Huber Matos, Comrade of Castro, Then Adversary

Fidel Castro, center, in 1959 with Mr. Matos, right, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

 

Huber Matos, a top commander in Fidel Castro’s army who broke from the Cuban revolution in 1959 over its tilt toward Communism, endured a harsh imprisonment for 20 years and became a leader of anti-Castro exiles in Florida, died in Miami on Thursday. He was 95. The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

A longtime opponent of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Mr. Matos, a former country schoolteacher, was one of a handful of men in the inner circle of Castro’s revolutionary organization, the 26th of July Movement.

In 1958 he traveled to Costa Rica and organized a large and crucial delivery of weapons to Cuban rebels in the Sierra Maestra. A year later he helped capture Havana, entering the city by Mr. Castro’s side, and he was named military commander of Camagüey Province.

But as Mr. Castro moved covertly toward Marxism in his first year in power, Mr. Matos expressed displeasure with the shift and, as he recounted in his autobiography, “How the Night Arrived,” appealed to Mr. Castro to stay true to the goals of the revolution, including re-establishing democratic government.

Increasingly disillusioned, Mr. Matos sent a letter of resignation to Mr. Castro alleging Communist infiltration in the government. In response, in October 1959, Mr. Castro ordered his arrest, a directive carried out by Camilo Cienfuegos, a central figure in the revolutionary movement. (Days later, Mr. Cienfuegos was presumed dead when a plane carrying him to Havana from Camagüey disappeared over the ocean.)

 Some speculate Fidel had Cienfuegos killed.

 

Paul Reichmann, Who Helped Develop the World Financial Center

“I think that what I did in those years was a greater achievement than what I’ve done since,” he was quoted as saying in a 1996 biography of his family, “The Reichmanns,” by Anthony Bianco. Paul Reichmann was born in Vienna on Sept. 27, 1930, the fifth of six siblings. His parents, Samuel and Rene, were Orthodox Jews who had moved from rural Hungary to Vienna, where they owned a prosperous egg export business. But Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 forced the family to flee to Paris.

Two years later, when the Nazis overran France, the Reichmanns fled to Tangier, Morocco, where Samuel Reichmann became a successful currency trader.

The Reichmanns filed for bankruptcy protection in London, Toronto and New York simultaneously.

Only three years later, Mr. Reichmann regained the helm at Canary Wharf, which finally gained nearly full occupancy in 2000 thanks to a booming real estate market in London. By 2000, the Reichmann family’s net worth reached $1 billion. But in an interview with Institutional Investor that year, Mr. Reichmann said his business accomplishments had never given him the sense of fulfillment he experienced as a youthful religious social worker and teacher in North Africa. But “what could have been is a silly way to look at things,” he said. “You are what you are.”

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Countess Felicia Gizycka

In a front-page essay reviewing two books, entitled Dynasts of the Daily Press, Joseph Epstein quotes the countess, great-granddaughter of Joseph Medill, whose only flaw in his otherwise perfect game plan was his children. He had no sons but three daughters, one of whom died young. The surviving daughters, Katherine and Elinor, he described as “the worst two she-devils in all Chicago.” His great-­granddaughter Felicia Gizycka claimed that this was the bowdlerized description and that what he had actually said was “the two biggest bitches in Christendom.”

This obituary from the Tuesday, 18 May 1999 edition of the UK's Independent, perfectly displays a style that no US newspaper would dare use.

It was also a custom of the era to view American heiresses as the easiest method to restore European aristocratic fortunes and Cissy was pursued by an impoverished nobleman, Count Josef Gizycki, a hard-drinking ladies' man with a bankrupt estate in Russian Poland. Cissy fell for dashing Count "Gigi" and, despite pleas from her family, married him. No sooner did she reach his dilapidated, freezing "castle" in Narvosielica than she realised her mistake; he told her bluntly that they had sex only to make a child and so that he could gain her $30,000 a year income. In 1905 that child, Felicia, was born whilst the Count was away whoring.

Epstein writes: Cissy, after a wretched marriage to a Russian-Polish aristocrat named Josef Gizycki — he disappeared on her on their wedding night, drank heavily, beat her and absconded with their daughter, Felicia — flounced about Washington as the Countess Gizycka, a social butterfly with the fangs of a viper.

No whoring allowed in the New York Times, or, at least, on its printed and web pages.

Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.

Trying to? Who doubts it? Well, other than Karl Rove, Fox-nuts and the extreme rightwingers?

Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.

That would make it George HW Bush's and Bill Clinton's presidencies.

Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote. “This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”

Not because they hate our way of life.


