The 10th Mark Twain Laureate

November 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, Humor, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

George Carlin was awarded the Kennedy Center’s tenth annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor last night — the first, alas, to be awarded posthumously.  Happily, he was informed of the honor a few days before his death last June (which was noted here).

George Carlin was a classic standup, an accomplished actor, and a successful author.  His career spanned more than fifty years and included twenty-two albums and three New York Times bestsellers.  He was the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live; he appeared on The Tonight Show more than 130 times.

George Carlin railed against the “bloodless, lifeless” language of the late 20th century — and he brought rigorous logic, raw intensity, and a gimlet eye to its deconstruction.  (”If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”)

 

Dee Dee Warwick 1945-2008

October 21, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Music | Leave a Comment 

Delia (Dee Dee) Warwick died on Saturday in New Jersey.  The gospel, soul, and R&B singer was part of a distinguished musical dynasty.  Her elder sister was Dionne Warwick, who was with her when she died; her mother Lee and her aunt Cissy Houston were gospel singers; Whitney Houston was her cousin.

Although her voice wasn’t as distinctive as her older sister’s, it was no less superb.  And she started off with a solid career as a session singer.  She can be heard on recordings by Gene Pitney, Connie Francis, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and WIlson Pickett.  Her solo career extended from 1963-1975 and included ten charted singles.

Her first solo record was the original version of Clint Ballard Jr.’s  ”You’re No Good”.  Although her debut was widely noticed, it was Betty Everett’s cover of the song that became the hit.  (Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 cover reached Number One on the Billboard Hot 100.).

Similarly, in 1966 she introduced “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and reached #88 on the pop charts (and #13 on the R&B); but the covers by Diana Ross and the Supremes and The Temptations were the Top Ten hits.  Her biggest hit was “You Don’t Know” from the score of Sammy Davis Jr.’s, Broadway show Golden Boy — a performance that was mostly ad-libbed; it reached Number Nine on the R&B charts and #41 on the Hot 100.

Collections of her recordings for Mercury and Atco are available on CD.

In 1999 she received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.  Most recently she had been singing backup with Dionne Warwick on recordings and on tour.  She joined Dionne on the title track of her 2008 album Why We Sing.

Dee Dee Warwick received back-to-back Grammy nominations in 1969 and 1970 for two great Ed Townsend songs — “Foolish Fool” (described, not without reason, as “possibly one of the most ‘over-the-top’ performances ever committed to tape”) and the more subdued but no less dramatic “She Didn’t Know (She Kept On Talking)”:

Two Memorials, Opposing Morals

October 9, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under In Memoriam, International Affairs, Terrorism | Leave a Comment 

Cliff May commemorates the fallen 214 Marines in Hezbollah’s 1988 Beirut terror bombing:

At dawn on October 23, Geraghty writes, “at the foot of the Beirut Memorial, nestled in the pines of North Carolina, families, veterans, and friends will gather to pay tribute to those who ‘Came in Peace’ on this, the 25th anniversary. Later, a more formal ceremony will include military music, pageantry, and speeches commemorating the legacy of the peacekeepers who paid the ultimate sacrifice.”

On the same day, Geraghty observes, at “the Iranian Behesht-E-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, there will be a ceremony at a monument erected in 2004 to commemorate the Beirut suicide bombers. In attendance will likely be some dressed as suicide bombers, chanting the standard ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel.”

 

Norman Whitfield 1940-2008

September 18, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Culture, Entertainment, In Memoriam, Music | 2 Comments 

To get a sense of what we have lost with the death of composer-producer Norman Whitfield yesterday in Los Angeles, just listen to Marvin Gaye’s striking version of one of Mr. Whitfield’s most memorable melodies:

Norman Whitfield was born in Harlem in 1940.   When he was a teenager his family moved to Detroit.  The formerly drifting youth and hotshot pool player became fixated with the Detroit sound, and he pestered Berry Gordy until he was given an entry level job at Motown Records.  Before long his prodigious talents had been recognized and rewarded; his songs were being recorded and he had become the producer for The Temptations.

In 1968 —triggered by a change in The Temptations’ personnel but no doubt inspired by the changes taking place in America and the world during that fateful year— Mr. Whitfield started taking the Motown sound in general, and The Temptations’ in particular, into deeper, darker, richer territories.

