Katharine Q. Seelye

Prominent liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson, were appealing for money for a legal-defense fund for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who was facing a trial in Alabama on perjury charges — a good local angle for The Journal.

The ad, titled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” castigated Alabama officials for what it called “an unprecedented wave of terror” against leaders of the civil rights movement.

Within minutes, Jenkins tapped out 13 paragraphs about the ad; his article appeared in the paper that afternoon.

Apparently no one else had noticed the ad until then — The Times sold 394 papers a day in Alabama in 1960. And so Alabama officials were startled and enraged after reading Jenkins’ report, which pointed out that the ad contained some factual errors.

They filed a libel suit against The Times, which ended four years later in a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the paper’s favor. The case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, made it harder for public officials to sue for defamation and remains a bedrock legal principal upholding freedom of the press.

Jenkins died Oct. 24 at his home in Baltimore. He was 89. His wife, Bettina Jenkins, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Jenkins always expressed amazement that his short, routine article about the Times ad — the piece didn’t even carry his byline — would prove so important. When he retired in 1991 from journalism after a distinguished 40-year career, he said it was “the most significant story I ever wrote.”

By then he had already won a Pulitzer Prize as a young journalist in the South, served as editorial page editor of The Baltimore Evening Sun, been named a Nieman fellow at Harvard and worked for two years as a press aide to President Jimmy Carter.

While living in Montgomery, Alabama, where The Journal was based, Jenkins covered the civil rights movement and developed a close relationship with King, then pastor of the city’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Nancy Jenkins-Chafin, Jenkins’ daughter, said in a phone interview that the two had spoken regularly in the church’s basement and that Jenkins had written often about King’s vision and mission.

“My father’s coverage may have helped to change hearts and minds of Southerners who had been living for generations in a deeply segregated society,” she said.

In one of their discussions, recalled by Jenkins in a column he wrote years later, King marveled that he, a descendant of slaves, was sitting and talking with Jenkins, a descendant of slave owners.

Jenkins asked King if he might include that thought in a speech some day. King did, in his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963.

“I have a dream,” King said from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Carrell Ray Jenkins was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in Sylvester, Georgia, about 200 miles south of Atlanta. His mother, Eunice (Thornton) Jenkins, was a homemaker, and his father, Herbert, sold tractors for International Harvester while also farming cotton, corn and tobacco.

Ray was the first in his family to go to college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in 1951.

He began his career at The Columbus Ledger in Columbus, Geogia, on the border of Alabama, and was a member of a team that won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for public service for exposing political corruption in neighboring Phenix City, Alabama.

While living in Columbus, he met Bettina Cirsovius, who had immigrated from Germany in 1952. They were married in 1956.

In addition to her and their daughter, Jenkins is survived by their sons, Sam and Mark, and four grandchildren.

Jenkins was named city editor of The Alabama Journal in 1959 and spent the next two decades covering the civil rights movement. But of all the articles he wrote and edited, the one he dashed off about the Times advertisement would prove to be one of the most consequential.

The ad never named any of the officials that it was taking to task, and the newspaper publicly apologized for the factual errors. Still, several Alabama officials, including L.B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, who supervised the police, contended that they had been defamed by inference and filed suit against The Times.

“If the officials could win, they would almost certainly silence the civil rights movement in Alabama — as well as the newspaper that consistently covered it,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in “The Race Beat,” which chronicled the news coverage of the civil rights era and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history. “Silence, not money, was the goal.”

For a time, the lawsuits had their intended effect. Lawyers for The Times told the paper to keep its reporters out of Alabama while the matter was in litigation.

The Times lost in the lower courts. But on appeal to the Supreme Court, the newspaper prevailed.

In a unanimous 1964 ruling, the court held that the First Amendment protects newspapers even when they print a false statement, unless a complainant can prove that the newspaper had made the statement with “‘actual malice’ — that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Jenkins was not involved in the case but was interested in the law. He took night classes and in 1977 received his law degree from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, now part of Faulkner University in Montgomery.

He became managing editor of The Journal, then editorial page editor and in 1978 was named executive editor of both The Journal and The Montgomery Advertiser, sister papers owned by the same company.

When the papers were sold soon thereafter, Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, offered Jenkins a job at the White House. Jenkins worked in the press office until Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980. (The Journal closed in 1993.)

