BEDFORD, N.Y. (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s estranged wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who had fought drug and alcohol problems, was found dead at the family property Wednesday.

An autopsy for the 52-year-old was scheduled for Thursday, and no cause of death had been released.

In a statement issued by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s chief of staff, the family said Mary Kennedy, an architect, “inspired our family with her kindness, her love, her gentle soul and generous spirit.”

“Mary was a genius at friendship, a tremendously gifted architect and a pioneer and relentless advocate of green design who enhanced her cutting edge, energy efficient creations with exquisite taste and style,” the family said.

The former Mary Richardson, a longtime connection of the Kennedy clan, married Robert Kennedy Jr., a prominent environmental lawyer and the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, in 1994. The couple had four children, the youngest born in July 2001. Robert Kennedy Jr. also has two children from a previous marriage.

Mary Kennedy also was a designer and had overseen the renovation of the couple’s home into an environmentally advanced showpiece. Her family cited her devotion to her children in remembering her.

“We deeply regret the death of our beloved sister Mary, whose radiant and creative spirit will be sorely missed by those who loved her,” the family said in a statement issued by attorney Kerry Lawrence, who had represented her in a drunken-driving case. “Our heart goes out to her children who she loved without reservation.”

Neighbor Leslie Lampert, who owns the Cafe of Love restaurant a short drive from the Kennedy home, said Mary Kennedy was “at all times just a lovely individual.”

“She was community oriented,” Lampert said. “She was always kind in our presence.”

Another neighbor, Kim Fraioli, a trauma therapist who lives a few houses down from the Kennedys, said the family was private.

“We left them alone,” Fraioli. “We didn’t have any interaction. I think it’s a tragedy. It’s very sad for their family and the surviving children. My heart goes out to the family.”

At the home on Wednesday, a red brick mansion with a columned porch entrance set in a heavily wooded acreage, police kept media away.

Mary Richardson had known the Kennedys for years, through her friendship with Robert Kennedy Jr.’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, whom she met at boarding school. She had been Kerry Kennedy’s maid of honor at her wedding in 1990.

She had had trouble with drugs and alcohol and had two high-profile arrests around the time her husband filed for divorce in 2010.

Kennedy was first arrested May 15 of that year on a charge of driving while intoxicated after a police officer reported seeing her drive her car over a curb near the family’s Bedford home. Her only passenger was a dog, and police said she had a blood-alcohol level of 0.11 percent; the legal limit is 0.08 percent. Her license was suspended.

At the time of her sentencing, famous family and friends spoke out in support of her.

Her mother-in-law, Ethel Kennedy, wrote in a letter that she “is a caring, nourishing mother who has nursed her four children through lifelong bouts of debilitating allergies,” according to an account in Westchester’s The Journal News at the time.

Kerry Kennedy, in her letter, said, “When I look at my three daughters, my wish for them is that they are as blessed as I have been to have a companion, a confidante, a friend, like Mary Richardson.”

Mary Kennedy was charged later that year with driving under the influence of drugs, but that charge was dismissed in July 2011 when a judge said the evidence showed she didn’t know the medications she had taken would impair her ability to drive.

There were indications her troubles started earlier. In 2007, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drove his wife to a hospital for treatment, but she resisted and ran from the car, according to the Journal News, which cited Mount Kisco police records.

“I remember she was acting kind of out of it, kind of crazy,” a witness, Rae Kesten, told The Journal News in 2007. “She was running into the street and flailing her arms around. He was trying to restrain her. I didn’t know if they were fighting or not, but I was concerned.”

The unexpected death of another person connected to the storied Kennedy clan brought to mind the other sorrows the famous family has suffered, including the assassinations of RFK and JFK in the 1960s.

Shopping in Bedford, Diane Glokler said, “I’ve always just thought that family is very tragic. They keep having tragic things happening to them. It’s heart-wrenching.”

Police At Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s House, His Wife Mary Dead At 52
Created 05/16/2012 – 3:00pm
By RadarOnline.com Staff

Police were called to the home of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in New York after his wife Mary Kennedy was found dead Wednesday, RadarOnline.com has learned exclusively.

A source says Mary committed suicide, but RadarOnline.com has yet to confirm that information.

Lt. Dickan of the Bedford PD confirmed that a deceased body was removed from the home and Radar has confirmed that the Westchester County Medical Examiner has Mary’s body.

“There was a phone call made from the home requesting assistance for a death at that location,” Dickan told RadarOnline.com. “This is an unattended death investigation. That means no one was there when the person died.”

“There was an EMT vehicle outside the home about an hour ago,” a neighbor, who wished to remain anonymous, exclusively told RadarOnline.com.

“We deeply regret the death of our beloved sister Mary, whose radiant and creative spirit will be sorely missed by those who loved her,” a family representative tells RadarOnline.com. “Our heart goes out to her children who she loved without reservation. We have no further comment at this time.”

Mary Richardson Kennedy’s attorney Patricia Hennessey tells RadarOnline.com, “No one knows anything right now. The family knows she died sometime today and we are waiting on fuller information as soon as we can. The family is making arrangements.”

As for suicide, Hennessey says, “That’s not anything I know or anyone knows.”

The famed Kennedy was married to Mary for 16 years, before filing for divorce in May 2010. The couple has four children together.

Mary lived at the family home in Mount Kisco, New York while Robert spent the majority of his time in Los Angeles.

Another source, close to Robert tells RadarOnline.com: “Mary was in a very dark place recently. Robert tried to help her all he could but it was difficult or him to be around her. Robert is committed to his sobriety but Mary had chosen a whole different path to take.”

Mary was charged with driving under the influence in May 2010 by the Bedford, New York police after she failed a number of sobriety tests and her blood alcohol level registered at 0.11. The incident occurred just three days after Robert filed for divorce.

