Obituaries

Jerry Robinson, comic book legend and creator of Batman nemesis, the Joker, dead at 89

Jerry Robinson, the pioneering comic book artist credited with creating Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, and later a crusading hero for cartoonists in his own right who helped restore “Superman’s” creators’ rights in a single bound, died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was 89.“Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich legacy that he leaves behind,” Jim Lee, DC Entertainment co-publisher and popular “Batman” artist, said in a statement.Discovered by “Batman” creator Bob Kane as a 17-year-old journalism student enrolled at Columbia University, Robinson entered comics in 1939 as an inker and letterer on the fledgling comic. Though Kane claimed he and writer Bill Finger came up with the idea for the Joker — embodied by Heath Ledger in the 2008 film, “The Dark Knight” — most comic historians credit Robinson for the iconic villain....

I. Michael Heyman, Smithsonian Leader, Dies at 81

I. Michael Heyman, who led the Smithsonian Institution in the 1990s during a period of significant expansion and fierce controversy over the exhibiting of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died on Nov. 19 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 81.The cause was emphysema, his son James said.Having served for a decade as the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Heyman in 1994 began a largely successful five-year run overseeing the Smithsonian, the world’s biggest museum complex.During his time in Washington, Mr. Heyman obtained financing to build the National Museum of the American Indian and a $60 million donation for a National Air and Space Museum annex in Northern Virginia. He directed the creation of the institution’s first Web site and a network of affiliates that now includes 170 museums across the country. By the time he announced his retirement in 1999, donations had increased to $146 million from $52 million in 1995....

Ken Russell, Director Fond of Provocation, Dies at 84

Ken Russell, the English filmmaker and writer whose outsize personality matched the confrontational brashness of his movies, among them “Women in Love” and “The Devils,” died on Sunday at his home in Lymington, England. He was 84.His death was confirmed by a spokesman, Shade Rupe.A polarizing figure who delighted in breaching the limits of propriety and cinematic good taste, Mr. Russell courted controversy through much of his career. “Women in Love,” a 1969 adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel, was his breakthrough film, and “The Devils” (1971), about a 17th-century outbreak of religious hysteria, was his most notorious. Both caused run-ins with censors.

Tom Wicker, Chronicler of JFK Shooting, Dies at 85

Tom Wicker, who died Friday of an apparent heart attack at age 85, was one of the most significant print journalists of the 20th century.  He was a reporter, a pundit, an author of many books, a longtime bureau chief of The New York Times, a contributor to The Atlantic, and an outspoken critic of journalism itself (as well as a frequent target, the Times candidly noted in his obituary, of many of his own critics in and beyond the media).To reporters and journalism professors, Wicker's legacy is a vast and varied one. But to the American people, indeed to the world, he will forever be known for his work over a four-day stretch in November 1963, when he covered the assassination and then the burial of President John F. Kennedy. The man was in the right place at the wrong time, you might say, and he performed brilliantly during the story of his lifetime.

Nusrat Bhutto, Political Force in Pakistan, Dies at 82

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.

Robert Pierpoint, 86, Dies; CBS News Correspondent

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....

Dr. J. Willis Hurst, Cardiologist to Lyndon B. Johnson, Dies at 90

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.

Kenneth H. Dahlberg, Watergate Figure and WWII Ace, Dies at 94

“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.

Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at 89

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....

Apple’s Visionary Redefined Digital Age

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.

Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67

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....

James M. Cannon III, former Newsweek editor and Ford adviser, dies at 93

James M. Cannon III, 93, a Korean War combat correspondent who held prominent editing positions at Newsweek magazine before serving as a top domestic policy adviser during the Ford administration, died Sept. 15 at the Capital Hospice in Arlington.He had complications from a stroke, his son James M. Cannon IV said.In a career that spanned five decades, Mr. Cannon rose from a cub reporter covering city hall to a trusted presidential aide with an office in the West Wing.Mr. Cannon was covering the 1968 presidential primary in New Hampshire for Newsweek when he realized he wanted to “get out of the grandstand and go down on the playing field.”He joined the staff of New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who Mr. Cannon covered during the campaign, as a liason to the state government and the Nixon administration....

Carl Oglesby, Antiwar Leader in 1960s, Dies at 76

Carl Oglesby, who led Students for a Democratic Society as it publicly opposed the Vietnam War but who was later expelled by a radical faction that became the Weather Underground, died on Tuesday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 76.The cause was lung cancer, said his partner, Barbara Webster.Mr. Oglesby, who left a military industry job and a comfortable lifestyle to join S.D.S., was the organization’s president from 1965 to 1966. Trained as an actor and a playwright, he was regarded as one of the most eloquent spokesmen of the period.“He was the great orator of the white New Left,” Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University professor who was the president of S.D.S. from 1963 to 1964, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “His voice was a well-practiced instrument.”Mr. Oglesby’s speech “Let Us Shape the Future,” delivered at an antiwar rally in Washington on Nov. 27, 1965, is considered a landmark of American political rhetoric. In it, he condemned the “corporate liberalism” — American economic interests disguised as anti-Communist benevolence — that, he argued, underpinned the Vietnam War....