He joined The Baltimore Evening Sun in 1981, becoming a columnist and editor of the editorial page. Over the years he also wrote frequently for The Times. After his retirement he continued to write columns and essays, often about civil rights. He also wrote “Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders” (1997), about mail bombs sent in 1989 that killed a federal judge in Alabama and a civil rights lawyer in Georgia.

In a tribute to Jenkins in The Sun, Ernest Imhoff, a retired editor of the newspaper, said, “Ray was a fine Southern gentleman who offered us a bit of guidance and wisdom from another time that helped us as Northerners understand that part of the country a lot better.”

This article originally appeared in

Ray Jenkins, Newspaperman Who Covered Civil Rights Era, Dies at 89

Ray Jenkins, the city editor of The Alabama Journal, was eating a bologna sandwich at his desk on April 5, 1960, and thumbing through a week-old copy of The New York Times when a full-page ad caught his eye.

She died after a three-year battle with Powassan virus, a type of encephalitis, or brain inflammation, her family said in a statement. The virus is transmitted to humans by ticks.

“We are heartbroken to share that Kay left us unexpectedly this morning,” her family said.

Hagan defeated Dole in the first general election for the Senate in which two women competed. When she ran for reelection in 2014, Hagan was defeated by Thom Tillis, a Republican, in what was then the most expensive Senate race in the country. After her loss, she became a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

Since contracting her illness in 2016, Hagan largely stayed out of the public eye. Using a wheelchair, she made a rare appearance in June, when she attended the groundbreaking ceremony for an air traffic control tower at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, for which she had helped procure federal dollars. She did not speak at the ceremony.

“Kay’s ability to speak is limited, but her comprehension is very good,” her husband, Charles T. Hagan, told reporters. He said her illness limited her ability to control her muscles. “She still has a great deal of difficulty in standing and walking and that sort of stuff,” he said.

In addition to her husband, Hagan is survived by her three children, Jeanette Hagan, C. Tilden Hagan IV and Carrie Hagan Stewart; her father, Joe P. Ruthven; her brothers, Joe L. Ruthven and Greg Ruthven, and five grandchildren.

Kay Hagan, Former North Carolina Senator, Dies at 66

Kay Hagan, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina who served one term in the capital after defeating Elizabeth Dole, a Republican, in 2008, died Monday at her home in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was 66.

Her son, Trevor Soames, confirmed her death and said she had been in failing health, with declining mobility, for many years.

Known chiefly for her portraits, Soames, a rare woman in the testosterone-fueled world of Fleet Street newspapering, was a purist. She shot exclusively in black and white, considering color a “vulgarity,” and relied as much as she could on natural light.

The results were celebrated portraits of prominent people of the second half of the 20th century — Margaret Thatcher, Sean Connery, Rudolf Nureyev, Margaret Atwood, Rupert Murdoch, Alec Guinness and Andy Warhol among them.

The National Portrait Gallery in London holds 17 of her portraits. The Victoria and Albert Museum has two (Nureyev and Lord Denning, the longtime English judge).

Soames, who was known to be a warm and exuberant woman, researched the people she was taking pictures of thoroughly and never called them “subjects,” considering that a dehumanizing term. She would read up on them in advance, sometimes correspond with them by mail, then engage them in conversation during a portrait session long before she raised her camera.

Her goal was to relax them so they would forget they were being photographed and let their faces reveal something. It was wonderful when it happened, she once said, “then it’s over.”

She was able to spend half a day with Orson Welles, the American director, but was offered only 3 1/2 minutes with Connery, the original James Bond. Nonetheless, she used two of those minutes to talk with him, not shoot.

She used the same technique in developing a close rapport with Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister.

Soames visited her frequently at 10 Downing St. and was there on the last night in 1990 before Thatcher, who had been forced to resign, was to leave office. It was Soames, not the Iron Lady, who burst into tears.

“I’ve known you for 11 years and I’m very upset,” she told the prime minister, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph. “We had a real affinity, especially at the end. There was I behaving like a baby, and she was cheering me up.”

She noted, however, that Thatcher had never called her by her name, only “dear.”

Even the notoriously egotistic Norman Mailer, who loathed being photographed, was cooperative with Soames and ended up writing the preface to one of her two books, “Writers” (1995), a collection of her portraits of authors. (Her first collection was “Manpower,” published in 1987.)