“Robert still supported Mary and was there for her whenever he could be, but he had pretty much moved on,” the source tells RadarOnline.com. “He has been dating Cheryl Hines for a while now and they are very happy together.”

RFK Jr., 58, is the son of former Sen. Robert Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.

November 22-25, 2012
Five Decades Later – What Do We Know Now?
COPA’s 17th Annual Regional Meeting will be held in Dallas, TX as a Researcher’s Gathering. We will have roundtable discussions on Ballistic, Forensic and Medical Evidence, Classified Records Release, Oswald’s Role, Who? and Why?, Other Assassinations, Photographic Evidence, 50th Anniversary Plans. We will have a limited number of speakers this year to address each topic area or bring new evidence to light. Our focus will be to share the best research being done and what we have learned over the years. Arrangements are being made with the Hotel Lawrence and other meeting venues and will be announced. A donation of $100 to COPA in advance of the conference will cover full registration and a set of last year’s conference DVDs. Registration rates will be announced and can be paid at the events. We will hold our Moment of Silence on the Grassy Knoll on the 22nd at 12:30 pm.

50 Years is Enough! Free the Files, Find the Truth
November 22-24, 2013
COPA will hold a national conference in Dallas, TX to mark the 50th anniversary. We are working to find a larger venue for this event. We are still negotiating a permit for a Moment of Silence on the Grassy Knoll with the Dallas authorities, who want to take over the space. We expect huge crowds will be there and want to be visible to them with a message about the truth. We are busy this year lining up the best speakers and making plans for a major event. We are reaching out to the press to cover us locally and nationally. You won’t want to miss this one. Advance registrations will be offered at a discount to help us plan. If you are interested in coming, let us know by email now, and mark your calendar.

Occupy the Grassy Knoll 2013
Moment of Silence
Grassy Knoll, Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX
November 22, 2013 – 12:30 pm
We will hold our annual Moment of Silence followed by famous researchers speaking out on the assassination of President Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his death. We were recently denied a permit by the Dallas Parks and Recreation because the Sixth Floor Museum got an exclusive permit for control of Dealey Plaza for a week surrounding the anniversary date despite having no events planned. They want to prevent discussion of the assassination on that day. We have called for Occupy the Grassy Knoll to speak truth to power. We are coordinating our activities as best we can with the Mayor’s office and the Museum, but we assert our tradition of free speech on the Knoll since 1964 with the Moment of Silence. Please join us there to prevent perpetual silence on the assassination after the 50th.

For more information or to RSVP, contact copa@starpower.net

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who helped shape the political history of the 1960s, facing down segregationists, riding herd on historic civil rights legislation and helping to map Vietnam War strategy as a central player in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died Tuesday night at his home in Skillman, N.J. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Lydia.

Mr. Katzenbach was one of the “best and the brightest,” David Halberstam’s term for the likes of Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and other ambitious, cerebral and often idealistic postwar policy makers who came to Washington from business and academia carrying golden credentials. Mr. Katzenbach, an attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was the son of a New Jersey state attorney general, a Rhodes scholar, a law professor at Yale and the University of Chicago and a war hero.

His six years in government put him in the thick of some of the major events of the ’60s. He advised President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, negotiated the release of Cuban prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion and pushed for an independent commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination. He was Robert F. Kennedy’s No. 2 in the Justice Department and took on J. Edgar Hoover, the pugnacious F.B.I. director, over his wiretapping of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As an under secretary of state, he defended Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War before Congress.

“Few men have been so deeply involved in the critical issues of our time,” Johnson wrote to him when Mr. Katzenbach left government in 1968.

Perhaps his tensest moment came on June 11, 1963, when he confronted George C. Wallace in stifling heat on the steps of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Mr. Wallace was the Alabama governor who had trumpeted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and vowed to block the admission of two black students “at the schoolhouse door.”

Mr. Katzenbach, in front of television cameras and flanked by a federal marshal and a United States attorney, approached Foster Auditorium, the main building on campus, around 11 a.m. Mr. Wallace was waiting behind a lectern at the top of the stairs, surrounded by a crowd of whites, some armed. “Stop!” he called out, raising his hand.

Mr. Katzenbach read a presidential proclamation ordering that the students be admitted and asked the governor to step aside peacefully. Mr. Wallace read a five-minute statement castigating “the central government” for “suppression of rights.”

Towering over Mr. Wallace, Mr. Katzenbach, a 6-foot-2-inch former college hockey goalie, was dismissive. “I’m not interested in this show,” he said.

About four hours later, with the acquiescence of the governor, Mr. Katzenbach escorted the students to register.

Mr. Katzenbach was known for reconciling differences and cooling tempers. In the Alabama confrontation he had the idea of defusing the situation by leaving the aspiring black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, in a car while he approached Governor Wallace.

Steering Civil Rights Bills

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Katzenbach, a Democrat, cultivated the good will of Republican senators in 1964 to help pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he also helped draft, ending a century of discrimination at the polls. In an interview with The New York Times for this obituary in 2006, he contrasted his even-tempered style with that of his predecessor, the often brutally straightforward Robert Kennedy. He said his own way was to be “less than direct.”

His unflappability was on display early on, when as a bomber’s navigator in World War II he heard the bombardier announce over the intercom that the plane was on fire. “That’s too bad,” Mr. Katzenbach replied.

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach was born on Jan. 17, 1922, in Philadelphia, the younger of two sons of Edward Lawrence Katzenbach and the former Marie Louise Hilson. His father was a corporate lawyer and New Jersey attorney general from 1924 to 1929. He died when Nicholas was 12. His mother was a member of the New Jersey State Board of Education for 44 years and its president for a decade. His brother, Edward Jr., died in 1974.

Mr. Katzenbach was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he played hockey, and Princeton, where he majored in international relations and public affairs. As a 19-year-old junior he drove to New York to enlist after the Pearl Harbor attack. A month later he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces and became a navigator on B-25 bombers. On a mission in 1943, he was captured when his plane was shot down. (He was awarded an Air Medal and three clusters.) As a prisoner of war in Germany he read, by his count, 400 books in 15 months.

