publié le 25/03/2014 à 12h35

Tony Porcel, grand champion de la boxe lyonnaise, est mort  le 24 mars dernier

Né à Oran en 1937, il est arrivé en France au début des années 60 où il a entamé une carrière professionnelle avec le Boxing-club du Rhône. De 1963 à 1973, il a livré 61 combats, remportant cinq fois le championnat de France. Le 12 mars 1966, à Villeurbanne, il perd aux points en 15 rounds le championnat d’Europe face à René Libeer. C’est à Villeurbanne aussi qu’il perd son titre de champion de France face à Guy Caudron, le 13 avril 1973, avant de raccrocher les gants pour créer, avec ses frères, la section de boxe de l’Asvel. Là, il a formé jusqu’en 1993 de nombreux boxeurs, dont Madjid Madhjoub, champion de France des Super-Welter.

publié le 21/03/2014 par Christophe Leconte

Elle fut conseillère municipale d'opposition pendant plusieurs mandats.

Thérèse Lebouteiller est décédée mardi à l'âge de 89 ans. Née dans une famille de cultivateurs de La Galaisière, elle a connu l'occupation et la Libération, ce dont elle avait souvent témoigné notamment dans Ouest-France.

Agent des impôts, catholique pratiquante, bénévole dans des associations, elle fut aussi adhérente du Parti socialiste et conseillère municipale d'opposition pendant plusieurs mandats, dans les années 70 et 80.

La cérémonie religieuse aura lieu mardi 25 mars 2014, à 14 heures, à la cathédrale de Coutances.

publié le 22/03/2014 à 03h51

Georges Latapie vient de s'éteindre à l'âge de 90 ans, des suites d'une longue maladie. Il était né dans l'Aveyron, à Aubin, village situé à proximité de Decazeville, dans une famille de 8 enfants.

Très jeune, à l'âge de 14 ans, il dut partir travailler au fond d'une mine de la région. À 16 ans, il s'engagea dans la Résistance, puis partit à la guerre. Il participa à la libération de Royan. À son retour, il reprit le chemin de la mine comme mineur de fond ? d'abord, puis en surface. Il rencontra Janine, née Jorge, et l'épousa. Plus tard, le couple vint s'installer à Lamarque-Pontacq et trouva du travail dans des usines de Pontacq. Entre-temps, la famille s'était agrandie avec l'arrivée de deux fils, Robert et Daniel. Puis, vint l'âge de la retraite. En 2008, Georges perdit sa compagne de toute une vie, Janine, emportée par la maladie, et se retrouva seul dans sa maison du quartier du Bédat où il recevait régulièrement la visite de ses enfants.

Le 8 mai 2010, lors d'une cérémonie, il reçut, en compagnie de trois autres personnes, le diplôme d'honneur des anciens combattants. Georges aimait le football, la nature et surtout la marche qu'il dut abandonner quand l'âge et la maladie l'obligèrent à délaisser cet exercice physique. Il est parti entouré de ses enfants, petits-enfants et arrière-petits-enfants, de ses proches, de ses amis et de quelques voisins. Il repose auprès de Janine, dans le petit cimetière de Lamarque.

publié le 24/03/2014 à 13h10

Adolfo Suarez, premier chef de gouvernement de la démocratie espagnole et grande figure de la transition post-franquiste, est mort, hier, à l'âge de 81 ans dans une clinique de Madrid.

Dans un message télévisé, le roi d'Espagne Juan Carlos a aussitôt salué « un collaborateur exceptionnel », « guidé à chaque instant par sa loyauté à la Couronne et à tout ce qu'elle représente, la défense de la démocratie, de l'état de droit, de l'unité et de la diversité de l'Espagne ».

Vendredi, Adolfo Suarez Illana avait annoncé que l'état de son père, qui souffrait depuis une dizaine d'années de la maladie d'Alzheimer, s'était aggravé et que le décès était « imminent ». L'Espagne se préparait donc depuis deux jours déjà à un deuil national suivi de funérailles d'État pour celui qui, héritier du franquisme, fut aussi, aux côtés du roi Juan Carlos, l'une des personnalités emblématiques de la délicate période qui a suivi la mort de Francisco Franco en 1975. Avant même son décès, l'ensemble de la classe politique espagnole, tous bords confondus, lui a rendu hommage.

publié le 31/07/2008 à 17h04 par Mader

Mardi dernier quelque 300 personnes ont assisté à Zagreb à l’enterrement de Dinko Sakic, un ancien commandant du camp de concentration de Jasenovac, l’un de ceux développés par le régime oustachi d’Ante Pavelic allié aux nazis pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, autrement connu comme l’"Auschwitz croate".

Au-delà du fait que la présence d’autant de monde à la cérémonie de mise en terre d’un tel personnage plus de 60 ans après la fin de la guerre soit assez dérangeante en soi, celui que Sakic (prononcez Shakitch) ait été enterré dans son uniforme oustachi est assurément choquant et les propos tenus par le prêtre catholique ayant officié proprement scandaleux.

Le discours de ce dernier, à défaut de provoquer la réaction des Serbes, les principales victimes de Jasenovac, probablement restés discrets parce qu’encore en partie tétanisés par l’opprobre dont on les a revêtus à l’occasion du drame yougoslave et trop occupés par la saga de la remise de l’ancien chef politique des Bosno-Serbes Radovan Karadzic au tribunal de La Haye, ne manqua pas cependant de faire réagir la communauté juive de Croatie et le Centre Simon Wiesenthal en Israël.

Condamnant «  les circonstances honteuses ayant accompagné l’enterrement de Sakic  », qu’ils considèrent être «  la plus profonde insulte à la piété des victimes du régime criminel oustachi », les juifs de Croatie dénoncèrent également le fait que le prêtre Vjekoslav Lasic ait affirmé que le régime oustachi croate de l’époque « constituait une base de la Croatie d’aujourd’hui » et que « tous les Croates honnêtes devraient être fiers de Dinko Sakic. »

Efraim Zuroff, qui dirige le Centre Simon Wiesenthal à Jérusalem, adressa une lettre au président croate Stjepan Mesic dans laquelle il écrit  : "L’idée que l’ancien commandant de Jasenovac, incontestablement l’un des plus terribles camps de concentration en Europe à l’époque de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dans lequel ont été systématiquement assassinés de nombreux Serbes, Juifs, Croates antifascistes et Roms innocents, puisse être enterré dans son uniforme oustachi, et que ce faisant le prêtre le loue comme exemple pour tous les Croates, est une lourde injure à tous ceux qui ont été victimes des Oustachis, de même que pour les personnes de par le monde qui ont une conscience."

Réagissant à la lettre de Zuroff, la présidence croate émit un communiqué rappelant que Mesic a régulièrement, et de façon non équivoque, déploré tous les crimes commis par le régime oustachi, qu’il qualifie de criminel. Elle ajouta qu’il demanda "à toutes les institutions concernées de faire le nécessaire pour que l’enterrement de Dinko Sakic, impudemment utilisé pour la réhabilitation du régime oustachi, ne porte pas atteinte à la réputation mondiale de la Croatie", et ne produise un effet dommageable à long terme sur certains jeunes désorientés. Sur ce dernier point, il faisait peut-être allusion aux gamins beuglant «  tue, tue le Serbe  » il y a deux mois au concert donné en plein cœur de Zagreb par Marko Perkovic, alias Thompson, dont l’apologie du régime d’Ante Pavelic est l’une des marques de fabrique.

C’est tout jeune lui aussi, à l’âge de 21 ans, que Sakic arriva à Jasenovac en 1942 et parvint ensuite à grimper l’échelle hiérarchique jusqu’au poste de commandant qu’il occupa pendant sept mois en 1944. Petit protégé du responsable de tous les camps de concentration croates, Vjekoslav Luburic, il en épousa la sœur Nada (signifiant Espoir en serbe), qui elle-même débuta une carrière de garde à la section des femmes du camp de Stara Gradiska à l’âge de 16 ans.

La guerre perdue, Sakic et son épouse se réfugièrent en Argentine, où ils arrivèrent comme Ante Pavelic grâce au réseau d’exfiltration mis en place par le Vatican. C’est sous son vrai nom qu’il y vécut au grand jour pendant plus d’un demi-siècle avec sa femme, désormais rebaptisée Esperanza, tout en menant une affaire de textile. Dans les années 90, il donna même des interviews à des journaux croates et affirma en 1994 à la revue Magazin, à l’occasion de la visite d’Etat du président croate Franjo Tudjman à Buenos Aires, qu’il était fier de qu’il avait fait et le ferait à nouveau, tout en déplorant qu’il n’y ait pas eu davantage de Serbes à mourir à Jasenovac.

«  Déniché  » par le chasseur de nazis Zuroff, il fut renvoyé en 1998 en Croatie où, reconnu coupable de la mort d’au moins 2 000 détenus entre mai et novembre 1944, il fut condamné à vingt ans de prison l’année suivante pour crimes contre l’humanité. Il décéda le 21 juillet dernier à l’âge de 86 ans dans un hôpital de Zagreb où il avait été transféré parce que souffrant d’une «  grave maladie  » dont la nature ne fut jamais révélée, mais que beaucoup soupçonnent de s’appeler vieillesse. Certains médias croates rapportèrent qu’à son enterrement le père Lasic estima que «  la cour qui condamna Dinko Sakic condamna également la Croatie et le peuple croate  ».

