Grim Reader: This Week in Death 7/10/2009
by Michael Schaffer
JULY 10, 2009 TAGS:
Grim Reader has long associated Robert McNamara with the verb “expiate.” Years ago, we first learned that ten-cent word while reading about his stint as World Bank president — allegedly the ex-Defense secretary’s way of making up for Vietnam. The Obitosphere, at least, was unswayed: Front-page obituaries across the country this week put the war front and center. In the Washington Post, for instance Thomas Lippman begins by describing McNamara as “the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.” So much for expiation.
The obits all trace the life of a cerebral manager whose belief in statistical analysis took him to the top of the Ford Motor Co. at age 44, but left him unable to manage a war that would not be won by whoever dropped the most bombs. The Post and the Los Angeles Times both quote David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest: Blinded by progress charts, McNamara, “was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.” Yet McNamara’s late-life revelation that he knew the war was doomed while he was still Defense secretary, complicates that view. In the New York Times, Tim Weiner quotes from an editorial the paper ran following the 1995 publication of the secretary’s memoir: “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” it reads.
McNamara’s typically technocratic service at the World Bank does indeed merit attention. But the obits all play his post-Pentagon career like a Shakespearean denouement. “He wore the expression of a haunted man,” Weiner writes of the elderly McNamara. “He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.” (The Post does dig up an old quote where McNamara says it’s “baloney” to think his World Bank job was an effort at atonement.)
Reading the coverage felt a bit like opening a Vietnam-era time capsule. Even in news section coverage, the divisions and disagreements are on display. “Years later, historians still spar over whether the attacks were as serious as they were initially reported,” the Los Angeles Times’ obit says of the Tonkin Gulf skirmish that led Congress to OK deeper involvement in Vietnam. “The attack never happened,” the New York Times’ version counters.
Indeed, more than any recent death, McNamara’s showcases passions unleavened by any concern for the dearly departed. Editorial cartoons by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tony Auth and the syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant are almost shockingly harsh. Ditto the quotes from notable Vietnam vets like former Senator Bob Kerrey, who skips the my-prayers-are-with-his-family boilerplate and instead tells Politico that “His death reminds me of death, destruction, horror and the suffering of that war…. I am not saddened by his loss. I am saddened by all the other losses.” The toughest of all may be the final take from the veteran McClatchy war reporter Joseph L. Galloway. “The aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell,” he writes. “McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”
And inevitably, yesteryear’s disagreements elide into today’s. USA Today editorializes that McNamara’s hubris holds a contemporary lesson — likening the late secretary to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And, sure enough, right-wingers like the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens and Washington Post columnist George Will see that same hubris and are reminded of … Barack Obama. Grim Reader has a feeling McNamara’s obits are less a return to past divisions than an example of the Obitosphere’s future.
--
Another highlight from the week in death appears mainly as developing news: the killing of former NFL star Steve McNair in Nashville. McNair, 36, was found alongside a 20-year-old woman who wasn’t his wife, the apparent victim in a murder-suicide. The scene undercut McNair’s good-guy image, a fact lamented by NFL.com’s Steve Wyche. “It's hard to look back on McNair's life as a football player when all this is staring you in the face,” he writes. Echoes the Tennessean’s Jim Wyatt, “stories of his infidelity, and the image of two bullets to his head and two more to his chest, have left an impression arguably more powerful than any touchdown pass or run he ever made.”
Can this really be true? When Grim Reader watches a beautiful touchdown pass, he rarely stops to wonder whether the quarterback is a faithful husband. When not lamenting his tarnished image, most of the obits for McNair feature locker room clichés about his toughness, leadership ability, and tenacity. Why pretend such qualities can’t coincide with marital weakness? McNair’s death could be a chance to present the athlete-hero as a mixed, flawed creature. Instead, many of the obituarists seem actually to be mourning their own foolishly innocent illusions.
--
Elsewhere this week, the Los Angeles Times also has a write-up on developer Ray Watt, who did much to define Southern California’s modern look. Watt was “widely credited as the first in the West to popularize condominiums, strip shopping centers, time-share vacation homes and residential communities with shared amenities such as golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools and lakes,” the paper says. But couldn’t the piece have included just a few lines about how many people loathed that sprawl?
