Corazon Aquino, Ex-Leader of Philippines, Is Dead

By SETH MYDANS
Corazon C. Aquino of the Philippines, who was swept into office on a wave of “people power” in 1986 and then faced down half a dozen coup attempts in six years as president, died Saturday in Manila, her son said. She was 76.
Her son, Senator Benigno S. Aquino III, known as Noynoy, said in a statement that she died at 3:18 a.m. She learned she had advanced colon cancer last year and had been hospitalized in Manila for more than a month, he said. The cancer had spread to other organs, he added, and she was too weak to continue chemotherapy.
Demure but radiant in her familiar yellow dress, Mrs. Aquino brought hope to the Philippines as a presidential candidate, then led its difficult transition to democracy from 20 years of autocratic rule under her predecessor, Ferdinand E. Marcos.
That initial triumph of popular will — after a fraudulent election in which Mr. Marcos claimed victory, though most people believed that Mrs. Aquino had won — was a high point in modern Philippine history, and it offered a model for nonviolent uprisings that has been repeated often in other countries.
But it also set a difficult precedent in the Philippines, where people nostalgic for their shining moment continue to see mass movements as an acceptable, if unconstitutional, answer to the difficulties of a flawed democratic system.
Since Mrs. Aquino left office in 1992, the Philippines has had two electoral transfers of presidential power and two attempts at replicating “people power,” including one that succeeded in removing a democratically elected president, Joseph Estrada, in 2001.
Mrs. Aquino spent the decades after her presidency as the fading conscience of her country, supporting social causes and, in her last years, joining street protests calling for the resignation of the current president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
An observant Roman Catholic who sometimes retreated to convents for contemplation, she attributed much of her success to a divine will. She also said she sought guidance from the spirit of her late husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr., who had been a chief challenger to Mr. Marcos. His assassination in 1983 fueled the opposition against Mr. Marcos and made his widow a popular figure.
“What on earth do I know about being president?” Mrs. Aquino said in an interview in December 1985, after a rally opening her election campaign.
But that was beside the point. For many Filipinos, she embodied a hope of becoming a better nation and a prouder people.
“The only thing I can really offer the Filipino people is my sincerity,” she said in the interview.
It was what they hungered for, and what she delivered as president. Although often criticized as an indecisive and ineffectual leader, Mrs. Aquino combined passivity and stubbornness and an unexpected shrewdness to hold firm against powerful opponents from both the right and the left.
Her survival in office was one of her chief accomplishments. She was succeeded by Fidel V. Ramos, whose challenge to Mr. Marcos was a catalyst for the uprising in 1986 and whose support as Mrs. Aquino’s military chief was crucial to her in quelling coup attempts.
In the months after she took office, while ambitious people who had wilted under Mr. Marcos’s dominance jockeyed for power, Mrs. Aquino succeeded in restoring a freely elected Parliament and an independent judiciary.
She had come to power through what amounted to popular acclaim — she called it “people power” — expressed by huge crowds that gathered in support of her after the disputed election in February 1986.
One year later, in February 1987, an 80 percent popular vote for a new Constitution was seen as a vote of confidence in her presidency, and coming after her nonelectoral ascent to power, it confirmed her legitimacy and helped keep her challengers at bay.
But these challenges, including the attempted coups and continuing agitation from pressure groups, limited her options. Lacking political experience, she held back from making the most of her overwhelming mandate.
Born into one of the country’s wealthy land-owning families, the Cojuangcos of Tarlac, Mrs. Aquino did not lead the social revolution that some had hoped for. She failed to institute effective land reform or to address the country’s fundamental structural ailment, the oligarchic control of power and politics.
Under pressure from her restive military, she was forced to abandon one of the most strongly held ideas she brought to her presidency, an amnesty and reconciliation with a Communist insurgency. In one of the most striking retreats of her presidency, addressing the graduating class at the Philippine Military Academy a year after taking power, she said, “The answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform, but police and military action.”
She turned her military loose, and the war against the Communist New People’s Army resumed. The four-decade conflict continues today, along with widespread extrajudicial killings by the military that are reminiscent of Mr. Marcos’s time.
Although the economy revived under her leadership, it remains weak, sustained by the remittances of millions of overseas workers. Economic growth is also hampered by an exploding population in a largely Roman Catholic nation in which artificial birth control is rejected by the church.
Maria Corazon Aquino, popularly known as Cory, was born on Jan. 25, 1933, in Tarlac Province in central Luzon, the sixth of eight children of José Cojuangco.
Like her future husband, she came from a wealthy and politically powerful family. Their banking and commercial interests, along with their 15,000-acre sugar plantation, made them one of the wealthiest families in the province.
Like the Aquinos, they belonged to the class of oligarchs of Chinese, Spanish and Malay descent who have held the real power in the Philippines since colonial days. She attended exclusive schools in Manila until she was 13, when she was sent to finish her education at convent schools in the United States. Teachers and students remembered her as a quiet, studious and devoutly Catholic girl.
She studied at Ravenhill Academy in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Convent School in Manhattan, a small institution on West 79th Street (now called Notre Dame School), where she was a member of the class of 1949. In 1953 she graduated from the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with a major in French and a minor in mathematics.
She enrolled in law school in Manila, where she met Benigno Aquino, a promising young journalist with a future in politics clearly ahead of him. She left the law behind and married him in 1954, and the couple had four daughters and a son.
Besides her son, she is survived by her daughters, Maria Elena Aquino-Cruz, Aurora Corazon Aquino-Abellada, Victoria Elisa Aquino-Dee and Kristina Bernadette Aquino-Yap.
Mrs. Aquino played the dutiful wife as her husband’s political star rose. In less than 20 years he became the country’s youngest elected mayor, governor and senator, emerging as one of the chief potential rivals of Mr. Marcos, who was then president.
When Mr. Marcos declared martial law in 1972, extending his presidency beyond its two-term limit, Mr. Aquino was arrested and charged with subversion and illegal possession of firearms. He spent the next seven years behind bars. During that time, Mrs. Aquino’s political education began in earnest. As her husband’s only link to the world outside, she memorized his messages and statements and passed them on to the press.
In 1980, Mr. Marcos allowed Mr. Aquino to go to the United States for a triple-bypass heart operation. Mr. Aquino accepted academic posts at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the family settled in Newton, a suburb of Boston, for what Mrs. Aquino later recalled as the happiest three years of her life.
But despite warnings from Mr. Marcos’s powerful and eccentric wife, Imelda, Mr. Aquino pursued a sense of mission and returned to the Philippines on Aug. 21, 1983. He was escorted from his airplane by two soldiers, who gunned him down on a side stairway leading to the tarmac.
Mr. Marcos was widely blamed for the assassination, although no proof has emerged, and a huge antigovernment protest took place at Mr. Aquino’s funeral.
It was at his funeral, dressed in black and standing beside his open coffin, that Mrs. Aquino became a national symbol, showing the dignity and composure that would characterize her most difficult moments as president. Her popularity reached its peak during her presidential campaign against Mr. Marcos in January 1986, when she was surrounded by enthusiastic crowds chanting, “Cory! Cory! Cory!”
The “people power” uprising began with a foiled coup attempt by a clique of junior officers two weeks after the election in which Mr. Marcos was declared the winner by a compliant legislature. Two of Mr. Marcos’s military leaders — Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Mr. Ramos, then chief of the national police — broke away from Mr. Marcos and took refuge in a military camp in the capital.
Responding to calls by the Catholic Church and by Mrs. Aquino’s backers, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets around the military camp, blocking the advance of tanks and calling on the soldiers to join them. The tide had clearly turned against Mr. Marcos. President Ronald Reagan, who had supported him throughout, sent him the message that it was time for him to leave.
Four days after the uprising began, Mr. Marcos was flown on an American aircraft to exile in Guam and then to Hawaii, where he died in 1989. Before fleeing, Mr. Marcos had himself sworn in as president in his nearly empty palace. Almost simultaneously Mrs. Aquino was sworn in by her civilian supporters at a social club near the military camp. She was immediately recognized as president by the United States. In an address to the nation, she declared, “Our long national nightmare is over,” and there was a moment of hope.

