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Post by Deleted on May 16, 2018 16:54:56 GMT 10
I was talking to Stephen on my Ouija board the other day....he said there is no after life.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 18, 2018 11:09:54 GMT 10
from The New York Times…Reinhard Hardegen, Who Led U-Boats to America's Shore, Dies at 105“We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked upon the coast of the U.S.A.”By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN | 3:48PM EDT — Sunday, June 17, 2018The American passenger freighter Robert E. Lee was sunk by a German submarine in 1942 in the Gulf of Mexico. U-boats, like the one commanded by Captain Reinhard Hardegen, sank or crippled dozens of merchant vessels off the American coast as part of a German operation called Drumbeat. — Photograph: C & C Technologies, Incorporated.REINHARD HARDEGEN, a leading German submarine commander of World War II who brought U-boat warfare to the doorstep of New York Harbor in the winter of 1942, died on June 9. He was 105.
His death, evidently in Bremen, Germany, where he was born and raised, was confirmed in the Bremen news media on Thursday by Christian Weber, the president of the Bremen State Parliament.
Soon after the United States went to war with Japan and Germany, Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German submarine service, sent six U-boats to attack oil tankers and freighters in American and Canadian waters before they could head overseas. The mission, code-named Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), was aimed at further disrupting Britain's precarious supply lifeline and demoralizing the American home front.
Captain Hardegen provided Drumbeat with some of its most stirring exploits when his U-boat sank two ships off Long Island and brought him close enough to New York City to see the glare from Manhattan's skyscrapers in the night skies.
“It was a very easy navigation for me,” he told Stephen Ames, a filmmaker, in a 1992 interview, recalling how his approach was aided by the lights along the shoreline.
Approaching the entrance to New York's Lower Bay on the evening of January 14, 1942, Captain Hardegen climbed to the bridge of U-123 and beheld an illumination that thrilled him.
“I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great,” he wrote in a war memoir published in Germany in 1943. “I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked upon the coast of the U.S.A.”
By the time Captain Hardegen's two war patrols to America had concluded in May 1942, he had sunk or crippled 19 merchant vessels, according to Michael Gannon, the author of “Operation Drumbeat” (1990).
He did so despite suffering a severe leg injury in a crash while serving in Germany’s naval air arm in the 1930s.
Captain Hardegen's marauding and the sinkings carried out by fellow U-boat captains led the Navy to organize convoys of merchant vessels escorted by warships along the coastlines. The Army ordered lights along the East Coast to be doused or shielded to lessen the silhouetting of ships offshore that had made them easy prey for U-boats. That “dimout” put Times Square in shadow, its signature neon advertising signs gone dark.
And Captain Hardegen's exploits evidently inspired the German home front.
A photographer carried aboard U-123 to shoot propaganda pictures was unable to get any clear shots of nighttime Manhattan. But fabricated still photos and movies purporting to show New York's lights as captured from U-123 were shown in German movie theaters, according to Clay Blair's “Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942” (1996).
“Although the fabrications were amateurish, German audiences accepted them as authentic,” Mr. Blair wrote.Captain Hardegen in an undated photo. He is credited with sinking or crippling 19 merchant ships in American waters. — Photograph: Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.Reinhard Hardegen was born on March 18, 1913, in Bremen, Germany. He joined the German Navy and visited New York City in 1933 on a cadet training cruise, going up to the Empire State Building's observatory to gaze at the night skies over the city.
He transferred to the submarine branch in 1939, took command of U-123 in May 1941 and was chosen for Drumbeat after sinking several ships off West Africa, his rank of kapitänleutnant the equivalent of a lieutenant in the United States Navy.
In the early hours of January 14, 1942, he brought U-123 east of Long Island and sank the Norwegian-manned oil tanker Norness some 150 miles from New York City.
He kept his sub underwater during the daylight hours that followed. At nightfall, aided by tourist guidebooks to New York he had brought along, he surfaced and followed the southern shore of Long Island and Queens, glimpsing the lights of homes and cars in the Rockaways and the illuminated Ferris wheel at Coney Island.
After getting to the outer reaches of New York Harbor, he returned to deeper waters off Long Island, where he sank the British oil tanker Coimbra about 100 miles from New York.
The sinkings of the Norness and the Coimbra, a day apart, made for front-page headlines. Captain Hardegen then headed to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where his submarine sank three more ships before he returned to his base at Lorient, France.
On his second war patrol to America, between March and May 1942, his toll including the American oil tanker Gulfamerica off Jacksonville, Florida. But his boat was nearly sunk off St. Augustine, Florida, by a destroyer's depth charges before he managed to get away.
After leaving the submarine service in May 1942, he held a naval training position and worked on the development of advanced submarine torpedoes. In the winter of 1945, with German forces reeling, he was transferred to land warfare and became a battalion commander.
Soon after Germany surrendered, he was arrested by the British, who mistook him for a someone with the same last name who had been a member of the Nazi SS forces. He was held for 16 months before he convinced them that he was a career Navy officer.
“I was not a Nazi,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a 1999 interview. “I did my duty for my country, not for Hitler.”
Returning to Bremen after the war, he founded a marine oil company and was a long-time member of its Parliament.
In confirming Mr. Hardegen's death and remembering his service in Bremen's postwar Parliament, Mr. Weber, its president, said “he continued to be very open” about his wartime submarine service.
Mr. Hardegen and his wife, Barbara, had four children: Klaus-Reinhard, Jorg, Ingeborg and Detlev, according to the book “Operation Drumbeat”. A list of survivors was not immediately available.
Captain Hardegen had earned a reputation for audacity at sea that brought him the prestigious Knights Cross. His fearlessness was on full display when Hitler extended his personal congratulations over a vegetarian dinner in May 1942 after he had completed his final war patrol.
As Captain Hardegen told it, he responded to Hitler's accolades by scolding him for failing to develop a wartime naval air arm, leaving Hitler red-faced with anger. Afterward, a mortified General Alfred Jodl, who was at that gathering, sharply reprimanded Captain Hardegen for “impertinence”. He retorted: “Herr General, the Führer has the right to hear the truth, and I have the duty to speak it.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Richard Goldstein was born in 1944 and is a former New York Times editor and obituary writer; he still writes obituaries for the newspaper although long since retired from the staff. He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife, Nancy Lubell, a clinical psychologist, and their three dogs. His most recent book, “Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II”, was published in April 2010 by Free Press. www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/obituaries/reinhard-hardegen-who-led-u-boats-to-americas-shore-dies-at-105.html
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Post by pim on Jun 18, 2018 11:31:16 GMT 10
Interesting article. When I lived in Canberra I used to escape to the NSW Far South Coast towns of Moruya and Batemans Bay.It's what Canberrans do, especially in winter. To the point that Batemans Bay and Moruya have become Canberra-on-sea. Anyhow local history buffs in that neck of the woods tell of a German U-boat that had surfaced off the coast at Moruya and sank an American Liberty ship. There were also sightings of U-boats surfacing in Gulf St Vincent near Port Adelaide. They used Japanese-occupied Singapore as their base. My favourite story - probably apocryphal but I don't care - is of a U-boat surfacing off farmland on the NZ coast and a landing party doing a quick raid to get themselves some fresh produce.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 18, 2018 11:44:43 GMT 10
I've got an interesting book about a U-boat which sank a couple of ships off the entrance to Sydney Harbour, then hightailed it out of there quick-smart to escape the Australian Navy and crossed the Tasman to NZ and undertook a patrol around the Bay of Plenty, round East Cape and down to Gisborne, then down to Napier. They sat out in Poverty Bay off Gisborne for a few days but didn't see any ships, so decided to enter the harbour basin to see what was in there. They snuck in under cover of darkness on the surface, but using their electric motors and made it right to the inner harbour basin, but nothing was there, so they backed out, but got stuck on a sandbar on the way back out again. The U-boat was so close to the shore that they could see meatworkers turning up for work at 3am and could hear their conversations, but fortunately remained undetected until the incoming tide allowed them to float off the sandbar and make their escape without detection. The U-boat then headed down to Napier where they fired a couple of torpedos at a ship leaving the harbour, but missed, and as the captain was worried they may have been seen, they decided it might be best to bugger-off before the RNZAF or the navy came after them. While sitting off Napier's Marine Parade one evening a couple of days before the failed attack on the ship, some of the officers went ashore in a rubber dinghy and went for a stroll around the town without being challenged. I posted a thread about the book to the Wings Over New Zealand Aviation Forum HERE just over a year ago.
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Post by KTJ on Jul 1, 2018 13:14:48 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…Gudrun Burwitz, ever-loyal daughter of Nazi mastermind Heinrich Himmler, dies at 88She never renounced her father and later helped provide support for Nazi war criminals.By MATT SCHUDEL | 6:47PM EDT — Saturday, June 30, 2018Gudrun Himmler Burwitz in 1938 with her father, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. — Photograph: Associated Press.GUDRUN BURWITZ, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died on May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.
Her death was first reported by the German newspaper Bild, which also confirmed that Mrs. Burwitz had worked for two years in West Germany's foreign intelligence agency. The agency's chief historian, Bodo Hechelhammer, told the newspaper that Mrs. Burwitz worked as a secretary under an assumed name in the early 1960s. The agency does not comment on current or past employees until they have died.
Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.
At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.
The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.
Gudrun, who was Himmler's oldest child and only legitimate daughter, was exceptionally devoted to her father. Himmler and his wife later adopted a son, and had two other children with his mistress.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father's polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates.
When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.
Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.”
“And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”
As the Third Reich was collapsing in May 1945, 15-year-old Gudrun and her mother fled to northern Italy, where they were arrested by American troops. Himmler was seized by Russian forces on May 20, 1945, and transferred to British custody. Three days later, he killed himself by biting on a cyanide capsule he had concealed.
Gudrun and her mother were held for four years in various detention facilities in Italy, France and Germany. She refused to believe that her father's death was a suicide and maintained that he had been killed by his British captors.
She was present at some of the war-crimes trials of her father’s associates in Nuremberg, Germany.
“She did not weep, but went on hunger strikes,” Norbert and Stephan Lebert wrote in “My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders — An Intimate History of Damage and Denial”, their 2002 book about the children of Nazi leaders. “She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing.”
After their release, mother and daughter settled in the northern German town of Bielefeld, where Gudrun trained as a dressmaker and bookbinder. She found it hard to hold a steady job with her family history.
In 1961, she joined the German intelligence service as a secretary under an assumed name at the agency's headquarters near Munich. She was dismissed in 1963, when West German authorities were reviewing the presence of former Nazis in the government.
In the late 1960s, she married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, a writer who became an official in a right-wing political group, and settled in a Munich suburb. They had two children.
Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.
She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika.
She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe”, or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.
The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.
Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.
Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014.
“She was surrounded all the time by dozens of high-ranking former SS men,” Roepke said, after attending one such gathering. “They were hanging on her every word … It was all rather menacing.”
Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon”, and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Malloth was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in the Czech Republic, but Mrs. Burwitz reportedly helped arrange for him to stay at a retirement facility outside Munich on land once owned by Nazi official Rudolf Hess.
“I never talk about my work,” she said in 2015 when British journalist Allan Hall confronted her at her home. “I just do what I can when I can.”
“Go away,” her husband said. “You are not welcome.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He has degrees in English from the University of Nebraska and the University of Virginia and has never taken a course in journalism. He worked for a now-defunct book division of U.S. News & World Report and was a copy editor for The Post's Book World and Style sections before moving on to journalism jobs in Raleigh, North Carolina; New York City; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has been a feature writer, magazine writer, jazz critic and art critic and has covered a wide variety of topics, including murder cases, wild armadillos and the space program. He is the author of a photo-biography of Muhammad Ali's years in Miami and the ghostwriter of the autobiography of civil rights photographer Flip Schulke. He likes writing obituaries because there is nothing more interesting than people's lives. www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/gudrun-burwitz-ever-loyal-daughter-of-nazi-mastermind-heinrich-himmler-dies-at-88/2018/06/30/6d57d42a-7c76-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html
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Post by pim on Jul 1, 2018 14:25:06 GMT 10
You should read The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass. It's the Great German Novel of the 20th century. Anyone who read German literature as part of an Arts degree would find it was a set text. Set in Danzig in the interwar period, then during WW2 and the final section is after the war when Danzig was emptied of Germans by the Russians and it became the Polish city of Gdansk. The main character, a German boy named Oscar, grows to adulthood in Danzig but his growth is stunted by dwarfism. He's depicted on the cover playing a tin drum with Polish colours. At war's end the Red Army informs the Germans that there's a train heading west in an hour and they'd better be on it. They could take one suitcase only. Anything else they owned they had to leave behind. As the train carrying Oskar west leaves Danzig for it to become Gdansk, Oskar feels himself starting to grow. And in his new life in West Germany he does grow - but into a deformed hunchback. It's an allegory of Germany, stunted and shrunk after WW1, deformed after WW2, and haunted by its past. It's why what Merkel did, more than any other German leader since 1945, in letting in those refugees, helped Germany move on from WW2. If Gunther Grass were alive today and wrote a 21st century sequel to the Tin Drum, he'd have Oskar finally grow into a "normal" man.
I had to read it in the original German and it was the only German novel that I needed to read in English translation alongside the German version. Half of it is in Danzig dialect which stumped me!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 1, 2018 19:18:01 GMT 10
Unrepentant interesting character....raised in an a era where fascist took hold and still believed in that politics, and would be many Germans still believing.
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Post by KTJ on Jul 1, 2018 20:00:21 GMT 10
I get the impression from that obituary that Gudrun Burwitz remained a Nazi right to the end of her life.
A real chip off the old block, eh?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 21, 2018 18:28:29 GMT 10
First Hook...next Line and Sinker.
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Post by KTJ on Jul 29, 2018 18:12:49 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…Mary Ellis, wartime volunteer who flew Spitfires, dies at 101She flew fighters, Wellington heavy bombers and other aircraft, usually solo, during World War II.By PHIL DAISON | 4:15PM EDT — Saturday, July 28, 2018British World War II pilot Mary Ellis with a Spitfire at Biggin Hill Airfield, England, in 2015. — Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Press Association/Associated Press.AT THE height of World War II, 26-year-old Mary Wilkins, all 5 feet 2 inches of her, helmet-less and with curly blond hair, climbed down a ladder from the cockpit of a mighty twin-engine Wellington bomber at a combat-ready Royal Air Force base in England.
“Where's the pilot?” someone on the ground crew asked.
“I am the pilot!” she responded.
As a volunteer pilot for Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary, her job was to deliver warplanes — Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, the famous Wellingtons (nicknamed Wimpys), Lancaster bombers and more than 70 other types of military aircraft — from factories to scramble-ready male pilots at bases of the RAF and the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm. She had delivered the Wellington — solo, although built for a five-man crew — from its factory.
“Well, they didn't believe me,” she wrote in her memoir, “A Spitfire Girl”. “One or two of them still decided to clamber on up the ladder to check the aeroplane for the ‘missing’ pilot…. They just could not believe women could fly these aeroplanes.”
The death of Mary Ellis, nee Wilkins, on July 25 at 101 — a year older than the RAF itself — was confirmed by Graham Rose, chairman of Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary Association. The organization works to ensure that the ATA's pilots, men and women — including its chairman’s own mother, Molly Rose — are remembered.
Mrs. Ellis died at her home, next to a runway at Sandown on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. No specific cause was provided.
Mrs. Ellis was one of the last surviving female pilots of the ATA. Only three are thought to be alive.
The “Attagirls,” as they were nicknamed, almost always flew solo and always without compass or radio assistance, guiding themselves via maps and following rivers or railway lines. Mostly British, but including several American, Canadian and other Allied volunteers, they did not fly in combat but faced the daily danger of attack by Luftwaffe fighters and collisions with the huge barrage balloons floating around southern England as obstacles to low-flying enemy planes.
Mrs. Ellis once had to take evasive action to avoid a deadly Nazi flying bomb known as a “doodlebug” or “buzz bomb” because of its noise. With her plane unarmed, she could do nothing to stop it reaching its target in London or elsewhere.
In her 2016 memoir, co-written with journalist Melody Foreman, she recalled flying over Pershore, Worcestershire, when a Luftwaffe fighter plane with black Swastika markings flew alongside her.
“With one hand I waved at this pilot to move away and get out of my sight,” she wrote. “I can picture his grinning face now. Then he cheekily waved back again and again — and then suddenly he was gone. I wondered if it was my blonde curls that caused him to stare as I never ever wore a helmet during my whole career with the ATA. What was the point of a helmet when we couldn't speak to anyone? It didn't do much for the hairstyle either.”
She was once shot at over Bournemouth, in southern England, by “friendly fire” from the ground (“not an experience I ever wanted to repeat”) and had a near miss when landing in thick fog at the same time a combat Spitfire landed on the same runway from the opposite direction. Among her female comrades, that episode won her the nickname “the fog flyer”.
She also survived a crash landing when her Spitfire's landing gear jammed. During the war, the ATA delivered more than 309,000 aircraft using 1,152 male pilots and 168 women. It lost 159 men and 15 women in accidents, usually because of bad weather or failing to find highly camouflaged air bases.
One of those killed was Mrs. Ellis's good friend, the renowned English aviator Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly alone from England to Australia. Her Airspeed Oxford plane, on an ATA delivery flight, crashed into the Thames Estuary near London in 1941.Portrait of Mary Ellis from the autobiography “Spitfire Girl”. — Photograph: Pen & Sword Books.One thing for which the ATA has rarely been praised is being the first branch of the British armed forces to gain equal pay for women, a massive crack in what later became known as the “glass ceiling” for women.
In all, Mrs. Ellis, latterly with the ATA rank of first officer, flew more than 1,000 warplanes of 76 types — including 400 Spitfires — among more than 200 British airfields from 1942 to the end of the war in 1945.
The middle of five siblings, Mary Wilkins was born on February 2, 1917, on her family's 1,000-acre farm near the village of Leafield.
She was 8 when her father bought her a ride in a de Havilland DH-60 Moth two-seater biplane. She was hooked. As a teenager, she persuaded her father to pay for flying lessons, and she earned her pilot's license at 22 in 1939, just as war was looming.
After the Battle of Britain in 1940, when the RAF successfully repelled the Luftwaffe but at a high cost, she heard an ad on BBC radio for qualified pilots to help the war effort.