--
Oscar Mayer died at 95, meriting wire obits in major papers but prompting the Wisconsin State Journal to declare that his was, “perhaps, the most famous name in Madison,” an irony since Mayer himself shunned publicity. … The New York Times covers rock-climber John Bachar, offering one of the nicer life-defining first sentences in ages: “John Bachar, a rock climber who inspired awe as a daredevil, condescension as an anachronism and eventually respect as a legend, fell to his death Sunday from a rock formation near his home in California.” … The Los Angeles Times picks up the death of electric guitar maker George Fullerton. While Fullerton’s colleague Leo Fender came up with models like the Telecaster, non-musician Fullerton was in charge of mass-producing them, helping turn the instrument into a postwar staple. At its peak, the obit notes, their firm was “was turning out a guitar a minute from its 27 buildings.”
--
Newspaper publishers everywhere should study the obituaries of Robert Taylor, publisher of the long-dead Philadelphia Bulletin. Rather than focusing on his business acumen, or lack thereof, hometown obits in the Philadelphia Daily News as well as the national take by New York Times media reporter Richard Perez-Pena focus on his willingness to go to jail in a key test case of journalists’ right to keep sources anonymous. Note to newsroom suits who want flowery tributes: In the Obitosphere, standing up for journalism is more important than all the circulation trickery in the world.
Also in newspapers, the Los Angeles Times writes up the life of Togo Tanaka, a journalist who was among the 110,000 Japanese interned during WWII and who documented his experiences in real time as the camp historian. And the animus Tanaka experienced also explains a blunder that defined the journalistic career of William Hutchinson, news editor of the Honolulu Advertiser on Dec. 7, 1941. The paper’s press was broken, and after Pearl Harbor it refused help from a local Japanese-language paper, thereby missing the biggest story in Hawaiian history. “Maybe they should have waited,” writes the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan, noting that the Dec. 8 Advertiser blared a wildly erroneous headline about a Japanese landing. Hutchinson eventually joined the Foreign Service. (Oddly, the Advertiser itself doesn’t run an obit.)
--
The New York Times is alone among American dailies in running a staff-written obit for literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a pioneer of Queer Theory. The paper’s William Grimes offers some highlights from Sedgwick’s work “teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James.” But, as usual in the case of writers and scholars, the format of British obits in the Guardian and the Times of London leaves much more room for exegeses. Grimes, though, does note the surprising fact that Sedgwick was married. “The relationship struck some readers of Ms. Sedgwick’s work as anomalous: one of the creators of queer theory was straight, although she disliked the term, which ran counter to her notion of sexual orientation as a continuum rather than a category.”
--
Finally, with the Michael Jackson obitorama dying down, Grim Reader will pause to note that for all his years of obit perusing, he’d seen neither coverage of a funeral’s Nielsen ratings nor critical reviews of the service until Jackson’s send-off Tuesday in Los Angeles. For the record, 31 million people watched, and critics called it “tasteful.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Fridays in Obit. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
The obits all trace the life of a cerebral manager whose belief in statistical analysis took him to the top of the Ford Motor Co. at age 44, but left him unable to manage a war that would not be won by whoever dropped the most bombs. The Post and the Los Angeles Times both quote David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest: Blinded by progress charts, McNamara, “was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.” Yet McNamara’s late-life revelation that he knew the war was doomed while he was still Defense secretary, complicates that view. In the New York Times, Tim Weiner quotes from an editorial the paper ran following the 1995 publication of the secretary’s memoir: “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” it reads. McNamara’s typically technocratic service at the World Bank does indeed merit attention. But the obits all play his post-Pentagon career like a Shakespearean denouement. “He wore the expression of a haunted man,” Weiner writes of the elderly McNamara. “He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.” (The Post does dig up an old quote where McNamara says it’s “baloney” to think his World Bank job was an effort at atonement.)
Reading the coverage felt a bit like opening a Vietnam-era time capsule. Even in news section coverage, the divisions and disagreements are on display. “Years later, historians still spar over whether the attacks were as serious as they were initially reported,” the Los Angeles Times’ obit says of the Tonkin Gulf skirmish that led Congress to OK deeper involvement in Vietnam. “The attack never happened,” the New York Times’ version counters.
Indeed, more than any recent death, McNamara’s showcases passions unleavened by any concern for the dearly departed. Editorial cartoons by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tony Auth and the syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant are almost shockingly harsh. Ditto the quotes from notable Vietnam vets like former Senator Bob Kerrey, who skips the my-prayers-are-with-his-family boilerplate and instead tells Politico that “His death reminds me of death, destruction, horror and the suffering of that war…. I am not saddened by his loss. I am saddened by all the other losses.” The toughest of all may be the final take from the veteran McClatchy war reporter Joseph L. Galloway. “The aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell,” he writes. “McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”
And inevitably, yesteryear’s disagreements elide into today’s. USA Today editorializes that McNamara’s hubris holds a contemporary lesson — likening the late secretary to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And, sure enough, right-wingers like the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens and Washington Post columnist George Will see that same hubris and are reminded of … Barack Obama. Grim Reader has a feeling McNamara’s obits are less a return to past divisions than an example of the Obitosphere’s future.