Michael Hart, a Pioneer of E-Books, Dies at 64

Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July 4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64.His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois, where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer at the school’s Materials Research Lab.Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100 million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did....

Nick Ashford, of Motown Writing Duo, Dies at 70

Nick Ashford, who with Valerie Simpson, his songwriting partner and later wife, wrote some of Motown’s biggest hits, like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough“ and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and later recorded their own hits and toured as a duo, died Monday at a hospital in New York City. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.Mr. Ashford had throat cancer and was undergoing treatment, but the cause of his death was not immediately known. His death was announced by Liz Rosenberg, a friend who is a longtime music publicist.One of the primary songwriting and producing teams of Motown, Ashford & Simpson specialized in romantic duets of the most dramatic kind, professing the power of true love and the comforts of sweet talk. In “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” from 1967, their first of several hits for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, lovers in close harmony proclaim their determination that “no wind, no rain, no winter’s cold, can stop me, baby,” but also make cuter promises: “If you’re ever in trouble, I’ll be there on the double.”...

Jerry Leiber, Prolific Writer of 1950s Hits, Dies at 78

Jerry Leiber, the lyricist who, with his partner, Mike Stoller, wrote some of the most enduring classics in the history of rock ’n’ roll, including “Hound Dog,” “Yakety Yak,” “Stand By Me” and “On Broadway,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 78.The cause was cardio-pulmonary failure, said Randy Poe, president of Leiber & Stoller Music Publishing.The team of Leiber and Stoller was formed in 1950, when Mr. Leiber was still a student at Fairfax High in Los Angeles and Mr. Stoller, a fellow rhythm-and-blues fanatic, was a freshman at Los Angeles City College. With Mr. Leiber contributing catchy, street-savvy lyrics and Mr. Stoller, a pianist, composing infectious, bluesy tunes, they set about writing songs with black singers and groups in mind.In 1952, they wrote “Hound Dog” for the blues singer Big Mama Thornton. The song became an enormous hit for Elvis Presley in 1956 and made Leiber and Stoller the hottest songwriting team in rock ’n’ roll. They later wrote “Jailhouse Rock,” “Loving You,” “Don’t,” “Treat Me Nice,” “King Creole” and other songs for Presley, despite their loathing for his interpretation of “Hound Dog.”...

Australia WWII heroine Nancy 'White Mouse' Wake dies

One of the most highly decorated Allied secret agents of World War II, Nancy Wake, has died in London aged 98. Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, she is credited with helping hundreds of Allied personnel escape from occupied France. The German Gestapo named her the "White Mouse" because she was so elusive.   Working as a journalist in Europe, she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933 and then vowed to fight against his persecution of Jews.   After the fall of France in 1940, Mrs Wake became a French Resistance courier and later a saboteur and spy - setting up escape routes and sabotaging German installations, saving hundreds of Allied lives. She worked for British Special Operations and was parachuted into France in April 1944 before D-Day to deliver weapons to French Resistance fighters....  

Hugh Carey, Who Led Fiscal Rescue of New York City, Is Dead at 92

Hugh L. Carey, the governor who helped rescue New York from the brink of financial collapse in the 1970s and tamed a culture of ever-growing spending, died Sunday at his summer home on Shelter Island, N.Y. He was 92.His death was announced by the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. “Governor Carey led our state during a time of great financial turmoil and pulled us back from the brink of bankruptcy and economic ruin,” Mr. Cuomo said in the statement.From 1975 through 1982, as the state’s 51st governor, Mr. Carey led a small group of public servants who vanquished the fiscal crisis that threatened New York City and State — the direst emergency a governor had faced since the Depression — by taking on powers over the city’s finances that no governor had wielded before and none has wielded since.

Richard F. Pedersen, Cold War Era Diplomat, Dies at 86

Richard F. Pedersen, a United States diplomat who left a career imbued with cold war politics to become president of the American University in Cairo, died on July 11 at his home in Greenport, Long Island. He was 86.His wife, Nelda, confirmed the death.Mr. Pedersen’s government career of more than 20 years encompassed posts at the United Nations and the State Department and in Hungary, where he was the United States ambassador. At the United Nations, starting in 1953, he worked under five United States ambassadors, including Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in the Eisenhower administration and Adlai E. Stevenson under President John F. Kennedy, assisting Mr. Stevenson in tense negotiations during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962....

Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, former Joint Chiefs chairman, dies at 75

Retired Army Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, who became the first foreign-born chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and guided military and humanitarian efforts in the post-Cold War era of the 1990s, has died. He was 75. Shalikashvili died Saturday morning at Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington state of complications from a stroke, the Army said in a statement. A native of Poland, Shalikashvili rose to the top military post at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 1997. He succeeded Gen. Colin L. Powell as chairman.