Huge tunnel to be built under San Francisco Bay
By Paul Rogers
San Jose Mercury News
The Hetch Hetchy water system looking East a leak on the 1920s pipe (the pipe... ( Nhat V. Meyer )«12345»Hoping to protect one of the Bay Area's main water supplies after the next major earthquake, construction crews will soon embark on a job that sounds like something out of a Jules Verne novel: building a massive, 5-mile-long tunnel underneath San Francisco Bay.
The project is believed to be the first major tunnel ever built across the bay.
Using a giant boring machine, workers will carve a 14-foot high corridor through clay, sand and bedrock from Menlo Park to Newark as deep as 103 feet below the bay floor. They'll then run a 9-foot-high steel water pipe through the middle.
"All the experts tell us that within the next 30 years, there is a 63 percent chance of having a major earthquake in the Bay Area," said Ed Harrington, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which is in charge of the project.
"By building extra tunnels and strengthening our pipelines, it means we have much greater assurance that we'll have water after the next earthquake."
Bids on the tunnel will be advertised Friday.
Only 12 companies in the world are certified to perform the job, which is estimated to cost $347 million. Digging will start next spring on the Menlo Park shoreline just south of the Dumbarton Bridge, and head eastward, with work scheduled to be completed in 2015. An additional 16 miles of pipe connecting to the tunnel on either side of the bay also will be replaced.
The job is part of a $4.5 billion
Renovation by the San Francisco PUC to upgrade its water system. Commonly known as the Hetch Hetchy System, the network of tunnels, pipes and reservoirs delivers water 167 miles through gravity-fed pipes from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park to Crystal Springs Reservoir along I-280 in San Mateo County.
Biggest system
The largest water system in the Bay Area, it provides some or all of the drinking water to 2.5 million people from North San Jose through the Peninsula to San Francisco, along with Fremont, Hayward and other parts of the East Bay.
Another agency, the Santa Clara Valley Water District, provides water to 1.8 million people in Santa Clara County from groundwater and the delta.
An engineering marvel, the Hetch Hetchy system was built following the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco burned after its water system failed. Today, much of its equipment is antiquated and at risk of collapse in the next major quake.
The tunnel, for example, will replace two large steel pipes built in 1925 and 1936 that sit on the floor of the bay, and could easily break in a major quake, cutting off water for weeks.
"Being buried deep in stronger, tighter materials, there is much smaller vulnerability to being pulled apart from shaking and liquefaction," David Schwartz, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, said of the proposed tunnel. "From an engineering point of view, it's much stronger."
Schwartz noted that since the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, a 6.9 magnitude event that killed 63 people and did $6 billion in damage, other Bay Area agencies have been hard at work.
Racing to beat the next earthquake, Caltrans has retrofitted dozens of freeway overpasses and is rebuilding the Bay Bridge. Pacific Gas & Electric has upgraded gas lines and substations. BART is retrofitting the Transbay Tube, a 3.6 mile-long cylinder that sits on the floor of the bay, connecting Oakland and San Francisco.
"The question is, can we get it all done in time?" Schwartz said.
Retrofitting needed
Many of the region's hospitals have not been retrofitted. And thousands of old buildings, including homes and unreinforced masonry buildings, remain at risk.
USGS scientists say there is a 63 percent chance of a quake of 6.7 magnitude or larger hitting the Bay Area by 2036. Geologists are most concerned about the Hayward fault, which runs from San Jose to Richmond.
With that backdrop, the San Francisco PUC won approval from San Francisco voters in 2002 to upgrade its water system. Funding is coming from revenue bonds, financed by a near-doubling of residential water rates in San Francisco from $23 a month now to $40 in 2015, with similar hikes expected in other communities that receive Hetch Hetchy water.
The project also will rebuild pipelines, water treatment plants and Calaveras Dam, north of San Jose, over the next five years so that they can withstand a quake of up to magnitude 7.9 on the San Andreas fault and 6.9 on the Hayward fault.
Despite the sensitive politics of anything involving the bay, environmentalists did not oppose the new tunnel.
"The environmental effects of a tunnel would be less than if they built new pipelines across the marshes," said Florence LaRiviere, co-founder of the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, in Palo Alto.
And the earthquake risks are real, so "it is entirely appropriate," she said.
Still, LaRiviere said she wants the PUC to remove the old pipes when the tunnel is done to restore the shoreline to its natural state. For now, the agency plans to leave them in place as a backup.

From The London Times
This was the war that shaped our world
The death of Harry Patch makes me think of my father and the debt we all owe to their generation
William Rees-Mogg

