Sunday, August 11, 2013

A00020 - Berthold Beitz, One of the Righteous Among Nations

Berthold Beitz, German Steel Industrialist Who Saved Jews, Dies at 99

By MELISSA EDDY
Published: August 1, 2013
BERLIN — The rise of Berthold Beitz to the head of ThyssenKrupp, the steel conglomerate, is the stuff of modern German legend. He played a critical role in the rebuilding of postwar Germany into an industrial powerhouse.
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Mr. Beitz, right, with Alfried Krupp Jr.

Yet when Mr. Beitz died on Tuesday at 99, he was remembered as much for his efforts to save hundreds of Jews and Poles from the Nazis while stationed in Poland during World War II.
Mr. Beitz (pronounced BITES) worked for an oil company when the war broke out. But rather than calling him up for active duty, the Nazis sent him to supervise the Borislav oil fields, which had fallen into German hands with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Oil was crucial to Hitler’s war machine, and Mr. Beitz wielded considerable power. He used it to create unneeded jobs that spared hundreds of Poles and Jews from being deported to death camps.
His death, on the island of Sylt, off Germany’s northern coast, was announced by ThyssenKrupp.
Often called “the grand old man of German steel,” Mr. Beitz joined the company after the war and over the next six decades transformed it into a publicly traded international conglomerate. While continuing to make steel and armaments, it expanded into building and equipping factories and manufacturing elevators, among other things.
Mr. Beitz’s reputation for integrity, earned during the war, gained him the confidence of leaders beyond Germany’s industrial backbone in the Ruhr River Valley and placed him in a position after the war to renew business and restore diplomatic ties to countries in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sent him on an exploratory mission to Poland in the 1960s, paving the way for Willy Brandt’s normalization of relations with East Germany and its allies a decade later.
“With the death of Berthold Beitz, Germany has lost one of its most eminent and successful corporate personalities, who helped to shape the country in important ways,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
Born on Sept. 26, 1913, in the eastern German city of Zemmin, Mr. Beitz trained to become a banker, but his career took a turn in 1938 when he joined the Shell Oil Company in the northern port city of Hamburg. His experience there led to his war duty in Poland.
After the war, Poland awarded him its highest civilian honor, and the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, honored him as a Righteous Among the Nations, its highest recognition for non-Jews who saved Jews from the Holocaust.
“I saw how people were shot, how they were lined up in the night,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “My motives were not political; they were purely humane, moral motives.”
After the war, as president of the German insurance company Iduna, Mr. Beitz adopted business methods, like bonuses and competitions, that were unusual at that time. His success caught the eye of Alfried Krupp, then 45 and the sole owner of the Krupp steel company. Mr. Krupp had recently left prison after serving part of a 12-year sentence for war crimes, including using slave labor.
Mr. Krupp needed someone with an unblemished reputation, and in 1953 he made Mr. Beitz the company’s chairman. One of his major tasks was to re-establish a sense of purpose and direction among the company’s demoralized employees.
Mr. Krupp died in 1967, leaving Mr. Beitz as executor of his will. Mr. Beitz persuaded Mr. Krupp’s sole heir to renounce his inheritance, with which he then established the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and converted the company into a publicly traded corporation. The foundation today holds a 25.3 percent stake in ThyssenKrupp.
In recent years, ThyssenKrupp has suffered from Germany’s slow economic growth as the country’s center of economic power has shifted away from the Ruhr Valley.
Mindful of that shift, Mr. Beitz invested heavily in the arts and established a cultural foundation that helped transform the Ruhr Valley from an industrial heartland to a hub of postmodern and postindustrial art. The foundation provided the Folkwang Museum with financing for a new building, designed by David Chipperfield. It opened in January 2010.
Mr. Beitz is survived by his wife of more than 70 years, Else; three daughters, Barbara Ziff, Susanne Henle and Bettina Poullain; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Robert Ziff, a grandson, said Mr. Beitz did not like to talk about his experiences during the war. Instead, he gathered letters he had received from survivors and bound them in a book, which he gave to his family.
He “let that do the talking,” Mr. Ziff said.
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A00019 - Eydie Gorme, "Blame It on the Bossa Nova" Singer