The anguish and anger he felt about Vietnam was distilled in Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit “War” — which was, in the words of Mr. Whitfield’s long-time lyricist Barrett Strong, good for “absolutely nothing”.   This Motown-produced time capsule video for the song conveys the intense feelings of those times.

The Temptations bridled more at Mr. Whitfield’s complex instrumental arrangement (which they felt downplayed their vocal contribution) rather than the unvarnished subject matter of 1972’s “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”

In 2004 Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Strong were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. His last few years were beset by legal and physical problems. He had suffered from diabetes for some time, and had only just emerged from a coma shortly before he died on Wednesday in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.  

He was at times a difficult and demanding man, complicated and, at least latterly, reclusive.  He had had to conduct not always well-received end-runs around Berry Gordy and others in order to get some of the songs he believed in recorded (including, unbelievably, “Grapevine”).  But, as Dorian Lynskey writes in his moving tribute on The Guardian’s music blog, Norman Whitfield “changed the landscape of soul”.  

Thanks to him, songs could pass the 10-minute mark, use every studio trick available and speak to the concerns of a tougher, angrier black America. He paved the way for classics such as What Going On and Innervisions within Motown, plus hard-hitting political statements by the likes of the O’Jays and the Isley Brothers outside of it.

The critic Greil Marcus remembers friends who pulled their cars over the first time they heard “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and sat “waiting, shivering, as the song crept out of the box and filled up the night”.  I’ll be doing something similar tonight.

One of Mr. Whitfield’s earliest and sunniest songs was written for The Velvelettes.  Although its title is used in a different context, it could be a fitting epitaph for Norman Whitfield himself: He Was Really Saying Something.

George Putnam, 1914-2008

September 14, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under In Memoriam, Media, News media, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

They say that the deaths of prominent people come in threes, and remarkably, three of the notable Americans whose deaths were announced this weekend were California residents. These were the novelist David Foster Wallace, whose premature and tragic passing I note below; ex-Trotskyite Peter Camejo of the Green Party, Ralph Nader’s 2004 vice-presidential running-mate (who also proved himself as adept in argument as Arianna Huffington, formerly of the Cambridge Union, proved spectacularly inept, in the famed 2003 televised debate of the leading candidates in the California gubernatorial contest brought on by the recall election); and a genuine legend, broadcaster George Putnam.

Putnam, who died in Chino, where he kept a stable of dozens of horses (including the Palominos he rode for almost a half-century in the Tournament of Roses parade), was born in 1914 in Minnesota. He entered the world of radio broadcasting during its golden age, and in the early 1940s gained the attention of the nation’s premier columnist Walter Winchell, who hailed him as the best voice on the air.

After a decade based in New York, Putnam came to Los Angeles and began anchoring the newscast at KTTV, owned by the Times-Mirror company. He instantly rose to the top of the ratings, and at once became the nationally recognized archetype of the local TV news anchorman - impeccably dressed, seemingly omniscient, and with alternately soothing and imposing stentorian tones. (As the late Ted Knight acknowledged many times, Putnam was a major model for the character of Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) He continued to do regular radio commentaries (keeping them up right into this decade) and also narrated many public-service films, including the one lovingly deconstructed and reconstructed throughout the internet, which has kept his name alive among Generations X, Y, Z, and Millennium: Perversion For Profit. (When watching this film it should be kept in mind that during the past two decades Putnam stated on several occasions that he regretted the homophobic language used in it.)

In 1984, during a 70th-birthday roast for the broadcaster, former President Nixon observed:

Some people didn’t like what he said; some people liked what he said. But everybody listened to George Putnam. That is why he has been one of the most influential commentators of our times.

His death leaves Paul Harvey and Art Linkletter as the last of the active broadcasting giants who began their careers before television.

The Spy Who Almost Stayed In The Cold, and RIP DFW

September 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, History, In Memoriam | 2 Comments 

The London Times has just published a lengthy interview, conducted by the paper’s Rod Liddle, with renowned British spy novelist (and former MI6 agent) John Le Carre. He spends most of it reiterating his anger, often manifested in his recent statements and writings, regarding neoconservatism and the war in Iraq. But there is one rather startling item:

And then there are the things [Le Carre] didn’t do but perhaps almost did - such as defecting to the Soviet Union when he worked for MI6. This is the sort of confidence I hadn’t expected, to tell you the truth.