His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market. The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”

Bridge between Cold War superpowers

Karen Epstein/Abc - Georgi A. Arbatov

MOSCOW — Georgi A. Arbatov, who was the senior “Amerikanist” in the Soviet Communist Party in the final decades of the cold war and served as the Kremlin’s voice for a generation of television viewers in the United States, died here on Friday. He was 87. Mr. Arbatov was an adviser to five Communist Party general secretaries and was involved in negotiating arms control and other agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States. But he attained prominence by acting as a bridge between the superpowers at a time when they were divided by suspicion, misunderstanding and outright hostility.He was one of the first Soviet officials to reach out to government, industry and academia in the United States, using his fluent English to try to explain the thinking of an insular Soviet leadership that often seemed to have no idea how to sway American opinion. He was regularly interviewed on American television and was a fixture on programs like “Nightline.”

Chronicler of History

Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which he learned he had in September 2008. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

“In effect,” Mr. Judt wrote in an essay published in January in The New York Review of Books, “A.L.S. constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole.”

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

His developing interest in Europe as a whole, including the states of the former Eastern Bloc, led him to take an active role in the developing Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia; it culminated in “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” (2005), a sweeping, richly detailed survey embracing countries from Britain to the Balkans that, in the words of one reviewer, has “the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia.”

Mr. Judt was perhaps best known for his essays on politics and current affairs in journals like The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.

“He had the unusual ability to see and convey the big picture while, at the same time, going to the heart of the matter,” said Mark Lilla, who teaches intellectual history at Columbia University. “Most academics do neither — they float in between. But Tony was able to talk about the big picture and explain why it matters now.”

Tony Robert Judt was born in the East End of London on Jan. 2, 1948, and grew up in Putney. His parents, although secular and apolitical Jews, encouraged him to join the Labor Zionist youth organization Dror as a way to meet friends. He became a fervent convert to the cause, spending several summers working on a kibbutz in Israel and serving as the organization’s national secretary from 1965 to 1967.

“I was the ideal recruit: articulate, committed and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch for The New York Review of Books in February.

After he passed the entrance examinations to King’s College, Cambridge, he volunteered as an auxiliary with the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, acting as an interpreter for other volunteers in the newly conquered Golan Heights. There he lost faith in the Zionist mission and began to see Israel as a malign occupying power whose self-definition as a Jewish state, he later argued, made it “an anachronism.”

Mr. Judt returned to Britain disabused and highly skeptical of the radical political currents swirling around him at Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from King’s College in 1969. After studying for a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he returned to King’s College and earned a doctorate in 1972.

His dissertation, on the French socialist party’s re-emergence after World War I, was published in France as “La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste: 1921-1926” (1976). In 1979 he followed up with “Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left,” and in 1986 he published “Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981.”

These relatively specialist works led to two interpretive studies of French postwar intellectual life: “Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956” (1994) and “The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century” (1998).

Casting his lot with the nonideological liberals, like Raymond Aron and Albert Camus, who dared to criticize the Soviet Union and third-world revolutionary movements, he subjected Sartre and others to a withering critique that came as a shock to many French and American intellectuals. His target, he wrote, was “the uneasy conscience and moral cowardice of an intellectual generation.”

Fluidly written, with a strong narrative drive and an insistent, polemical edge, both books established Mr. Judt as a historian whose ability to see the present in the past gave his work an unusual air of immediacy. Increasingly he inclined toward free-ranging inquiry across disciplines, pursuing a wide range of his interests reflected in the essay collection “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” (2008).

“A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about,” he told the online magazine Historically Speaking in 2006. “Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently.”

In 1987, after teaching at Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford, he began teaching at N.Y.U. There, in 1995, he helped found the Remarque Institute with a bequest from Paulette Goddard, the widow of the writer Erich Maria Remarque. Under his directorship, it became an important international center for the study of Europe, past and present. His skepticism about the future of the European Union found expression in a sharply polemical, pamphlet-length book, “A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe” (1996).

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two sons, Daniel and Nicholas.

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

In 2006, a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan was abruptly canceled for reasons later hotly disputed, but apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, told The New York Observer at the time that Mr. Judt, on Israel, “has become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual heroes would have despised.” Mr. Judt’s name had been removed from the masthead of the magazine, where he had been a contributing editor, after his article on the one-state solution.

Mr. Judt expressed some surprise that he should be defined by his position on one issue and expressed distaste for public controversy, while showing an unmistakable relish for the cut and thrust of public debate.

“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”

His discovery in 2008 that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease did not deter him from his work. He continued to write and lecture.

Last October, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt spoke about social democracy before an audience of 700 at N.Y.U. He turned that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land,” published in March by Penguin Press.

During the lecture, his last public appearance, he told the audience that some of his American friends felt that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting. But he added, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”

He did write about his illness, however. In an essay in The New York Review of Books in January, he wrote, “In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

History remained uppermost in his mind, though. In “Ill Fares the Land,” he turned his attention to a problem he regarded as acute: the loss of faith in social democracy, and the power of the state to do good, that had brought prosperity to so many European countries after World War II.

