, Mr. McCain volunteered for more missions and was transferred to the carrier Oriskany. On October 26 he took off on his 23rd mission of the war, part of a 20-plane attack on a heavily defended power plant in central Hanoi. Moments after releasing his bombs on target, as he pulled out of his dive, a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile sheared off his right wing.

He ejected as the plane plunged, but hit something as he exited. Both arms were broken and his right knee was shattered. He fell into a lake and, with 50 pounds of gear, sank 15 feet to the bottom, then pulled the inflating pins of his Mae West life jacket with his teeth and rose to the surface, gasping for air. Swimmers dragged him ashore, where he was set upon by a mob.


Mr. McCain, center, after he ejected from his fighter plane in 1967 and fell into a lake. The Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured him for more than five years. — Photograph: Library of Congress.
Mr. McCain, center, after he ejected from his fighter plane in 1967 and fell into a lake. The Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured him
for more than five years. — Photograph: Library of Congress.


Mr. McCain was stripped to his skivvies, kicked and spat upon, then bayoneted in the left ankle and groin. A North Vietnamese soldier struck him with his rifle butt, breaking a shoulder. A woman tried to give him a cup of tea as a photographer snapped pictures. Carried to a truck, Mr. McCain was driven to Hoa Lo, the prison compound its American inmates had labeled the Hanoi Hilton.

There he was denied medical care. His knee swelled to the size and color of a football. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. When he awoke in a cell infested with roaches and rats, he was interrogated and beaten. The beatings continued for days. He gave his name, rank and serial number and defied his tormentors with curses.

After two weeks, a doctor, without anesthesia, tried to set his right arm, broken in three places, but gave up in frustration and encased it in a plaster cast. He was moved to another site and tended by two American prisoners of war, who brought him back from near death.

Commander McCain's prisoner-of-war status was widely reported around the world. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given a modicum of medical treatment. Other prisoners said he spoke, incongruously, of someday being president of the United States.

Once he was visited by a group of North Vietnamese dignitaries. A prisoner, Jack Van Loan, said Mr. McCain shrieked at them. “Here's a guy that's all crippled up, all busted up, and he doesn't know if he's going to live to the next day, and he literally blew them out of there with a verbal assault,” Mr. Van Loan told Mr. Timberg. “You can't imagine the example John set for the rest of the camp by doing that.”


Two Years in Solitary

In March 1968, Mr. McCain was put in solitary confinement, fed only watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. It lasted two years. When Admiral McCain became the Pacific Theater commander in July, his son was offered early repatriation repeatedly. Commander McCain refused, following a military code that prisoners were to be released in the order taken. He was beaten frequently and tortured with ropes.

Years after his confession to “war crimes” and “air piracy,” Mr. McCain wrote: “I had learned what we all learned over there: that every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”


Mr. McCain in 1967 at a hospital in Hanoi, North Vietnam. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given medical treatment. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Mr. McCain in 1967 at a hospital in Hanoi, North Vietnam. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given medical treatment.
 — Photograph: Associated Press.


His ordeal finally ended on March 14, 1973, two months after the Paris Peace Accords had ended American involvement in the war. The place he had lived longest in his nomadic life was Hanoi. At 36, his hair had gone white. He went home a celebrity, cheered in parades, showered with medals, embraced by President Richard M. Nixon and Governor Ronald Reagan of California.

For a Navy man who had always tried to live up to his father's accomplishments, the Silver and Bronze Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross and other decorations he received were not enough. But a psychiatrist's report seemed to capture his happiest moment. “Felt fulfillment,” it said, “when his dad was introduced at a dinner as ‘Commander McCain's father’.”

After months of rehabilitation and recovery, he returned to duty and became the Navy's Senate liaison, as his father had once been. But he knew that his Navy future would be limited by his physical disabilities, and that he would never be an admiral like his forebears. With his mother's encouragement, he was already thinking about a political career when he retired as a captain in 1981.

Setting his sights on a congressional seat, he settled in Phoenix and became a public relations executive for his father-in-law's beer distributorship. He developed contacts in the news media and business community, and got to know real estate developers and bankers like Charles Keating Jr.

When Representative John Rhodes of Arizona retired after 30 years in Congress in 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won the seat in a Republican district. He embraced President Reagan's agenda of tax and budget cuts and a strong national defense, but voted to over-ride Mr. Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa for its racist policies. He was re-elected in 1984.


In 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won a seat in a Republican congressional district in Arizona. — Photograph: Tom Tingle/Phoenix Gazette/via Associated Press.
In 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won a seat in a Republican congressional district in Arizona.
 — Photograph: Tom Tingle/Phoenix Gazette/via Associated Press.


After Senator Barry M. Goldwater decided not to seek re-election as Arizona's conservative stalwart in 1986, Mr. McCain crushed Richard Kimball, a former Democratic state legislator, for the seat. He won appointments to the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee, and soon gained national attention.

A long-time gambler with ties to the gaming industry, Mr. McCain helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, codifying regulations for Native American gambling enterprises. He backed legislation, sponsored by Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, for automatic spending cuts in deficit budgets. He was short-listed as a vice-presidential running mate by the 1988 Republican nominee, George Bush, who won the White House (with Senator Dan Quayle on the ticket).

But Mr. McCain's rising political career was almost upended by scandal. He was one of five senators who took favors from Charles Keating to intercede with federal regulators on behalf of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed with catastrophic losses. The scandal cost the government and investors billions, and Mr. Keating went to prison for fraud; the so-called Keating Five, cleared of wrong-doing by Senate investigators, were only rebuked for ethical lapses.

In the years that followed, Mr. McCain reinvented himself as a scourge of special interests, crusading for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

The Persian Gulf War in 1991 also helped restore Mr. McCain's tarnished image. As a television commentator, he showcased his military savvy and impressed Americans as an authoritative voice on foreign policy. While Mr. Bush lost the White House to Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. McCain easily won re-election.

After years of voting along party lines, Mr. McCain, in the 1990s, emphasized his independence. With the presidency in his distant sights, he challenged Republican leaders and Democrats and was harder to peg politically. He became a self-appointed Republican spokesman on national security — challenging the Clinton administration's intervention in Somalia, counseling against deploying American troops to the Balkans and sounding an early warning on North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, a Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran, were chairmen of the Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, which found “no compelling evidence” that Americans were still alive in captivity in Southeast Asia. Veterans groups and families of long-missing troops rejected the report. He also pressed for full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which were achieved in 1995.

In the 1996 election, Mr. McCain appeared to be a favorite for the Republican vice-presidential slot, but former Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, chose Jack Kemp, the former congressman and National Football League star. They would lose to Mr. Clinton and Al Gore.

Mr. McCain won re-election to a third term by a landslide in 1998, and a year later he published a memoir, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir which became a best seller in time for the 2000 election campaign and was later made into a television movie, starring Shawn Hatosy as Mr. McCain.


Smears and Defeat

Seeking the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain pledged “a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests.” Governor George W. Bush of Texas was favored, but Mr. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, 49 to 30 percent. South Carolina's primary then loomed as crucial.

It was one of the era's dirtiest campaigns. Anonymous smears falsely claimed that Mr. McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict and that he was a homosexual, a traitor and mentally unstable. McCain ads portrayed Mr. Bush as a liar and called his religious supporters, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the televangelist Pat Robertson, “agents of intolerance.”

Mr. McCain later said he regretted calling a Confederate flag on the State Capitol in Columbia a “symbol of heritage.” Civil rights groups had denounced it as a symbol of slavery and oppression of African-Americans. “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” Mr. McCain admitted.


Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mr. McCain, right, before a debate in 1999. The others, from left, were Gary Bauer, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, Steve Forbes, Senator Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes. — Photograph: Luke Frazza/Agence France-Presse.
Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mr. McCain, right, before a debate in 1999. The others, from left, were Gary Bauer, Governor
George W. Bush of Texas, Steve Forbes, Senator Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes. — Photograph: Luke Frazza/Agence France-Presse.


Mr. Bush won the primary and the nomination, and narrowly defeated the Democrat, Vice President Gore, in the general election.

Always wary of an adventurousness that might blind Mr. McCain to potential embarrassments, his advisers grew anxious during the 2000 campaign when a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, began turning up with him at fund-raisers and at his office. It came to nothing. But a long report in The New York Times in 2008 said that aides, fearing a romantic involvement, had cautioned Mr. McCain and warned Ms. Iseman off.

The article raised a flap of angry denials, and Ms. Iseman sued the newspaper for libel. The N.Y. Times did not retract its article but published a note to readers saying it had not intended to suggest a romantic affair, and the suit was dropped.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. McCain supported the Bush administration's war on terrorism; its invasion of Afghanistan to suppress a fanatic Taliban regime and hunt for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks; and later the invasion of Iraq to depose President Saddam Hussein, the tyrant who was wrongly believed to have weapons of mass destruction.


Mr. McCain visiting American troops in Kabul in 2014. He supported the Bush administration's fight against terrorism after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. — Photograph: Diego Ibarra Sanchez/for The New York Times.
Mr. McCain visiting American troops in Kabul in 2014. He supported the Bush administration's fight against terrorism after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001. — Photograph: Diego Ibarra Sanchez/for The New York Times.


Rewarded for years of pushing campaign-finance reforms, Mr. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, finally saw passage in 2002 of the McCain-Feingold Act. It banned a key source of financing for both parties, so-called soft money donated in unlimited amounts to build party strengths, and it limited donations for national candidates to “hard money,” subject to annual limits and other rules. The law's effects became tangled in lawsuits, court rulings and financing schemes.

As a torture victim, Mr. McCain was sensitive to the detention and interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism. In 2005 the Senate passed his bill to bar inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by limiting military practices to those permitted by the United States Army Field Manual on Interrogation. His 2008 bill to ban waterboarding as torture was adopted, but vetoed by President Bush.

Mr. McCain wrote six books with his aide, Mark Salter, all with themes of courage. Besides his 2018 memoir, they were Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir (2002), Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life (2004), Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember (2005), Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (2007) and Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War (2014).

In 1993, Mr. McCain gave the commencement address at Annapolis: the sorcerer's apprentice, class of 1954, home to inspire the midshipmen. He spoke of Navy aviators hurled from the decks of pitching aircraft carriers, of Navy gunners blazing into the silhouettes of onrushing kamikazes, of trapped Marines battling overwhelming Chinese hordes in a breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.

“I have spent time in the company of heroes,” he said. “I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling cruelty until further resistance is impossible, break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more. All these things and more I have seen. And so will you. I will go to my grave in gratitude to my Creator for allowing me to stand witness to such courage and honor. And so will you.