I last visited Fletcher House in Wells on January 18, when it was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its opening. I did not see Harry Patch, who was resting in his room, but I was shown round the home, met many residents, and even made a brief speech. The reason I was invited was that Fletcher House was named after my father, Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg. He was the chairman of the Welfare Committee of the Somerset County Council in the late Forties and Fifties. He acquired a chain of houses for the county council and supervised their conversion into homes for the elderly. Fletcher House was the first to be purpose-built.
Harry Patch was born in 1898, and my father in 1889. They both belonged to the generation whose lives — if they survived — were moulded by the First World War. Both of them were born and died in Somerset, both were present at the Battle of Passchendaele, and both of them came away from that terrible battle with similar memories.
When Harry Patch was asked for his comment on Passchendaele, he replied: “Mud. Mud. Mud.” I remember my father saying that Passchendaele was the worst of all the battles. He blamed the staff for deciding to fight a major battle in conditions of trench warfare when the water table was only 18 inches below the surface.
At Passchendaele, Mr Patch was a machinegunner; my father was in charge of a motor transport unit as a junior officer. My father always took the view that his role was considerably less dangerous than that of the infantry. One of his fellow officers, however, commented that when he went to sleep at night he never knew whether he would be woken by his batman or by St Peter.
It is common for people to reflect more on their parents’ lives as they themselves get older. Perhaps that is particularly true of the way older men think about their fathers. I find that the death of Harry Patch has made me think about the war experiences of my father, and by extension the experience his whole generation had to suffer.
We should remember that this was the generation which shaped the later 20th-century world. In Britain, every prime minister from 1940 to 1963, that is from Churchill to Macmillan, had seen active service in the First World War. They led Britain through the aftermath of the Slump, the Second World War, the creation of the welfare state, the most dangerous years of the Cold War and the ending of the British Empire. In Germany, another survivor of the First World War was Adolf Hitler; it is impossible to assess how far his evil career was shaped by the nervous breakdown he suffered from his experience of the trenches. He, too, was born in 1889, a few months before my father.
Certainly, the experience of the young English soldiers, including Mr Patch himself, was to make them more, rather than less, idealist. They hated war. Mr Patch campaigned against war in the last years of his life, making his celebrity a platform for his anti-war feelings. In the Thirties, when the First World War generation was increasing its political influence, the strength of pacifist feeling was so great that it was very difficult to win a public majority for rearmament. The younger officers, particularly Eden and Macmillan, felt they owed a social responsibility to the men with whom they had fought.
In the United States, a popular, newly elected President is now having great difficulty in winning support for a national health service in a nation in which a quarter of the citizens do not have health cover. In Britain it was possible to create a National Health Service 60 years ago. Clement Attlee, the 1945 Labour Prime Minister who was responsible for it, had served as a major in the First World War, and campaigned as Major Attlee in the 1935 general election. One could say the British welfare state is supported by the ex-service commitment of two wars.
At the same time, the First World War generation had lasting respect for the military virtues, though none for the deficiencies they perceived in the staff. My father never forgave Haig’s staff officers for what he regarded as their amateur and long-distance attitudes: moving men as virtual symbols on their maps, but seldom coming near the front to see what the conditions were really like. He remembered driving one pompous brigadier who did make a forward visit. A shell landed near their car and blew off my father’s glasses. He made the brigadier scramble in the mud to find them, pointing out with some satisfaction that he could not drive the brigadier back to his HQ unless he could see where he was going.
What one got from the memories of Harry Patch, and indeed from what I know of my father’s experiences, is an extraordinary respect for their resilience. Yet their courage was neither ideological nor militarist. They were both peace-loving and moderate men.
What are the lessons? Do not go to war unless it is inevitable, and preferably not even then. Maintain the welfare of the poor, the sick and the old. Look after the nation’s Armed Forces. Do not ask them to fight impossible battles with inadequate equipment. Make generous provision for those mentally or physically damaged by war. Keep cynicism and aggression out of national policy.
In Britain, perhaps because we were on the winning side both in 1918 and 1945, both world wars produced fine generations. Not so, in Germany or France. The British soldiers who survived the Western Front were good and honest people, and they were unbelievably brave.
They offer a fine example to all subsequent generations.

In Iran, the Opposition Delivers a Sermon
By Andrew Lee Butters / Beirut
Time
Iranians have been waiting for weeks to hear from former President Ayatullah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. At the height of the demonstrations on Tehran's streets, when hundreds of thousands of people called for a do-over of the June 12 presidential election officially won by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many Iranians have wondered if Rafsanjani, one of the Islamic Republic's most powerful men and a leading supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, would mount a challenge to Ahmadinejad's main patron, the Supreme Leader Ayatullah Khamenei.
So when word spread that Rafsanjani would deliver the keynote address at Friday prayers July 17 at Tehran University, one of the country's highest-profile platforms, many opposition supporters hoped his speech would provide new impetus to the protest movement. Mousavi himself, rarely seen in public these days, attended the prayer service. Taking no chances, security forces deployed in force hours before the event, and authorities filled the prayer hall with government supporters. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)
In the end, though, the speech was more conciliatory than confrontational. Rafsanjani made several nods to opposition sentiment, acknowledging that the events of recent weeks constituted a "crisis" for the Islamic Republic. He also used strong terms to deplore the violence that broke out. But he praised the government's preparations for the election and said it occurred in an atmosphere of "healthy competition" and "unprecedented freedom."
Crucially, he appeared to call for the opposition to back down in exchange for concessions from the government — the release of opposition prisoners and a relaxation of controls over the media. "My sisters and brothers, we have to find a way of maintaining unity," he said. "For the protection of the state and our values, we have to seek to maintain our unity for future generations." This would be possible if the will of the people is respected, he said, but he made no mention of allegations of electoral fraud. Indeed, his call for unity in the face of outside threats even played into the government's narrative that the postelection unrest was not an expression of popular will but the result of foreign agitation.
Though perhaps not the clarion call that the rank and file may have been hoping for, the notes of compromise struck by Rafsanjani made sense within the context of a power struggle at the apex of the Islamic Republic, according to Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. "The phase we're in now is one where the different sides are trying to determine the rules by which they'll continue their political conflict," he says. "Remember, these guys are all in the same boat to some extent, all invested in the regime's survival. And if they keep this fight going without any rules, they run the risk that the system could collapse and take them down with it. Both sides have an incentive to avoid that."
Rafsanjani's speech may even have been a smart move as far as his own career is concerned. "Rafsanjani very cleverly positioned himself as a unifying figure, emphasizing the need to bring everyone together," says Parsi. "That was an indirect attack on the Supreme Leader [Ayatullah Ali Khamenei], who has been widely accused of abusing his position by being so partisan in backing the Ahmadinejad faction. When the Supreme Leader is incapable of bringing about unity within the system, then anyone else who is capable of achieving that will strengthen his position relative to the Supreme Leader." (See pictures of the lasting influence of Ayatullah Khomeini.)
But that may not be enough to satisfy those who keep risking their lives to confront the regime in street protests. Surprisingly large crowds of opposition supporters gathered outside Tehran University despite the heavy security presence Friday. Plainclothes officers harassed opposition presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who nevertheless managed to make it into the prayer hall, according to an account posted on an opposition news website by Karroubi's son. Eyewitnesses say that government supporters shouting "Death to America" were met by opposition protesters chanting "Death to Russia" and "Death to China" — two countries that have recognized Ahmadinejad's re-election. Before the speech, protesters called out to Rafsanjani using his midde name: "Hashemi, Hashemi, take back my vote. Hashemi, Hashemi, silence will make you a traitor," and "Honorable clerics, support, support."
But with powerful establishment clerics like Rafsanjani shying away from open confrontation with the Ahmadinejad government, the protest movement may need to look beyond clerical leadership. Rafsanjani himself didn't have any suggestions for how the opposition should continue its struggle, other than that it should obey the law. Mousavi advisers have talked about starting a new political party, but that would require government permission. Rank-and-file supports have been reduced to largely symbolic gestures like turning on hair dryers and irons during presidential speeches in order to trigger mass blackouts, or boycotting Siemens Nokia, which they accuse of having sold telecommunications-monitoring equipment to the government. (Read Mousavi's interview with TIME's Joe Klein.)
Ahmadinejad, meantime, appears to be growing more emboldened. On Thursday he pushed back against suggestions by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that time is running out for Iran to sit down and negotiate with the U.S. over its nuclear-development program. He demanded that the U.S. apologize for interfering in Iran's elections before talks could begin. "They talked nonsense," he said. "They were rude."
— With reporting by Nahid Siamdoust / Beirut and Tony Karon / New York

