ALI MAZRUI, SCHOLAR OF AFRICA WHO DIVIDED U.S. AUDIENCES
His family announced the death without specifying a cause.
Uhuru Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, where Professor Mazrui was born, said at the time of his death that he was “a towering academician whose intellectual contributions played a major role in shaping African scholarship.”
His books and his hundreds of scholarly articles explored topics like African politics, international political culture, political Islam and globalization. He was for many years a professor at the University of Michigan, and since 1989 had held the Albert Schweitzer chair at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Reflecting his habit of provocation, Professor Mazrui wrote an article in 2012, posted on Facebook, accusing Dr. Schweitzer, the revered medical missionary in pre-independence Gabon, of being “a benevolent racist.” He wrote that Dr. Schweitzer had called Africans “primitives” and “savages,” and had treated Africans in a hospital unit that was separate from, and less comfortable than, one for whites.
Professor Mazrui’s courage transcended ideas. When he was a political-science professor in Uganda in the early 1970s, the country’s brutal dictator, Idi Amin, invited him to be his chief adviser on international affairs — “his Kissinger,” Professor Mazrui told The New York Times in 1986. Instead, he publicly criticized Amin and fled Uganda.
“The Africans,” a nine-part series that was originally broadcast by the BBC and later shown on PBS, portrayed Africa as having been defined by the interplay of indigenous, Islamic and Western influences. Professor Mazrui had acquired the perspective by growing up speaking Swahili, practicing Islam and attending an English-speaking school in Mombasa, Kenya.
“My three worlds overlapped,” he said in the interview with The Times.
The series glorified the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, saying he inspired Africans to have a sense of destiny and become actors on the world stage — a stance that set off storms of criticism. In the last episode, Professor Mazrui predicted a “final racial conflict” in South Africa that would end with whites’ shrinking from using nuclear weapons for fear of killing themselves and then being defeated in an armed struggle, ending apartheid. Victorious blacks, he said, would then inherit “the most advanced nuclear infrastructure on the continent,” and nuclear weapons would become a bargaining chip in a worldwide black-white struggle.
He told The Los Angeles Times that he was “uneasy” that the United States and the Soviet Union could start a nuclear war, without Africa having the same capability. “I want black Africa to have the bomb to frighten the system as a whole,” he said.
Professor Mazrui’s answer to Mrs. Cheney was that he had intended from the beginning to represent the views of one African — “a view from the inside,” he called it. “There are many parts that are anti-imperialist,” he told The New York Times. “Africa is concerned with past domination and afraid of redomination.”
Reviewing the series for The Times, John Corry called its scholarship “empty” and said it was “a vehicle solely for Mr. Mazrui’s feelings.”
But Clifford Terry, writing in The Chicago Tribune, suggested that this personal perspective was in fact a strength: “It is obvious, through it all, that here is a man who deeply cares about what he likes to call a ‘remarkable continent.’ ”
Tom Shales of The Washington Post applauded the shows’ abrasiveness. “The alternative,” he wrote, “would be an innocuous, safely ‘balanced’ documentary on Africa that made no ripples, provoked no discourse.”
Ali Al’Amin Mazrui was born on Feb. 24, 1933, in Mombasa. His father was an eminent Muslim scholar and the chief Islamic judge of Kenya.
As a boy he was not a good student and studied typing at a technical school. He stayed on at the school as a clerk and kept unsuccessfully applying to university, he said in a 2009 interview with The Observer, a Ugandan newspaper.
The Observer reported that the governor of Kenya had heard him give a speech on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and had been impressed. That led to a series of interviews and a scholarship to finish secondary school in England. He ended up earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manchester, a master’s from Columbia in New York and, in 1966, a doctorate from Oxford.
The next year he published three books on African politics. In 1973, he began teaching at Makerere University in Uganda. When he fled Uganda, he went to the University of Michigan to teach political science. In addition to teaching at Binghamton, he held an at-large professorial appointment with Cornell and lectured at many schools around the world.
He was president of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America and president of the African Studies Association of the United States. He advised the United Nations and the World Bank.
Professor Mazrui’s marriage to the former Molly Vickerman ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Pauline Uti; his sons, Jamal, Alamin, Kim, Farid and Harith; his daughter, Grace Egbo-Mazrui; three grandchildren; and a sister, Alya.
