Obituaries

Duck Dunn, Bassist in Booker T. and the MG’s, Dies at 70

Duck Dunn, whose simple but inventive bass playing anchored numerous hit records and helped define the sound of Memphis soul music, died early Sunday in Tokyo, where he had been on tour. He was 70.His death was announced online by the guitarist Steve Cropper, a longtime associate and fellow member of the instrumental quartet Booker T. and the MG’s, who said Mr. Dunn died in his sleep but did not specify a cause. Mr. Dunn and Mr. Cropper had been performing at the Tokyo Blue Note with a Stax Records alumni band....

Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.The cause was complications of a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor. Mr. Sendak, who died at Danbury Hospital, lived nearby in Ridgefield, Conn.Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963....

Nicholas Katzenbach, Policy Maker During Major ’60s Events, Dies at 90

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who helped shape the political history of the 1960s, facing down segregationists, riding herd on historic civil rights legislation and helping to map Vietnam War strategy as a central player in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died Tuesday night at his home in Skillman, N.J. He was 90.His death was confirmed by his wife, Lydia.Mr. Katzenbach was one of the “best and the brightest,” David Halberstam’s term for the likes of Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and other ambitious, cerebral and often idealistic postwar policy makers who came to Washington from business and academia carrying golden credentials. Mr. Katzenbach, an attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was the son of a New Jersey state attorney general, a Rhodes scholar, a war hero and a law professor at Yale and the University of Chicago....

Earl Rose, Coroner When Kennedy Was Shot, Dies at 85

Earl Rose, who as the Dallas County medical examiner when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated insisted that he should do the autopsy, only to be overruled in a confrontation with presidential aides, died on Tuesday in Iowa City. He was 85.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Marilyn.On Nov. 22, 1963, Dr. Rose was thrust into the thick of a 20th-century American nightmare. He performed an autopsy on J. D. Tippit, the police officer who was believed to have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone suspect in the assassination. Two days later, he performed an autopsy on Oswald himself after the nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Four years later, Dr. Rose performed an autopsy on Ruby, determining that he had died of a blood clot in a lung.

George Cowan, Nuclear Scientist, Dies at 92

George Cowan, a chemist who helped build the first atomic bomb, detect the first Soviet nuclear explosion and test the first hydrogen bomb, died on Friday at his home in Los Alamos, N.M. He was 92.The Santa Fe Institute, a scientific research center that Dr. Cowan headed and helped found, announced the death.For his many contributions, Dr. Cowan was awarded the federal Energy Department’s highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the highest honor given by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Los Alamos Medal. The citation on his Los Alamos award called him “the driving force in the early radiochemical evaluations of nuclear weapons.”

Virginia Spencer Carr, Literary Biographer, Dies at 82

Virginia Spencer Carr, a literary scholar whose book “The Lonely Hunter” remains the standard biography of Carson McCullers, died on April 10 at her home in Lynn, Mass. She was 82.The cause was liver disease, her daughter Karen Carr Gale said.Ms. Carr also wrote respected lives of two other 20th-century American writers, John Dos Passos and Paul Bowles, but McCullers was her first writerly obsession and the subject that defined her career.Having written her doctoral dissertation on McCullers’s work, Ms. Carr began “The Lonely Hunter” in the late 1960s after landing a job as an English professor at Columbus College (now Columbus State University) in Columbus, Ga., McCullers’s hometown....

Raymond Aubrac, an Exalted Leader of the French Resistance, Dies at 97

Raymond Aubrac, who took that nom de guerre as a storied leader of the resistance effort in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, died on Tuesday in a military hospital in Paris. He was 97.His daughter Catherine announced the death.Mr. Aubrac and his wife, Lucie, became exalted symbols of heroism in their country’s fight against the Germans, who defeated France in 1940. Their story of valor and love was told in movies and books, some written by them, and they were showered with national honors. Mrs. Aubrac died in 2007 at 94.President Nicolas Sarkozy said Wednesday that the Aubracs and their colleagues had “operated behind the scenes and saved the honor of France, at a moment when it seemed lost.”...

Ahmed Ben Bella, Revolutionary Who Led Algeria After Independence, Dies at 93

Ahmed Ben Bella, a farmer’s son who fought for France in World War II, turned against it in the brutal struggle for Algerian independence and rose to become Algeria’s first elected president, has died at his home in Algiers, the capital. He was 93.The state news agency announced his death on Wednesday morning.

Mike Wallace, CBS Pioneer of ‘60 Minutes,’ Dies at 93

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of America’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,” died on Saturday. He was 93.On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who received a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008.A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for when “you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other,” he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature “Last Word.”...

Priscilla Buckley, Editor at National Review, Dies at 90

Priscilla L. Buckley, a journalist who was the longtime managing editor of National Review, the conservative magazine founded by her brother William F. Buckley Jr., died on Sunday at her home in Sharon, Conn. She was 90.Her death, at Great Elm, the 30-room Georgian mansion in which Miss Buckley and her siblings were reared, was of kidney failure, said her nephew Christopher Buckley, a writer and Mr. Buckley’s son. Miss Buckley had lived for many years in one of the several condominiums into which Great Elm was partitioned in the 1980s.Miss Buckley, who was associated with National Review for more than four decades, was its managing editor from 1959 to 1985. In that role, she oversaw the day-to-day operations of the magazine, riding herd — by all accounts without raising her voice so much as a decibel — on a staff of occasionally bibulous, sometimes fractious and constitutionally dilatory writers....