“The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly,” he told Historically Speaking. “A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.”

August 7, 2010

Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Nuremberg Nazi Tribunals Prosecutor

* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 22, 2010, 10:22 P.M. ET

Whitney Harris : 1912-2010
Prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg Tribunals


By STEPHEN MILLER

Whitney Harris prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the postwar Nuremberg tribunals and represented the prosecution at the hanging of 10 convicted war criminals on Oct. 16, 1946.

Mr. Harris, who died Wednesday at age 97, was one of the last surviving members of the team of Nuremberg prosecutors. He later wrote a legal history of the tribunal, "Tyranny on Trial." The trials broke new legal ground by establishing categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Washington University in St. Louis



At Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945, Mr. Harris investigated crimes against humanity by high-ranking Nazis. He elicited from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess an estimate that "at least 2.5 million" victims had been murdered in the concentration camp, mostly Jews. (Most historians accept a lower number.)

"Hoess was a very unimpressive individual, he looked like a clerk at a grocery store, he didn't look like a big Nazi or murderer or anything like that, but he was responsive to my questions," Mr. Harris said during a 1995 visit to the Nuremberg courtroom, on the 50th anniversary of the trials. Among other atrocities, Hoess under interrogation took credit for introducing Zyklon B, normally a pesticide, as the killing agent in gas chambers.

Described by author Joseph Persico as a "Navy officer and lawyer whose film-star handsomeness belied a serious character," Mr. Harris was raised in Seattle and said he attended law school because jobs were scarce during the Depression. After practicing law in Los Angeles for a few years, he joined the Navy as an officer during World War II.

After the German surrender, he was posted to Europe, where he became assistant to Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and an associate justice on the Supreme Court. It was Mr. Jackson who in his opening statement called the Nuremberg tribunal "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."

Working in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Mr. Harris set to work collecting documentary evidence against Erst Kaltenbrunner, the head of Reich security, including the Gestapo secret police, at the end of the war.

"I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide," Mr. Harris told Der Spiegel magazine in 2005. "We didn't have much solid evidence when we started."

In the course of his investigation, Mr. Harris discovered and interrogated SS Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppen D, who admitted on the stand that his soldiers had conducted 90,000 executions of men, women and children, mostly Jews, in the Ukraine and Crimea.

Mr. Harris also assisted in Mr. Jackson's cross-examination of German air force chief Hermann Goering, who was sentenced to death but managed to take cyanide in his cell the night before the execution. Mr. Harris attended the executions of Mr. Kaltenbrunner and nine others as the representative of Mr. Jackson.

After the war, Mr. Harris taught law at Southern Methodist University and then became a corporate attorney for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. He also had a private practice and was a member of the Supreme Court bar.

He was a founder of the Committee of Former Nuremberg Prosecutors for a Permanent International Criminal Court.

"These were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose, and we did get the evidence, and we were able to do so," Mr. Harris said during the 1995 Nuremberg trip.

Doyen of the international diplomatic corps

Anatoly Dobrynin helped to negotiate peaceful coexistence between the world's two superpowers during some of the darkest days of the Cold War, and became the doyen of the international diplomatic corps in Washington. Mr. Dobrynin, who died Tuesday at age 90, was the U.S.S.R.'s chief diplomat to the U.S. for a quarter century. His posting almost literally started with a bang when, just months after his appointment in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis flared.

When the Soviets were discovered constructing nuclear launchpads in Cuba, President Kennedy imposed a blockade and it seemed that war threatened. Hostilities were averted after Mr. Dobrynin agreed to a deal by which NATO missiles based in Turkey were removed as a quid pro quo for the Cuban missiles. By then, Mr. Dobrynin had set up the "back channel" communications with the White House that included entering the State Department through the garage and using the secretary of state's private elevator. Starting in the détente-minded Nixon administration, he enjoyed a dedicated hotline to Henry Kissinger.

Associated Press - Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, left, listened to Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, on the South Lawn of the White House in December 1974.

Mr. Dobrynin's extraordinary diplomatic privileges were suspended under President Reagan, but Mr. Dobrynin eventually won over even the architect of the 1980s military buildup. When the urbane Mr. Dobrynin was recalled to Moscow to become a high Communist Party official in 1986, an astonished Reagan is said to have asked, "Is he a Communist?"

The first U.S.S.R. ambassador to the U.S. born after the Bolshevik Revolution, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin was the son of a plumber and a theater usher. Trained as an aviation engineer, he was working in a fighter-plane factory in 1944 when he was recruited for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on orders from Stalin, who wanted technicians and not intellectuals as diplomats. During the 1950s, Mr. Dobrynin served in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and then at the United Nations. He accompanied Soviet leader Khrushchev on a 1959 visit to the U.S.