“You were genuinely tempted?” I ask him, in some surprise.

“Yes, there was a time when I was, yes,” he says.

“For ideological reasons, like the rest of them - Blunt, Philby, Maclean?”

Le Carré is considered to be on the left these days, of course - a consensus arrived at largely through his visceral dislike of recent US foreign policy. One of that coterie of British literary greats - Pinter, Hare, Amis - railing at the supposed cretin in the White House, snarling about rendition and Guantanamo and Halliburton. Surely, though, he was not that far to the left, back then?

“God, no, no, no. Never for ideological reasons, of course not . . . ” “Then why?” Not money, surely, I think to myself.

“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest.”

Further on in the interview, Le Carre notes that in 1987 he was offered a chance to dine with the most notorious defector in espionage annals, Kim Philby - the model for the character Gerald in his own novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the man who blew Le Carre’s cover to the Soviets and forced him out of espionage and into writing about it - not long before the latter’s death, but declined the opportunity because he did not want to meet the man responsible for the deaths of dozens of British agents sent into Albania in the 1940s.

In sadder literary news, David Foster Wallace (known to his legions of fans by his initials), the fiction writer, MacArthur fellow, and professor at Pomona College, author of the brain-bendingly complex (but widely acclaimed) thousand-page novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his Claremont home Friday night, an apparent suicide at the age of 46.

Martin Tytell - 1913-2008

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, In Memoriam, Lifestyle, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On the day after the 91-year-old co-defendant of the Rosenbergs finally admitted that he was, like them, a spy, comes word of the death of the 94-year-old typewriter expert who was dragooned into service for the appeal lodged by Alger Hiss’ defense team.

Hiss’ appeal finally boiled down to what amounted to a “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” defense.  The secret documents he was accused of stealing had been retyped before being passed on to a Soviet courier on a Woodstock typewriter — the typeface of which was identical to one owned and used by Alger and Priscilla Hiss during the period in question. 

Everyone knew that typewriters were like fingerprints — each unique and uniquely identifiable.  So, with the dramatic discovery of the Hiss’ old Woodstock, the case seemed to have been solved and closed.

And that’s where Mr. Tytell came in.  Hiss’ attorneys tasked him with recreating in his workshop a typewriter whose characteristic product would be identical —right down to the tiniest indented Rockwell serif— to that of the damning Hiss machine.  

Martin Tytell was apparently able, after two years working on it, to do what he was asked.  All his work went for naught when the the appeal requesting a new trial was unsuccessful.  

Mr. Tytell’s obituarist, Bruce Weber, notes that, in addition to providing the basis for the abortive appeal, Mr. Tytell’s recreated machine became, after Hiss’ release from prison in 1954, “the foundation of…the debate over his guilt, which goes on to this day.”  I don’t know anything about the circles in which Mr. Weber moves (presumably the ones in which Morton Sobell’s innocence is still an article of faith), but they must be pretty rarefied if that debate is still current among them.

 

 

 

 

I’m sure that at least some TNN readers are old enough to remember (and remember fondly) the typewriter technology of the mid-to-late twentieth century.  They will, like me, still revel remembering the sight and sound and feel of a stately solid old office Underwood (the kind PN would have used when she taught typing at Whittier High School, with the bell to warn you of the approaching margin, and the satisfying heft of the carriage return); or the sleek sensual thrill of boarding a plane carrying a bright new Olivetti portable (designed by Ettore Sottsass who, alas, died in Milan last January at the age of 90); or the no-nonsense authority of the IBM Executive (the only machine on which Rose Mary Woods would type RN’s White House documents); or the IBM Selectric’s “end of history” technology (with its easily interchangeable tying elements and its automatically spooling correction tape that made errors obsolete).

For those of us, there will be great charm —and not a little nostalgia— in the more professional details of Mr. Tytell’s obituary:

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma.

