Neil Genzlinger

His death was announced by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on its website.

Gaines, who spent his early years on a Louisiana plantation, captured the lives and strivings of those he had grown up with in a time of limited opportunities and oppressive racism. Many of the adults he knew in childhood had little education, giving him an accidental underpinning for his career.

“At an early age I used to write and read letters for them,” he told The Boston Herald in 1999. “In that way I got to learn their stories.”

Those stories lent a genuineness to his fiction. His first novel, “Catherine Carmier,” published in 1964, told the story of a young black man who, much like Gaines himself, left his home in Louisiana for college in California before returning to the South. It was not exactly a bestseller — “I didn’t make a damn cent,” Gaines told The New York Times in 1978 — but it staked out his geographical and emotional territory.

By the time his second novel, “Of Love and Dust,” came out three years later, he was beginning to gain some attention. “Aside from occasional technical awkwardness,” novelist Robert Granat wrote of the book in The Times Book Review, “the writing is clean, and Mr. Gaines paints some vivid scenes and fine portraits.”

In February 1969, when James Baldwin wrote a scalding essay in The Times about the difficulties faced by black artists, it was Gaines’ novel he cited in making a point about film and television.

“In such a system, it makes perfect sense that Hollywood would turn out so ‘liberal’ an abomination as ‘If He Hollers, Let Him Go,’” Baldwin wrote, referring to a forgettable movie of the day, “while leaving absolutely unnoticed and untouched such a really fine and truthful study of the black-white madness as, for example, Ernest J. Gaines’ ‘Of Love and Dust.’”

It was not long before Hollywood did take notice. In 1971, Gaines published “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the sprawling story of the fictional title character’s long life, which begins in slavery and continues into the civil rights era.

The book was a critical smash. Alice Walker, in The Times, called it a “grand, robust, most valuable novel that is impossible to dismiss or to put down.” Three years later, CBS made it into a television movie starring Cicely Tyson as the title character. The production won nine Emmy Awards.

Two subsequent books, also widely acclaimed, were made into movies as well: “A Gathering of Old Men” (1983) and “A Lesson Before Dying” (1993).

“A Gathering of Old Men” weaves together multiple viewpoints, including those of a group of old black field hands, to tell a tale of subjugation on a Louisiana plantation.

“He uses a couple of dozen narrators,” Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review in The Washington Post, “each of whom he imbues with a voice that is distinct and believable. Not least, he knows how to tell a story, and ‘A Gathering of Old Men’ is a good one.”

“A Lesson Before Dying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is the story of a young Southern black man’s struggle for dignity as he awaits execution in prison.

Charles R. Larson, reviewing it in The Chicago Tribune, wrote, “This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”

Ernest James Gaines was born Jan. 15, 1933, on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne Jefferson Gaines, were sharecroppers.

“I attended school about 5 to 5 1/2 months out of the year,” he said in a video interview on the Ernest J. Gaines Center’s website. “The rest of the time, I had to work in the fields.”

His early life on the plantation gave him the foundation for many of his novels, including “Of Love and Dust,” whose central character is a young black man, accused in a murder, who is “bonded out” to a harsh plantation owner.

“When I brought my young killer to the plantation,” Gaines said in an interview in “Conversations With Ernest Gaines,” a book edited by John Lowe and published in 1995, “I knew the kind of house he would have to live in; I had lived there 15 years myself. I knew the kind of food he would eat; the same kind that I had eaten. I knew the kind of clothes he would wear, because I had worn the khaki and denim clothes myself. I knew the work he would have to do.”

Gaines’ father left when he was young, and his mother remarried and moved to California, leaving him in the care of a great-aunt, Augusteen Jefferson. Her “quiet heroism,” he later said, became the model for several of the strong female characters in his novels, including Jane Pittman. Jefferson could not walk, but she “taught me the importance of standing,” as he wrote in the dedication of “Miss Jane Pittman.” And she was a disciplinarian when necessary.

“She had the strongest pair of arms,” he said. “She could whip hard. I had to go out and break the switch, bring it to her, kneel down, and get my whipping.”

Because she couldn’t walk, many people came to visit Jefferson at her home. Gaines listened to their stories and, just as important, the cadences of their speech, absorbing details and yarn-spinning techniques that would be reflected in his books.

Gaines left Louisiana in 1948 to join his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California. There he was able to do something that was forbidden to him in Louisiana: go to a library. Once he did, he began to discover the great novels — he especially liked Turgenev and the other Russians — but also found they were missing something.

“Many left me with the feeling of disappointment,” he told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 1999. “They were not describing my people, my aunt, my brothers or my friends whom I played ball and marbles with. I did not see me.”