Criticism, even outrage, quickly followed. C.G. Grey, founding editor of the British magazine Aeroplane, was among the most ardent voices against women in the cockpit. “The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying in a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly,” he wrote.
Years later, Mrs. Ellis recalled: “Girls flying aeroplanes was almost a sin at that time.”
Britain badly needed combat pilots, but there were not enough of them to deliver planes as well as fight the enemy in them. Thus was the ATA founded in 1940, to allow able-bodied but not combat-ready pilots to support the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm. The mission was to deliver planes from factory to base, or often vice versa for repairs.
When the ATA was disbanded at the end of the war, Mrs. Ellis was seconded to the RAF and became one of the first women to fly Britain's earliest jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. After her discharge, she became a rally driver; at the wheel of her black Allard sports car, she won many competitions, including the Isle of Wight Rally.
Having settled on the island in the English Channel, she went on to become air commandant — basically managing director — of the Isle of Wight's Sandown airfield in 1950.
She was thought to be the first woman to run an airport in Europe, and over the next two decades, she did everything from working the control tower to running out to shoo away sheep and wave the aircraft in toward the terminal. She even cut the grass and helped the airfield grow into a busy airport handling flights between the Isle of Wight and many mainland English cities.
She married fellow pilot Donald Ellis in 1961. He died in 2009, and she has no immediate survivors.
“Up in the air, you are on your own,” Mrs. Ellis told a British TV interviewer when she turned 100. “And you can do whatever you like. I flew 400 Spitfires…. I love the Spitfire; it's everybody's favorite. I think it's a symbol of freedom. And occasionally I would take one up and go and play with the clouds. I would like to do it all over again. There was a war on, but otherwise it was absolutely wonderful.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Phil Davison writes obituaries for The Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/mary-ellis-wartime-volunteer-who-flew-spitfires-dies-at-101/2018/07/26/104b2766-90e7-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html
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Post by Yassir Rebob on Aug 17, 2018 7:03:33 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Aug 26, 2018 10:41:14 GMT 10
WOW....The New York Times obviously had an obituary for John McCain already prepared for publication.
Within less than an hour of his family announcing the senator's death, the very large, comprehensive article was on the newspaper's website.
Not a peep on The Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or The Seattle Times about John McCain's death as I post this.
I wonder if The New York Times also has an obituary pre-prepared for Donald J. Trump … just in case a sniper takes him out with a bullet?
UPDATE: The Washington Post has just put an obituary up on their website a couple of minutes ago.
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Post by KTJ on Aug 26, 2018 11:27:35 GMT 10
Yep … and I posted an article 2-3 months or so ago about John McCain (who I have always regarded as being an honourable man, in spite of him being on the wrong side of the political fence, and teaming up with that stupid woman from Alaska whose name I'm not prepared to mention), and in the article which followed an extensive interview with the dying senator at his home in Arizona, he stated that he had invited Barak Obama to speak at his funeral and give an eulogy, but that Donald J. Trump WOULD NOT be welcome to attend under any circumstances. I cannot recall whether the article was published by The Washington Post or The New York Times (I'm fairly sure it was one of those two newspapers), but I might carry out a search for it later. However, I see that the “piece of filth” currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has posted thoughts & prayers on Twitter (and copped some well-deserved blunt replies already), although I have no doubt he will only have done that for his own self-centred narcissistic reasons and not because he really cares about John McCain. In fact, President Arsehole is most likely privately celebrating the demise of one of the few Republicans brave enough to stand up to him. (that's just a tiny sample of tweets posted in reply to Donald J. Trump's narcissistic tweet)
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2018 12:52:45 GMT 10
Trump wouldn't shed tear for no one....
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Post by KTJ on Aug 26, 2018 14:19:34 GMT 10
from The New York Times…John McCain, War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender, Dies at 81A naval aviator who endured torture in Vietnam, Mr. McCain rose to the heights of power in Washington until cancer felled him.By ROBERT D. McFADDEN | Saturday, August 25, 2018The son and grandson of Navy admirals who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Senator John McCain rose to become one of the towering figures in American politics. — Photograph: Zach Gibson/for The New York Times.JOHN S. McCAIN, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.
According to a statement from his office, Mr. McCain died at 4:28 p.m. local time. He had suffered from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017.
Despite his grave condition, he soon made a dramatic appearance in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party's drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But while he was unable to be in the Senate for a vote on the Republican tax bill in December, his endorsement was crucial, though not decisive, in the Trump administration's lone legislative triumph of the year.
A son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr. McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century. It was an odyssey driven by raw ambition, the conservative instincts of a shrewd military man, a rebelliousness evident since childhood and a temper that sometimes bordered on explosiveness.Mr. McCain, bottom right, in 1965 with his Navy squadron. While in the Navy, he was cocky and combative and resisted discipline. — Photograph: National Archives.Nowhere were those traits more manifest than in Vietnam, where he was stripped of all but his character. He boiled over in foul curses at his captors. Because his father was the commander of all American forces in the Pacific during most of his five and a half years of captivity, Mr. McCain, a Navy lieutenant commander, became the most famous prisoner of the war, a victim of horrendous torture and a tool of enemy propagandists.
Shot down over Hanoi, suffering broken arms and a shattered leg, he was subjected to solitary confinement for two years and beaten frequently. Often he was suspended by ropes lashing his arms behind him. He attempted suicide twice. His weight fell to 105 pounds. He rejected early release to keep his honor and to avoid an enemy propaganda coup or risk demoralizing his fellow prisoners.
He finally cracked under torture and signed a “confession.” No one believed it, although he felt the burden of betraying his country. To millions of Americans, Mr. McCain was the embodiment of courage: a war hero who came home on crutches, psychologically scarred and broken in body, but not in spirit. He underwent long medical treatments and rehabilitation, but was left permanently disabled, unable to raise his arms over his head. Someone had to comb his hair.
His mother, Roberta McCain, Navy all the way, inspired his political career. After retiring from the Navy and settling in Arizona, he won two terms in the House of Representatives, from 1983 to 1987, and six in the Senate. He was a Reagan Republican to start with, but later moved right or left, a maverick who defied his party's leaders and compromised with Democrats.
He lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, who won the White House.
In 2008, against the backdrop of a growing financial crisis, Mr. McCain made the most daring move of his political career, seeking the presidency against the first major-party African-American nominee, Barack Obama. With national name recognition, a record for campaign finance reform and a reputation for candor — his campaign bus was called the Straight Talk Express — Mr. McCain won a series of primary elections and captured the Republican nomination.
But his selection of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, although meant to be seen as a bold, unconventional move in keeping with his maverick's reputation, proved a severe handicap. She was the second female major-party nominee for vice president (and the first Republican), but voters worried about her qualifications to serve as president, and about Mr. McCain's age — he would be 72, the oldest person ever to take the White House. In a 2018 memoir, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations”, he defended Ms. Palin's campaign performance, but expressed regret that he had not instead chosen Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent.
At some McCain rallies, vitriolic crowds disparaged black people and Muslims, and when a woman said she did not trust Mr. Obama because “he's an Arab,” Mr. McCain, in one of the most lauded moments of his campaign, replied: “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
Analysts later said that Mr. Obama had engineered a nearly perfect campaign. And Mr. McCain confronted a hostile political environment for Republicans, who were dragged down by President George W. Bush's dismal approval ratings amid the economic crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq.
On Election Day, Mr. McCain lost most of the battleground states and some that were traditionally Republican. Mr. Obama won with 53 percent of the popular vote to Mr. McCain's 46 percent, and 365 Electoral College votes to Mr. McCain's 173.In the Gang of EightReturning to his Senate duties, the resilient Mr. McCain moved to the right politically to fend off a Tea Party challenge to his 2010 re-election. He voted against the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama's signature health care plan, which became law in 2010. He endorsed Mitt Romney's losing Republican bid for the presidency in 2012.Mr. McCain in 2013 with a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform. — Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times.But while he was a persistent and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, Mr. McCain had by 2013 become a pivotal figure in the Senate, meeting with Mr. Obama and occasionally fashioning deals with him. He joined a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform.
“When Mr. McCain is with the president — on immigration and in brokering the recent deal to secure Senate approval of stalled Obama nominees — they can usually trump the political right,” The New York Times said in a 2013 news analysis. “When he is against him — sabotaging Mr. Obama's plan last year to nominate Susan E. Rice as secretary of state — the White House rarely prevails.”
As Congress reconvened in January 2015 with Republicans in control of the Senate, Mr. McCain achieved his long-time goal to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with the power to advance his national security and fiscal objectives under a $600 billion military policy bill. He considered the post second only to occupying the White House as commander in chief.Mr. McCain in 2016 before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He served six terms in the U.S. Senate. — Photograph: Drew Angerer/for The New York Times.With the rise of Donald J. Trump, the Republican flame thrower who steered American politics sharply to the right after his election in 2016 as the nation's 45th president, Mr. McCain was one of the few powerful Republican voices in Congress to push back against Mr. Trump's often harsh, provocative statements and Twitter posts and his tide of changes.