Walter Cronkite, Voice of TV News, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Walter Cronkite, who pioneered and then mastered the role of television news anchorman with such plain-spoken grace that he was called the most trusted man in America, died Friday at his home in New York. He was 92.
The cause was complications of dementia, said Chip Cronkite, his son.
From 1962 to 1981, Mr. Cronkite was a nightly presence in American homes and always a reassuring one, guiding viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike, from moonwalks to war, in an era when network news was central to many people’s lives.
He became something of a national institution, with an unflappable delivery, a distinctively avuncular voice and a daily benediction: “And that’s the way it is.” He was Uncle Walter to many: respected, liked and listened to. With his trimmed mustache and calm manner, he even bore a resemblance to another trusted American fixture, another Walter — Walt Disney.
Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Mr. Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,” a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. (He professed incomprehension that Maria Shriver beat him out in the eighth category, attractiveness.) He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.
Yet he was a reluctant star. He was genuinely perplexed when people rushed to see him rather than the politicians he was covering, and even more astonished by the repeated suggestions that he run for office himself. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman — his title was managing editor of the “CBS Evening News” — and so did his audience.
“The viewers could more readily picture Walter Cronkite jumping into a car to cover a 10-alarm fire than they could visualize him doing cerebral commentary on a great summit meeting in Geneva,” David Halberstam wrote in “The Powers That Be,” his 1979 book about the news media.
As anchorman and reporter, Mr. Cronkite described wars, natural disasters, nuclear explosions, social upheavals and space flights, from Alan Shepard’s 15-minute ride to lunar landings. On July 20, 1969, when the Eagle touched down on the moon, Mr. Cronkite exclaimed, “Oh, boy!”
On the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Cronkite briefly lost his composure in announcing that the president had been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Taking off his black-framed glasses and blinking back tears, he registered the emotions of millions.
It was an uncharacteristically personal note from a newsman who was uncomfortable expressing opinion.
“I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor — not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”
But when he did pronounce judgment, the impact was large.
In 1968, he visited Vietnam and returned to do a rare special program on the war. He called the conflict a stalemate and advocated a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the broadcast, Mr. Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” quoting a description of the scene by Bill Moyers, then a Johnson aide.
“The president flipped off the set,” Mr. Moyers recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ”
Mr. Cronkite sometimes pushed beyond the usual two-minute limit to news items. On Oct. 27, 1972, his 14-minute report on Watergate, followed by an eight-minute segment four days later, “put the Watergate story clearly and substantially before millions of Americans” for the first time, the broadcast historian Marvin Barrett wrote in “Moments of Truth?” (1975).
In 1977, his separate interviews with President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel were instrumental in Sadat’s visiting Jerusalem. The countries later signed a peace treaty.
“From his earliest days,” Mr. Halberstam wrote, “he was one of the hungriest reporters around, wildly competitive, no one was going to beat Walter Cronkite on a story, and as he grew older and more successful, the marvel of it was that he never changed, the wild fires still burned.”
Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born on Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., the son of Walter Leland Cronkite Sr., a dentist, and the former Helen Lena Fritsche. His ancestors had settled in New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that became New York. As a boy, Walter peddled magazines door to door and hawked newspapers. As a teenager, after the family had moved to Houston, he got a job with The Houston Post as a copy boy and cub reporter. At the same time, he had a paper route delivering The Post to his neighbors.
“As far as I know, there were no other journalists delivering the morning paper with their own compositions inside,” he wrote in his autobiography.
When he was 16, Mr. Cronkite went with friends to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair. He volunteered to help demonstrate an experimental version of television.
“I could honestly say to all of my colleagues, ‘I was in television long before you were,’ ” he said in an interview with CBS News in 1996.
Mr. Cronkite attended the University of Texas for two years, studying political science, economics and journalism, working on the school newspaper and picking up journalism jobs with The Houston Press and other newspapers. He also auditioned to be an announcer at an Austin radio station but was turned down. He left college in 1935 without graduating to take a job as a reporter with The Press.
While visiting Kansas City, Mo., he was hired by the radio station KCMO to read news and broadcast football games under the name Walter Wilcox. (Radio stations at the time wanted to “own” announcers’ names so that popular ones could not be taken elsewhere.)
He was not at the games but received cryptic summaries of each play by telegraph. These provided fodder for vivid descriptions of the action. He added details of what local men in the stands were wearing, which he learned by calling their wives. He found out in advance what music the band would be playing so he could describe halftime festivities.
At KCMO, Mr. Cronkite met an advertising writer named Mary Elizabeth Maxwell. The two read a commercial together. One of Mr. Cronkite’s lines was, “You look like an angel.” They were married for 64 years until her death in 2005.
In addition to his son, Walter Leland III, known as Chip, Mr. Cronkite is survived by his daughters, Nancy Elizabeth and Mary Kathleen; and four grandsons.
In his last years, Joanna Simon, a former opera singer and sister of Carly Simon, was his frequent companion.
The family said it was planning a private service at St. Bartholemew’s Church in New York.
After being fired from KCMO in a dispute over journalism practices he considered shabby, Mr. Cronkite in 1939 landed a job at the United Press news agency, now United Press International. He reported from Houston, Dallas, El Paso and Kansas City.
The stint ended when he returned to radio and then took a job with Braniff International Airways in Kansas City, selling tickets and doing public relations.
Returning to United Press after a few months, he became one of the first reporters accredited to American forces with the outbreak of World War II. He gained fame as a war correspondent, crash-landing a glider in Belgium, accompanying the first Allied troops into North Africa, reporting on the Normandy invasion and covering major battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, in 1944.
In 1943, Edward R. Murrow asked Mr. Cronkite to join his wartime broadcast team in CBS’s Moscow bureau. In “The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism” (1996), Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote that Murrow was astounded when Mr. Cronkite rejected his $125-a-week job offer and decided to stay with United Press for $92 a week.
That year Mr. Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected for an Army Air Forces program that took them on a bombing mission to Germany aboard B-17 Flying Fortresses. Mr. Cronkite manned a machine gun until he was “up to my hips in spent .50-caliber shells,” he wrote in his memoir.