After helping to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mr. Dobrynin was part of all the superpower diplomatic milestones, including summits, the development of détente, as well as treaties that limited nuclear weapons. Part of his skill was communicating the ways of America to his masters in Moscow. In his 1995 memoir "In Confidence," Mr. Dobrynin wrote that during a 1972 meeting at Camp David, Soviet leader Brezhnev thought President Nixon had presented him an inexpensive gift, a Steuben glass eagle. Brezhnev gave it to Mr. Dobrynin, saying "I don't need it. You take it." Mr. Dobrynin informed the premier that it was valued at $30,000 or more. "Really?" Brezhnev said. "Give it back."

Anatoly Dobrynin 1919-2010: Cold-War Envoy

By STEPHEN MILLER
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

Barnstormer flew with the Stars

 Sullivan Family - Elinor Smith, circa 1930, began piloting when she was 10 and rivaled contemporaries including Amelia Earhart.

* REMEMBRANCES
* MARCH 24, 2010

Elinor Smith 1911-2010
A Barnstormer Who Flew With the Stars

By STEPHEN MILLER

Dubbed "The Flying Flapper" by newspapers that followed her every feat, Elinor Smith set aviation records for endurance, height and speed at a young age. Ms. Smith, who died Friday at age 98, was one of the last survivors of aviation's early barnstorming days. She flew with such legends as Amelia Earhart and James Doolittle. She recalled Charles Lindbergh seeing her off from Roosevelt Field in 1928 on her most notorious exploit, flying under four of New York City's East River bridges.

It seemed Ms. Smith was born to fly. When she was age 6, her father, vaudeville star Tom Smith, tied her blond braids together and put her in a sight-seeing biplane that took off from a Long Island potato field not far from her home in Freeport, N.Y. "What I cannot forget is the view," Ms. Smith wrote in a 1980 memoir. She added, "I knew that my future in airplanes and flying was as inevitable as the freckles on my nose."

Aviatrix. Elinor Smith. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1981.

Along with French and piano lessons typical for a well-off girl, Ms. Smith studied aeronautics. By age 10, she had learned to take the controls, aided by wooden blocks attached to the rudder pedals of a Curtiss Jenny. She soloed at age 15, and at 16 became among the youngest pilots licensed up to that time, her license signed by Orville Wright. Ms. Smith nearly lost the license a year later thanks to the bridge stunt—another flyer had his suspended by the Commerce Department after he crashed into another East River bridge. On a dare, Ms. Smith studied the four suspension bridges and did her stunt one Sunday morning in October. She headed south in her Waco 9 biplane, dodging ships while flying beneath the Queensboro, Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. She finished by flying sideways beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and then circled the Statue of Liberty twice.

The WACO 9 was state-of-the-art for its time.
Credits - National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI Neg No. 72-8833)


Mayor Jimmy Walker was so charmed when he met the young aviatrix that he volunteered to smooth things over with the Commerce Department. Ms. Smith was back flying within days, now a celebrity. "I got the letter of reprimand with a little personal note," she wrote in her memoir, "asking for my autograph by return mail."

Over the next few years, Ms. Smith would set numerous records, spurred on by a handful of other aviatrices, including Ms. Earhart, Bobbi Trout, and Pancho Barnes. All were trumpeted by the media. Ms. Smith's "Flying Flapper" moniker was matched by "The Flying Cashier" and "The Flying Salesgirl." Each strove to break free of the pack. "That's how you got jobs, by setting records," said Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum. "Women had to take what they could get since careers in the military were closed to them."

Ms. Smith set several endurance records, and once flew so high in an attempt to set the altitude record that she blacked out above 30,000 feet. "When I came to, I was in a power dive right into the Hempstead Reservoir," but averted a crash, she told writer Laura Muha in the 2000 book "Takeoff! How Long Island Inspired America to Fly."

Ms. Smith's feats aloft—all well publicized—got her jobs piloting for the Irvin Air Chute Co., maker of parachutes, and as a test pilot for the Fairchild Aviation Corp. She also worked for several years as an aviation commentator for NBC radio. Married without publicity in 1933 to New York lawyer and politician Patrick Sullivan, Ms. Smith retired a few years later to concentrate on raising a family. She gave lectures on the history of flight and on aviatrix fashion, something many of the early female fliers were expert in.

She occasionally returned to flying when invited to air shows, and had the chance to pilot training jets in the 1950s. In 2000, she flew the Space Shuttle flight simulator, and managed to successful land after crashing on her first try.