Gaines tried filling that gap while still a teenager, writing a novel and sending it off to a New York publisher. When it was rejected, he burned the manuscript, he said.

After serving in the Army from 1953-5, he enrolled at San Francisco State University, publishing short stores in a literary journal there. That was enough to get him a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford University, where he stayed for a year before settling in San Francisco.

He worked an assortment of jobs while continuing to write. He took another pass at the novel he had destroyed as a teenager, but was having trouble with it. Then, in 1962, as he followed the reports about a black man, James Meredith, who was trying to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi, he had an epiphany.

“I realized then with all the trouble he had to put up with, I must go to Louisiana if I’m going to write my novel,” he told CNN in 2010. “I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.”

He returned to his home state in early 1963 and finished the book, “Catherine Carmier,” six months later. “Miss Jane Pittman,” in 1971, made him famous, and the next year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He became a writer in residence at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1981. In 2008, the university established the Ernest J. Gaines Center to promote the study of his life and works.

Gaines was named a MacArthur Fellow — the “genius grant” — in 1993. In 2000, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton.

“His body of work has taught us all that the human spirit cannot be contained within the boundaries of race or class,” Clinton said at the award presentation at the White House.

In 2013, President Barack Obama presented Gaines with the National Medal of Arts.

Among Gaines’ other books are “Bloodline” (1968), a collection of five stories; “In My Father’s House” (1978), about a civil-rights leader and a mysterious stranger; and “The Tragedy of Brady Sims” (2017), a novella about a courthouse shooting.

Gaines married Dianne Saulney, a Miami attorney he had met at a book fair, in 1993.

“In the earlier years I couldn’t take the chance,” Gaines said, explaining his relatively late-in-life marriage. “I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something. I was afraid it wouldn’t be the writing.”

His wife survives him. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.

Shortly after the turn of this century, the Gaineses were visiting the black cemetery on the grounds of the old plantation where he grew up, where many of his ancestors are buried. They noticed a for-sale sign on a nearby 6-acre plot, bought it and built a house there.

They also rebuilt a 1930s-era church where Gaines had received school lessons, and moved it from one part of the plantation to their new backyard. And they formed an association to preserve and keep up the cemetery, holding an annual beautification day. Gaines thought it was the least he could do for his ancestors and the others buried there.

“They had nothing,” he told The Times in 2010. “At least here they each have 6 foot of ground.”

Gaines knew that whatever storytelling gifts he had came from those people and his upbringing. In the 1978 interview with The Times, he explained that the art wasn’t merely in the tale, but in the shaping of it.

“Content is probably only 40% of it, no more than 50%, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “If a book doesn’t have form, then damn, it ain’t no novel. We can go down the block right now and find a guy on the next corner who’ll tell the biggest and truest story you can ever hear. Now, putting that story down on paper so that a million people can read and feel and hear it like you on that street corner, that’s going to take form. That’s writing.”

This article originally appeared in

Ernest J. Gaines, Novelist of 'Miss Jane Pittman,' Dies at 86

Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote of the inner struggle for dignity among Southern black people before the civil rights era in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and other acclaimed novels, died Tuesday at his home in Oscar, Louisiana. He was 86.

His daughter, Laurie Newbound, said through a spokeswoman that the cause was complications of Lewy body dementia.

Slade was a stage actor and theatrical producer before he turned his attention to writing. After substantial success in Canada, he signed a contract with Screen Gems to write three television pilots a year.

With Harry Ackerman he created “Love on a Rooftop,” a romantic comedy seen on ABC in the 1966-67 season. He fared somewhat better as a creator of “The Flying Nun,” which premiered in 1967 and ran for three seasons, advancing the career of its young star, Sally Field.

“The Partridge Family,” a comedy about a musical family that finds success as a pop band, made its debut in September 1970, with Shirley Jones as the matriarch and David Cassidy playing the resident heartthrob.

“While in Canada I had written a television play called ‘The Big Coin Sound,’ which was about a vocal group,” Slade recalled in his memoir, “Shared Laughter” (2000). “Then one night I happened to catch a family group called the Cowsills on ‘The Tonight Show.’ Since ‘The Sound of Music’ was enormously popular at the time, I thought the combination of original music and comedy could be very effective in a television series.”

The producers originally thought of casting some members of the Cowsills, but, as Slade put it, they “didn’t really fit into any of the characters that I had written,” and so Jones, Cassidy, Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce and others were cast as Partridges. The resulting show ran for four seasons on ABC, made a teenage idol out of Cassidy, spawned hit records and became a touchstone of 1970s kitsch.