Eydie Gorme, Voice of Sophisticated Pop, Dies at 84

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Published: August 11, 2013
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Eydie Gorme, the lively singer with a remarkable range who performed a decades-long act with her husband, Steve Lawrence, that made them the sweethearts of mid-20th-century American pop music, died on Saturday in Las Vegas. She was 84.
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Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence on their wedding day in Las Vegas in 1957.
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"Blame it on the Bossa Nova" was a huge solo hit in 1963.
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Eydie Gorme in 1956.

Her death was confirmed by Howard Bragman, her publicist.
Ms. Gorme and Mr. Lawrence had a sophisticated stage presence and vibrant voices, but they stood out for two other reasons. As rock ’n’ roll conquered pop music, they refused to join in. Instead, they stood resolutely with the standards, performing the songs of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
“If we came out in jeans and sneakers, it would be ridiculous,” Ms. Gorme said in an interview. “We’re stuck with who we are.”
And they specialized in old-married-folk banter that was slightly naughty by pre-sexual-revolution standards. At one point in their “tux and gown” nightclub act, they would dance elegantly and Mr. Lawrence would make a grand gesture, a dramatic dip. When she would say, “I’m getting nauseous,” he would respond, “That used to excite you.”
Despite their long and successful marriage, they had the usual marital disputes, but Mr. Lawrence said it helped the act.
“One of the best shows we ever had was after a terrible argument,” he recalled in 1992. “The orchestra was starting to call divorce lawyers. Who knew what it was about? We went on the stage so hostile. Clenched teeth. I was saying everything a husband always wants to say to his wife. I mean — venomous. And the more we snapped at each other, the more the audience loved it. After the show we were fine. It was like therapy.”
Ms. Gorme and Mr. Lawrence, who starred in a 1958 summer-replacement television series “The Steve Lawrence-Eydie Gorme Show,” won a 1960 Grammy Award as best pop duo and a 1979 Emmy Award in the outstanding comedy-variety or music program for “Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin.”
It was hard to separate Steve and Eydie (no one ever seemed to think of calling them Lawrence and Gorme), but Ms. Gorme did have instances of solo triumph.
One was her 1963 Grammy-nominated hit recording of“Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” inspired by the dance fad of the moment and written by the songwriting team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. Another was “Amor,”recorded a year later in Spanish (a language she spoke fluently from childhood) and an enormous success in Spanish-speaking countries, where it is the song most associated with her.
“She’s like a diva to the Spanish world,” Mr. Lawrence said in 2004.
Her 1966 recording of “If He Walked Into My Life,” a lament from the Broadway musical “Mame,” was also a standout.
Mr. Lawrence had his own solo hit in 1962 with “Go Away Little Girl,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.
Edith Gormezano was born on Aug. 16, 1928, in the Bronx. Her father, a tailor, was from Sicily and her mother from Turkey, but both were Sephardic Jews and spoke Spanish, as well as English, at home.
After graduation from William Howard Taft High School, where Stanley Kubrick had been a classmate, Edith worked as a translator at the United Nations. She also took night courses at City College and began her singing career with bands led by Tommy Tucker, Tex Beneke and Ray Eberle.
Her big break was an audition for “The Steve Allen Show” in 1953.
“They asked me how many songs I knew, and I said 2,000,” she recalled in 1992. “They took one look at me and weren’t so sure. They were looking for a blonde, someone who looked like Marilyn Monroe. And I was, well, me. With my bangs.”
She was hired to perform for two weeks but ended up staying for years, as the show evolved into the “Tonight” show with Allen as host. She was also impressed by a young cast member, Mr. Lawrence, a cantor’s son from Brooklyn, and they were married in Las Vegas in 1957.
“Eydie has been my partner onstage and in life for more than 55 years,” Mr. Lawrence said in a statement. “I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time.”
In addition to Mr. Lawrence, she is survived by a son, David, a composer; and a granddaughter. An older son, Michael Lawrence, died of heart failure in 1986.
Like many performers who were part of the early days of television, Ms. Gorme looked back on that era with fondness. In 1996, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, she said of “The Steve Allen Show” and its very brief rehearsal time, “The beauty was, if you screwed up, that’s what people loved.”
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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A00018 - Marv Rotblatt, Pitcher Celebrated Through Softball Marathon