In editing “The Africans” for American television, Professor Mazrui deleted his description of Karl Marx as “the last of the great Jewish prophets” because producers feared it might be taken as anti-Semitic.
In Britain, where the line was used, he had worried that Marxists might be offended by the reference to Marx as a prophet.
“My life,” he once said, “is one long debate.”
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the person who was impressed by a speech Mr. Mazrui gave on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, leading to new educational opportunities. It was the governor of Kenya, not the governor of the technical school where he was working as a clerk.SOURCE
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OSCAR DE LA RENTA, WHO CLOTHED STARS AND BECAME ONE
Oscar de la Renta Is Dead at 82
CreditRichard Drew/Associated Press
His death was confirmed by his wife, Annette de la Renta. The cause was complications of cancer.
Though ill with cancer intermittently for close to eight years, Mr. de la Renta was resilient. During that period his business grew by 50 percent, to $150 million in sales, as his name became linked to celebrity events like the Oscars. Amy Adams, Sarah Jessica Parker and Penélope Cruz were among the actresses who wore his dresses.
Recently his biggest coup was to make the ivory tulle gown that Amal Alamuddin wore to wed George Clooney in Venice.
Determined to stay relevant, Mr. de la Renta achieved fame in two distinct realms: as a couturier to socialites — the so-called ladies-who-lunch, his bread and butter — and as a red-carpet king. He also dressed four American first ladies, but it was Hollywood glitz, rather than nice uptown clothes, that defined him for a new age and a new customer. Just as astutely, he embraced social media.
Behind the Scenes With Oscar de la Renta
The Times’s Eric Wilson interviewed Oscar de la Renta about his process of selecting pieces for his fall 2007 runway collection.
Publish Date February 6, 2007.
Many high-end designers had bigger businesses. Some were more original. But very few were fearless enough to adapt to a cultural shift. Mr. de la Renta did it twice in his career, the first time in 1980.
Normally he didn’t dwell on the subject of his legacy. In an interview in 2009, at his home in Punta Cana, in his native Dominican Republic, he said of fashion: “It’s never been heavy. Somebody might ask, ‘What is Oscar de la Renta?’ And you could say, ‘It’s a pretty dress.’”
Instead he preferred to joke, or talk about his vegetable garden in Kent, or dish the dirt. He rarely shied from controversy or calling someone out.
Three years ago, he chided Michelle Obama for wearing foreign labels. (He insisted that his comments were not made because she never wore his things. Eventually, this month, she did.) Once, in a speech, he offered to send three-way mirrors to certain editors who wore miniskirts.
But then, all his life Mr. de la Renta loved being where the action was — whether a gala, a dominoes table, or in his various homes entertaining talented and influential friends.
“He notices everything,” John Fairchild, the retired publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, said a few years ago. A telephone call from Mr. de la Renta might begin with a familiar bit of flirtation: “How are you, my darling? Tell me the gossip.”
In 1980 he and his first wife, a former editor named Françoise de Langlade, posed for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, with the headline “Living Well Is Still the Best Revenge.” By then, Mr. de la Renta had lived in New York for 17 years — less time than his rivals Bill Blass and Geoffrey Beene.
The article, which described the stylish couple’s uninhibited social ascent — and the array of people who came to their “salons,” ranging from Norman Mailer to Henry Kissinger — was a kind of watershed moment. Fashionable people had long been part of the city’s social scene; that wasn’t news. But, as a point of contrast, when Truman Capote held his Black and White Dance in 1966, only a tiny fraction of the 540 guests were dress designers. They became more visible during the 1970s, but the Times Magazine article, by Francesca Stanfill, now put their money and status out in the open.
Timeline
Oscar de la Renta’s Life Through the Years
Milestones in the life and career of the influential designer, who died Monday at age 82.
As Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast, said, “Designers have become the new tycoons.” Mr. de la Renta soon embarked on the next phase of his career: as a designer to first ladies, beginning with Nancy Reagan.
Though he never took his job lightly, he always gave the impression that his life mattered more. He had enormous zest, displayed in his fashion — the vibrant colors, the airy sleeves, the Turkish delight numbers that so appealed to his greatest champion, the editor Diana Vreeland.