In his end-of-life memoir, Mr. McCain scorned Mr. Trump's seeming admiration for autocrats and disdain for refugees. “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” he wrote of the president. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”
Long before Mr. Trump was criticized as setting new lows for public discourse, Mr. McCain himself had used coarse language and blunt insults, although they were far less assertive, and he often used them in jest. He called Secretary of State John Kerry, a Democrat, “a human wrecking ball,” and the right-wing Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky “wacko birds.”Mr. McCain campaigning with Mitt Romney in 2012 in Pensacola, Florida. He endorsed Mr. Romney's Republican bid for the presidency that year. — Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.Personal animus between Mr. McCain and Mr. Trump arose in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. After months of boasts by Trump about his wealth, celebrity and deal-making as qualifications for the White House, and his dismissive capsule characterizations of climate change as “a hoax” and the Iraq war as “a mistake,” Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, with standing as the previous two Republican presidential nominees, denounced Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency.
Saying Mr. Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment for the White House, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney called him ignorant on foreign policy and said he had made “dangerous” statements on national security. They warned that his election might imperil the United States and its democratic systems.
In a venomous response, Mr. Trump denigrated Mr. Romney as a “failed candidate” and “a loser” beaten by Mr. Obama. He had little to say about Mr. McCain. But months earlier, Mr. Trump, who had never served in the military (or held public office) had derided Mr. McCain as a bogus war hero and made light of his years of captivity and torture.
“He's a war hero because he was captured,” Mr. Trump said. “I like people who weren't captured.”
Mr. McCain held his fire. But the nation was shocked. An avalanche of denunciations tumbled from editorial boards and political leaders, but the outrage faded into the tapestry of Mr. Trump's provocations against Mexicans, Muslims, women and black and Hispanic people. Trump supporters, who were mostly white, said his biases showed a refreshing willingness to disregard political correctness.A No-Show in ClevelandAs the Trump juggernaut rolled on, Mr. McCain, campaigning for re-election to his sixth six-year term, did not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but said he would support his party's nominee. (Mr. McCain withdrew that support months later after a recording surfaced exposing lewd comments about women by Mr. Trump, who bragged that his celebrity allowed him to grope them.)
Days after the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton as the first major-party female candidate for the presidency, Mr. McCain rebuked Mr. Trump for his comments about the family of a Muslim Army captain killed by a suicide bomber as he tried to save fellow American troops in Iraq in 2004. Given the podium at the Democratic convention, Khizr Khan, the father of the captain, Humayun Khan, had denounced Mr. Trump for suggesting that Muslims harbored terrorist sympathies.
With his wife, Ghazala, at his side, the father held up a pocket-size copy of the Constitution and asked if Mr. Trump had read it.
In response, Mr. Trump belittled the parents, saying the soldier's father had delivered the speech because his wife had not been “allowed” to speak. His implication, that Mrs. Khan had not spoken because of female subservience in some strains of Islam, drew widespread condemnation, led on Capitol Hill by Senator McCain.
“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” Mr. McCain said. “I challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.”
Soon after Mr. McCain's statement, other Republican senators offered their own condemnations. In ensuing days, as outrage over the Trump remarks spread, Mr. Trump told his Twitter followers that Mr. Khan had “no right” to “viciously” attack him.
Seemingly impervious to criticism of any kind, Mr. Trump, who had easily won nomination, turned his guns on Mrs. Clinton. After a bruising campaign laden with Trump falsehoods and scurrilous innuendo, he defeated her in the general election, losing the popular vote by nearly three million but winning in the Electoral College.
After the election, Mr. McCain, determined to let the new administration take shape, said he would temporarily not discuss Mr. Trump publicly.
But weeks after President Trump moved into the White House and began blindsiding the public and sometimes the government with executive orders and mixed messages on immigration, foreign policy and other issues, Mr. McCain, himself newly re-elected, let loose.
At a security conference in Munich, he delivered a forceful critique of Mr. Trump's “America First” program before a receptive audience of allied officials and foreign policy experts dismayed at the administration's drift from seven decades of Western alliances.
“Make no mistake, my friends, these are dangerous times,” Mr. McCain said. “But you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out.”
As for Mr. Trump's claim that his White House was operating like a “fine-tuned machine,” Mr. McCain said, “In many respects, this administration is in disarray.”
Appearing on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” a day later, Mr. McCain punctured Mr. Trump's contention that the news media was “the enemy of the American people.”
“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” Mr. McCain, a strong defender of the First Amendment, told his national television audience. While not expressly calling the president a dictator, he said, “We need to learn the lessons of history.”
For a senator who had long backed free trade, NATO and assertive foreign policies, and who had harbored suspicions about Russian intentions, Mr. McCain's differences with Mr. Trump ran deep. He denounced Russia for “interfering” in the presidential election and called for a select Senate committee to investigate the Kremlin's cyber-activities.
His disapproval of Mr. Trump perhaps peaked in July, after the president and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met privately in Helsinki, Finland, and then participated in an extraordinary joint news conference there. Responding to Mr. Trump's performance, in which the president spoke favorably of his Russian counterpart and questioned American intelligence findings that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. McCain declared, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
Weeks later, in signing a $716 billion military spending bill named in Mr. McCain's honor, Mr. Trump did not mention the senator by name in what was widely interpreted as a deliberate snub.
Although Mr. McCain was sharply critical of Mr. Trump, especially when he thought the new president had threatened to overstep domestic or national interests, he remained broadly supportive of the administration's agenda.
After an acrimonious year-long fight over replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain joined the Senate's 54-to-45 majority to confirm Mr. Trump's selection of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice. Justice Gorsuch's installation tipped the court's balance in favor of a conservative majority that seemed destined to last for years.
Mr. McCain voted for all but two of Mr. Trump's 15 cabinet selections and eight other administration posts requiring Senate confirmation. But he also chastised Mr. Trump for comments equating Russian and American interests. “That moral equivalency is a contradiction of everything the United States has ever stood for in the 20th and 21st centuries,” he said.
During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing taking testimony from James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump, Mr. McCain posed confusing questions, seeming to conflate the 2016 investigation of Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state with the 2017 investigation of Russian interference in the American election. He later issued a clarification.
“What I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the president rise to the level of obstruction of justice,” he said. “In the case of Secretary Clinton's emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump — whether or not the president's conduct constitutes obstruction of justice.”
Since he had opposed the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama's signature health care law, Mr. McCain became a critical vote on the Republican bill to repeal and replace it. Written in secret, the Republicans' bill was opposed by health care and patient advocacy groups. Mr. McCain, fearing his constituents might be harmed, was non-committal. After struggling to write a passable bill and with no votes to spare, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, put off a showdown when Mr. McCain was sidelined by surgery for a cranial blood clot over his left eye in July.
Senator McCain's office disclosed that, behind the clot, his doctors had found a glioblastoma, an aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Medical experts said that such cancers may be treated with radiation and chemotherapy but almost always grow back, and that the median length of survival with a glioblastoma is about 16 months.Days after surgery for brain cancer, in July 2017, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate to take part in the vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. In a dramatic televised moment, he voted not to replace it, turning a pivotal thumb down. — Picture: Senate TV/Reuters.Days after surgery for the brain cancer, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate and provided a crucial vote for the Republicans to open debate on their efforts to repeal the health law. But when a last-ditch repeal vote was taken later, Mr. McCain made a stirring televised reappearance in the well of the Senate and shocked his colleagues and the nation by turning his thumb down, casting the decisive vote against it.
The seven-year Republican drive to derail the Affordable Care Act had collapsed. Some pundits called the McCain vote cold revenge for Mr. Trump's mockery of his ordeal as a prisoner of war. But the senator told colleagues that he felt compelled only to “do the right thing.” And in a later statement, he gave a fuller explanation.
“The vote last night presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh,” he said. “I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to trust each other, stop the political gamesmanship and put the health care needs of the American people first. We can do this.”
In December, Mr. McCain had been expected to be a pivotal vote in the Republican drive to rewrite the nation's tax code and cut taxes for individuals and businesses by adding up to $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit. Critics of the measure had identified him as a potential holdout against his party's legislation. Days before the vote, however, Mr. McCain returned home to Arizona for medical treatment, and he did not cast a ballot in the Senate proceedings. But he endorsed the bill, and his support was important, though not decisive, in the Senate's 51-48 adoption of the tax package.To the Navy BornJohn Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, one of many posts where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., served in a long, distinguished Navy career. He was the middle sibling of three children. His mother, born Roberta Wright, was a California oil heiress. His parents eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, to marry in 1933.
With his older sister, Jean Alexandra (who was known as Sandy), and brother, Joseph Pinckney McCain II, John grew up with frequent moves, an often-absent father, a rock-solid mother and family lore that traced ancestral lineages to combatants in every American war and to Scottish clans. There were also highly dubious family claims of having descended from Robert the Bruce, the 14th-century king of the Scots.
The patriarch of the 20th-century military family was John's grandfather, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr. A pioneer of aircraft carriers, he led many naval and air operations in the Western Pacific in World War II, covering General Douglas MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy in the war's final stages. He was in the front row of officers aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the documents of surrender in 1945.Mr. MCain, left, in 1961 with his parents, Roberta Wright McCain and John S. McCain Jr., with a plaque of Mr. McCain's grandfather, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr., the patriarch of the military family. — Photograph: Associated Press.John's father was a decorated submarine commander in World War II. In Washington, the elder Mr. McCain was influential in political affairs as the postwar Navy's chief information officer and liaison with Congress. Senators, representatives and military brass were often guests at his home. Raised to full admiral, he was the commander of American naval forces in Europe and, from 1968 to 1972, of all American forces in the Pacific, including those in the Vietnam War theater.
