Grim Reader, June 10, 2011: Jack Kevorkian, Geronimo Pratt and Albertina Sisulu

by Michael Schaffer

JUNE 10, 2011 TAGS: OBITS, NEWSPAPERS ADD A COMMENT

One nice thing about obits: They aren’t about issues. They’re about individuals. And Jack Kevorkian, for all of his identification with the issue of euthanasia, was most definitely a singular individual: “awkward, grim, driven, quick to anger and unpredictable … fiercely principled and equally unflexible,” as the New York Times puts it. There was a reason why Kevorkian, who performed 130 assisted suicides, was the one willing to defy laws and turn himself into the face of the movement. Kevorkian “forced his country, and indeed the rest of the developed Western world, to confront the end-of-life dilemmas of suicide – whether assisted or unassisted – and of euthanasia, passive or active,” says the Independent.

Jack Kevorkian

The Washington Post notes that the legislative scorecard of this dilemma-confronting is not strong -- and gives Kevorkian’s “abrasive” personality some of the blame: “To date, no state has made this legal and only three states, Washington, Oregon and Montana, have legalized any form of physician-assisted suicide. To the contrary, the state of Michigan, where Dr. Kevorkian did much of his work, explicitly banned physician-assisted suicide in 1993 in direct response to his efforts.” A San Francisco Chronicle item, on the other hand, suggests that Kevorkian’s effect on how we treat the terminally ill is more nuanced. He “may have indirectly contributed to the growth of palliative and hospice care; and his death occurs during a time when novel, end-of-life approaches are being conceived and developed,” it explains. “In demanding that patients should be sovereign, he helped change the patient-doctor relationship,” adds the Detroit Free Press.

And yet there’s a reason the word “macabre” popped up in two Kevorkian obits and “ghoulish” in another. Several obits mention his support for re-using organs from condemned prisoners. Others note that his medical career was hardly a model of pure scientific devotion: For a time, he abandoned pathology to paint and invent an aquatic bicycle. Kevorkian had beaten several indictments when he gave 60 Minutes a videotape showing him actually administering lethal drugs -- rather than helping a patient hit a button that made the deadly medicine flow; depictions of that tape, which got him sent away for eight years, are decidedly grim. But few of the obits mention a more troubling detail: Kevorkian’s hometown Detroit Free Press’ reporting that many of his terminally ill patients were anything but. The Freep restates some of its reporting in a lengthy obit.

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Take that, Henry Kissinger

Lawrence Eagleburger is remembered as the unlikeliest secretary of state: A “wisecracking, chain-smoking” (Los Angeles Times) “hugely overweight” (Associated Press) midwesterner “known for his dry, sometimes caustic wit, rumpled suits and reliance on a cane,” (New York Times), he was the only career Foreign Service officer to become secretary of state. The coverage recites much of the same CV: earthquake relief in Yugoslavia as a junior officer; service as the rare aide who could stand up to Henry Kissinger; helping George H.W. Bush keep his coalition together in the first Iraq War; various other crises.

In classic death-of-a-Washington-establishmentarian form, the obits all provide favorite examples of the dearly departed’s wit. Most frequently cited: Eagleburger’s explanation that he’d named all three of his sons Lawrence in order to screw up the Social Security system. Grim Reader’s favorite: Asked at a confirmation hearing whether he’d ever pinched a woman’s behind in public or private, Eagleburger asked permission to divide the question into two parts. Everyone notes that Eagleburger was a lifelong Republican. But the New York Times’ is the rare obit to detail his blasting the younger Bush’s Iraq war. (The kicker for the Times obit depicts Eagleburger snagging a smoke with a reporter before attending a White House meeting with George W. Bush. As he heads into the building, he tosses the lit cigarette into the bushes outside, snarling about whether the administration had “finally figured out the damn war.”)

Barrier-breaking scientist

There are two varieties of obit for Rosalyn Yalow: scientist and barrier breaker. A New York Daily News editorial provides a good example of the latter: “She was from New York, she was Jewish, she was a woman, and so Rosalyn Yalow was deemed unworthy of a career in science,” the piece opens. “But refusing to take no for an answer, she ultimately proved herself worthy of the Nobel Prize.” The Washington Post’s employs the former: “A Nobel Prize-winning scientist who co-developed the laboratory technique of radioimmunoassay that permits measurement of once immeasurably small quantities of hormones and other biological molecules,” it calls her.

