Citizen Cartwright

Celebrating Pete McCloskey, congressman for whom I came to Washington

After studying politics and economics in college, I wanted to find out how it all really worked. I was fortunate to get a job working for Rep. Pete McCloskey, R-Calif., who died yesterday at 96.

 

He was very smart, a Stanford educated lawyer. He was a Korean War hero. He was a liberal Republican (do I even need to write that there aren’t any of those now?).

 

Most impressive to me were Pete McCloskey’s values. There was a framed poster on our office wall that said doing good creates concentric circles of good. His motivation was public service, and it was an honor to be part of that effort.

 

He co-wrote the Endangered Species Act. He co-chaired the first Earth Day. In his typical quixotic way, he ran for president on an anti-Vietnam War platform against Richard Nixon, getting one delegate vote at the Republican convention (a cartoon about that was on the office wall, too).

 

After he lost a Senate race, he went back to California to practice law. He said he didn’t want to stay to become a lobbyist (living the cliche of going to Washington to do good and staying to do well, making big bucks).

 

McCloskey’s obituaries by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press accurately reflect the person I knew. 

 

But I think these comments describe him best:

 

“He stood for everyone without a voice and was especially passionate about our environment — he was afraid of nothing or anyone who sought to take advantage of another,” says Joe Cotchett, his law partner since 2004. 

 

“With a twinkle in his eye but a titanium backbone, Pete McCloskey spent his whole life campaigning for peace, justice, and a livable future,” says Denis Hayes, who organized the first Earth Day. “A powerful champion of endangered species, Pete, ironically, became one: the last remaining progressive, green, anti-war Republican.”

 

My thoughts are with Pete’s wife Helen, the rest of his family, my co-workers with whom I worked like crazy to keep up with him (he would fly in from California on the red-eye, come straight to the office, work all day and then run home to his Georgetown house).

 

I’ll always be grateful to you, Pete McCloskey, for the model of your values. And for encouraging me and helping give me the confidence to live a life that’s exceeded my dreams.

Celebrating Cecil Williams, celebrator of our common humanity

The longtime pastor of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, who preached being “radically inclusive,” died last week at 94.

 

“The reason this place is what it is, is that there are those of us who love unconditionally,” he said. “We don’t put no barriers up. Everybody is alike even though we’re different.”

 

That included people with drug addictions, the homeless, the LGBTQ community. Williams performed same-sex weddings decades before they were legal in the United States, says his New York Times obituary.

 

“We’re going to break all of the barriers and let you know that we love you and accept you," he said.

 

I basked in that love and acceptance when I lived in San Francisco.

 

It seemed that every kind of person went to Glide: rich, poor, tourists, celebrities. One Sunday, a man got up and said he lived in a car. He said there had been a disagreement with the other people who lived in the car and that he was grateful to Williams for resolving the disagreement.

 

I wrote two years ago in a blog item about auctions to help others (billionaire investor Warren Buffett auctioned off his investment advice over annual lunches, raising more than $53 million over 21 years to benefit Glide’s work) that: 

 

Williams’ main message was, "If you want to change your life, do it now." His encouragement week after week meant so much to me as a young person trying to figure out the kind of life I wanted to live, and I’ve been grateful to him always.

 

Here is Williams’ obituary in Britain’s Guardian.

 

Williams in 1956

Alexei Navalny: Model of civic courage

The Russian opposition leader, who died in prison on Friday, had returned to Russia in 2021 after medical treatment in Germany for a near-fatal poisoning, knowing he’d be arrested.

 

"By doing so he turned himself from an ordinary Russian into something else: a model of what civic courage can look like, in a country that has very little of it,” writes foreign affairs analyst Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. "Not only did he tell the truth, but he wanted to do so inside Russia, where Russians could hear him. This is what I wrote at the time: 'If Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.'”

 

Navalny, who was just 47 when he died, had survived multiple physical attacks, says his New York Times obituary. Before the poisoning in 2020 for which he was treated in Germany, he survived an earlier suspected poisoning attempt when he was in jail in 2019 and an assault in 2017 when somebody threw a green liquid in his face, nearly blinding him.

 

So it seems Navalny would not be someone who would say his death means that “courage is useless.”

 

During his most recent imprisonment, he corresponded with Kerry Kennedy, a human rights activist and daughter of Democratic politician Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, says a separate Times article.