“My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk of The New York Times and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He has covered many of New York's major news stories in his more than 30 years as a reporter and rewrite man for the paper, and has earned a reputation as one of the finest rewrite men in the business. Mr. McFadden's byline has appeared regularly over articles on plane crashes, hurricanes, strikes, parades, blackouts, city and state government affairs, health, crime, transportation, politics, education, the environment, the mass media and a wide array of other subjects. In an era of increasing specialization, Mr. McFadden, as a rewrite man for most of his career, has remained essentially a general assignment reporter who, on a given day and at a moment's notice, covers domestic and foreign crises, writes profiles of people and nations and draws together the diverse threads of sprawling stories on blizzards or riots, floods or ships floundering at sea. Among Mr. McFadden's major stories were the 1977 blackout in the New York region, written by candlelight in a darkened newsroom; the 1986 suicide of Queens Borough President Donald Manes, touching off New York's biggest scandal of the 1980’s; and a series on the case of Tawana Brawley, a black upstate New York teenager whose 1987 charges of rape by a gang of whites, including law enforcement officials, inflamed racial tensions before being exposed as a hoax. Mr. McFadden is the co-author of two books: No Hiding Place. a 1981 account of the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis, published by Times Books, and Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, published by Bantam Books in 1990. The recipient of 18 major journalistic awards and seven New York Times Publisher's Awards, Mr. McFadden has long been known as the anchor of The N.Y. Times rewrite bank.  He was named a senior writer for the paper in January 1990. Mr. McFadden was born in Milwaukee in 1937 and was raised in Chicago and Cumberland, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school in 1955.  He then worked his way through college, holding several reporting jobs before graduating in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a bachelor of science degree, cum laude, in journalism. Starting as a stringer for the United Press, Mr. McFadden was a reporter for The Wisconsin Rapids (Wisconsin) Daily Tribune in 1957 and 1958, The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison in 1958 and 1959, and after graduating from Wisconsin, for The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1960. Mr. McFadden joined The New York Times in May 1961 as a copy boy and was promoted to reporter a year later in an internal training program that included tours as a financial news writer and script writer for WQXR, The N.Y. Times' classical radio station.  After five years as a police and general assignment reporter on The Times' metropolitan staff, he became a rewrite man in 1967. Mr. McFadden is married and has a son.  He lives with his family in Manhattan.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Sunday, August 26, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York print edition with the headline: “A Symbol of Courage in Half a Century of Battles”.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: John McCain: The Making of a Maverick

 • Reflections of John McCain's decades in public life by reporters and editors at The New York Times.

 • John McCain to Lie in State at Capitols in Washington and Arizona

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 • John McCain: By the Book


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/obituaries/john-mccain-dead.html
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« Reply #460 on: August 26, 2018, 08:16:34 pm »


A spokesman for the McCain family has announced, following consultation with senior members of Congress representing both Republicans and Democrats, that John McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. before being given a national funeral service with full military honours at the Washington National Cathedral. Eulogies will be offered by former presidents George W. Bush and Barak Obama. Vice-President Pence will be invited to attend, but will not be granted a speaking role during the service. However, President Donald J. Trump will be officially informed that he is NOT WELCOME and to STAY AWAY from the funeral service. The body of John McCain will then be transported to Phoenix, Arizona where he will lie in state at the state Capitol, before being transported back north for a burial service and interment at the Naval Acadamy cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.

Trump will be FUMING that he is being specifically and publicly excluded in this way. However, President Dumb isn't even fit to wipe the dirt from Senator McCain's boots, so things are as they should be.

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« Reply #461 on: August 27, 2018, 04:01:11 pm »

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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #462 on: August 27, 2018, 06:52:04 pm »


The difference betwee John McCain and Donald J. Trump?

McCain withstood years of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, yet remained true to his country.

Donald J. Trump was a yellow-bellied, cowardly draft-dodger. If he had been captured by the North Vietnamese, he would have been singing like a bird at even the slightest hint of torture, because basically Donald J. Trump is a gutless wonder....a yellow-bellied cunt. Totally unlike brave John McCain.
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« Reply #463 on: August 28, 2018, 09:40:19 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Trump turns McCain's death into another political firestorm about Trump

The controversy reflected the bitter years-long battle between the two men.

By FELICIA SONMEZ, JOSH DAWSEY and JOHN WAGNER | 7:41PM EDT — Monday, August 27, 2018

President Donald J. Trump issued a proclamation on Monday that flags be flown at half-staff until Senator John McCain's interment, hours after incurring criticism as the White House flag flew at full-staff. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
President Donald J. Trump issued a proclamation on Monday that flags be flown at half-staff until Senator John McCain's interment, hours after incurring criticism
as the White House flag flew at full-staff. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


IT'S THE standard Washington protocol — a member of Congress dies, and the flags over official buildings are flown at half-staff. That's what happened when John McCain died on Saturday.

But first thing on Monday morning, the flag over the White House was back at full-staff, and a barrage of bitter criticism soon followed, with detractors — including the American Legion — interpreting the fleeting tribute as a sign of President Trump's pettiness.

He had refused to utter McCain's name earlier this month when signing the defense policy bill named for the senator. He had rejected staff suggestions over the weekend that he issue a statement upon McCain's death. And now he was refusing to follow a tradition of leaving the flag at half-staff until interment.

Then, suddenly, the flag was back at half-staff on Monday afternoon, and the president issued a statement offering “respect” for McCain.

By day's end, it had become clear that in his stubborn defiance of protocol, the president had single-handedly turned the death of McCain into yet another political firestorm that was all about Trump.

“It's all a self-inflicted wound, especially the flag,” said Ari Fleischer, who worked as White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “The ceremonial things, the traditional things that keep a lot of people together — even if you have policy or personal disagreements, you have to know where to draw that line.”

Trump, Fleisher added, “too often draws that line in a way that hurts himself because he thinks he is hurting others.”

The day's events were punctuated by a letter read aloud by McCain's long-time adviser in which the Arizona Republican obliquely rebuked Trump posthumously.

Trump is not expected to attend the funeral or memorial services in Washington for McCain, a senior White House official said. Vice President Pence will speak at a ceremony on Friday at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton will represent the administration at McCain's private funeral on Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

In his statement on Monday, Trump wrote: “Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment.”


An American flag flies at full-staff on the roof of the White House after briefly being flown at half-staff for the passing of Senator John McCain. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
An American flag flies at full-staff on the roof of the White House after briefly being flown at half-staff for the passing of Senator John McCain.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


After McCain's death on Saturday at the age of 81, Trump had initially offered words of condolence to the senator's family in a tweet that made no mention of McCain's storied service in the military and on Capitol Hill — a stark contrast with the effusive praise for McCain voiced by lawmakers, world leaders and members of the military.

That was followed by nearly two full days of silence from the president, who ignored almost a dozen shouted questions about McCain from reporters at three separate White House events on Monday while he tweeted on a wide range of other topics, from Tiger Woods to trade with Mexico.

Trump's silence reflected the bitter years-long battle between the two men. Trump has said that McCain, who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam, was “not a war hero” and continued to snub the long-time senator throughout his battle with brain cancer.

McCain, in turn, pulled no punches in criticizing the president on foreign policy and other issues, most recently in a stinging denunciation of Trump's summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in Helsinki last month.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Trump had rejected the advice of top aides who advocated releasing an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a “hero.”

On Monday morning, images of the flag atop the White House at full-staff — and behind it, the Washington Monument encircled by flags, all at half-staff — blazed across the nation's TV and computer screens. Criticism was not far behind.

The American Legion, a veterans organization, issued a sternly worded statement calling on Trump to treat McCain with more reverence.

“On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his [interment],” said Denise Rohan, the group's national commander.

Several administration officials said Trump was frustrated with the TV coverage and felt besieged — that nothing he said about McCain would be enough. Trump also suggested to advisers that many of those speaking out on television were merely looking for reasons to attack him and that some of the same people now praising McCain previously did not like the senator.

Yet among those hailing McCain was Ivanka Trump, Trump's daughter and senior White House adviser, who on Monday called the late senator “an American patriot who served our country with distinction for more than six decades.”

“The nation is united in its grief and the world mourns the loss of a true hero and a great statesman,” the first daughter said in remarks at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington.


An American flag flies at half-staff for the passing of Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) on the roof of the White House. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
An American flag flies at half-staff again for the passing of Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) on the roof of the White House.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


Trump told advisers over the weekend that lavishing praise on McCain would not be genuine because he did not feel that way. “Everyone knows we don't like each other,” the president said, according to one White House official who spoke with him.

Even so, after speaking with a number of close advisers on Monday, including Bolton, Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — all of whom urged him to clean up the mess — the president backtracked.

Trump wrote much of Monday's statement, White House officials said, and wanted to express that he disagreed with McCain on policy and politics.

Later, at a White House dinner celebrating evangelical leaders, Trump said that “our hearts and prayers” are with McCain's family and made note of this week's planned events in honor of the senator.

“We very much appreciate everything that Senator McCain has done for our country,” Trump said.

Trump's proclamation came hours after an emotional news conference in Phoenix at which McCain's longtime adviser and family spokesman, Rick Davis, read a farewell statement from the senator that contained a veiled critique of the president. In the letter, McCain did not name Trump but called on Americans to rally behind the country's founding principles rather than hiding behind walls and succumbing to political tribalism.

“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe,” McCain wrote in the letter. “We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to build a wall across the U.S. border with Mexico and force Mexico to pay for it.

McCain's statement also referred at some length to the populist and protectionist forces that helped propel Trump to the office McCain twice failed to win.

“We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil,” McCain wrote. “We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world.”

White supremacists who marched in Charlottesville last year chanted “blood and soil,” a translation of a Nazi slogan. Trump appeared to defend the rallygoers, who clashed with counterprotesters, when he said there were “fine people on both sides.”


President Donald J. Trump crosses his arms and remains silent when asked by reporters to comment on the passing of Senator John McCain. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump crosses his arms and remains silent when asked by reporters to comment on the passing of Senator John McCain.
 — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.


At the Capitol on Monday, the Senate convened for the first time since McCain's death. Inside the chamber, the wooden desk that McCain occupied for six terms was draped in black. A vase of white flowers had been placed on top.

One by one, McCain's colleagues rose to deliver somber tributes to him. They included Senator Jeff Flake (Republican), McCain's junior Arizona colleague, who welled with emotion as he spoke of the late senator's legacy.

“If John McCain can forgive the North Vietnamese torturers, we can at least forgive each other,” Flake said.

Yet it was Trump's actions that dominated the conversations between senators and reporters in the marble hallways just outside the chamber.

“I don't know why the administration had the flag lowered for such a brief period of time,” Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine) said. “It seems to me that it would be appropriate to keep the flag at half-mast until Senator McCain has been buried.”

Asked whether Trump had let his personal views stand in the way of paying proper respects to McCain, Collins responded: “It certainly looks that way.”

Some Trump allies, including Senator James M. Inhofe (Republican-Oklahoma), suggested the dust-up was being blown out of proportion. Both Trump and McCain were “two of the most stubborn people I ever met,” Inhofe said, arguing that if McCain had been the one in the White House, he would have behaved similarly to Trump.

“If the tables were turned, it'd be the same way with McCain. The flag is lowered, so he's doing it with respect, but everyone knows they didn't get along,” Inhofe said.

Other lawmakers decided to sidestep the topic entirely.

“I'm not gonna get into that,” Senator Cory Gardner (Republican-Colorado) said when asked about Trump's re-lowering of the flag. “What I am gonna say is this week's about John McCain and his legacy and his lifetime of service to this country. You can get into the fight between the president and John McCain. I'm not going to.”

The varied opinions on Capitol Hill were themselves emblematic of the America comprising “three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals” that McCain described in his letter. In the end, the Arizona Republican noted, “we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement.”

“If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we will get through these challenging times,” he wrote. “We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Trump turns McCain's death into another political firestorm about Trump.

Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter at The Washington Post covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. Previously, she spent more than four years in Beijing, where she worked first as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and later as the editor of The Wall Street Journal's China Real Time Report. She also spent a year in advanced Chinese language study as a Blakemore Freeman Fellow at Tsinghua University. From 2010 to 2013, she reported on national politics for The Washington Post, starting as a writer for The Fix and going on to cover Congress, the 2012 presidential campaign and the early days of President Barack Obama's second term. She began her career teaching English in Beijing and has also covered U.S. politics for the Asahi Shimbun and National Journal's the Hotline.

Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for The Wall Street Journal.