Slade wrote a number of the show’s 96 episodes, but by the end of its run he had become disenchanted with television and had turned his attention back to his original interest, theater. In 1975 he found spectacular success with “Same Time, Next Year,” a two-hander about a man and a woman, each married to someone else, who are having a very particular type of affair, meeting just once a year at the same inn.

The play, with Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin constituting the opening-night cast and Gene Saks directing, ran for almost 3 1/2 years. Clive Barnes, reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, was ecstatic.

“It is a delicious and very moral kind of immoral play,” he wrote. “It has wit, compassion, a sense of humor and a feel for nostalgia — who could ask for anything more? It restores one’s faith in the possibility of a commercially styled Broadway hit — for here is a play clearly geared for popularity that does not for one moment talk down to its audience.”

Slade’s first Broadway credit, it was nominated for a Tony Award for best play.

“Same Time, Next Year,” which ran for 1,453 performances on Broadway and had name actors replacing the original stars over the years, became a staple of theaters large and small and is often described as one of the most-produced plays in the world. Slade adapted it into a 1978 movie, which starred Burstyn and Alan Alda. It was nominated for four Oscars.

Part of the appeal of the play is that Slade made it more than merely a gentle romance. As its characters meet year after year, they change in ways that reflect the changing times.

“What puts the final icing on Mr. Slade’s wonderfully confectioned cake,” Barnes wrote, “is the way in which he contrives to give us a social history of the United States during the past quarter‐century. His eye and ear for salient detail are sure, and the period feel is assisted by the evocative use of nostalgic tapes (speeches, songs, sports broadcasts of the period) between the scenes. Clever, clever, Mr. Slade.”

Bernard Slade Newbound was born on May 2, 1930, in St. Catharines, Ontario, about 13 miles from Niagara Falls. His parents, Frederick and Bessie Newbound, were British, and in 1935 they returned to England. During World War II, the family moved around constantly because of wartime evacuations; young Bernard attended 13 schools in seven years.

At 18 he returned to Canada, settling in Toronto and taking a job “working in a customs cage stamping little cards that came out of nowhere and went he knew not whither,” as Macleans magazine put it in 1975. He answered an ad for summer-stock actors, leading to numerous roles onstage and on television and radio in Canada.

In 1953 he married Jill Foster, an actress who had responded to that same summer-stock ad, and they ran a theater in Vineland, Ontario, for a time.

Slade’s writing credits in the early 1960s included several installments of the Canadian anthology series “Playdate” and “Encounter.” In 1964 he relocated to Los Angeles. In addition to his early breakthrough, “Love on a Rooftop,” he wrote 17 episodes of the popular comedy “Bewitched” in the mid-1960s. In the early 1970s he created and wrote episodes of “The Girl With Something Extra,” which also starred Field, and “Bridget Loves Bernie.”

In David Cassidy’s autobiography, “Could It Be Forever? My Story” (2007), Slade is quoted explaining the origin of the family name in his best-known TV show.

“The show was originally called ‘The Family Business’ and later changed to ‘The Partridge Family,’” he said. “I went to school in England and played on the soccer team. The center-half was a guy named Partridge, which, as it turned out, was not that uncommon a name. But at the time I thought it was unusual and it seemed fitting.”

Slade began writing “Same Time, Next Year” while waiting in an airport, sketching out the first scene on airline stationery. He wrote many other plays as well. One of them, “Tribute,” about a man who learns he has leukemia, opened on Broadway in June 1978. It starred Jack Lemmon and ran for 212 performances. Lemmon also starred in a 1980 film version.

Slade had another Broadway success with “Romantic Comedy,” which opened in October 1979 with Mia Farrow and Anthony Perkins leading the cast.

“Writing for theater is very public,” Slade told The Times as that play was getting ready to open. “You put it on the line each time. Elsewhere you’re as good as your best play, but in America you seem to be only as good as your last.”

“Romantic Comedy” ran for almost a year, but Slade’s last Broadway effort, “Special Occasions” in 1982, was a flop. It starred Richard Mulligan and Suzanne Pleshette, who was then well known from the popular 1970s TV series “The Bob Newhart Show.”

“It’s not nearly as amusing as ‘The Bob Newhart Show,’ ” Frank Rich wrote in The Times, “it’s just longer and more sparsely populated.”

It closed after the opening-night performance.

Slade’s wife died in 2017. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a sister, Shirley Rabone; a son, Chris Newbound; and four granddaughters.

In 1975, as he was transitioning out of TV writing, Slade acknowledged having some trepidation early in his career about the types of things he was writing.