Respected British expert in American history

Bridging the Pond, as it were, a British expert in American history. Not in the New York Times, for this is a British person, even if his specialty was the US. Witness the obituary above about a US soldier, Modesto Cartagena; his obit won't appear in British media, for he is outside of their focus. Yet, this man is something of an anomaly: his exertise was US history, yet he likely was utterly unknown in the US itself.

The London Times has his obit. The American Historical Association awarded him a prize in 2002. NPR has a link to the London Times obit. And more. This is Guardian's obit.


Jack Pole, who has died aged 87, was one of the most erudite and insightful of British historians of early American history, and one of the first British historians of America whose work was taken seriously by US historians. He had the courage to tackle the big ideas of American ideology – among them liberty, equality and representation. He also anticipated, in work shared with his friend Jack P Greene, the modern interest in Atlantic history. Throughout his career, he showed great intellectual independence. Because he could take a very broad view, and root it in detailed mastery of the archival sources, he compelled respect even from those who did not expect to agree with him.

Indeed, the Nassau County OPAC has nine entries under his name. *

His intellectual method, in fact, resembled his style in the game of cricket, the other great obsession of his life. Crouched at the wicket, he would defend, if necessary, for hours, with infinite tenacity, then abruptly deliver the most elegant of off-drives or a blatant slog over the bowler's head.

If I had any idea what that meant ...

For 10 years until 1989, he held the Rhodes chair of American history at Oxford University and a fellowship at St Catherine's College. He succeeded in ensuring that American history should be taken seriously at Oxford, and caused waves by insisting that it should be taught only by qualified specialists. He was also one of the ringleaders in the successful move to deny an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher, not (as Conservatives who did not know him maintained) out of snobbery, but because he considered that Thatcher had damaged British higher education.

Of course, by American history the obituarist means US history. That inaccuracy aside, interesting points: that taking US history seriously needed to be debated seems absurd; give that over to snobbery. And that US history needed to be taught by specialists is another absurdity: surely those who opposed such would be aghast to have any other academic subject not taught by such specialists.

The London Times obit starts off this way: Professor Jack Pole was the foremost British historian of the United States in his generation, and his books and articles won him recognition and acclaim in the highest ranks of US historians. He was an expert on the American Revolution but he wrote on all periods and linked the history of the US to that of Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Yes, US history, not American history.

For such a careful researcher, Jack was a prolific author. His 1966 book Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic first established his reputation. In 1983 he published The Pursuit of Equality in American History, which many scholars regard as his best book, though his 1975 work, The Decision for American Independence, has been influential for generations of students.

Jack was born in London. His father, Joe, a journalist and later head of publicity in London for the Hollywood studio United Artists, and his mother, Phoebe, daughter of the Rickards haulage and taxi-owning family, were classic Hampstead intellectuals of the period. They moved in a world of academics, psychoanalysts and socialists. Jack's father knew all the stars of Hollywood's golden age, and Jack himself received a Christmas card for many years from Charlie Chaplin.

Academics, psychoanalysts and socialists: the politics of the first two groups are not specified, nor are the occupations of the third.


Jack was sent to King Alfred's, the progressive school in Hampstead. It was there that he began his love affair with cricket. It is said that until late middle age, his batting average – mostly accumulated on behalf of the Trojan Wanderers, the team he founded with his lifelong friend, the music critic David Cairns – exceeded his years. The Trojan Wanderers survive, a nomadic team for which the conductor Colin Davis, the tenor Robert Tear and many others (including myself) have turned out. On one occasion, an Indian academic was pressed into service to make up the numbers and put in at number 11. When he made 60 in a few minutes, it turned out that he had admitted not to playing a bit in India, as Jack thought, but to playing for India.

Pole's service in the second world war was as an anti-aircraft officer, first at Scapa Flow in Orkney, then in the campaign against the Italians in the Horn of Africa, famous for the exploits of Orde Wingate's Gideon Force. After the war he went to Oxford to read history. The decisive connection of his life came when he went on a scholarship to Princeton, in New Jersey, and met three British students who became lifelong friends, Cairns, Anne Robbins (daughter of the economist Lionel Robbins, who became an editor at Penguin) and the historian Gerald Aylmer.


Jack and Cairns started the first cricket team at Princeton. But the high point of his years in the US, perhaps, came when Jack, David and his sister Margaret, and Anne drove across the continent in an elderly Chevrolet, sleeping in the open air most nights. In Hollywood they were treated royally by the friends of Jack's father. At Princeton, Jack came under the influence of the great American liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, and while working for his PhD he became, for a time, an instructor at the university. There he met and married Marilyn Mitchell, with whom he had a son, Nicholas, and two daughters, Ilsa and Lucy. The marriage was dissolved in 1988.

Dissolved. How understated a term.