“The relation between the eye that commands the lens and the subject is essentially an oppressive and one-sided relation,” Mailer wrote. But he added, “It is Sally Soames’ gift to take that arid and mutually exploitative encounter, and turn it into the rarest of media transactions — an agreeable 10 minutes between two strangers who thereby are left with a simple reminder that fellowship is also a communion natural to us.”

Sally Winkleman was born on Jan. 21, 1937, in London. Her father, Leonard, was a businessman and art connoisseur as well as a member of the Communist Party.

Sally was educated at St. Martin’s College of Art in London and married Leonard Soames, a businessman who ran a clothing line called Snob. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966.

One day she happened to pick up her husband’s camera and found she enjoyed photography. She joined a camera club but had no formal training. Then, on New Year’s Eve 1961, she took a picture of a young man celebrating in Trafalgar Square and entered it in a competition run by the newspaper The Evening Standard. She won, and thus began her career.

Another newspaper, The Observer, hired her in 1963, and in 1968 she joined the staff of The Sunday Times, where she stayed for 32 years.

Those decades were not easy for female photographers. When she was assigned to shoot a portrait of Muhammad Ali, Ali remarked that he had never encountered a female photographer and was not comfortable with her. He barred her from a photo shoot of him receiving a rubdown while several male photographers were allowed in.

Still, she was adventurous. During the miners’ strikes of the early 1980s, she descended into the mines. On one assignment she fell and hurt herself. Arthur Scargill, president of the mineworkers union, carried her to the surface in his arms and put her on a stretcher. As he hovered over her, she took his picture. She kept that picture at her desk for many years.

Soames had no qualms taking on dangerous assignments. While being shelled during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 in an Arab counterattack on the Syrian front, she continued to take pictures.

Nicholas Tomalin, a reporter for The Sunday Times, wrote in a dispatch that as a Su-20 fighter-bomber, a Soviet-built aircraft, rained bombs down on them, a calm and fearless Soames stood bolt upright, “snapping pictures as if she were covering a golf tournament.” His article ran with her picture from the front lines, where explosions sent debris flying around them and created huge clouds of dust.

Shortly after, a Syrian anti-tank missile struck the car in front of Soames, killing Tomalin. The episode left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I don’t think she really ever got over it,” her son, Trevor, said by email.

She survived other close shaves, too, he said, including the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, by the Irish Republican Army in an attempted assassination of Thatcher. Five people were killed; Soames, staying in an adjacent hotel, was unharmed.

Soames, who was Jewish, developed an attachment to Israel. Despite her PTSD, she returned many times to the Middle East.

She also visited Auschwitz, where she was put up for the night in the former offices of the SS. Poking around the room, she was horrified to open a cupboard and find a pile of yellow cloth Stars of David, the badges that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe.

She retired in 2000. After years of carrying heavy bags and contorting herself into position to get the best photos, she became increasingly immobile.

“She was small and petite, but carried large amounts of heavy camera equipment (bodies and lenses) prior to her early retirement,” her son, Trevor, said. He said this caused problems with her knees and back, which grew only worse.

In addition to her son, Soames is survived by two brothers, Barry and Alan Winkleman; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

After retiring, Soames told The Newcastle Journal in 2010 that she regretted how public relations managers had come to limit the time she could spend with people she was photographing, to help them relax. And, she said, she felt she had lost some of her zip — that she had become “a bit institutionalized.”

Her best photograph had been her first, she said, the one taken on New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square. “What I was doing,” she said, “was fearless.”

Sally Soames, Fearless Photographer With Personal Touch, Dies at 82

Sally Soames, an intrepid British photojournalist who prided herself on establishing a personal connection with the politicians, actors, writers, artists and others she photographed, died on Oct. 5 at her home in London. She was 82.

His death was announced by the Gately Funeral Home in Melrose, Massachusetts.

Markham, a former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, had a long legal career. He prosecuted organized crime figures, including Raymond Patriarca, the boss of the New England Cosa Nostra. He was part of the Justice Department team in 1968 that prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famed child-rearing expert, on charges of advising young men on how to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. (Spock was convicted but the verdict was overturned on appeal.)

But Markham, a longtime Kennedy family friend, was perhaps best known for having been swept up in the tragedy known as Chappaquiddick, named for a tiny island off Martha’s Vineyard.