A défaut de condamner les fréquents excès de glorification d’un passé fasciste, l’Union européenne, que la Croatie se prépare à rejoindre, n’est pas des plus disertes en matière de remontrances dont elle n’est pourtant pas avare vis-à-vis de sa voisine la Serbie, chez qui la moindre expression patriotique est immédiatement dénoncée comme celle d’un nationalisme des plus odieux. S’agit-il là de simple négligence ou faut-il y voir la marque d’une éventuelle mansuétude envers la renaissance manifeste d’un certain état d’esprit d’avant-guerre  ?

published 02/03/2014 at 18:29

There is an ancient ritual in Edinburgh. Whenever a new fire master is appointed – or, as we must now say, chief fire officer – the first event is the arrival of the curator of the fire museum carrying a battered bag.

Inside the bag is a book, On the construction of Fire Engines and Apparatus: the training of Firemen and the method of providing in cases of fire. It is written by the first city fire master anywhere in the world, a great man, James Braidwood, who pioneered the beginnings of a modern fire service between 1824 and 1832.

He was poached by the city fathers in London and was their chief fire master between 1832 and 1861, when he perished in the notorious Tooley Street fire. His book has to be signed by an incoming fire chief, and in 1959 Frank Rushbrook applied his signature, the beginning of 11 distinguished years as fire master of Edinburgh and the south-east of Scotland, for which he was made a CBE. He brought many innovations to the training of firemen and fire officers, particularly regarding ship fires. The facilities, unique in Britain for staged ship fires and associated smoke at McDonald Road in Edinburgh, are a testament to his vision.

Particularly during his final term of office he became increasingly aware that the Fire Service needed people with higher academic qualifications to deal with the complex industrial and commercial risks which were becoming increasingly common. He had the intelligence and imagination to realise that the subject of fire engineering had reached a stage in its development that deserved education at tertiary level, and proposes that a university department should be established to produce graduates for the UK Fire Service.

He convinced the principal of the University of Edinburgh, Sir Michael Swann, that Edinburgh should take up the challenge of a department of Fire Engineering. In June 1973 Dr David Rashbash became the first Professor of the discipline and proceeded to develop a groundbreaking postgraduate course.

Rushbrook had also hoped for an under-graduate course, but this was not to happen for another 25 years. It is only in the last 10 years that such courses have been set up at other universities, but the developments at Edinburgh, driven by Rushbrook’s relentless scrutiny, proved to be an essential precursor to these academic developments. Rushbrook’s initiative led to a new academic discipline adopted by universities worldwide.

After 1970 Rushbrook began a second career as a consultant on marine fires, a field in which he characteristically made huge contributions. His book Fire Aboard is recognised internationally and is frequently quoted. He testified as an expert witness in a number of key trials in London and New York following serious incidents at sea. His evidence influenced a number of crucial judgments and led directly to improvements in the safety of those who travel and work at sea. When I asked him when he felt in the greatest danger, he said unhesitatingly that it wasn’t during the London Blitz but much later in his life, when his firm, International Fire Investigators and Consultants, was called in by the Greek government to a fire they had allowed to rage for some days in the great port of Thessalonika.

Although Rushbrook spent much time giving evidence in courtrooms up to the age of 90, he also took up first-hand the task of training ships’ crews and advising them how best to deal with serious live shipboard fires.

Frank Rushbrook was born and brought up in Leith, where he had a sound technical education at Leith Academy. He joined the Edinburgh Fire Service and worked his way up to junior fire officer. He volunteered to go to London in 1940 and spent the Blitz with the East Ham Brigade, with particular responsibilities in the London and Royal Docks.

As a Leither he knew all about shipping, but nothing had prepared anyone for the Blitz. I was told by John Horner, secretary of the fire brigade union and later a Labour MP, that Rushbrook had been quite outstanding, combining skill and bravery, a most welcome Scot among the Cockneys. After the war he returned to Scotland in a senior position with the South Lanarkshire Fire Brigade but was asked back when a senior position at East Ham fell vacant.

In 1959 he returned to Edinburgh to assume the mantle of James Braidwood. It is perhaps a reflection on the public-spirited nature of the Rushbrook family that his son, a successful investment banker, should decide that he didn’t want any claim on his father’s business but that it should go to the technical manager most fitted to run an international marine fire fighting business.

Frank Rushbrook, fire master and businessman: born Leith 6 December 1914; CBE; married Violet (died 2001; one daughter, and one son deceased); died 17 February 2014.

published 28/08/2008 at 10:29 PM BST

KGB intelligence officer whose sudden defection to the West was initially viewed with suspicion

Yuri Nosenko defected to the West at the height of the Cold War

Yuri Nosenko, who died on August 23 aged 80, was a KGB intelligence officer who defected to the West at the height of the Cold War; after initial doubts about his authenticity, the CIA came to consider him one of its most valuable, if troublesome, defectors.

Codenamed "Foxtrot" by the CIA, Nosenko was a KGB Second Chief Directorate (SCD) officer when he approached the CIA in Geneva in June 1962. He was in Switzerland as a member of the Soviet Union's disarmament delegation.

Nosenko offered to provide the Americans with information, saying that he hoped to defect some time in the future, and that he wished to acquire medication for his asthmatic daughter, Oksana; but his principal objective was to replace funds which he had misappropriated from the local rezidentura which he had then blown in a local nightclub.

Nosenko – the son of one of Stalin's ministers – was persuaded to continue working in the KGB, but in the meantime he made some significant disclosures. He revealed that the SCD had compromised a British official who had been caught in a honeytrap in Moscow while employed at the British embassy, and MI5 soon identified the suspect as an Admiralty clerk, John Vassall.

He also named the Canadian ambassador, John Watkins, as having been compromised in the same way, as well as a CIA officer, Edward Ellis Smith. All three allegations proved accurate. Nosenko added that he had heard that MI5 had been penetrated by the KGB at a high level.

After these initial contacts, Nosenko returned to Moscow, but he unexpectedly defected in Geneva during a second visit, in February 1964, having claimed to have reviewed the KGB file on President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The CIA's Counterintelligence Staff, however, spotted a number of significant contradictions in Nosenko's debriefings, including details of his career and even his rank, and became convinced that he was a "dispatched defector".

The issues at stake were considerable, because if Nosenko were a plant his insistence that the KGB had played no part in the assassination of President Kennedy could be considered equally bogus.

Another KGB defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who had defected in 1961, had warned that the organisation would very likely seek to discredit him by sending to the West others armed with ingeniously-constructed cover stories to mislead Western intelligence agencies. Some professionals came to believe that Nosenko was one of these.

Accordingly, from April 1964 Nosenko was detained at a safe house in Maryland for nearly 18 months, on the authority of the US attorney-general, before being transferred to a cell-block specially constructed at the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, in Virginia. He remained there, under continuous and hostile interrogation, until October 1967.

A year later a report sponsored by the CIA's Office of Security concluded that Nosenko was a genuine defector, and he was given an apology for his treatment, $137,062 in compensation and a contract as a consultant.

The controversy over Nosenko's bona fides was to continue for years, and had the effect of splitting the American counter-intelligence community. The central issue was the concept of the "dispatched defector": the idea that a professional intelligence agency would risk sending a well-informed staff officer directly and deliberately into the hands of an adversary.

On the one hand, the Counterintelligence Staff, led by James Angleton, found it impossible to reconcile the many inconsistencies in the defector's story; they pointed out that Nosenko's family was part of Moscow's elite and that he was therefore an improbable traitor. Furthermore, Nosenko's claim that he had had access to Oswald's file, a claim made just as the Warren Commission was investigating the background of the assassination, seemed a little too convenient – especially as Nosenko's essential message was that the KGB had been innocent of any plot.

The case against Nosenko was made in Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games (2007), a book by Pete Bagley, a CIA officer stationed in Switzerland in the early 1960s who initially handled Nosenko's case.

The opposing view suggested that Nosenko was a hard-drinking womaniser who had found himself in financial difficulty in Geneva and, in turning to the CIA for help, had exaggerated his own status.

Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko was born on October 30 1927 at Nikolaev, in the Ukraine, the son of Ivan Nosenko, who was minister for shipbuilding in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1956, the year of his death; he was buried with honours in the Kremlin wall. Yuri was a student at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and joined the KGB in 1953.

Once he had been brought over to the United States, Nosenko proved difficult to handle, often becoming involved in bar brawls and embarrassing episodes with women. He never complained, however, about the harsh treatment he had received, once remarking: "While I regret my three years of incarceration, I have no bitterness and now understand how it could happen."

Nosenko's case epitomised the "wilderness of mirrors" in the counter-intelligence community, and his illegal incarceration became one of the notorious "family jewels", the list of the CIA's breaches of its 1947 charter which led to the Pike and Church congressional investigations conducted in 1974.

Until two years ago he continued to visit the CIA headquarters to give presentations. By contrast, those who had opposed his rehabilitation were shunned and their arguments dismissed as manifestations of the paranoia often associated with lengthy, labyrinthine counter-intelligence investigations.

A month ago the CIA delivered to his house in the United States a ceremonial flag and a letter of thanks from the agency's director, Michael Hayden.

published 27/02/2014 at 18:57 by Anne Keleny

Joan Williams was one of the linchpins of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet Secretariat, heading part of the small military wing within it that gave him the near-dictatorial powers to act that he saw as vital for Britain's conduct of the Second World War.

A squadron officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, she took on a rapidly expanding and crucial role in 1942 when she was asked to set up a cipher office within the Cabinet Office that was quickly to become known as "Coco (Cabinet Office Cipher Office)".

Beginning with eight WAAFs coding, decoding and typing out secret messages from across the world, Coco started life as the "special signals" adjunct to the Air Ministry Cipher Office, of which Williams had up to then been in charge.

In 1943 the office, which would eventually need 48 staff, moved to the ground floor of a building off Whitehall, with an entrance in Great George Street, close to Churchill's wartime basement map room and nerve-centre of operations where the three forces' chiefs of staff thrashed out how best to channel the nation's fighting power.