Martin Kenneth Tytell was born on Dec. 20, 1913, the next-to-last of 10 children whose Russian Jewish immigrant parents lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Eventually, going to school mostly at night, he earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and an M.B.A. from New York University.

But as a boy he worked in a hardware store, carrying a screwdriver everywhere, and one day in school he got himself excused from gym class by volunteering to answer the telephone in a nearby office. Sitting on a desk was an Underwood typewriter, which he took apart. The man who came to fix it gave him his first lesson in typewriter repair. Before he was out of high school he had the typewriter-maintenance account for Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.  

In 1943, a contraband shipment that included 100 Siamese typewriters was seized by the federal government, and with typewriters needed by overseas forces and typewriter producers having largely converted to other wartime manufacturing, Mr. Tytell, then in the Army, was asked to convert the Siamese typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.   His machines, capable of reproducing 17 different languages, were airdropped to O.S.S. headquarters at various war fronts.

Mr. Tytell wore a white lab coat and a bow tie while waiting on customers who included writers and journalists such as Dorothy Parker, Richard Condon, David Brinkley, and Harrison Salisbury.  Both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower were among his clients.  He was sufficiently established to have letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York,” delivered to his premises at 116 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

It is one of my firmly held (and, I realize, not entirely orthodox) beliefs that God, Who recognizes eternal excellence, continues to use His old Remington.  So perhaps Mr. Tytell is still wearing his lab coat and bow tie and simply pursuing his honorable old trade in a new and  better place.

Illustrations (top to bottom): Woodstock, Olivetti, IBM Executive, IBM Selectric, Underwood.

9/11/08

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam | 1 Comment 

Jerry Reed, 1937-2008

September 2, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam | 3 Comments 

Word came today of the death of Jerry Reed at age 71, of complications from emphysema.  Born Jerry Reed Hubbard in Atlanta in 1937, he worked his way up the ranks as a musician and songwriter, penning songs for the likes of Gene Vincent and Brenda Lee, and attracting the attention of Chet Atkins with his phenomenal guitar-picking (seen to powerful effect here in a duet with Atkins).  In 1968 he attained his first pop hits as a songwriter when Elvis Presley covered his “U.S. Male” and “Guitar Man.”

Reed then signed with RCA Records and in 1970 had a sizable hit with “Amos Moses.” The following year he scored a Top Five hit with “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” (the title borrowed from a Flip Wilson catchphrase of the day), which led to guest appearances on innumerable Nixon-era TV variety shows.

After starring in his own short-lived variety series, Reed branched out into film acting with Gator in 1976. Soon afterwards a stuntman friend, Hal Needham, approached him with a film script he wished to direct and Reed was offered the part of Bo Darville in….you guessed it….Smokey And The Bandit. At that point Burt Reynolds expressed interest in the project, so he was cast as the Bandit and Jerry moved over to the role of the hero’s semi-driving sidekick, Cledus Snow.

The resulting film, powered in no small degree by Reed’s theme song “East Bound And Down” and featuring Sally Field and Jackie Gleason’s phenomenal portrayal of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, became the second-highest-grossing movie of 1977 after Star Wars and led to two sequels (with Reed playing the Bandit in Smokey And The Bandit III after a version with Gleason playing both of the title roles bombed with preview audiences).

After a few more films in this style, Reed went back to recording and touring, scoring giant hits on the country charts in the 1980s with “She Got The Goldmine (I Got The Shaft)” and “The Bird.”  He continued to record, tour, and make appearances on the stock-car and Southern regional circuits, into this decade.  He will be missed.

In A World….Without Don LaFontaine

September 2, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

From Los Angeles this morning comes the news that Don LaFontaine, the voiceover professional renowned for his narration of over 5000 movie trailers (many beginning “In a world….” or “In a city….”), and more recently a familiar face as well as voice thanks to his appearance on a Geico commercial, has died of complications from a collapsed lung, six days after his 68th birthday. Youtube has an interesting five-minute clip about his life and times.

“Accuracy And Elegance”

August 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under In Memoriam, Nixon Administration figures | Leave a Comment 

From a British perspective, a thoughtful essay on President Nixon’s late colleague Peter Rodman.

