ORLANDO BOSCH REDUX: FIDEL & ORLANDO

I wrote Orlando Bosch's obituary for the Independent five years ago, and I thought it might be worth posting it here to widen the perspective of reflection on the death of Castro, and American attitudes toward terrorism. The death toll from Operation Condor alone is instructive. You can look at my original posting here at IT which I wrote when I linked to the Indy piece: it includes the Dealey Plaza photo. I've posted my original copy here; it was edited slightly in the Indy, and I've added a couple of notes.

ORLANDO BOSCH: CUBAN EXILE CONVICTED OF TERRORISM

It is said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. If so, Orlando Bosch, who has died aged 84, was all things to all men. A dedicated anti-Castro Cuban, Bosch was implicated in dozens of terrorist acts, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Air flight 455, which killed 73 people, and the assassination in Washington, DC the same year of the Chilean exile Orlando Letelier. Hailed as a hero by America's Cuban exile community, Bosch was a prime example of the double-standards of the Bush administration's so-called 'Global War on Terror' and the long-standing policy of the US toward Cuba, especially considering the electoral importance of Florida's Cuban vote. Despite his terrorist record, Bosch was personally championed by Jeb Bush, and released from US custody by his father, President George HW Bush.

Orlando Bosch Avila was born 18 August 1926, five days after Fidel Castro, in Poterillo, Cuba. His father, a former policeman, ran a restaurant; his mother was a teacher. While studying medicine at the University of Havana he became friends with Castro, a law student; both were in the student government. He completed his medical internship in Toledo, Ohio and his residency in Memphis before returning to Cuba, where he was the first doctor to provide the new polio vaccine. At the same time he began organising underground support for Castro's campaign against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, for which he was forced to flee to Miami with his wife Myriam and their children. He returned after Batista fell, but quickly became disenchanted with his old friend, and after launching a failed counter-revolution, returned to Miami in 1960.

He became general coordinator of the Insurectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR), and joined Operation 40, a CIA-backed effort to arrange Castro's assassination, whose membership included future Watergate burglars E.Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and a former Cuban intelligence officer named Luis Posada Carilles. Meanwhile, he lost his medical job for using the hospital to store explosives, and was arrested numerous times for violating the Neutrality Act, once for towing a home-made torpedo through Miami's streets. According to a later Justice Department report, between 1961 and 1968 Bosch was involved in some 30 terrorist operations, often organised with Posada, most notoriously the phosphorus bombing of Cuban sugar factories.

Some researchers claim to have spotted Bosch in Dealey Plaza, sitting next to the 'umbrella man' in the aftermath of John Kennedy's assassination; the photographs are more convincing than the so-called 'tramp' photos which purported to include Hunt or Sturgis, but still the figure looks more like an older Bosch than how he might have appeared in 1963. In 1985, when Hunt lost a libel suit against a magazine which claimed he was in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Marita Lorenz, once Castro's mistress and later Sturgis' girlfriend, testified under oath linking Bosch to, among others, Sturgis, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Later witnesses placing Bosch in Dealey Plaza are generally considered less reliable, and investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations 'failed to support that claim'.

In 1968, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a bazooka at a Havana-bound Polish freighter docked in Miami. While he was in prison his wife divorced him. Released in 1974, he immediately broke parole and travelled around Latin America, often overstaying his welcome by being caught in terrorist activity. He was arrested in Venezuela for planning to bomb the Cuban embassy; the US declined extradition, and thanks to the intervention of President Carlos Andres Perez he was released quickly. He moved to Chile, where he met his second wife, Adrian, and in the next two years, according to the US government, attempted postal bombings of Cuban embassies in four countries. After another arrest, in Costa Rica, Bosch went to the Dominican Republic, where the CIA, now headed by George HW Bush, attempted to unify and control the various Cuban exile groups by forming the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organisations (CORU).

The scale of Bosch's operations increased, including the failed assassination of the Cuban ambassador to Argentina and the bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City. In September 1976, Bosch and Posada met with Michael Townley, a CIA agent assigned to DINA, the Chilean secret police, and the architect of Operation Condor, which killed or 'disappeared' at least 60,000 people around Latin America, to plan Letelier's killing.

Flight 455 was brought down the following month, while en route from Barbados to Jamaica; Cuba's entire national fencing team was killed. Barbadian police arrested two Venezuelans, who confessed and named Bosch and Posada as the men who gave them their instructions. When Venezuelan authorities arrested them, Posada was still carrying a map of Letelier's route to work. The two were acquitted of planning the bombing by a military court in 1980, but eventually civilian authorities struck down the verdict and ordered a new trial. But by then, coincidentally, key evidence had gone missing in police custody, and the confession of the two bombers was ruled inadmissible because it was in English. While in prison Bosch allegedly told the journalist Alicia Herrerra, 'we planted the bombs—so what?' With judges wary of Bosch's connections with President Lopez, the Venezuelan bombers were sentenced to 20 years each, but Bosch and Posada were finally acquitted in 1987, by which time Posada had already bribed his jailers and escaped. Since then, freedom of information requests have revealed documents noting both foreknowledge of the attack by the CIA and confirmation by an FBI informant that Bosch received a phone call from the bombers saying 'a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed'.

US ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich arranged for Bosch to return to Miami, where he was greeted as a hero by the Cuban community, but almost immediately arrested for absconding while on parole. He served three months in prison, and the US Justice Department called for him to be deported; Associate US Attorney General Joe Whitely said Bosch was 'resolute and unswerving in his advocacy of terrorist violence.' The only country willing to accept Bosch was Cuba, where he would have been tried again as a terrorist, but by then Jeb Bush, at the time head of the Dade County Republican Party and with close financial ties to the exile community, took the forefront of a campaign to have Bosch allowed to remain in the USA. In 1990 Jeb's father, by now president, overturned Bosch's deportation order by presidential fiat, in effect pardoning him. As part of the deal, Bosch promised to renounce the use of violence. In a later interview, he called his promise 'a farce', saying 'they purchased the chain but they don't have the monkey'.

While in prison Bosch had taken up painting, and his work commanded high prices in Miami's Little Havana. He set up 'Mortar for Masons' to fund resistance to Castro, and acknowledged the money raised was not for 'flowers or hot meat pies'. When he was linked to a 1997 series of bombings in Cuban hotels, which killed an Italian tourist, he denied it with a wink, saying 'we have nothing to do with these attacks. Besides, if we did, we'd still be denying it, since that's illegal in this country.' Earlier this month, Posada received a hero's welcome in Miami, after being acquitted by a Texas jury of lying on his immigration forms, but by then Bosch was already ill. Bosch died 27 April in Miami and is survived by his second wife, and six children, five from his first marriage. In Miami, there were public demonstrations of mourning the man who said, 'you have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people.'

JIM KELLY: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Jim Kelly, best-known for Enter The Dragon, but for me at his best as one-third of Three The Hard Way, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. The track of Kelly's brief career as a blaxploitation star might be said to reflect his relative lack of acting ability--he had a certain presence (which his combat pout, combined with tufts of chest hair that appeared to be glued on, and loud exhales during karate fights all did much to dissipate; see below left) but there is self-restrained cool and there is the inability to emote. Fred 'the Hammer' Williamson had more of a career, but little of it was worthwhile so perhaps Kelly was better off pursuing other avenues which gave him more satisfaction. You could say that was what Jim Brown did, first when he gave up football, and later when he withdrew from full-time acting.