John Wagner is a national reporter who leads The Washington Post's new breaking political news team. He previously covered the Trump White House. During the 2016 presidential election, Wagner focused on the Democratic campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley. He earlier chronicled Maryland government for more than a decade, a stretch that included O’Malley's eight years as governor and part of the tenure of his Republican predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. He came to The Post from The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as the paper's Washington correspondent, covering the 2004 presidential bid of Senator John Edwards and the final years in office of Senator Jesse Helms.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: President Trump keeps silent when asked about John McCain

 • Republicans' anger at McCain speaks volumes about America's tribal politics

 • Analysis: Insults, straight talk, expertise — McCain knew how to attract the media

 • Flags at White House return to half-staff in tribute to McCain

 • Jennifer Rubin: McCain gets the last word on Trump

 • E.J. Dionne Jr.: John McCain and the last of human freedoms

 • Max Boot: John McCain leaves the stage when we need him most


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-turns-mccains-death-into-another-political-firestorm-about-trump/2018/08/27/fd1ece86-aa36-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html
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« Reply #464 on: June 07, 2019, 07:58:27 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Dr. John, flamboyant soul of New Orleans music, dies at 77

He rose to fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced,
patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.


By CHRIST MORRIS | 7:39PM EDT — Thursday, June 06, 2019

Malcolm Rebennack Jr., shown performing as Dr. John in 2008, concocted a voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona as “the Night Tripper”. — Photograph: Dave Martin/Associated Press.
Malcolm Rebennack Jr., shown performing as Dr. John in 2008, concocted a voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona as “the Night Tripper”.
 — Photograph: Dave Martin/Associated Press.


MALCOLM REBENNACK Jr., the flamboyant New Orleans singer-pianist known as Dr. John whose hoodoo-drenched music made him the summarizing figure of the grand Crescent City R&B/rock-n-roll tradition, died on June 6 at 77.

His family said the cause was a heart attack but did not disclose where he died.

Mr. Rebennack had already tallied more than a decade of experience as a session musician in New Orleans and Los Angeles when he rose to solo fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.

In their history of postwar New Orleans music Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II, Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones wrote richly of the artist they called “a true original.”

The writers described him exclamatorily: “Dr. John! — sunglasses and radiant colors, feathers and plumes, bones and beads around his neck, the crusty blues voice rich in dialect cadences, and then the man himself in motion: scattering glitter to the crowds, pumping the keyboard, a human carnival to behold.”

After flashing his fantastical character on a quartet of early albums that garnered him an enthusiastic underground following, Dr. John settled in to become New Orleans's great latter-day exponent of bayou funk and jazz, playing in a style that reconciled the diverse streams of the city's music.

His early '70s work was distinguished by a collection of historic New Orleans favorites, “Gumbo”, and a pair of albums with famed New Orleans producer-arranger-songwriter Allen Toussaint and funk quartet the Meters — the first of which, “In the Right Place”, spawned a top-10 hit.

He memorably branched into traditional pop with his 1989 album “In a Sentimental Mood”; the album spawned the first of his six Grammy Awards, for Makin' Whoopee, a duet with Ricki Lee Jones.

Dr. John would delve deeper into jazz terrain later in his peripatetic career with Bluesiana Triangle, a collaboration with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman and drummer Art Blakey, and homages to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. But the earthy R&B of his hometown served as his main stylistic and emotional propellant.

In 2008, his Grammy-winning collection “City That Care Forgot” dwelled movingly on the havoc wreaked on his city by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As an in-demand sideman, he recorded with Levon Helm, Gregg Allman, Van Morrison, Harry Connick Jr., Ringo Starr and B.B. King, among others. He released “Triumvirate”, a “super session” date with guitarists Mike Bloomfield and John Hammond Jr., in 1973.

His turns on the big screen ranged from a memorable performance in Martin Scorsese's “The Last Waltz” (1978), a documentary about the Band's farewell performance, to an appearance as a member of the fictional “Louisiana Gator Boys” in “Blues Brothers 2000” (1998). He guested regularly on the New Orleans-set HBO dramatic series “Treme” from 2010 to 2013.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.


Dr. John in 2010. — Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters.
Dr. John in 2010. — Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters.

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., known as “Mac,” was born in New Orleans on November 21, 1940. He began playing the family piano but soon acquired a guitar, which became his principal instrument during his early professional career.

By the time he dropped out of Jesuit High School in the 11th grade, he had already acquired a taste for heroin and the chops to work as a session guitarist at J&M Music, which spawned major R&B hits by Fats Domino and other local R&B stars. He played his first date behind singer Paul Gayten.

During this period, he got to know some of the city's most influential keyboardists, including Professor Longhair and the eccentric virtuoso James Booker (who taught him to play organ and later joined Dr. John's touring band).

He recorded steadily, appearing on local hits by Jerry Byrne (“Lights Out”) and Roland Stone (“Down the Road”, a.k.a. “Junco Partner”) and as a leader (including the 1959 instrumental Storm Warning). He also worked as an A&R man and sideman for Johnny Vincent's Ace Records.

On Christmas Eve 1961 on a tour stop in Jacksonville, Florida, Mr. Rebennack and pianist Ronnie Barron got involved in a scuffle with a motel owner, and the guitarist was shot in his fretting hand, nearly severing the ring finger. During a slow recovery, he moved first to bass, and later to keyboards.

The studio scene in New Orleans was beginning to dry up in the early '60s when Mr. Rebennack was busted for heroin possession, drawing a two-year sentence in federal prison in Texas.

On his release from jail in 1965, he headed to Los Angeles, where a group of New Orleans expatriates that included producer-arranger Harold Battiste had set up shop as studio musicians. Mr. Rebennack worked with, among others, Canned Heat, the Mothers of Invention and Sonny & Cher.

In L.A., Mr. Rebennack moved to fulfill a lingering musical concept grounded in New Orleans history that he had originally developed for the reluctant Ronnie Barron.

In his 1994 autobiography Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper he wrote, “In the 1840s and 1850s, one New Orleans root doctor was preeminent in the city for the awe in which he was held by the poor and the fear and notoriety he inspired among the rich. Known variously as John Montaigne, Bayou John, and most often Dr. John, he was a figure larger than life.”


Dr. John in 2013. — Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters.
Dr. John in 2013. — Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Using studio time left over from a Sonny & Cher session, Mr. Rebennack and Battiste cut an album of hazy, incantatory songs steeped in Crescent City voodoo imagery. Issued by Atlantic Records' Atco subsidiary as Gris-Gris, the collection failed to chart, but it inaugurated several years of extroverted live shows that established Dr. John as a unique under-the-radar performer.

Three more similarly styled albums — “Babylon” (1969), “Remedies” (1970) and “The Sun Moon and Herbs” (1971) — deepened the Dr. John image; the latter album, recorded in London, included guest appearances by Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger.

However, he turned away from his original swampy style for an album he described in the notes as “More Gumbo, Less Gris Gris.” Co-produced by Battiste and Jerry Wexler, “Gumbo” (1972) was devoted to covers of New Orleans roots music by Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Sugar Boy Crawford and others; its good-time Mardi Gras atmosphere lifted it to No.112 on the charts.

His first set with Toussaint and the Meters became his biggest commercial success: “In the Right Place” (1973) included the No.9 single “Right Place Wrong Time”. While the follow-up LP “Desitively Bonnaroo” (1974) failed to duplicate its predecessor’s popularity, its title inspired the name of the popular Bonaroo Festival.

A schism with Atlantic — possibly prompted by Wexler's daughter Anita's introduction to heroin by Dr. John — led to a period of label-jumping by the musician.

In 1989, he landed at Warner Brothers Records with “In a Sentimental Mood”, a well-received set of standards elegantly produced by Tommy LiPuma that included the Grammy-winning duet with Jones. That year, he finally kicked his more than three-decade addiction to heroin. Another Grammy winner, the self-descriptive Goin' Back to New Orleans, followed in 1992. Around that time, he also sang the opening theme to the TV sitcom “Blossom”, My Opinionation.

He abided as an “eminence gris-gris” for the remainder of his career. He settled in for a long stay at Blue Note Records in the new millennium; his five-album sojourn for the imprint was inaugurated the Ellington tribute “Duke Elegant” in 2000. (His homage to trumpeter Armstrong, “Ske-Dat-De-Dat”, was released by Concord in 2014.

The intensely felt “City That Care Forgot” was succeeded by the atypical “Locked Down” for Nonesuch Records in 2012; the album, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and eschewing pianistics for a tough hard-rock-based sound, also collected a Grammy as best blues album.

Information about surviving offspring was not immediately available.


__________________________________________________________________________

This story was originally published at Variety magazine.

Chris Morris is an acclaimed writer and editor specializing in the video game and consumer electronics industries. He has covered both fields since 1996, offering analysis of news and trends and breaking several major stories, including the existence of the Game Boy Advance and the first details on “Half-Life 2” (after a five year cone of silence from the developer). Chris is also a veteran financial journalist with more than 25 years of experience, the last 18 of which were spent with some of the Internet's biggest sites. As Director of Content Development, he was a key part of the senior management team that helped grow CNNMoney.com to one of the most prominent financial sites online. Later, as Managing Editor of Yahoo! Finance, he orchestrated changes that resulted in a 61 percent increase in unique users in less than a year, climbing from 11.7 million to 18.8 million. While there, he was also responsible for maintaining relationships with over 30 editorial partners. He also has extensive experience in newspaper, magazine and radio. Today, he works with a number of clients including (but not limited to) CNBC, Yahoo!, Variety, Common Sense Media, Coast 2 Coast Radio Networks, GamesIndustry.biz and Wired.com. His work has also appeared on the web sites of USA Today, Fox Business, the Chicago Tribune, Fidelity and several other sites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dr-john-flamboyant-soul-of-new-orleans-music-dies-at-77/2019/06/06/e31783f2-88b1-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html
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« Reply #465 on: December 30, 2019, 12:17:55 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times…

OBITUARY: Ram Dass, part of the '60s
psychedelic movement, dies at 88


By ELAINE WOO | 6:46AM PST — Monday, December 23, 2019

Ram Dass was a point person for the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. — Photograph: Rameshwar Das/Harper Collins.
Ram Dass was a point person for the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. — Photograph: Rameshwar Das/Harper Collins.

IN 1963, Richard Alpert ended one life and launched a new one: Ousted from Harvard University's faculty with co-merrymaker Timothy Leary for giving hallucinogenic drugs to students, he became a point man for the psychedelic movement of the '60s.

Many drug-fueled highs later, Alpert's second, and most lasting, transformation occurred. He went on sojourn in India and in 1968 returned as Ram Dass, a name that became synonymous with another of that era's social and psychological explosions.

As Ram Dass, Alpert spread the word that turning inward was far more powerful than just turning on. A nimble communicator who was articulate, funny and self-effacing, he became a central figure in the movement to make Eastern mysticism understandable to Western minds.

Ram Dass, 88, who died on Sunday at his home in Maui, according to a post on his Instagram account, described his metamorphoses in Be Here Now (1971), a counterculture classic still in print almost four decades and millions of copies later.

As popular in its time as Dr. Spock's baby manual, it became the hippie bible, offering a personal parable of enlightenment as well as practical guidance on yoga and meditation decades before such practices became mainstream.

“He was the voice for applied spirituality — his life was the model,” bestselling self-help author Wayne Dyer once said.

Ram Dass in some ways reinvented himself again in 1997 after a debilitating stroke left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. He learned to depend on others and appreciate the silences that remained after he recovered some of his speech. The trailblazer of the 1960s and '70s entered the new millennium with hard-won wisdom about “conscious aging,” which he detailed in the book Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying (2000).