In 1953 Jack returned to a lectureship at University College London, where he taught until he was called to Cambridge to be reader in American history and government and a fellow of Churchill College, of which he became vice-master (1975-78). In 1979 he moved to Oxford. In his early 70s, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. However, he continued to work in spite of the disease for many years. Jack was a talented painter and, with the onset of more serious symptoms, he converted effectively to a style that involved stippling the paint instead of brushstrokes.

Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stippling

Almost a decade after his diagnosis, in 2005, he came out with a definitive edition of The Federalist Papers, in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay laid out the fundamental political ideas of the American revolution. It was a subject ideally chosen to engage Jack's grasp of the relationship between history and political philosophy. He is survived by his three children and five grandchildren.

• Jack Richon Pole, historian and cricketer, born 14 March 1922; died 31 January 2010

• Godfrey Hodgson
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 March 2010 18.41 GMT
• Article history

* Pole, J. R. (Jack Richon)

The Times obituary takes an entirely different tack: it is jaunty, and offers details glossed over or ignored in the Guardian obit. To wit:


Jack Richon Pole was born in London in 1922. His father, Joe Pole, had arrived in Britain from Ukraine as a boy. The Jewish family were en route to New York but got no farther than Glasgow. Joe was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War and later he worked as a journalist and as the head of publicity for United Artists in London. There he met Jack’s mother, Phoebe Rickards, from a more anglicised Jewish family who ran a fleet of horse-drawn carriages, and later, taxis. She had been a suffragette and was once arrested in Hyde Park. Later she was a prominent Labour member of the council in Finchley and frequently crossed swords with the local MP, Margaret Thatcher. When his mother died, Jack Pole received a handwritten letter of condolence from Mrs Thatcher, by then the Prime Minister.

 It says so much more than the Guardian's obit. The connection with Thatcher isn't detailed in the latter; only passing reference is made to it. This one offer rich detail.

This radical background left Pole with an ingrained lifelong hatred of social and racial injustice. He campaigned for the rights of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain in the 1960s and supported the struggle for black civil rights in the US. He was sent to progressive schools: first, aged 4, to the experimental Malting House School in Cambridge founded by the educationist Geoffrey Pyke, which Pole disliked, and then King Alfred School in Hampstead where he was much happier.


On leaving school he went straight into the Army and for most of his six years in uniform he served in antiaircraft batteries, at Scapa Flow, in Somaliland and on the South Coast trying to shoot down V1 flying bombs. He went up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946 where he took a First in modern history. His closest friend in the college, F. M. L (Michael) Thompson, also became a distinguished professor of history. Pole could have become a French historian, but he chose to work on the then unfavoured subject of US history and studied for his PhD in Princeton from 1949. It was unusual for a young British historian to be trained in the US at this time, but it was the making of Pole’s career. It introduced him to the US, its leading historians and their most recent work. During one summer holiday he and another notable English historian, Gerald Aylmer, took a road trip across America. Pole met Marilyn Mitchell in New York. They married in 1952 and had three children. The marriage was dissolved in 1988.

Theree's that word, dissolved, once again.

At Cambridge and then Oxford he set about building up US history and freeing it from the prejudices of more hidebound colleagues who objected to the study of such a new country and of such a brash popular culture. At Oxford he changed the syllabus, increasing the number of options in US history and changing their nature. The final-year undergraduate special subject on “Slavery and Secession” had been a history of the Civil War as a struggle between white men. Pole changed this to “Slavery and Emancipation” with a focus on the struggles of black men and women. The course looked beyond 1865 to consider the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War to safeguard black civil and political rights in perpetuity. Pole brought to the study of US history in both universities the latest ideas and research; he also attracted star US historians to Cambridge (as the Pitt Professor) and to Oxford (as holders of the visiting Harmsworth chair). The historian to whom he was closest was Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, the most fluent and sophisticated of all postwar American historians. 

That opinion of Hofstadter is offered, but the obit has no byline.


Pole’s first published works were on Abraham Lincoln. They included a powerful tribute to the Civil War President delivered at Cambridge on the centenary of his assassination in 1965. He wrote and edited several books, sometimes with US co-editors, and compiled many selections of documents. His textbook, Foundations of American Independence 1763-1815 (1973), introduced many a sixth-former to American history. But as a populariser he had high standards and was publicly critical of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke’s version of US history in his 1972 TV series America. 

How interesting, for Cooke's series was quite popular here.

Pole published a series of works on the colonial origins of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the framing of the Constitution, and the debate over its ratification. Perhaps his most important book was Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (1966) which immediately took its place with the revisionist work of such leading US historians as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. Together, these historians explained the revolution in the colonists’ own terms and with due regard for the political language in which they expressed themselves and why they had rebelled.