What is odd is the way Bruce Lee's star rose, fuelled by his death, no doubt. Lee is closer to Kelly in acting terms than he was to, say, John Saxon--for all that Enter The Dragon is a cult film, none of the three actors had great careers afterwards. I wonder how much camp is involved in the whole blaxploitation revival --certainly we could look at almost all of Quentin Tarantino's later career as an excercise in camp, if not an effort to become a high-priced Larry Cohen. That Kelly didn't join the Original Gangstas cast, or thht Kung Fu Joe is a figure of some fun in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka says something about the continuing value of Kelly's role.

Still, he seemed to appreicate his late renaissance in fandom, and take it with good humour. Speaking of which, you really should go to you tube and watch that 2004 Nike Chamber of Fears commercial, in which LeBron James goes head to head with Kelly--it is absurdly weird.

BERT STERN: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the photographer Bert Stern, best-known for his 'Last Session' shots of Marilyn Monroe, is in today's Independent, buy the paper paper or link to it here. Obviously, the Marilyn pictures are the big talking point--I avoided getting into detail about whether or not Stern, as I said in the piece a notorious womaniser, and Marilyn actually consummated a different sort of relationship, and Stern himself hinted but never said, but I probably should have mentioned that he laid on a lot of Dom Perignon along with the other acoutrments, and in many of the shots Monroe looks decidedly heavy-lidded.

The Smirnoff ad is indeed remarkable, and he also made a fantastic one with Buster Keaton for the vodka. There was a long essay on the bleeding into 'art' of commercial photography, and the way fashion is the cutting edge of that bleed. In the modern art world, where ironic commentary on one's own work is more important than the work itself, the advertising theme might well be considered part of the art--so the ironic commentary of the pun on 'dry' in dry martini is just as artistic as the representation of heat, or the geometric inversion of glass and pyramid. Stern, it should be said, appears to have been a master of using the emotional power of red--see the Lolita poster.

I would also have liked to have said more about Jazz On A Summer's Day, which is a truly memorable document. It is a very mainstream picture of the jazz world in 1958, as you might expect with Willis Conover emceeing, but the performances are brilliant, and it does include Thelonious Monk, in a trio with Roy Haynes on drums. Jazz in that period, particularly the five years following, might well be my favourite music, period, and watching the film puts you in the mood for a little bit of the harder revolution that was to follow. In terms of creating an impressionistic picture of Newport at the time, it's perfect, right down to the America's Cup races going on in the background. Beats the hell out of High Society.

RICHARD BEN CRAMER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the journalist Richard Ben Cramer appeared in the Independent on 30 March, but I somehow missed it at the time. You can link to it here, but because there were a few literals in article, including my listing only five of the six candidates profiled in What It Takes (I left out Dick Gephardt, of course), I've reprinted it below with a few small corrections. Sadly, it appears that piece may be the last I do for the Indy, at least for some time...I've always appreciated them for their willingness to both cover some unusual people and allow me to present their obits while assuming the audience will understand the usually American context.

I've been reading What It Takes lately--it stands up superbly after 25 years, particularly because of its sympathy, its non-judgemental understanding--his one paragraph take on the essential difference between George Bush and Ronald Reagan is alone worth the price of admission. It was also fun to recall that Cramer had wanted to include one more of the candidates in 1988, Jesse Jackson, but couldn't because alone of the contenders, Jackson would not grant him the necessary access. What It Takes spawned many imitators, but by then few candidates would allow the same openess, but mostly because none of those who followed could actually do what Cramer was able to do so well...understand people, and put that understanding down on paper. Were I writing the obit again, I would probably compare it more to The Right Stuff--but Cramer has a sharper, less romantic, conception of the American drive for success than Wolfe. Anyway, here's the piece:

Richard Ben Cramer: Journalist noted for his empathy with his subjects

The New Journalism opened the floodgates for writers of non-fiction to use the materials of fiction. When Richard Ben Cramer produced his landmark study of the 1988 US presidential campaign, What It Takes, it was criticised widely for its perceived lack of seriousness. Reviewers seemed to expect Cramer's 1,000 page study of the six contenders, George Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Biden, to creak under its accumulated gravitas. Instead they got Tom Wolfe typography and bursts of wild metaphor they'd expect from Hunter S Thompson, blinding them to the fact that, with his energy and empathy, Cramer was able to explore deeply these lives, and uncover the dilemma faced by all of them: the price they needed to pay to achieve their ultimate goal. Today, What It Takes is considered a classic.

Its theme was something Cramer has addressed before, in the showcase article from the famed June 1986 special "The American Man: 1946-86" issue of Esquire. Cramer's profile of the irascible and notoriously private baseball star Ted Williams was both revealing and endearing. Half of Williams' quotes appeared in all capital letters, emphasising his awkward bellow. Asked how old he was, Williams answered 'WELL HOW DO I LOOK?.. HUH? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?' That provided the story its title, but what made it was Cramer's realisation that what drove Williams' insecurity was the other side of his drive to be the greatest hitter of all time, the best sport fisherman, the top fighter pilot. It was deeply American, and it became Cramer's theme: "He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust."

His own lack of success in sport drove Cramer to journalism. Born in Rochester, New York in 1950, he joined his high school newspaper after being cut from the baseball team. He edited the paper at Johns Hopkins University, where he took his degree in 1971. He fell in love with Baltimore, but after failing to land a job with the Baltimore Sun he took an MA at New York's Columbia School of Journalism, before getting hired on the second attempt by the Sun in 1973. In 1976 he left for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sent him to Israel, where his reporting from the Middle East won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

He went freelance and moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore, writing for Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated as well as Esquire. His wife Carolyn White was a talented editor who, while he worked on What It Takes, gave up her own work to, in the words of one friend, 'become his Maxwell Perkins'. It took Cramer six years to research and write the book; a heavy smoker and prodigious coffee-drinker, he suffered health setbacks, including phlebitis, pleurisy, and Bell's palsy, before finishing it. It was published to coincide with the 1992 elections; the four-year delay was a factor in its cool reception.

Cramer wrote the copy for The Seasons Of The Kid (1991), a photo-book about Williams based on his article, and with The Choice (1992) began writing and narrating documentaries for America's Public Boradcasting System, PBS. The Battle For Citizen Kane (1995), made for their American Experience series, was nominated for an Academy Award. He expanded part of What It Takes into a 1995 biography of Bob Dole, and in 2001 returned to his theme of the demands of fame with Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, the first warts-and-all portrait of another American baseball icon.

Cramer returned to the Middle East with How Israel Lost: Four Questions (2004), whose thesis, that Israel was a victim of its own victories, and whose straightforward answers to its four questions, provoked some predictably contentious reviews. His final book, in 2011, was a return to his 1986 article, but by this time the title, What Do You Think Of Ted Williams Now, became an invitation to reflect on time passed.

Cramer died of lung cancer. He is survived by his and White's daughter Ruby, and by his second wife Joan. In a tribute, Vice President Joe Biden recalled reading about himself in Cramer's book: "It is a powerful thing to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself. That was my experience with Richard."

Richard Ben Cramer, journalist: born Rochester, New York 12 June 1950 died Baltimore 7 January 2013.

TED WILLIAMS: THE LOST GUARDIAN OBIT

NOTE: Tonight I am doing a broadcast on BBC Radio, of the Red Sox season-opening game at Yankee Stadium against the Evil Empire. If you are a Red Sox fan, as I am, you will appreciate the appropriateness of April Fools Day to start the Sox' season, but in the eternal spirit of hope, I thought I'd post this obit, which I recently found in my files, of the greatest Red Sox of all, Ted Williams.