(Two Navy destroyers were named McCain, for the senator's father and grandfather, the first father-and-son full admirals in American naval history.)
Whip-sawed by family relocations, young John attended some 20 schools before finally settling into Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, in the fall of 1951 for his last three years of secondary education. The school, with an all-male faculty and enrollments drawn mostly from upper-crust families of the Old South, required jackets and ties for classes.
But the scion of one of the Navy's most illustrious families was defiant and unruly. He mocked the dress code by wearing dirty bluejeans. His shoes were held together with tape, and his coat looked like a reject from the Salvation Army. He was cocky and combative, easily provoked and ready to fight anyone. Classmates called him McNasty. Most gave him a wide berth.
“He cultivated the image,” Robert Timberg wrote in a biography, “John McCain: An American Odyssey” (1995). “The Episcopal yearbook pictures him in a trench coat, collar up, cigarette dangling Bogey-style from his lips. That pose, if hardly the impression Episcopal sought to project, at least had a fashionable world-weary style to it.”
John and a few friends often sneaked off campus at night to patronize bars and burlesque houses in Washington. He joined the wrestling team — a 127-pound dynamo, he once pinned an opponent in 37 seconds, a school record — and the junior varsity football team, as a linebacker and offensive guard. His grades were abysmal, except in literature and history, his favorite subjects. He graduated in 1954.
That summer, he followed his father and grandfather into the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He resisted the discipline. His grades were poor. He stood up to upperclassmen, broke rules and piled up demerits, though never enough to warrant expulsion. But he became a ferocious boxer, a magnet for attractive young women and one of the most popular midshipmen in his class.In the CockpitMr. McCain possessed the rugged independence of a natural leader. It came out at parties and in carousing with friends. Caught by the Shore Patrol at an off-limits bar, he led a carload of drinking buddies in a daring escape. “Being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck,” one recalled. In 1958, he graduated 894th in his class, fifth from the bottom.
Accepted for flight training, the newly commissioned Ensign McCain learned to fly attack jets at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He also had flings with a succession of young women, from schoolteachers to strippers, and once with a tobacco heiress, “often returning to base just in time to change clothes and drag himself out to the flight line,” Mr. Timberg said.
He liked flying, but his performance was sub-par, sometimes careless or even reckless. In the 1960s he crashed in Corpus Christi Bay in Texas and Tidewater, Virginia, but escaped with minor injuries — and his flying skills improved over time. Early assignments were aboard aircraft carriers: the Intrepid in the Caribbean during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the Enterprise in the Mediterranean.
In 1965, Mr. McCain married Carol Shepp, a model. He adopted her two children, Douglas and Andrew, and they had a daughter, Sidney. After a long separation, the couple were divorced in 1980. He then married Cindy Lou Hensley, a Phoenix teacher whose father owned a beer distributorship. They had two sons, John IV and James, and a daughter, Meghan, and adopted a girl, Bridget, from a Bangladeshi orphanage.The crew on the carrier Forrestal put out a fire that killed 134 men in the worst non-combat incident in American naval history. Mr. McCain was seriously injured. — Photograph: U.S. Navy/via Associated Press.Promoted to lieutenant commander in early 1967, Mr. McCain requested combat duty and was assigned to the carrier Forrestal, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its A-4E Skyhawk warplanes were bombing North Vietnam in the campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. He flew five missions.
Then, on July 29, 1967, he had just strapped himself into his cockpit on a deck crowded with planes when a missile fired accidentally from another jet struck his 200-gallon exterior fuel tank, and it exploded in flames. He scrambled out, crawled onto the plane's nose, dived onto a deck seething with burning fuel and rolled away until he cleared the flames.
As he stood up, other aircraft and bomb loads exploded on deck. He was hit in the legs and chest by burning shrapnel. At one point, the Forrestal skipper considered abandoning ship. When the fire was finally brought under control, 134 men had been killed in the worst non-combat incident in American naval history.
A complete list of survivors was not immediately provided.
Despite his misgivings, Mr. McCain volunteered for more missions and was transferred to the carrier Oriskany. On October 26 he took off on his 23rd mission of the war, part of a 20-plane attack on a heavily defended power plant in central Hanoi. Moments after releasing his bombs on target, as he pulled out of his dive, a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile sheared off his right wing.
He ejected as the plane plunged, but hit something as he exited. Both arms were broken and his right knee was shattered. He fell into a lake and, with 50 pounds of gear, sank 15 feet to the bottom, then pulled the inflating pins of his Mae West life jacket with his teeth and rose to the surface, gasping for air. Swimmers dragged him ashore, where he was set upon by a mob.Mr. McCain, center, after he ejected from his fighter plane in 1967 and fell into a lake. The Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured him for more than five years. — Photograph: Library of Congress.Mr. McCain was stripped to his skivvies, kicked and spat upon, then bayoneted in the left ankle and groin. A North Vietnamese soldier struck him with his rifle butt, breaking a shoulder. A woman tried to give him a cup of tea as a photographer snapped pictures. Carried to a truck, Mr. McCain was driven to Hoa Lo, the prison compound its American inmates had labeled the Hanoi Hilton.
There he was denied medical care. His knee swelled to the size and color of a football. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. When he awoke in a cell infested with roaches and rats, he was interrogated and beaten. The beatings continued for days. He gave his name, rank and serial number and defied his tormentors with curses.
After two weeks, a doctor, without anesthesia, tried to set his right arm, broken in three places, but gave up in frustration and encased it in a plaster cast. He was moved to another site and tended by two American prisoners of war, who brought him back from near death.
Commander McCain's prisoner-of-war status was widely reported around the world. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given a modicum of medical treatment. Other prisoners said he spoke, incongruously, of someday being president of the United States.
Once he was visited by a group of North Vietnamese dignitaries. A prisoner, Jack Van Loan, said Mr. McCain shrieked at them. “Here's a guy that's all crippled up, all busted up, and he doesn't know if he's going to live to the next day, and he literally blew them out of there with a verbal assault,” Mr. Van Loan told Mr. Timberg. “You can't imagine the example John set for the rest of the camp by doing that.”Two Years in SolitaryIn March 1968, Mr. McCain was put in solitary confinement, fed only watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. It lasted two years. When Admiral McCain became the Pacific Theater commander in July, his son was offered early repatriation repeatedly. Commander McCain refused, following a military code that prisoners were to be released in the order taken. He was beaten frequently and tortured with ropes.
Years after his confession to “war crimes” and “air piracy,” Mr. McCain wrote: “I had learned what we all learned over there: that every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”Mr. McCain in 1967 at a hospital in Hanoi, North Vietnam. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given medical treatment. — Photograph: Associated Press.His ordeal finally ended on March 14, 1973, two months after the Paris Peace Accords had ended American involvement in the war. The place he had lived longest in his nomadic life was Hanoi. At 36, his hair had gone white. He went home a celebrity, cheered in parades, showered with medals, embraced by President Richard M. Nixon and Governor Ronald Reagan of California.
For a Navy man who had always tried to live up to his father's accomplishments, the Silver and Bronze Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross and other decorations he received were not enough. But a psychiatrist's report seemed to capture his happiest moment. “Felt fulfillment,” it said, “when his dad was introduced at a dinner as ‘Commander McCain's father’.”
After months of rehabilitation and recovery, he returned to duty and became the Navy's Senate liaison, as his father had once been. But he knew that his Navy future would be limited by his physical disabilities, and that he would never be an admiral like his forebears. With his mother's encouragement, he was already thinking about a political career when he retired as a captain in 1981.
Setting his sights on a congressional seat, he settled in Phoenix and became a public relations executive for his father-in-law's beer distributorship. He developed contacts in the news media and business community, and got to know real estate developers and bankers like Charles Keating Jr.
When Representative John Rhodes of Arizona retired after 30 years in Congress in 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won the seat in a Republican district. He embraced President Reagan's agenda of tax and budget cuts and a strong national defense, but voted to over-ride Mr. Reagan's veto of sanctions against South Africa for its racist policies. He was re-elected in 1984.In 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won a seat in a Republican congressional district in Arizona. — Photograph: Tom Tingle/Phoenix Gazette/via Associated Press.After Senator Barry M. Goldwater decided not to seek re-election as Arizona's conservative stalwart in 1986, Mr. McCain crushed Richard Kimball, a former Democratic state legislator, for the seat. He won appointments to the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee, and soon gained national attention.
A long-time gambler with ties to the gaming industry, Mr. McCain helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, codifying regulations for Native American gambling enterprises. He backed legislation, sponsored by Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, for automatic spending cuts in deficit budgets. He was short-listed as a vice-presidential running mate by the 1988 Republican nominee, George Bush, who won the White House (with Senator Dan Quayle on the ticket).