Born on April 6, 1931, in Boston, he was the youngest of three sons of George Alpert, a Jewish lawyer who was a founder of Brandeis University and president of the New Haven Railroad. He honed an expertise in psychology through three degrees: a bachelor's from Tufts University in 1952, a master's from Wesleyan University in 1954 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1957. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1958.

When the '60s dawned, Alpert was living high. He had appointments to teach in four departments at Harvard — Social Relations, Psychology, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist — and had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. He lived in an antiques-filled Cambridge apartment, drove a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph motorcycle, and flew his own Cessna plane.

At the same time, he was “living a lie,” according to journalist Don Lattin, who profiles Alpert and other counterculture figures in The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (2010). With a male lover in San Francisco and a female lover in Cambridge, Alpert was struggling to keep the strands of his sexual life separate. Teaching at Harvard was beginning to feel like an elaborate game.

Then he met Timothy Leary.

A Harvard lecturer in psychology, Leary had encountered a fungus with unusual properties on a 1960 trip to Mexico. The “magic mushrooms” contained psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance. Once he ate a few of the mushrooms, his life changed dramatically. He founded a psilocybin research project at Harvard and began experiments with a synthetic form of the mushroom's mind-altering ingredient.

In early 1961, after a semester at UC Berkeley as a visiting professor, Alpert joined Leary's wild party, which by then included some of the leading bohemian intellectuals of the day, such as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Buddhist writer Alan Watts. Leary gave his colleague 10 milligrams of synthetic psilocybin and Alpert went up, up and away.

First, “the rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me,” Alpert recalled in “Be Here Now”. Then he slid deeper into himself, feeling each of his identities — teacher, lover, pilot, son — dissolving. As he shed each role he was filled with escalating sensations of wonder and bliss, akin to a religious awakening.

He joined Leary in the research project, which initially examined whether psilocybin could be used as a therapeutic agent: They administered the drug to prisoners, for instance, to find out if it could make criminals less likely to break the law.

But soon they were also giving psilocybin and LSD to students. According to Lattin, one of the people who turned them in to the administration was then-Harvard undergraduate Andrew Weil — the future guru of holistic medicine — who exposed the professors' misdeeds in the Harvard Crimson and Look magazines. Alpert and Leary's activities became a national scandal and the two were booted out of Harvard.

The academic exiles became outspoken advocates of LSD, or “acid” as it became known to a legion of youthful users. Alpert said the drug was “less dangerous than a four-year liberal arts college education” and lectured about its potential to groups as varied as the Food and Drug Administration and the Hell's Angels. In 1967 he and Leary were headliners at the Human Be-In, a massive gathering of hippies in Golden Gate Park where Leary issued his famous call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

By 1968, however, the news was full of stories about acid trips that ended badly, in psychotic breakdowns and suicide. The federal government banned LSD later that year.


A still from the documentary movie “Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary”, of Ram Dass formerly known as Richard Alpert. — Photograph: CNS Communications.
A still from the documentary movie “Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary”, of Ram Dass
formerly known as Richard Alpert. — Photograph: CNS Communications.


A burned-out Alpert sought relief in India. There he met a Hindu holy man named Neem Karoli Baba, whom his followers called Maharaji. Alpert immediately had an extraordinary exchange with the spiritual teacher. Without Alpert telling him, Maharaji knew that his Western visitor had spent the previous night thinking about his mother, who had died six months earlier of an enlarged spleen. The holy man knew when she died and what caused her death.

The conversation blew Alpert's mind. After considering “every super CIA paranoia I've ever had,” he began sobbing.

The next day, Maharaji asked for the “medicine” Alpert had brought from the United States. Alpert was stunned: He had not said a word to the mystic about the bottle of LSD he had hidden in his pack. But he had brought the drug to India exactly for this purpose: to find a holy man who could explain the nature of its magic.

He gave Maharaji 900 micrograms, a substantial dose that should have produced a substantial reaction. But the mystic seemed unfazed.

After hours passed with the guru doing nothing more than “twinkle” at Alpert in his usual way, Alpert realized that the guru had no need for pharmaceutical help to reach a higher state of consciousness. Love, Maharaji told him, was a much stronger drug.

Over the next several months, Alpert stayed with the guru to study Hindu philosophy, yoga and meditation. When he left India, he was Ram Dass, Hindi for “servant of God.”

Back in the U.S., people who had known him as the ex-Harvard oracle of LSD flocked to hear what he had to say as the berobed Baba Ram Dass. He gave workshops at Esalen, the New Age retreat in Big Sur, and he lectured around the country. He talked about how the Eastern path to enlightenment differed from “the Western hang-up — the tremendous need to know, along with not knowing that you know.”

Such talk led some to scorn him as a new kind of snake-oil salesman. The National Lampoon dubbed him Baba Rum Raisin. His father called him Rum Dum.

But to many others who, like Alpert, had not found lasting fulfillment in psychedelics, Ram Dass was a sage for a new age.

Part of his appeal was his acknowledgment that he was no saint, that he had “lusts and fears just like real people do.” He joked, for instance, about the time a follower found him in line to see the X-rated movie “Deep Throat”.

During the 1970s and 1980s, critics attacked him for not supporting political and social causes. He responded by launching several non-profit organizations, including the Seva Foundation, which works to alleviate disease and poverty around the world. He donated most of his speaking fees to charity, particularly his Hanuman Foundation.

There was also the time in the mid-1970s, after Maharaji's death, when Alpert became a follower of a Brooklyn woman named Joya, who claimed to be an enlightened being. After studying with her for a year, however, Ram Dass renounced her as a charlatan, confessing his mistake in a 1976 article for Yoga Journal called “Egg on My Beard”.

The affair caused him to lose credibility with his followers for a while, but he continued to write books and reach out to new audiences. Two decades after he first burst into public consciousness as a counterculture icon, he found himself addressing large audiences of people who had never gotten high or chanted a mantra.

One night in early 1997 he was at home in bed in Marin County, contemplating an ending for his book about aging. He was imagining what it would be like to be old and infirm when he noticed that his leg seemed to have fallen asleep. He got up to answer the phone but fell to the floor. “I didn't realize,” he wrote later, “that my leg was no longer working because I'd had a stroke.”

He nearly died from the massive cerebral hemorrhage. It not only took away his ability to walk and talk but shattered his self-image as a vibrant 65-year-old. “I thought I was at the end of a graced life,” he recalled in a 2004 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.

Therapy helped him learn to talk again, but the words came so haltingly — and often failed him completely — that he considered giving up public speaking. But he eventually resumed a lecture schedule. And he finished the book that became “Still Here”. Some disability advocates cringed at its references to the ennobling aspects of suffering, but other critics appreciated its gentle teachings about growing older.

“The stroke,” Ram Dass wrote, “was unbearable to the Ego, and so it pushed me into the Soul level…. From the Soul's perspective it's been a great learning experience. Although I'm more in the spirit now, I'm also more human.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Elaine Woo is a Los Angeles native who has written for her hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times since 1983. She covered public education and filled a variety of editing assignments before joining “the dead beat” — news obituaries — where she has produced artful pieces on celebrated local, national and international figures, including Norman Mailer, Julia Child and Rosa Parks. She left the L.A. Times permanent staff in 2015 but still writes obituaries for the paper on a freelance basis.

https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2019-12-23/ram-dass-dead
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« Reply #466 on: February 25, 2020, 10:27:46 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Katherine Johnson, ‘hidden figure’ at NASA
during 1960s space race, dies at 101


Long overlooked, she became the subject of a book and hit movie in her 90s.

By HARRISON SMITH | 9:59AM EST — Monday, February 24, 2020

Research mathematician Katherine Johnson at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center with a globe, or “Celestial Training Device”, in 1962. — Photograph: National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA).
Research mathematician Katherine Johnson at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center with a globe, or “Celestial Training Device”, in 1962.
 — Photograph: National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA).


WHEN Katherine Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953, she was classified as “sub-professional,” not far outranking a secretary or janitor.

Hers was a labor not of scheduling or cleaning but rather of mathematics: using a slide rule or mechanical calculator in complex calculations to check the work of her superiors — engineers who, unlike her, were white and male.

Her title, poached by the technology that would soon make the services of many of her colleagues obsolete, was “computer”.

Mrs. Johnson, who died on February 24 at 101, went on to develop equations that helped the NACA and its successor, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), send astronauts into orbit and, later, to the moon. In 26 signed reports for the space agency, and in many more papers that bore others' signatures on her work, she codified mathematical principles that remain at the core of human space travel.

She was not the first black woman to work as a NASA mathematician, nor the first to write a research report for the agency, but Mrs. Johnson was eventually recognized as a pathbreaker for women and African Americans in the newly created field of spaceflight.

Like most backstage members of the space program, Mrs. Johnson was overshadowed in the popular imagination by the life-risking astronauts whose flights she calculated, and to a lesser extent by the department heads under whom she served.

She did not command mainstream attention until President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the country's highest civilian honor — in 2015. The next year, her research was celebrated in the best-selling book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly and the Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

Mrs. Johnson was “critical to the success of the early U.S. space programs,” Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian, said in a 2017 interview for this obituary. “She had a singular intellect, curiosity and skill set in mathematics that allowed her to make many contributions, each of which might be considered worthy of a single lifetime.”

A math prodigy from West Virginia who said she “counted everything” as a child — “the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed” — Mrs. Johnson worked as a schoolteacher before being hired as a computer at the NACA's flight research division, based at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.


President Barack Obama kisses mathematician Katherine Johnson after awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. — Photograph: Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.
President Barack Obama kisses mathematician Katherine Johnson after awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
 — Photograph: Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/Shutterstock.


The agency was established in 1915 and began enlisting white women to work as computers 20 years later. Black computers, assigned mainly to segregated facilities, were first hired during the labor shortage of World War II. Mrs. Johnson was one of about 100 computers, roughly one-third of whom were black, when she joined the NACA.

The movie Hidden Figures took occasional liberties with fact to emphasize the indignities of segregation. Mrs. Johnson, played by Henson, is forced to run half a mile to reach the “colored” bathroom. In reality, Mrs. Johnson said, she used the bathroom closest to her desk.

“I did not feel much discrimination, but then that's me,” she recalled in a 1992 NASA oral history. When she detected hints of racism, such as when a white colleague stood up to leave as soon as she sat down, she said, she tried not to respond. “I don't wear my feelings on my shoulder. So I got along fine.”

Mrs. Johnson had a bachelor's degree in mathematics and spent her early career studying data from plane crashes, helping devise air safety standards at a time when the agency’s central concern was aviation. Then, in October 1957, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik thrust the space race into full tilt.

Mrs. Johnson and dozens of colleagues wrote a 600-page technical report titled Notes on Space Technology outlining the mathematical underpinnings of spaceflight, from rocket propulsion to orbital mechanics and heat protection.

One of rocket science's most vexing challenges, they soon realized, was calculating flight trajectories to ensure that astronauts returned safely to Earth, splashing down in the ocean reasonably close to a Navy vessel waiting to pluck them from the water.

For astronauts such as Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when Freedom 7 launched on May 5, 1961, the math was relatively straightforward. Shepard's craft rose and fell, like a champagne cork, without entering orbit.

Calculating the trajectory for an orbital flight, such as the one to be undertaken by Marine pilot John Glenn in 1962, was “orders of magnitude more complicated,” said Shetterly, the “Hidden Figures” author.

“I said, ‘Let me do it’,” Mrs. Johnson recalled in a 2008 NASA interview. “You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.”


Research mathematician Katherine Johnson at work in 1980 at NASA Langley Research Center. — Photograph: NASA.
Research mathematician Katherine Johnson at work in 1980 at NASA Langley Research Center. — Photograph: NASA.