 

He told her he'd cried “two or three times” while reading a book about her father recommended by a friend, according to a copy of a letter, handwritten in English, that Kennedy posted on Instagram after Navalny died. Navalny thanked Kennedy for sending him a poster with a quote from her father’s speech about how a “ripple of hope,” multiplied a million times, “can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

 

“I hope one day I’ll be able to hang it on the wall of my office,” Navalny said.

 

Let’s hang it on our walls to hopefully inspire our own courage.

Celebrating woman for her posthumous gift to others

In this week of giving thanks, let’s focus this morning on the life and example of Casey McIntyre, a 38-year-old New York book publisher, wife and mother who died Nov. 12.

 

Two days after she died, her husband posted a note for her on her social media accounts, saying: “A note to my friends: if you’re reading this I have passed away.”

“The cause was stage four ovarian cancer. I loved each and every one of you with my whole heart and I promise you, I knew how deeply I was loved.”

McIntyre asked for donations to RIP Medical Debt, which uses data analytics to find households with medical debt that have income below four times the federal poverty level or have debts that make up 5 percent or more of their annual income. 

 

I’ve just checked, and she’s raised $438,684 so far. 

 

“In general, $1 donated does abolish $100 of medical debt,” says Daniel Lempert, vice president of communications for RIP Medical Debt. So at this moment, McIntyre has raised about $40 million to pay off strangers’ medical debt.

 

We can donate here.

Honoring Ian Fishback

The anti-torture whistleblower during the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was laid to rest Tuesday with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

 

Fishback, 42, died of cardiac arrest nearly two years ago while in court-mandated mental health care in Michigan. 

 

"Fishback was a dissident-in-uniform who ultimately set aside a sparkling military career to become a philosopher before entering a dizzying mental health spiral," says The New York Times. 

 

The presiding Army chaplain, Maj. Joanna Forbes, highlighted the manner in which Fishback applied the values he embraced as a West Point graduate and as a military officer to protect those who ended up in the Army’s battlefield grasp. 

 

“Ian fought with honor, integrity and courage for his nation and his fellow soldiers, too,” said Forbes. “And with those same values he also stood up for some viewed only as enemies but, he knew, were people who had the right to just treatment and dignity. I have buried many heroes. But none like Ian Fishback.”

 

Marc Garlasco, a former Human Rights Watch investigator who helped bring the abuses to light, said Fishback ranked among the most courageous veterans of the United States’ long and ultimately failed occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — a young officer who put moral duties and his oath to the Constitution above other concerns.

“Ian’s strong moral courage was all he had after his chain of command told him to stay quiet,” Garlasco said. “Ian was the only one to stand up and say, ‘No, America shouldn’t torture people.’”

 

In 2006, Fishback was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 100 influential people of the year. But after two deployments to Iraq with the Special Forces, he told family and friends he felt shunned and sometimes threatened by some soldiers, commanders and peers, who treated him as a turncoat.

 

Fishback pursued a new career in academics, first as a philosophy instructor at West Point and later, after departing the Army at the rank of major, as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. There he studied just-war theory, a genre of philosophy that examines the behavior of combatants. But he didn't rebound from the painful isolation of whistle-blowing, an experience his family says compounded an escalating mental illness, never firmly diagnosed, and that plunged him into periods of paranoia and delusion.

 

His treatment, beginning soon after the University of Michigan awarded him a doctorate in 2021, pushed Fishback into the news late that year. This time he was a profile of tragedy — the fatal casualty of what his family and supporters described as a seemingly unresponsive VA, which denied him care as he was shuffled through civilian hospitals and group homes, growing ever more confused and frail while receiving antipsychotic medication against his will, according to medical records.

 

The details of his involuntary care and apparent state and federal inaction during what became an enfeeblement so profound that it turned lethal are under review by the state of Michigan and the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

 

Early this year, after The New York Times Magazine published an investigation into Fishback’s decline and death, Denis McDonough, the VA secretary, conceded in a speech to the American Legion that the department had “failed” to fulfill its responsibilities to the former officer. “We all have to be there for veterans when it matters most, especially in times of crisis,” McDonough said. “We didn’t carefully coordinate our response to his needs across federal, state and county systems.”

Death of Daniel Smith, thought to be the last child of a slave

I rarely have time to summarize an obituary, and I’ve been waiting for weeks to have time to summarize this one.