But Mr. McCain's rising political career was almost upended by scandal. He was one of five senators who took favors from Charles Keating to intercede with federal regulators on behalf of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed with catastrophic losses. The scandal cost the government and investors billions, and Mr. Keating went to prison for fraud; the so-called Keating Five, cleared of wrong-doing by Senate investigators, were only rebuked for ethical lapses.
In the years that followed, Mr. McCain reinvented himself as a scourge of special interests, crusading for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
The Persian Gulf War in 1991 also helped restore Mr. McCain's tarnished image. As a television commentator, he showcased his military savvy and impressed Americans as an authoritative voice on foreign policy. While Mr. Bush lost the White House to Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. McCain easily won re-election.
After years of voting along party lines, Mr. McCain, in the 1990s, emphasized his independence. With the presidency in his distant sights, he challenged Republican leaders and Democrats and was harder to peg politically. He became a self-appointed Republican spokesman on national security — challenging the Clinton administration's intervention in Somalia, counseling against deploying American troops to the Balkans and sounding an early warning on North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, a Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran, were chairmen of the Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, which found “no compelling evidence” that Americans were still alive in captivity in Southeast Asia. Veterans groups and families of long-missing troops rejected the report. He also pressed for full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which were achieved in 1995.
In the 1996 election, Mr. McCain appeared to be a favorite for the Republican vice-presidential slot, but former Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, chose Jack Kemp, the former congressman and National Football League star. They would lose to Mr. Clinton and Al Gore.
Mr. McCain won re-election to a third term by a landslide in 1998, and a year later he published a memoir, “Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir” which became a best seller in time for the 2000 election campaign and was later made into a television movie, starring Shawn Hatosy as Mr. McCain.Smears and DefeatSeeking the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain pledged “a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests.” Governor George W. Bush of Texas was favored, but Mr. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, 49 to 30 percent. South Carolina's primary then loomed as crucial.
It was one of the era's dirtiest campaigns. Anonymous smears falsely claimed that Mr. McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict and that he was a homosexual, a traitor and mentally unstable. McCain ads portrayed Mr. Bush as a liar and called his religious supporters, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the televangelist Pat Robertson, “agents of intolerance.”
Mr. McCain later said he regretted calling a Confederate flag on the State Capitol in Columbia a “symbol of heritage.” Civil rights groups had denounced it as a symbol of slavery and oppression of African-Americans. “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” Mr. McCain admitted.Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mr. McCain, right, before a debate in 1999. The others, from left, were Gary Bauer, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, Steve Forbes, Senator Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes. — Photograph: Luke Frazza/Agence France-Presse.Mr. Bush won the primary and the nomination, and narrowly defeated the Democrat, Vice President Gore, in the general election.
Always wary of an adventurousness that might blind Mr. McCain to potential embarrassments, his advisers grew anxious during the 2000 campaign when a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, began turning up with him at fund-raisers and at his office. It came to nothing. But a long report in The New York Times in 2008 said that aides, fearing a romantic involvement, had cautioned Mr. McCain and warned Ms. Iseman off.
The article raised a flap of angry denials, and Ms. Iseman sued the newspaper for libel. The N.Y. Times did not retract its article but published a note to readers saying it had not intended to suggest a romantic affair, and the suit was dropped.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. McCain supported the Bush administration's war on terrorism; its invasion of Afghanistan to suppress a fanatic Taliban regime and hunt for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks; and later the invasion of Iraq to depose President Saddam Hussein, the tyrant who was wrongly believed to have weapons of mass destruction.Mr. McCain visiting American troops in Kabul in 2014. He supported the Bush administration's fight against terrorism after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. — Photograph: Diego Ibarra Sanchez/for The New York Times.Rewarded for years of pushing campaign-finance reforms, Mr. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, finally saw passage in 2002 of the McCain-Feingold Act. It banned a key source of financing for both parties, so-called soft money donated in unlimited amounts to build party strengths, and it limited donations for national candidates to “hard money,” subject to annual limits and other rules. The law's effects became tangled in lawsuits, court rulings and financing schemes.
As a torture victim, Mr. McCain was sensitive to the detention and interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism. In 2005 the Senate passed his bill to bar inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by limiting military practices to those permitted by the United States Army Field Manual on Interrogation. His 2008 bill to ban waterboarding as torture was adopted, but vetoed by President Bush.
Mr. McCain wrote six books with his aide, Mark Salter, all with themes of courage. Besides his 2018 memoir, they were “Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir” (2002), “Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life” (2004), “Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember” (2005), “Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them” (2007) and “Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War” (2014).
In 1993, Mr. McCain gave the commencement address at Annapolis: the sorcerer's apprentice, class of 1954, home to inspire the midshipmen. He spoke of Navy aviators hurled from the decks of pitching aircraft carriers, of Navy gunners blazing into the silhouettes of onrushing kamikazes, of trapped Marines battling overwhelming Chinese hordes in a breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.
“I have spent time in the company of heroes,” he said. “I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling cruelty until further resistance is impossible, break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more. All these things and more I have seen. And so will you. I will go to my grave in gratitude to my Creator for allowing me to stand witness to such courage and honor. And so will you.
“My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk of The New York Times and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He has covered many of New York's major news stories in his more than 30 years as a reporter and rewrite man for the paper, and has earned a reputation as one of the finest rewrite men in the business. Mr. McFadden's byline has appeared regularly over articles on plane crashes, hurricanes, strikes, parades, blackouts, city and state government affairs, health, crime, transportation, politics, education, the environment, the mass media and a wide array of other subjects. In an era of increasing specialization, Mr. McFadden, as a rewrite man for most of his career, has remained essentially a general assignment reporter who, on a given day and at a moment's notice, covers domestic and foreign crises, writes profiles of people and nations and draws together the diverse threads of sprawling stories on blizzards or riots, floods or ships floundering at sea. Among Mr. McFadden's major stories were the 1977 blackout in the New York region, written by candlelight in a darkened newsroom; the 1986 suicide of Queens Borough President Donald Manes, touching off New York's biggest scandal of the 1980’s; and a series on the case of Tawana Brawley, a black upstate New York teenager whose 1987 charges of rape by a gang of whites, including law enforcement officials, inflamed racial tensions before being exposed as a hoax. Mr. McFadden is the co-author of two books: “No Hiding Place”. a 1981 account of the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis, published by Times Books, and “Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax”, published by Bantam Books in 1990. The recipient of 18 major journalistic awards and seven New York Times Publisher's Awards, Mr. McFadden has long been known as the anchor of The N.Y. Times rewrite bank. He was named a senior writer for the paper in January 1990. Mr. McFadden was born in Milwaukee in 1937 and was raised in Chicago and Cumberland, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school in 1955. He then worked his way through college, holding several reporting jobs before graduating in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a bachelor of science degree, cum laude, in journalism. Starting as a stringer for the United Press, Mr. McFadden was a reporter for The Wisconsin Rapids (Wisconsin) Daily Tribune in 1957 and 1958, The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison in 1958 and 1959, and after graduating from Wisconsin, for The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1960. Mr. McFadden joined The New York Times in May 1961 as a copy boy and was promoted to reporter a year later in an internal training program that included tours as a financial news writer and script writer for WQXR, The N.Y. Times' classical radio station. After five years as a police and general assignment reporter on The Times' metropolitan staff, he became a rewrite man in 1967. Mr. McFadden is married and has a son. He lives with his family in Manhattan. • A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Sunday, August 26, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York print edition with the headline: “ A Symbol of Courage in Half a Century of Battles”. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • VIDEO: John McCain: The Making of a Maverick • Reflections of John McCain's decades in public life by reporters and editors at The New York Times. • John McCain to Lie in State at Capitols in Washington and Arizona • John McCain, a Last Lion of the Senate • John McCain, a Maverick We Can Learn From • EDITORIAL: John McCain, a Scarred but Happy Warrior • John McCain to Discontinue Treatment for Brain Cancer, Family Says • In ‘The Restless Wave’, John McCain Says America Is Still Exceptional • Maybe We Don't Deserve John McCain • Trump Talks for 28 Minutes on Bill Named for John McCain. Not Mentioned: McCain. • John McCain: By the Bookwww.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/obituaries/john-mccain-dead.html
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Post by KTJ on Aug 26, 2018 14:44:02 GMT 10
A spokesman for the McCain family has announced, following consultation with senior members of Congress representing both Republicans and Democrats, that John McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. before being given a national funeral service with full military honours at the Washington National Cathedral. Eulogies will be offered by former presidents George W. Bush and Barak Obama. Vice-President Pence will be invited to attend, but will not be granted a speaking role during the service. However, President Donald J. Trump will be officially informed that he is NOT WELCOME and to STAY AWAY from the funeral service. The body of John McCain will then be transported to Phoenix, Arizona where he will lie in state at the state Capitol, before being transported back north for a burial service and interment at the Naval Acadamy cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.
Trump will be FUMING that he is being specifically and publicly excluded in this way. However, President Dumb isn't even fit to wipe the dirt from Senator McCain's boots, so things are as they should be.
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Post by KTJ on Aug 28, 2018 19:42:32 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…Trump turns McCain's death into another political firestorm about TrumpThe controversy reflected the bitter years-long battle between the two men.By FELICIA SONMEZ, JOSH DAWSEY and JOHN WAGNER | 7:41PM EDT — Monday, August 27, 2018President Donald J. Trump issued a proclamation on Monday that flags be flown at half-staff until Senator John McCain's interment, hours after incurring criticism as the White House flag flew at full-staff. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.IT'S THE standard Washington protocol — a member of Congress dies, and the flags over official buildings are flown at half-staff. That's what happened when John McCain died on Saturday.
