Obit watch: August 19, 2024.
August 19th, 2024Loser update: August 19, 2024.
August 19th, 2024Sometime over the weekend – I’m not sure if it was Saturday or Sunday – the Chicago White Sox became the first (and so far only) team to be mathematically eliminated from post-season play.
The Sox are currently 30-95, for a .240 winning percentage, and are currently 42.5 games out of first in the AL Central. A .240 winning percentage projects out to 123 losses.
For them to lose only 119 games (which would make them not as bad as the 1962 Mets) they will have to win 13 out of the remaining 37 games, for a .351 winning percentage over the rest of the season.
They play in San Francisco tonight. SF is roughly a 70-30 favorite.
Obit watch: August 18, 2024.
August 18th, 2024Alain Delon, noted French actor. NYT (gift link).
Other credits include “Someone Is Bleeding” (aka “Icy Breasts”, based on a Richard Matheson novel), “The Assassination of Trotsky” (apparently, he was the assassin to Richard Burton’s (!) Trotsky), and…
…he didn’t have much of a US career, but he did play “Joe Patroni”‘s co-pilot and procurer in “The Concorde…Airport ’79“.
John Aprea, actor. Other credits include a movie that does not exist and is clearly a copyright trap by IMDB, “Renegade”, “Lt. Vince Novelli” on “Matt Houston”, “Mrs. Columbo” (but not “Columbo”), “The F.B.I.”, “The Seven-Ups”…
…and yes, he did do a “Mannix” (“Murder Revisited”, season 3, episode 23. IMDB lists him as “Thug (uncredited)”.)
Obit watch: August 16, 2024.
August 16th, 2024Peter Marshall. NYT (archived).
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Also, producer Abe Burrows wanted Marshall to star opposite Mary Tyler Moore in a production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s aiming for Broadway. Marshall assured him that The Hollywood Squares would last just 13 weeks and he would be available after that. But when the show was renewed for another 13 weeks, Burrows informed him that he was going with Richard Chamberlain.
“Well, I ran 16 years [on Hollywood Squares] and Breakfast at Tiffany’s closed in Boston,” Marshall said. “You never know.”
Greg Kihn. NYT (archived). Is it fair to call him a 2.5 hit wonder?
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(I would also give him half-credit for “I Lost On Jeopardy”, thought I don’t know how many people would think that was a hit.)
Jack Russell, lead singer and co-founder of Great White.
Short random gun crankery.
August 16th, 2024I am hoping to be able to get back to gun crankery (and gun book crankery) next week. I expect things to be a little less busy (famous last words). And I have a hysterical historical letter coming from Colt about another old gun (though not quite as old as the last one) so I want to put up a post about it.
In the meantime, I wanted to highlight this: “Killing Lincoln: John Wilkes Booth’s Philadelphia Deringer” by Dr. Dabbs. Greg Ellifritz had this in his weekend link dump (which you should really be reading: I resisted for a long time, even though Karl regularly linked to it, and now I regret not reading it) but I probably would have gotten to it eventually since I subscribe to American Handgunner.
I note this for two reasons:
1) The blog’s ongoing interest in presidential assassination weapons, which appears to be shared by Dr. Dabbs.
Something’s happening here…
August 16th, 2024…and what it is, ain’t exactly clear.
The former CFO of the Austin Independent School District, who was previously charged with insurance fraud in Williamson County, had the charges dropped yesterday by the WillCo DA’s office.
More from KVUE (archived, because they’ve become really bad about ad blockers):
KVUE obtained the arrest warrant for Ramos from the Round Rock Police Department to investigate allegations of fraud, which authorities determined was not directly related to his work with the district.
According to the warrant, Ramos was accused of insurance fraud regarding a claim of $5,422.64.
However, the district said Thursday evening it would reinstate Ramos after learning the Williamson County District Attorney’s Office would not prosecute any charges related to his personal affairs.
According to KVUE, he has been re-instated by the district, but his previously scheduled resignation takes effect today. He apparently does not plan to return to the district, but he leaves “in good standing”.
I feel like I should apologize to the former CFO for including him in the “flaming hyenas” watch. But I was very scrupulous about not including his name (even though it was in the linked press reports) because this seemed like a situation that had the potential to be a tempest in a teapot, and I wanted to wait and see how it shook out. I’m glad I did.
Meanwhile, the evidence tampering trial of former WillCo Sheriff Robert Chody and former WillCo prosecutor Jason Nassour was going on this week.
Emphasis on the “was”. The judge has placed the trial on hold.
Why? Well, it looks like the prosecution’s case is completely borked, and they’ve asked for a hold.