“The closest I came to being embarrassed is when I wouldn’t tell people the title of what I was working on,” the Macleans article quoted him as saying. “I was ducking into doorways when I’d see friends. I mean, I did not want as an epitaph, ‘He Created The Flying Nun.’ ”

Bernard Slade, 'Partridge Family' Creator and Playwright, Dies at 89

Bernard Slade, a writer who created the enduring 1970s television series “The Partridge Family,” among other shows, and wrote one of the most successful plays in Broadway history, “Same Time, Next Year,” died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 89.

His son Brian said the cause was a heart attack.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Ackerman, generally with business partners, operated theaters in the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island and various suburbs. Some were standard commercial theaters, but he was beloved among cinephiles for the houses, most of them single-screen, that showed foreign films, independent films, quirky films, films too controversial for the mainstream.

Perhaps chief among these was the 68th Street Playhouse on Third Avenue in Manhattan, which he acquired in 1969. He built its reputation as a destination for movie lovers, as he had already done for the Carnegie Hall Cinema on Seventh Avenue, which he and two partners opened in 1961.

Having the Meyer Ackerman seal of approval could take an under-the-radar film a very long way. When he presented the French film “La Cage aux Folles” at the 68th Street Playhouse in 1979, it ran for an astonishing 19 months. It ran for so long, in fact, that by the time of its final showing at 68th Street, in December 1980, the sequel, “La Cage aux Folles II,” was already out. Ackerman of course booked it.

He had another spectacular success with “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” a gentle comedy from South Africa that became a word-of-mouth phenomenon after he opened it in July 1984.

“After five months, the film took on a life of its own, and we were no longer selling it,” Ackerman told The New York Times a year later, with people still lining up outside the 68th Street Playhouse to see the movie. “We get young people, old people, middle-aged people, sophisticated and unsophisticated people and all ethnic groups.”

Ackerman was born on Feb. 27, 1923, in the Bronx. His father, Isidore, was a waiter, and his mother, Molly (Stern) Ackerman, was a maid; both were from Hungary.

Meyer grew up in the Bronx and, after graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

After studying at Institute of Film Techniques of the City College of New York, Ackerman held several jobs at Columbia Pictures, although, as he told The Times in 2005, they “had nothing to do with the art end, which was what I liked.”

In 1950, a longtime friend, Sid Bernstein, introduced him to Marilyn Weingarten; they married the next year. Bernstein, a promoter, later became known for a different sort of introduction: He was a key figure in introducing the Beatles to the United States.

In the mid-1950s, Ackerman took over the Devon, a theater in the Bronx that had opened in the 1930s, and he and his partners, Bob Ferman and Eve Schlosser, soon added theaters in Irvington, New Jersey, Syracuse and elsewhere.

In 1961, they renovated an off-Broadway theater in a corner of Carnegie Hall into a 300-seat movie house concentrating on foreign and independent films.

“The supply is there,” Ackerman told The Times that year. “It only takes time, selectivity and, I suppose, faith in your choices.”

When the cinema opened in May 1961 with Italian director Luchino Visconti’s “White Nights,” Times critic Bosley Crowther was more impressed with the house than he was with the movie.

“We are happy to report that the red, white and gold theater is a lot brighter than this black and white film,” he wrote.

As his theater holdings grew, Ackerman found himself courted by film world figures eager to secure a spot in one of his cinemas.

“It was a time when art films played exclusively at one theater,” Brian Ackerman, founding director of programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, said by email, “and almost by definition, films that opened in New York were an American, if not a world, premiere.”

Especially in New York, this was a vigorous period in cinema, with moviegoers growing more adventurous and numerous theaters opening.

“The key theaters were all situated along a relatively narrow band of Midtown,” Brian Ackerman said. “So there was this wonderful dynamic of jockeying for films and position all the time, and art houses were always angling to elevate their reputation so the range of films they could select from would expand.”

Meyer Ackerman could be unrelenting when he found a film he liked. It took him four years to secure the rights to “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” which had been released in South Africa in 1980. His wife played a part in that story.

Ackerman had seen a 20-minute promotional reel for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980.

“I saw it, loved it and wanted to distribute it, but they had ambitions of selling it to a major,” he told The Times in 1985. Jensen-Farley Pictures, another distributor, obtained the rights and was planning on premiering it in the United States in a string of Southern theaters.

Marilyn Ackerman, her interest in movies blossoming as a result of her husband’s career, had founded the Westchester Cinema Club with Beth Kochen in 1980. Club members got to see screenings of movies before their general release, and Marilyn Ackerman secured a showing of “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” collecting comment cards afterward from those in attendance.