The Pitfalls Of Being A Tad Too Efficient

August 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

The reports of Rep. Tubbs Jones’ demise turned out, happily, to be premature —although she is in very critical condition with limited brain function after suffering an aneurysm while driving in her home district of Cleveland Heights. Our thoughts and prayers are with her.

UPDATE 7 PM 8/20/08: It was announced at 6.12 PM that Rep. Tubbs Jones died at the Cleveland Clinic. She was 58 years old.

The first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress, she worked hard for her constituents and fought passionately for her beliefs. Most recently she had been an ardent advocate of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; as a superdelegate she was expected to play a large part at the Democratic convention next week in Denver.

C-SPAN is now running Ms. Tubbs Jones’ 1/28/07 appearance on Q&A in memoriam.

Hua Guofeng 1921-2008

August 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under China, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

Hua Guofeng, the Second Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, is dead at the age of 87.

Born in Shanxi province, he joined the Red Army when he was fifteen. He became a full Party member in 1938 and was assigned to Hunan province after the Communists took it over. He probably first met Chariman Mao when Mr. Hua was Party secretary in Chairman Mao’s birthplace Shaoshan.

He was named Deputy Prime Minister in 1975 and succeeded Zhou Enlai when he died the following year. When Chairman Mao died later in 1976, Mr. Hua succeeded him as the Party’s Second Chairman.

The newly-minted Chairman greeted RN when he revisited the PRC, as the guest of the government, in the fall of 1976. (There is no record of Chairman Hua expressing the same sentiment as Georges Pompidou at General DeGaulle’s funeral when he said to RN: “Enfin seuls.”)

Chairman Hua’s obituary outlines his life. An analysis of his career in the Telegraph (London) concludes that he was “a man who helped China to break with an unhappy past and yet remained tarnished by it.”

In an interview in 1983, RN described Chairman Hua as “stolid, tough–they’re all tough–strong, unimaginative. I thought he was a good party operator, but I did not think he had any kind of charisma that would have him last too long.”

Jerry Wexler: RIP And R-E-S-P-E-C-T

August 18, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam | 1 Comment 

Few people have had as much influence on the things we hear in America today —and the way we listen to them— as Jerry Wexler, who died on Friday at the age of 91.

On today’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross revisited an interview she conducted with him in front of a live audience in 1993.

Ms. Gross is at her best —and that’s saying alot— in her conversations with musicians, and she elicits some great memories and stories. His description of breaking up a fight between Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge is classic. He answers the question why he was determined that the Drifters, against their objections, would record “Under the Boardwalk” in six plain words. And you’ll have new respect for “Respect” after you hear Jerry Wexler describe it.

In fact, it’s worth listening simply to enjoy Mr. Wexler’s wonderful command and choice of words.

As Rolling Stone noted: “Jerry Wexler, the legendary record man, music producer and ageless hipster, died at 3:45 a.m. today at the age of 91. Wexler was one of the great music business pioneers of the 20th century…..

“Wexler was much more than a top executive — he was a national tastemaker and a prophet of roots and rhythm. The impact of his deeds matched his larger-than-life personality. Because of him, we use the term “rhythm and blues” and we hail Ray Charles as “Genius” and Aretha Franklin as “Queen.” We came to know of a record label called Stax and a small town called Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We witnessed the rise of Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, and we care about a thing called soul.”

But a song is worth ten thousand words, and Rolling Stone provides a playlist of “Wex on Wax” — where you can listen to twenty essential Wexler productions — including Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say?” (1959), Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” (1965), Aretha’s “Respect” (1967), Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” (1969), Etta James’ “Take It to the Limit” (1978), and Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979), and —sure to get Father Taylor’s attention— Dire Straits’ “Lady Writer” (1979).

He Was A Complicated Man….

August 10, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

This afternoon word came that Isaac Hayes, one of the iconic figures of American culture in the Nixon era - and, indeed, during the decades that followed -  died in his Memphis home, ten days short of his 66th birthday.  Here he is performing his Oscar-winning “Theme From Shaft,” introduced by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Not Forgotten

August 9, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

We have recently lost three outstanding members of our Nixon family — Anne Armstrong, Clay Whitehead, and Peter Rodman.