But first thing on Monday morning, the flag over the White House was back at full-staff, and a barrage of bitter criticism soon followed, with detractors — including the American Legion — interpreting the fleeting tribute as a sign of President Trump's pettiness.
He had refused to utter McCain's name earlier this month when signing the defense policy bill named for the senator. He had rejected staff suggestions over the weekend that he issue a statement upon McCain's death. And now he was refusing to follow a tradition of leaving the flag at half-staff until interment.
Then, suddenly, the flag was back at half-staff on Monday afternoon, and the president issued a statement offering “respect” for McCain.
By day's end, it had become clear that in his stubborn defiance of protocol, the president had single-handedly turned the death of McCain into yet another political firestorm that was all about Trump.
“It's all a self-inflicted wound, especially the flag,” said Ari Fleischer, who worked as White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “The ceremonial things, the traditional things that keep a lot of people together — even if you have policy or personal disagreements, you have to know where to draw that line.”
Trump, Fleisher added, “too often draws that line in a way that hurts himself because he thinks he is hurting others.”
The day's events were punctuated by a letter read aloud by McCain's long-time adviser in which the Arizona Republican obliquely rebuked Trump posthumously.
Trump is not expected to attend the funeral or memorial services in Washington for McCain, a senior White House official said. Vice President Pence will speak at a ceremony on Friday at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton will represent the administration at McCain's private funeral on Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
In his statement on Monday, Trump wrote: “Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment.”An American flag flies at full-staff on the roof of the White House after briefly being flown at half-staff for the passing of Senator John McCain. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.After McCain's death on Saturday at the age of 81, Trump had initially offered words of condolence to the senator's family in a tweet that made no mention of McCain's storied service in the military and on Capitol Hill — a stark contrast with the effusive praise for McCain voiced by lawmakers, world leaders and members of the military.
That was followed by nearly two full days of silence from the president, who ignored almost a dozen shouted questions about McCain from reporters at three separate White House events on Monday while he tweeted on a wide range of other topics, from Tiger Woods to trade with Mexico.
Trump's silence reflected the bitter years-long battle between the two men. Trump has said that McCain, who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam, was “not a war hero” and continued to snub the long-time senator throughout his battle with brain cancer.
McCain, in turn, pulled no punches in criticizing the president on foreign policy and other issues, most recently in a stinging denunciation of Trump's summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Trump had rejected the advice of top aides who advocated releasing an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a “hero.”
On Monday morning, images of the flag atop the White House at full-staff — and behind it, the Washington Monument encircled by flags, all at half-staff — blazed across the nation's TV and computer screens. Criticism was not far behind.
The American Legion, a veterans organization, issued a sternly worded statement calling on Trump to treat McCain with more reverence.
“On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his [interment],” said Denise Rohan, the group's national commander.
Several administration officials said Trump was frustrated with the TV coverage and felt besieged — that nothing he said about McCain would be enough. Trump also suggested to advisers that many of those speaking out on television were merely looking for reasons to attack him and that some of the same people now praising McCain previously did not like the senator.
Yet among those hailing McCain was Ivanka Trump, Trump's daughter and senior White House adviser, who on Monday called the late senator “an American patriot who served our country with distinction for more than six decades.”
“The nation is united in its grief and the world mourns the loss of a true hero and a great statesman,” the first daughter said in remarks at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington.An American flag flies at half-staff again for the passing of Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) on the roof of the White House. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.Trump told advisers over the weekend that lavishing praise on McCain would not be genuine because he did not feel that way. “Everyone knows we don't like each other,” the president said, according to one White House official who spoke with him.
Even so, after speaking with a number of close advisers on Monday, including Bolton, Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — all of whom urged him to clean up the mess — the president backtracked.
Trump wrote much of Monday's statement, White House officials said, and wanted to express that he disagreed with McCain on policy and politics.
Later, at a White House dinner celebrating evangelical leaders, Trump said that “our hearts and prayers” are with McCain's family and made note of this week's planned events in honor of the senator.
“We very much appreciate everything that Senator McCain has done for our country,” Trump said.
Trump's proclamation came hours after an emotional news conference in Phoenix at which McCain's longtime adviser and family spokesman, Rick Davis, read a farewell statement from the senator that contained a veiled critique of the president. In the letter, McCain did not name Trump but called on Americans to rally behind the country's founding principles rather than hiding behind walls and succumbing to political tribalism.
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe,” McCain wrote in the letter. “We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”
Trump campaigned on a promise to build a wall across the U.S. border with Mexico and force Mexico to pay for it.
McCain's statement also referred at some length to the populist and protectionist forces that helped propel Trump to the office McCain twice failed to win.
“We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil,” McCain wrote. “We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world.”
White supremacists who marched in Charlottesville last year chanted “blood and soil,” a translation of a Nazi slogan. Trump appeared to defend the rallygoers, who clashed with counterprotesters, when he said there were “fine people on both sides.”President Donald J. Trump crosses his arms and remains silent when asked by reporters to comment on the passing of Senator John McCain. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.At the Capitol on Monday, the Senate convened for the first time since McCain's death. Inside the chamber, the wooden desk that McCain occupied for six terms was draped in black. A vase of white flowers had been placed on top.
One by one, McCain's colleagues rose to deliver somber tributes to him. They included Senator Jeff Flake (Republican), McCain's junior Arizona colleague, who welled with emotion as he spoke of the late senator's legacy.
“If John McCain can forgive the North Vietnamese torturers, we can at least forgive each other,” Flake said.
Yet it was Trump's actions that dominated the conversations between senators and reporters in the marble hallways just outside the chamber.
“I don't know why the administration had the flag lowered for such a brief period of time,” Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine) said. “It seems to me that it would be appropriate to keep the flag at half-mast until Senator McCain has been buried.”
Asked whether Trump had let his personal views stand in the way of paying proper respects to McCain, Collins responded: “It certainly looks that way.”
Some Trump allies, including Senator James M. Inhofe (Republican-Oklahoma), suggested the dust-up was being blown out of proportion. Both Trump and McCain were “two of the most stubborn people I ever met,” Inhofe said, arguing that if McCain had been the one in the White House, he would have behaved similarly to Trump.
“If the tables were turned, it'd be the same way with McCain. The flag is lowered, so he's doing it with respect, but everyone knows they didn't get along,” Inhofe said.
Other lawmakers decided to sidestep the topic entirely.
“I'm not gonna get into that,” Senator Cory Gardner (Republican-Colorado) said when asked about Trump's re-lowering of the flag. “What I am gonna say is this week's about John McCain and his legacy and his lifetime of service to this country. You can get into the fight between the president and John McCain. I'm not going to.”
The varied opinions on Capitol Hill were themselves emblematic of the America comprising “three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals” that McCain described in his letter. In the end, the Arizona Republican noted, “we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement.”
“If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we will get through these challenging times,” he wrote. “We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.”__________________________________________________________________________ • Trump turns McCain's death into another political firestorm about Trump.• Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter at The Washington Post covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. Previously, she spent more than four years in Beijing, where she worked first as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse and later as the editor of The Wall Street Journal's China Real Time Report. She also spent a year in advanced Chinese language study as a Blakemore Freeman Fellow at Tsinghua University. From 2010 to 2013, she reported on national politics for The Washington Post, starting as a writer for The Fix and going on to cover Congress, the 2012 presidential campaign and the early days of President Barack Obama's second term. She began her career teaching English in Beijing and has also covered U.S. politics for the Asahi Shimbun and National Journal's the Hotline. • Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for The Wall Street Journal. • John Wagner is a national reporter who leads The Washington Post's new breaking political news team. He previously covered the Trump White House. During the 2016 presidential election, Wagner focused on the Democratic campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley. He earlier chronicled Maryland government for more than a decade, a stretch that included O’Malley's eight years as governor and part of the tenure of his Republican predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. He came to The Post from The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as the paper's Washington correspondent, covering the 2004 presidential bid of Senator John Edwards and the final years in office of Senator Jesse Helms. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • VIDEO: President Trump keeps silent when asked about John McCain • Republicans' anger at McCain speaks volumes about America's tribal politics • Analysis: Insults, straight talk, expertise — McCain knew how to attract the media • Flags at White House return to half-staff in tribute to McCain • Jennifer Rubin: McCain gets the last word on Trump • E.J. Dionne Jr.: John McCain and the last of human freedoms • Max Boot: John McCain leaves the stage when we need him mostwww.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-turns-mccains-death-into-another-political-firestorm-about-trump/2018/08/27/fd1ece86-aa36-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Sept 7, 2018 11:15:00 GMT 10
Presumably they'll bury him in a coffin with a mirror on the underside of the lid?
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Post by KTJ on Sept 7, 2018 11:45:08 GMT 10
Nope....not too soon.
You cannot decide to put a mirror on the underside of the coffin lid after it's buried in the ground without a shitload of legal palava.
So best to decide that before the burial.