“The state has been looking forward to having a full and fair trial… [However], the state can’t continue at this time,” a state prosecutor said Thursday.
The filing indicates the state cannot prosecute parts of the indictment due to it being “preempted by federal law.”
More from Fox 7:
A Live PD crew was with Williamson County deputies when Javier Ambler was taken into custody for a traffic violation. The chase had ended in Austin and with Ambler dying from a heart attack.
Austin police, who were in charge of the scene, never got a warrant to seize the Live PD camera equipment, and the court has ruled federal law allowed the production team to leave with their gear.
Judge Sage, on several occasions, pointed out to prosecutors that because of the law, it didn’t matter who allowed the crew to leave with the equipment because the officer on scene never got a warrant.
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Prosecutors are trying to show the loss of the video is a violation of the Michael Morton act which requires prosecutors to keep and provide evidence to defense attorneys.
But defense attorneys, during cross-examination, showed the jury a section of the contract which also hurt that argument. It was noted Live PD was required to retain and turn over any video, if ordered to do so by a court.
So if I’m understanding this right (and I Am Not A Lawyer), the prosecution’s argument is that the loss of the footage constitutes evidence tampering. But they’ve been precluded from making that argument in court because of 1) the contract which specified that “Live PD” had to turn over any video if a court order was obtained, and nobody could be arsed to get a court order until it was too late, and 2) Federal law, which states that law enforcement can’t confiscate gear and footage without a warrant, and APD (who was in charge at the scene) didn’t get a warrant.
I guess the WillCo DA’s office is fighting inflation by running a BOGO special…on nothing-burgers.
(Edited to add: technically, the evidence tampering trial is taking place in Travis County. But since former WillCo officials are involved, I’m letting the nothing-burger comment stand.)
Obit watch: August 15, 2024.
August 15th, 2024Wally Amos, of “Famous Amos” cookie fame.
He also became an advocate for childhood literacy. His mother had never learned to read, and neither had he until late in his childhood. He worked closely with the group Literacy Volunteers of America, and in 1987 he hosted his own public-access cable TV program, “Learn to Read.”
Years later, after he had gotten back into the cookie trade with a small shop near his home in Honolulu, he set aside an adjacent room stocked with children’s books. Every Saturday, he would take a seat in a rocking chair, surrounded by children, and read to them for hours.
Gena Rowlands. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Run For Your Life”, “Lonely Are the Brave”, “77 Sunset Strip”, and “Columbo”.
Seth Bloom, the blue-haired clown and physical comedy virtuoso who helped outreach organizations in Afghanistan and other remote places stage circuses that roused smiles from children while also teaching them important life skills, including how to avoid land mines, died on Aug. 2 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 49.
Mr. Bloom died by suicide, said his wife, Christina Gelsone, with whom he performed in two-person clown shows around the world, including at the Big Apple Circus in New York City.
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The Acrobuffos act took the couple around the world. For part of “Air Play,” which was probably their biggest hit, they jumped around in giant balloons, with only their heads visible.
“The most important thing we’ve learned about climbing inside balloons is not to fart,” Mr. Bloom once said.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline.
Obit watch: August 13, 2024.
August 13th, 2024Captain Paul Bucha (United States Army – ret.).
Captain Bucha received the Medal of Honor for actions between March 16 and 19th, 1968. His citation:
He was a West Point graduate:
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Ross Perot hired him.
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Mr. Bucha later openly criticized Mr. Perot for exaggerating stories about his career and traveled around the country on behalf of President George H.W. Bush’s campaign for a second term. In 2008, Mr. Bucha was a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
There was a point of consistency across his political stances, Ms. Whaley, his daughter, said: “He was a person who valued character and integrity.”
He served as president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society from 1995 to 1999.
Though Mr. Bucha became well known for his Medal of Honor, he often appeared publicly without it.
“I never wear it if I’m giving a speech that might get political,” he told the Purple Heart Mission. The medal, he said, belonged not principally to him but to the men he had fought alongside, and he did not want to say anything while wearing it that they might have disagreed with.
Statement from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. According to the society, there are 60 surviving recipients.
Obit watch: August 9, 2024.
August 9th, 2024Jacques Lewis has passed away. He was 105.
Mr. Lewis is believed to have been the last surviving French soldier who went onshore at Normandy on D-Day.
In 1944, Mr. Lewis was a member of the Free French Forces, the army that Gen. Charles de Gaulle had assembled in exile in London after Germany invaded and occupied France in 1940. Fluent in English, he was assigned as a liaison officer attached to the U.S. Army’s 70th Tank Battalion as the D-Day landings approached.