But where he really revealed himself, his hospitable nature, was in the Dominican Republic, where he was regarded as an unofficial ambassador (he held a diplomatic passport anyway). He built two homes there. The first, in Casa de Campo, featured thatched roofs, rattan furniture and hammocks, and images of the de la Rentas’ informal gatherings often appeared in W in the 1970s.
The second home, in Punta Cana, though imposing in the Colonial style, with wide verandas (and its own chapel on the grounds), also had a relaxed feeling. Mr. de la Renta built the house with his second wife, the former Annette Engelhard Reed, whom he married in 1989, after the death of Francoise, from cancer, in 1983.
In addition to his wife, Mr. de la Renta is survived by a son, Moises; three sisters; three stepchildren; and nine step-grandchildren.
At holidays, the de la Rentas filled their house in Punta Cana with relatives and friends, notably Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy and Henry Kissinger, and the art historian John Richardson. The family dogs had the run of the compound, and Mr. de la Renta often sang spontaneously after dinner. First-time visitors, seeking him out in the late afternoon, were surprised to find him in the staff quarters, hellbent on winning at dominoes.
A man of the world, he was at ease everywhere — though he once said, “To me, home is wherever Annette is,” then added with a droll laugh, “She could be unbelievably happy without me.”
Oscar Aristedes de la Renta was born in Santo Domingo on July 22, 1932. The youngest of seven children and the only boy, he often recalled that he usually got what he wanted from his family. He finished high school in Santo Domingo, and although his father preferred that he join him in the insurance business, young Oscar persuaded his mother to send him to Madrid to study art.
At 19, he left for Spain on a passenger ship.
Besotted by postwar Madrid and his new freedom, Mr. de la Renta was soon spending more time in the cafes and nightclubs, meeting flamenco dancers, than in class. As well, he acquired a “señorito” wardrobe, he told the writer Sarah Mower, which consisted of custom-made suits from the tailor Luis Lopez, high starched collars and a carnation of deepest red in his buttonhole. The $125 his father sent each month paid for fancy clothes and in a sense his broader education afoot in Spain.
For extra money, he drew clothes for newspapers and fashion houses. He later admitted that his drawings were not technically accomplished or original. Nonetheless, some of his sketches were seen by Francesca Lodge, the wife of John Davis Lodge, then the United States ambassador to Spain. In 1956, she asked Mr. de la Renta to design a coming-out dress for her daughter Beatrice. The dress and the debutante appeared on the cover of Life that fall.
He was soon working in the Madrid salon of Cristobal Balenciaga, perhaps the greatest couturier of that period. Mr. de la Renta’s job was to sketch dresses to send to clients. But when he asked Mr. Balenciaga to transfer him to the main studio in Paris, the couturier told him he wasn’t qualified yet and to wait a year.
De la Renta’s ‘Computer Chip’ Style
Decades into his career, the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta previewed his spring 2009 collection that used graphic prints and modern materials like plastic.
Publish Date August 24, 2012.
Instead, armed with letters of introduction, Mr. de la Renta left for Paris and was immediately offered a job at Christian Dior.
The next day he went to see Antonio del Castillo, the designer at Lanvin, who was looking for an assistant. “He loved me because I spoke Spanish, and he asked me if I could cut, drape and sew, and of course I said yes,” Mr. de la Renta told Bernadine Morris, a former fashion reporter for The Times. “He offered me a little more money than Dior, and I said I would start in two weeks. Then I went to a fashion school and asked the woman who ran it if she could teach me the year’s course in two weeks.”
Mr. de la Renta remained with Mr. Castillo from 1961 to 1963, when he decided to try his luck in the United States. He joined Elizabeth Arden, which then produced a couture line. Mr. de la Renta recalled that when Ms. Arden asked how much money he wanted, he threw out the largest number he could think of — $700 a week — and then sat back to wait. “Did I have the know-how to really earn that?” he recalled. “Probably not.”
Six months later, when Ms. Arden complained about his long vacation in Europe, he cannily proposed dinner at her apartment, where he let her win at cards. “From then on I could do in that house anything,” he said.
In 1965, Mr. de la Renta left Arden to join the Seventh Avenue company of Jane Derby as partner and designer. Miss Derby retired shortly after, and Mr. de la Renta took over, with backing from Ben Shaw. The brand eventually grew to include fragrances, boutiques in the United States and abroad, and dozens of licenses.