Pole’s book examined the development of representative politics in the key colonies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, relating this to English antecedents, tracing the growth of a revolutionary consciousness in the 1770s, and examining the new political arrangements developed by each state in independence. Mixing institutional history, constitutional scholarship and the history of political thought, the work was immediately hailed as a classic.

 I've always objected to anything being immediately hailed as a classic.  How can that be? A classic is something that stands the test of time, as I understand it.



Of equal stature is Pole’s study, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (1978). In it he examined different types of equality in US history — political, civil, racial, social and economic — and traced them through the experience of different groups, from slaves and labour radicals in the 19th century to New Deal workers in the 1930s and feminists in the 1970s.
Pole was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. In retirement he painted, read poetry and continued to play cricket into his seventies, by which time he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
In 1957 he had co-founded a cricket team, the Trojan Wanderers, which meandered its way through the cricket grounds of Oxbridge and the south of England for many years and gave Pole — no very talented player it must be said — the greatest pleasure. His supervisions and tutorials were wont to end with a cricketing story or the appreciation of a notable player. In later life his companion was the English scholar, Janet Wilson.

Winston Churchill

This obit from the AP appeared today in the Chicago Tribune.

Winston Spencer Churchill


LONDON (AP) - Winston Spencer Churchill, a former member of Parliament and grandson of Britain's wartime leader, died Tuesday, an associate said. He was 69. Churchill had been suffering from cancer and died at his London home, said Cmdr. John Muxworthy, president of the United Kingdom National Defense Association.


Churchill was a member of the House of Commons from 1970 to 1997. Earlier he had been a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph and other papers. He was a founder of the Defense Association, which campaigned for greater support for Britain's armed forces. "A true patriot, WSC followed in the steps of his grandfather, Sir Winston, who, in the 1930s campaigned ceaselessly for this country to rearm in the face of the ever-growing threat from Nazi Germany," Muxworthy said. "Eighty years on, our Winston has been fighting the same battle."


Churchill was born in October 1940 at Chequers, the prime mi nister's official country residence, shortly after Royal Air Force pilots prevailed in the Battle of Britain. During it, Hitler's Luftwaffe was prevented from destroying Britain's air defenses or forcing the country to negotiate an armistice. He was the son of Randolph Churchill and Pamela Digby, who scandalized London society with her affairs and who, in later life, as Pamela Harriman, became U.S. ambassador to France. The parents divorced in 1945.

Wife of Averell Harriman. A Washington DC socilate; as I recall, her home was a Democratic Party temple. President Clinton appointed her ambassador to France, as I recall. An interesting detail of her fascinating life was her being introduced to Adolf Hitler by Unity Midford, one of the noted Mitford sisters and a prominent supporter of fascism.

"I never knew my parents together, so their split meant nothing to me," Churchill said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2008. "But it did mean I got a great deal of grandparental sunlight." He recalled staying at Chartwell, his grandfather's home southeast of London, and finding the old man "wreathed in cigar smoke with a whisky and soda already on his table" in the morning. The drink, he added, was very weak. "Each afternoon, we'd spend a couple of hours together, laying bricks. If anyone had as ked me what my grandfather did, I'd have said: He's a bricklayer,'" Churchill recalled.

In his autobiography, "Memories and Adventures," Churchill said his famous name could be a burden, especially when he was in school at Eton. He told of bullies swearing at him, then saying: "And take this for being Winston-bloody-Churchill!"

Imagine having the old man as one's grandfather; what a burden for a youngster.

Young Winston's career in journalism began with an unpaid job as a copyreader at The Wall Street Journal. Following his graduation from Oxford University, he covered conflicts in Yemen, the Congo, Angola, Vietnam and Biafra. He also recalled being attacked by Chicago police officers at the raucous Democratic Party convention in 1968.

His grandfather had also been a journalist.


He was elected as a Conservative to represent Stretford in Lancashire in 1970, serving that district until 1983. During that period he effectively killed his chances for advancement by defying Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and voting against sanctions against white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Churchill subsequently represented Manchester Davyhulme from 1983 until 1997.


In 1979, he was embroiled in scandal over his two-year affair with Soraya Khashoggi, the former wife of a Saudi arms dealer. The affair came to light during a sensational prosecution of three police officers for blackmailing Khashoggi. A defense lawyer had claimed police were investigating Khashoggi because she was involved with a politician, subsequently identified as Churchill. He also drew criticism in 1995 after selling his grandfather's personal papers to the nation for 12.5 million pounds ($20 million).


"Although the trustees could have got significantly more on the world market, it was their and my specific wish that the papers should not be offered in the open market but should remain in this country," Churchill said at the time. Churchill is survived by two daughters and two sons from his marriage to Mary Caroline d'Erlanger, which ended in divorce in 1997; and by his second wife, Luce Danielson.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press

Of course, his obituary will appear in many places, certainly in English media. The Daily telegraph headlines it Former Tory MP Winston Churchill dies; the Independent: former MP, and a related article: Winston Churchill's grandson took fight to the backbenches; the Ukranian Globalist: Winston Churchill the Junior is dead;and so on.