"My debt to (the Secretariat's) members is immeasurable," Churchill, who assumed the post of Minister of Defence, wrote. Had it not existed, he asserted, "a process of ill-timed constitution-making" would have been needed to embody his defence job in a department of its own. Instead, most of the "delicate adjustments" necessary for decision-making in war "settled themselves by personal goodwill."

Squadron officer Williams, admitted to this elite group of public servants, set two young women at a time to work four round-the-clock shifts, scrambling, unscrambling, and copying messages with cipher machines attached to their typewriters and linked to a device so huge that it was kept in the basement of Selfridges' Oxford Street department store.

Rats infested the sub-basement where they were first installed, and their door was guarded by a security man at a locked gate who asked all comers for their passes. Williams and her "girls" rarely saw the many young gold-braided officers whose duties brought them within yards of where the women toiled in the stuffy, poison-gas-proof filtered air, polluted by the smoke from the Prime Minister's cigars and his colleagues' many tensely smoked cigarettes.

More breathing-space came with the move, in late summer 1943, to four rooms with a view over St James's Park. But it was Churchill's second serious bout of illness within 10 months that year that gave the cipher girls what Williams described as the highlight of their war.

They had a fairy-tale Christmas in North Africa after they were flown out to assist when the Prime Minister stopped there to convalesce from pneumonia. The illness, which he had also suffered the previous February, had returned while he was on his way home from the November Tehran conference with Roosevelt and Stalin.

The women's round-the-clock work was leavened with dances, luxurious hotel rooms and in Williams's words, "wonderful food with white bread at every meal". Their presence enabled Churchill, in his red and gold silk, dragon-embroidered dressing-gown, to continue issuing orders, just as in health he was also wont to do, from his bed.

Not everyone was grateful for Williams's efforts. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, back in London, confided to his diary: "Winston, sitting in Marrakech, is now full of beans and trying to win the war from there! As a result a three-cornered flow of telegrams in all directions is gradually resulting in utter confusion!"

Williams and her group sailed home with the Prime Minister in January 1944 on the battleship HMS King George V. They then had to prepare for the D-day Normandy landings, sending out dummy messages as well as real ones to confuse the Germans.

Message traffic multiplied whenever there was an international war leaders' conference, and just as for earlier meetings in 1942 at Cairo and Moscow, the cipher staff in 1944 and 1945 had to overlap their shifts by an extra hour in the airless office in London for the meetings at Quebec, Moscow, Yalta and Potsdam. Williams herself once worked for 36 hours at a stretch.

Williams, who was appointed OBE in 1944, stayed near the heart of politics in a different capacity after the war, as the wife of a Tory MP who became a junior home office minister from 1951-52 in Churchill's last administration. David Llewellyn, whom she married in February 1950, was himself knighted in 1960.

Llewellyn was the younger brother of Sir Harry "Foxhunter" Llewellyn, Bt, the equestrian champion, and uncle of Harry's sons Dai (died 2009) and Roddy (still living) who became celebrities in the 1970s. He was MP for Cardiff North from 1950 until 1959. To his wife, Cardiff was familiar territory – her childhood family home having been Bonvilston House in the village of Bonvilston in the Vale of Glamorgan.

She was to return to England again when the couple set up home at Yattendon, near Newbury in Berkshire. She cared for her husband, who was in ill health, until his death in 1992.

Joan Anne Williams, Lady Llewellyn, cipher officer: born, Llantwit Major, Vale of Glamorgan 24 December 1916; OBE 1944; married 1950 David Llewellyn (two sons, one daughter died 1992); died Berkshire 26 November 2013.

published 26/02/2014 at 19:07 by Adrian Hamilton

"Speak," she would command, turning her chair sideways to the window, putting her feet up on to the radiator and powdering her nose while waiting for you to disgorge your thoughts.

For almost anyone working on Vogue in those days Beatrix Miller was a formidable editor. For anyone coming new to her staff she was quite terrifying. But you learned two things about "Miss Miller", as we junior members of staff called her, or "Bea", as she was known to her intimates. One was always to have ideas. You didn't turn up for a general conference or a solo meeting without them. The other was how willing she was to listen even to the most outlandish thoughts, and to go with them if she thought they had even a half-chance of success.

If great editors are marked by their ability to embrace and encapsulate their times, Beatrix Miller was certainly among them. As editor of Queen through the heady and revolutionary era of Jocelyn Stevens' ownership in the late 1950s and early '60s, and then as editor for 22 years of Vogue, where she helped make the reputations of many of finest writers and photographers of the time, she remade women's magazines from being noticeboards of High Society to being the expression of Swinging London and the social changes behind it.

If the other sign of a great editor is the team she or he builds around them, then Miller showed that in full measure. Incredibly shy and private herself, she found expression in fostering the youthful ambitions of others. The number of photographers she encouraged, such as David Bailey, Duffy and Terence Donovan, the designers she favoured, the models she employed and the writers she gave a chance to make up a roll call of talent of that extraordinary period of cultural explosion that marked the '60s through to the '70s.

The oddity, and in some ways the making, of Miller as a magazine editor was that she was never really either a fashion expert or a natural visual journalist. Her first love, aside from music, was words, their rhythm and their oddities. The second daughter of an eminent doctor who had served with distinction on the Western Front and married her mother, a nurse on the Front, she was brought up in Rudgwick in Sussex and educated entirely by tutors to the age of 17. Fearful of impending German invasion, and to her own fury, she was packed off to a relative in Ontario, Canada, while her elder sister signed up with the Waafs.

Escaping Ontario after a miserable year, she headed to New York where, surviving for two weeks on popcorn, by her account, she found a job as a secretary. She returned to Europe after the war partly to study on a six-month course at the Sorbonne and worked for a year and half with MI6 in Germany – a period about which she remained extremely reticent.

Returning to New York after a stint in British magazines in 1956, she joined American Vogue as a copywriter, where her ability to find a witty or intriguing title for a feature and capture a sitting with flight of phrase brought her a considerable reputation. It was from there that Jocelyn Stevens plucked her to edit his newly-acquired Queen magazine in 1958 and make it the hot magazine of the "Chelsea Set".

It was a baptism of fire, very nearly literally so if the stories of Stevens' infamous temper are anything to go by. He is alleged to have bullied Beatrix mercilessly, as he attempted to dominate others, but the two of them, together with a galaxy of talents, including Mark Boxer, helped wreak a revolution in magazines for women. Out went the traditions of record and emulation of a class. In came a chaotic, fun-filled celebration of a new world of satire, parody and youth.

Beatrix, charged with keeping some focus to this torrent of novelty and providing a feminine voice to a male-dominated coterie, came up with a definition of the target reader. Called "Caroline", a 16-year-old who'd left school without absorbing too much education, she was the "kind of girl you finished up in bed with". The character, which gave the name to Britain's first commercial radio station, which Stevens launched in 1966, was typical of Miller's teasing humour and served as a template for editorial discussion for years after.

Miller herself – fortunately in view of the commercial pressures which were to cause Stevens to sell the magazine – was lured to Vogue in 1964 to inject some of the same youthful high spirits to that greying institution. Freed of the public-school spirit of Queen, wisely she did not try to repeat the exercise. Instead she concentrated on her strengths, which were in culture in the broadest sense, and reinforced her weaknesses, especially in fashion, by appointing young talent and encouraging it to flower. She had the true journalist's autodidactic mind, picking up what was new and interesting, catching what suggested a trend, seizing on what was funny or eccentric.

She managed her fashion content the same way. Clothes never interested her in themselves and she was too aware of her own physique to try and be fashionable herself. But she liked themes and narratives and, with a title in mind, she encouraged fashion editors in touch with the zeitgeist and photographers eager to develop a more natural style of pictures to go out and shoot "stories".

By the early 1980s London's swing was slowing and journalism was less concerned with riding developments and more with celebrating consumerism. The role of Vogue was seen as a bible of the industry and the role of the editor to be a leading player in it. Miller retired in 1986 to make room for Anna Wintour.

The job of editor is never easy to relinquish. It is a position of almost unique personal power and prestige. Miller, who was always an enabler of others and almost pathologically intent on avoiding the limelight, didn't seek out the membership of committees which are the lot of many in retirement. She made abortive starts with a memoir to be called Life After a Fashion or Life to the Letter. But she never saw it through despite the gallant efforts of Sir Roy Strong, a good friend until the end, to help her.

Instead she concentrated on life in the country in her beloved cottage, "Pig", in in Wiltshire, and the pleasures of her nieces, and her nephew and his children. An editor's editor, she will be remembered for the talent she fostered and the images she created at the heart of the Swinging Sixties.

Beatrix Molyneux Miller, journalist: born 29 June 1923; died 21 February 21 2014.

published 26/02/2014 at 19:11 by John Rogers

Walter Ehlers accomplished awe-inspiring acts of bravery during D-Day, earning a Medal of Honor for knocking out two German machine-gun nests and saving countless Allied lives. The 23-year-old staff sergeant charged through gunfire to kill seven enemy soldiers, chase away several others, put a halt to mortar fire and carry a wounded comrade to safety, even after he been shot in the back. His passing leaves seven surviving Second World War Medal of Honor recipients.

"He would always tell you his brother was his hero," his wife recalled. The brothers had enlisted in 1940 and took part in the invasions of North Africa and Italy before D-Day in June 1944. The day before, their superiors told them they were separating them to improve the odds that at least one would survive.