After covering the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and then reporting from Moscow from 1946 to 1948, he again left print journalism to become the Washington correspondent for a dozen Midwestern radio stations. In 1950, Murrow successfully recruited him for CBS.
Mr. Cronkite was assigned to develop the news department of a new CBS station in Washington. Within a year he was appearing on nationally broadcast public affairs programs like “Man of the Week,” “It’s News to Me” and “Pick the Winner.”
In February 1953 he narrated the first installment of his long-running series “You Are There,” which recreated historic events like the Battle of the Alamo or the Hindenburg disaster and reported them as if they were breaking news. Sidney Lumet, soon to become a well-known filmmaker, directed the series.
“What sort of day was it?” Mr. Cronkite said at the end of each episode. “A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. And you were there.”
In 1954, when CBS challenged NBC’s popular morning program “Today” with the short-lived “Morning Show,” it tapped Mr. Cronkite to be the host. Early on he riled the sponsor, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, by grammatically correcting its well-known advertising slogan, declaring, “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”
When not interviewing guests, he mulled over the news with a witty and erudite puppet lion, Charlemagne. Occasionally he ventured outside the studio — using a tugboat, for example, to meet luxury liners so he could interview celebrities before they landed.
In 1952, the first presidential year in which television outshined radio, Mr. Cronkite was chosen to lead the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. By Mr. Cronkite’s account, it was then that the term “anchor” was first used — by Sig Mickelson, the first director of television news for CBS, who had likened the chief announcer’s job to an anchor that holds a boat in place. Paul Levitan, another CBS executive, and Don Hewitt, then a young producer, have also been credited with the phrase.
The 1952 conventions made Mr. Cronkite a star. Mr. Mickelson, he recalled, told him: “You’re famous now. And you’re going to want a lot more money. You’d better get an agent.”
Mr. Cronkite went on to anchor every national political convention and election night until 1980, with the exception of 1964. That year he was replaced at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City by Roger Mudd and Robert Trout in an effort to challenge NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley team, which had won the ratings battle at the Republican convention in San Francisco that summer.
In 1961, Mr. Cronkite replaced Murrow as CBS’s senior correspondent, and on April 16, 1962, he began anchoring the evening news, succeeding Douglas Edwards, whose ratings had been low. As managing editor, Mr. Cronkite also helped shape the nightly report.
The evening broadcast had been a 15-minute program, but on Sept. 2, 1963, CBS doubled the length to a half-hour, over the objections of its affiliates. Mr. Cronkite interviewed President Kennedy on the first longer broadcast, renamed the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite.” He also broadcast from a real newsroom and not, as Edwards had done, from a studio set.
At the time the broadcast was lengthened, Mr. Cronkite inaugurated his famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.” The original idea, he later wrote, had been to end each broadcast with a quirky news item, after which he would recite the line with humor, sadness or irony.
Richard S. Salant, the president of CBS News, hated the line from the beginning — it ate up a precious four seconds a night — and the offbeat items were never done.
“I began to think Dick was right, but I was too stubborn to drop it,” Mr. Cronkite wrote.
Starting with Herbert Hoover, Mr. Cronkite knew every president, not always pleasantly. A top aide to President Richard M. Nixon, Charles Colson, harangued the network’s chairman, William S. Paley, after Mr. Cronkite’s 14-minute Watergate broadcast. The next segment was shortened. In 1960, during the Wisconsin primary, Mr. Cronkite asked Kennedy, then a senator, about his Roman Catholic religion. As Mr. Cronkite recalled in his memoir, Kennedy called Frank Stanton, CBS’s president, to complain that questions about the subject had earlier been ruled out of bounds. He then reminded Mr. Stanton that if he were elected he would be appointing members of the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Stanton “courageously stood up to the threat,” Mr. Cronkite wrote.
By contrast, Mr. Cronkite’s relations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower were so cordial that President Kennedy incorrectly assumed Mr. Cronkite, a political independent, was a Republican.
Mr. Cronkite also enjoyed the company of President Ronald Reagan, with whom he exchanged often off-color jokes. And he whimsically competed with his friend Johnny Carson to see who could take the most vacation time without getting fired.
Mr. Cronkite raced sports cars but switched to sailing so he could spend more time with his family. He liked old-time pubs and friendly restaurants; there was even one in Midtown Manhattan where his regular chair was marked with his initials.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2002, Mr. Cronkite scrunched his eyes and lowered his voice into a theatrical sob when asked if he regretted missing out on the huge salaries subsequent anchors had received.
“Yes,” he said, adding, “I frequently call myself the Mickey Mantle of network news.”
Mr. Cronkite retired in 1981 at 64. He had repeatedly promised to do so, but few had either believed him or chosen to hear. CBS was eager to replace him with Dan Rather, who was flirting with ABC, but both Mr. Cronkite and the network said he had not been pushed.
After his retirement he continued to be seen on CBS as the host of “Walter Cronkite’s Universe,” a science series that began in 1980 and ran until 1982. The network also named him a special correspondent; the position turned out to be largely honorary, though news reports said it paid $1 million a year. But after he spent 10 years on the board of CBS, where he chafed at the cuts that the network’s chairman, Laurence A. Tisch, had made in a once-generous news budget, more and more of his broadcast work appeared on CNN, National Public Radio and elsewhere, not CBS.
By the time Mr. Rather was leaving the “CBS Evening News” in 2005, Mr. Cronkite had abandoned mincing words. He criticized his successor as “playing the role of newsman” rather than being one. Mr. Rather should have been replaced years earlier, he said.
When Katie Couric took over the job in September 2006, Mr. Cronkite introduced her on the air and praised her in interviews.
His long “retirement” was not leisurely. When Senator John Glenn went back into space on the shuttle Discovery in 1998, 36 years after his astronaut days, Mr. Cronkite did an encore in covering the event for CNN. He made some 60 documentaries. And among many other things, he was the voice of Benjamin Franklin on the PBS cartoon series “Liberty’s Kids,” covered a British general election for a British network and for many years served as host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
He had already won Emmy Awards, a Peabody and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (in 1981), and he continued to pile up accolades. Arizona State University named its journalism school after him.
In July 2006, PBS broadcast a 90-minute “American Masters” special on Mr. Cronkite’s career. Mr. Lumet, the filmmaker, appeared and said, “He seemed to me incorruptible in a profession that was easily corrupted.”
On his 90th birthday, Mr. Cronkite told The Daily News, “I would like to think I’m still quite capable of covering a story.”
But he knew he had to stop sometime, he allowed in his autobiography. He promised at the time to continue to follow news developments “from a perch yet to be determined.”
“I just hope that wherever that is, folks will still stop me, as they do today, and ask, ‘Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?’ ”