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy drove off a bridge on the island in an accident that killed the young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, and effectively derailed his presidential ambitions. The name of the island would enter the political lexicon as shorthand for a permanent stain on Kennedy’s character, despite the subsequent achievements of his long Senate career.

That night, Kennedy and Kopechne had been at a party that included the “boiler room girls” — the women, of whom Kopechne was one, who had worked on the 1968 presidential campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Kopechne, 28, and Ted Kennedy, 37, left the party early. With Kennedy behind the wheel, they plunged off a small bridge into a tidal pond. The car turned upside down. Kennedy surfaced but Kopechne did not.

Kennedy said later that he had dived “into the strong and murky current” multiple times in a vain attempt to extract Kopechne from the car. He then made his way back to the party, where he collected a cousin, Joseph F. Gargan, and Markham, who had recently stepped down as U.S. attorney.

The three drove back to the scene.

“Up to this time, I didn’t know what the accident really was, and I remember saying, ‘Holy God,’” Markham testified at an inquest.

He said that he and Gargan had stripped down and dived repeatedly for about 45 minutes to try to reach Kopechne. They were unsuccessful.

They then told the senator that he had to report the accident, and he agreed to do so. According to testimony at the inquest, Kennedy instructed the men not to tell the others at the party about what had happened, and they parted. Kennedy would make 17 phone calls, but none to the police.

The next morning, the car and Kopechne’s body were found by a fisherman and his son, who alerted the police.

Markham said at the inquest that he had been astonished to learn that Kennedy did not immediately report the accident to the police, and that a “heated conversation” between the two had ensued.

Almost 10 hours after the accident, Markham and Kennedy went to the Edgartown Police Department, on Martha’s Vineyard. The senator dictated a statement to Markham, who took it down in longhand and gave it to the police chief.

Kennedy pleaded guilty a week later to leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, was placed on probation for one year and had his driver’s license suspended for a year.

A month after Kopechne’s death, her mother, Gwen Kopechne, told reporters that she thought that Markham and Gargan should have gone to the police themselves and that their failure to do so immediately “invited all kinds of awful speculation.”

Numerous questions from that night — Had Kennedy and Kopechne become romantically involved? Did he really take a wrong turn, as he maintained? Did alcohol play a role? Why didn’t he report the accident? — remain unanswered. Now, with the four principals dead, the full story may never be known. (Kennedy died in 2009, Gargan in 2017.)

In an interview with The New York Times 10 years after the incident, Kennedy said he had ordered Markham and Gargan not to go to the police “because I was the responsible person in the accident and I felt I should report it.” But he did not do so immediately, he long maintained, because he was too shocked and confused in the aftermath of such a traumatic event.

Paul Francis Markham was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 22, 1930, to James E. and Mary (Fitzgerald) Markham. His father, a lawyer, worked in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration overseeing seized assets in World War II. His mother, a former model for the Jordan Marsh department store, was a homemaker.

Paul grew up in Washington and attended Georgetown Preparatory School. He studied economics at Villanova University, dropped out to serve in the Coast Guard and then resumed his studies, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1955. He graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1958.

He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar that year and worked at a personal injury law firm before becoming an adviser to the Small Business Administration.

Markham was appointed assistant U.S. attorney in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy, who was the attorney general at the time. Markham ascended to the top job of U.S. attorney in 1966 and remained there until 1969, when Richard M. Nixon became president. He resigned to work in private practice and retired in 2004.

He is survived by his wife, Claire Markham; four daughters, Ellen, Jane and Susan Markham and Mary Soldati; two sons, Paul and John; and 10 grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/paul-f-markham-dead.html" id="f121ec87-a8e2-333c-aab9-a41d459ea738">The New York Times</a>.

Paul F. Markham, who dived into dark waters to try to find a young woman who was in a car with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy when Kennedy famously drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, in 1969, died on July 13 in Peabody, Massachusetts He was 89.

Paul F. Markham, Kennedy Friend at Chappaquiddick, Dies at 89

The cause was complications of a severe stroke, her nephew Eric Kroeber said.

Wille (pronounced willy) wrote for Chicago’s three biggest daily newspapers over four decades, became a journalistic institution as she exposed scoundrels and prodded the city to do better. She championed its neighborhoods, called for sensible city planning and leaned on the horn to call attention to corruption and graft.