Henry S. Ruth, Who Helped Lead Watergate Prosecution, Dies at 80

Henry S. Ruth Jr., who helped lead the criminal prosecution of Nixon administration officials involved in covering up the Watergate break-in and kept it on track when President Richard M. Nixon fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, died on March 16 in Tucson. He was 80.The cause was a stroke, his wife, Deborah Mathieu, said.Mr. Ruth had broad experience in criminal law when he became Mr. Cox’s chief deputy shortly after Mr. Cox’s appointment as special prosecutor in May 1973. Five months later, on Oct. 20, President Nixon ordered Mr. Cox’s dismissal after he refused to drop his plan to subpoena tapes of the president’s conversations in the Oval Office. The firing prompted the two top Justice Department officials, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to quit in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre....

Ralph McQuarrie, Artist Who Helped Bring ‘Star Wars’ to Life, Dies at 82nted=2&ref=todayspaper

Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who transformed George Lucas’s rudimentary concepts and earliest scripts into lush, vivid images of intergalactic expanse and light-saber combat that became the visual core of the “Star Wars” saga, died on Saturday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 82.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Stan Stice, a friend and co-author of the 2007 book “The Art of Ralph McQuarrie.”

Robert Hecht Jr. dies at 92; controversial dealer in classical antiquities

When Robert E. Hecht Jr. arrived at the loading platform of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 1972, he was carrying a large wooden box and was escorted by an armed guard. Inside the box was perhaps the finest Greek vase to survive antiquity, a masterpiece that would soon be making headlines around the world. The Met had agreed to pay a record $1 million for the ancient work. Hecht said it had been in the private collection of a certain Lebanese gentleman. But when Met director Thomas Hoving heard the story, he scoffed: "I bet he doesn't exist." Indeed, as Hecht later revealed in his unpublished memoir, he had just bought the vase from "loyal suppliers" who had dug it up from ancient tombs outside Rome and smuggled it out of Italy....

Kazimierz Smolen, Director of Auschwitz Memorial Site, Dies at 91

WARSAW (AP) — Kazimierz Smolen, a survivor of Auschwitz who was director of the memorial site there for 35 years, died on Friday, the 67th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation. He was 91.Mr. Smolen’s death, in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Nazi Germany operated Auschwitz and Birkenau, was announced by Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum....

Joe Paterno, Longtime Penn State Coach, Dies at 85

Joe Paterno, who won more games than any other major-college football coach, and who became the face of Pennsylvania State University and a symbol of integrity in collegiate athletics only to be fired during the 2011 season amid a child sexual abuse scandal that reverberated throughout the nation, died Sunday in State College, Pa. He was 85.His family announced his death in a statement released Sunday morning. The cause was lung cancer, according to Mount Nittany Medical Center, where he had been treated. Paterno’s family announced in mid-November that he had received a diagnosis of lung cancer after a visit to a physician regarding a bronchial illness a few days earlier. He lived in State College.

Etta James, Powerful Voice Behind ‘At Last,’ Dies at 73

Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit, “At Last,” died Friday morning in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said that the cause was complications of leukemia. Ms. James, who died at Riverside Community Hospital, had been undergoing treatment for some time for a number of conditions, including leukemia and dementia. She also lived in Riverside.Ms. James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records like “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” She is in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame....

Henry Lafont, Pilot, Dies at 91; Fought in Battle of Britain

Henry Lafont, a French pilot who took part in a harrowing aerial escape from North Africa to fight for the honor of France after its capitulation to Hitler and who became the last surviving French veteran of the Battle of Britain, died on Dec. 2 in Trémuson, in the Brittany region of France. He was 91.His death was announced by the French Embassy in Washington.When France fell to the Germans in June 1940, and a collaborationist government based in Vichy was being formed, Mr. Lafont, a noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Oran in Algeria, then a French colony. Shortly after midnight on June 30, Mr. Lafont and five fellow servicemen, several of them pilots, convinced an airfield sentry that they were on a patrol, then stole a twin-engine, six-passenger transport plane that they knew carried fuel and set off to link up with British forces in Gibraltar.What they did not know made for an unnerving flight....

Holden Withington, Last Living B-52 Designer, Dies at 94

On a Friday in 1948, six aeronautical designers from the Boeing Company holed up in a hotel suite in Dayton, Ohio. They stayed put until Monday morning, except for the one who left to visit a hobby shop and returned with balsa wood, glue, carving tools and silver paint.The group emerged with a neatly bound 33-page proposal and an impressive 14-inch scale model of an airplane on a stand. Col. Pete Warden, the Air Force chief of bomber development, studied the result and pronounced, “This is the B-52.”One of those six was Holden Withington, and on Dec. 9, at age 94, he became the last of the B-52 designers to die. His daughter, Victoria Withington, said he died at his home on Mercer Island, Wash. He had Alzheimer’s disease.It takes a vast team of experts to design a complex airplane, particularly one like the B-52 Stratofortress, with its eight engines and radically swept-back wings. Mr. Withington, called Bob, played down the achievement, saying it evolved from earlier plane designs and not a little luck....

Vaclav Havel, Dissident Playwright Who Led Czechoslovakia, Dead at 75

Vaclav Havel, the writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was 75.His assistant, Sabina Tancevova, said that Mr. Havel died in his sleep at his country house in northern Bohemia. “He suffered from long-term health problems to which he succumbed,” Ms. Tancevova said, adding that Mr. Havel’s wife Dagmar was at his side.A Czech embassy spokesman in Paris, Michal Dvorak, said in a statement that Mr. Havel, a heavy smoker who almost died during surgery for lung cancer in 1996, had been suffering from severe respiratory ailments since last spring.

Ante Markovic, Last Premier of Yugoslavia, Dies at 87

Ante Markovic, who as the last prime minister of Yugoslavia tried to stave off the ethnic warfare that led to the disintegration of that nation, died on Nov. 28 in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. He was 87.Croatia’s state news agency, HINA, reported the death.