Grim Reader has never been sure how to balance the two: On the one hand, the obits are full of horrific details of the sexism that Yalow faced. According to the Los Angeles Times, an academic employer once told her that her A-minus in biology (her sole non-A) proved women couldn’t do biology. On the other hand, Yalow’s Nobel prize wasn’t for “refusing to take no for an answer.” It was for figuring out an incredibly complicated scientific puzzle that has saved millions of lives. One politically neutral reason why obit writers might prefer the inspirational tale to the scientific one: Science is hard! Grim Reader thinks he’s a pretty bright guy, but couldn’t figure out what the Post’s lede meant. A few paragraphs later came the explanation: Radioimmunoassay allowed doctors to test for things like insulin, revolutionizing treatment for diabetes.

Radicalized in California

There are lots of obits this week for Geronimo Pratt, the onetime Black Panther who spent 27 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. The Los Angeles Times does the most thorough job, moving from Pratt’s youth in the segregated South to his heroism in Vietnam to his radicalization in the tortured racial climate of early 1970s Southern California. His case, with its grotesque government misconduct, in turn radicalized someone better known than Pratt: Johnnie Cochran, his lawyer, who went on to defend O.J. Simpson. Pratt died in the Tanzanian village he’d called home for much of the time since his 1998 release. ... And, at the opposite end of the American-mythology spectrum, there are obits for James Arness, whom the Washington Post identifies as “television’s most enduring western hero, the laconic, fair-minded and incorruptible Marshal Matt Dillon of the two-decade-long series ‘Gunsmoke.’” Fun fact: Arness’ younger brother was the actor Peter Graves.

A turn for the better

Also this week, the Wall Street Journal turns out a nice obit for Felix Zandman, the Holocaust survivor -- he escaped from slave labor and a farm family hid him from the Nazis -- who went on to found a huge U.S. electronics firm. ...There are a bunch of obits for Sammy Ofer, whom everyone refers to as Israel’s richest man. But the coverage is overshadowed by news that Ofer’s firm was accused last week of dealing with Iran -- something the Associated Press leads with. ... Albertina Sisulu, the widow of African National Congress leader Walter Sisulu, is remembered as a serious activist in her own right. While her husband was at Robben Island, she led efforts by black and white women to oppose apartheid. Today, one of her daughters is the country’s defense minister, according to the Telegraph. … Russian economist Igor Birman defected to the West in the 1970s, but found his prediction that the Soviet economy would collapse widely mocked; he once wrote to CIA analyst Robert Gates asking for a meeting, reports the Telegraph, but was denied. Gates, of course, is currently secretary of defense. … John R. Alison is remembered in a Washington Post obit as the military genius who led the WWII air invasion of Burma -- by glider.

Steve Martin’s hero

Death comes in twos: Disney performers. Comedian Wally Boag played Pecos Bill, among other characters in Disneyland’s Golden Horseshoe Revue. A lengthy Los Angeles Times obit notes that Boag was cast by Walt Disney himself, who found the “wholesomely cornball” comic hilarious. The piece also quotes Steve Martin, who grew up in Orange County and Tweeted this week that Boag was "My hero, the first comedian I ever saw live, my influence, a man to whom I aspired." … Boag died a day before his five-shows-a-day castmate, Betty Taylor, who played Sluefoot Sue, Pecos Bill’s love interest. Like Boag, she had auditioned for what she thought was a brief gig that lasted a quarter-century, says the Los Angeles Times. (Martin pops up in that obit, too.) In general, Boag gets better Obitosphere play than Taylor, though the Associated Press runs a rare double-obit for the duo.

Time on his side

Finally, Grim Reader has always enjoyed the obits for the late bloomer, the person whose claim to fame didn’t happen until late in life -- and whose story leaves Grim Reader feeling as if he’s got plenty of time. This week, there are two of ’em: Harry Bernstein “became a literary lion at 96,” says the Telegraph. A former trade-magazine editor, Bernstein in retirement wrote a “painfully eloquent memoir about growing up Jewish and poor in a northern English mill town,” drawing literary attention -- and sparking controversy with its portrait of British anti-Semitism, says the New York Times. Not to be outdone, Hans Keilson “became an international literary sensation in his 100th year,” says the Guardian. A psychoanalyst and WWII Resistance fighter, Keilson spent much of his career doing work on childhood trauma, focusing on Holocaust survivors. In his 30s, he published a couple novels in German, getting little commercial traction. Flash forward a half-century: “The novels were rediscovered in 2007 by American writer and translator Damion Searls, who stumbled upon an old copy of ‘Comedy in a Minor Key’ in a bargain bin outside a Yugoslavian specialty bookshop in Austria,” explains the Washington Post. Upon publication in English, the centenarian was championed by the author Francine Prose, whose book review called him one of “the world’s very greatest writers.”

Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.