Mr. Lewis was not just an interpreter; he was a soldier, and thus well-suited to take on a vital role after the invasion. The Americans needed someone with military experience to link up with French villagers and French guerrilla resistance fighters known as the Maquis to help guide U.S. troops past German positions inland to reach the small rural town of Carentan and relieve members of the U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, who had earlier parachuted in, behind enemy lines.
In an interview with the French television channel TF1 in 2019 on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, he recalled approaching Utah Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944. It was the first time he had spoken about the war, even to his family, he said.
“We were crouched behind the ramp of our landing craft, and when the ramp went down, I saw my country, France, which I’d wanted to help liberate for so long,” he said. “It was very moving. But then I saw the stretchers carrying wounded or dead American soldiers — being carried down the beach to get into our landing craft to be taken back to England. I realized that many of the first wave of my American comrades had already died on the beaches to liberate my country.”
He waded ashore, his rifle over his head, under heavy German gunfire. In the TF1 interview, he displayed a military identification bracelet that he wore on his left wrist that morning (comparable to the dog tags his American comrades wore around their necks). Pointing to his military number, FFF 55770, he said, “That was so that they knew I was a French soldier if I died.”
Allied casualties on Utah Beach — 197 killed or wounded — were relatively light compared with the 2,400 or so recorded at Omaha Beach to the east. By nightfall on D-Day, more than 10,300 allied troops had been killed or wounded across Normandy.
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After Mr. Lewis crossed Utah beach unscathed, his first task was to help the Americans reach Carentan. Consulting with resistance fighters and French residents, he mapped out routes that the Americans could take and then joined them. Along the way, they were greeted as saviors.
“The locals appeared at their windows or emerged from their doors,” he recalled. “They gave us wine, and my American colleagues gave the kids chocolate. They were so happy to see the Americans and surprised to realize I was French.”
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Chi Chi Rodriguez, noted golfer.
Rodriguez was 5-foot-7 and about 120 pounds. But he used his strong hands and wrists to get off long low drives, and he was an outstanding wedge player, offsetting his sometimes balky putting game. “For a little man, he sure can hit it,” Jack Nicklaus told Sports Illustrated in 1964, relating how Rodriguez often outdistanced him off the tee on flat, into-the-wind fairways.
Rodriguez won eight tournaments on the PGA Tour, then became one of the top players on the Senior (now Champions) Tour, capturing 22 events, including two majors: the 1986 Senior Players Championship and the 1987 Senior PGA Championship. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.
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Kevin Sullivan, professional wrestler.
Known early in his career as “The Boston Battler,” Sullivan was inspired by the heavy metal acts of the 1970s and ’80s like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest to become the “Prince of Darkness,” a demonic rival of some of the stars of that era, including Dusty Rhodes, the Road Warriors and Hogan, according to W.W.E.
Among the crews he led in the ring were the Army of Darkness; The Varsity Club, a group of college buddies; and Dungeon of Doom, W.W.E. said. Also known as “The Taskmaster,” he painted black X’s and lightning bolts on his forehead, wore leather body armor and chains and stuck out his tongue like Gene Simmons of Kiss.
“During their heyday, Sullivan’s cult came to the ring with either Jeff Beck’s ‘Gets Us All in the End’ or Deep Purple’s ‘Nobody’s Home’ blaring behind them and a series of black-cloaked and corpse-painted minions who usually brought with them boa constrictors of varying colors and sizes,” according to a 2015 editorial about Sullivan on the website Metal Injection. “Add in a half-naked Fallen Angel, then you’ve got a good idea of just how much of a spectacle Sullivan’s Army of Darkness was.”
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Those Sox.
August 8th, 2024This is not going to become the “all White Sox, all the time” blog.
But this is sportsfirings.com, so I do have to report that the White Sox fired manager Pedro Grifol. Chicago Tribune. ESPN.
Mr. Grifol was 89-190 over less than two seasons. The Sox were 61-101 last year. Currently, they are 28-89, for a .239 winning percentage. That projects out to 123 losses this season if trends continue. Looking at things another way, in order to lose only 119 games (and be better than the 1962 Mets) they will have to go 15-30 over the rest of the season, for a .333 winning percentage in the remaining games.
“Worst MLB record ever? White Sox on pace for most losses” from ESPN.
Probability of a franchise-record 107 or more losses: 99.9%.
Probability of a modern era record of 121 or more losses: 41.9%
That time of the year.
August 7th, 2024Time for “on a stick”, that is.