Mr. de la Renta formed close friendships with the first ladies he dressed, in particular Mrs. Reagan and Mrs. Clinton. Beginning in 1997, in Mr. Clinton’s second term, Mr. de la Renta helped Mrs. Clinton streamline her style, with signature pantsuits in bright pastels. Mrs. Clinton liked to say, somewhat drolly, “He’s been working for 20 years to turn me into a fashion icon.”
Mr. de la Renta made his debut as a couture designer in Paris in 1993, showing a collection for Pierre Balmain. He became the first American to design an important couture collection in Paris since Main Rousseau Bocher, known as Mainbocher, closed his salon there in 1940. The house of Balmain, a fixture on the fashion scene since 1946, had foundered after its creator’s death in 1982, and before Mr. de la Renta’s arrival several designers had been responsible for the line.
Mr. de la Renta also showed his ready-to-wear collection in Paris for three seasons, in 1991 and 1992. The shows were substantially backed by Sanofi, the producer of his fragrances — Oscar and So de la Renta for women, and Pour Lui, for men.
He was presented with Coty Awards, chosen by a jury of fashion editors, for having had the most significant influence on fashion in both 1967 and 1968. In 1973 he was named to the Coty Hall of Fame, and in 1989 he was given a lifetime achievement award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
During his long career, Mr. de la Renta was among the few designers who knew the difference between the runway and fashion.
“Never, ever confuse what happens on a runway with fashion,” Mr. de la Renta once said. “A runway is spectacle. It’s only fashion when a woman puts it on. Being well dressed hasn’t much to do with having good clothes. It’s a question of good balance and good common sense.”
An earlier version of a slide show that appeared with this obituary erroneously included a photo of Michelle Obama at a state dinner in 2011. At the dinner, she wore Alexander McQueen, not Oscar de la Renta.
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of Mr. de la Renta’s fragrance for men. It is Pour Lui, not Pour Homme.SOURCE
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BEN BRADLEE, WASHINGTON POST EDITOR AND WATERGATE WARRIOR
Ben Bradlee, a Crusading Editor
CreditMike Lien/The New York Times
With full backing from his publisher, Katharine Graham, Mr. Bradlee led The Post into the first rank of American newspapers, courting controversy and giving it standing as a thorn in the side of Washington officials.
When they called to complain, Mr. Bradlee acted as a buffer between them and his staff. “Just get it right,” he would tell his reporters. Most of the time they did, but there were mistakes, one so big that the paper had to return a Pulitzer Prize.
Mr. Bradlee — “this last of the lion-king newspaper editors,” as Phil Bronstein, a former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, described him — could be classy or profane, an energetic figure with a boxer’s nose who almost invariably dressed in a white-collared, bold-striped Turnbull & Asser shirt, the sleeves rolled up.
Bradlee and the Medal of Freedom
Ben Bradlee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2013 by President Obama, who spoke about Mr. Bradlee’s legacy and his impact on journalism.
Publish Date October 21, 2014.
When not prowling the newsroom like a restless coach, encouraging his handpicked reporters and editors, he sat behind a glass office wall that afforded him a view of them and them a view of him. “We would follow this man over any hill, into any battle, no matter what lay ahead,” his successor, Leonard Downie Jr., once said.
His rise at The Post was swift. A former Newsweek reporter, as well as neighbor and friend of John F. Kennedy’s, Mr. Bradlee rejoined the paper as deputy managing editor in 1965 (he worked there for a few years as a reporter early in his career). Within three months he was named managing editor, the second in command; within three years he was executive editor.
The Post as he had found it was a sleepy competitor to The Evening Star and The Washington Daily News, and he began invigorating it. He transformed the “women’s” section into Style, a brash and gossipy overview of Washington mores. He started building up the staff, determined “that a Washington Post reporter would be the best in town on every beat,” as he wrote in a 1995 memoir, “A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.” He added, “We had a long way to go.”
How long became painfully clear to him in June 1971, when The Post was scooped by The New York Times on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of United States involvement in Vietnam. After The Times printed excerpts for three days, a federal court enjoined it from publishing any more, arguing that publication would irreparably harm the nation. The Post, meanwhile, had obtained its own copy of the papers and prepared to publish.
But The Post was on the verge of a $35 million stock offering, and publishing could have scuttled the deal. At the same time, Mr. Bradlee was under pressure from reporters threatening to quit if he caved in. It was up to Mrs. Graham to choose. She decided to publish.