Mrs. Johnson's findings, outlined in a 1960 paper she wrote with engineer Ted Skopinski, enabled engineers to determine exactly when to launch a spacecraft and when to begin its re-entry. The paper, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position”, marked the first time a woman wrote a technical report in NASA's elite flight research division.

“You could work your teeth out, but you didn't get your name on the report,” she said in the 1992 oral history, crediting her breakthrough to what she described as an assertive personality. When a superior said that she could not accompany male colleagues to a briefing related to her work, Mrs. Johnson asked, “Is there a law that says I can't go?” Her boss relented.

Mrs. Johnson's handwritten calculations were said to have been more trusted than those performed by mainframe computers. A short time before Glenn launched into space, he asked engineers to “get the girl to check the numbers.”

“All the women were called ‘the girls’,” said Barry, “and everyone knew exactly which girl he was talking about.” Mrs. Johnson, who was then 43, spent a day and a half checking the trajectory calculations made by the IBM computer before giving the go-ahead to Glenn, who became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.

In a subsequent report, Mrs. Johnson took her calculations one step further, working with several colleagues to determine how a spacecraft could move in and out of a planetary body's orbit. Her formulas were crucial to the success of the Apollo lunar program and are still in use today, Barry said. “If we go back to the moon, or to Mars, we'll be using her math.”


Modest beginnings

Katherine Coleman was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, then a town of about 800, on August 26, 1918. Her mother was a former teacher. She credited her proclivity for mathematics to her father, a farmer who had worked in the lumber industry and could quickly calculate the number of boards a tree could produce.

By 10, Katherine had finished all the coursework offered at her town's two-room schoolhouse. Joined by her mother and her three older siblings, she moved to Institute, a suburb of the state capital, to attend the laboratory school of West Virginia State College while her father remained at home to support the family.

Mrs. Johnson went on to study at West Virginia State, a historically black college, with plans to major in French and English and become a teacher. A mathematics professor — W.W. Schiefflin Claytor, widely reported to be the third African American to receive a doctorate in math — persuaded her to change fields.

Mrs. Johnson later recalled his saying: “You'd make a good research mathematician, and I'm going to see that you're prepared.” She had never heard of the position before. “I said, ‘Where will I get a job?’ And he said, ‘That will be your problem’.”


“Hidden Figures” stars Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer join Katherine Johnson to present the award for best documentary feature at the Oscars in 2017. NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle, who escorted Mrs. Johnson to the ceremony, holds the microphone. — Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press.
Hidden Figures” stars Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer join Katherine Johnson to present the award for best documentary
feature at the Oscars in 2017. NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle, who escorted Mrs. Johnson to the ceremony, holds the microphone.
 — Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press.


After graduating in 1937, at 18, she taught at a segregated elementary school in Marion, Virginia, a town near the North Carolina border.

Three years later, she was one of three black students selected to integrate West Virginia University's graduate programs. She dropped out of her master's in mathematics program after one semester to start a family with her husband, James Goble, a chemistry teacher. She later returned to teaching, in West Virginia, before a brother-in-law suggested she apply for a computer position at Langley.

Goble died of cancer in 1956, and three years later Mrs. Johnson married James Johnson, an Army artillery officer. He died in 2019.

Mrs. Johnson's death was confirmed by lawyer and family representative Donyale Y.H. Reavis, who said she died at home in Newport News, Virginia, but did not cite a specific cause.

Survivors include two daughters from her first marriage, Joylette Hylick of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and Katherine Moore of Greensboro, North Carolina; six grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her daughter Constance Garcia died in 2010.

Mrs. Johnson was invited to move to Houston in the mid-1960s to help establish what is now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, but she declined the offer to maintain her family's ties to the Hampton community, Shetterly said.

At Langley, where she retired in 1986, she performed calculations that determined the precise moment at which the Apollo lunar lander could leave the moon's surface to return to the command module, which remained in orbit high above. She also contributed to NASA's space shuttle and Earth satellite programs.

After the release of “Hidden Figures”, Mrs. Johnson played down the importance of her role in the early years of the space program. “There's nothing to it — I was just doing my job,” she told The Washington Post in 2017.

“They needed information, and I had it, and it didn't matter that I found it,” she added. “At the time, it was just a question and an answer.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk, where he has worked since 2015. He covers people who have made a significant impact on their field, city or country — a group of the recently deceased that includes big-game hunters, single-handed sailors, fallen dictators, Olympic champions and the creator of the Hawaiian pizza. Educated at the University of Chicago where he earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy, Harrison previously worked for KidsPost and contributed to Washingtonian and Chicago magazines, among other publications. He co-founded the South Side Weekly newspaper in Chicago before moving to the District of Columbia in 2015.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: NASA mathematician portrayed in ‘Hidden Figures’ explains how she helped astronauts

 • The stars of ‘Hidden Figures’ are now immortalized on street sign

 • Hidden’ no more: Katherine Johnson, a black NASA pioneer, finds acclaim at 98

 • The ‘Hidden Figures’ stars on how working at NASA in the 1960s is a little like Hollywood


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/katherine-johnson-hidden-figure-at-nasa-during-1960s-space-race-dies-at-101/2020/02/24/fd5058ba-5715-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html
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« Reply #467 on: April 04, 2020, 05:30:26 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times…

Bill Withers, ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Ain't No Sunshine
singer-songwriter, dies at 81


By DOUGLAS WOLK | 7:38AM PDT — Friday, April 03, 2020

Bill Withers wrote and sang a string of soulful songs in the 1970s that have stood the test of time, including “Lean on Me”, “Lovely Day” and “Ain't No Sunshine”. — Photograph: Gilles Petard/Redferns.
Bill Withers wrote and sang a string of soulful songs in the 1970s that have stood the test of time, including “Lean on Me”,
Lovely Day” and “Ain't No Sunshine”. — Photograph: Gilles Petard/Redferns.


SINGER-SONGWRITER BILL WITHERS, who came to music late and left it early but created enduring hits like “Ain't No Sunshine”, “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us”, died in Los Angeles from heart complications on March 30, according to an announcement from his family. He was 81.

“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved, devoted husband and father. A solitary man with a heart driven to connect to the world at large, with his poetry and music, he spoke honestly to people and connected them to each other,” the family statement read. “As private a life as he lived close to intimate family and friends, his music forever belongs to the world. In this difficult time, we pray his music offers comfort and entertainment as fans hold tight to loved ones.”

Born on July 4, 1938 (“that makes me very American,” he joked), in the coal-mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, Withers always made a point of emphasizing his working-class origins and sympathies. A stuttering, socially awkward teenager, he joined the Navy after high school, becoming an aircraft mechanic. After nine years in the military, he moved to California and got interested in music as a way to meet women, so he bought his first guitar and learned to play it. His first single, “Three Nights and a Morning”, came out in 1967 and made no commercial impact at all. (Later, he would rerecord it as “Harlem”.)

In 1971, the independent record label Sussex released Withers' debut album, “Just As I Am”, on which he was backed by Stephen Stills and members of Booker T. & the M.G.'s. The cover photograph showed Withers in jeans and T-shirt, leaning against the Weber Aircraft factory where he worked at the time, holding his lunchbox; with characteristic prudence, he didn't give up his job at the factory until it laid him off shortly before the album appeared.

A folk-soul landmark, “Just As I Am” was built around Withers' calm, supple baritone voice and acoustic guitar. “Ain't No Sunshine”, his first hit, was a quiet thunderbolt: a plain-spoken and devastating love song, barely two minutes long, with a break in which Withers simply sang “I know” 26 times in a row over Al Jackson Jr.'s skeletal drums. It became an instant standard. So did its follow-up, “Grandma's Hands”, a sentimental memory with genuine, sharp pain, and the cadences of black churches and the gospel songs he'd heard there as a child beneath its surface.




As a songwriter, Withers built on the traditions of Thomas Dorsey, Hank Williams and Irving Berlin, distilling overwhelming emotions to thoughtful, aphoristic phrases. “To me,” he told Songfacts in 2004, “the biggest challenge in the world is to take anything that's complicated and make it simple so it can be understood by the masses. … I'm a stickler for saying something the simplest possible way with some elements of poetry. Because simple is memorable.”

As his musical career was taking off, Withers bought a Wurlitzer electric piano — he hadn't really played that before, either — and promptly came up with the rising-and-falling melody at the center of “Lean on Me”, which topped both the pop and R&B charts in 1972. The album on which it appeared, “Still Bill”, also produced the slinky funk hit “Use Me”, and a triumphant October 1972 Carnegie Hall concert was released as a live album.

After that, though, Withers' career and personal life grew more turbulent. His 1973 marriage to “Room 222” actress Denise Nicholas quickly collapsed; they were divorced the next year, and the bitter emotional fallout from the breakup underscored his messy 1974 album "+'Justments”. Sussex Records folded in 1975, and Withers moved to the much larger label Columbia, whose executives' ideas about what he should be recording clashed with his own. His songwriting left the raw emotion of his earlier work behind, and although the slick, good-mood pop he was now making had its moments — 1977's “Lovely Day” was a substantial hit — his heart clearly wasn't in it most of the time, which was a problem for an artist who had built his reputation on direct sincerity.

Withers made no albums in the seven years after 1978's “'Bout Love”, although he did have one of his biggest hits in 1981: “Just the Two of Us”, a collaboration with smooth jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. And then, after 1985's forgettable “Watching You Watching Me” album, he was done. He'd become frustrated by the music business, he explained, and since he'd come to it relatively late, it wasn't the only path he could imagine for himself. As he later told Rolling Stone, “There’s no rule that says your life has to be one thing.”

So he moved on. Withers simply stepped out of the public eye, in a way that seemed unthinkable for a pop star of his caliber. The music business wasn't entirely done with Withers, though. He won a 1988 Grammy Award for R&B song for the 16-year-old “Lean on Me”, whose cover by Club Nouveau had topped the charts; his old recordings were sampled by artists like Blackstreet (“No Diggity”), Eminem (“'97 Bonnie and Clyde”) and Kendrick Lamar (“Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst”).


Stevie Wonder, left, and Bill Withers at the 2015 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where Withers was among the inductees. — Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.
Stevie Wonder, left, and Bill Withers at the 2015 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where Withers
was among the inductees. — Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.


Meanwhile, Withers went his own way, investing in real estate and managing his songwriting catalog. He didn't eschew publicity altogether — he was the subject of a 2009 documentary, “Still Bill”, and gave a witty speech when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. But aside from a few brief guest appearances on friends' records and a cover of “(You've Been Quite a Doll) Raggedy Ann” on a Little Jimmy Dickens tribute album in 2017, he released no new music in the last 35 years of his life.

“A very famous minister actually called me to find out whether I was dead or not,” Withers told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I said to him, ‘Let me check’.”

Withers is survived by his second wife, Marcia, and their children, Todd and Kori.


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Bill Withers dies: Kamala Harris, John Legend, Alicia Keys pay respects to R&B great

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-03/lean-on-me-lovely-day-singer-bill-withers-dies-at-81
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« Reply #468 on: July 22, 2020, 03:41:45 pm »



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« Reply #469 on: December 27, 2020, 06:46:41 pm »


from The Washington Post…

George Blake, notorious Cold War double
agent who helped Soviets, dies at 98


The British spy escaped from a London prison after he was found guilty of betraying secrets to the Soviets.

By T. REES SHAPIRO | 10:31AM EST — Saturday, December 27, 2020

George Blake, pictured in 2001, a British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviets, died in Russia at 98, the country's foreign intelligence service announced on December 26. — Photograph: Alexander Natruskin/Reuters.
George Blake, pictured in 2001, a British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviets, died in Russia at 98, the country's foreign intelligence service
announced on December 26. — Photograph: Alexander Natruskin/Reuters.