After the war Mr. Katzenbach convinced Princeton that his reading qualified him for an undergraduate degree. The university had him take nine examinations and write a thesis, and in two months he graduated cum laude, in 1945. Two years later he graduated from Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. On a Rhodes scholarship, he studied at Balliol College at Oxford.

In the 1950s, Mr. Katzenbach worked at his family law firm, advised the general counsel of the secretary of the Air Force and taught law at Yale and the University of Chicago. In 1961, he and Morton A. Kaplan wrote “The Political Foundations of International Law.”

Mr. Katzenbach joined the Kennedy administration after many of his friends had signed on. In his book “Kennedy Justice,” Victor Navasky described the recruits as living by the “code of the Ivy League gentleman,” believing “in the notion that reasonable men can always work things out.”

One friend was Byron R. White, the newly appointed deputy attorney general under Robert Kennedy. Mr. White made Mr. Katzenbach an assistant attorney general, putting him in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, a post some call “the attorney general’s attorney general.”

After Mr. White was named to the Supreme Court in March 1962, Mr. Katzenbach replaced him as Robert Kennedy’s deputy. That September, in the face of riots, he was sent to the University of Mississippi to enforce a federal court order requiring the university to admit its first black student, James Meredith.

“If things get rough, don’t worry about yourself,” Robert Kennedy told him jokingly, according to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.” “The president needs a moral issue.”

After rioting began at Ole Miss, the president called in federal troops. “A bone-weary Katzenbach was talking with President Kennedy when joyous shouts went up that regular troops had been sighted” outside the administration building, Taylor Branch wrote in “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63.” Mr. Meredith was ultimately admitted.

That fall, during the missile crisis, Mr. Katzenbach wrote a legal brief supporting President Kennedy’s decision to blockade Cuba.

After Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Mr. Katzenbach read the words of the oath of office to a Johnson aide, Jack Valenti, as Johnson prepared to be sworn in aboard Air Force One. And on Nov. 25, three days afterward, he sent a memo to the presidential aide Bill Moyers proposing that an independent national commission be established to investigate the killing.

The memo, released by the National Archives in 1994, began, “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at a trial.”

Four days later, Johnson appointed the Warren Commission to investigate the killing; it concluded that Oswald had acted alone.

Conspiracy buffs have interpreted the Katzenbach memo as calling for such a panel to come to a predetermined conclusion. But Mr. Katzenbach maintained that he was simply convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Mr. Katzenbach witnessed the famously tempestuous relationship between Johnson and Robert Kennedy. In his interview with The Times in 2006, he recalled the time Johnson angrily summoned him and Kennedy to the Oval Office to discuss reports that Kennedy had leaked a story to the press about a “peace feeler” from North Vietnam in 1967. Though Kennedy denied the accusation, the president was “absolutely insulting to Bobby” as well as himself, Mr. Katzenbach said, and both left in anger

When Kennedy resigned as attorney general to run for the Senate from New York in September 1964, he recommended that Mr. Katzenbach succeed him. Johnson first offered the job to Clark M. Clifford, a consummate Washington insider, who declined. After months of speculation that Johnson was wary of naming someone so close to Kennedy as attorney general, the president, partly on the advice of his friend Abe Fortas, a future Supreme Court justice, summoned Mr. Katzenbach and his wife to the White House on Jan. 28, 1965. Greeting them in his pajamas — he had a bad cold — Johnson offered him the job.

Drawing the Line on Hoover

As attorney general, besides helping to draft and steer civil rights legislation through Congress, Mr. Katzenbach defended the 1964 Civil Rights Act before the Supreme Court, winning a 9-0 ruling. In 1965 he had the Justice Department seek a federal court order barring Alabama officials from interfering with the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which was led by Dr. King.

He also tried to navigate a treacherous course between King and Hoover at the F.B.I. He had agreed with Robert Kennedy in 1962 that it was necessary for the F.B.I. to tap Dr. King’s phones in the face of Hoover’s accusations that King was associating with Communists. Mr. Katzenbach said he and Kennedy believed the tapes would clear Dr. King.

But when he learned that the F.B.I. was doing far more than tapping phones, that it was bugging hotel rooms to record Dr. King’s extramarital sexual encounters, then trying to blackmail him, even suggesting that he commit suicide, Mr. Katzenbach drew the line.

“I flew to President Johnson’s Texas ranch to ask him to help put a stop to it,” Mr. Katzenbach wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I think that he did, but such was Hoover’s power, I cannot be sure that even the president had the courage to do so.”

Mr. Katzenbach resigned in 1966, stating that “he could no longer effectively serve as attorney general because of Mr. Hoover’s obvious resentment of me.” Johnson appointed him under secretary of state, replacing George W. Ball, who had resigned.

There was speculation that Mr. Katzenbach left as attorney general in part to make way for Ramsey Clark, an assistant attorney general. Johnson, it was said, wanted to make a historic appointment to the Supreme Court, choosing Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice. Appointing Mr. Clark would prod his father, Justice Tom C. Clark, to resign to avoid a conflict of interest with his son. Ramsey Clark was appointed, Justice Clark did resign and Marshall did succeed him.

From Public to Private Sector

As the No. 2 official at the State Department, Mr. Katzenbach defended the legality of United States involvement in Vietnam, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 1967 to argue that the Tonkin Gulf resolution, passed by Congress in 1964, had given the president the authority to widen the war.

Opponents of the war had hoped that he would follow in Mr. Ball’s footsteps and challenge the administration’s policies from within. Mr. Katzenbach took a quieter tack, setting up a secret working group — “the Non-group,” he called it — to pursue ways to end the war. Mr. Katzenbach later said the group had added shades of gray to policy discussions and had contributed to bombing halts.

After Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, was elected president in 1968, Mr. Katzenbach resigned from the State Department and joined I.B.M. as senior vice president and general counsel. He soon found himself in the role of adversary of the federal government.

Three days before Nixon took office, the Johnson administration filed an antitrust suit against I.B.M., seeking to break it up. I.B.M. admitted it was a monopoly but argued that its actions were legal and did not suppress competition. Mr. Katzenbach represented the firm in a 13-year war of attrition, including a trial of more than six years. In the end, the administration of President Ronald Reagan dropped the case, in 1982, saying it was without merit.

Resigning from I.B.M. in 1986, Mr. Katzenbach went into private practice at the New Jersey-based firm of Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti.

Besides his wife, the former Lydia King Phelps Stokes, Mr. Katzenbach’s survivors include his sons Christopher and John, the novelist; his daughters Mimi and Anne deBelleville Katzenbach; and six grandchildren.

While in private practice Mr. Katzenbach often took on special assignments for the public and private sectors, in one instance serving as chairman of the troubled Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991.

The appointments flowed from his reputation for loyalty and competence. Johnson often asked top officials, “Why can’t you be like Nick Katzenbach?”

Mr. Katzenbach had his own standards for judging government officials.

“The problem with that man is that he thinks government is just a game,” he once observed about a White House aide. “He doesn’t care about the consequences of his actions.”

In an opinion released Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler said Volume V in the CIA’s Official History of the Bay of Pigs was a draft that was “rejected for inclusion in the final publication” and was exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Washington-based National Security Archive, a research institute and library, filed suit last year asking for declassification of all five volumes in the set after its previous FOIA requests were unsuccessful.

Volumes I, II, and IV were released last April. Volume III had actually been declassified in 1998 but researchers remained unaware of the fact until a Villanova university professor found it stashed in a box at the National Archives Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in 2005.

The National Security Archive called Kessler’s decision “a regrettable blow to the right-to-know.”

Volume V is a rebuttal by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, who died in 1997, of a report by the intelligence agency’s inspector general that found the CIA was primarily responsible for the failure of the invasion.

Who bears responsibility for the failure of the April 14-19, 1961, mission designed to topple the Castro regime has long been debated.

The CIA inspector general’s report concluded faulty intelligence, poor planning, inadequate staffing and failure to inform President John F. Kennedy there was little chance the mission would be successful were to blame. But Pfeiffer put the blame on the Kennedy White House.

The judge agreed with the CIA assertion that release of Volume V would have a chilling effect on current CIA historians who might be reluctant to try out “innovative, unorthodox or unpopular interpretations in a draft manuscript” if they thought it would be made public.

The CIA successfully showed release of Volume V “would harm the deliberative process,” making it exempt from disclosure under FOIA, Kessler said in her opinion.

“The idea that the CIA can advance the cause of accurate historical analysis by hiding history from the peer review of the public is preposterous,” said Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project.

The National Security Archive had argued that the passage of time should serve as a basis for disclosure of Volume V, but Kessler said the CIA had shown that the passage of time hasn’t “affected the rationale for invoking” the FOIA exemption.

Kornbluh noted an executive order by President Barack Obama that “no information shall remain classified indefinitely” and said the NSA would press the administration to force the CIA to adhere to the order.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/12/v-print/2796961/judge-keep-part-of-cias-bay-of.html#storylink=cpy

DALLAS – Plans are underway to restore the historic Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The two-acre site, completed in 1941, has gone largely untouched for much of its more than 70 years.

The plans include repairing structural damage, updating the fountains in the two reflecting pools and bringing some sidewalks into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The restoration will be paid for with public and private funds. There is a fundraising effort underway, and the project is a little less than $1 million shy of the $4.3 million budget.

Dealey Plaza was designed in 1939 by the Kansas City, Missouri, architectural firm of Hare and Hare and it stands on what’s believed the birthplace of Dallas. The owner of the Dallas Morning News, George Bannerman Dealey, donated the land and the city park in his name was dedicated in 1949, hailed as the “front door of Dallas.”

But President Kennedy’s assassination made Dealey Plaza infamous and synonymous with the assassination.

As a result, with the exception some sporadic cosmetic touch ups and updates, the National Historic Landmark has gone largely untouched.

Visit DallasFoundation.org if you are interested in making a donation to the restoration of Dealey Plaza.

E-mail gcampos@wfaa.com

FILE – In this Aug. 17, 1967 file photo, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which is studying a resolution aimed at giving Congress more power in foreign affairs, saying that the President has the top foreign affairs power under the Constitution. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin)

TRENTON, N.J. — While researching his epic series on Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro found himself again and again calling upon Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, the former Justice Department and State Department official.

“He was a key figure in so many of the most crucial moments in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,” says Caro, whose fourth Johnson volume, “The Passage of Power,” was recently released. “And he was so careful about making sure that I truly understood them.”

The Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Integration of schools. The Warren Report. The Civil Rights Act. Vietnam. In some ways, the history of Katzenbach’s time in government was itself a history of government in the 1960s.

Katzenbach died Tuesday night at age 90 at his home in Skillman, N.J. His career was praised by Princeton University scholar Sean Wilentz as “long and singular” and defined by a “bedrock devotion to principle.”

Katzenbach’s son, John, said his father “passed away with the same quiet dignity that he displayed throughout his life.” He noted that although his father had accomplished much in his career as a lawyer, statesman and as a father and grandfather, “he never thought any battle was fully won until hearts and attitudes followed the law.”

Katzenbach was in his early 40s when he joined the Justice Department in 1961 under Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The graduate of Princeton and Yale and former prisoner of war had the intellect and resolve that the Kennedys valued. He soon joined Burke Marshall, future Supreme Court justice Byron White and future Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox among others during what is regarded as a brief, golden era for the department.