As the landing craft arrived under heavy fire, Ehlers led his soldiers on to the sand. His brother, on another boat, was killed.Ehlers single-handedly knocked out two machine-gun nests, andchased away a group of Germans firing mortar rounds. His Medal citation reads: "The intrepid leadership, indomitable courage, and fearless aggressiveness displayed by S/Sgt. Ehlers in the face of overwhelming enemy forces serve as an inspiration to others."

After the war, his wife recalled with a laugh, "He wanted to get into the movies." He did play a West Point cadet in the 1955 John Ford film The Long Gray Line, but that apart, he spent many years working for the Veterans Administration. On the 50th anniversary of D-Day he returned to France, where he joined President Clinton and others in commemorating the event.

Walter David Ehlers, soldier: born Junction City, Kansas 7 May 1921; married; died Long Beach, California 20 February 2014.

published 23/02/2014 at 08:45 PM

Beatrix Miller was the editor of Vogue who brought benevolence and a literary lilt to the modish world of fashionistas

Beatrix Miller, who has died aged 90, was the exacting and benevolent longtime editor of British Vogue, who for two decades cultivated a hothouse of creativity at the glossy bible to high-fashion.

With quiet precision she steered the magazine with enormous success through the swinging Sixties, the fey Seventies, and into the hard-nosed Eighties with the same incisive intelligence and feeling for the moment, the same rigorous literary standards and visual discrimination that kept the magazine ahead of its competitors. But it was in her ability to help others achieve their aspirations that she found her forte. “What do you really want to do, darling?” she asked of leagues of impassioned writers, editors, photographers, models and designers.

Beatrix Miller (often known as Bea) was born on June 29 1923, the daughter of a country doctor. Educated abroad, including a period at the Sorbonne, she started her journalistic career as a secretary on the society magazine, The Queen (later Queen), eventually rising to the position of features editor.
 

Beatrix Miller in 1964

After several years, however, she decided to broaden her horizons and in 1956 left to work in New York, where she was offered a job on American Vogue. Two years later she received a call from Jocelyn Stevens, the recently appointed proprietor of The Queen. “You don’t know who I am,” he said, “but I am ringing to offer you the job of editor of The Queen.” Half asleep, she dismissed the offer. “It’s 4am, you’re mad,” she replied and put the phone down. Eventually, after several further nocturnal requests, she was persuaded to return to England and, with the maverick Stevens and the accomplished artistic director Mark Boxer, formed part of a triumvirate which was to turn the magazine into a byword for wit and originality.

In 1964 she was asked to take over the editorship of British Vogue, a magazine which, at the time, represented a life lived in the drawing-rooms of Eaton Square and on the lawns of country houses. But English life had already become much looser, livelier and unconventional. It was to this new world that “Bea” Miller began to introduce the Vogue reader.

“Vogueland” she believed, was “relatively superficial but in the broadest sense it is the mood of the moment translated visually — the words people use, the books they read, the sounds they hear, the houses, they live in, the pictures they look at.” The magazine she created from this brief possessed a freshness and quality that was a particularly English version of glossiness. Opening the pages of one of her issues was like being invited to an exclusive party of the creative, the patrician, the exotic and the influential. Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Joanna Lumley, Jean Shrimpton, Lady Antonia Fraser, Bianca Jagger and Michael Caine were just some of those who appeared in Vogue under her editorship.

Even in the demotic Sixties, however, she continued to attach great significance to the aristocracy and the Royal Family, and was prepared to hold back an issue from the printers to get in photographs of a noble wedding or party.

Often she had insider information. Sarah Spencer, the older sister of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, was at one stage her secretary, while their other sister, Jane, worked in the beauty department. It was scarcely surprising that the 19-year-old Diana Spencer turned to Vogue for advice when she entered the public spotlight.

Unsociable and uninterested in her own personal style (though she always dressed in Jean Muir, her outfits were chosen by the fashion department), Beatrix Miller was not someone who herself craved the spotlight. Her strength as an editor lay in her unerring ability to spot and nourish the talent of others. “Bea Miller had a way of coaxing the best out of everyone,” said the model Grace Coddington.

Drawing of Beatrix Miller and Grace Coddington

She rarely took writers from other magazines but liked to discover and foster new talent. Some writers — like Marina Warner — she hired straight from university, but many others (Candia McWilliam, Georgina Howell, Helen Simpson, Leslie Forbes) were the product of the annual Vogue talent competition, which was her entrance examination to the magazine. On hiring editorial staff, she would appraise interviewees’ suitability by asking if they knew the work of the novelist Lesley Blanch (Vogue’s feature editor from 1937 to 1944).

She also had an eagle eye for those whose talents lay in images rather than words and she was fearless in her appointments and commissions. “I’ve got the photographer here for that idea of yours about men of back-stairs influence,” she told the journalist Adrian Hamilton in the late sixties. “Why don’t you come in and try to persuade him?” Her choice was the “famous and choosy” Henri Cartier-Bresson. She also despatched Cecil Beaton to photograph Roy Strong on his appointment as director of the National Portrait Gallery and ushered in a young, wayward David Bailey to becoming Vogue’s unofficial chief photographer.

Grace Coddington, meanwhile, stepped off the catwalk to become Miller’s unexpected choice as junior fashion editor. Miller interviewed her over lunch at the Trattoria Terrazza in Soho. “She seemed far more interested in what I was reading than in what I was wearing,” recalled Coddington, “I could sense myself being mentally marked down as a dimwit. Nevertheless, by the end of the meal I was recruited.”

Miller was a truly great patron because she would permit experiment but not madness, encouraging and understanding and at the same time knowing how far she could push them. She trusted her fashion editors to bring back something marvellous, but never wanted to know too much about how they managed it until afterwards. The downside of this liberal approach was that she was totally unimpressed by practical difficulties.

On one occasion Lord Snowden — a long-time contributor to Vogue — went to photograph the couture collections in Paris in a shoot which involved performing horses, forty-foot backdrops, all-night photography, and a model nearly getting killed. All Beatrix Miller said when she examined the result was: “The dress is no good”. The pictures were never used.

She could, on the other hand, be immensely supportive and would allow editors, against all received wisdom, their head and never allowed editorial to be dictated to by the demands of advertisers.

On retiring, in 1985, she helped set up a “think tank” with, amongst others, Sir Terence Conran and the designer Jean Muir, to provide a link between the government and the fashion industry.

Often likened to a headmistress (all but a select inner band addressed her at all times as Miss Miller), with her upright bearing, ample bosom, round Teutonic face and short, curly blonde hair, she was a quietly formidable presence. Witty and at times endearingly considerate, she avoided all show of ambition, effort or anxiety.

She never appeared on television or gave an interview, rarely attended public engagements and seldom entertained, preferring, when not at her Hanover Square office, to garden or read a book at her home in Chelsea.

Beatrix Miller never married. She was an intensely private and shy woman devoted to her career — a dedication that strove for nothing but the very best. “Legends collect around such editors,” commented one writer on Beatrix Miller’s retirement. “But I was there when one day she summoned 48 members of staff into her office and told us: 'I want you all to know that, as far as I am concerned, the July issue is a write-off. There is a mistake on page 136.”

Beatrix Miller, born June 29 1924, died February 21 2014

published 18/02/2014 at 19:24 PM GMT

Lady Llewellyn was a wartime cipher officer with Fighter Command who later picnicked with Winston Churchill in Marrakesh

Lady Llewellyn, who has died aged 96, was a wartime cipher officer, serving at Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain and later handling the Allies’ classified signals in the build-up to D-Day.

She was born Joan (Jo) Anne Williams on Christmas Eve 1916 at the village of Llantwit Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan. Her father was chairman of the Cardiff Gas, Coal & Coke Co, as his father and grandfather had been before him; he was also MFH of the Glamorgan Hunt. Jo herself took no interest in riding, but at St James’s, West Malvern (where, she said, elocution and deportment were considered as important as maths and science), she was head girl and proved herself a fine tennis player, once competing at Junior Wimbledon.

In January 1939 Jo was one of the first to volunteer for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) – her service number was 84 — and in August she was called up to full-time service and commissioned.

After training as a codes and cipher officer she was posted to HQ Fighter Command at Bentley Priory. The C-in-C, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, had developed a sophisticated control and reporting organisation which relied heavily on secure communications. Jo Williams served at the HQ throughout the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.

 In 1941 she was at the RAF signal station at Leighton Buzzard, staffed by more than 600 service personnel handling telephone, teleprinter and radio communications and linking the major RAF Commands at home and overseas.

On promotion to squadron officer (the female equivalent of squadron leader) in December that year, she moved to the Air Ministry cipher and coded signals department in London — the Air Ministry was responsible for providing and maintaining the classified communication facilities for the Cabinet Office and the War Room.

Following the Cairo and Tehran conferences in late 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia, and went to Marrakesh to convalesce. While there, he remained in constant touch with President Roosevelt, the British Chiefs of Staff and with Stalin; and on December 23 Jo Williams left for Marrakesh, where the temporary signals office was dealing with top-secret papers and communiqués. By January 14 1944 Churchill was fit enough to travel, and four days later Jo Williams returned to London.

By then planning for the D-Day landings was well advanced, and this generated vast amounts of classified signals with the Allied Powers and commanders-in-chief. Jo Williams was on cipher duty in London throughout the build-up to the Allied landings, during D-Day and through the advance of the armies from the Normandy bridgehead.

In September she travelled to Quebec, where Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting to discuss the final phases of the various Allied offensives in Europe, south-east Asia and the Pacific.

Jo Williams’s final wartime posting was back at Leighton Buzzard, where she remained until being released from the Service in October 1946. She was appointed OBE (military) in June 1944, having six months earlier been mentioned in despatches.