This one was written for the Guardian,with a British audience in mind, as a stock piece for their files before Williams died. But when Ted did finally pass away, on 5 July 2002, the Guardian's news desk thought it was important enough to run a short wire-service piece in the news pages, and the obits desk decided that was enough attention for one baseball player, although, of course, Williams was much more than that. I've left it as I wrote it, except to fill in his age when he died. The Red Sox did finally win another World Series, in 2004, and then again in 2007, but in the process somehow found themselves morphing into the Yankees-lite, anathema to old-school Sox fans like me. I've since written, though the Independent hasn't yet published it, an obit of Richard Ben Cramer, whose tremendous piece in Esquire's June 1986 special issue, The American Man: 1946-1986, is one of the best profiles ever written (you can link to it here). Look at the picture of Ted in the follow through of his swing.  That's the Ted Williams I will always remember, though I never actually saw him play.

TED WILLIAMS was born in 1918, the last year the Boston Red Sox won baseball’s World Series. The next winter, the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, where he became the game’s greatest star, and launched a dynasty of Yankee championships that continues to this day. Boston fell under the so-called Curse of the Bambino, which not even stars as great as Williams were able to overcome. Now Williams has died aged 83, and his Red Sox are still without another championship.

Williams was America’s real-life John Wayne: baseball prodigy, war hero, record-holding fisherman. How many men could make reasonable claims at being the world’s best at three different things? He embodied a masculine image which became deeply unfashionable, yet in recent years a society which lavishes huge rewards on mediocrity came to re-evaluate his accomplishments, understand, and even embrace his uncompromising personality. What was brash in a youngster becomes lovable in an aging icon. In this he came to symbolise Boston, where he was destined to play tragic hero: the young god whose hubris was repaid by the denial of World Series glory with his cursed Red Sox. 

Williams epitomised some classic New England values, working with dedication to become prodigiously skilled at his craft. Using a narrow cylinder of wood to hit a baseball bearing down at your head at speeds above 95mph is arguably the single most difficult task in sports, but no one made it look easier than Williams. Ruth may be the sport’s greatest player, but for pure hitting talent, Williams is the only man who could argue he was Ruth’s better. He could also sacrifice. Although he was accused at one point of dodging military service (he was his mother's sole support) he eventually lost much of his baseball prime to military service. And he was loyal. Despite his feuds with the Boston press, the so-called 'knights of the keyboard' he despised, and despite his love/hate relationship with Boston's fans, he played all 22 seasons of his career with the Red Sox.

But Ted never possessed another New England trait: self-restraint. He never learned the grace, the taciturn style, the faux-worldliness, of New York’s glamorous Yankees like Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle. He debuted for the Red Sox in 1939, a 21 year old rookie calling himself “the Kid”. He resembled Wayne playing the Ringo Kid, tall, lean, and impossibly handsome: a combination of youthful innocence and lethal skill. He could count the stitches on a baseball hurtling at him, and uncoil his slender body like a finely-wound spring to make contact with it. Great players demand multiple definitions: soon they were calling him “The Splendid Splinter", later he would add "The Thumper".

 

His perfectionism contrasts with cricket’s equally obsessive Geoffrey Boycott. Like Boycott, Williams waged a career-long battle with the press, who accused him of placing individual success above his teams’ goals. When Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau shifted his fielders to pack the right side of the diamond, Ted refused to alter his technique and hit the opposite way. It would have stopped him taking his perfect swing. But unlike Boycott, Williams was exuberant in his abilities, generous with his chosen art to both teammate and opponent. His childish glee as he danced around the bases after winning the 1941 All-Star Game with a late home run earned him yet another nickname, “Teddy Ballgame”. “Jeffy Cricket-match” lacks the same ring. But Williams steadfastly refused to compromise for acceptance: he wouldn’t wear ties and he couldn’t pander to public relations; he never had an empathy for those who lacked the absolute sense of security his ability gave him.

Williams’ came by obsession naturally. His father abandoned his mother, a fanatical organiser for the Salvation Army. She in turn left him to his own devices; he haunted San Diego’s sandlots, hitting baseballs whenever he could persuade someone to pitch them. He was already playing semi-pro while still a high-school star, and at 18 turned pro with the San Diego Padres, then a top independent minor league team, in the Pacific Coast League, who eventually sold him to the Red Sox.

In 1941 Williams became the first player in almost 20 years to hit over .400 for the season. Where three safe hits every ten at-bats (.300) is considered excellent, the .400 barrier is regarded as nearly impossible. Before the season’s final day, Williams’ average stood at .3995. He refused his manager’s offer to sit out the final two-game double-header to protect his average, which would have been rounded up to .400. Instead, he stroked 6 hits in 8 at-bats, raising his mark to .406. No one has reached .400 since. Typically, however, 1941 was also the season DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games, and the Yankee Clipper captured the Most Valuable Player award. The two engaged in a triumphant reunion tour fifty years later, still New York chalk and Boston cheese. But by then, both they, and America, had learned to relish the contrast.

Williams’ career statistics fall short of many of the game’s greats, mostly because he lost five peak seasons to wars. He was so skilled a Marine fighter pilot that he was forced to spend World War II as an instructor. Recalled to Korea, he flew as John Glenn’s wingman. The future astronaut, Senator, and “right-stuff” test pilot called Williams the best combat flyer he had ever seen. 

 

In private Williams, whose ne’er do well brother died at age 39 of leukaemia, was a driving force behind the success of the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox “pet” charity for children’s cancer research. In public, he used his induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame as a platform to call for the inclusion of Negro League stars, denied by segregation their chance to play in the majors.

But if baseball was his obsession, fishing was his passion. He retired to Florida where he could indulge himself with deep-sea fishing, where he held a number of world-record catches, and was equally adept with a fly rod, the same vision, coordination and patience that made him a great hitter of baseballs made him a great caster of lures.

Aged 38, and slow afoot, Williams still batted .388. Two years later, he retired. John Updike chronicled his final game in a famous New Yorker magazine essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”. In his final at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park, Williams hit a home run. After he took his place in left field, he was replaced, allowing the fans the chance to give him one final ovation. He trotted back into the dugout, without tipping his cap, and disappeared. Despite prolonged cheering, he never returned. As Updike explained, “Gods do not reply to letters”.

RONALD DWORKIN: THE LOST INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond my control, the Independent double-booked the assignment to write the obit of Ronald Dworkin, the legal philosopher and one of my favourite writers in the New York Review of Books. Mine was the later assigned, and filed, so though I rushed to complete about 1,000 words in a couple of hours while watching two kids on half-term break, it went unused. I offer it here, as written and not edited by the paper. The one the paper used is good, and explains more fully than I try to the nature of Dworkin's philosphy, and the ones it argues against. It wasn't for me to insert myself into the obit, but it is my feeling that the legal profession in general prefers the HLA Hart approach to the law, as a sort of chess game taking place divorced from the 'real' world, and within the cheesboard of the courtroom. It avoids having to question one's own actions, and fall back on the zero-sum game theory of the adversarial approach, where winning is the goal, not justice. I can also recommend Godfrey Hodgson's excellent obit in the Guardian, a more personal reminiscence--and certainly the Gatsby-esque photo on the beach goes along with the best three-house arrangement I could think of.

RONALD DWORKIN: LEGAL MORALIST

Ronald Dworkin, who has died aged 81, was one of the world's foremost legal philosophers, and a forceful advocate for using morality to interpret issues of constitutional law. He was a leading scholar of constitutional law as a professor in both Britain and the United States, but he exerted equal influence in the wider world with his commentary on political issues and philosophy, most notably in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where his essays flowed like lectures, taking his audience along for an illuminating ride.