Marv Rotblatt, 1927-2013

Former White Sox pitcher served in Army, played in minors, sold insurance and gained following at a Minnesota college softball marathon

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In the late 1950s, Mr. Rotblatt settled down and embarked on a career selling insurance for New England Life. He spent 39 years with the company, retiring in the 1990s, his son said.
In 1964, students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., began putting Mr. Rotblatt's name on an intramural softball league, it was said, after a student had one of Mr. Rotblatt's old baseball cards.
Three years later — and every year since — students have played a marathon softball game named after Mr. Rotblatt that runs from sunrise until sunset. The rules of the game require players to use just one hand to hit and field, often carrying a beer in the other.
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    Mr. Rotblatt began attending the annual event shortly after it began and loved it.
    "He initially thought it was a joke and that it was not real, that they put the name of an obscure ballplayer on their game. But once he found out it was the real thing, he was never anything but flattered," his son said. "He went almost every year."
    One year, Mr. Rotblatt brought three bats up to the plate and swung them around in "a vaudeville thing," his son said. He then returned to the plate with one bat, pointed to the outfield in true Babe Ruth fashion and slugged a home run.
    "It worked out that he was the perfect person (to be celebrated)," his son said. "He reveled in this kind of attention."
    Mr. Rotblatt mostly lived in the Chicago area after his major league career, although he moved out to Las Vegas for a time in the 1990s. After experiencing some health problems, he returned to Skokie in 2000, his son said.
    In 1960, Mr. Rotblatt married his wife, Lois, whom he had met while playing in Arkansas in the minors. They divorced in the 1970s. She died last year.
    Mr. Rotblatt is survived by another son, Richard; and three grandchildren.
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    Sunday, July 21, 2013

    A00017 - Leonard Garment, Attorney for President Nixon

    Leonard Garment, attorney to President Nixon during Watergate scandal, dies at 89