GEORGE BLAKE, a British intelligence official who betrayed closely guarded secrets to the Soviets and was among the most damaging traitors of the Cold War, then made a daring escape from a London prison in 1966 and lived out his days as a national hero in Moscow, has died at 98.

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, known as SVR, announced his death on December 26 but provided no further details. Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Mr. Blake as a “brilliant professional” and a man of “remarkable courage.”

News accounts from the 1960s described Mr. Blake as a “Super Spy,” and perhaps one secret to his successful treachery was that he hid in plain sight. As one of his friends, a Salvation Army executive, told a reporter at the time, Mr. Blake resembled “a typically blasé bowler-hatted, rolled umbrella government official.”

In fact, he was the last high-profile survivor of a string of British turncoats who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, a badge of dishonor that included the Cambridge Four: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.

Dick White, a former chief of British intelligence, once said Mr. Blake wrought the most damage. The information he turned over reputedly led to the deaths of scores of highly placed Western agents, including Robert Bialek, a top-ranking East German police official.

He also betrayed to his Soviet handlers a joint mission between British and U.S. intelligence known as Operation Gold. The goal was to dig a tunnel underneath East Berlin to tap Soviet phone lines in the early 1950s. Mr. Blake sabotaged the multimillion-dollar operation before a shovel had ever struck German soil.

“There was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed on to my Soviet contact,” Mr. Blake confessed at his closed-door trial in 1961, news accounts reported at the time. According to a CIA report, Mr. Blake passed more than 4,720 pages of classified documents to the Soviets.

Mr. Blake spent nearly a decade leading a double life before he was arrested, tried and sentenced to 42 years in prison for espionage. At his trial, the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Hubert Parker, said that Mr. Blake had “rendered much of [Britain's intelligence] best efforts useless.”

Five years into his term, Mr. Blake escaped in the middle of the night using a ladder made of knitting needles and rope. He was smuggled into East Berlin while hidden inside a secret compartment of a camper van and later traveled to the Soviet Union.

In his adopted motherland, Mr. Blake was bestowed with the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian award in the Soviet Union. A countryside dacha, a Volga car and a pension, along with his ribbons for courage and dedication to the communist cause, were the trappings Mr. Blake earned for his 9½ years of service to the KGB.

“It is hard to over-rate the importance of the information received through Blake,” Sergei Ivanov, an official for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told Russian media in 2007. “It is thanks to Blake that the Soviet Union avoided very serious military and political damage which the United States and Great Britain could have inflicted on it.”

He was born Georg Behar on November 11, 1922, in Rotterdam. His mother was Dutch, and his father was a Jewish businessman of Middle Eastern descent who earned British citizenship while fighting for the Allies in World War I. After his father died, his mother married a man with the last name Blake.

As a youth, he spent summers with family in Cairo. It was there, Mr. Blake later said, that his interest in communism was sparked by cousins with left-wing views.

During World War II, Mr. Blake served in the Dutch underground as a bicycle courier before making his way to Britain. He joined the British navy in the early 1940s and, because of his facility with languages, was recruited to British intelligence.

As a covert officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service — often called MI6 — Mr. Blake held posts in Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Beirut. He studied Russian at Cambridge and developed a specialty in the Soviet Union.

He was assigned to the British diplomatic mission in Seoul when North Korean forces invaded the capital city in 1950. Mr. Blake spent 34 months as a prisoner, subsisting on a diet of rice and turnips in a North Korean camp. With the other prisoners, Mr. Blake sometimes displayed his creative ability to take on personas.

“He loved to imagine himself … a great officer of the crown ennobled for gallant and devoted service,” journalist Philip Deane, who spent time imprisoned with him in North Korea, wrote in The Washington Post in 1961. “Lightly we would tap him on the shoulder and say solemnly: ‘Arise, Sir George’. We promoted him to baron, earl, marquess. He never quite made duke; captivity ended too soon.”


George Blake, a former British spy who doubled as a Soviet agent, gestures during a news conference in Moscow on January 15, 1992. Blake, a former British intelligence officer who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union, has died in Russia. He was 98. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service announced his death on Saturday, December 26, 2020 without giving any circumstances of his death. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed condolences, hailing Blake as a “brilliant professional” and a man of “remarkable courage”. — Photograph: Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press.
George Blake, a former British spy who doubled as a Soviet agent, gestures during a news conference in Moscow on January 15, 1992. Blake, a former
British intelligence officer who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union, has died in Russia. He was 98. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service
announced his death on Saturday, December 26, 2020 without giving any circumstances of his death. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed
condolences, hailing Blake as a “brilliant professional” and a man of “remarkable courage”. — Photograph: Boris Yurchenko/Associated Press.


Mr. Blake said his decision to spy for the Soviet Union came after witnessing what he described as atrocities perpetrated by the West. In the PBS documentary “Red Files”, Mr. Blake described watching American bombers obliterate small Korean villages.

“It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering technical superior countries fighting against what seemed to me quite defenseless people,” Mr. Blake said in the broadcast. “I felt I was committed on the wrong side. And that's what made me decide to change sides. I felt that it would be better for humanity if the communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war, to wars.”

He passed a note written in Russian to his guards and was granted an audience with a KGB official, offering his services to the Soviets.

As a highly placed mole, Mr. Blake leaked secrets to the Soviets that few British spies were even cleared to know. Among the most damaging to be revealed was the Berlin tunnel operation.

Although the tunnel was built and the phone lines were tapped, no worthwhile intelligence ever resulted from the intercepts by the CIA or MI6. The project ended up wasting the equivalent of $51 million in today's dollars, according to the Cold War Museum in Warrenton, Virginia.

Instead, the Soviets used the phone lines for a disinformation campaign. To protect Mr. Blake, they allowed the operation to toil for 11 months before the tunnel was “accidentally” discovered after rainstorms washed up the handiwork of the British and American intelligence branches.

Mr. Blake's downfall came after a Polish officer defected to the West and described — but did not identify — a top-ranking British officer who was a Soviet mole. While posted to Lebanon, Mr. Blake was called back to MI6 headquarters under false pretenses, accused and arrested.

His trial at the Old Bailey was considered so sensitive that the judge ordered the courtroom vacated, the doors locked and the windows shuttered.

Mr. Blake was found guilty, and his 42-year sentence was one of the harshest in British history for such a crime. (Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who betrayed atomic secrets to the Soviets in the 1950s, was sentenced to 14 years.)

In 2007, Mr. Blake received the Order of Friendship from Putin. “You and your colleagues made an enormous contribution to the preservation of peace, to security and to strategic parity,” Putin said in 2007. “This is not visible to the eyes of outsiders, but very important work deserves the very highest acknowledgment and respect.”

No information on survivors was immediately available. His first wife, an English woman with whom he had three children, divorced him after his defection. He later was said to have married a Soviet woman and had a son with her.

Mr. Blake embraced his new life with a new name: Giorgi Ivanovich Bekhter. Early on, he naively planned to drive across his new homeland in his gifted Volga.

“At the time, I knew very little about Russian roads,” Mr. Blake later said.

Instead, Mr. Blake remained in his wooded dacha outside Moscow, reading Gogol and Chekhov. He described his life in Russia as happy and peaceful. Contemplating his legacy on occasion of 90th birthday, Mr. Blake said he had no regrets.

“I do not believe in life after death,” Mr. Blake told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper, in 2012. “As soon as our brain stops receiving blood, we go, and after that there will be nothing. No punishment for the bad things you did, nor rewards for the utterly wonderful.”


__________________________________________________________________________

T. Rees Shapiro was an education reporter for The Washington Post. He left in September 2017, but continues to guest-write occasional obituaries for The Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • REUTERS VIDEO: Soviet-era spy George Blake dies in Russia at 98


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-blake-notorious-cold-war-double-agent-who-helped-soviets-dies-at-98/2020/12/26/be090600-477b-11eb-b0e4-0f182923a025_story.html
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« Reply #470 on: April 15, 2021, 11:55:05 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Bernard Madoff, mastermind of vast Wall Street Ponzi scheme, dies at 82

Once one of the most sought-after stockbrokers in high finance, he became a symbol of Wall Street greed.

By EMILY LANGER | 9:49AM EDT — Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Financier and Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff, center, leaves federal court in New York in March 2009. — Photograph: Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.
Financier and Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff, center, leaves federal court in New York in March 2009.
 — Photograph: Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency/Agencia-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.


BERNIE L. MADOFF, who died April 14 at 82, was the mastermind of perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history, a reviled symbol of Wall Street greed and, once, one of the most sought-after stockbrokers in high finance.

For years, “Bernie” Madoff was regarded as an investment sage. He had clients, homes and boats strewn about exclusive enclaves around the world. Leveraging the clout he had amassed as a legitimate trader, he lured — and eventually fleeced — thousands of investors who entrusted to him their retirement savings, their children's college funds and their financial security.

His clients included Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (Democrat-New Jersey), and scores of retirees and other private individuals. Banks, hedge funds, universities and charities came to rely on his improbably reliable reported returns.

In reality, there were no such returns. For at least 16 years, and perhaps longer, Mr. Madoff ran a scam in which he paid existing investors with money from new clients.

In 2008, as a financial crisis crippled the U.S. economy, investors began seeking withdrawals of funds that Mr. Madoff did not have. His undoing recalled the downfalls dramatized in Greek tragedies: It was swift, excruciating and, in retrospect, inevitable.

On December 10, 2008, Mr. Madoff informed his sons, Mark and Andrew Madoff, that his business, the family's extravagant wealth and his investors' flourishing portfolios were “all just one big lie.” The brothers turned their father in to authorities.

His arrest the next day at his New York penthouse stunned many of the most experienced financial experts. Government regulators, too, seemed caught unawares — a perception that fueled public outrage as estimates of victim losses reached $20 billion in actual original investments and $65 billion in recorded paper wealth.

His exposure triggered years-long efforts by officials — notably Irving H. Picard, the court-appointed trustee for the liquidation of Mr. Madoff's securities firm — to unravel his scheme and compensate victims. Many investors would recoup only a fraction of the money they had given him.

For Mr. Madoff, the personal fallout was catastrophic. His family largely disintegrated. He was so widely despised for his perceived hubris that, reporting for at least one court appearance, he wore a bulletproof vest.

“I live in a tormented state now knowing of all the pain and suffering that I have created,” he said in June 2009, when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to 11 felony charges, including securities fraud and money laundering. “I have left a legacy of shame.”

Mr. Madoff reportedly had a heart attack in prison in 2013. In February 2020, he asked a judge for compassionate release, citing end-stage renal disease and other ailments that had left him in need of a wheelchair and constant care. The request was denied.

His death, at a federal prison medical facility in Butner, North Carolina, was announced by a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman. The spokeswoman, Kristie Breshears, did not provide a cause but said Mr. Madoff had tested negative for the coronavirus.

At the time of his death, Mr. Madoff remained a chief villain in the narrative of the 2008 economic meltdown that, ironically, had helped unveil his wrong-doing. His scheme did not feature subprime loans, credit-default swaps or the other complex financial maneuvers that had contributed to the onset of the recession. Mr. Madoff had engaged in the simple, ancient act of swindling.


Creation of a myth

TO MANY CLIENTS, Mr. Madoff seemed unimpeachable, an entrepreneur whose grit and ingenuity had fueled his rise from relative rags to extreme riches.

In his early working years, he was a lifeguard and installed sprinkler systems, squirreling away his earnings with the goal of starting a private investment firm. He was in his early 20s when he opened Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960.