Katzenbach wrote a legal brief in support of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to blockade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis and helped secure the release of prisoners captured during the disastrous Bay of Pigs raid on Cuba in 1961. He became a deputy attorney general in 1963 and, after Kennedy’s assassination, served as attorney general and an undersecretary of state under President Lyndon Johnson.

Katzenbach, who helped Johnson pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had been the Kennedy administration’s point man when James Meredith became the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The following year, he was the federal official on hand when segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace made his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” – symbolically attempting to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering the University of Alabama.

Looking businesslike in a suit and tie, his bald head sweating under the Alabama sun, Katzenbach walked up to the entrance of a university building and handed Wallace, who stood in the shade, a presidential proclamation saying he must obey the law. The nation watched on television, including a nervous Robert Kennedy at his office in Washington.

It was a historic confrontation, but resolved in advance. President Kennedy had federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered some of its units to the university campus. An agreement was then reached between the White House and Wallace’s aides, and Malone and Hood enrolled at the school after Wallace read a proclamation to Katzenbach and left.

Katzenbach’s efforts in Alabama were praised Wednesday by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who noted that Malone later became his sister-in-law.

“Throughout one of the most challenging and consequential eras in American history, his extraordinary talents – and dedicated leadership of the Department of Justice – helped to guide our Nation forward from the dark days of segregation and to secure the successful passage of the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts,” Holder said.

A few months after the face-off in Alabama, Katzenbach again stepped up, in the days following Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. On Nov. 25, three days after the slaying, Katzenbach sent a memo to Johnson aide Bill Moyers urging that results of the FBI’s investigation be made public to combat any notion that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone.

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large,” Katzenbach wrote.

Four days after the memo, Johnson appointed some of the nation’s most prominent figures to the Warren Commission, which ultimately concluded that Oswald acted alone, a theory still disputed. Skeptics and conspiracy theorists have often cited Katzenbach’s memo as a sign of a government cover-up.

In February 1965, Johnson picked Katzenbach as his attorney general, but he held the post for less than two years, feuding with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others before stepping down in October 1966. A short time later, he was named an undersecretary of state, a post he held for the remainder of the Johnson administration and which led to an unhappy entanglement with the Vietnam War.

In testimony before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee in 1967, Katzenbach made a controversial defense of the war’s legality, citing the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which allowed the U.S. to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. The committee’s chairman, Sen. J. William Fulbright, had disputed that the Tonkin resolution – passed before the U.S. had sent ground troops to Vietnam – was a formal declaration of war.

“What could a declaration of war have done that would have given the president clearer authority?” Katzenbach responded. “It would not, I think, reflect correctly the very limited objectives of the United States with respect to Vietnam to use an outmoded phraseology, to declare war.”

Katzenbach believed his testimony was accurate, but acknowledged its unpopularity. Philip Roth and Jules Feiffer were among the artists who took out a full-page newspaper ad condemning his remarks. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota would cite Katzenbach as a reason for running for president in 1968 as an anti-war candidate, a decision that helped convince Johnson not to seek a second term.

In 1969, after the Johnson administration ended, Katzenbach was appointed IBM’s general counsel and helped represent the computer giant in its long fight against an anti-trust lawsuit filed by the government and eventually dismissed. He also served on prison reform panels and remained active in national Democratic politics and constitutional issues. In December 1998, he took part in a protest in Princeton against Republican efforts to impeach President Clinton and also spoke as a witness for the president.

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach was born in Philadelphia in 1922 to a family of politicians. His middle name, with the unusual abbreviation deB., came from a forebear who had served as physician to Napoleon’s brother before emigrating to the U.S.

Katzenbach served in the Army Air Force during World War II and spent two years as a prisoner of war in Italy. He later graduated from Princeton and the Yale Law School and studied at Oxford University for two years as a Rhodes Scholar.

For much of the 1950s, Katzenbach was a professor of law, first at Yale, then at the University of Chicago. He was on a leave of absence, in Switzerland, when John F. Kennedy received the Democrats’ nomination for president, in 1960.

His eight-year career in presidential administrations started the following year.

It was an exciting time,” Katzenbach told the AP. “There were lots of young people who got themselves involved in civil rights, and later in protesting the Vietnam War, feeling involved in the government and what’s going on in their own future. To my mind that’s what makes this a great country.”

AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

Wecht on cover of tabloid, to his surprise
By Michael A. Fuoco / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
May 3, 2012 1:36 pm

The April 30, 2012 edition of the National Examiner.

Cyril H. Wecht is a voracious news consumer, reading five daily newspapers, not a supermarket tabloid among them.

“I don’t read tabloids. I can’t afford $4 for a newspaper,” he quipped.

That’s why he was surprised to learn from a reporter that he was the cover story for the April 30 edition of the National Examiner.

Thankfully, the Examiner didn’t purport to have learned the renowned forensic pathologist was a “Missing Kardashian Sister!” or that he had a hand in a “Brad and Angelina Split!”

Still, the headline was a little jarring: “Top coroner demands: DIG UP JFK!” A subhead proclaimed “New Autopsy Will Finger Real Killers!”

Huh? Really?

Anyone who doesn’t live in a cave, who reads a newspaper, watches TV or listens to the radio knows Dr. Wecht is anything but media shy. He’s the media’s go-to expert on all manner of death, dying and crime. He is a nationally acclaimed forensic pathologist, an attorney, a medical-legal consultant, a professor of medicine and of law.

He is accommodating to local, national and international outlets alike. Indeed, while customers checking out at supermarkets and drug stores Saturday stared at his photograph on the tabloid cover, he was appearing on the CBS news show “48 Hours,” discussing a New York murder case.

Still, for all his media accessibility, he was stumped by the story’s origin even though the subject wasn’t a surprise. Perhaps the harshest critic of the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Wecht has contended for more than four decades that a new autopsy could show there were two shooters.