His legal philosophy was challenged most heavily from the political right, and he became a particular target when he opposed President Ronald Reagan's appointment to the Supreme Court of his former Yale colleague Robert Bork, with whom he had taught jointly a course in constitutional law. He based his opposition on Bork's strict constructionist approach, which he called a refusal to 'test interpretation of the Constitiution against the principles latent in (the Supreme Court)'s own past decisions.' Believing the framers of the Constitution had imbued it with room for moral interpretation, Dworkin often found such strict interpretations hypocritical, or in the case of the Supreme Court's 2000 decision to 'acclaim' George W Bush president, an exercise in 'professional self interest'. He wrote 'the fiat of the five conservative justices...stopped the deomocratic process in its tracks.'

Dworkin's work for the New York Review stretched from a trenchant analysis of affirmative action through the 2000 election and to the current Roberts court, which he described as a 'right-wing phalanx...guided by no judicial or political principle at all, but only by partisan, cultural, or perhaps religious allegiance'. In the New York Review he published a memorable destruction of the 2010 Citizens United decision, which applied the concept of freedom of speech to allow corporations unlimited spending on political campaign advertising, and a convincing argument in favour of 'Obamacare' and its requirement that people have health insurance. He was attacked, often derided, from the right. Bork called him a 'liberal moral relativist', and the New York Review would often run long criticisms of his articles by Harvard professor Gerald Fried, which Dworkin would then dissect in rebuttal. But Dworkin's principled stances earned the respect, if not agreement, of many on the right. Walter Olson, of the Cato Institute, wrote 'over decades of intra-left legal debate, he took the better side—arguing for the importance of individual rights, free speech, and the integrity of law as a discipline in itself'.

Ronald Myles Dworkin was born in Providence, Rhode Island 11 December 1931. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and his mother raised three children by teaching piano. He won a scholarship to Harvard, and after graduating went to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His final examination paper was largely critical of the theory of legal positivism, as propagated by H.L.A. Hart, Oxford's Chair of Jurisprudence. Hart saw justice embodied in adherence to the law's system of rules, not requiring the perspective of morality. As it happened, Hart was called in to be one of the reader's of Dworkin's exam, which he passed with highest marks. In 1969, when Hart retired, he nominated Dworkin as his successor to the Chair, and cited passages from that exam in his welcoming speech. They also provided the basis of his collection, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he took apart not only Hart's Concepts Of Law but John Rawls' A Theory Of Justice. Dworkin argued that the law needed to be interpreted to provide justice, rather than relying on a black and white answer, because, strictly speaking, both parties in a dispute might well be 'right' to a greater or lesser degree.

After taking his Oxford exams, Dworkin returned to Harvard to complete another law degree, and then clerked for Judge Learned Hand, of the US Court of Appeals, one of America's greatest jurists. In a move he came to regret, he then turned down an offer to clerk for the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, instead joining the prestigious New York firm of Sulolivan and Cromwell. He had married Betsy Ross, whom he met while clerking for Hand, with whom they spent one of their first dates, and with the arrival of twins he found the travel demands of the job too pressing, and in 1962 took a professorship at Yale. He added the Oxford post, but in 1975 turned down Harvard and joined the faculty at New York University, helping to build its law school into one of the nation's best. Eventually, he moved to University College, London, and split time between London, where he kept a flat in Belgravia, and New York, with a colonial news house just off Washington Square. His summers were spent on Martha's Vineyard.

Dworkin's most influential book was Law's Empire (1986), which expounded his own theory of law, while in Sovereign Virture he offered a notion of society's parallel needs to allow people freedom to succeed while cushioning them against failure; that although all people were equal under the law, the law needed to realise that all people were not equal (2000). His books, like his essays, moved between the abstract principles of law, and analyses of contemporary legal issues. In Life's Dominion (1993) he examined legal arguments about both abortion and euthanasia, and A Badly Flawed Election (2002) took apart the Supreme Court's Bush v Gore decision. Justice For Hedgehogs (2011), with its title recalling Isiah Berlin, was his attempt to mix all his philosophy into one field theory, and a 16^th book, Religion Without God is forthcoming.

Betsy died in 2000, and Dworkin married Irene Brendel, the ex-wife of his friend, the pianist Alfred. He died of cancer, and is survived by his second wife, and his son and daughter from his first marriage.

BARBARA ANN SCOTT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the great Canadian figure skater Barbara Ann Scott is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. I may have underplayed the importance of the dual golds for Scott and Dick Button in 1948. Scott proved that the Europeans couldn't dominate the compulsories, which they had considered their territory, and Button showed that a more athletic style of free skate could be so impressive as to win that part of the event too. How difficult this was to accomplish is illustrated by the 1947 World Championships, where Button finished second. The legendary Swedish skater Ulrich Salchow was so upset with the judging that he gave Button his 1901 International Cup (a prize Dick eventually passed on to John Misha Petkevitch).

When I worked for ABC Sports I did a lot of shows with Dick, and his understanding of the strange politics and the, shall we say, conservative aesthetics, of the skating world was a huge help in understanding the changes in the sport which came about, inevitably, as it became more popular--a kind of bowling alley ballet--and the focus of the Winter Olympics in the countries not dominated by skiing (or, like Canada, ice hockey).

Scott's career as an entertainer never took off the way Sonja Henie's did--she didn't project into movies, and I get the impression she didn't want to: honestly she couldn't really play the All-Canadian girl. She was a queen in her world, not just skating, but in her life that followed. In 1956, she and Button did an ice ballet Happy New Year special--I wonder if copies of that telecast exist, because I'd love to see it.

GAETON FONZI: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Gaeton Fonzi, investigative reporter, researcher, and author of one of the very best books on the JFK assassination, is in today's Independent. I've reprinted it below because, sadly, there were two crucial typos in the piece as printed: the second counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was G. Robert Blakey, not Blakely as appears in the first reference, and 1979 was 15 years after the Warren Report', not 25. I feel incredibly embarrassed, and tried to get them corrected on the web page, but the 25 years remains.

Back where the stupid errors are corrected but the big ones stay, oddly enough, the New York Times obit of Fonzi, which insisted on repeatedly calling him an 'Ahab', used Blakey for its main quotes. This is odd because Blakey is the figure most heavily criticised in Fonzi's The Last Assassination, which is part research on the JFK assassination and part analysis of how and why the HSCA failed to do its job.

Fonzi's book might be thought of as the start of the 'second wave' of volumes about the assassinations--building on the research done by any number of writers, which showed clearly the flaws in the Warren Report, and the case for a conspiracy, but were usually vague about identifying who was behind it and how it actually worked.

But if you read Fonzi's book, John Newman's Oswald And The CIA, James Douglass' JFK And The Unspeakable (you can link to my essay on that book, which I wrote for Lobster magazine, here), and the LaFontaines' Oswald Talked, you get a very clear picture of the involvement of at least elements of various intelligence agencies, and the way in which the need to cover that involvement up would drive the institutions involve to collude after the fact to protect the actual plotters, even if they were not acting 'officially'.

Like many of the assassination researchers, Fonzi came to his belief in a conspiracy through disillusionment with the official story. Unlike many of them, he was a true professional, a dogged journalist who got his information the old fashioned way, with face to face digging. That his work with HSCA got largely buried was a tragedy, which his book, too easily dismissed by the mainstream who would reflexively gush over the Gerald Posners of that world, could not set right. But his work after its publication was indefatigable, and deserved straightforward praise.