“Power brokers in Chicago admired and appropriately feared Lois,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune and now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. “If she thought you were on the wrong side of history, it could be a withering experience.”

Wille wrote two books that reflected her deep knowledge of how “the city that works,” as its longtime mayor, Richard J. Daley, called Chicago, really did work. In “Forever Open, Clear, and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront” (1972), she examined the powerful forces that sought to control the valuable stretch of city property along Lake Michigan; and in “At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park” (1997), she documented the rise of a neighborhood in a blighted city tract in the face of political machinations to thwart it.

Despite her reputation as a ferocious advocate in print, Wille in person was quiet, poised, precise and unflappable.

“People think of this as a two-fisted town, a Rostenkowski steak-and-gin-joint kind of city,” Bruce Dold, the current publisher and editor-in-chief of the Tribune, said, referring to former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, famous for his arm-twisting methods of persuasion. “But she didn’t have to bludgeon anyone. She knew the power of a careful needle.”

Lois Jean Kroeber was born in Chicago on Sept. 19, 1931, to Walter and Adele (Taege) Kroeber. Her father, who had fled Germany as Hitler rose to power, was an architect and opened his own firm in suburban Arlington Heights, where he raised his family. Her mother was a homemaker.

Lois liked writing and adventure, and she idolized Brenda Starr, the glamorous flame-haired female comic-strip character who reported for a mythic paper, The Flash. (The strip was created in 1940 by Dalia Messick, who changed her name to the androgynous sounding Dale after encountering discrimination in the male-dominated comic strip profession.)

In real life, Lois knew of only a couple of female reporters, and they covered “silly” things, Wille said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Washington Press Club Foundation.

After high school she gravitated to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1952 and her master’s in 1953. The next year, she married Wayne Wille, a classmate, who became an editor for World Book Publishing.

Wayne Wille survives her. Besides Kroeber, she is also survived by another nephew, David Kroeber.

Wille broke into the swaggering male-dominated world of Chicago newspapers by becoming the assistant to the fashion editor at the Chicago Daily News.

She was soon writing for the “women’s pages,” as they were called, where she found herself writing the kind of soft-news articles she had earlier looked down on. For one story she played pool with Willie Hoppe, a hotshot but aging billiards player; for another, she brushed the teeth of a rhinoceros with a large toothbrush.

As one of only a handful of women at the paper, Wille noticed a gaping double standard in how men and women were allowed to behave.

“The men could have tantrums and throw their typewriters and yell and scream if something happened to their copy, or go off on two- or three-day benders, and it was considered very colorful and part of the great Chicago tradition in journalism,” Wille said in the oral history.

But women had to appear “in control and calm,” she said, “or we would have been thought, you know, frail and temperamental creatures.”

Frail she was not. She assertively went after one of the two slots for hard-news news reporters that the Daily News reserved for women at the time, at one point breaking away from a fashion assignment to cover a fire that she spotted.

She also dreamed up stories on her own, like the one that yielded her first front-page byline, in 1956. She had been sending out Christmas cards when she noticed that the stamps weren’t sticking. They didn’t have enough glue.

“So I did the story on the frustration all over the city, of people buying these stamps for their Christmas cards and not enough glue on them,” she recalled. “And that ended up as a feature story across the top of the front page, which was thrilling for me.”

It helped propel her to one of the coveted spots reserved for women on the news side, where she plunged into investigating subjects she cared about, like poverty, health care and the civil rights movement.

Wille often went undercover. For her first big series, she posed as a legal aide in exposing abuses in juvenile court. She later posed as a medical worker at a mental health clinic, wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard. Still another time she acted like a volunteer at Cook County Hospital and saw a huge roomful of neglected babies whose mothers had abandoned them.

That kind of misrepresentation is widely considered a breach of journalistic ethics today, but Wille defended her ruses, saying that matters of public health and safety had been at stake. In all three cases her reporting led to reforms.

While examining the welfare system, Wille learned from caseworkers that indigent women had no access to free contraception as part of their medical care. Because the Roman Catholic Church opposed birth control and was so entrenched in the body politic, the subject was largely taboo, even in the newspapers.

But Wille wrote a five-part series about the issue, leading with a 26-year-old mother of seven on welfare who had asked her doctor for information about birth control. The doctor, who was barred from discussing the subject, told her, “Well, you’re healthy enough for seven more.”