She took the Official Secrets Act with the utmost seriousness. Once she described in great detail to her son, then aged 40, a picnic which she had attended with Churchill in Marrakesh, naming each of the picnic’s nine courses. When her son said, “I’m not the slightest bit interested in what you had to eat, I want to know what Churchill said,” she replied: “I couldn’t possibly tell the likes of you that.”

Jo Williams went to work for Shell Mex Petroleum, and in 1950 married David Llewellyn, less than a week before he was elected Conservative MP for Cardiff North. He was Under-Secretary for Welsh Affairs in 1951-52. He retired from politics in 1959 and was knighted the next year. Later he wrote the “Jack Logan” column in Sporting Life.

The Llewellyns lived at Yattendon, Berkshire, where Lady Llewellyn was an active figure in village life and in the local church — gardening, hassock-making, cake-baking, knitting and smocking, flower-arranging, and supplying Meals on Wheels. She was still driving and attending fitness classes until a fortnight before her death. At the end of a busy day she would like to settle down with a glass of Veuve Cliquot or Pol Roger.

Sir David died in 1992, and his wife is survived by their two sons and one daughter.

Lady Llewellyn, born December 24 1916, died November 26 2013

published 25/02/2014 at 19:31

The exigencies of military supply by air made Thomas Lawrie "Jock" Kennedy a master of the skies who flew across every continent, equipping him also to push forward the use of advanced strategic defence technology at the height of the Cold War. The Berlin airlift of 1948-49 taught him precision flying with full loads at specified altitudes, and landing procedure on pierced-steel makeshift runways.

At the end of the Korean War in 1953 he evacuated prisoners of war across storm-tossed mountains with the danger ever present of iced-up wings. In Operation Musketeer during the Suez crisis of 1956 he learned how to bomb in anger, and during upheaval in Africa in 1965 he practised organisation at speed.

The former Boy Scout from Hawick in the Scottish Borders who joined up in 1946 as a National Service airman, then trained as an officer at RAF Cranwell, was to win the Air Force Cross and Bar for his operational flying skills as well as rising to be an air chief marshal and Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.

His worldwide adventures gave him knowledge invaluable from 1957 to 1960 as senior pilot at the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, testing airborne radar systems on the Vickers Valiant, which was developed to carry Britain's nuclear deterrent, and on the high-altitude Canberra bomber. It was the radar post that brought the Bar to the Air Force Cross that he had been awarded in 1952, after flying a slow Hastings bomber in company with faster Canberras, on a goodwill tour of South America.

Kennedy advanced via the RAF Selection Board, HQ Middle East from 1962-64, and the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1976, to be Air Officer Commanding of the RAF's Northern Maritime Air Region from 1977-79. As such he controlled Nimrod surveillance patrols that ranged from the North Sea to within the Arctic Circle, working from Pitreavie Castle in Fife, the headquarters of the RAF's Northern Maritime Air Region, to track the movements of Soviet submarines.

The radar and AOC positions were the fruit of varied experience in the air that began as soon as Kennedy graduated from Cranwell in 1949. The first duties of the 20-year-old former pupil of Hawick High School, whose father was John Domone Kennedy, author of Forest Flora of Southern Nigeria (1936), were themselves to become literary material: he was plunged into the Allied airborne delivery of food, coal, and medicines to the Soviet-blockaded population of Berlin that was immortalised in 1951 by the thriller writer Hammond Innes in Air Bridge.

Innes' novel includes scenes in the place at Berlin's Gatow airport where Kennedy, a Hastings pilot, would have paused to restore energy between flights, with hot tea and a "wad". This was the RAF "Malcolm Club", one of many at RAF bases overseas, which were named after a squadron leader awarded the Victoria Cross after being shot down in 1942.

The "Mally" clubs, which Airlift crews relied on, closed in the 1960s, but left their mark so deeply on Kennedy's memory that he was to preserve their records for the RAF Museum, Hendon, to which he gave the papers in 2006. The Soviets lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949 and the airlift drew to a close four months later.

Kennedy served in No 24 Squadron before an exchange from 1953 to 1955 with the Royal Australian Air Force took him to Korea and Japan as part of RAAF 36 Transport Squadron flying C-47 Dakotas. The squadron was ready for "all conditions of flight, and Korea had them all," an Australian colleague said later. "Mountainous terrain, thunderstorms, snowstorms, typhoons, severe turbulence, zero vision, dangerous winds … in-flight icing … overloading…." In the two months following the end of the Korean war in July 1953 the squadron evacuated more than 900 Commonwealth prisoners of war from Korea to Japan.

A decade later, the turbulence that would require Kennedy's wings was in Africa. "We shall not stand idly by," the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson vowed in December 1965 after white-ruled Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) declared UDI – a unilateral breakaway from Britain and the Commonwealth that prompted Britain to impose sanctions and had the effect of cutting fuel supplies to Rhodesia's newly independent neighbour Zambia, once Northern Rhodesia.

Within 48 hours of the oil embargo, the House of Commons was told, "supplies of oil were flown into Zambia by RAF Britannias". Kennedy was the Commanding Officer of No 99 (Britannia) Squadron which did the job, and in a debate on 25 January 1966 the Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, Cledwyn Hughes, added: "I should like to pay tribute to the officials, officers and men who went to work with such speed and effectiveness."

In the 1970s Kennedy, a man of charm whom all ranks held in much esteem and affection, was Commanding Officer, RAF Brize Norton, Deputy Commandant, RAF Staff College, and Director of Operations (Air Staff) at the Ministry of Defence. He became Deputy Commander-in-Chief, RAF Strike Command from 1979-81, Commander-in-Chief, RAF Germany and Commander 2nd Allied Tactical Air Force from 1981-83, and for the next three years, before his retirment in 1986, Air Member for Personnel and Air ADC to the Queen.

He joined the aircraft equipment-maker Dowty as a director, and as controller of the RAF Benevolent Fund from 1988-93 raised more than £20m, also serving as Chairman of the International Air Tattoo at Fairford, Gloucestershire. He was a Deputy Lieutenant of Leicestershire.

Thomas Lawrie Kennedy, aviator: born Hawick, Scotland 19 May 1928; AFC 1953 and Bar 1960, CB 1978, KCB 1980, GCB 1985; married 1959 Margaret Ann Parker (one son, two daughters); died Manton, Rutland 18 November 2013.

published 25/02/2014 at 19:35 by Martin Andersono

Alice Herz-Sommer was a musician. But by the end of her long life, she was much more than that: the oldest living Holocaust survivor, she had become a symbol of tolerance and optimism known around the world. As a Jew living in Prague when Hitler swept into Czechoslovakia, she went to hell and back, but she would talk of her experiences with gratitude for the lessons they taught her and which to the end informed her outlook with a quiet radiance.

Her days of public performance were well behind her when she became famous, and with no commercial recordings available, not least because war and emigration dislocated her career, no one knew how important a musician she had been. It took the release in 2006 of a CD of private performances from her seventies and eighties, in conjunction with the publication of a biography, to reveal that she had been one of the finest pianists of the 20th century.

She was born into a German-Jewish family in Prague that was moderately well off and well-connected artistically: her father's business supplied the Hapsburg Empire with precision scales, while her mother had been a childhood friend of Gustav Mahler. Her elder sister, Irma, married Felix Weltsch, a close friend of Franz Kafka, who would take Alice and her twin sister Marianne into the woods and tell them stories. She remembered his "great big eyes", but she found him "a man who apologised to himself for being alive: shy, didn't speak and afraid of living".

Alice – called Gigi by friends and family – was given her first piano lessons by Irma, and responded with such enthusiasm that there was soon little doubt that she would become a musician. She took lessons with Irma's teacher, the composer and pianist Vaclav Stepan; she studied with him for 10 years.

She went on to take part, for three years, in the master-class of Conrad Ansorge, who had been a student of Liszt, a living link she would mention with pleasure almost a century later: "Liszt got a kiss from Beethoven, Ansorge got a kiss from Lizst and I got a kiss from Ansorge!" But she noticed that Ansorge would absent himself and come back smelling of alcohol; she arranged her lessons for first thing in the morning to catch him while he was sober.

At her debut in 1924 she played Chopin's E minor Piano Concerto to glowing reviews. She paid in advance for a year's study with Eduard Steuermann, who had had studied with Busoni and Schoenberg. She regretted the decision, giving Steuermann an account of the deficiencies of his teaching. Another disappointment was Arthur Schnabel, who in 1933 took a large fee simply to tell her that her playing was of a standard that he could not improve.

She was already earning an independent living as a piano teacher when she met, and in 1931 married, Leopold Sommer, a young businessman; their son Stefan was born in 1937. In 1938 the Munich Agreement gave Hitler a slice of Czechoslovakia, and when Germany occupied Prague in March 1939 her life changed for good. Her sisters and their husbands had bought visas for Palestine and left just in time; Alice and Leopold discussed emigration but couldn't afford two more visas, and there was Alice's aging mother to consider. They were stuck.

Terezin – Theresienstadt in German – is an 18th-century garrison town an hour's drive from Prague; in 1940 the Gestapo began to convert it into a ghetto to function as a transit camp for Jews on their way to the gas chambers. Since the Nazis often used Jewish labour, Leopold was put to managing the removal of Prague's Jews from the city, which meant that he, Alice and Stefan were sent to Terezin relatively late, in July 1943.

The reaction of their neighbours taught Alice a lesson she never forgot: her Czech "friends" ransacked their flat, helping themselves to anything they fancied – but a German officer billeted in the same building came to bid her farewell, thanked her for the music she had played, wished her well and expressed his hope that they would meet again.