But he said he wasn’t on a current campaign in that regard, had never “demanded” an exhumation and noted that a new autopsy wouldn’t “finger the real killers.”

Most surprisingly, he said he never spoke to the writer of the two-page story, Gregory Michaels, but didn’t dispute quotes attributed to him.

“I’m surprised because I never spoke with the man, but I’m not surprised with the fact it is attributed to me, because I’ve been saying this for 47 years,” Dr. Wecht said.

As it turns out, the story was an apparent rewrite of one published in the March 19 edition of the Examiner’s sister publication The Globe that was written by Dawna Kaufmann, Dr. Wecht’s co-author of two books.

Ms. Kaufmann, of Los Angeles, said she wrote the story for The Globe after rereading Dr. Wecht’s 1993 book, “Cause of Death,” that included his views on the JFK assassination, and subsequently interviewing him. She said over her objection Globe editors insisted on saying that Dr. Wecht demanded an exhumation. Not only didn’t she know the story would be recycled as an Examiner cover story, she did not know Mr. Michaels. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

Dr. Wecht was more bemused than annoyed by his tabloid treatment and his sharing the cover with headlines proclaiming “COUNTRY MUSIC WARS!” “Man drives across America–ON 2 GALLONS OF GAS!” and “Whitney’s DISTURBING AUTOPSY REPORT!”

“I’ve been in tabloids over the years, such as in the case of O.J. [Simpson] and JonBenet [Ramsey], but I don’t know if I ever made the cover. I’m always willing to talk to them. I’m not going to be snooty.”

The Examiner story wasn’t the first time Dr. Wecht has been front-page news regarding the JFK assassination. In August 1972, he was given permission to examine the Warren Commission’s evidence and discovered the president’s brain, supposedly preserved for examination, was missing. Dr. Wecht’s discovery was a front-page story the next morning in The New York Times with a headline that had a dash of tabloid journalism in it — “Mystery Cloaks Fate of Brain of Kennedy.”

He said he still believes, after all of these years, that an examination of Kennedy’s skull, even without the brain, could answer once and for all whether Oswald acted alone.

“Do I believe this is going to occur? Absolutely not. There’s no way it’s going to occur. I’m not on any kind of campaign for that.”

But might Caroline Kennedy consider an exhumation if she sees the National Examiner cover in a supermarket?

He chuckled. “Caroline Kennedy will be in a supermarket when I grow hair on my head.”

I watched a very sorry display on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show “Hardball” tonight: Chris Matthews conducted a short, stage-managed, cream-puff interview with retired Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, and the game was rigged “from the get-go.” That was obvious. But it was also completely unacceptable, and forever tarnishes the reputations of both of these men.

The occasion was a brief discussion of Clint Hill’s short new memoir, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me.”

I picked the book up in the store about three weeks ago and read the three or so pages that everyone naturally turns to: Clint Hill’s description of what happened during the shots in Dallas, on Elm Street, on November 22, 1963, when he ran from the left running board of the Queen Mary (the Secret Service follow-up car that day), to President Kennedy’s limousine, only to arrive at, and mount the limousine, after all of the shots had been fired.

I was particularly interested to see whether Clint Hill’s description of President Kennedy’s head wound had changed from what he wrote in 1963, or from what he testified to in 1964 while under oath before the Warren Commission, or from the words attributed to him in the recent book “The Kennedy Detail.” The words hadn’t changed. In his new memoir, Clint Hill (again) described a large, gaping wound in the right rear of President Kennedy’s head, and made explicitly clear that a large amount of debris had been blown to the rear after the fatal shot, and that Jacqueline Kennedy had emerged from her seat to retrieve a part of President Kennedy’s skull that had gone to the rear, and lay on the trunk lid, after the fatal shot.

He described all of that again today on television with Chris Matthews. Anyone familiar with his 1963 written report, and with his 1964 sworn testimony, also knows that in this 1964 testimony before Assistant Warren Commission Counsel Arlen Specter, he said that a large portion of the rear of President Kennedy’s head was lying in the back seat of the car, and that the trunk lid was covered with bloody water and brain issue. All of this—the biological debris from her husband’s head retrieved by Jacqueline Kennedy from the trunk lid; the large, gaping wound in the right rear of the head of the 35th President of the United States; and the blood and brain tissue sprayed over the trunk lid—all of this, of course, speaks graphically and plainly of a fatal shot from the front, or right front (not a fatal shot from the rear, where the Book Depository was).

Clint Hill knows it, and Chris Matthews knows it. But they pretended otherwise, presumably for all the “low information voters” in the TV audience. The problem for these two guys is, there aren’t that many low information (i.e., uneducated or stupid) voters watching this show. The show has a very highly educated audience. So what they did was not only grossly dishonest—it was blatantly offensive, as well as just plain dumb.

Now, anyone who has read about the JFK assassination knows that every doctor who treated JFK at the the side of his gurney in Trauma Room One at Parkland Hospital, in Dallas, described the same head wound that Clint Hill did in 1963 and 1964: a wound that could only have been an EXIT WOUND, which meant that the fatal shot had to come from the front, or right front, not from behind. Not one doctor at Parkland who wrote a treatment report the day of the assassination mentioned anything in those reports but a wound in the right rear of the skull. (And no one mentioned any damage to the top of his head or the right side of his head above the ear.) If you don’t believe me, read the treatment reports (they were published in the Warren Report, after all). The wound described by these Parkland treating physicians and nurses that day was an avulsed wound (exploded outward from within), and the right rear of JFK’s head was devoid of scalp and skull, in an exploded area about the size of a baseball. The head wound observed at Parkland Hospital during the 40 minutes that President Kennedy was treated (that duration was given by Dr. Clark in a press conference that day) had none of the characteristics of an entry wound whatsoever. It had all of the classic characteristics of an exit wound. A large amount of cerebral brain tissue was missing—blown out—and part of the badly damaged cerebellum, the part of the brain very low in the rear of the skull, was extruding from the head wound onto the treatment cart, as the Parkland physicians treated President Kennedy and tried to save his life.