 

The life of Daniel Smith is important, not just because of the way he lived it, but because it reminds us of what a young country the United States actually is. From 1776 to 2022 is just the span of three long lifetimes.

 

Smith was 90 when he died Oct. 19. His father, Abram Smith, was born into slavery during the Civil War in Virginia and was 70 when his much younger wife, Clara, gave birth to Daniel in 1932. 

 

"While it is impossible to know for certain whether Daniel Smith was the last living child of an enslaved person, historians who have studied his generation say they do not know of any others,” says The New York Times’ obituary.

 

Smith, a retired federal employee, liked to say that he led a quiet, unexciting life. But he also joked that he was a bit like a “Black Forrest Gump”: He attended the March on Washington in 1963; crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965; and stood in the audience to watch Barack Obama take his first oath of office as president in 2009.

 

In 1955, Smith was in his hometown of Winsted, Conn. Flooding killed nearly 100 people throughout Connecticut in the aftermath of Hurricane Diane. The death toll would have been higher were it not for Smith, who rescued a truck driver from the floodwaters, an act of heroism that was documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Hersey, who was covering the storm for The New Yorker.

 

About two years later, Smith found himself in another life-or-death situation while working at a YMCA camp near Winsted. During a trip to a reservoir where he'd once gone swimming, he tried to help a young woman who'd disappeared into the deep water and was pulled out by another swimmer. Smith found that she still had a pulse and began performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A uniformed police officer began ordering him to stop, insisting that the woman was dead.

It was immediately clear, Smith recalled, that the officer was wrong, that she still had a pulse. Yet she was White; he was Black. “This remains the most racist incident I have ever experienced in my life,” he wrote in his memoir, “Son of a Slave,” which was published posthumously on Oct. 29. “To this day, telling this story brings tears to my eyes. To think that someone would rather have anyone die rather than have her White lips touch my Black mouth. Incomprehensible.”

 

Smith is survived by his second wife, Loretta Neumann, a former long-time congressional staffer. I remember her vividly, not least because I made a mistake in describing a bill she was helping to move through the House, in a publication subscribed to by nearly 400 members of Congress.

 

The Times and Washington Post obituaries require a password. Here is one from CBS News and another from France 24, a French TV network.

Gorbachev: Few leaders had 'such a profound effect on their time'

Before resuming the day-to-day of this blog, I want to note the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformer of the Soviet Union, who died Aug. 30 at 91.

 

His rise to power "set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation,” says The New York Times obituary.

"Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain [the political, military, and ideological barrier erected by the Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and seven eastern and central European nations from open contact with the West], decisively altering the political climate of the world,” the Times says.

 

“It would be hard to find a Russian today who would remember him positively, much less in the brave and heroic way in which he is often perceived in the West,” says Serge Schmemann, former Moscow bureau chief for the Times, in a Times opinion article.

 

"To those, like Vladimir Putin, who pine for lost empire, he was the man who destroyed the mighty Soviet state. To liberals, he was the leader who failed to set its successor in the right direction.

 

"But in those first heady days of his leadership, Mr. Gorbachev, who at 54 was decades younger than most of the senile relics around him in the Politburo, was a global rock star. The Soviet Union was near rock bottom. Store shelves were empty, the economy wrung dry by a rapacious military machine. An army of KGB agents and informers brutally crushed any public deviation from the official ideology, in which nobody believed. The outside world was a forbidden dream.

"Yet Mr. Gorbachev was a reformer, not a revolutionary. Only nine months before the Soviet Union was to collapse, he confessed before an audience in Minsk, in what is now Belarus, 'I am not ashamed to say that I am a Communist and adhere to the Communist idea, and with this I will leave for the other world.'

"What he failed to understand — and what his grizzled, ruthless predecessors in the Kremlin knew intuitively — was that to loosen a system built on coercion, power and fear was to destroy it. While Soviet society burst from the restraints of Soviet authoritarianism, Mr. Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the economy foundered on the same rocks as all previous reforms: the privileged, corrupt Communist Party apparat.

"He tried economic shock therapy, then reversed course, then tried force, but it was all too little, too late. Without the cruel glue of repression, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the economy ground to a halt. An attempt by Communist hard-liners to seize power by force in August 1991 was put down by Boris Yeltsin, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would survive only a few months more.

"In retrospect, it is intriguing to question whether things could have gone differently or whether the Soviet Union could have survived had Mr. Gorbachev taken different actions. China, which crushed the liberalizing forces set loose by Mr. Gorbachev in Tiananmen Square, suggests an alternative route.