In 1971 RN named Anne Armstrong co-chairman of the RNC. In 1972 he appointed her Counselor to the President with Cabinet rank. During the Ford administration she was, for a brief but memorable period, our Ambassador to the Court of St. James’. The London Telegraph particularly noted her outstanding service there.

Anne Armstrong left Britain maintaining that her time there had been “the greatest year of my life”, and left behind a reputation for great diplomatic skill combined with memorable elegance and charm.

The Weekly Standard celebrated Tom Whitehead’s pivotal contribution to modern communications and the way we live now.

The Man Who Brought Us Cable

Clay Whitehead died last week, at the comparatively early age of 69, after a long battle with cancer. His name is not likely to resonate with the public, but Whitehead was one of those people, briefly in public life, whose influence was decisive, even historic–and decidedly benign.

An MIT-trained engineer and administrator, he was the first director of the old White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, during the Nixon administration, where his agile brain and conservative politics antagonized the Democratic Congress and Washington press corps of the late 1960s and early ’70s. But it was Whitehead who fought for, and achieved, a market-based “open skies” policy for communications satellites and cable television licenses, ending the monopolies controlled by the federal government, and leading to competition, variety, and abundance on the airwaves.

The televised world we inhabit today–hundreds of channels, C-SPAN, Classic Arts Showcase, ESPN, Turner Classic Movies, the Weather Channel, Fox News, Animal Planet, you name it–is made possible by the work of this smart, personable, dedicated man whose premature death we note with regret.

Here, in full, are Henry Kissinger’s thoughts about his friend Peter Rodman, as he told them to Time. They are especially meaningful in view of the Washington Post’s rather querulous obituary.

A man of towering character and intelligence, Peter Rodman, who died of leukemia on Aug. 2 at age 64, served as foreign policy adviser for five Republican Presidents, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Rodman epitomized the essential continuity of American foreign policy.

He understood that service to the country requires confronting certain realities and that you cannot use one truth as an alibi to neglect another. He was never partisan. He had a certain innocence about national service: he believed that if he stood for the right thing, people would give it consideration. When he didn’t get that consideration, he didn’t sulk but moved on.

I first knew him when he was my tutee at Harvard, and after he finished law school, I took him into the White House, where he soon made himself indispensable. Within a year or so, he was responsible for preparing materials for every negotiation and was always at my right hand.

Of course, we didn’t agree on everything, but Peter’s views were thought out with precision and presented with great decency. The only subject on which we truly disagreed was baseball: despite my best efforts, he remained a devout Red Sox fan, while I’m an avid Yankees fan.

Peter–who was like a son to me–was a good friend and a man who adored his family. He was extremely devoted to his wife and two children–and rabid about his dog. He was a man who possessed the rare combination of capability, moral strength and unselfishness. Much of the debate about foreign policy tends to group people into realists or idealists, but this is not a meaningful distinction. To conduct foreign policy, you have to understand the world as it is, but to avoid stagnation, the country also needs a vision of the future. The essence of Peter Rodman was a combination of both.

Paris & Ferrante & Teicher

August 6, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Entertainment, In Memoriam, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

So far as I know, Britney Spears has yet to officially respond regarding her fleeting appearance in the McCain campaign’s “Celebrity” ad.  But Paris Hilton has now spoken. And did she ever speak.  Larry King’s appearance in her video leads me to think that guessing the subject of his show tonight is an easy thing to do.

And in other pop-culture news, Lou Teicher, who with Arthur Ferrante constituted one of the top-selling instrumental acts of the 1960s and 1970s (also performing at the White House for Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan) has died at age 83.  Here is the duo, complete with their trademark back-to-back grands, black-rimmed glasses, and lavish black hair, performing their 1969 hit “Theme From Midnight Cowboy,” minus, unfortunately, Vincent Bell’s famed “underwater guitar” intro and that seductive harpsichord (which, however, can be heard here).

We Will Miss Peter Rodman

August 5, 2008 by Paul Saunders | Filed Under In Memoriam, Nixon Center | Leave a Comment 

Today, The Washington Post and The New York Times published obituaries of Peter Rodman, The Nixon Center’s former Director of National Security Programs (1995-2001). We greatly miss Peter, who was a wonderful colleague and friend, and have also posted a short statement at The Nixon Center’s web site.