GAETON FONZI: INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
 

On 29 March 1979, nearly 15 years after the Warren Report was released, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) issued its own report, concluding President John Kennedy was 'probably' assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald as part of a conspiracy. The committee's chief counsel, Robert Blakey, immediately announced, contrary to the report's own equivocations, 'the mob did it'. By accepting much of the flawed evidence of the Warren Report, and failing to reach any conclusions of its own, the HSCA report perpetuated the controversy that would not be addressed officially again until the public outcry arising from the Oliver Stone movie JFK.

Gaeton Fonzi, who has died aged, was a reporter hired as an investigator for HSCA, working primarily on connections between Cuban exile groups, and through them, American intelligence agencies, and the assassination. In 1993, in the wake of Stone's film and Gerald Posner's revisionist defence of the Warren Report, he published The Last Investigation, which combined trenchant analysis of the assassination itself with a revealing inside portrait of the machinations and politics behind the HSCA, which led to the failings of its report. It remains one of the very best works on the assassination, notable particularly for its restraint in making no assumptions and drawing no conclusions not backed by evidence. Its quality reflects Fonzi's undoubted skill as a journalist.

Fonzi's path to conspiracy theories grew from his background as an investigative reporter in Philadelphia, where he was born on 10 October 1935. He grew up in West New York, New Jersey, but returned to Philadelphia to study journalism and edit the daily paper at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife Marie. After graduating he worked on the Delaware County Daily and served in the army, before joining Philadelphia Magazine in 1959 as a reporter and later editor. His most important work was a series, written with Greg Walter, exposing Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Harry Karafin, who extorted money from businessmen by threatening to write negative stories, claiming to be the 'hatchet man' of the Inquirer's powerful owner, Walter Annenberg. Annenberg's own use of the paper's power to advance Republican party candidates was later detailed in Fonzi's 1970 biography, Annenberg, but by the time it was published, Annenberg had already sold the Inquirer and been appointed by Richard Nixon as US Ambassador to Great Britain.

Fonzi originally accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report. But when Warren committee counsel Arlen Specter returned to Philadelphia to run for district attorney, he was a natural subject for interview. Fonzi came across an article by another Philadelphia lawyer, Vincent Salandria, who was among the first critics of the Warren Report, and in particular the 'single-bullet' or 'magic bullet' theory advanced by Specter. Fonzi studied the case, and then, shocked by Specter's inability to defend his findings convincingly, became a sceptic. In another piece for Philadelphia Magazine he called the Warren Report 'a deliberate lie.'

In 1972 he moved to Miami, where he edited Miami and Gold Coast magazines. In the wake of scandals surrounding the intelligence community, in 1975 the US Senate created what came to be known as the Church Committee, and Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker asked Fonzi to join as an investigator. It was a natural move two years later to HSCA, where he was hired by the committee's original counsel, yet another Philadelphia lawyer, Richard Sprague. As The Last Investigation details, Sprague's refusal to defer to the intelligence community, the CIA in particular, brought him into conflict with his committee heads, and he eventually resigned, to be replaced by Blakey.

The contacts between Oswald, purportedly a Castro supporter, and the violently anti-Castro Cuban exile community headquartered in Miami became a natural point of Fonzi's investigations. His crucial discovery was the testimony of Antonio Veciana, leader of the exile group Alpha 66. Veciana's CIA contact was a man he knew as 'Maurice Bishop', and in 1963, Veciana arrived in Dallas for a meeting with Bishop, to find him conferring with a man he later identified as Oswald. Fonzi was able to show Bishop was in reality David Atlee Phillips, who had also been the CIA's station chief in Mexico City when Oswald was purportedly filmed and recorded at the Soviet consulate there. Veciana would later survive an assassination attempt on him just at the time the HSCA report was released.

Fonzi's digging into the connections between Cuban exiles and their CIA handlers, as well as mob figures sometimes employed by the CIA, established beyond doubt a prima facie case for conspiracy, and with increasing likelihood, the reality that Oswald was indeed what he said he was, 'a patsy'. Frustrated by Blakey's failure to pursue these avenues, Fonzi wrote another scathing article for Philadelphia magazine in 1980, which formed the basis of his book, and became a leading figure in the assassination research community. He continued to write, for outlets as varied as the New York Times and Penthouse magazine, and served as a lecturer at a number of universities. His work was honoured by more than dozen awards, including the William Allen White, for investigative journalism, and the Mary Ferrell-JFK Lancer Pioneer award. He died 30 August 2012 at home in Satellite Beach, Florida, of complications from Parkinson's disease. He is survived by Marie and four children. At the end of The Last Investigation, he quotes Slyvia Odio, a key witness ignored and discredited by two government investigations. 'We lost,' she told him. 'We all lost'.

PUTIN AMERICA IN ITS PLACE: The British Press and the 2002 Winter Olympics

 While preparing for London 2012, I discovered in one of my Olympic files this piece, which I wrote during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Not surprisingly, I failed to sell it to any of the British papers, who find both winter sport and self-criticism of minority interest. Ten years later, it would have been interesting to revisit Mitt Romney's success in rescuing the games from the Olympic bribery scandal--the latter of which I did write about elsewhere. Salt Lake is now a dim memory, as is curling in the minds of Britons, and some of the discussion of skating judges may still be esoteric, but here it is, basically as written ten years ago....

PUTIN AMERICA IN ITS PLACE
Winter Games Highlight A Double Standard In The British Press

What better place than Salt Lake City 2002 to un-thaw the Cold War? Incredibly, as US-Russian relations went downhill faster than Alberto Tomba, the British press rushed to back Vladimir Putin’s call for a boycott of the Winter Olympics.  Biased judging was victimising the Russians.  Biased drug testing was penalising the Russians.  Partisan crowds (“those whining snivelling Americans,” as the Independent described them) were intimidating everyone from the President of the IOC to the Russian ice-hockey players who lost to the Czechs (though why the Americans wanted to stage manage a win by the defending champion Czechs was never really explained.) To anyone familiar with Olympic history, the most interesting event has often been hypocrisy, and backing Putin’s putsch was merely the culmination of another gold medal performance by Britain.

Who in Britain cared?  After all, the Winter Games are made up of odd sports with odder nomenclature, not invented or played exclusively by Commonwealth nations. But of course a little America-bashing, admittedly all too easy in these days of Bush junior, is just the thing for feature writers who know little and care less about sport anyway, yet still get sent to cover the world's biggest sporting stage. It made perfect fodder for filling a column or two in the back pages, while ignoring the actual competition.

But then Britain struck GOLD! In curling! Cue Curl-mania!  To anyone with a memory, it was a carbon-copy of Hockey-Madness! thrown up by Britain’s 1988 Go For Gold medal in Seoul. At least most people in Britain actually knew what field hockey was. The BBC began showing every curling match available, and taking it very seriously indeed, as if trying desperately to legitimise the sport, now that Britons were world-beaters.  We suffered through seven years of hockey coverage after Seoul; how long before curling supplants snooker on BBC2?

Had not Putin come along, curling might have distracted Britain from whingeing about biased judging, and blaming it on American spectators, which is like blaming the Birmingham Six's conviction on the courtroom gallery.  The attacks on the US for unacceptable chauvinsim began when the Salt Lake crowd booed ferociously after a Canadian skating pair were denied gold, in favour of the Russians. This was portrayed as unacceptable chauvinism, even though Canada was, at last glance, still a separate country, actually competing against the US.  The crowd, of course, might well have contained a large number of Canadians, but in any event, what they were jeering was judging they immediately recognised as biased and politicised. And they turned out to be right. The Canadians had been cheated by a French judge who felt so guilty over what she had done she actually confessed.  In fact, she had been merely following the orders of her federation, who had cut a mutual cheating deal with, guess who? the Russians, who promised to perform a similar cheat in their favour in another event.  No wonder Putin wanted to shift the blame.