Mr. Madoff was credited with understanding before many others the potential role of the computer in stock-trading. Through innovative use of technology, he made trading faster and more transparent and helped small investors break into circles that for generations had been dominated by floor traders.


Mr. Madoff, while on bail, walks on Lexington Avenue to his New York apartment in 2008. — Photograph: Don Emmert/Agence France Presse/Getty Images.
Mr. Madoff, while on bail, walks on Lexington Avenue to his New York apartment in 2008. — Photograph: Don Emmert/Agence France Presse/Getty Images.

[size=In the early 1990s, Mr. Madoff was appointed chairman of the Nasdaq, the first electronic stock market. His firm became an institution and operated from Manhattan's Lipstick Building, a landmark in the financial capital of the United States.

As his success grew, Mr. Madoff became increasingly fawned on and, by his design, elusive — so that no one would detect the fraudulent operation that, at some point, he began runnin11pt]g on the side. Mr. Madoff dated his scheme to 1992, while government investigators traced its beginning to the 1980s. Other accounts suggested that it started even earlier.

Mr. Madoff did not advertise. Rather than lassoing prospective investors, he turned many away. He had discerned that the fewer clients he accepted, the more desirable his services would appear.

There “was a myth that he created around him that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret,” Wiesel, whose Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity lost $15 million, said in public remarks.

Former employees recalled the militaristic authority Mr. Madoff exerted over his office. Workspaces were to be kept spotlessly clean. The decor, on his order, featured black and gray tones described by one visitor as “icily cold modern.”

At the same time, Mr. Madoff sought to project authenticity, emphasizing the family-run nature of his business, which included his sons, his brother, Peter B. Madoff, and other relatives. Mr. Madoff adopted a reassuring motto: “The owner's name is on the door.”

He promised his investors annual returns of about 12 percent — sizable enough to be impressive but modest enough to avoid suspicion. More than large, the returns were steady. Mr. Madoff became widely known as “the Jewish T-bill,” a reference to his Jewish background, his many Jewish clients and an old moniker for conservative government Treasury bonds.

For years, Mr. Madoff rebuffed investors, journalists and government regulators who questioned his results. “It's a proprietary strategy,” he said in 2001 to Erin E. Arvedlund, then writing for Barron's magazine and later a Madoff biographer. “I can't go into it in great detail.”

In retrospect, many experts agreed that the consistency of his returns in a volatile market should have engendered greater skepticism.

Other red flags included the outdated computing system that Mr. Madoff used for his record-keeping and steadfastly refused to replace. His trading statements, produced on a typewriter-ribbon printer in an era of laser machines, looked rather phony in hindsight, at least one investor observed.

In November 2005, Harry Markopolos, a derivatives expert and investment manager, submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission a memo about Mr. Madoff titled The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud. The SEC investigated Mr. Madoff's firm at least five times before his arrest. But the scheme went on.

In prison, during an investigation by the SEC's inspector general, Mr. Madoff said that he was “astonished” that regulators had not more fully verified the trading he reported. He said he knew that he would one day be exposed.

“As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal,” Mr. Madoff said at the time of his guilty plea. “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by, I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come.”[/size]

Success, wealth, ruin

BERNARD LAWRENCE MADOFF, one of three children, was born on April 29, 1938, in New York City. Detailed information about his family was not widely available. His father, Ralph Madoff, wrote on his marriage license that his occupation was “credit.” A family acquaintance recalled that he was perhaps a stockbroker or an account representative, Fortune magazine reported. Both he and his wife, the former Sylvia Muntner, appeared to have had tax and other legal problems involving their finances.

Bernard Madoff attended the University of Alabama before transferring to Hofstra University on Long Island, where he received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1960. A year earlier, he married Ruth Alpern, his childhood sweetheart. He attended but did not graduate from Brooklyn Law School, having thrown himself into his investment business.


Mr. Madoff leaves federal court in New York City after a bail hearing in 2009. — Photograph: Kathy Willens/Associated Press.
Mr. Madoff leaves federal court in New York City after a bail hearing in 2009. — Photograph: Kathy Willens/Associated Press.

Besides his innovations in computerized trading, he helped develop and popularize a concept known as payment for order flow, in which brokers are paid a penny or more per share for routing business to market makers such as Mr. Madoff's firm. By the 1990s, the practice had become common, and highly controversial. Critics described the payments as kickbacks.

“People would like to apply pejorative-type terms,” Mr. Madoff said at the time. “I think people that use that kind of terminology are unhappy they are losing business.”

The practice, which is not illegal, continues to be widespread and helped Mr. Madoff make his fortune. Besides his penthouse apartment in Manhattan, his assets included homes in the Long Island community of Montauk and in Palm Beach, Florida, yachts, and shares in private jets.

He also collected watches. He had at least two wedding rings, The New York Times reported, so that he could match the metal of the ring to the time-piece, gold or platinum, that he had selected for wear.

In addition to his business interests, Mr. Madoff operated with his wife the multimillion Madoff Family Foundation that gave money to medical, cultural, educational and other causes. When he confessed his crime to his wife, she was said to have replied with a question: “What's a Ponzi scheme?”

Ruth Madoff said publicly that she and her husband attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills on Christmas Eve in 2008, when he was under house arrest. Eventually, she said, she ended communication with her husband.

Their son Mark Madoff hanged himself in 2010, on the second anniversary of his father's arrest, amid lawsuits seeking recovery of Madoff family assets to repay victims of the fraud. Before an earlier suicide attempt, his widow wrote in a book, Mark Madoff left a letter to his father. It read in part: “Bernie: Now you know how you have destroyed the lives of your sons by your life of deceit.”

In 2012, Peter Madoff, who had been chief compliance officer at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, was sentenced to a decade in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to the avoidance of taxes and false filings to regulators. He maintained that he had not been aware of his brother's Ponzi scheme until shortly before it was revealed to the public. He was released from home confinement in 2020.

In 2014, Mr. Madoff's son Andrew died of mantle cell lymphoma. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In the years since his arrest, biographers have set out to uncover some tragic flaw that Mr. Madoff possessed, some hardship he had undergone or some pathology that might be diagnosed to explain why he did what he did.

The efforts to fully understand his crime were inconclusive. In email exchanges with Diana B. Henriques, a reporter who covered his downfall in The New York Times and later wrote a book about him, he cast blame on unsavory clients who, he said, had pushed him into losses that he could not withstand.

Reversing the usual description of his relationship with his investors, he claimed that it was he who had “foolishly trusted” them.

At his sentencing, the judge described the fraud as “extraordinarily evil” and recounted a scene in which Mr. Madoff assured a grieving widow that her money was safe with him.

“I'm sorry,” the defendant said before the courtroom.

He added, “I know that doesn't help you.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Matt Zapotosky and former Washington Post writer Tomoeh Murakami Tse contributed to this report.

Emily Langer has been a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk since 2011. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections. Before joining The Post in 2007, she was a researcher for The Almanac of American Politics. From 2010 to 2011, she was a Fulbright fellow in Trieste, Italy. Emily was educated at Georgetown University, where she earned a B.A. in Italian and English.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • REUTERS VIDEO: Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff dies in prison

 • Helaine Olen: Bernie Madoff's downfall left behind a surprising legacy

 • Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff, who bilked investors out of billions, seeks medical release from prison

 • Andrew H. Madoff, son of convicted financier, dies at 48

 • Book Review: Ruth Madoff hurt more by husband’s alleged infidelity than his Ponzi scheme


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« Reply #471 on: April 29, 2021, 01:46:31 pm »


from The Washington Post…

Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90

While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the surface of the moon,
he orbited alone in the command module.


By SARAH KAPLAN | 12:36PM EDT — Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, during training for the July 1969 moon landing. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, during training for the July 1969 moon landing. — Photograph: Associated Press.

ON JULY 20, 1969, eight years after President John F. Kennedy pledged to land a man on the lunar surface and return him safely to Earth, astronaut Michael Collins sat alone in the command module Columbia. He was floating 60 miles above what he later called the “withered, sun-seared peach pit” of the moon.

A lander carrying his fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, sped away from the main craft, en route to fulfilling Kennedy's goal.

“You cats take it easy,” Mr. Collins radioed to his crew mates.

While Armstrong and Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind, in Armstrong's memorable phrase, Mr. Collins circled the moon alone, keeping the command module going and running through the 117-page list of contingencies he had prepared in the event that anything went awry.

He was a quarter of a million miles from home — farther than any traveler had ever gone on his own — without even radio communication to tether him to the rest of humanity. The moon's bulk blocked the Earth from view and cut off contact with mission control for large portions of his orbit.

“Not since Adam has any human known such solitude,” NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward remarked to reporters at the time.

The diffident Mr. Collins, who died on April 28 at 90, later brushed off the comparison to the biblical first man, but he admitted to feeling petrified. In his 17 years as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, no flight had worried him as much as the lunar lander's 3½-hour trip to reunite with the Apollo 11 command module.

“My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,” he wrote in his 1974 memoir, Carrying the Fire. He had resolved not to take his own life if Armstrong and Aldrin didn't make it, but he knew that being the mission's sole survivor would make him “a marked man for life.”

That foreboding never came to pass. All three crew members were present for Apollo 11's triumphant splashdown in the Pacific and the subsequent victory tour. At its close, three weeks later in Los Angeles, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

“His contribution to this great undertaking,” each man's medal citation read, “will be remembered so long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.”


Mr. Collins, center, with Neil Armstrong, left, and Buzz Aldrin in quarantine in an isolation unit aboard the USS Hornet after their splashdown and recovery on July 24, 1969. — Photograph: Associated Press.
Mr. Collins, center, with Neil Armstrong, left, and Buzz Aldrin in quarantine in an isolation unit aboard the USS Hornet after their splashdown
and recovery on July 24, 1969. — Photograph: Associated Press.


The Apollo 11 crew, from left: Neil Armstrong, commander; Mr. Collins, module pilot; and Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot. — Photograph: NASA/Associated Press.
The Apollo 11 crew, from left: Neil Armstrong, commander; Mr. Collins, module pilot; and Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot.
 — Photograph: NASA/Associated Press.


That was not always true of Mr. Collins, whose name never gained the universal recognition of Armstrong's and Aldrin's.

This was partly a function of personality. He had stayed clear of the rivalries and showdowns that marked life at Johnson Space Center in Houston — including the reported bitterness between Armstrong and Aldrin over who would get to set foot on the moon first. After their Apollo mission, when Armstrong turned reclusive and Aldrin struggled with alcoholism, Mr. Collins thrived outside the glare of publicity.

He had the deep respect of those who understood what his mission entailed. The pioneering transatlantic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who would later write the foreword to Carrying the Fire, sent a letter to Mr. Collins after the moon landing lauding his role in the mission.

“I watched every minute of the walk-out, and certainly it was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways great profundity,” Lindbergh wrote. He went on to compare Mr. Collins's solitude to his own solo flight across the Atlantic: “I felt closer to you in orbit than to your fellow astronauts I watched walking on the surface of the moon.”

Mr. Collins went on to become an eloquent advocate for space exploration, in his many books and as founding director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He was an inductee of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, among other honors. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 at the rank of major general.


MICHAEL COLLINS was born in Rome on October 31, 1930, to a distinguished military family. His father, Army Major General James Lawton Collins, had long served as an aide-de-camp to General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.

The elder Collins was a military attache in Italy when his son was born. His father's brother, General Joseph Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, was Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michael's older brother, the late James L. Collins Jr., was an Army brigadier general and military historian.