Rafsanjani defies Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as protesters turn out in force
Michael Purcell

Times of London

Tens of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran yesterday to hear the country’s most influential powerbroker pronounce the Islamic Republic in crisis and as he called for the release of those arrested in recent pro-democracy demonstrations.
In a devastating attack on the regime, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading cleric and former President, told a crowd at Tehran University that the Government had lost the people’s trust. Referring to the handling of last month’s disputed election, which President Ahmadinejad claims to have won, he said that the custodians of the Islamic Revolution had undermined its basic principles.
Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani condemned the brutal suppression of protests and called for the release of those detained during the post-election crackdown. The crowd acclaimed his address by chanting: “Death to the dictator” and “Leaders, give us arms”.
Police and pro-government Basij militiamen responded by firing teargas and using truncheons to break up the crowd, the largest street gathering in weeks. Mehdi Karoubi, one of the presidential candidates who claims that his votes were stolen last month, was assaulted by plainclothes militia.
At least 15 people were arrested, including the leading women’s rights campaigner and lawyer Shadi Sadr, who was beaten and dragged into a car in front of a crowd of her friends. “Shadi called me from an unknown location and said she was arrested by plainclothes officials who forcefully got her into a car,” her husband, Hossein Nilchian, said.
Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani’s sermon at the university, the cradle of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, came as a crucial opportunity to galvanise the embattled opposition, who believe that the election was stolen from the moderate challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Mr Mousavi’s attendance at yesterday’s sermon was his first official public appearance in weeks. He has been under virtual house arrest, his communications monitored, closest aides arrested and news outlets closed.
Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani, a key Mousavi sponsor, who heads the clerical council with the authority to remove the Supreme Leader, has spent the past few weeks canvassing the religious establishment in Qom to make such a move against him.
Only a month ago at the same venue, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, declared that the election debate was over and warned of consequences for those who questioned the victory of Mr Ahmadinejad, the conservative incumbent. Many within the clerical establishment saw his backing of one candidate as a betrayal of his position.
Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani couched his sermon yesterday with calls for unity but his challenge to the regime was unmistakable. “Today is a bitter day,” he said. “I hope with this sermon we can pass through this period of hardships that can be called a crisis.”
He warned Iran’s leaders not to ignore the will of the people — a key tenet of the revolution. “If the Islamic and Republican aspects of the revolution are not preserved, it means we have forgotten the principles of the revolution,” he said. “Our key issue is to return the trust which the people had and now to some extent is broken.”
Reminding worshippers of his close relationship with the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, he condemned the use of iron-fisted security forces to crush protests. “We knew what Imam Khomeini wanted. He didn’t want the use of terror or arms,” he said. Iran puts the official death toll at 20, although human rights activists believe that hundreds may have been killed during the protests.
Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani drew thunderous applause as, blinking back tears, he demanded the release of demonstrators. “It is not necessary that in this situation people be jailed. Let them join their families. We should not allow enemies to rebuke and ridicule us because of detentions. We should tolerate each other,” he said.
Outside the prayer hall protesters carrying green banners — the colour of Mr Mousavi’s election campaign — called on President Ahmadinejad to resign. Some evoked the slain martyrs of the protest movement, chanting:
“Sohrab is not dead, it is the Government that is finished” and “We are all one voice, we are all Neda”.
The regime had banned public rallies, which had largely died out since security forces launched the crackdown on the streets last month, making Friday prayers one of the few opportunities left to gather.

From The London Sunday Times
Palin leads the right into a reality TV vortex
The Alaska governor’s resignation shows how shallow Republicans have become
Andrew Sullivan

Writing about Sarah Palin always presents a quandary. Does one operate under the usual assumption that this is a rational figure, a serious politician, a rising Republican star . . . or do you acknowledge the copious evidence that she cannot tell the truth, has delusions of grandeur, has no policy record to speak of and quit her job as Alaska governor halfway through her first term because she is, in her own explanation, “not a quitter”? I think that you have to proceed under the assumption that this is a joke of a candidate and a symptom of a political party in the middle of a mental breakdown.
Mind you, I love the idea of Sarah Palin: a brassy, no-nonsense enemy of bloated government and corruption. That was probably John McCain’s rough idea of who she was in the five minutes his staff vetted her, and on the one occasion he’d met her, before offering her a chance to be leader of the free world. The idea of Sarah Palin, though, is sadly not the reality of Sarah Palin.
The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity. Every action she takes is designed to make sense . . . if you believe that government is really a version of a reality show. The remote, David Lynch-style location, the family often in trouble with the law, the pregnant teenage daughter and her impossibly handsome redneck boyfriend, the boyfriend’s angry sister, an ornery Alaskan trooper, a few moose and mysterious pregnancies . . . and, well, the mini-series never ends. The best guess I’ve heard of the real reason for her abrupt departure is: “I’m a celebrity . . . get me out of here!”
No one yet understands the real reason for a first-term governor just quitting on Friday, July 3, with no advance notice. If it were planned, why did her husband have to travel 300 miles to be there? Why do it all on a federal holiday before the Fourth of July? As Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous might note: “Who can say?”
A blog reader scanned every single governor of all the states for the past century to find precedents. There are plenty of examples of governors being arrested, being impeached or dying. But only two others in American history have just up and quit: Eliot Spitzer, New York governor, involved in a professional escort service after he had vowed to clean up the state; and Jim McGreevey, whose gay lover blackmailed him. Palin has quit for no apparent reason.
If it were to spend time with her family, it would be understandable, but she insists that’s not the case — and if you’re prepared to run for national office months after giving birth to an infant with Down’s syndrome, it’s a little odd to quit the governorship of a state when you have only a year and a half to go. It doesn’t make sense politically since it implies she could do the same thing at any moment in any future office. Why should anyone vote for someone who could quit for no good reason at any time?
But trying to makes sense of Sarah Palin is a fool’s errand. I spent a lot of time last year trying to figure out how her bizarre pregnancy story could make any sense at all — it doesn’t — and came up with nothing but a suspicion that large parts of it were made up. If you present the facts to Palin spokespeople, they seem offended and regard you as some liberal hater. But the facts reveal she lies all the time about almost everything and so is probably improvising about her reasons for resigning.
I’ve now compiled 32 incontrovertibly untrue statements of fact that she has uttered in the public record and never retracted. They are not the usual political lies — spinning or shading the truth; they are demonstrably, empirically untrue in the public record. Some are trivial: Palin said on television that she asked her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the vice-presidency offer; but that story contradicts details given by Palin herself, who said she accepted the offer on the spot.
Others are more serious: Palin lied when she said the dismissal of Walt Monegan, her public safety commissioner, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire Mike Wooten (her former brother-in-law, who was at war with her family) from his job as a state trooper; in fact, the Branchflower report concluded she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.
Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to the famous “bridge to nowhere”, an expensive, pork-barrel government project; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor. I could go on. But the truth is, she’s a reality-show star vaulted to national prominence by a Republican party now so devoid of talent and desperate for some kind of support that it gambled on the political equivalent of Susan Boyle. One who couldn’t even sing.
My own bet is that there is another scandal out there that would have forced her resignation if she hadn’t pre-empted it. Yet as plausible is the simple notion uttered by the only person in the melodrama who seems halfway sane: Levi Johnston, the teenage father of Palin’s grandson: “I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars.” With a multi-million-dollar book deal, Palin can now become the darling of the right-wing media in America without the tedious duties of actually, you know, governing something. If the book contains scandals we have not yet learnt about, it could be explosively big in the mainstream; if it’s a hagiography, it could sell well with an adoring religious base.
And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it. Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers. Anyone criticised by the left or even by the establishment right is a martyr in this world. In America, martyrdom sells. And Palin is a product worth lots of money.
She wants some of it; and she has no actual interest in governing America (even though she’d love the title of president). She referred to giving up her “title” as governor, not her “office”. In this, she is the ultimate Republican of this degenerate moment: all culture war, no policy; all identity politics, no engagement with practical answers to difficult public problems; and all hysterical opposition to Barack Obama, no actual alternatives offered.
Since even epic scandals heighten celebrity rather than diminish it, Palin’s future is secure. Her party’s? Getting bleaker by the day.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Barack Obama keeps his cool in hothead Washington
Both left and right want more radical action, but the president is playing a long game
Andrew Sullivan