The Russians got caught, but their skaters weren’t penalised, beyond having to share the gold with the Canadians. But in the best traditions of political tit for tat, when Russia's Irina Slutskaya finished second in the women’s skating, the Russians tried a similar appeal.  The only problem with claiming biased judged against Slutskaya was that her silver medal was the direct result of the American judge placing her second in the long programme, behind gold medallist Sarah Hughes, but ahead of the American favourite, Michelle Kwan.  Had the American not dropped the Candian Hughes to second, and the American to third, Slutskaya would have finished third. Meanwhile, the Russian judge had, amazingly enough, placed Slutskaya first. And dropped Hughes all the way to fourth. It made for an embarrassing protest. And no sooner had that controversy died down, than Russian cross country skiers were banned from the Games for blood-doping, with the Americans again being accused of bias, even though the IOC runs drug testing.

“It’s changed because of prize money,” says Jayne Torvill.  But the real question was whether it had changed at all, because money has actually been a factor in figure skating going back to the days of Sonja Henje, and more to the point, judging abuse has a long Olympic tradtion, based on factors of nationalism and mutual benefit. In fact, the ISU instituted the current scoring system specifically to try to eliminate jury-rigging.  Instead, the placements system, which eliminated the averaging of scores, actually made it easier for judges to help their own, and hurt anyone else’s, competitors

So we came full circle.  When an American crowd boos because Canadians have been cheated, it’s because Americans are boorish homers.  But when, for example, at Edmonton’s World Athletics Championships, Russia’s Yegerova WASN’T banned for doping, the British press welcomes the Canadian crowd’s jeering her. In fact, British athletes on the track led the booing. Did I mention gold medal double-standards?

We heard similar yelps about American crowds in Los Angeles and Atlanta.  But the Yanks are wimps compared with the abuse Polish competitors faced in Moscow in 1980, or Japanese received in Seoul in 1988. The fact of geography guarantees Olympic crowds in the US are overwhelmingly American, while a European Olympics is more accessible to more countries. Unlike Britain, America produces contenders in many of the esoteric winter sports, and  surprisingly enough, American crowds do prefer to see American winners. Although when they see those winners, unlike British supporters, they don’t invade the playing surface (the scenes after the women’s curling were another replay of the 1988 hockey final, when the pitch invasion was led by Colin Monyihan, then minister for sport).  Lack of nationalism must explain why the British press was filled with stories about the achievements of Ole Einar Bjorndalen, Janica Kostelic, or Simon Ammann, and a curling gold medal was kept in reasonable perspective. That was meant ironically, by the way, even though, as an American (born) I am supposed by the Brits to be incapable of such a thing. The British find American  partisanship far more reprehensible than, say, the idea of football supporters routinely killing people while following “the beautiful game”.  Presumably this is because Americans are not as culturally advanced as Europeans.

The IOC is predominately Euro-centric. The winter sports federations, each of which supervises the judging at its own events, are overwhelmingly controlled by Europeans.   They are happy to reap the financial benefits that American television brings them, and the record attendances delivered by a venue like Salt Lake City.  But when the routine corruption or incompetence which passes unnoticed in their cozy wintry wonderland is suddenly exposed on television screens around world what can they do?  Blame the messenger.  Blame the Americans.  And the British press jumps on the European bandwagon so fast you’d think it was the Ryder Cup.

Controversy in Olympic judging is as old as the games themselves.  British officials didn’t do a bad job of trying to eliminate American medal winners in London in 1908.  What goes around eventually comes around.  Was Kim Dong-Sung unfairly deprived of his gold medal when he was disqualified in his short-track race?  I happen to think so, but the referee (not ‘the judges’ as the British press insisted) who made the decision happened to be Australian, the same Aussie who had refused to take a gold medal away from his countryman after another Korean caused a total shambles in the 1000m race.  Trying to make up for one bad decision, he made another. The Korean Olympic Committee threatening lawsuits are the same people who organised the 1988 Olympics, which featured some of the most biased judging in Olympic history, in favour of Koreans in boxing, karate, and judo?  Or have we forgotten Roy Jones already?

One solution might be to hold the games only in small winter-friendly countries, where partisanship on the cross-country ski course or the ski jump goes unnoticed by the outside world,  and where the host nation has no contenders in figure skating or ice hockey.  Another is to reduce, rather than increase, the number of sports which let judges choose winners. But figure skating is what pulls in the audience which otherwise doesn’t know and doesn’t care about winter sports, so neither solution is likely to happen. I suppose that too is America’s fault.

JACK TWYMAN: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

The friendship between Jack Twyman and Maurice Stokes, which prompted Twyman to look after his paralysed teammate, is one of the greatest stories in sports. My obit of Jack Twyman is in today's Indy, you can link to it here.

All that was cut from it was some of the basketball detail. Stokes scored 32 points in his very first NBA game, and averaged 16.8 points and 16.3 rebounds in his rookie season, winning the Rookie of the Year award, and making second-team all-NBA, which he would do for each of his three seasons. Twyman averaged 14 points as a rookie, and that would improve to 17ppg in his third year. I pointed out that while Twyman was part of a long continuum of 'white small forwards'--include Cliff Hagan, Jack Marin, Billy Cunningham, Larry Bird, and Dirk Nowitski in that, among others--Stokes was unique in his time. His game was more complete even than someone like Charles Barkley, and he was taller than Barkley as well.

The key bit cut had to do with Stokes' membership on the all-time NBA 'what-if' team. As I wrote, without Stokes, Twyman's scoring 'average went from 17 to 26 points per game the next year, along with 9 rebounds, and in 1959-60 he and Chamberlain became the first players to average over 30 points per game (31.2, along with 8.9 rebounds). After the 1960 Olympics, another Cincinnati University star, Oscar Robertson, joined the Royals; one of the great what-ifs of NBA history is imagining how Stokes,Twyman, and Oscar would have played together. Those Royals also had Wayne Embry, and might have been contenders for years. The rest of the all-time what if team is Bill Walton, Connie Hawkins, David Thompson, and Pete Maravich. That's injury, scandal, drugs, and drugs n all kinds of other shit.

I've never seen the film Maurie, but like Bang The Drum Slowly, it suffered from coming after Brian's Song, and unlike Bang The Drum, a film starring Bo Swenson and Bernie Casey was not aimed at being an A feature. But I think the true story of Twyman and Stokes rivals the fictional one of Bruce Pearson and Henry Wiggin in that baseball novel and film. As I said, it's one of the great sports stories of all time, and because of it, I have always admired Jack Twyman.

MURRAY ROSE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Australian swimmer Murray Rose is in today's Indy, you can link to it here. While I was researching it, it occured to me that the Australian swimmers had been eclipsed by the Eastern Europeans, and their special training techniques, but that, helped by a home Olympics, they'd pushed themselves back into the spotlight. It will be interesting to see if the home pool advantage (and attention in training) helps Britain this summer.

You can see why Hollywood might have been interested in Rose--it would be hard to imagine him looking any more Californian, and the precedent with swimmers was already established. Of course, had he examined the careers of Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe more closely, he might have spared himself the trouble!

Rose's movie career was short-lived, but I do remember him as an engaging swimming commentator, back in the days when it was still a big draw on Wide World of Sports.