Even Chris Matthews knows that bullets make small holes when entering the body, and large holes when exiting the body. (Especially head wounds.)

And yet Chris Matthews asked Clint Hill today if he had come to any conclusions about the shooting, and Clint Hill, obviously prepared for the question, said, “Sure: one shooter, three shots, from behind,” or words almost identical to that. Now, Clint Hill knows that cannot be true. He always has. In fact, he knows it is such utter bullshit that he didn’t say that in his new book—he merely described the wound he observed (an obvious exit wound), without commenting on where the shots came from or who did the shooting.

I knew what game Clint Hill was playing when he described JFK’s head wound in “The Kennedy Detail” and in “Mrs. Kennedy and Me”—the game was: I will describe exactly what I saw and will not lie about it, but neither will I openly challenge the Warren Commission’s or the HSCA’s “government line” that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy all on his own. The rules of the game Clint Hill was obviously engaging in when these two books were published were, “I will tell the truth about what I saw, but I will not comment on what it means.” In playing by those unwritten rules, Hill managed to sit on the fence, and tell the truth about the head wound, and at the same time avoided directly refuting the Warren Commission and HSCA conclusions that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK from the Texas School Book Depository, firing from above and behind.

But today Clint Hill crossed the line, and said JFK was killed by a Communist sympathizer, Lee Harvey Oswald, firing all the shots from behind. Shame on you, Clint Hill. You crossed a line today that you did not cross in either of the two recent books that quote you. What you did was unforgivable.

And then Chris Matthews (who served in the Peace Corps, not in the military), gave us all his best benefit as a “firearms expert” by saying that when he stood on Elm Street in Dallas in the 1990s (“when I was down there with CBS,” he said), he had concluded that killing JFK from the TSBD was “an easy shot.” Gee, thank you, Chris, for this profound wisdom based on all your years as a trained marksman in the Peace Corps. Of course, Chris Matthews never mentioned today that the scope on the rifle was a cheap piece of crap that was misaligned; that the rifle found in the Depository was an unreliable piece of junk; or that it had a defective firing pin which the FBI had to replace before even test firing it. And Chris Matthews never discussed the last marksmanship test score noted in Oswald’s USMC Service Record before being discharged from the Marine Corps, which was only one point above failure. (Oswald received average marksmanship scores in boot camp, achieving the middle of three shooter designations, but obviously received a “pass” in 1959—when he most likely failed his test that year. It is obvious to me that after his skills had atrophied through disuse, he was given the official score that was only one point above failure, as a gift. As fellow Marine Nelson Delgado explained to Mark Lane in 1966 (in the film “Rush to Judgment”), Oswald was such a poor shot he was always getting flagged with “Maggie’s Drawers” at the El Toro shooting range; his poor marksmanship was a standing joke in his own unit.) Chris Matthews will not discuss evidence, because he knows he will lose the argument—he only wants to discuss the politically correct conclusions endorsed by the National Security State.

Chris Matthews has much to be ashamed of here. He used to be the principal aide to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. It was Tip O’Neill who published in his own memoir, “Man of the House,” on page 211 (paperback edition, St. Martin’s Press, 1987), that the two aides closest to President Kennedy on a personal basis—Kenneth O’Donnell, and Dave Powers—told him at dinner in 1968, five years after JFK’s assassination, that at least two shots came from behind the fence on the grassy knoll, to the right front of the limousine. O’Donnell also told Tip O’Neill at that dinner meeting that he had lied to the Warren Commission about the origin of the shots, at the request of the FBI.

Surely Chris, you cannot pretend to be unfamiliar with this recollection of Tip O’Neill’s??? If he did not tell you himself over a beer one night, surely you read it in his memoirs? Don’t tell me you have not read the memoirs of your former boss, Chris…that won’t fly.

Clint Hill crossed the line tonight from telling just part of the truth, to telling a lie that I am sure he does not believe in, and that cannot be true. And he knows it.

Chris Matthews, an otherwise intelligent person, repeatedly promotes the falsehood of the Lone Assassin Myth as if it were certified fact, when it cannot be true. And he knows he is promoting a Big Lie. Is this the price for keeping your job with the Mainstream Corporate Media, Chris? Or do you really believe that by lying about JFK’s assassination, and pretending there was NOT a coup in this country in 1963, that you are somehow “protecting America’s institutions?” I hope not, because there is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than lies perpetuated by big media and the government.

How do you sleep with yourself at night, Chris? How do you look at yourself in the mirror when you shave every day?

This is the last night I will ever watch Chris Matthews or “Hardball” again. I am boycotting that show, and any show he appears on, as long as he remains alive on this mortal coil, for Chris Matthews has proven himself—once again—to be a man without honor whenever he discusses the assassination of the man he professes to be his greatest hero, Jack Kennedy.

The Intelligence Community (read: CIA) has a stranglehold on the national TV media and the national print media, when it comes to the JFK assassination. You are not allowed to speak about it anymore, unless you support the Warren Commission, or unless you disparage JFK’s character and misrepresent the historical record of his presidency. The major executives of these outlets and their producers are in the government’s pocket, when it comes to the taboo subject of the Kennedy assassination. The truth gets out on local and regional radio stations, and the government has not quite yet figured out how to shut down free speech on the internet, but Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s Information Czar, would like to—he said so in a prestigious law school paper just about 4 years ago. Google his name, and you can read the outrageous paper, yourself. Sunstein actually advocated fining people on the internet who engage in “conspiracy” speech that he defines as irresponsible (including about JFK’s death), and also advocated infiltrating such groups, and combating their messages, with government-sponsored third party surrogates. And this man was appointed America’s Information Chief by President Obama. Unsettling, isn’t it?