After the series ran, in 1962, the state and city changed their policies and provided birth control for low-income women. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in journalism.

Wille continued reporting for The Daily News until 1976, when she became editor of the paper’s editorial page. She found she liked expressing her strong opinions.

Her voice was distinct, “and she thrived having it broadcast through the megaphone of the editorial page,” said Rick Kogan, a storied reporter and columnist at the Tribune. While most editorials were unsigned, he added, “people knew who was writing them, no question.”

When The Daily News went out of business in 1978, she moved to the Chicago Sun-Times and ran the editorial page there. And when the Sun-Times was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1984, she went to the Tribune, where, in 1989, she won her second Pulitzer, this one for editorial writing.

“She really suited Chicago,” Lipinski said. “You couldn’t imagine her in any other place. She knew it so well and cared about it so deeply. She and the city grew up alongside each other in ways that made both of them stronger.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/business/media/lois-wille-dead.html" id="1f2a5190-ec8b-3a67-a434-fe9fd4942a81">The New York Times</a>.

Lois Wille, a Chicago reporter, editorial writer and author who examined, scolded and challenged the city she loved with hard-hitting investigations and won two Pulitzer Prizes, died Tuesday at her home in downtown Chicago. She was 87.

Lois Wille, Pulitzer-Winner in Her Beloved Chicago, Dies at 87

His successor, Archbishop Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, announced the death. In June, he said Ortega was in a weakened state because of terminal cancer.

Ortega retired in 2016, a decision that had long been expected because he was 79; the church requires bishops to submit their resignations when they turn 75. He, like many other bishops, was allowed to serve longer at the pope’s discretion.

With his resignation, he left behind a Cuban church whose reach was greater than at any point since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959. Far from the days when Roman Catholics were marginalized and the cardinal, as a young priest, spent time in a labor camp, the church was openly active, building new places of worship, tending to the poor and prodding the government to speed up economic reforms.

Ortega was the most powerful figure in the Cuban church when, in 2014, he helped open a dialogue between Havana and the United States that led the two countries to resume diplomatic relations. Pope Francis brokered the deal, after Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama had secretly turned to him for help.

According to later reports, after the pope had entrusted Ortega to deliver a letter to both presidents, he became a secret courier, delivering messages among the principals; in one instance he made a clandestine trip to the White House.

“I was the letter,” Ortega said later about his role, meaning that he had delivered some messages orally.

“Perhaps the most important part of my mission came when President Raúl Castro asked me to convey a message to President Obama,” he said during a speech.

The message was that in Castro’s view, Obama had not been responsible for U.S. policy toward Cuba, that he was an honest man and that in Havana they knew he wanted to improve relations with the island.

Obama thanked Castro for his words and sent the cardinal to deliver an oral response: “It was possible to improve the existing situation” despite their differences.

On Dec. 17, 2014, Pope Francis’ 78th birthday, Cuba and the United States announced the restoration of diplomatic relations.

Both sides acknowledged the work of the Catholic Church as mediator, although some in the Cuban exile community and opponents of the Castro regime criticized Ortega for not demanding improved human rights and freedoms as part of the negotiations, saying he had been too conciliatory toward the Cuban government.

His supporters defended him as being astute and politically savvy in keeping the church relevant through difficult years.

During his more than three decades overseeing the Archdiocese of Havana, Ortega restored dozens of sanctuaries and established the headquarters of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Cuba. In 2010, he inaugurated the new headquarters for the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary, the first building constructed by the Catholic Church on the island since 1959.

His achievements were noteworthy, considering that for much of his time the Cuban government was officially atheist and had banned believers of any faith from the Communist Party, the military and other professions.

Before he retired, Ortega greeted Obama at the Cathedral de San Cristóbal de la Habana on the first day of the president’s visit to Cuba in March 2016. Obama was the first American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years.

The son of a sugar worker, Ortega was born on Oct. 18, 1936, in the sugar mill town of Jagüey Grande in the central province of Matanzas. He began studying for the priesthood at San Alberto Magno Seminary in Matanzas and completed his studies in Quebec.

He returned to Matanzas to be ordained on Aug. 2, 1964. At the time, Fidel Castro’s new Communist government was already undermining the Cuban church, which was vehemently anti-Communist; the government later accused prominent Catholics of trying to topple Castro.