The Sommers arrived in Terezín to find an intellectual life flourishing in the teeth of death: the Germans, realising it cut down on supervision, allowed the inmates to organise lectures, concerts and theatrical productions. After four years in occupied Prague, where Jews were forbidden any kind of public association (even ice cream and walks in the park were banned), Alice was delighted at the opportunity to perform again. She threw herself into musical life, giving over 150 concerts before liberation.

"We didn't eat," she recalled. "In the morning we had a black water named coffee, at lunchtime a white water called soup, in the evening a black water called coffee, so my son didn't grow a millimetre... I played the 24 Études by Chopin without eating." Music, she said, kept them alive: "We were not allowed music; it was all in our head. I believe we don't need food, in hard times we have a need ... it's a sort of religion maybe, this music for us was a religion." One of Herz-Sommer's most striking characteristics was her ability to draw something positive from the most adverse circumstances.

In September 1944, just before Leopold was sent from Terezin to Auschwitz, he made Alice promise never to volunteer for anything the Nazis proposed. The advice saved her life: a little later the authorities asked if the ghetto wives wanted to rejoin their husbands, and they joyfully climbed into the cattle wagons that took them to their deaths. Alice remembered her promise, and she and Stefan remained behind – and at the end of the war he was one of only 123 children to survive, of the 15,000 who had passed through Terezin.

His father had perished in Dachau only weeks before it was liberated. A fellow prisoner later brought Alice his spoon; it was all they had to remember him by.

Antisemitism survived the Nazis, of course: life in Soviet-dominated postwar Prague soon became intolerable and in 1949 Alice obtained visas for herself and Stefan to join her relatives in the new state of Israel. There she made a living from playing and teaching, privately and, for 25 years, at the Jerusalem Conservatory; she also made the occasional broadcast. Stefan took the name Raphael, the better to suit his new Israeli surroundings, and soon proved himself an exceptionally talented cellist.

It was his appointment to a teaching post at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester that prompted her move to Britain in 1975. For a decade she commuted between Israel and Britain, where she stayed with her son before she settled permanently in 1985 in the single-room flat in Belsize Park, where she lived out the rest of her days. The support of her family, especially the daily care of her grandson Ariel (who survives her, along with his brother David), allowed her to live alone, in proud self-reliance, until the very end.

Self-discipline was an important part of her routine, as it had always been: until advanced old age she went for a daily swim, walked, attended the University of the Third Ages and, every morning from 10 to 1, religiously practised the piano for three hours, something she continued to do right up to her death. She lived simply: a roast chicken every Monday provided the basis of the soups which sustained her for the rest of the week; she abjured coffee, tea and alcohol, drinking only hot water.

On weekday afternoons a succession of visitors – musicians, journalists, historians and more – came to see her; she received them in Czech, German, English, Hebrew or Yiddish, as required. Weekends were reserved for family, backgammon with friends and chamber music. As a last living contact with Franz Kafka, she was a favourite of Kafka scholars. On one of my occasional visits the phone rang three times in two hours with people wanting to come and talk to her about Kafka. I asked her if she didn't get fed up being asked the same questions all the time. Alice being Alice, she saw the bright side: "No, because where they come from, they ask me different questions".

That resilience was pushed to its limits in 2001, when she was 98: Raphael, on a concert tour of Israel, collapsed with a ruptured aorta and died on the operating table. But she drew comfort even from that tragedy: "I am so grateful that he died without pain". That indefatigable optimism was captured in a simple maxim she would repeat to her stream of visitors: "Life is beautiful".

Alice Herz, pianist: born Prague 26 November 1903; married 1931 Leopold Sommer (died 1944; one son deceased); died London 23 February 2014.

published 12/02/2014 at 20:01 by Tam Dalyell

Had I been asked in 1962, the year I was elected to the House of Commons, who would be likely to be the Leader of the Conservative Party a decade and a half later, it would not have occurred to me to put the new Joint Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, one Margaret Thatcher, on any shortlist. Top for me would have been the thrusting, capable, extremely confident Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, David Price.

I well remember a Prime Minister's Questions (in an era when any PMQ not directly relevant to the responsibilities of the Prime Minister was transferred to other ministers) which ended seven minutes early. Trade questions returned. Macmillan, subsided into his seat, beamed approvingly as his young Parliamentary Secretary dealt effectively with Labour's Treasury Secretary, Douglas Jay.

Price's ministerial career thrived under Sir Alec Douglas Home, who on Reggie Maudling's recommendation made him chief Opposition spokesman on Science and Technology when the Conservatives went into opposition in 1964. On their return to power in 1970 Edward Heath, maybe on account of Price's support for Maudling, did not give him the Cabinet post, or even Minister-of-State seniority, which he understandably expected.

Price was born in London. His parents were working in Normandy but his mother made a trip back to Britain, "to make sure I was born Brit and not French," Price recalled with a chuckle. His father was a soldier who had survived the First World War only because he got trench fever. He met Price's mother when he was a staff officer in Le Havre; she was half-French, half-Scottish. She died when Price was six and he went happily to a boarding school in the west of Scotland.

Going to Eton in 1938, Price boarded at the House of Hubert H-S Hartley, a genial modern languages teacher. The influence of House Masters can be lasting, and geniality was one of Price's lifelong trademarks. However, even greater was the influence of his wife, who was omnipresent. Grizel Hartley, with her flowing golden hair and her ruddy complexion, was a "character". She believed in "feeding the boys", and did so, supplemented by her own money. She also believed they should know how to cook and took a special interest in Price, who had lost his mother. Result: he became an extremely good cook – and wine connoisseur.

While at school he became a member of the LDVs – the Local Defence Volunteers, forerunner of the Home Guard – which he told me was "even more primitive than Dad's Army." At 17, Price was chosen as a sergeant in the Home Guard inter alia organising people to work in factories in Slough, and often to cut down trees in Windsor Great Park. Thanks partly to the expert teaching of the wartime "beak", DL Graham, Price's Modern Tutor, and of CRN Routh and AK Wickham, erudite and committed scholars, Price won the Rosebery Scholarship in history to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Within three years of leaving Eton, Price was being knocked into shape by fearsome drill-sergeants, and nine months later he was with the Scots Guards fighting his way up the spine of Italy. "There were eight of us who joined the Guards the same day from school," he would sombrely recollect. "Four were killed, a fifth lost both his legs and three of us were more or less all right. It was not due to any merit of mine that I was one of the three to survive."

Price was always inhibited about MPs sitting in the Commons sending other people's son's, brothers, husbands and fathers to war in the absence of clear objectives.

In spite of the casualties, and much hardship in bitter fighting, Price acquired an abiding love and affection for Italy. He told me he saw himself as a "Renaissance Florentine." In 1945 he moved to a staff job as a captain in Trieste and was released in September 1946, just in time to take up his scholarship. He read History, played rugby, rowed, and was elected President of the Cambridge Union as a "Tory Peelite." A fellowship at Yale followed. Over a formative year Price developed lifelong friendships, and became a Roman Catholic. Perhaps this was not a huge step, as he had been brought up as an Anglo-Catholic. He told me he felt that theologically he had "come home".

Returning to Britain, he accepted a position as leader-writer on the Daily Telegraph, but threw the job up in favour of a less well-paid position with ICI, on the grounds that if he were to go into politics it was advantageous to be perceived as knowing something about industry. After a few months he was plucked out to be one of two assistants to the ICI chairman, and travelled the world with him.

In 1951 he was shortlisted for Grantham: Margaret Roberts did not make the shortlist despite the efforts of her father, Alderman Roberts. Price lost to the future Foreign Office minister, Joe Godber. Four years later he won the safe seat of Eastleigh, where for the next 37 years he was considered an excellent constituency MP. In the difficult years between 1979 and 1983, as a member of the Select Committee on Transport he was most helpful to his constituents in Eastleigh's railway industry.

After a spell as a junior minister responsible for aviation, Price left Heath's government in 1972. He did not sulk at being gently eased out; he thought it was not good for an MP to be a junior minister for too long. "There is a big difference between that and being a Cabinet minister, where you are part of the administration," he said. "Otherwise you are beavering away down the line – and there is a time limit as to how long that activity should last." As one of the honorary secretaries of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee at the time, I can say from first-hand knowledge that Price – from 1973 to 1975 and for a unique second term, from 1979-82 – was one of the best and most active chairmen the Committee ever had.

Price married in 1960. Four years later his wife had a very bad accident, and was rendered paraplegic. The abiding memory of Price for many MPs will be of him lovingly wheeling his spouse round the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, and of his becoming a champion of disabled causes, in and out of parliament.

David Ernest Campbell Price, politician: born London 20 November 1924; MP for Eastleigh 1955-92; married 1960 Rosemary Johnston (one daughter); died 31 January 2014.

published 25/03/2014 at 11:16 AM by Matt Grossmann

This is a guest post by Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann.  He will be guest-blogging this week about his new book, “Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945.” 

Lyndon Johnson, when he was Senate majority leader, visited  then-Vice President Richard Nixon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in August 1960.  (Walter Reed Army Medical Center via AP)

In April, President Obama will join three former presidents at the LBJ Presidential Library to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. All four presidents — Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush — have faced unfavorable comparisons to Johnson. The occasion will afford another opportunity to contrast Johnson’s legislative successes to contemporary paralysis.  No doubt commentators will continue to fault Obama for failing to build relationships, work across the aisle and forge national consensus.

Political scientists typically question such conclusions, pointing to the political fundamentals that Lyndon Johnson had on his side: large congressional majorities, liberal public opinion and less ideological polarization. A full explanation for Johnson’s success requires acknowledging these factors, but that hardly means that Johnson’s individual skill (or that of his contemporaries) should be dismissed.

In “Artists of the Possible,” I argue that the broader period from 1961-1976 (which I call the Long Great Society) stands out for its high levels of productivity and liberalism in all branches of government — and it is not well explained by political fundamentals.