Although I'm not really old enough to remember Rose's performance in Melbourne, I do recall the college swimming battles between USC, with their Aussie imports, and Yale's Don Schollander and Steve Clark, both recruited from the Santa Clara Swim Club, almost in USC's backyard. Schollander, of course, was the star of the 64 Tokyo games, which the Aussie blazerati stopped Rose from attending. Clark won three relay gold medals there, setting a world record in the opening leg of the 4x100; he couldn't swim in the individual events because he'd swum with a hurt shoulder at the US Olympic trials. Growing up in New Haven, we followed things like Yale swimming.

PETE GENT: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Pete Gent, Dallas Cowboy receiver and author of North Dallas 40, is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. It was, of necessity, short, but there was a lot more I would have liked to say about both the man, and his book and film. It is probably the best novel about football, but there are other contenders. What it did was to come along, as I said in the obit, after Jim Bouton's Ball Four; a time when writer George Plimpton's Paper Lion and Green Bay Packer star Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay had offered insider looks at the NFL, while Dave Meggesey's Out Of Their League was critical of it from much the same perspective as Gent. But Gent's fiction carried with it an aura of reality, as well as a situation where the intrinsic hypocricsy of those who ran it could be highlighted.

Phil Elliott is forced out of the game he loved because he won't conform, and, unlike Seth Maxwell, the team's good ol' boy star quarterback, he flaunts his non-conformity. He delivers on the field, but that isn't enough, because in the computerised Dallas system, there is always going to be someone bigger and/or faster. In Gent's case it was Lance Rentzel, whom Dallas had identified as a potential flanker to replace Gent, and who available from Minnesota because he'd been caught exposing himself (he was married to the TV starlet Joey Hetherton, which made the story even more bizarre). It had been covered up in Minnesota, but when he was caught again in Dallas it became a cause celebe, and again, as Gent's book makes clear, there is a double standard implicit in the morality of America's Team.

I made quite a bit of the Cowboys' scouting: Bob Hayes, of course, considered himself a football player who happened to run, but most NFL teams didn't take that seriously. Cornell Green, who was a very good corner for a long time, was, like Gent, a college basketball player, and the Cowboys specialised in finding guys at small black colleges or the by-then passe Ivy League. The NBA wasn't as rich an option in those days; John Havlicek was the last player cut by the Cleveland Browns before become a star for the Boston Celtics, but as a 6-4 shooting forward Gent was a long-shot, so to speak, for an NBA career.

Dallas' computerised judgement of talent was a metaphor for our dehumanising era, and in the film--which I said unequivocally is the best ever made about American football--Steve Forrest, as the team's owner, and Dabney Coleman as his brother, who has personal issues with Elliott and who has his job because of nepotism, are the real enemy. They are eerily accurate, except perhaps for the extent of their control (though look at Dallas now) and the way Phil perceives that the coach is merely a tool of the ownership is both perceptive and prophetic, if you think what happened after Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys.

There are many other twists to admire in the film: Charles Durning's smarmy assisstant coach, and the born-again quarterback who is the coaches' favourite, and wears number 9, and who drops the extra-point snap that would have tied their cruicial game, sent it into overtime, which Phil and Seth would surely win. Eerie foreshadowing of Tony Romo in Seattle! The film deals with the medical issues every bit as strongly as Any Given Sunday would many years later (you have read my Pocket Essential Oliver Stone, haven't you?). If it ends with less blackness than the novel, well, the metaphoric ending still works.

Gent wasn't a great writer--his other novels are sometimes heartfelt, sometimes revealing, but never as compelling as his first. But his first novel was a great book, coming at just the right time, making just the right message, in just the right way. He then became part of a group of Texas cynics, many of them transplanted, like Gent, from other areas, that included singer Jerry Jeff Walker and writers Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake, who also wrote good books about football. But his heart probably lay in small town Michigan, to which he returned in the 1990s. The Bangor High School state championship in basketball was a Hoosiers-type story--exactly the sort of sporting triumph which no amount of profit or corporate pressure can take away from an athlete.

CARL OGLESBY: THE INDPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Carl Oglesby, SDS leader and author of one of the most interesting of assassination studies, was in yesterday's Indy (29 September); you can link to the online version here. By the time I came to consider SDS, Oglesby was already on his way out, but his earlier writings and speeches were impressive, and The New Left Reader, which he edited, was a handbook of sorts as I wandered my way through protest. Oglesby's version of left-wing politics reflected his working-class upbringing, and a certain idealism which originally led him to found useful alliances with the wider anti-war and civil rights movements, with whom he organised the first great March on Washington. But his faith in the ultimate rationality of America's political leaders proved misplaced, at best. When the Weathermen came along, Oglesby was condemned as being hopelessly bourgeois, when really what he might have been was hopelessly American.

From that perspective, it's easy to understand the importance the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK had for him; he helped found the Assassination Information Bureau, and he wrote a number of books which reflected the wealth of information he gathered. The most interesting is The Yankee and Cowboy War, which tries to create a sort of unified field theory of the assassinations, and connect the dots between Dallas in 1963 and Watergate in 1972. It was a foreunner of what came to be known as 'Deep Politics', considering the forces that really power our country (and indeed, today, the world) regardless of who holds nominal power, and he tried to identify a power-struggle within that American elite between the old money of the east and the newer money in the west. If you don't see the relevance today, consider the Bush family, Skull and Boners all, who begin as Yankees, merchant bankers in New York with Prescott becoming a senator from Connecticut--but transform into Cowboys--George W goes into the oil bidnez, heads the CIA, and eventually becomes president, and Shrub, full scale born-again Texan, doesn't do much of anything but serves the needs of Cowboys as he becomes governor of Texas and then president, where he gets to recapitulate the Reagan malaise on a far grander scale.

I hadn't seen much by Oglesby on that malaise; he did two books on the JFK assassination in the 90s, but the more interesting of them draws heavily on Yankee/Cowboy, and I've yet to read Ravens In the Storm, his memoir of radical politics in the Sixties, but I surely will. I never even knew he'd made two folk-rock records, and it's interesting because one of the covers makes him look just like the great keyboardist Barry Goldberg. But in many ways he symbolises the better impulses of the Sixties generation--even though, like most of that generation's leaders, he came from the pre-baby boom. Perhaps someone ought to consider why my generation has proven so incapable of leading itself, at least in a progressive direction.

NEWTON THORNBURG: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Newton Thornburg is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. He's a strange contradiction in terms: he went off in totally different directions after his biggest successes, yet in the end went back to the same basic elements for all his best works. Sometimes those two strands conflate: Beautiful Kate (a lousy title, by the way) was both another riff on his theme of disfunctional families and romantic triangles, while at the same time approaching it in ways that made it hard to push either as crime or mainstream.

Thornburg wasn't high profile; in fact despite the delay I believe this was the first obituary to make it into national press in this country or the USA. In researching it, I was helped immensely by Bob Cornwell's excellent interview with Thornburg in Tangled Web, to which you can link here; Bob was also helpful with other details and his own take on Thornburg. I also got to quote my friends Michael Goldfarb and George Pelecanos in the piece, which may be their first joint appearance.

I'm not kidding when I mention the similarities in his best work: he returned to themes over and over. Spurred on by the assignment to write his obit, I decided to catch up, and starting reading Eve's Men (another less-than-perfect title), and even though it's been some years since my last Thornburg, it seemed very familiar indeed.

This is not to demean him. Cutter And Bone remains a pantheon work, like the film Cutter's Way it is one of those rare works that seems both just as good AND just as important as it did when it came out. I remember being bowled over by Beautiful Kate when I read it; as I recall on a visit back to my parents in the late Seventies, the kind of setting made for appreciating Thornburg's concerns. To Die In California is the other key book to check out, but start with Cutter And Bone and see if you aren't totally taken by it.