“I sent those sensational comment cards to Jensen-Farley,” Meyer Ackerman recalled, “with a letter that said: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got in this picture. You’ve got to open in New York.’”

Jensen-Farley continued to decline. But happily, at least for Ackerman, the company went bankrupt in 1983 before it could release the film. The tenacious Ackerman eventually secured the rights from Fox’s classics division.

Marilyn Ackerman died in 2012. In addition to his son Brian, Meyer Ackerman is survived by another son, Farrell; a daughter, Harriet Ackerman; and five grandchildren.

Ackerman’s art-house cinemas gradually fell by the wayside as high rents and the rise of the multiplex changed the movie presentation business. The 68th Street Playhouse closed in 1996.

For years the Westchester Cinema Club held its screenings at the 350-seat Scarsdale Fine Arts Cinema, which opened in 1972. Ackerman and two partners, Arthur and Bob Tolchin, built that theater from the ground up, imbuing it with the look and feel of an East Side art-house venue.

But that theater, Ackerman’s last, is also now gone; it closed in 2006. The final film shown there was Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” — the nostalgia-tinged story of a small theater that, by the movie’s end, is slated for demolition.

Meyer Ackerman, 96, Whose Theaters Were Loved by Cinephiles, Dies

Meyer Ackerman, whose movie theaters brought hard-to-find films to audiences in and around New York City in the decades before home video and the internet made hidden cinematic gems easier to access, died on Oct. 21 in White Plains, New York. He was 96.

Plame said the cause was organ failure.

Wilson served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career that began in 1976. One posting had been to Niger, and in 2002, by then a private citizen, he was asked by the CIA to travel to that country to try to verify reports that Niger had sold a nuclear material, uranium yellowcake, to Iraq in the 1990s. At the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, and among the issues was whether Iraq had or was developing nuclear weapons.

Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq deal were false. After Bush, in his State of the Union Message in January 2003, said that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and then ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later, Wilson felt the record needed to be corrected.

On July 6, 2003, he wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

“If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why),” he wrote. “If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”

That suggestion did not sit well with Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration. A week after the Op-Ed was published, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist with conservative leanings and Republican connections, wrote a column identifying Plame as a CIA operative, a startling breach given that her work required secrecy.

An investigation into the leak of Plame’s identity led to charges against Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., not for leaking the information but for lying about his conversations with reporters about Plame and for obstruction of justice. Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence, and last year President Donald Trump gave him a full pardon.

For Wilson, the decision to write the Op-Ed article was a matter of patriotic duty.

“The path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own mind,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity.” “My government had refused to address the fundamental question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address. Time after time during the previous four months, from March to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order to defend us against the threat of the ‘mushroom cloud,’ when they knew, as did I, that at least one of the two ‘facts’ underpinning the case was not a fact at all.”

Plame said he had never regretted the decision.

“He did it because he felt it was his responsibility as a citizen,” she said. “It was not done out of partisan motivation, despite how it was spun.”

“He had the heart of a lion,” she added. “He’s an American hero.”

Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69

Joseph C. Wilson, the long-serving U.S. diplomat whose clash with the administration of President George W. Bush in 2003 led to the unmasking of his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, resulting in accusations that the revelation was political payback, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 69.

ABC News, in a posting on its website Tuesday morning, said the cause was breast cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2002.

Roberts started her career at CBS, then began working for NPR in 1978, covering Capitol Hill. She joined ABC in 1988. Her three decades at the network included anchoring, with Sam Donaldson, the Sunday morning news program “This Week” from 1996 to 2002.

“Cokie’s kindness, generosity, sharp intellect and thoughtful take on the big issues of the day made ABC a better place and all of us better journalists,” James Goldston, president of ABC News, said in a statement.

Roberts was both reporter and commentator during her career and was widely respected both by her fellow journalists and by those she covered. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., recalled on Twitter on Tuesday a 2001 talk in which she “encouraged all of us, Republicans and Democrats, to always seek consensus where we could.”

“I’ll never forget how moving she was,” he added.

Danielle Kurtzleben, an NPR reporter, praised Roberts as an example for younger generations of journalists.

“I’m proud as hell — proud as hell — to work at a news organization that has ‘Founding Mothers’ whom we all look up to,” she said on Twitter. “God bless Cokie Roberts.”

Michelle and Barack Obama, in a statement, called Roberts “a role model to young women at a time when the profession was still dominated by men; a constant over 40 years of a shifting media landscape and changing world, informing voters about the issues of our time and mentoring young journalists every step of the way.”