After analyzing hundreds of domestic policy history books, I compiled 790 significant policy changes since 1945. More than 40 percent were enacted between 1961 and 1976.  This is twice the rate of policy change outside of the period. The legislative, executive and judicial branches were all substantially more productive during this time. This productivity is not explained by unified government or a lack of ideological polarization: Models including these factors still show significantly more policymaking during the Long Great Society.

Policy changes during the period were also overwhelmingly liberal: They expanded the scope of government spending, regulation and responsibility. Liberal policy changes outnumbered conservative changes 15 to 1; all three branches moved policy to the left. The figure below visualizes the direction of policy since 1945. I use a measure borrowed from “The Macro Polity“: liberal minus conservative policy changes per biennium. The Long Great Society stands out as a liberal period in all branches. The liberalism of this period is not explained by Democratic control, liberal public opinion or the ideology of policymakers.

Any explanation of this era must extend beyond Johnson, but the presidents did play key roles. The increase in productivity started in the Kennedy administration, which developed some of the proposals passed under Johnson. Richard M. Nixon oversaw an administration that was just as active and liberal on domestic policy. All three had substantial congressional experience and many productive ties with established interest groups and long-serving senators. In contrast, all of the presidents elected since 1976 have served less than a combined eight years in Congress.

Notably, although policy historians credited Johnson, Nixon and Kennedy with more policy changes than any other political actors, these presidents were almost never credited for unilateral action. Instead, it was what I call a “governing network” that helped make these presidents successful.  Johnson benefited from productive connections to more than 260 actors, including legislators, interest groups and others. After Johnson left office, many of these same actors maintained their connections to one another and thus enabled further productivity. Along with these three presidents, more legislators, administrators and interest groups were involved in policymaking in multiple issue areas and across branches of government.

As we approach the Civil Rights Act anniversary, expect to hear plenty of stories about Johnson cajoling and threatening his compatriots—and some longing for a president that knew how to move legislation. We should remember that Johnson had substantial help and that the productive liberal period outlasted his presidency.

But that should not let Obama, John Boehner and their contemporaries off the hook. The Long Great Society was not an inevitable consequence of trends in public opinion, ideology and election results. Even as leaders during that time disagreed and endured sometimes hard-fought negotiations, their relationships with each other and the coalitions they forged allowed for productivity that stands in stark contrast to today’s gridlock.

published 19/03/2014 at 18:26 par Matt Schudel

Randolph W. Thrower, who served two years as commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service under President Richard M. Nixon before clashing with the administration over appointments and its efforts to punish political enemies, died March 8 at his home in Atlanta. He was 100.

Randolph W. Thrower, shown during a Capitol Hill appearance in 1970, was forced out as Internal Revenue Service commissioner in 1971

A daughter, Patricia Barmeyer, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Mr. Thrower had been a tax lawyer and Republican official in Atlanta before being tapped to head the IRS in 1969. In his two years on the job, he introduced a number of reforms, including a simplified, one-page version of Form 1040, the standard individual income-tax form.

He also was instrumental in drafting the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which reduced taxes for people with lower incomes and raised taxes on capital gains. In 1970, he overturned an IRS ruling that had allowed segregated private schools in the South to claim tax exemptions.

It was only after he left his position in 1971 that Mr. Thrower’s battles with the Nixon White House came to light. He had agreed in 1969 to set up a special group to investigate the tax-exempt status of “subversive organizations of all kinds.”

As time went on, Mr. Thrower grew increasingly resistant to the strong-arm tactics of the Nixon administration. In 1973, he revealed to a Senate select committee investigating the Watergate scandal that in 1970 the White House asked Mr. Thrower to hire John J. Caulfield, a top lieutenant of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, then a branch of the IRS.

After Mr. Thrower rejected Caulfield, who was known for his phone-tapping skills and other “dirty tricks,” the next applicant offered by the White House for the job was G. Gordon Liddy, later convicted as a Watergate conspirator. Mr. Thrower turned him down as well.

The White House then demanded that Mr. Thrower hire Caulfield to lead a special enforcement unit at the IRS, under Mr. Thrower’s direct control. He again refused, saying the IRS commissioner had no need for “a personal police force.”

Documents later provided to congressional committees indicated that the White House asked Mr. Thrower to direct the IRS to audit the tax returns of Nixon’s opponents, including journalists, Democratic congressmen and leaders of the antiwar and civil rights movements.

“There was a great suspicion at the White House that IRS was Democratically oriented,” Mr. Thrower told the New York Times in 1974. “I had dealt with the service for many years as a tax lawyer, and I knew them to be highly professional and objective.”

Believing that Nixon would be alarmed by such partisan meddling, Mr. Thrower sent a memorandum to the president, requesting a meeting. Instead, Mr. Thrower received a phone call from Ehrlichman, telling him he was fired.

Mr. Thrower announced his resignation for “personal reasons” on Jan. 26, 1971. Five days earlier, in a private memo, later made public, Nixon had written: “May I simply reiterate for the record that I wish Randolph Thrower, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, removed at the earliest feasible opportunity.”

Randolph William Thrower was born Sept. 5, 1913, in Tampa. After the death of his father, he was raised largely by his grandparents in Atlanta, where he attended a military school.

After graduating in 1934 from Emory University in Atlanta and from Emory’s law school two years later, Mr. Thrower began to practice law. In the early 1940s, he worked as an FBI special agent in New York before serving as a Marine Corps officer during World War II. He lost a race for Congress as a Republican in 1956 but remained active in Republican circles in Georgia.

Mr. Thrower’s legal specialty was taxation, but he also handled civil rights appeals throughout his life and was a founding member of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group launched by President John F. Kennedy to provide legal support for the civil rights movement.

He was chairman of Atlanta’s Board of Ethics throughout the 1980s and held leadership positions with the American Bar Association. In 1987, he was a member of the ABA’s first Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, which was chaired by Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Thrower argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1989, he submitted an amicus curiae brief to the high court in the case of Texas v. Johnson, supporting the right of a citizen to burn the U.S. flag as an act of free speech. The Supreme Court held that act of flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment.

In 1993, Mr. Thrower received the ABA’s highest award for contributions to the legal profession.

His wife of 70 years, Margaret Munroe Thrower, died in 2009. Survivors include five children, Margaret MacCary and Laura Harris, both of New York City, Patricia Barmeyer of Atlanta, Randolph W. Thrower Jr. of Decatur, Ga., and Mary Wickham of Richmond; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

A few years after he left his post as IRS commissioner, Mr. Thrower returned to Washington with an Atlanta colleague and visited IRS headquarters on business, Barmeyer recalled. As word spread that he was in the building, IRS staffers emerged from their offices, spontaneously applauding as Mr. Thrower walked through the halls.

published 20/03/2014 at 18:45 by Joe Holley

Lawrence E. Walsh, a New York corporate lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials who as independent counsel prosecuted several key players in the Reagan-era Iran-contra scandal only to see the convictions overturned on appeal and many other officials pardoned, died March 19 at his home in Nichols Hills, Okla. He was 102.

Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh speaks to reporters in Washington in 1989

His death was confirmed by Kevin Gordon, president of the Crowe & Dunlevy law firm, with which Mr. Walsh had been associated. The cause was not immediately available.

Mr. Walsh began his career as a Depression-era racket buster under New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey in the late 1930s and later served as a federal district judge in New York and deputy attorney general of the United States. He also was a president of the American Bar Association.

He spent most of his career as a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the most powerful law firms in the country, where he did civil litigation for such corporate clients as AT&T, R.J. Reynolds and General Motors. In 1969, he served briefly as deputy to chief negotiator Henry Cabot Lodge during peace talks with North Vietnamese communists.

In retirement, Mr. Walsh gained his greatest public profile. On Dec. 19, 1986, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III appointed him special prosecutor to launch an inquiry into what at the time was considered the worst government scandal since Watergate. Mr. Walsh spent nearly seven years and $39 million as the special prosecutor in the Iran-contra scandal.

The investigation would conclude that the administration of President Ronald Reagan had illegally sold arms to Iran to win the release of U.S. hostages in the Middle East and had given the proceeds, in defiance of Congress, to a rebel group known as the “contras,” who were fighting to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

Congress also created a joint investigative committee, which many thought would lead to Reagan’s impeachment.

The Iran-contra affair led to the dismissal of the president’s national security adviser, Navy Adm. John M. Poindexter, and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security Council staff aide accused of masterminding the scheme.

Poindexter and North were among 14 officials who faced criminal charges. They also were among the 11 convicted, although their convictions were set aside by appellate court decisions. Five — including former State Department official Elliott Abrams and former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger — were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

Mr. Walsh concluded that there was “no credible evidence” that Reagan broke the law but that the president set the stage for the illegal activities of others.

Even though no one went to jail in the long-running inquiry, Mr. Walsh told The Washington Post in 1991 that the probe of what he called a “national security crime” was important in the long term. “Jail sanctions are important, and they would have been justified in several of the cases we brought, but the deterrent effect is there from the conviction itself,” he said.

Lawrence Edward Walsh was born Jan. 8, 1912, in the fishing hamlet of Port Maitland, Nova Scotia. His maternal grandfather was a sea captain. Although the family left Canada when Mr. Walsh was 2, he returned every summer until he was 12 to stay with his grandparents.

His father, a doctor, moved the family to the New York City borough of Queens.

His father died when Mr. Walsh was 15, leaving him, his mother and his sister in financial peril. He worked his way through college and law school at Columbia University by clerking in a bookstore, doing Christmas duty at the post office and working two hours a day in the cafeteria. Each summer, he went to sea, mostly on steamships, and worked as everything from a bellboy to a seaman.

