Obituaries
This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
SOURCE: NYT(10-25-11)
Nusrat Bhutto, a near-mythic figure in Pakistan’s modern history, whose husband, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed in 1979 after being deposed as prime minister in a military coup, and whose daughter, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed by a suicide bomber while campaigning for office in 2007, died Sunday in Dubai. She was 82.
Mrs. Bhutto, long a political force in her country, had cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, family members told The Associated Press. A throng of mourners at her burial service in southern Pakistan on Tuesday was led by her son-in-law, Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president.
Mrs. Bhutto was the daughter of an Iranian soap manufacturer who fled Mumbai and resettled his family in Karachi after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 into majority Hindu and Muslim countries, respectively.
When she became the second wife of Mr. Bhutto in 1951, she joined one of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most influential families....
SOURCE: NYT(10-24-11)
Robert Pierpoint, the CBS News correspondent who brought a human-interest touch to coverage of the Korean War and later reported on six presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter, died Saturday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 86.
The cause was complications of hip surgery, CBS News said.
In more than 40 years with CBS radio and television, Mr. Pierpoint covered the major news stories of his time, from Korea to the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, often reporting for “The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” and on the magazine-type program “Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt.
Mr. Pierpoint’s “special memory” of covering the Korean War involved not a particular battle but his visit to a Seoul orphanage....
SOURCE: NYT(10-8-11)
Dr. J. Willis Hurst, the cardiologist for Lyndon B. Johnson from the time of his first heart attack in 1955 and the principal editor of “The Heart,” a widely used textbook on cardiovascular disease, died on Oct. 1 in Atlanta. He was 90.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Philip W. Hurst said.
Dr. Hurst met his most famous patient in the summer of 1955, when Johnson, then the majority leader of the Senate, suffered a serious heart attack and was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where Dr. Hurst was the cardiologist on call.
“Lyndon had turned gray; he didn’t look alive, didn’t look like he was breathing,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in a foreword to “LBJ: To Know Him Better,” by Dr. Hurst and Dr. James C. Cain, Johnson’s personal physician. “It was a heart-stopping moment for me, and it lasted for the next six weeks, which was the routine stay then for heart attack patients. Dr. Hurst became the most important man in my life. He would either save Lyndon or not.”...
SOURCE: NYT(10-8-11)
“Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?” President Richard M. Nixon asked on June 23, 1972, his voice captured on tape in the Oval Office. He would find out soon enough. Without Kenneth H. Dahlberg, Nixon might not have become ensnared in the Watergate scandal and been forced to resign.
Mr. Dahlberg, who died on Tuesday at 94, became the unwitting link between the Nixon re-election campaign and the five men who, only days before Nixon’s remark, were charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
He had been a fund-raiser for Nixon’s re-election campaign, and his name was on a $25,000 cashier’s check that had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars, Bernard L. Barker. The money was to help cover the burglars’ expenses, and Mr. Barker had withdrawn that amount in $100 bills. He was carrying more than $5,000 when he was arrested on June 17.
Bob Woodward, a young reporter for The Washington Post who with Carl Bernstein unraveled the Watergate affair, has called the Dahlberg check the “connective tissue” that turned what they thought was a story about a common crime into one of historic dimensions....
SOURCE: NYT(10-5-11)
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in Birmingham.
It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.
Graphic scenes of helmeted police officers and firefighters under the direction of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner, scattering peaceful marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and nightsticks, provoked a national outcry....
SOURCE: NYT(10-5-11)
Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.
The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage. A friend of the family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with the disease, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment, introducing new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier....
SOURCE: NYT(10-5-11)
JERUSALEM — Hanan Porat, who helped turn Israel’s religious settler movement into a powerful force through the establishment of Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, died on Tuesday at his childhood kibbutz, which he had re-established. He was 67.
In a statement confirming his death, of cancer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Mr. Porat had “dedicated his life to building up the land of Israel, and to educating generations of students about religious Zionism and loving the land of Israel and the Jewish people.”
Mr. Porat, who was a rabbi, faded from the public spotlight in recent years as he sought treatment for cancer. But in his prime, in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Israeli right began its political ascent, he was a fiery advocate of hard-line Zionism, cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke....