--
Another highlight from the week in death appears mainly as developing news: the killing of former NFL star Steve McNair in Nashville. McNair, 36, was found alongside a 20-year-old woman who wasn’t his wife, the apparent victim in a murder-suicide. The scene undercut McNair’s good-guy image, a fact lamented by NFL.com’s Steve Wyche. “It's hard to look back on McNair's life as a football player when all this is staring you in the face,” he writes. Echoes the Tennessean’s Jim Wyatt, “stories of his infidelity, and the image of two bullets to his head and two more to his chest, have left an impression arguably more powerful than any touchdown pass or run he ever made.”Can this really be true? When Grim Reader watches a beautiful touchdown pass, he rarely stops to wonder whether the quarterback is a faithful husband. When not lamenting his tarnished image, most of the obits for McNair feature locker room clichés about his toughness, leadership ability, and tenacity. Why pretend such qualities can’t coincide with marital weakness? McNair’s death could be a chance to present the athlete-hero as a mixed, flawed creature. Instead, many of the obituarists seem actually to be mourning their own foolishly innocent illusions.
--
Elsewhere this week, the Los Angeles Times also has a write-up on developer Ray Watt, who did much to define Southern California’s modern look. Watt was “widely credited as the first in the West to popularize condominiums, strip shopping centers, time-share vacation homes and residential communities with shared amenities such as golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools and lakes,” the paper says. But couldn’t the piece have included just a few lines about how many people loathed that sprawl?
--
Oscar Mayer died at 95, meriting wire obits in major papers but prompting the Wisconsin State Journal to declare that his was, “perhaps, the most famous name in Madison,” an irony since Mayer himself shunned publicity. … The New York Times covers rock-climber John Bachar, offering one of the nicer life-defining first sentences in ages: “John Bachar, a rock climber who inspired awe as a daredevil, condescension as an anachronism and eventually respect as a legend, fell to his death Sunday from a rock formation near his home in California.” … The Los Angeles Times picks up the death of electric guitar maker George Fullerton. While Fullerton’s colleague Leo Fender came up with models like the Telecaster, non-musician Fullerton was in charge of mass-producing them, helping turn the instrument into a postwar staple. At its peak, the obit notes, their firm was “was turning out a guitar a minute from its 27 buildings.”
--
Newspaper publishers everywhere should study the obituaries of Robert Taylor, publisher of the long-dead Philadelphia Bulletin. Rather than focusing on his business acumen, or lack thereof, hometown obits in the Philadelphia Daily News as well as the national take by New York Times media reporter Richard Perez-Pena focus on his willingness to go to jail in a key test case of journalists’ right to keep sources anonymous. Note to newsroom suits who want flowery tributes: In the Obitosphere, standing up for journalism is more important than all the circulation trickery in the world.
Also in newspapers, the Los Angeles Times writes up the life of Togo Tanaka, a journalist who was among the 110,000 Japanese interned during WWII and who documented his experiences in real time as the camp historian. And the animus Tanaka experienced also explains a blunder that defined the journalistic career of William Hutchinson, news editor of the Honolulu Advertiser on Dec. 7, 1941. The paper’s press was broken, and after Pearl Harbor it refused help from a local Japanese-language paper, thereby missing the biggest story in Hawaiian history. “Maybe they should have waited,” writes the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan, noting that the Dec. 8 Advertiser blared a wildly erroneous headline about a Japanese landing. Hutchinson eventually joined the Foreign Service. (Oddly, the Advertiser itself doesn’t run an obit.) --
The New York Times is alone among American dailies in running a staff-written obit for literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a pioneer of Queer Theory. The paper’s William Grimes offers some highlights from Sedgwick’s work “teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James.” But, as usual in the case of writers and scholars, the format of British obits in the Guardian and the Times of London leaves much more room for exegeses. Grimes, though, does note the surprising fact that Sedgwick was married. “The relationship struck some readers of Ms. Sedgwick’s work as anomalous: one of the creators of queer theory was straight, although she disliked the term, which ran counter to her notion of sexual orientation as a continuum rather than a category.”
--
Finally, with the Michael Jackson obitorama dying down, Grim Reader will pause to note that for all his years of obit perusing, he’d seen neither coverage of a funeral’s Nielsen ratings nor critical reviews of the service until Jackson’s send-off Tuesday in Los Angeles. For the record, 31 million people watched, and critics called it “tasteful.”
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Fridays in Obit. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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