In 1966, Ortega was among those confined to a military labor camp where Castro sent religious leaders, gays and others who opposed his regime for “re-education.” After he was released, he became a parish priest in his hometown.

He was named bishop for the western province of Pinar del Rio in 1978, and in 1981 Pope John Paul II named him archbishop of Havana. In 1991, Ortega created Cáritas Havana, the first office of the Catholic relief charity in Cuba, which distributed medicine, food and other aid.

Providing such basic necessities was considered an essential first step before the church could start talking to people about religion and social change, as there had always been some question about how much sway the church had over the Cuban population. The Vatican said in 2015 that 60% of Cubans were Catholic, but the United States said that very few of them — perhaps only 4% or 5% — attended mass regularly.

Ortega was named cardinal in 1994, only the second Cuban in church history to be so named. By then, something of a thaw between church and state was underway, and the new cardinal sought to work it to the church’s advantage.

He was able to facilitate three papal visits to Cuba: John Paul II in 1998, Benedict XVI in 2012 and Francis in 2015.

In 2011 Ortega took part in negotiations for the release of 75 political prisoners who had been rounded up during the Black Spring, the 2003 crackdown on Cuban dissidents, journalists and grassroots activists. The regime had accused them of being agents of the United States. He was criticized later when he publicly stated that there were no political prisoners in Cuba.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/world/americas/cardinal-jaime-ortega-dead.html" id="560589ab-9328-3c7f-a407-3dfdf357d441">The New York Times</a>.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega, a Cuban Bridge to U.S., Dies at 82

Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, the former archbishop of Havana, who helped re-establish relations between Cuba and the United States and revive Catholicism on the island, died Friday in Havana. He was 82.

But perhaps his most lasting legacy stems from an earlier stint as executive director of the Theater Development Fund, a nonprofit organization in New York that supports the performing arts.

While there, Southern helped establish the TKTS booth in Times Square, where over the years millions of theatergoers have bought discounted same-day tickets to some of the most heralded shows both on and off Broadway.

Southern died on July 15 in a hospital in Leesburg, Virginia. He was 87. His wife, Kathy Dwyer Southern, said the cause was pneumonia and congestive heart failure.

The British-born Southern was dragged into the culture wars in 1989 over exhibitions financed by the National Endowment for the Arts that some deemed obscene and anti-Christian.

It was his finesse with Congress over this issue that impressed a Metropolitan Opera search committee that was looking for a general manager.

But before working at those renowned institutions, Southern was, from 1968 to 1982, the first executive director of the Theater Development Fund, an organization whose goal was to increase audiences for the performing arts in New York. At the time, the Broadway theater was in the doldrums and Times Square was to be avoided.

Southern was among those who believed that some revenue from a discounted seat was better than no revenue from an empty seat. This was initially a hard sell to Broadway producers, who worried that cut-rate tickets would drain away patrons who would otherwise pay full price.

A team that included Southern, Mayor John V. Lindsay, the Shubert Organization and Anna Crouse, wife of playwright Russel Crouse and a member of the fund’s board, helped convince them otherwise.

Only by paying full price, they pointed out, could patrons be assured of seeing the show they wanted to see, when they wanted to see it, in seats they chose, without having to stand in line in bad weather. At the same time, they argued, discounted tickets could make up for some lost revenue and open up the theater to people who might not otherwise go.

The producers gave it a try. The first TKTS booth, which was actually a trailer donated by the city Parks Department, opened in June 1973 in Duffy Square, the northern part of Times Square, between 46th and 47th streets and between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

It has been upgraded over the years and today is a modern glass affair tucked under a set of ruby-red glass steps, where ticket buyers congregate amid the panoply of humanity that swarms through the Crossroads of the World. TKTS also now has two satellite booths in Manhattan, one at Lincoln Center and the other at the South Street Seaport.

And business is booming. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, in which a record 14.7 million people saw Broadway shows, the TKTS booth at all three locations sold more than 1.1 million same-day discounted tickets, about 8% of all tickets sold.

Hugh Southern was born on March 20, 1932, in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England, to Norman and Phyllis Margaret (Hiller) Southern. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.

He attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he was part of a “literature discussion and sherry group” led by novelist E.M. Forester. He graduated in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature.