And President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to California from New Mexico, said of her: “I never met her. She never treated me nicely. But I would like to wish her family well. She was a professional and I respect professionals. I respect you guys a lot, you people a lot. She was a real professional. Never treated me well, but I certainly respect her as a professional.”

Cokie Roberts Dies; Veteran Broadcast Journalist Was 75

Cokie Roberts, the pioneering broadcast journalist known to millions for her work with ABC News and NPR, died Tuesday in Washington. She was 75.

If Roberts brought deep knowledge and keen insight to her work, that was in part because she was a child of politicians and first walked the halls of Congress as a girl. Her father was Hale Boggs, a longtime Democratic representative from Louisiana who in the early 1970s was House majority leader. After he died in a plane crash in 1972, his wife and Roberts’ mother, Lindy Boggs, was elected to fill his seat. She served until 1991 and later became U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Her background gave Roberts a deep respect for the institutions of government that she covered, and she did not hold herself or her journalism colleagues blameless for the problems of government.

“We are quick to criticize and slow to praise,” she said in a commencement address at Boston College in 1994.

“But,” she told the crowd, “it’s also your fault.” Constituents, she said, needed to allow members of Congress to make the tough votes and “let that person live to fight another day.”

In an oral history recorded for the House of Representatives in 2007 and 2008, she expanded on the impact of her childhood experiences in shaping her admiration for America’s institutions.

“Because I spent time in the Capitol and particularly in the House of Representatives, I became deeply committed to the American system,” she said. “And as close up and as personally as I saw it and saw all of the flaws, I understood all of the glories of it.”

“Here we are, so different from each other,” she added, “with no common history or religion or ethnicity or even language these days, and what brings us together is the Constitution and the institutions that it created. And the first among those is Congress. The very word means coming together. And the fact that messily and humorously and all of that, it happens — it doesn’t happen all the time, and it doesn’t always happen well, but it happens — is a miracle.”

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born Dec. 27, 1943, in New Orleans. She said that her brother, Tommy, invented her nickname because he couldn’t say “Corinne.”

She, her brother and her sister, Barbara, were immersed in political life, accompanying their father on campaign trips, attending ceremonial functions, and witnessing the discussions when other political leaders would come to dinner.

“Our parents did not have the children go away when the grown-ups came,” Roberts said. “In retrospect, I’ve sometimes wondered, ‘What did those people think to have all these children around all the time?’ But we were around, and it was great for us.”

Though her father had considerable influence on her, so did her mother, who was active in furthering her father’s career, along with other women she came to know like Lady Bird Johnson.

“I was very well aware of the influence of these women,” she said, adding, “I very much grew up with a sense, from them, that women could do anything, and that they could sort of do a whole lot of things at the same time.”

The author of eight books, Roberts explored in many of them the role of women in shaping the country, with titles like “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters” (1998) and “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation” (2008).

She attended Catholic schools in New Orleans and Bethesda, Maryland, and graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1964 with a degree in political science. In 1966 she married Steven V. Roberts, who was a correspondent then for The New York Times. Journalism was a largely male world at the time, something driven home to her when she went job hunting.

“In 1966 I left an on-air anchor television job in Washington, D.C., to get married,” she told The Times in 1994. “My husband was at The New York Times. For eight months I job-hunted at various New York magazines and television stations, and wherever I went I was asked how many words I could type.”

She eventually became a radio correspondent for CBS, before joining NPR in 1978. With her fellow newswomen Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer, she began to change the journalistic landscape.

“As a troika they have succeeded in revolutionizing political reporting,” The Times wrote in that 1994 article. “Twenty years ago Washington journalism was pretty much a male game, like football and foreign policy. But along came demure Linda, delicately crashing onto the presidential campaign press bus; then entered bulldozer Nina, with major scoops on Douglas Ginsberg and Anita Hill; and in came tart-tongued Cokie with her savvy Congressional reporting. A new kind of female punditry was born.”

Roberts wrote a syndicated political column with her husband for many years. They lived in Europe for a time in the 1970s, and over the years she covered international stories, but Washington was her main turf. She covered Congress at a time when her mother was an increasingly important member of it, though that proved to be not as big a benefit to her professionally as it might have seemed, Roberts said.

“She would never tell me anything,” she said in the oral history. “She was disgustingly discreet.”

Roberts continued to provide segments for NPR even after joining ABC. The difference between the two, she said, was partly a matter of airtime.

“My average piece from the Hill for NPR would be 4 1/2 minutes,” she said, “and my average piece for ABC would be a minute, 15.”

At NPR, one of her regular segments was “Ask Cokie,” in which she used her vast knowledge of Washington, politics and history to answer listeners’ question on matters major, minor and obscure. One asked whether nuclear weapons could be launched by executive order only, absent Congressional authorization. One wanted to know where the phrase “lame duck session” came from.