Cementing a Reputation
The government tried to stop The Post from publishing, as it had The Times, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of both papers. More than anything else, Mr. Bradlee recalled, the publication of the Pentagon Papers “forged forever between the Grahams and the newsroom a sense of confidence within The Post, a sense of mission.”
Watergate consolidated The Post’s reputation as a crusading newspaper. A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972 — the White House soon characterized it as a “third-rate burglary” — caught the attention of two young reporters on the metropolitan staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Soon they were working the phones, wearing out shoe leather and putting two and two together.
With the help of others on the staff and the support of Mr. Bradlee and his editors — and Mrs. Graham — they uncovered a political scandal involving secret funds, espionage, sabotage, dirty tricks and illegal wiretapping. Along the way they withstood repeated denials by the White House, threats from the attorney general (who ended up in prison) and the uncomfortable feeling of being alone on the story of the century.
When the trail of crimes and shenanigans led directly to the White House, Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974. The tapes that he himself had made of conversations in the Oval Office confirmed what The Post had been reporting. Mrs. Graham wrote to Mr. Bradlee in her Christmas letter that year, “We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it.”
Mr. Bradlee’s Post and Woodward and Bernstein, as the two became known, captured the popular imagination. Their exploits seemed straight out of a Hollywood movie: two young reporters boldly taking on the White House in pursuit of the truth, their spines steeled by a courageous editor.
The story became the basis of a best seller, “All the President’s Men,” by Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein, and the book did become, in 1976, a Hollywood box-office hit. Jason Robards Jr. played Mr. Bradlee and won an Oscar for his performance.
In their book, describing meetings in Mr. Bradlee’s office, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein recalled how Mr. Bradlee would pick up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball and toss it at a small hoop attached to a window. “The gesture was indicative both of the editor’s short attention span and of a studied informality,” they wrote. “There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee.”
They observed that double-edged manner in Washington society, sometimes seeing it displayed in one swoop, as when Mr. Bradlee would “grind his cigarettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party.”
“Bradlee,” they added, “was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.”
After Watergate, journalism schools filled up with would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins, and the business of journalism changed, taking on an even tougher hide of skepticism than the one that formed during the Vietnam War.
“No matter how many spin doctors were provided by no matter how many sides of how many arguments,” Mr. Bradlee wrote, “from Watergate on, I started looking for the truth after hearing the official version of a truth.”
Consumed by Watergate, Mr. Bradlee had been spending most of his waking hours at The Post when he started receiving what he called anonymous “mash notes.” His second marriage, to the former Antoinette Pinchot, was cooling, and the flirtation intrigued him. In 1973, Sally Quinn, an irreverent Style reporter, let him know that she was his secret admirer.
After Mr. Bradlee’s divorce, a third marriage was a questionable proposition. He said he once told a reporter that he would marry Ms. Quinn when the Catholic Church elected a Polish pope. On Oct. 16, 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland became pope; four days later, the couple were married.
Ms. Quinn survives him, as do their son, Quinn Bradlee; three children from his previous marriages, Benjamin C. Bradlee Jr., Dominic Bradlee and Marina Murdock; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild, according to The Post.
Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee died in November 2011.
The Post’s Watergate coverage won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service. It was one of 18 Pulitzers The Post received during Mr. Bradlee’s tenure. (It had won only a handful before then.) The total would have been 19 if The Post had not been compelled to return one awarded to a young reporter, Janet Cooke, for an article, titled “Jimmy’s World,” about an 8-year-old drug addict whose heroin supplier was his mother’s live-in lover. Only after Ms. Cooke was given the prize was it discovered that she had fabricated the story — and lied about her credentials when she was hired.
Mr. Bradlee offered to resign over the affair but received the same support from Mrs. Graham’s son Donald, who had become the publisher, as he had received from Mrs. Graham during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate crises.
By the time of the Janet Cooke episode, Mr. Bradlee had weathered strikes by members of the Newspaper Guild, many of them his friends, and the pressmen, who had vandalized the pressroom. During those strikes he served as a reporter, mailroom clerk and general lifter of spirits.
He had also endured libel suits and government efforts — unsuccessful ones — to stop The Post from publishing articles on the ground of national security. In one case even his own friends pressured him, to no avail, to kill a story.