I feel like nine out of the ten are items I could actually go for. Only the “Texas Sugar Rush Pickles” (“The sliced pickles taste like cotton candy and are covered in Froot Loops, Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch. The concotion, served in a cup, includes vanilla ice cream, cotton candy, cotton candy sugar crystals, strawberry syrup and powdered sugar for a colorful mix of flavors.“) really bother me.
Money quote:
Obit watch: August 7, 2024.
August 7th, 2024Charles Cyphers, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Renegade”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Jake and the Fatman”.
Duane Thomas, one of the great Dallas Cowboys. ESPN.
Thomas spent the 1971 season without speaking with reporters and apparently his teammates.
It didn’t stop Thomas from performing on the field. He became the first player to score a touchdown in Texas Stadium in 1971. When that season ended, Thomas rushed 175 times for 793 yards and a NFL-leading 11 touchdowns.
Patti Yasutake, actress. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy, M.E.” of the ’90s except it sucked), “Murder One” (curiously, Charles Cyphers was also in “Murder One”), “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”, and “T.J. Hooker”.
Joss Naylor, English sportsman. He specialized in “fell running”: basically, running up and down mountains for days at a time.
His feats running the fells — the term in northern England for hills and mountains — defied common sense and earned him multiple nicknames, including “Iron Man” and “King of the Fells.”
In 1971, Mr. Naylor became the sixth person to conquer the Bob Graham Round — a 24-hour challenge to finish a 66-mile trek over 42 peaks in Cumbria’s Lake District. He overachieved, topping 61 peaks in 23 hours 37 minutes.
The next year, he crossed 63 peaks in the challenge, followed by 72 in 1975 — both times in under 24 hours.
Still running at age 50 in 1986, he completed the Wainwright Round, a series of 214 summits, in just over seven days, setting a record that stood until 2014. (He would have finished faster had he not stopped to save a lamb stuck in mud.)
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Bucca di Bankrupt. (Headline hatip to Mike the Musicologist.)
The dead cat bounces.
August 7th, 2024White Sox 5, !Oakland A’s 1. The streak is busted.
However, there are 46 games left in the season. There’s enough room to start a new record-breaking streak.
Currently, the Sox are 28-88, for a .241 winning percentage. Right now, that projects out to about 123 losses.
Quick random book post.
August 6th, 2024I was busy all this past weekend, and will be busy all of this coming weekend. I’m hoping to get a gun book post up sometime between Wednesday and Friday, but I’m not sure if that’s going to work out. I did want to get this post up today, though, for obvious reasons.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Exhibition Guide. No author and no publishing information given. I think this is about 68 pages.
There are two sections to this, which are actually printed reversed (as you might gather from the index: apologies for the lousy picture, but I couldn’t get this to sit flat easily). One covers “The Reality of the Atomic Bombing” and “Damage From Radiation” along with introductory material (“Hiroshima Before the Bombing”, “The Atomic Bombing”, “A Lost Way of Life”). The other covers “The Dangers of Nuclear Weapons” and “Hiroshima History”.
This was a gift from my beloved and indulgent sister, who was able to tour Japan recently and brought this back for me.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#124 in a series)
August 6th, 2024I think this may be marginal, since the person in question is not an elected official. But they were still a high-ranking official in a position of trust locally.
The chief financial officer for the Austin Independent School District was arrested yesterday.
Technically, he’s the former CFO: according to the article, he submitted his resignation July 23rd, it was scheduled to be effective August 16th, and he was placed on leave immediately after his arrest.
He’s charged with insurance fraud, though the reports say the case against him has nothing to do with AISD.
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Loser update: August 6, 2024.
August 6th, 2024The Chicago White Sox lost to the Soon To Be Oakland No Longer But Nobody Knows Where They Will End Up A’s last night, 5-1.
This is the 21st consecutive loss for the White Sox. That ties the American League record for most consecutive losses (with the 1988 Baltimore Orioles). The National League record in the “modern” (post-1900) era is 23, held by the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies.
The overall record is 26 straight losses, surprisingly held not by the Cleveland Spiders, but by the 1889 Louisville Colonels.
The White Sox are currently 27-88, for a .235 winning percentage. By my math (and ESPN’s agrees with me) that’s a projected 124 losses, “which would be the most losses since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders of the National League went 20-134.” For comparison purposes, the 1962 New York Mets, who hold the modern era record in Wikipedia, went 40-120. So I’ve got high hopes for the White Sox.
They play the A’s again tonight. The A’s are the favorite, but ESPN has it about 60-40. So maybe the Sox might get the dead cat bounce and pull one out? Even if they do, there’s probably still enough margin in there to keep them in contention for the worst MLB team of the modern era.
Obit watch: August 2, 2024.