In a recent installment pegged to the 100th anniversary of the House vote to approve the 19th Amendment, Steve Inskeep, the host, found himself interrupted by Roberts when he used the phrase “granting women the right to vote” to introduce the segment.

“No, no, no, no, no granting — no granting,” Roberts said in her characteristically emphatic style. “We had the right to vote as American citizens. We didn’t have to be granted it by some bunch of guys.”

She is survived by her husband; her two children, Lee and Rebecca Roberts; and six grandchildren.

Roberts received numerous honors, including sharing in several Emmy Awards. In 2008, the Library of Congress named her as a recipient of one of its “Living Legends” awards.

Roberts long had a front-row seat to history. In a 2017 interview with Kentucky Educational Television, she recalled a moment when she had to remind herself not to become jaded by that proximity. It was March 2013, and she was waiting in a cold rain for the Vatican smoke signal that would soon announce the selection of Pope Francis.

“Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into St. Peter’s Square with the rain deluging them,” she said. “And my first reaction was: ‘Who are these people? What are they doing? That is crazy.’ And then I thought, ‘You jerk,’ to myself. ‘You are really not getting it. This is a moment in history that will be maybe the only time in all of these people’s lives that they have this front seat to history, and you’re so privileged you get it all the time.’”

But, she also reflected, big-stage moments give journalists only one part of the larger picture of their times.

“The individual interview with someone who is a mom in a shopping mall,” she said, “can tell you more about what’s going on in the world and how people feel about it than any of those grand things.”

Roberts started her radio career at CBS, then in 1978 began working for NPR covering Capitol Hill. She joined ABC in 1988. Her three decades at the network included anchoring, with Sam Donaldson, the news program “This Week” from 1996 to 2002.

Roberts was both reporter and commentator during her career and was widely respected both by her fellow journalists and by those she covered. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., recalled on Twitter a 2001 talk in which she “encouraged all of us, Republicans and Democrats, to always seek consensus where we could.”

Michelle and Barack Obama, in a statement, called Roberts “a trailblazing figure; a role model to young women at a time when the profession was still dominated by men; a constant over forty years of a shifting media landscape and changing world, informing voters about the issues of our time and mentoring young journalists every step of the way.”

If Roberts brought deep knowledge and keen insight to her work, that was in part because she was a child of politicians and first walked the halls of Congress as a young girl. Her father was Hale Boggs, a longtime Democratic representative from Louisiana who in the early 1970s was House majority leader. After he died in a plane crash in 1972, his wife and Roberts’ mother, Lindy Boggs, was elected to fill his seat. She served until 1991 and later became U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

It was a background that gave Roberts a deep respect for the institutions of government that she covered. She did not hold herself or her journalism colleagues blameless for the problems of government.

“Here we are, so different from each other, with no common history or religion or ethnicity or even language these days, and what brings us together is the Constitution and the institutions that it created,” she added. “And the first among those is Congress. The very word means coming together. And the fact that messily and humorously and all of that, it happens — it doesn’t happen all the time, and it doesn’t always happen well, but it happens — is a miracle.”

She, her brother and her sister, Barbara, were immersed in political life, accompanying her father on campaign trips, attending ceremonial functions, and witnessing the discussions when other political leaders would come to dinner.

Although her father had considerable influence on her, so did her mother, who was active in furthering her father’s career, and other women she came to know like Lady Bird Johnson.

“I was very well aware of the influence of these women,” she said. “I saw what they did. They were very busy, and they were always doing everything.”

“I very much grew up with a sense, from them, that women could do anything,” she added, “and that they could sort of do a whole lot of things at the same time.”

Many of her eight books explored the role of women in shaping the country, including “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters” (1998) and “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation” (2008).

Roberts attended Catholic schools in New Orleans and Bethesda, Maryland. In 1964, she graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in political science, and in 1966 she married Steven V. Roberts, then a correspondent for The New York Times. Journalism was a largely male world at the time, something driven home to her when she went job hunting.

She eventually became a radio correspondent for CBS, then in 1978 joined NPR. With Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer, she began to change the journalistic landscape.

Cokie Roberts, Veteran Broadcast Newswoman, Is Dead at 75

Cokie Roberts, the pioneering broadcast journalist known to millions for her work with ABC News and National Public Radio, died Tuesday. She was 75.

The cause was lung cancer, the wrestling organization WWE said on its website. It did not say where he died.