The article, appearing on the cover of the Style section on Sept. 19, 1986, had to do with the discovery that the diplomat W. Averell Harriman had not, in fact, been buried at the time of his funeral, on July 29 — and that his final resting place would not, as had been widely reported, be next to that of his second wife, Marie, on the Harriman estate, north of New York City. Rather, The Post revealed, on the instructions of Pamela Harriman, Mr. Harriman’s third wife and widow, his remains had been placed in a crypt while a permanent lakeside burial site was being prepared three miles away.
“The passage of time,” Mr. Bradlee wrote, “has done nothing to dim my enthusiasm for this story. No one should be able to perpetrate a fraud on the public and escape the modest consequences.”
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston on Aug. 26, 1921, the second son of Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr. and Josephine de Gersdorff Bradlee. In a family that moved from 211 Beacon Street to 295 Beacon Street to 267 Beacon Street and finally to 280 Beacon Street, his boyhood, as he wrote, was “not adventuresome.”
With his brother, Freddy, and a sister, Constance, he learned French, took piano lessons and went to the symphony and the opera. He was at St. Mark’s School when he was stricken with polio during an epidemic. But his self-confidence was undiminished: He exercised rigorously at home, and when he returned to school the next fall he had noticeably strong arms and chest and could walk without limping.
Continuing a family tradition that dated to 1795, he attended Harvard, where he joined the Naval R.O.T.C. As a sophomore he was one of 268 young Harvard men, including John F. Kennedy, chosen, as “well adjusted,” to participate in the now celebrated Grant longitudinal study, which tracked their lives over the years.
On Aug. 8, 1942, Mr. Bradlee graduated (“by the skin of his teeth,” he wrote of himself) as a Greek-English major, was commissioned an ensign and married Jean Saltonstall — all in all, a busy day.
A month later, Mr. Bradlee shipped out to the Pacific on the destroyer Philip and saw combat for two years. During the last year of World War II he helped other destroyers run shipboard information centers. After the war, Mr. Bradlee and a group of friends started The New Hampshire Sunday News, a weekly. For a time he thought “very, very, very seriously” about entering politics, he said in 1960. When the paper was sold, he snagged his first job at The Washington Post, in 1948.
Bradlee Talks Watergate With Woodward
Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward reflected on the Watergate scandal and the role of the anonymous source Deep Throat during a 2011 interview at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Video by Nixon Presidential Library on Publish Date October 21, 2014. Photo by Alex Gallardo/Reuters.
One Saturday, as he took a tour of the White House, a delegation of French officials was visiting President Harry S. Truman and no translator could be found. Mr. Bradlee filled in.
In 1951 he was offered the job of press attaché at the American embassy in Paris and left for France with his wife and his young son, Benjamin Jr. From the government job he moved on to Newsweek in 1954, as European correspondent based in Paris.
His work was thriving, but his marriage was falling apart and finally disintegrated when he met Antoinette Pinchot Pittman, known as Tony. They were married in 1957. A year later, Mr. Bradlee took up his post as the low man in Newsweek’s Washington bureau.
He also took up residence on N Street in Georgetown, in a house next door to Kennedy, then a young senator from Massachusetts. Thus began a rewarding and sometimes uneasy friendship. (The two had not been close at Harvard.)
Mr. Bradlee fell under pressure to separate what information he learned as a Kennedy intimate from what he could use as a reporter. But his inside track on the Kennedy campaign for the White House in 1960 elevated him from rookie status at Newsweek. He later said that Kennedy had been aware that he was keeping notes of their encounters, which Mr. Bradlee published in 1975 in the not-always-flattering book “Conversations With Kennedy.”
As journalism changed and private lives became fair game, Mr. Bradlee had to answer criticism that he never reported on what he later conceded was Kennedy’s proclivity to jump “casually from bed to bed with a wide variety of women.” But he insisted in his memoir that he knew nothing of Kennedy’s sex life at the time, adding, “I am appalled by the details that have emerged.”
A Lucrative Idea
Concerned about rumors that Newsweek was going to be sold, Mr. Bradlee, in a moment of brashness, decided late one night to call Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, with an urgent message: Buy Newsweek.
“It was the best telephone call I ever made — the luckiest, most productive, most exciting,” he later wrote.