August 2nd, 2024Major General Joe Engle (USAF – ret.), astronaut. He passed away on July 10th, but the obituary didn’t run until yesterday (and if it was reported elsewhere previously, I missed it). He was 91.
He flew 16 X-15 missions.
He was selected for Apollo, and scheduled to fly on Apollo 17. But he was replaced on that mission by Harrison Schmitt, and moved to Apollo 18. Apollo 18, of course, was cancelled.
In 1981, Mr. Engle, by then an Air Force colonel, went back to space as the commander of the second flight of the shuttle Columbia with the pilot Richard Truly. They demonstrated that the Columbia could be reused, but they had to return three days early because of a fuel cell failure. (Mr. Truly died in February.)
Four years later, Mr. Engle was the commander of the shuttle Discovery, which deployed three communications satellites and fixed an existing one.
He retired from the Air Force in 1986 and was promoted to major general, having flown more than 180 types of aircraft and logged more than 14,000 flight hours.
Quote of the day:
Quote of the day 2:
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#123 in a series)
August 2nd, 2024Misty Roberts, the mayor of DeRidder, Louisiana, resigned her position on July 27th.
She was arrested yesterday.
Surprisngly, the charges against her are not the usual Louisiana politician charges: bribery or some other form of corruption.
Ms. Roberts is accused of raping a minor.
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Adam Johnson, Roberts’ attorney, released the following statement:
Obit watch: August 1, 2024.
August 1st, 2024That was the mall for my family for a long time. We saw “Star Wars” at the theater there, and I spent a lot of time as a teen in that mall. But Willowbrook Mall opened up closer to our house, and that became the mall of choice (unless there was some compelling reason to go to Greenspoint).
After we all moved away, the mall and the area around it went into decline. Crime got so bad, the mall was nicknamed “Gunspoint Mall” by locals.
I’m sorry. Did someone say “Sears Auto Center”?
(I thought about putting a language warning on this, but: it’s Ron White. If you need a language warning on Ron White, well, welcome to our universe, I hope you enjoy your stay here.)
(And both Lawrence and I would be firmly in the “fark Sears Auto Center” camp, if Sears Auto Center still existed.)
I haven’t watched all of this yet, but here’s a “Dead Malls” YouTube video on Greenspoint:
This one’s for Mike the Musicologist: Richard Crawford.
“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.
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“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Mr. Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.
“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”
Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African-American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Mr. Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.
Obit watch: July 30, 2024.
July 30th, 202415 years ago today, I posted my first obit, for the late legendary Reverend Ike.
Just sayin’. “15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired.” I cannot tell a lie: that still makes me laugh my spleen out of my body. (As you know, Bob, the spleen is the most amusing body part, though not the most humerus.)
Francine Pascal, author. She did some screenwriting for soaps, but is best known as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series and the spinoffs of that.
Edna O’Brien, author.
Roland Dumas, French foreign minister under François Mitterrand. This is the most French obit I’ve read recently.
A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the most high-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.
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But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration. He failed to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believed in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II and, for much of his life, harbored hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life: the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.
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He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.
Finally, William L. Calley Jr.
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.
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On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals were dropped, as were those against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial, in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely; the Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted that he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting that he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.
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Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years, saying that Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement, which had ended in 1974.
Why don’t we have a party?
July 29th, 2024Since I’ve been blogging for 15 years, why not?
And what better kind of party to throw than…a gun book party! Because a gun book party don’t stop until we’re out of gun books, and I don’t see that happening. But I did run out of time to get this post up on Sunday, so I’m moving the party to Monday night instead.
Also, I’d like to get some more gun books off the kitchen table and reduce the stack before Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) gets sprung from durance vile and returns home. After the jump…
Brief notes on film: “The Concorde… Airport ’79”
July 28th, 2024The Saturday Movie Group watched this last night.
It is not a good movie.
It is, however, an enjoyably good bad movie.
I think I will put a jump here to avoid any inadvertent spoilers, though frankly this movie arrived already spoiled…
Well. That’s interesting. At least to me.
July 28th, 2024I have been blogging for 15 years as of today.
Obit watch: July 25, 2024.
July 25th, 2024Gene Peterson, longtime radio announcer for the Houston Rockets.
Houston Rockets Twitter. Apparently I can’t embed tweets any longer, unless maybe I’m logged in to Twitter? (That would be difficult, as I don’t have a Twitter account.)
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Quick loser update.
July 25th, 2024The White Sox are on a tear.
They’ve lost 10 games in a row, and are at 27-77 right now, for a .260 winning percentage.
If my math holds up and trends continue, it looks like they will lose 120 games this season, which is in the “historical” range.