The instinctive conservatism and constitutionalism of Barack Obama were core reasons for his election. He was a liberal in policy but a conservative in temperament: cautious, consensus-seeking, empirical. After the wild swings of the Bush administration, this seemed like balm with an Eisenhower vibe. Obama even started golfing during foreign policy crises.
Decisions were made after deliberation and study, not impetuously. Strategy was stuck to, even at the cost of a few tactical setbacks. There was no big emotional breast-beating on the international stage; all options were kept open — even as we watched the brutal repression in Iran.
The new president also understood the real role of his office — not the decider, but the presider; one branch of three co-equal branches of government, subject to the rule of law and the constitution.
So the president resisted the temptation to jump in and nationalise the banks; he picked Wall Street-friendly Tim Geithner for the Treasury; he postponed any big early withdrawal from Iraq; he added troops in Afghanistan; he gave up his tax hikes because the recession was so steep. While he banned torture, he moved towards careful compromise on rendition and preventive detention and state secrets.
As he had once written when describing his strategy as a black man in a white world: no sudden moves. And we have seen none. Obama likes the system; he just wants to make it work for more people.
Obama is also, at his core, a community organiser. Community organisers do not jump into a situation and start bossing people around. They begin by listening, debating, cajoling, inspiring and delegating. Less deciders than ralliers, community organisers explain the options, inspire self-confidence and try to empower others, not themselves. If you think of Obama even on a global stage, this is his mojo. And those community organisers do not tell you to expect instant results. It takes time when you try to build real change from below. But the change is stronger, deeper and more real when it comes.
The question buzzing around Washington’s chattering classes is the following: is the actual historical moment that Obama inherited — unforeseen in its scope and danger this time last year — the right moment for these instincts? Are his caution and delegation a liability in a period of a dysfunctional Congress, a near-psychotic Republican party and a potentially lethal global depression?
After a period in which the American executive claimed vast powers and institutionalised torture and abuse of suspected terrorists, is it enough simply to forget and forgive the past and try to glue onto the existing system more checks and balances and decency? Is the conservatism we sought, in other words, adequate to the radicalism that may now be required?
And is the president being too deferential to Congress in seizing the reins?
This critique is echoed on both left and right. The right, in its dominant neoconservative vein, is frustrated with his disdain for classic American moralising and sabre-rattling at a moment such as Iran’s stymied green revolution. The left wishes he had been more radical in taking on Wall Street, insisting on a single-payer healthcare reform and a full-bore carbon tax. Harper’s Magazine has even labelled him Barack Hoover Obama: personally brilliant, humane and pragmatic but simply not daring enough for the moment he is facing.
The Obama brigade would counter with some strong arguments. It would point out that he won a huge stimulus package from Congress very swiftly precisely because he did defer to the Hill. It would point to the first real carbon reduction legislation to be passed in the House. It would note the swift rebalancing of America’s alliances and the catalytic effect of the Cairo speech in Iran. It would note that Obama was not so indecisive in a legitimate case of purely executive decision making — as three Somali pirates shot on his orders found out.
It would also rightly argue that alternative methods of dealing with Congress — remember the Clinton White House’s presidential-driven healthcare debacle? — don’t work so well. Better an imperfect Barack victory than another Hillary nosedive. As for foreign policy toughness and clarity, Obama’s insistence that Israel cease and desist its settlement programme on the West Bank is not exactly passive-aggressive. Besides, he always said this would take time.
But what if the economic stimulus was too geared for long-term rather than short-term impact, as Friday’s jobs report — showing a bigger jump in unemployment than expected — suggested. By deciding to adopt George W Bush’s Iraq withdrawal strategy, has Obama wed himself to the fortunes of an occupation he was elected to end? And the attempt to co-opt the moderate wing of the Republican party — which Obama has done among many voters, officials, pundits and governors — nonetheless falters in a Congress where there are no moderate Republicans left.
My own brilliant contribution to this debate is that it’s too soon to tell, but I learnt long ago not to underestimate Obama’s strategic skills and persistence. The drawn-out stimulus spending might actually help to prop up the economy in the coming months — and it’s utopian to believe that any Congress would have borrowed even more money this winter after Bush’s $700 billion banking bailout and the vast projected deficits of the future.
The sheer complexity and volatility of the war on jihadism make instant solutions impossible. In so far as Obama can make a purely executive call — as in the commander he picked for Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal — he has opted for the most imaginative and daring option. He remains highly popular as a person and has imbibed the presidency so well that it’s now hard to conceive of it without him.
Healthcare reform is an immensely delicate task that may well pass this summer or early autumn. Even if the healthcare plan is insufficient and the climate change bill too anaemic, they will both put down infrastructure that can be built on in the years ahead. That’s better than anyone in a very, very long time.
The more you observe, the clearer it is that Obama is working on an eight-year time cycle. He wants deep structural change, not swift superficial grandstanding and conflict. He is taking his time and keeping his cool. The question is whether a volatile electorate in a terrible economic time will be patient enough to wait.

www.andrewsullivan.com

Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and NAZILA FATHI
CAIRO — The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.
The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.
Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s most senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution.
With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics — formed under the leadership of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.
The association includes reformists, but Iranian political analysts describe it as independent, and it did not support any candidate in the recent election.
The group had earlier asked for the election to be nullified because so many Iranians objected to the results, but it never directly challenged the legitimacy of the government and, by extension, the supreme leader.
The earlier statement also came before the election was certified by the country’s religious leaders, who have since said that opposition to the results must cease.
The clerics’ decision to speak up again is not itself a turning point and could fizzle under pressure from the state, which has continued to threaten its critics. Some seminaries in Qum rely on the government for funds, and Ayatollah Khamenei and the man he has declared the winner of the election, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have powerful backers there.
They also retain the support of the powerful security forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards. In addition, the country’s highest-ranking clerics have yet to speak out individually against the election results.
But the association’s latest statement does help Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and a former speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who have been the most vocal in calling the election illegitimate and who, in their attempts to force change, have been hindered by the jailing of influential backers.
“The significance is that even within the clergy, there are many who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the election results as announced by the supreme leader,” said an Iranian political analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
While the government could continue vilifying the three opposition leaders, analysts say it was highly unlikely that the leadership would use the same tactic against the clerical establishment in Qum.
The backing also came at a sensitive time for Mr. Moussavi, because the accusations that he is a foreign agent ran in a newspaper, Kayhan, that has often been used to build cases against critics of the government.
The editorial was written by Hossein Shariatmadari, who was picked by the supreme leader to run the newspaper.
The clerics’ statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.
It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections.
“Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?” the association said.
Perhaps more threatening to the supreme leader, the committee called on other clerics to join the fight against the government’s refusal to adequately reconsider the charges of voter fraud. The committee invoked powerful imagery, comparing the 20 protesters killed during demonstrations with the martyrs who died in the early days of the revolution and the war with Iraq, asking other clerics to save what it called “the dignity that was earned with the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs.”
The statement was posted on the association’s Web site late Saturday and carried on many other sites, including the Persian BBC, but it was impossible to reach senior clerics in the group to independently confirm its veracity.
The statement was issued after a meeting Mr. Moussavi had with the committee 10 days ago and a decision by the Guardian Council to certify the election and declare that all matters concerning the vote were closed.
But the defiance has not ended.
With heavy security on the streets, there is a forced calm. But each day, slowly, another link falls from the chain of government control. Last week, in what appeared a coordinated thrust, Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Khatami all called the new government illegitimate. On Saturday, Mr. Milani of Stanford said, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani met with families of those who had been arrested, another sign that he was working behind the scenes to keep the issue alive.
“I don’t ever remember in the 20 years of Khamenei’s rule where he was clearly and categorically on one side and so many clergy were on the other side,” Mr. Milani said. “This might embolden other clergy to come forward.”
The committee of clergy was formed in the 1960s. Mr. Milani said that for years, Ayatollah Khamenei also belonged to the group, and that it had developed some political clout by backing successful candidates for national office.
Many of the accusations of fraud posted on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site Saturday had been published before, but the report did give some more specific charges.
For instance, although the government had announced that two of the losing presidential contenders had received relatively few votes in their hometowns, the documents stated that some ballot boxes in those towns contained no votes for the two men.
Michael Slackman reported from Cairo, and Nazila Fathi from Toronto.