Mr. Collins grew up following his father on assignments to Oklahoma, New York City and Puerto Rico, among other places, before settling in Washington after the U.S. entry into World War II.

He graduated in 1948 from the private St. Albans School, where classmates nicknamed him “Scarecrow” for his tall and trim frame. He was an intense athletic competitor and proved more adept on the playing fields there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, than in the classroom.


House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, right, presents the Congressional Gold Medal to Mr. Collins in 2011. — Photograph: Mandel Ngan/Agence France Presse/Getty Images.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, right, presents the Congressional Gold Medal to Mr. Collins in 2011.
 — Photograph: Mandel Ngan/Agence France Presse/Getty Images.


From left, Aldrin, Armstrong and Mr. Collins next to their spacecraft in 1969. — Photograph: Associated Press.
From left, Aldrin, Armstrong and Mr. Collins next to their spacecraft in 1969. — Photograph: Associated Press.

After completing his bachelor's degree in 1952, he joined the Air Force — pointedly, a branch of the military where he didn't have family. He was drawn to test-piloting because of what he called the thrill of flying planes no one had ever flown before.

Described as reserved and levelheaded but with flashes of wry wit, he once told Life magazine of his work as a test pilot: “People think we're baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out. There is little of that. Essentially, we're learning an in­cred­ibly complex array of machines — and learning what to do if some of it doesn't go as advertised.”

Mr. Collins said he would have been content to remain in the Air Force had it not been for astronaut John Glenn's history-making solo orbit of Earth in 1962. Whereas most of the great barriers in flight had already been broken, he said, space travel offered countless opportunities to be first at something.

He immediately applied when NASA announced it was looking for candidates to supplement Glenn's original astronaut class. He was accepted on his second attempt. In addition to the wide-ranging scientific and survival training all astronauts go through, he was assigned to work with the engineers developing pressure suits for spacewalks. The mission patch that adorned his, Aldrin's and Armstrong's suits — an eagle holding an olive branch over the pockmarked lunar surface — was largely his design.

Before his trek to the moon, Mr. Collins orbited the Earth in 1966 as the pilot for Gemini 10. On the three-day mission, he and crew mate John Young, a spaceflight veteran, established a new orbital altitude record and rendezvoused with two unmanned Agena target vehicles. In addition, Mr. Collins became the first astronaut to journey outside his spacecraft twice.

A slipped disk in 1968 nearly derailed his astronaut career, but Mr. Collins recovered from surgery in time to be included on the Apollo 11 roster. He freely acknowledged that his was not the best job on the mission but said that he didn't resent being confined to the command module.

“This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two,” he wrote in Carrying the Fire.

He might have had another chance at a moonwalk. According to NASA's rotation system for crew selection, he was slated to be named commander of Apollo 17, which would take flight three years later and was the last mission to put men on the moon.

But in 1970, chafing from the constant attention and reluctant to undergo three more years of the exhausting physical training required for astronauts, Mr. Collins opted to retire from NASA. “My mind-set was: ‘It's over. We did it’,” he said in a 2015 talk at MIT.


Mr. Collins stands in front of the steel skeleton of the National Air and Space Museum in 1974. — Photograph: Doug Chevalier/The Washington Post.
Mr. Collins stands in front of the steel skeleton of the National Air and Space Museum in 1974. — Photograph: Doug Chevalier/The Washington Post.

Mr. Collins at MIT in 2014. — Photograph: Steven Senne/Associated Press.
Mr. Collins at MIT in 2014. — Photograph: Steven Senne/Associated Press.

Mr. Collins lived in Marco Island, Florida, according to his daughter, Ann Starr, where she and her sister had cared for him for the past year and a half. He had cancer and died at a hospice facility in Naples, Florida, she said.

Mr. Collins's wife of 56 years, the former Patricia Finnegan, died in 2014. Their son, Michael L. Collins, died in 1993. Besides Starr, of Belmont, Massachusetts, survivors include his daughter Kate Collins of Chicago; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

After leaving NASA, Mr. Collins told The New York Times, he was determined to “prevent the rest of my life from being an anti-climax.” He spent a year as assistant secretary for public affairs at the State Department, and then was named founding director of the National Air and Space Museum, overseeing its opening in time for the nation's bicentennial festivities. In the late 1970s, he was undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution before moving into the directorship of a private aerospace and defense company. He later ran an aerospace consulting firm.

In several books, including Flying to the Moon and Other Strange Places (1976) and Mission to Mars (1990), Mr. Collins was also an eloquent advocate for continued space exploration. In a New York Times book review, journalist and spaceflight author Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. said of Carrying the Fire that “no other person who has flown in space has captured the experience so vividly.”

Although Mr. Collins never got to leave his footprints on the moon, one small spot there bears his name — a tiny impact crater in the Sea of Tranquility, about 15 miles from the Apollo 11 landing site.

That was about as much recognition as he wanted. In a 2009 interview with NASA, Mr. Collins expressed irritation with “the adulation of celebrities and the inflation of heroism.”

“Heroes abound, and should be revered as such, but don't count astronauts among them,” he said. “We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do. … Celebrities? What nonsense.”

He sounded grumpy, the interviewer remarked.

“No, no, lucky!” Mr. Collins replied. “Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. Buzz Aldrin was born in 1930, and Mike Collins, 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck. Put ‘Lucky’ on my tombstone.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter at The Washington Post covering humanity's response to a warming world. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe. Sarah was educated at Georgetown University, where she earned a B.S. in International Culture and Politics.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Experience the historic Apollo 11 mission

 • Apollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicity

 • 50 astronauts, in their own words


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-collins-apollo-11-astronaut-dies-at-90/2021/04/28/fa86e906-2da6-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html
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« Reply #472 on: August 25, 2021, 10:53:52 am »







R.I.P.  ……………  CHARLIE WATTS











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« Reply #473 on: August 26, 2021, 01:23:43 pm »


from THE TIMES…

Charlie Watts: A reluctant star, ahead of his time

By DAVID SANDERSON | 12:01AM BST — Wednesday, 25 August 2021

Charlie Watts with his Rolling Stones bandmates Keith Richards, Sir Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood. He was called “one of the greatest drummers of his generation”.
Charlie Watts with his Rolling Stones bandmates Keith Richards, Sir Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood. He was called “one of the greatest drummers of his generation”.

THEY BECAME the biggest rock'n'roll band on the planet. But Charlie Watts, who gained a reputation as the group's quietest member, never seemed all that keen on fame. Mick Jagger had to ask him twice to join.

Last night, both Jagger and Keith Richards paid tribute to their departed colleague by posting photographs on social media. The band's frontman shared a photo of Watts laughing while sitting at his drums, while Richards shared a picture of a drumkit with a “closed” sign hanging from it.

The band comprising Jagger, Richards, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones, which Watts did eventually join in 1963, would rewrite the narrative of popular music. Last year — minus Jones, who died in 1969, and Wyman, who left the band in the 1990s — the Stones became the first group to have No.1 albums across six decades.

Unlike his bandmates, Watts married in the early 1960s and stayed with his wife, Shirley, for the rest of his life. The couple — who have bred Arab horses at their Devon farm in recent years — have a daughter Seraphina, who was born in 1968. She lives in Rhode Island, with her daughter, Charlotte.


Charlie Watts with his wife Shirley; and playing in 2018.
Charlie Watts with his wife Shirley; and playing in 2018.

Tributes were paid to Watts last night from his fellow musicians. Sir Paul McCartney described him as a “lovely guy”, saying in a video posted on Twitter: “I knew he was ill, but I didn't know he was this ill, so lots of love to his family, his wife and kids and his extended family, and condolences to the Stones. It'll be a huge blow to them because Charlie was a rock, and a fantastic drummer, steady as a rock. Love you Charlie, I've always loved you, beautiful man, and great condolences and sympathies to his family.”

Sir Elton John described Watts as the “ultimate drummer … the most stylish of men and such brilliant company”. He added: “My deepest condolences to Shirley, Seraphina and Charlotte. And of course, the Rolling Stones.”

Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer, said: “God bless Charlie Watts, we're going to miss you man, peace and love to the family.” Pete Townshend of The Who recalled that Watts had wept at the funeral of Keith Moon, the drummer who died in 1978, aged 32.

“I wish I was capable of such tears today,” the guitarist wrote on Instagram. “Instead, I just want to say goodbye. Not a rock drummer, a jazz drummer really, and that's why the Stones swung like the Basie band!! Such a lovely man. God bless his wife and daughter, and I’ll bet the horses will miss him too.”

The Stones, in between various health scares, have continued with a lucrative and demanding tour schedule despite their age. A profitable back catalogue, combined with chart-topping albums and the ability to charge an average of £183 for a concert ticket, have helped the band's members to feature on The Sunday Times Rich List.

It calculated Watts's wealth at £165 million, below that of Jagger and Richards, the band's main songwriters.

Watts's only known health scare before this year was in 2004, when he had throat cancer. He said he felt “very lucky” that doctors had caught it early.

He announced this month that he would miss the Stones upcoming tour of America after a medical procedure. A spokesman said it had been “completely successful” but the musician needed time to recuperate.

Watts said at the time, in his last public comments: “For once my timing has been a little off. I am working hard to get fully fit but I have today accepted on the advice of the experts that this will take a while.”


Charlie Watts drumming, aged 12.
Charlie Watts drumming, aged 12.

Watts’s heart sang when fans danced

IN THE glitzy, self-promoting world of rock celebrity there was no interviewee quite so unglitzy or self-deprecating as Charlie Watts (John Bungey writes). Ask him about his jazz heroes or get him talking about his poor upbringing among the prefabs of bomb-scarred Wembley and he could be loquacious. But ask him about his part in the Rolling Stones' global domination of popular music and his response would be a laconic mix of diffidence and embarrassment.

“I suppose I've seen 40 years of Mick's bum running around in front of me. It's what you play to a lot of the time,” is how he once summed up his time with Jagger and co to me. As for his prowess as a drummer: “I don't do drum solos … I can't count. I'm not good at counting.”

The last time I met him, in 2017, he claimed not to remember much about his Stones career. “It was quite pleasing when we became successful in the Sixties,” he said. “But I hated being recognised. When it was girls screaming down the street I felt very uncomfortable. To me it was so … unhip. To me Tubby Hayes [a 1960s bebop saxophonist] was hip. Georgie Fame was hip. This bloody other world [of pop] was a bit minor to me. I've always felt like that.”

In that interview Watts — quietly courteous and dapper as ever in a sharp grey suit — was meant to be celebrating winning a Jazz FM gold award “for services to jazz and blues”. Instead he appeared baffled. “It's rather ludicrous me getting the award,” he said. “My contribution has been minimal … If it was for the blues they could have given it to Freddy Below.” Never mind that Chuck Berry's old drummer had been dead for nearly 30 years.

But whether playing rock or jazz, for Watts the drums were always about making people move. “One of the biggest compliments I can have as a drummer is that someone is dancing to you,” he said. “'Cos the drums should dance and they should make you want to dance.”


__________________________________________________________________________

David Sanderson is The Times' arts correspondent. He keeps a close eye on the worlds of visual arts, cinema, theatre, music, opera, dance, literature, museums, galleries, auction houses and — if there is any time left — he dips into the wonderful world of heritage.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related:

 • Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts dies at 80 (12:01am, 25 August 2021).

 • Photographs: His life and times as a Rolling Stone (6:50pm, 24 August 2021).

 • Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts pulls out of US tour (5:00pm, 05 August 2021).


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/charlie-watts-a-reluctant-star-ahead-of-his-time-bf7vhlg7h
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« Reply #474 on: January 21, 2022, 08:26:55 pm »






R.I.P. Meat Loat








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