Peter Rodman’s NY Times Obituary…

August 4, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under In Memoriam, Nixon Administration figures | Leave a Comment 

…is here.

Rumsfeld Remembers Rodman

August 4, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

Don Rumsfeld has issued a statement on the death of his —and our— friend and colleague Peter Rodman.

Peter Rodman (1943-2008)

Peter Rodman was a dedicated public servant, an incisive strategist, a consummate diplomat, a serious pupil of history and a measured teacher of history’s lessons. He had a deep faith in the greatness of American democracy, and he understood that our nation’s foreign policy was at its best when it reconciled the moral idealism of America’s deep-seated liberalism with the conservative lessons of restraint and skepticism. Only by fighting on the moral terrain so often invoked by its enemies could the United States have a foreign policy with weight. But only by selectively choosing when and where to deploy its power could the United States sustain it.

With his rigorous intellect, unfailing sense of humor, and understated manner, Peter worked energetically over many decades finding bipartisan support for our nation’s foreign policy at home and a consensus among diplomats abroad. Unlike so many in the field of foreign policy, Peter was neither a partisan nor an advocate. He had no illusions as to the fundamental tensions and complexities of the profound and painful dilemmas of American foreign policy. He usefully characterized those irresolvable challenges so that they could be coped and dealt with. Peter understood the fundamental truth that problems without solutions are not problems, but facts.

I was fortunate to work with Peter on the stubborn challenges posed by the Soviet Union and its third-world adventurism during the Ford administration, the Middle East and the emerging threats to the nation-state system during the Reagan administration, and the new uncertainties of the 21st century when we worked together closely in the Department of Defense more recently. At every point along the way, I profited from his friendship, and above all, his advice and his admonitions. So, too, did America.

Nixon Center’s Peter Rodman Dies

August 2, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under In Memoriam | 1 Comment 

Peter Rodman, 64, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under President Bush and an assistant to Henry Kissinger during the most momentous foreign policy breakthroughs of the Nixon Administration, including the Shanghai Communique, died this morning in Washington as the result of complications from leukemia. Beginning in the mid-1990s until his appointment at the Pentagon, Peter was national security fellow at The Nixon Center, where he authored a series of annual monographs on the challenges faced by the United States in the years immediately after the end of the Cold War.

Peter leaves his wife, Veronique, a son, Nicholas, and a daughter, Theodora.

John O’Sullivan of the “National Review,” where Rodman had served as a senior editor, wrote today:

He spent a lifetime serving America as a diplomatic strategist. He did so brilliantly but without the slightest self-promotion. He understood his country’s interests clearly and could explain them eloquently. When Peter was speaking or writing, anyone listening or reading understood foreign policy too.

All at the Nixon Foundation extend their deepest condolences to Peter’s family.

RIP Anne L. Armstrong And Clay T. Whitehead

July 31, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, In Memoriam, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Technology, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

The last week saw the passing of a man and a woman who were both not only important figures at the Nixon White House, but by any measure significant in twentieth-century American history.  On July 23, Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy between 1970 and 1974, died in Washington at age 69.  During his time in that office, he gained fame among journalists for his vigorous defenses of Nixon Administration policy in his press briefings.  But it was what he did (with the help of his assistant Brian Lamb, later to found C-SPAN) to create and further the Open Skies policy that made history.  This policy permitted telecommunications companies to send up their own satellites and establish the networks that made both nationwide cable TV and competing, low-price long-distance phone services possible.  This in turn opened the way for the Internet and cellular technology as we know it.  (Indeed, had President Nixon been able to serve out his second term, Whitehead’s vision of a wired America could have brought something akin to the World Wide Web into being a decade before it happened.) In the 1980s, Whitehead played a central role in bringing cable TV and cellular communications to Europe.  Ironically, he does not have his own Wikipedia entry and is barely mentioned elsewhere at the site.

And yesterday Anne Legendre Armstrong died in Houston at age 80.  She was raised in an old Creole family in New Orleans and, after graduating from Vassar and briefly working in the New York magazine world, married a rancher and moved to Texas, where she switched from the Democratic to the Republican party and became active in GOP politics.  From 1970 until 1973, she was co-chair of the Republican National Committee and played an important role in generating support for Nixon’s re-election among women and Democrats.  In 1973 she became the first woman to serve as counselor to the President, and was one of the White House’s strongest defenders during the Watergate era.  During the Ford Administration she became the first female Ambassador to Great Britain, and in the Reagan era she headed the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987.  Both of these far-sighted Americans of high achievement will be much missed.