"Having witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet empire from Moscow and then from Berlin, I find it hard to imagine that an agent of change other than Mr. Gorbachev could have achieved the peaceful dismantling of a system that had all but collapsed. It took a believing Communist to try to change the system from within, but the system was beyond reviving.

"Mr. Gorbachev saw that in his later years. 'The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working, and the crisis in the society became even more acute,' he proclaimed in his resignation speech in December 1991. In the United States, most people thought it was self-evident that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of a totalitarian system would be universally perceived as a positive event. In Russia, though, there were many who deplored the loss of great-power status, a nostalgia that Mr. Putin harnessed to rebuild an authoritarian Kremlin.

"But when I heard of Mr. Gorbachev’s death, what came to my mind first and foremost was that broad smile, that contagious euphoria, that courageous faith in change and those shouts of “Gorby! Gorby!” from people being set free. That is Mikhail Gorbachev’s true legacy.”

 

And at Gorbachev’s funeral on Sept. 3, "the size of the crowds signaled the depth of the regret about the undoing of the freedoms that his tenure initiated,” says another Times article.

 

“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev gave us 30 years of sunlight,” said Maksim, a 20-year-old political science student.

“Unfortunately, this time has passed, and there is no more sun, only darkness,” Maksim said. “But I am deeply grateful to him for these 30 years.”

One dog barking

By John Dineen

 

Too many thoughts to record on the death of basketball great Bill Russell …

I said to Citizen Cartwright after hearing the news, “I knew this day would come, obviously, but I was hoping it wouldn’t.”
.  .  .

I’m not sure why we were Boston Celtics fans in my house when I was young, living in a suburb of New York City. Maybe because they were the Celtics, sporting a shamrock and led by a leprechaun; we were Irish, after all. Maybe because it was no conflict with also wishing the best for the New York Knicks, who, until their own magical rise at the end of the 1960s, traditionally turned the floor of Madison Square Garden into a giant welcome mat for the Celtics — and most everyone else. 

Maybe it was just because those Celtics won, all the time, in the most exciting fashion imaginable: Cousy, Heinsohn, the Joneses, Sam and K.C., and later, Havlicek. Led through it all by Bill Russell and his coach and brother-in-arms, Red Auerbach, to create a sports dynasty like no other. (An aside: We moved to Massachusetts during the Celtics’ reign, and the Knicks later started winning, a disorienting turn of events for me.)

The Celtics won 11 titles in 13 years after Russell arrived, including eight in a row. His acquisition by the Celtics in 1956 is the stuff of legend: To get Russell, they traded their all-star-caliber center and another player to the St. Louis Hawks, who had drafted Russell with the second pick. We then enter the gray area between legend and myth: According to Auerbach, the Celtics ensured that the cash-strapped Rochester Royals would pass on Russell with the first pick by offering Ice Capades dates at their arena; the Celtics owner, Walter Brown, was part owner of the Ice Capades. Neither owner ever confirmed the story.

Russell brought a new athleticism, a new verticality, to basketball — which had been floor-bound — with his shot-blocking, rebounding, and leaping ability. (He had been a high-jumper in college.) He combined his otherworldly physical gifts with a new way of thinking about the game, about ways to make his teammates better and to discourage and intimidate opponents.

That made Russell the ultimate champion: In 21 winner-take-all games across his college, Olympic, and professional careers, his teams were 21-0. The 21st may have been the best: game seven of the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers in the Forum in L.A., balloons suspended in the rafters to be released after the Lakers’ seemingly inevitable victory against an aging Boston team.

All of that would be enough for any sports fan. But with Russell, there was something else: He insisted that the bonds among equals that made his teams great had to extend to life off the court as well. For Russell, his equality, his rights in the larger world were non-negotiable.

He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He joined NFL great Jim Brown and then-Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in support of Muhammad Ali when Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army and was stripped of his boxing title. The passage of time has frozen those events in amber, where we can admire them from a comfortable distance. But they were not popular decisions, and they came with great risks.

For the young sports fan who had been living in a white New York suburb — we were a diverse collection of ethnicities emerging from generations of both subtle and overt discrimination, but, conspicuously, African Americans were not among us — these were a different kind of sports stars. Their willingness to engage the ills of the world beyond sports, their unyielding insistence on their equality and dignity as human beings, changed the way some of us saw both sports and the wider world. It changed our view of what constituted greatness in sports.

