I am also a dutiful reader of the Times’ opinion pages, an increasingly unsatisfying discipline. The Times is pretty good at this, better than at other things it does. Selecting just the right details is what separates an artful obituary from a mundane one. Of course, attention must be paid to the powerful and the accomplished, but there should also be room for the eccentric, the unfortunate, and for those whose stories can broaden our understanding of what it means to live a meaningful life. The mix of personalities on the obit page is just as important. Yes, it is a snapshot of a life, but still a snapshot of a life in whole. Obituaries, on the other hand, have a pleasing sense of completeness. It is the nature of a newspaper to give you only part of what is an ongoing story. He seems to have thought that someone other than Nixon, with his own motivations, was directing the operation.Īs I’m sure you’ve guessed, these stories come from the obituary pages of Sunday’s New York Times. But Becker also maintained that the real reason for the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate was never revealed. For his part, Becker contended that in accepting a pardon, Nixon acknowledged that he had obstructed justice in the investigation into the Watergate affair. It also contributed to Ford’s defeat in the 1976 race against Jimmy Carter. Ford hoped the pardon might help to heal the country’s divisions in the aftermath of Watergate, but it probably did the opposite. Who was the man who negotiated Richard Nixon’s pardon (quite a big deal for those of us of a certain age)? His name was Benton Becker, a lawyer and aide to President Gerald Ford. Of course, Contreras never admitted a thing. I remember the headlines, and the questions about U.S. On his watch more than 3,200 people were murdered or “disappeared.” In 1978 one of his agents assassinated Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former ambassador to the United States, by planting a bomb under his car in Washington, D.C. Contreras eventually ended up in prison after Pinochet was deposed, although his accommodations there were more resort-like than punishing. Then there is Manuel Contreras, former head of Chile’s gestapo-like secret police under dictator General Augusto Pinochet. That’s quite a story “arc.” (More on Watergate in a minute.) Gray ended up working with Charles Colson’s (he of Watergate fame) evangelical ministry. Perhaps it was male brain fluid that made Mr. Ed -you know, the show with the avuncular talking horse. That role certainly sounds like a career changer, but it didn’t prevent Gray from securing roles on TV’s Mr. Later in her career that wish was evidently granted when she starred in The Leech Woman (1960), playing a predator who somehow used fluid from men’s brains to forestall aging. Or what about noir and B movie actress Coleen Gray, she of the “luminous skin”? Gray, born Doris Bernice Jensen, played an ingénue opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawke’s classic Red River (1948), and often complained of not being cast as more of a seductress. Then you’re dead.” Ah, gangsters and their mothers. “If he’s suspicious, he’s gonna ask you who’s your mother and who’s your grandmother. Nevertheless, he appears to have possessed the characteristic Berrigan sense of vocation and certitude.Īnd did you know that the gangster (Paulie) played by Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas (was it pasta he was cooking to serve with the lobsters in his posh prison cell?) was based on a Brooklyn mobster named Paul Vario? Or that it was an undercover cop, who also happened to be a former teenage delinquent from Brooklyn, who set up Vario and hundreds of other gangsters in one of the NYPD’s most successful sting operations? “As soon as the guy thinks you’re a cop, it’s just like him knowing you’re a cop,” explained Douglas LeVien, the detective who infiltrated the mob. I confess I didn’t know there was a third Berrigan brother who was also a political activist and peace protester, though not an ordained one.
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