Race was pitted in high-profile matches against Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair, Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan and other marquee names. In his heyday he was such a name himself, personifying toughness but serving as a transitional figure who helped bring the sport from an era of brawn to one of character-driven performance.

“Before Race, sweaty grapplers played to a relatively small, but loyal and dedicated, group of fans,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in 2001. “After Race, wrestling is a megabillion-dollar industry with huge television contracts, pay-per-view spectacles and a sleazy soap-opera sensibility.”

As Flair, one of professional wrestling’s best-known and most flamboyant figures, put it on Twitter, “Without Harley Race, there was no Ric Flair.”

Harley Leland Race was born on April 11, 1943, in Maryville, Missouri. “It’s not a stage name, as many people still believe,” he said in his autobiography, “King of the Ring: The Harley Race Story” (2004), written with Gerry Tritz. His parents, Mary and George Allen Race, were sharecroppers, he wrote, and his father also drove a bus.

At 15, he said, he was tossed out of high school after slugging the school principal, who was trying to break up a good-natured fight between Harley and an equally rough-and-tumble friend.

“I was barred from school property until I apologized to the shaken but unhurt principal,” he wrote. “I’m not the apologetic type of guy, so it would become a lifetime suspension.”

That suited him fine, because he already knew that he wanted to be a professional wrestler, having heard promotional spots on the radio and seen a few matches on a black-and-white television. He moved further toward that goal when he got a job working on the Missouri farm of the Zbyszkos, a family that included two brothers, Stanislaus and Wladek, who had been professional wrestlers. They taught him moves.

“Mostly what they taught me were submission holds,” Race wrote. “They’d put me in one and say, ‘Try to get out.’ The more I tried, the more I wore myself out or hurt myself.”

He began wrestling professionally in 1960, working in small arenas across the United States. A car accident in 1961 killed his wife, Vivian, whom he had married only a month earlier, and left him seriously injured. In his autobiography, he recalled a doctor telling him that he was unlikely to walk again.

“‘I’ll send you ringside tickets to my first match,’ I told him,” Race wrote.

He and Larry Hennig won a series of tag team titles beginning in 1965. Individual accolades soon followed. He won his first National Wrestling Alliance championship in 1973 by beating Dory Funk — a belt he would win seven more times.

Race accumulated assorted nicknames over the years: “Handsome,” “Mad Dog,” “King of the Ring,” “Greatest Wrestler on God’s Green Earth.” He would often play the bad guy in the ring, inviting the crowd’s scorn.

“He was a good athlete, good looking, the whole package,” Hennig told The Des Moines Register in 2005. “Some rednecks don’t like that. They don’t like to see you talking and mouthing off. But he could back it up.”

Among his claims to fame was being the first man to body slam Andre the Giant, in 1978, when Andre was said to have weighed more than 500 pounds.

Race joined the WWE in 1986. His last serious matches were in the early 1990s. After that he worked as a wrestling promoter and manager for a time, then he started a sort of minor-league wrestling circuit, World League Wrestling, and training school, the Harley Race Wrestling Academy in Eldon, Missouri.

Race was married four times, most recently to Beverly Ann Race, who died in 2009. There was no information on his survivors immediately available.

Race taught the basics of wrestling at his academy.

“The longer your body is on the mat, the longer you are in the business,” he explained to The Register. “When you’re in the air, you gotta land somewhere. If you got the background in basic mat wrestling, you can wrestle anybody.”

But he also taught the showmanship aspect, beginning with the advice that a good match starts with the wrestler’s mindset.

“You go in the ring and you’re the band director,” he said. “You’re not part of the audience or part of the band. What you create in your mind is what makes people get behind you or go against you.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/sports/harley-race-dead.html" id="ba4137ff-2a1d-35ad-aa58-e7d1fe612b8c">The New York Times</a>.

Harley Race, Wrestler Known as 'King of the Ring,' Dies at 76

Harley Race, a professional wrestler who overcame serious injuries from a car accident to become a mainstay of the wrestling circuit, winning numerous individual and tag-team titles in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, died on Thursday. He was 76.

Her son, Gyorgy Feher, said Heller had gone for a swim, a favorite activity, when her body was found floating in the lake. She had been staying at the summer resort of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the town of Balatonalmadi.

The cause of death was not immediately clear. The police, Feher said, saw no sign of a heart attack or aneurysm. “So what can one say?” he said by email. The police ruled out the possibility of a crime, according to the Hungarian news site Hungary Today.

Agnes Heller, a prominent Hungarian philosopher and dissident who repeatedly found herself unwelcome in her own country, died on July 19 while vacationing on Lake Balaton in western Hungary. She was 90.

Neil Genzlinger

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