RIP Otto Fuerbringer

July 29, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, News media | Leave a Comment 

Looking at a copy of Time today, and considering the utterly peripheral role the newsweeklies now play, it’s impossible to imagine how much clout that magazine had for so long until television took over as the purveyor and arbiter of news in the early 1970s.

But back in the day, Time and Newsweek did more than just report the news; they made news. (And Time was unquestionably the first among those equals.) Time’s annual selection of a Man of the Year was a major national event.

Time’s editor during the eventful period 1960-1968 was Otto Fuerbringer. His editorship coincided with the last years of Henry Luce’s life.

Mr. Fuerbringer died on Monday in his retirement home in Fullerton, California; he was 97. There is an obituary in today’s New York Times; there will undoubtedly be an appreciation in the next issue of Time.

He was born in 1910 in St. Louis into a family of Lutheran ministers. At Harvard (’32) he was President of the Crimson. He returned home and wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a decade before joining Time as a national affairs writer. He wrote more than thirty of the magazine’s famous cover stories; the Times quotes his description, in one of them, of Senator Harry S Truman, before he became Vice President, as “a man as neat and grey as his double-breasted suits who has none of the flowing pretensions that many senators wear like togas.”

One of Mr. Fuerbringer’s innovations was to liven up Time’s hitherto staid and formulaic covers. One of the magazine’s most famous and controversial covers appeared on his watch on 8 April 1966 — asking, in bold print, the stark question: “Is God Dead?”

He also introduced the work of outside artists. Among them, he commissioned Bernard Safran to paint a portrait of RN for the cover of the 31 October 1960 issue.

Snow And Tull

July 17, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Bush Administration, In Memoriam, News media | Leave a Comment 

Few people were better liked in Washington, and for good reason, than former White House press spokesperson Tony Snow, who died last week at age 53, so it’s no surprise that this morning President Bush, Karl Rove, and other figures from the political, social, and journalistic worlds in Washington and elsewhere crowded into the cavernous Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University for his funeral Mass. Politico.com describes the event. Elsewhere, Snow’s father discusses his son’s life and legacy, and Youtube now has a clip from “Fox News Sunday” (during the era when Snow hosted it) of him performing a flute duet with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.

Saturday He Goes Out And Plays

July 12, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, In Memoriam, News media | Leave a Comment 

Tony Snow, who died today after a long battle against colon cancer, on grappling with chronic illness:

The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don’t. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift — a field of vision others don’t have about the power of hope and the limits of fear; a firm set of convictions about what really matters and what does not.

And did you know he played blues flute? Somewhere and sometime in America, probably when Snow was still with FOX News, a jam morphed into “Stormy Monday.”

Nelson Rockefeller at 100

July 8, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

Today is the 100th anniversary of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s birth. The world was —and remains— a better place for the life-enhancing presence of that particular polymath politician, philanthropist, connoisseur, collector — and RN nemesis.

The former Governor and Vice President’s biographer, Richard Norton Smith, wrote a pre-birthday tribute in yesterday’s New York Times (noted here by John Taylor). In a column in today’s New York Post, the Manhattan Institute’s E. J. McMahon takes a rather different view (and takes on, incidentally, our friend Rick Smith’s article).

How typical of Rocky. 100 years old and still stirring things up.

Katherine B. Loker: A Gift Of Love

June 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Foundation News, In Memoriam, Nixon Library | 1 Comment 

Katherine with fellow Nixon Foundation board members John Barr, Don Bendetti, Kris Elftmann, and Hubert Perry

News came on Thursday afternoon that Katherine Bogdanovich Loker, who would’ve been 93 in August, died earlier in the day after suffering a stroke at her Oceanside, California home on Saturday morning.

My colleague Cheryl Saremi had talked to her three days before her illness. She’d asked about our ping-pong diplomacy rematch a few weeks ago, which a trip to Boston, all by herself, undou