The response to this stranglehold on the mainstream media by the American people (80% of whom have consistently concluded over the decades that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, and that there was a massive coverup) should be to openly and vociferously protest the Big Lie whenever it is trotted out as it was tonight, and to aggressively boycott those shows that promote the Big Lie.

President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that involved many in the National Security Establishment at the time, as well as former members of the National Security Establishment; and a massive medical coverup was implemented immediately after his death in an attempt to hide all evidence that he was shot from the front (as well as from behind). That coverup has now failed. If you are not familiar with how it was carried out, you can read my five volume book, “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.” The ten depositions taken by the ARRB General Counsel and me, of JFK autopsy witnesses, in 1996 and 1997, undeniably prove that a medical coverup occurred. Anyone not afraid of the truth, and of evaluating facts and what they really mean, should read my book. It will take you to a place where you are less secure, less proud, and less confident about your own country, but if you are someone who believes that truth can be cleansing, and have a powerful, positive, and redemptive force, than my book may just be the perfect antidote to the propaganda about the JFK assassination that will rule the mainstream media airwaves and the national print media between now and the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

Meanwhile, boycott MSNBC’s “Hardball.” If you truly believe that JFK was killed by a conspiracy and that the U.S. government covered it up, then turn off the tube every time Chris Matthews’ face appears on the air. Chris used to only talk like this every November 22nd, on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination; now he is going out of his way to do it as often as possible. Make MSNBC pay a price for promoting the Big Lie in America. We all deserve better journalism than that.

Earl Rose, who as the Dallas County medical examiner when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated insisted that he should do the autopsy, only to be overruled in a confrontation with presidential aides, died on Tuesday in Iowa City. He was 85.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Marilyn.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Rose was thrust into the thick of a 20th-century American nightmare. He performed an autopsy on J.D. Tippit, the police officer who was believed to have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald , the lone suspect in the assassination. Two days later, he performed an autopsy on Oswald himself after the nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Four years later, Rose performed an autopsy on Ruby, determining that he had died of a blood clot in a lung.

But it was the autopsy he did not do that has become the most historic. After demanding to conduct an autopsy on the president, as he was legally required to do in any murder, Rose reluctantly stepped aside to allow the president’s body to be returned to Washington, as the president’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his aides insisted.

The autopsy was later performed at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland. The pathologists there did not know that a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the stricken president had been taken, had performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy that obscured a gunshot wound in his neck. Nor did they have access to the clothing the president was wearing.

A forensic panel commissioned by Congress determined in 1978 that the Bethesda doctors had failed to dissect a wound in Kennedy’s upper back and had only probed it with a finger. The same year, pathologists involved in the autopsy admitted that they had been in “hurry up” mode. Conspiracy theorists have questioned whether high-ranking civilian and military officials who were present during the autopsy may have influenced its results.

Rose said in 1992 that an autopsy performed in Dallas “would have been free of any perceptions of outside influence.”

His confrontation with the president’s party occurred outside Trauma Room 1 at Parkland. Rose, a physician and lawyer who had become county medical examiner less than six months earlier, informed the Secret Service and other aides traveling with Kennedy that state law required that an autopsy in a murder be performed in the county where the crime had taken place.

He said that it would take no more than 45 minutes, and that the doctors who had treated the president were there to advise. Critical evidence could be gathered at a time when the assassin or assassins were still at large. “You can’t break the chain of evidence,” Rose was quoted as telling them.

Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s physician, reminded Rose that the country was dealing with the president and said he must waive local laws. At the time, however, there was no federal law expressly addressing assassinations. Any suspect would have been tried in a Texas state court.

But historians have said that Jacqueline Kennedy insisted on returning to Washington as soon as possible and that she would not leave without her husband’s body. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was to be shortly sworn in as the 36th president aboard Air Force One, supported the first lady’s decision.

As Jacqueline Kennedy emerged from the trauma room beside a gurney carrying the casket, tension mounted. Roy Kellerman, head of the White House Secret Service detail, squared off against Rose. Obscenities were shouted. Unconfirmed accounts said Kellerman had pointed a gun at Rose. Years later, Rose said that might have happened but that he wasn’t sure.

“Finally, without saying any more, I simply stood aside,” Rose said.

Earl Forrest Rose was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Eagle Butte, S.D. His father worked on a ranch, and Earl rode his horse five miles to school. He dropped out of high school in 1944 to join the Navy, where he served on a submarine in the South Pacific.

He graduated from Yankton College, now closed, in 1949, and went on to study medicine at the University of South Dakota for two years before finishing his medical studies at the University of Nebraska. He earned his law degree from Southern Methodist University while working as medical examiner in Dallas.

After working in private medical practice in Lemmon, S.D., in the mid-1950s, Rose continued his medical education, completing residencies in surgical pathology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, in clinical pathology at DePaul Hospital in St. Louis, and in forensic pathology at the University of Virginia.

He moved to Dallas in June 1963 at the age of 37, hired by the county to establish a scientifically valid medical examiner’s system to replace its existing system of elected lay coroners.

Rose taught pathology at the University of Iowa from 1968 until his retirement in the early 1990s. He took writing courses, carved sculptures from cow bones and, with his wife, was a mediator in small claims court. Each Nov. 22, he could count on hearing from assassination buffs. He personally rejected conspiracy theories, however, believing that the Warren Commission had rightly concluded that three shots were fired by a single assassin and that Kennedy was struck from the rear by two of them.

In addition to his wife, the former Marilyn Preheim, Rose is survived by his daughters Elise, Cecile, Karen, Miriam and Carol Rose, and 12 grandchildren. His son, Forrest, died in 2005.

After witnessing several executions, Rose became an outspoken opponent of capital punishment. Several years ago he wrote that the most poignant tragedies usually do not involve important people. “Rather,” he wrote, “the most tragic deaths involve the people who have no reserve of emotional support, many of whom are poor.”