    By Emily Langer,July 16, 2013
    • Leonard Garment, a high-powered lawyer and adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, died at 89. (Photo by Frank Johnston/The Washington Post)
    Leonard Garment, a high-powered lawyer and adviser to President Richard… (/ )
    Leonard Garment, a top-shelf Washington lawyer whose most famous client was the embattled president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, at the peak of the Watergate scandal, died July 13 in New York City. He was 89.
    His daughter, Ann Garment, confirmed his death but did not cite a specific cause.
    For decades, Mr. Garment was one of the most prized lawyers on the East Coast. His roster of clients included former attorney general Edwin Meese III, former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, Toshiba, and the jazz bandleader Benny Goodman.
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    The latter client reflected Mr. Garment’s early life as a professional saxophonist and clarinetist. As a young man, he performed in the Woody Herman big band and with future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
    By the end of his career, Mr. Garment was seemingly omnipresent in elite Washington circles. But in his first and most enduringly important assignments here — as special consultant and later counsel to Nixon — he almost seemed out of place.
    For starters, Mr. Garment was a Democrat in a Republican administration. The son of Jews from Eastern Europe, he found himself working for a president who was prone to spewing anti-Semitic vitriol. At one time in his life, Mr. Garment wrote, he had been a “reflexive Nixon denigrator.”
    Mr. Garment met the former vice president in the mid-1960s at the high-powered New York law firm that would bear Nixon’s name as Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander and Mitchell.
    At the time, Nixon was battling political irrelevance after his defeats in the 1960 presidential campaign and the 1962 California governor’s race. Months before joining the firm, he had convened what he called his “last press conference” and told reporters they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
    Mr. Garment, for his part, was battling boredom. “I couldn’t have cared less that Richard Nixon was the political Antichrist of eastern liberalism,” he wrote in a highly regarded memoir, “Crazy Rhythm: From Brooklyn and Jazz to Nixon’s White House, Watergate, and Beyond” (1997).
    Nixon, Mr. Garment wrote, was “an opening to a different life and the possibility of salvation.”
    In the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, he helped assemble the campaign team that would help fill out the ranks of Nixon’s administration. After Nixon’s election, Mr. Garment was named special consultant, a role that relegated him to laboring mainly in what he called “the distant swamplands of Republican politics.” His portfolio included issues such as desegregation and affirmative action, American Indian concerns and the humanities, as well as acting as a liaison to American Jews.
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    His direct dealings with the president, he wrote, were “virtually nonexistent.” In hindsight, such distance worked to his advantage.
    Mr. Garment became legal counsel in 1973, after Nixon fired John W. Dean III, who had begun cooperating with Watergate investigators. Mr. Garment was, he noted, “the last senior White House staffer who (a) had a license to practice law and (b) was not a potential indictee.”
    On Nixon’s urging, he asked then-attorney general Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson resigned rather than comply, leading to the chain of resignations that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
    Mr. Garment was credited with encouraging Nixon not to destroy White House tape recordings, an act that he said would have been obstruction of justice. Mr. Garment later said that the advice was sound legal judgment but poor political advice.
    By late 1973, he had encouraged the president to resign, as Nixon would ultimately do on Aug. 9, 1974. In the last days of the presidency, he spoke little with Nixon, save for one conversation the night before the resignation.
    “I’m sorry I let you down, Len,” the president said. He hung up before Mr. Garment could respond.
    Leonard Garment was born May 11, 1924, in Brooklyn. His mother was from Poland; his father came from Lithuania and made dresses for a living.
    In his memoir, Mr. Garment described his childhood as an unhappy time. Music became his outlet. He funded his education in part by playing clarinet and saxophone in jazz groups, and he graduated from Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School, where he was first in his class.
    In 1957, he made partner at the New York law firm where he would meet Nixon. Mr. Garment described himself as “one of a handful of Jews in my generation who squeezed through the keyhole of the tightly closed Gentile fraternity of Wall Street lawyers.”
    Mr. Garment emerged from the Nixon administration with his reputation undamaged — a product, perhaps, of his distance from the president. Mr. Garment was an adviser to President Gerald R. Ford, who later named him U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

    Leonard Garment, attorney to President Nixon during Watergate scandal, dies at 89

    By Emily Langer,July 16, 2013
    (Page 2 of 2)
    He later returned to legal practice in Washington and New York. He prominently assisted his friend Robert H. Bork, a former Nixon colleague who had finally fired Cox, in his unsuccessful nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987.
    Mr. Garment struggled with depression, as did his first wife, the former Grace Albert, whose death in 1976 was ruled a suicide. Their daughter, Sara Garment, died in 2011, and their son, Paul Garment, died in 2012.
    Survivors include his wife of 33 years, the former Suzanne Bloom, of New York City; their daughter, Ann Garment, also of New York; a brother; and a grandson.
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    In addition to his memoir, he wrote “In Search of Deep Throat” (2000), in which he inaccurately guessed that Deep Throat, the enigmatic source at the center of The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, was Nixon aide John P. Sears. In 2005, W. Mark Felt, a top FBI official, was revealed as the true Deep Throat.
    At one time, Mr. Garment had been suspected as the secret source, an allegation he had always denied. Until the end of his life, he remained devoted to the president he had served.
    “Placed on the fringe of Nixon’s life,” he wrote, “I was exposed mainly to his attractive sides — his intelligence, idealism, and generosity. Only by ‘hearsay,’ mainly tape-recorded, did I ‘see’ the fulminating stranger I was happy not to know.”