Mr. Graham saw Mr. Bradlee that night, and they talked until dawn. On March 9, 1961, The Post acquired Newsweek, and Mr. Bradlee, soon to become the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, was rewarded with enough Post stock, as a finder’s fee, to live as a wealthy man.
Mr. Bradlee continued his friendship with Kennedy and the Kennedy clan. When the president was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Bradlee was among the friends invited to receive the first lady in Washington. “There is no more haunting sight in all the history I’ve observed,” he wrote in his memoir, “than Jackie Kennedy, walking slowly, unsteadily into those hospital rooms, her pink suit stained with her husband’s blood.”
Months before Kennedy’s death, Philip Graham committed suicide, leaving his widow, Katharine, in charge of the family business. Two years later she was still finding her way at a newspaper that had been suffering losses of $1 million a year when she proposed that Mr. Bradlee join The Post as a deputy managing editor. The two formed a lasting bond.
Their relationship came under scrutiny in a 2012 biography by Jeff Himmelman, a journalist and former research assistant to Mr. Woodward. (Mr. Himmelman had helped Quinn Bradlee write “A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures,” a 2009 memoir about his coping with velo-cardio-facial syndrome, a genetic disorder.)
The book, “Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee,” though praised in reviews, was denounced by many Bradlee associates, including Mr. Woodward, as a betrayal. The book suggests that Mr. Bradlee had questioned Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein’s reporting during Watergate. And through letters and interviews it reveals intimate details of Mr. Bradlee’s family life, including an assertion by Mr. Bradlee that he and Mrs. Graham, who died in 2001, had had a mutual romantic interest that was never acted on.
Mr. Bradlee remained with the paper for 26 years, stepping down in 1991 at age 70. Named vice president at large, he had an office at The Post and became what he called “a stop on the tour” for new reporters.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony in 2013.
In his memoir Mr. Bradlee confessed to having no overarching prescriptions for the practice of journalism. He wrote that he knew of nothing more sophisticated than the motto of one of his grade-school teachers: “Our best today; better tomorrow.”
“Put out the best, most honest newspaper you can today,” he said, “and put out a better one the next day.”
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NELSON BUNKER HUNT, OIL TYCOON WITH A TEXAS-SIZE PRESENCE
His death, at an assisted living center, followed a long period of treatment for cancer and dementia, The Dallas Morning News reported.
“A billion dollars ain’t what it used to be,” he said in 1980 after silver stakes he had amassed with two brothers, Herbert and Lamar, fell to $10.80 from $50.35 an ounce. In barely two months, their holdings and contracts for purchases — corralling a third to half the world’s deliverable silver — had plunged from a $7 billion value in January to a $1.7 billion loss in March.
With the Hunts unable to cover enormous margin calls, the debacle endangered financial markets and brokerage houses, forcing federal regulators and the nation’s banks to step in with a $1 billion line of credit, a bailout that saved the system from a stampede and the Hunts from a meltdown.
But for Bunker Hunt, who used his middle name, and his brothers — scions of one of the world’s richest clans — the boom and bust led to years of lawsuits, civil charges, fines, damage claims and bankruptcy proceedings that gobbled up vast holdings in real estate, oil, gas, cattle, coal, thoroughbred stables and other assets. Still, they managed to salvage millions and were not subjected to criminal charges.
Countless others were affected — speculators who bought bullion and futures contracts and could not get out in time to avoid heavy losses and ordinary people who sold silverware, jewelry and candlesticks to cash in on soaring silver prices. New rules limiting trades had been imposed, and the glut of silver on the open market intensified the panic that led to the price collapse.
Bunker Hunt was a jovial 275-pound eccentric who looked a bit like the actor Burl Ives. In the 1960s and ’70s he was one of the world’s richest men, worth up to $16 billion by some estimates. With his five siblings, heirs of the oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who sired 15 children by three women and died in 1974, he controlled a staggering family fortune whose value was not publicly reported.
In his heyday, Bunker Hunt owned five million acres of grazing land in Australia, 1,000 thoroughbreds on farms from Ireland to New Zealand, eight million acres of oil fields in Libya, offshore wells in the Philippines and Mexico, and an empire of skyscrapers, cattle ranches, mining interests and other holdings. Home was a French provincial mansion in a Dallas suburb and his 2,000-acre Circle T Ranch 30 miles out of town.