Ed Thigpen

Thigpen in 2005 Photograph: Kevin Statham/Redferns

Ed Thigpen obituary: Classy jazz drummer with Oscar Peterson, he was known as 'Mr Taste'

Peter Vacher: guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 February 2010 18.50 GMT

If the ideal preparation for a jazz drummer is to be the son of a jazz drummer, then Ed Thigpen, who has died aged 79, was well placed. His father, Ben Thigpen, was a distinguished performer in the swing era, known for his long tenure with Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy but, ironically, played little part in his son's musical progress once he had separated from the boy's mother.

With or without his father's tutelage, Ed Thigpen far surpassed his father in both his jazz accomplishments and his prominence in the genre, earning the title "Mr Taste" for his sensitivity and classy control. Marked out by peers and commentators for his exceptional yet understated command of percussive techniques, especially when using wire brushes, Thigpen worked and recorded with a wide range of musicians but was best known for his association with Oscar Peterson. In six years with the Canadian pianist, he made an array of highly regarded albums, working alongside the bassist Ray Brown in what for many was Peterson's finest trio.

Excellent trio, indeed. I have a vinyl LP record.

Thigpen was born in Chicago and spent his infancy in St Louis, where his father lived, but moved with his mother to Los Angeles in 1935 after his parents had split up. After the death of his mother when he was 12, the boy was placed with a family who had little interest in his musical aspirations and, indeed, actively disliked the drums. Despite this, he persevered and took lessons. In what was a highly segregated city, Thigpen mixed with many other African-American youngsters who aspired to be jazz musicians. At junior school, he participated in a three-way drum battle in which he came third, before moving on to the city's Jefferson high school. This establishment gained renown as a training ground for musicians because of the inspirational tuition provided by its music teacher, Samuel Browne.

Thigpen benefited from Browne's encouragement, as did the trumpeter Art Farmer, the saxophonist Dexter Gordon and the drummer Chico Hamilton, all of whom passed through the school swing band during the teacher's time. After a year in college studying sociology, Thigpen opted for the musical life – he had already played local gigs – and spent a year in St Louis with his father, whom he named, along with Count Basie's drummer Jo Jones, as his principal influence.

That is quite a roster of musicians.

By 1951 Thigpen was in New York, where he worked for six months with the ex-Duke Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams's combo at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom before his military call-up. Posted first to Fort Ord, in California, where he was a drum instructor, he served in Korea with the Eighth Army band. During a visit to Tokyo, Thigpen encountered Peterson for the first time when the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) troupe was playing there. He knew then that he wanted to perform with Peterson and told Brown: "I need to play with this group." Four years later, Thigpen replaced the guitarist Herb Ellis in Peterson's trio, which had thus far managed without a percussionist.

Back in New York after demobilisation, Thigpen worked and recorded with the singer Dinah Washington and the pianists Toshiko Akiyoshi, Billy Taylor, Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano. The call from Peterson in 1959 led to a hectic period of travel, prestigious engagements and tours with the all-star JATP package, including visits to the UK. Thigpen impressed local critics with his bandstand authority, articulacy and courteous demeanour, often making time to conduct drum clinics and workshops. He was also a key presence on Peterson's recordings, including the critically lauded Songbook series and Night Train (1962), often cited as Peterson's finest album.

After leaving Peterson, Thigpen joined Ella Fitzgerald's backing group for a year from December 1965, took on studio work and then returned to her band in 1968, staying for a further four years before trading continents and moving permanently to Copenhagen. He said race was a factor in his decision but added: "In my case, it was the love of a woman." Using Denmark as his base, Thigpen built a considerable career as a bandleader, using younger Danish musicians and recording often. He linked up with other expatriate US musicians for club dates and tours, appearing at Ronnie Scott's in the 1990s with Roots, the all-star saxophone group, and was active as a teacher, running his own percussion studio. He wrote several drum manuals and was the subject of Don McLean's 2009 documentary film Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm and Taste, its title an apt summary of Thigpen's personal and musical attributes.

Always impeccably dressed and gracious in manner, Thigpen had suffered from Parkinson's disease latterly, yet continued to perform, last appearing in public in October 2009. He is survived by his daughter Denise and his son Michael. Their mother, Inga-Lisa, died in 1981.

• Edmund Leonard Thigpen, jazz drummer and teacher, born 28 September 1930; died 13 January 2010

Tough Tenor

July 26, 2008
Johnny Griffin, 80, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years. His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France.

Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization.

In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.

“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”

Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.

Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.

By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.

Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.

A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s.

Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France.

Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.