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Post by kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 7, 2019 18:05:33 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…Dr. John, flamboyant soul of New Orleans music, dies at 77He rose to fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.By CHRIST MORRIS | 7:39PM EDT — Thursday, June 06, 2019Malcolm Rebennack Jr., shown performing as Dr. John in 2008, concocted a voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona as “the Night Tripper”. — Photograph: Dave Martin/Associated Press.MALCOLM REBENNACK Jr., the flamboyant New Orleans singer-pianist known as Dr. John whose hoodoo-drenched music made him the summarizing figure of the grand Crescent City R&B/rock-n-roll tradition, died on June 6 at 77.
His family said the cause was a heart attack but did not disclose where he died.
Mr. Rebennack had already tallied more than a decade of experience as a session musician in New Orleans and Los Angeles when he rose to solo fame in the late '60s after concocting his voodoo-influenced, patois-laced persona of “the Night Tripper”.
In their history of postwar New Orleans music “Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II”, Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones wrote richly of the artist they called “a true original.”
The writers described him exclamatorily: “Dr. John! — sunglasses and radiant colors, feathers and plumes, bones and beads around his neck, the crusty blues voice rich in dialect cadences, and then the man himself in motion: scattering glitter to the crowds, pumping the keyboard, a human carnival to behold.”
After flashing his fantastical character on a quartet of early albums that garnered him an enthusiastic underground following, Dr. John settled in to become New Orleans's great latter-day exponent of bayou funk and jazz, playing in a style that reconciled the diverse streams of the city's music.
His early '70s work was distinguished by a collection of historic New Orleans favorites, “Gumbo”, and a pair of albums with famed New Orleans producer-arranger-songwriter Allen Toussaint and funk quartet the Meters — the first of which, “In the Right Place”, spawned a top-10 hit.
He memorably branched into traditional pop with his 1989 album “In a Sentimental Mood”; the album spawned the first of his six Grammy Awards, for “Makin' Whoopee”, a duet with Ricki Lee Jones.
Dr. John would delve deeper into jazz terrain later in his peripatetic career with Bluesiana Triangle, a collaboration with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman and drummer Art Blakey, and homages to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. But the earthy R&B of his hometown served as his main stylistic and emotional propellant.
In 2008, his Grammy-winning collection “City That Care Forgot” dwelled movingly on the havoc wreaked on his city by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
As an in-demand sideman, he recorded with Levon Helm, Gregg Allman, Van Morrison, Harry Connick Jr., Ringo Starr and B.B. King, among others. He released “Triumvirate”, a “super session” date with guitarists Mike Bloomfield and John Hammond Jr., in 1973.
His turns on the big screen ranged from a memorable performance in Martin Scorsese's “The Last Waltz” (1978), a documentary about the Band's farewell performance, to an appearance as a member of the fictional “Louisiana Gator Boys” in “Blues Brothers 2000” (1998). He guested regularly on the New Orleans-set HBO dramatic series “Treme” from 2010 to 2013.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.Dr. John in 2010. — Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters.Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., known as “Mac,” was born in New Orleans on November 21, 1940. He began playing the family piano but soon acquired a guitar, which became his principal instrument during his early professional career.
By the time he dropped out of Jesuit High School in the 11th grade, he had already acquired a taste for heroin and the chops to work as a session guitarist at J&M Music, which spawned major R&B hits by Fats Domino and other local R&B stars. He played his first date behind singer Paul Gayten.
During this period, he got to know some of the city's most influential keyboardists, including Professor Longhair and the eccentric virtuoso James Booker (who taught him to play organ and later joined Dr. John's touring band).
He recorded steadily, appearing on local hits by Jerry Byrne (“Lights Out”) and Roland Stone (“Down the Road”, a.k.a. “Junco Partner”) and as a leader (including the 1959 instrumental “Storm Warning”). He also worked as an A&R man and sideman for Johnny Vincent's Ace Records.
On Christmas Eve 1961 on a tour stop in Jacksonville, Florida, Mr. Rebennack and pianist Ronnie Barron got involved in a scuffle with a motel owner, and the guitarist was shot in his fretting hand, nearly severing the ring finger. During a slow recovery, he moved first to bass, and later to keyboards.
The studio scene in New Orleans was beginning to dry up in the early '60s when Mr. Rebennack was busted for heroin possession, drawing a two-year sentence in federal prison in Texas.
On his release from jail in 1965, he headed to Los Angeles, where a group of New Orleans expatriates that included producer-arranger Harold Battiste had set up shop as studio musicians. Mr. Rebennack worked with, among others, Canned Heat, the Mothers of Invention and Sonny & Cher.
In L.A., Mr. Rebennack moved to fulfill a lingering musical concept grounded in New Orleans history that he had originally developed for the reluctant Ronnie Barron.
In his 1994 autobiography “Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper” he wrote, “In the 1840s and 1850s, one New Orleans root doctor was preeminent in the city for the awe in which he was held by the poor and the fear and notoriety he inspired among the rich. Known variously as John Montaigne, Bayou John, and most often Dr. John, he was a figure larger than life.”Dr. John in 2013. — Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/ReutersUsing studio time left over from a Sonny & Cher session, Mr. Rebennack and Battiste cut an album of hazy, incantatory songs steeped in Crescent City voodoo imagery. Issued by Atlantic Records' Atco subsidiary as “Gris-Gris”, the collection failed to chart, but it inaugurated several years of extroverted live shows that established Dr. John as a unique under-the-radar performer.
Three more similarly styled albums — “Babylon” (1969), “Remedies” (1970) and “The Sun Moon and Herbs” (1971) — deepened the Dr. John image; the latter album, recorded in London, included guest appearances by Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger.
However, he turned away from his original swampy style for an album he described in the notes as “More Gumbo, Less Gris Gris.” Co-produced by Battiste and Jerry Wexler, “Gumbo” (1972) was devoted to covers of New Orleans roots music by Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Sugar Boy Crawford and others; its good-time Mardi Gras atmosphere lifted it to No.112 on the charts.
His first set with Toussaint and the Meters became his biggest commercial success: “In the Right Place” (1973) included the No.9 single “Right Place Wrong Time”. While the follow-up LP “Desitively Bonnaroo” (1974) failed to duplicate its predecessor’s popularity, its title inspired the name of the popular Bonaroo Festival.
A schism with Atlantic — possibly prompted by Wexler's daughter Anita's introduction to heroin by Dr. John — led to a period of label-jumping by the musician.
In 1989, he landed at Warner Brothers Records with “In a Sentimental Mood”, a well-received set of standards elegantly produced by Tommy LiPuma that included the Grammy-winning duet with Jones. That year, he finally kicked his more than three-decade addiction to heroin. Another Grammy winner, the self-descriptive “Goin' Back to New Orleans”, followed in 1992. Around that time, he also sang the opening theme to the TV sitcom “Blossom”, “My Opinionation”.
He abided as an “eminence gris-gris” for the remainder of his career. He settled in for a long stay at Blue Note Records in the new millennium; his five-album sojourn for the imprint was inaugurated the Ellington tribute “Duke Elegant” in 2000. (His homage to trumpeter Armstrong, “Ske-Dat-De-Dat”, was released by Concord in 2014.
The intensely felt “City That Care Forgot” was succeeded by the atypical “Locked Down” for Nonesuch Records in 2012; the album, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and eschewing pianistics for a tough hard-rock-based sound, also collected a Grammy as best blues album.
Information about surviving offspring was not immediately available.__________________________________________________________________________ • This story was originally published at Variety magazine.• Chris Morris is an acclaimed writer and editor specializing in the video game and consumer electronics industries. He has covered both fields since 1996, offering analysis of news and trends and breaking several major stories, including the existence of the Game Boy Advance and the first details on “Half-Life 2” (after a five year cone of silence from the developer). Chris is also a veteran financial journalist with more than 25 years of experience, the last 18 of which were spent with some of the Internet's biggest sites. As Director of Content Development, he was a key part of the senior management team that helped grow CNNMoney.com to one of the most prominent financial sites online. Later, as Managing Editor of Yahoo! Finance, he orchestrated changes that resulted in a 61 percent increase in unique users in less than a year, climbing from 11.7 million to 18.8 million. While there, he was also responsible for maintaining relationships with over 30 editorial partners. He also has extensive experience in newspaper, magazine and radio. Today, he works with a number of clients including (but not limited to) CNBC, Yahoo!, Variety, Common Sense Media, Coast 2 Coast Radio Networks, GamesIndustry.biz and Wired.com. His work has also appeared on the web sites of USA Today, Fox Business, the Chicago Tribune, Fidelity and several other sites. www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dr-john-flamboyant-soul-of-new-orleans-music-dies-at-77/2019/06/06/e31783f2-88b1-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2019 13:09:51 GMT 10
Gone and nearly forgotten.....good that you remembered Tricko...
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2019 22:26:30 GMT 10
And it remains to this day we (Australians) are still humiliated by the US and those aspirational to be just like them.
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Post by KTJ on Aug 4, 2019 11:35:53 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Aug 4, 2019 12:00:07 GMT 10
I guess this means we're going to see one of the biggest funerals for many years here in Wairarapa later this week, including heaps of rugby royalty from all over the world in attendance.
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Post by KTJ on Aug 17, 2019 16:11:37 GMT 10
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