Russell did all of that: reaching the pinnacle of achievement in sports, demonstrating that those accomplishments were just one part of life, and doing it with an infectious laugh — his unforgettable cackle — that reminded us how big, how joyous, how brave, a life can be.

 

(One Dog Barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a news and information service.)

More on Bill Russell …

The obituary from the Associated Press

 

AP appreciation: Russell lived a life like very few others

Reactions to Russell's death

A May 1999 appreciation by Bob Ryan, then a columnist and long-time basketball writer with the Boston Globe

As part of its “millennium” series, Sports Illustrated featured Russell on the May 10, 1999, cover with this headline: “The greatest team player on the greatest team ever.” Who are we to argue? The accompanying story by Frank DeFord

An original thinker and compassionate doer

I’ve been planning to write something about the sudden passing of Dr. Paul Farmer on Feb. 21, at 62.

He "devoted his professional life to improving health care in the most destitute corners of the world, a campaign that brought him international renown and was credited with improving if not saving millions of lives,” says The Washington Post obituary.

 

"Sometimes described as a modern-day Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Farmer was a doctor, a humanitarian and, by all accounts, an almost otherworldly force whose aspirations for global public health seemed unattainable until he showed they were within reach,” the Post says. 

 

He was a practitioner of “social medicine,” saying there was no point in treating patients for diseases only to send them back into the desperate circumstances that contributed to them in the first place, says The New York Times obituary. Illness has social roots and must be addressed through social structures, Farmer said.

 

Partners in Health, the global health organization Farmer co-founded in 1987, said Farmer's cause of death was “an acute cardiac event while he was sleeping.”

 

Farmer led Partners in Health’s work in 12 countries, including Haiti, Rwanda, Peru and Sierre Leone, and 18,000 staff. He said PIH had to be “the house of yes,” working with government partners to build wraparound care that met both short- and long-term needs, from cash so patients could buy food, to community health workers, sanitation, hospitals and schools, according to The Guardian's obituary. 

 

Farmer was born in North Adams, Mass., the second of six children. His father was a teacher and his mother worked in a supermarket. 

 

"They were a family of free spirits, encouraged to take risks and follow their dreams, which were all quite different; his younger brother Jeff, for example, became a professional wrestler,” says The Guardian.

 

In addition to his work at Partners in Health, Farmer was chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He wrote a dozen books.

 

He was the subject of a widely read 2003 book by Tracy Kidder, “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.”

 

He also was the subject of a 2017 documentary film titled "Bending the Arc.”

 

Two Farmer quotes:

 

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”

 

“I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.”

 

Here is more:

 

Tracy Kidder in New York Times: 'He Wanted to Make the Whole World His Patient'

Tracy Kidder’s New Yorker profile of Farmer in 2000: ’The Good Doctor’

 

Bill Clinton in Time: 'Paul Farmer Tried to Heal the World’

 

Dr. Ashish Jha in The Atlantic: 'Paul Farmer Invented a New Way of Caring for One Another'

 

NPR: 'With love and tears: My first and last memories of Dr. Paul Farmer'

Remembrances of Farmer on the Partners in Health website

 

WBUR Boston: 'Colleagues and friends remember Paul Farmer, in their own words'

Good-news article: Magawa, the hero rat

The African giant pouched rat sniffed out more than 100 landmines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance in Cambodia over five years, "winning hearts and an international award,” says The New York Times.

 

Magawa, who died of natural causes over the weekend at age eight, was the most successful "HeroRAT" deployed by the Belgian nonprofit APOPO, which works across Southeast Asia and Africa, says Reuters.

 

Magawa’s achievements were honored in 2020 when he was the first rodent to receive a gold medal from the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British nonprofit.

 

Land mines laid in Cambodia during decades of conflict have caused more than 64,000 casualties, according to the HALO Trust, a land mine clearance nonprofit.

Parts of the country have unexploded ordnance dropped in U.S. airstrikes during the Vietnam War, according to a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service.

APOPO’s so-called “HeroRATs” are trained to detect the explosive TNT and can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes. The same work usually would take a person with a metal detector four days.

 

When the rats find a mine, they signal to their handler by scratching at the soil above it. Their light weight means they're able to avoid detonating mines, unlike humans, so there's minimal risk of injury.