So eager was he to seek opportunities in America that he and his first wife, Jane Rosemary (Llewellyn) Southern, moved to New York in 1955 before he graduated. He later returned to Cambridge for several months to finish his degree before moving to New York permanently.

He and his first wife divorced, and in 1988 he married Kathy (Ayers) Dwyer. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his children from his first marriage, William Norman Southern and Hillary Llewellyn Southern, and a son, Jaime Andres Southern, from his second, as well as three grandchildren.

After spending 14 years at the Theater Development Fund, Southern served as deputy chairman of programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, from 1982 to 1989. In 1989 he was named acting chairman while President George H.W. Bush sought a permanent chairman.

At the time, critics were complaining about taxpayer funding of the arts. Their outrage exploded in 1989 when an NEA grant of $15,000 supported an exhibition of the work of Andres Serrano, which included a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.

Many on the religious right, most prominently North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, railed against the NEA and called for it to be abolished.

Southern took the diplomatic approach.

“I most certainly can understand that the work in question has offended many people,” he wrote to Congress. “I personally found it offensive.”

But, he added, the NEA “is expressly forbidden in its authorizing legislation from interfering with the artistic choices made by its grantees.” He added that the agency had provoked very few controversies with the 85,000 grants it had awarded in its nearly 25-year history.

Shortly thereafter, Bush named a permanent head of the agency, John Frohnmayer, and Southern left. In the end, Congress tightened the rules by which such grants were made, but slightly increased the agency’s appropriation.

“He stayed cool under fire and had a lovely sense of humor,” his wife said in a phone interview. “And the British accent didn’t hurt.”

The Metropolitan Opera noticed Southern’s finesse and hired him as its general manager, even though he had little experience with opera.

That lack of experience “did concern us,” Louise Humphrey, president of the Met’s board and head of the search committee, told The New York Times in 1989. But, she said, Southern got along with people and could help with fundraising, and she singled out his “diplomacy” in responding to Helms.

But after just eight months on the job, Southern shocked the opera world by stepping down.

He said he had “not found fulfillment.” Others said that his authority was limited since the previous general manager had remained as a powerful member of the Met board. At the same time, James Levine, the company’s longtime conductor and artistic director, retained firm control over artistic matters, leaving Southern little room to spread his wings.

After he left the Met, he worked with various artistic institutions, including the Virginia Festival of American Film (now the Virginia Film Festival) in Charlottesville, the New York State Council on the Arts and Film Forum in Manhattan.

Although he loved living in the United States, he also loved being British, his wife said. But he finally became an American citizen in 2015 — moved to do so because, for the first time, he felt compelled to vote.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/theater/hugh-southern-dead.html" id="e4121f75-68ce-3353-a540-fbea0df433f0">The New York Times</a>.

Hugh Southern, a Creator of the TKTS Booth, Dies at 87

NEW YORK — Hugh Southern held some high-profile jobs. He was acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the culture wars of the 1980s and, briefly, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.

<h1>Jan Meyers, the first Republican woman elected to Congress from Kansas, died on Friday at a hospital in Merriam, Kansas. She was 90.</h1>

Her daughter, Valerie J. Meyers, said the cause was complications of heart disease.

Meyers, who was from Overland Park, represented Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, an area in the eastern part of the state that included Kansas City, from 1985 to 1997.

Meyers was unusual among Kansas Republicans in that she supported abortion rights and gun control.

“She was a pioneer,” Mike Murray, her former chief of staff and campaign manager, told The Kansas City Star. “She was way ahead of today’s movement for women in politics.”

While moderate on social issues, she was a staunch fiscal conservative and frequently voted to cut the federal deficit.

Her stint in Congress included two years as chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee. It was the first time that a Republican woman had chaired a House committee since Edith Nourse Rogers, from Massachusetts, headed Veterans’ Affairs from 1953 to 1955, according to Meyers’ official House biography.

After she left Congress, Meyers reflected on her career and the fact that she sometimes voted against her party.

“Listen to your conscience and your constituents — both,” she told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call in 2001. “Most of the time they’ll agree. If your conscience is different than your constituents’, then you’ll have a hard time.”

Janice Lenore Crilly was born on July 20, 1928, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the daughter of Howard M. Crilly and Lenore N. (Hazel) Crilly. She grew up in Superior, Nebraska, where her father ran the local newspaper, The Superior Express.

Katharine Q. Seelye

Articles written by the author

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