Often likened to Jett Rink, the antihero of Edna Ferber’s “Giant,” or the scheming J. R. Ewing of the long-running CBS television drama “Dallas,” he was a nonsmoking teetotaler who cultivated a devil-may-care Texas mystique by inhabiting cheap suits, a battered Cadillac, economy-class airline seats, burger and chili joints, and dusty barnyards in the raucous company of ranch hands.
He was an evangelical Christian close to the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and supported right-wing politicians and causes, including the John Birch Society. He loathed the federal government, warned of international communist conspiracies, spouted anti-Semitic sentiments, did business with the Saudi royal family and bankrolled expeditions to salvage the Titanic and to find Noah’s Ark.
After being pummeled by the silver debacle and further losses in oil and real estate, Mr. Hunt and his brothers took out loans to pay debts, then sold properties to repay the loans and placed many family holdings into bankruptcy, including the Placid Oil Company, the crown jewel of the Hunt financial empire. It was eventually sold, along with the homes, land, stables, art and coin collections, and other treasures.
In one lawsuit, a federal jury in Manhattan determined in 1988 that the Hunts had conspired with others in a racketeering enterprise to monopolize the silver market and ordered them to pay $130 million in damages to a Peruvian commodities concern. Bunker and Herbert were found most culpable, while Lamar, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, was assigned a lesser role.
As creditors closed in, the Hunts hemorrhaged money and defaulted on $1.5 billion in loans. They agreed to pay $90 million in back taxes over 15 years and $10 million each in fines levied by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which barred them from trading. In 1989, Bunker emerged from bankruptcy with assets of $5 million to $10 million and debts that stretched to the Pecos horizon.
But through the clever use of courts and trusts to protect assets, and of counterclaims and settlements to gain time and ease the pain, the Hunts for years carried on much as usual: Bunker exploring for oil abroad, attending the races and overseeing smaller thoroughbred stables; Herbert running real estate operations; Lamar focusing on his sports enterprises.
Like his siblings, Bunker still had millions in trusts set up by his father, and Forbes reported in 2001 that, while he had long ago dropped off the list of the richest Americans, he had recently bought 80 racehorses for $2.5 million, and that a filly called Hattiesburg, which he picked up for $20,000, had won $357,000.
“I don’t really know anything,” he said. “I am just trying to win a few races.”
Nelson Bunker Hunt was born in El Dorado, Ark., on Feb. 22, 1926, one of seven children of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. and Lyda Bunker Hunt. One girl died in infancy. H. L. Hunt had already struck oil riches, and by 1935 trust funds had been set up for Bunker; two sisters, Margaret and Caroline, and three brothers, William Herbert, Lamar and Haroldson III, who was known as Hassie and was incapacitated with mental illness.
It was not until years later that they discovered that their father had two other families: four children each with Ruth Ray and Frania Tye. In the ensuing internecine intrigues, all were given trust funds and some became beneficiaries of the patriarch’s will.
When Bunker was 12, his family moved to Dallas. He attended the University of Texas, joined the Navy in World War II and, after being discharged, attended Southern Methodist University. He worked with his father and brothers in the oil business for a time, then began his own ventures in cattle, horses and oil. He made $5 billion in Libya before Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi nationalized the oil fields.
In 1951, he married Caroline Lewis, who survives him. He is also survived by their son, Houston; their daughters, Ellen Hunt Flowers, Mary Hunt Huddleston and Betsy Hunt Curnes; his brother William Herbert Hunt; his sister Caroline Rose Hunt; 14 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. (Lamar Hunt died in 2006, Hassie Hunt in 2005 and Margaret Hunt Hill in 2007.)
As oil prices rose in the 1970s, the family’s wealth skyrocketed — as did inflation. The Hunts insisted that their pursuit of silver had merely been a hedge against inflation. Much of the hoard was bought on margin or financed with borrowed money.
By mid-January 1980 they owned or controlled such vast quantities of silver that they were reaping $100 million in paper profit with every $1 increase in the price.
Then the bubble burst.
After the market had collapsed and the family had been forced to put up billions in collateral, the oldest sister, Margaret, a dominant voice in family councils, confronted Bunker, demanding to know what he had intended to accomplish.
“I was just trying to make some money,” he replied.
Ann
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