From History News Network
The Last Integrationist: A Note on Michael Jackson
By Jim Cullen
Mr. Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York

As we all know, Michael Jackson has and will be remembered in many ways: pop star, freak, business mogul, et. al. What I fear, amid all all the grief, cacophony, and distaste of these and coming days, is that we will lose sight of the truth that he was, whatever else he might have been, a great artist. Like his predecessor, Elvis Presley, Jackson was a distillation -- and extension -- of all that had come before him, in his particular case a tradition that runs from ring shouts to James Brown. And like Presley, a major component of Jackson's claim on immortality will be his status as a great American artist. And like Presley too, the heart of that claim is that like Jackson's quintessential generational embodiment of the grand drama of our history: the saga of integration.
Michael Jackson first burst into public consciousness as part of the final flowering of Motown Records, a label founded in the 1950s in large measure to make black music that would be commercially appealing to white people. But by the time of its heyday in the mid-1960s, Motown had achieved its cultural pre-eminence as great American music. African American music, yes, and thus ineluctably somehow not quite pure (i.e. white). But set against the social and political drama of the sixties this was precisely what legitimated it. At the time and ever since, there have been those who have denigrated Motown as pop that pandered. But this has always been a minority position, even among African Americans themselves. The paradoxical essence of American identity is its mongrel character (or, if you prefer, its hybrid character). That's as true of the Anglo-American Benjamin Franklin, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass, and the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin as it was of Jackson.
By the late 1960s, the times were a changin,' even at Motown. The Temptations, Marvin Gaye -- even marvelously bright-spirited Stevie Wonder -- were realigning themselves on a landscape where Memphis, not Detroit, was central. Literally and figuratively, the national mood was a good deal darker, especially for African Americans. By the early 1970s it was no longer considered appropriate for anyone (with the possible exception of a child star) to uncritically embrace the paled appeal of racial integration. Popular music largely re-segregated, reflecting a society in which a seemingly permanent black underclass took shape and residential patterns that stubbornly resisted legal mandates for multi-racial schools. Overt racism was no longer permissible. But by the early 1980s, the music executives at MTV would make what seemed to be a rational assertion that white audiences would simply not be interested in seeing videos for a song like "Billie Jean."
Like Marian Anderson and Louis Armstrong, Michael Jackson in his heyday almost entirely sidestepped racial conflict, and like them this was a big part of his appeal -- even as the inescapability of his racial identity was also part of his appeal. With Off the Wall in 1979 and Thriller in 1982, he staked a fully formed adult claim to the center of American life and miraculously straddled musical cultures, as well as the transition from album-oriented radio to music video. That he could not remain in the center says less about his tragically deformed personality than it does the ineluctable shifting of what constitutes the center at any given time. The rise of hip-hop pushed Jackson to the musical margins, even on hit radio. By the early 1990s, the Sidney Pointier of his generation, Denzel Washington, was playing Malcolm X in a Spike Lee film.
We of the early 21st century have another honor roll that lists names like Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sotomayor, and Barack Obama. We no more wish these people to deny the particularities of their heritage any more than we would Abraham Lincoln to deny his poverty or F. Scott Fitzgerald his Irish Catholicism. Far from a barrier, such distinctions have become a veritable asset. There's a word we often use to describe this state of affairs: Progress. But progress always has a price. The death of Michael Jackson serves as a pointed reminder of its cost, who pays, and what a society loses when we become who we are.

From The London Times
Working-class Hollywood hero Karl Malden dies
James Bone in New York (AP)
Karl Malden, the Oscar-winning actor with a bulbous nose who parlayed his immigrant roots into gritty roles in some of Hollywood's classic films, died yesterday at the age of 97.
His agent said the actor, who had been in failing health in recent years, died of natural causes in his sleep at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.
Malden, the son of a Czech mother and Serbian father, worked for a time in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana — the same industrial town where Michael Jackson was later born.
Often playing working class characters, he went on to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1951 for his role as Blanche DuBois’ naive suitor in A Streetcar Named Desire, alongside Marlon Brando.
He was nominated for an Oscar again three years later for his performance as Father Corrigan, the fearless priest in another Brando film, On the Waterfront.
Malden's more than 50 films included Patton, in which he played Gen Omar Bradley, One-Eyed Jacks, The Cincinnati Kid and the Birdman of Alcatraz.
He became embroiled in controversy for Baby Doll, a Tennessee Williams story about a husband who allows his child bride to be exploited by a businessman. The film was condemned by the Catholic Legion for Decency for its "carnal suggestiveness".
Malden became well known to another generation for his role as a detective opposite younger partner Michael Douglas in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco from 1972 to 1976.
"He's my mentor," Douglas later said. "You know why Marlon Brando loved to work with him? Because he was so giving as an actor."
Also at that time, Malden began a 21-year stint moonlighting as a pitch-man for American Express travellers cheques. He earned himself a place in popular culture with the tag line: "Don't leave home without them."
Malden's trademark was his bulbous nose, which he had broken twice while playing sport at school.
He was keenly aware he lacked the matinee idol looks of a Hollywood leading man.
"There were times when certain leads would come along, and I'd say, 'Gee, I could do that,'" he once said. "But ... you've got to have a great nose. You've got to have great eyes. Everything that an actor has to have to be that leading man, I don't have. So I made the best with what I had."
Malden wrote an autobiography, When Do I Start?, that was acclaimed as one of the best by an actor. But he seldom appeared before the camera in recent years, although he did appear in a small role on the TV political drama West Wing in 2000.
He took an often-unpopular stance in Hollywood by standing by his friend, On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, who had named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.
In 1999, he nominated Kazan for a controversial lifetime achievement Oscar, which was awarded over the protests of many Hollywood luminaries angry at Kazan’s betrayal.
Malden was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912 and did not speak English until he went to nursery school. He said he later regretted that he had to change his name to become an actor. To honour his heritage, he insisted that Fred Gwynne's character in On the Waterfront be named Sekulovich.
His family moved to Gary when he was small and he remained there until he quit his steel mill job in 1934 to try acting.
"When I told my father, he said, 'Are you crazy? You want to give up a good job in the middle of the Depression?' Thank God for my mother. She said to give it a try," he once recalled.