JOANNA RUSS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Joanna Russ is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. In the flower of my sf reading, late teens and early twenties, I was more impressed by Russ' work than fond of it, though I remember loving Picnic On Paradise, in its Ace Special edition with a beautiful cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, the illustrators of choice for 'New Wave' sf. I made the comparison with Ursula LeGuin deliberately, because they seem to me to be two sides of the feminist coin, in a time and a genre when 'liberation' was still primarily a male game. But they approached it in different ways, and Russ' work always seemed more didatic, more rooted in theory and argument. I could be wrong, but my suspicion is LeGuin's work, more accessible and making its points more metpahorically, will hold up better and survive longer--though as I said in the obit, I think Russ' criticism will continue to be important.

In the piece I used the term 'sci-fi' when I was making a deliberate contrast between the work of Leigh Brackett or CL Moore with the 'speculative fiction' or 'sf' Russ wrote. Call me unreconstructed, but I still love Brackett and Moore and their space opera. But I did use sf in all my other references, which the Indy rendered as sci-fi. If any of you hardcore new wave sf fans were offended, I apologise.

CY TWOMBLY: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY THAT WASN'T

Yesterday I wrote this obituary of Cy Twombly for the Independent, but because of a glitch in my computer, I never actually filed the copy to them, and as they were unable to reach me later they had to rush to get another piece. This is the kind of mistake I hope I never make again, wasting their time and mine, and losing the opportunity to register my appreciation of Twombly in print.

I first wrote about him after I went to the Tate Modern's 'Cycles and Seasons' exhibition in 2008, the very first post for Untitled: Perspectives, which was intended to be a regular blog about art, but has been somewhat irregular instead. You can link to that essay here. I had always been interested in Twombly, because of the Black Mountain connection, and I took time in this obit to try to explain briefly its importance; but there wasn't really space to link the writing of Olson or Robert Creeley, the music of John Cage, the dance of Merce Cunningham and the art of Kline, Motherwell, or Twombly.

But that Tate show was a revelation to me, because although I had a sort of regard for Twombly, I hadn't realised how beautiful much of his work could be, and I was overcome by its ability to express emotion and move me. I regret messing up that assignment from the Independent, and apologise profusely to my editors there. What I wrote for them follows.

CY TWOMBLY, ARTIST

The American painter Cy Twombly, who has died aged 83, was our last link with the glory days of the Abstract Expressionists, but his work was always an awkward fit with that movement, indeed with any modern movement. It was a mark of his idiosyncratic talents that he abandoned New York for Italy just as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline were at their peaks of success; moreover, where all of those artists died at the height of their fame, appreciation of Twombly's work progressed slowly, dividing critics and the public alike. Some of the reasons for this became evident in his hugely successful retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2008. Where individual Twombly canvases might seem ephemeral, random, and difficult, presented together their impact was intensified and became clearer. His mix of dripping colour, hand-written notes or fragments of poetry, and chaotic lines for many obscured his mix of classical and modern concerns. Cynical voices accused him of deliberate obscurantism, but Twombly never indulged in flamboyant display for its own sake, preferring to find new ways to express old stories.

If Abstract Expressionism wanted to go beyond the pure self-involvement of abstraction, Twombly's work can be seen as constantly seeking more direct expression, and even in a European context, spoke of a uniquely American perspective. Like the Abstract Expressionists, there is a sense of American pragmatism, but there is also the intellectual curiosity which allowed him to absorb European classism, and meld it into something sui generis.

He was born Edward Parker Twombly, Jr., 25 April 1928 in Lexington Virginia. His nickname came from his father, a pitcher in baseball's major leagues who was called 'Cy' for his resemblance to the great Cy Young. He studied in Lexington with the exiled Spanish artist Pierre Daura, and after finishing high school, he spent a year at a prep school in Georgia followed by brief spells at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts school. In 1950 he got a scholarship to New York's Art Students League, where he met and became close to Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg introduced him to Franz Kline, and persuaded Twombly to enroll at Black Mountain, an experimental college in North Carolina, where Kline, Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell taught, and where Twombly's affair with Rauschenberg would lead to the breakup of the latter's marriage.

The influence of Kline and Motherwell was apparent in Twombly's first New York shows, one arranged by Motherwell at the Samuel Kootz gallery, and another at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, where he shared the space with Joseph Cornell. But Black Mountain's influence extended beyond painting. The college's rector was the poet Charles Olson, and much of the writing on Twombly's canvases recalls Olson's 'Projective' verse, and his dictum that 'form is never more than an extension of content'. Kline's work is often compared to Chinese written characters, and Olson drew on Ernest Fenollosa's studies of them; we can often see Twombly's graffiti as objects in themselves. John Cage taught music at Black Mountain, and the silences in his work might be seen to have their equivalent in the large expanses of blank canvas in many of Twombly's larger works.

A grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts allowed Twombly to travel to southern Europe and North Africa. 'Virginia is a good start for Italy,' he said, referring to his Southern sense of faded glory, but he returned from that first trip to go into the Army. His service as a military cryptographer also had a profound influence on the writing he would include in his paintings. Moving back to New York, he worked closely with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were was breaking away from Abstract Expressionism, and would be crucial in the foundation of Pop Art. Twombly left Stable for Leo Castelli, fast becoming New York's most influential modern art gallery, but by then he had moved to Italy, and, in 1959 married Tatiana Franchetti, the sister of one of his patrons.

If his 1959 'Poems To The Sea' show a fusion of Kline's art and Olson's poetry while celebrating the peaceful Mediterrean shore, Twombly was already creating new work which reflected the heat and passion of Italy, such as 'Crimes of Passion' and 'Murder of Passion', as well as more classical influences, including Roman myths, particularly Leda and the Swan. His series based on the Discourses of Commodus, which he painted to reflect the assassination of John Kennedy, received a savage reception from the critics when shown at Castelli in 1964. Although that setback caused his production to slow down, he began returning to the States more often, working both in Lexington and in New York. His painting reflected this part-time change of setting, particularly the series Treatise On The Veil, whose strong brush strokes and serenity remind one of late Rothko. At the same time, the elegaic Nini's Paintings seem an almost violent grief in response to the death of the wife of his Roman dealer.

One can see pieces of Shahn's emotional impact and Cornell's cool found-object commetary co-existing in Twombly, but his scale was always increasing. By the Seventies, massive works like his deliberately-mistitled 'Fifty Days At Iliam', based on the Trojan War had restored his reputation, prompting a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1979. He began spending most of his time in the southern Italian coastal town of Gaeta, producing sculptures based on boats and paintings with watery themes, like his version of the myth of Hero and Leandro. Twombly showed at the Venice Biennale three times, thirty-seven years apart, and had retrospectives in Zurich and Paris before the monumental 1994 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, In 1995 the Cy Twombly Gallery was opened at the Menil Collection in Houston.

One of the highlights of the Tate Modern show, titled 'Cycles And Seasons', was Twombly's two versions of what his arguably his greatest work, 'The Four Seasons'. Although influences of music and poetry abound in the paintings, there is an obvious reference point to Poussin, and just last week the Dulwich Picture Gallery opened 'Arcadian Painters', a joint exhibition of Twombly and Poussin, which does much to answer the still-spiteful voices in the British press who, even after his death, rushed to deflate his reputation. Twombly died in Rome 5 July 2011, after a long struggle with cancer. His wife predeceased him in 2010; he is survived by his son Cyrus Allessandro, and by his long-time companion Nicola del Roscio.

Note: this essay appears also at Untitled: Perspectives (On Art