He graduated from Columbia College in 1932 and Columbia Law School in 1935, in the midst of the Depression. It was hard to find a job, he told The Post in 1993, and when he did — as a special assistant attorney general on a Brooklyn bribery investigation — he worried about losing it. He resolved to be the hardest-working young lawyer in the city.

“I remember figuring out to myself that if I had one night at home a week, it was better than average,” he said. He was 24 and making $1,800 a year.

Around this time, he married Maxine Winton, who died in 1964. He married Mary Porter in 1965. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.

In 1937, Dewey — a future two-time Republican presidential candidate — was elected Manhattan district attorney. He began putting together a staff of young prosecutors who were honest, incorruptible and willing to work 16-hour days. From thousands of applicants, Mr. Walsh was one of the 70 who were chosen. Judges called them the “boy scouts.”

In 1941, Mr. Walsh left the district attorney’s office for Davis Polk & Wardwell. He told the New York Times that he was looking for security. “I’d been out of law school five years and never knew where I was going to be very long,” he said. “Davis Polk never fired anybody.”

His stay was brief. Dewey was elected governor of New York in 1942, and he sought out Mr. Walsh to be an assistant counsel. Mr. Walsh later became the governor’s chief counsel. He also worked in Dewey’s second unsuccessful presidential campaign, in 1948, and for the rest of his life, he referred to himself as “a Dewey Republican.”

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Mr. Walsh to the federal bench in Manhattan, but when William P. Rogers, a former colleague in the New York district attorney’s office, became U.S. attorney general, he asked Mr. Walsh to join him as chief deputy. Mr. Walsh oversaw the selection of federal judges and the integration of the public schools in Litttle Rock.

With the election of Democrat John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960, Mr. Walsh returned to Davis Polk. He was a Wall Street super lawyer who, as the New York Times noted in 1987, resembled a character out of a Louis Auchincloss novel about Wall Street lawyers: “He has grayed at the temples; there is never a hair out of place. His wardrobe is a sea of dark suits and white shirts, usually worn with a plain tie and well-polished black shoes.”

In 1969, he led the American Bar Association committee that found President Richard M. Nixon’s nominees Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate rejected both nominees, and the bar association and Mr. Walsh received strong criticism.

In 1981, Mr. Walsh retired from Davis Polk and moved to Oklahoma City, his wife’s home town, where he joined Crowe & Dunlevy. He was in semi-retirement when he was appointed Iran-contra special counsel.

During the Iran-contra investigation, Mr. Walsh established a three-city operation — Washington, New York and Oklahoma City — that included teams of lawyers and support staff from the Customs Service, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.

In 1993, a lawyer who had worked on the investigation told The Post that he recalled delivering papers to Mr. Walsh’s hotel late at night. “And he was still working — in a coat and tie, at the little hotel desk,” the lawyer said, “as though this was what everybody does at 11 o’clock at night when they’re 75 years old.”

On March 16, 1988, a grand jury handed down a 23-count indictment against North, Poindexter and other top administration officials. Each defendant was tried separately.

After the trials of the major figures, Mr. Walsh focused on individuals suspected of having assisted or having falsely denied knowledge of Iran-contra activities, leading to criminal charges against 10 people. Seven were convicted. One CIA official’s case was dismissed on national security grounds, and Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president at the time of the scandal, pardoned two defendants before their trials.

“By then,” John B. Judis wrote in the New York Times in 1997, “Walsh had become a Lear figure, roaming the moors of Washington, railing privately against Bush, the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, and his other detractors.”

Mr. Walsh continued to insist that the investigation uncovered information the American people needed to know.

“The underlying facts of Iran/contra,” he concluded in his official report, released on Aug. 4, 1993, “are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President’s willful activities.”

In his book “Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up” (1997), Mr. Walsh maintained that the architect of the coverup was Meese, abetted by Bush, White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, CIA Director William J. Casey, Weinberger and other top administration officials.

“What set Iran-contra apart from previous political scandals,” Mr. Walsh wrote, “was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension.”

The Assassination of Richard Nixon ou L'Assassinat de Richard Nixon en Belgique est un film américain de Niels Mueller, sorti en 2004. L'histoire d'un homme brisé parce que sa femme l'a quitté, parce que son travail ne marche pas, parce qu'il a la sensation d'être un moins que rien, à qui on a menti. Il décide alors d'entreprendre quelque chose qu'il pense être son salut : il décide d'assassiner Richard Nixon, responsable selon lui de son échec.










Fiche technique

• Titre : The Assassination of Richard Nixon
• Réalisation : Niels Mueller
• Scénario : Kevin Kennedy et Niels Mueller
• Production : Alfonso Cuaron et Jorge Vergara
• Production : Alexander Payne et Leonardo DiCaprio
• Musique : Steven M. Stern
• Photographie : Emmanuel Lubezki
• Montage : Robert Hamer
• Pays d'origine : États-Unis
• Format : Couleur
• Genre : Drame
• Durée : 92 minutes
• Sortie : 27 octobre 2004 France

Distribution

• Sean Penn (VF : Emmanuel Karsen) : Samuel J. Bicke
• Naomi Watts (VF : Anneliese Fromont) : Marie Andersen Bicke, sa femme
• Don Cheadle (VF : Jean-Paul Pitolin): Bonny Simmons, le meilleur ami de Sam, garagiste
• Jack Thompson : Jack Jones, le patron de Sam, vendeur de mobilier pour bureaux
• Brad Henke : Martin Jones, le fils de Jack et son vendeur préféré
• Nick Searcy : Tom Ford, la personne à qui Sam propose son affaire de bus avec pneus
• Michael Wincott (VF : Féodor Atkine) : Julius Bicke, le frère aîné de Sam et son ancien employeur
• Mykelti Williamson (VF : Bruno Henry) : Harold Mann, le "Black Panther" qui reçoit Sam et son idée de "zèbres"

La Commission Rogers, de son nom officiel Commission présidentielle sur l'accident de la navette spatiale Challenger (Rogers Commission ou Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident) est une commission présidentielle américaine désignée pour enquêter sur l'accident de la navette spatiale Challenger lors de son décollage le 28 janvier 1986. La commission publia un rapport officiel de 225 pages le 9 juin 1986, documentant les facteurs techniques et managérials ayant conduit à l'accident.

Elle détermina que la cause de l'accident était une défaillance d'un des joints circulaires de la fusée booster droite. Le joint défaillant laissa passer des gaz chauds sous pression qui entrèrent en contact avec le réservoir central conduisant à son explosion. Les joints n'étaient pas conçus pour avoir une élasticité donc une étanchéité suffisante par basses températures ce qui était le cas le jour du lancement.

Mais elle mit en cause la Nasa et son fournisseur Morton Thiokol et leurs défaillances à mettre au point un joint adéquat. La commission découvrit que, dès 1977, les ingénieurs de la NASA étaient au courant du problème des joints circulaires mais aussi que cela pouvait avoir des conséquences catastrophiques. Cela conduisit la Commission Rogers à en conclure que l'accident de Challenger était un « un accident ayant ses racines dans l'Histoire » (an accident rooted in history).

Le rapport critiqua aussi fortement le processus de décision conduisant à l'autorisation de lancement, indiquant qu'il était sérieusement « défectueux  » (flawed). Le rapport apporta des preuves que les managers de la NASA ignoraient les inquiétudes des ingénieurs de Thiokol sur les effets du froid sur les joints et ne comprirent pas que Rockwell voyait l'important givrage présent sur le pas de tir comme une contrainte au lancement, faisant dire à la commission : « des failles dans la communication... résulta une décision de lancement basée sur des informations incomplètes et parfois fausses, sur une opposition entre données d'ingénierie et jugements du management et sur une structure managériale de la NASA qui permettait à des problèmes concernant la sécurité du vol d'être ignorés des managers clés du programme de la navette. »

L'un des membres les plus connus de la Commission était le physicien Richard Feynman. Son style d'investigation avec ses propres méthodes directes en dehors du programme de la commission le mis à part des autres membres et suscita le commentaire de Rogers que « Feynman était en train de devenir une vraie douleur ». Feyman fit une démonstration restée célèbre sur la manière dont les joints circulaires devinrent moins efficaces et sujets à des défauts d'étanchéité par températures glaciales en plongeant un échantillon de joint dans un verre rempli d'eau glacée. Les propres investigations de Feynman révélèrent aussi une déconnexion entre les ingénieurs et les cadres de la NASA qui fut bien plus surprenante qu'attendue. Ses interviews de responsables de haut rang de la NASA révélèrent des malentendus surprenants sur des concepts élémentaires. Un tel concept était la détermination d'un facteur de sécurité.

La commission était composée de

• William P. Rogers (1913-2001), président, ancien secrétaire d'État des États-Unis ;
• Neil Armstrong (1930-2012), vice-président, ancien astronaute ;
• Sally Ride (1951-2012), ancienne astronaute et ayant volé sur Challenger, première femme américaine dans l'espace ;
• David Acheson (né en 1921), avocat ;
• Eugene Covert spécialiste aéronautique, ancien chef scientifique de l'US Air Force ;
• Robert Hotz, spécialiste aéronautique ;
• Richard Feynman (1918-1988), prix Nobel de physique 1965 ;
• Albert Wheelon ;
• Arthur B. C. Walker, Jr. (1936-2001) astro-physicien ;
• Donald J. Kutyna, ancien général de l'US Air Force ;
• Robert Rummel ;
• Joe Sutter (né en 1921), ingénieur aéronautique, le « père » du Boeing 747 ;
• Charles Elwood Yeager (né en 1923), pilote d'essai de l'US Air Force.