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    Thursday, July 18, 2013

    A00016 - Alan Rosenthal, Government Reformer


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    Alan Rosenthal, Who Reshaped Legislatures, Dies at 81

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    Published: July 11, 2013
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    Alan Rosenthal, a political scientist whose ardent belief in representative democracy led him to help reshape and strengthen state legislatures across the country and to criticize their excesses and ethical infirmities, died on Wednesday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 81.
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    Alan Rosenthal as director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

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    The cause was cancer, the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, where he was director from 1974 to 1993, said.
    Mr. Rosenthal had studied legislatures in all 50 states, and worked to change the organization or policies of 35. Among lawmakers and fellow political scientists, he championed a belief that government could be a force for good, and argued — despite public cynicism — that democracy was not broken.
    “He in a lot of ways was the conscience of legislatures,” said Karl Kurtz, the director of the Trust for Representative Democracy at the National Conference of State Legislatures, which itself was shaped by the recommendations in a report by Mr. Rosenthal in the 1970s. “He was always urging them to do better.”
    Among the graduates of his institutes for lawmakers were two former governors, John Engler of Michigan and Pete Wilson of California, and two former senators, Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming. In a tribute in the National Conference’s newsletter, Mr. Simpson called Mr. Rosenthal “one of the greatest influences in my life as a legislator.”
    But Mr. Rosenthal was also known for approaching his subject with pragmatism and an irreverent wit.
    Observing the Ohio General Assembly, he decided to test the old saying that likened the legislative process to sausage making, so he visited a sausage factory. His conclusion, written for State Legislatures magazine in 2001, was that sausage making was cleaner, more efficient, more collaborative and better labeled.
    Between consulting with legislatures, leading institutes for up-and-coming politicians, and writing and editing 19 books, Mr. Rosenthal worked as a guest clown for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He was a donor to its clown college in Florida and often took his children there to watch graduation, where clowns performed their routines. (At the invitation of a former student, he also served as a judge for the Miss Las Vegas pageant in 2000.)
    When Mr. Rosenthal started out as a young professor of political science in the mid-1960s, legislatures were by far the weakest branch of state governments, with most power centered in governors’ offices. They had little staff or office space. A report ranking their effectiveness was called “The Sometime Government.”
    Mr. Rosenthal believed that they could be the most responsive and effective examples of representative democracy. If they were to be equal, he believed, they had to be professionalized. As a result of his advice, legislatures across the country created staff and committees, ethics laws and nonpartisan budget offices, so lawmakers would not have to rely on executive branch estimates of what programs would cost. In Connecticut, for instance, the legislature went from an every two years to an annual schedule, increased salaries and set up a computerized bill-tracking system.
    In later years he often advised legislatures on ethics and campaign finance, pushing for contribution limits, restrictions on how campaign money could be used and full disclosure of lobbyist spending.
    Assuming the part of political anthropologist, Mr. Rosenthal cultivated encyclopedic knowledge of statehouses, getting to know their power brokers, both elected and unelected.
    In his home state, New Jersey, he served as the tiebreaking vote on the Congressional Redistricting Commission in 1992 and 2001, and for state legislative redistricting in 2011, leading one political Web site to declare him the most powerful unelected person in the state.
    While calling himself a moderate Democrat, he said that working with legislators had worn down his partisan “edge.” And his work on the commissions won him praise for fairness from Republicans and Democrats alike.
    Mr. Rosenthal was born in Manhattan on March 18, 1932. His parents divorced when he was young, and he lived with his mother, a teacher, and his grandmother.
    After graduating from Harvard, he joined the Army. Stationed in West Germany during the early years of the cold war as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps, he infiltrated the local Communist Party to cultivate informants. Returning home, he received a doctorate in politics from Princeton and took a job with Rutgers, where he remained until his death.
    He is survived by his wife, Lynda Kresge; two sons, John and Tony, and two daughters, Kai and Lisa, from his first marriage, to the former Lavinia Lamont; a stepson, Nicholas; and eight grandchildren.
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