Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Gerald Ford

  Gerald Rudolph Ford, an accidental president of the United States, died on December 26th 2007, aged 93

  THERE were many times in his long life when Gerald Ford felt he had reached the top of the tree. The moment when, puffing out his teenage chest, he was made an Eagle Scout after earning 21 badges (Cooking, Camping, Civics, Lifesaving, Bird Study, First Aid). The afternoon when, his big bland face still running with sweat under his leather cap, he was named most valuable player for Michigan against Minnesota in the 1934 football season. The day in 1948 when he beat Bartel Jonkman, darling of the powerful Dutch Calvinist community, to win the Republican primary for the Grand Rapids congressional seat by nearly 10,000 votes; and the morning when, wearing one black shoe and one brown one, he walked down the aisle with Betty Warren, the prettiest single woman in the city.

  The moment he became vice-president of the United States felt somewhat less portentous. Spiro Agnew had resigned in October 1973 after charges of tax evasion; the leaders of Congress had picked Mr Ford to succeed him. There was a telephone call. Mr Ford, after 13 terms as a congressman, had risen to become a popular minority leader in the House, with no ambitions but to be speaker one day if control swung back to the Republicans. Still, as he told Betty, the vice-presidency would make a “nice conclusion” to his career.

  It was not the conclusion. The moment he reached the top came on August 9th 1974, when Richard Nixon, worn down by the Watergate scandal, resigned the presidency. Mr Ford, like the rest of America, watched the broadcast on television. Then he went to bed. “My feeling is you might as well get to sleep,” he said later. After becoming the first unelected vice-president, he was now the first unelected president of the United States. He snored happily on.

  Mr Ford disliked fuss. His philosophy was to put his head down, work “like hell” and not fret about what might have been. His straightness and squareness made him the antithesis of the wriggling, tormented man he replaced. As he made his inaugural speech in the East Room of the White House – “just a little straight talk among friends” – the very flatness of his Michigan vowels, his stumbles over words, his mistiness whenever he talked about prayers, seemed like a gale of fresh air.

  But straightness could also be disconcerting. Americans found that out when, after a month in office, Mr Ford gave Nixon a “full, free and absolute” pardon for anything he might have done while president. All inquiries, charges, rootings through the evidence, rehashings of the past were short-circuited; America would move on. The president’s hordes of critics suspected a deal had been done, and certainly one had been floated by Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig. But Mr Ford had not agreed to it. He had pardoned Nixon – as his speech at the time made clear, and as remarks made public after his death confirmed – both to calm things down, and because he was his friend. Buddies should stick by each other.

  For an average congressman thrust accidentally into power, Mr Ford made a fairly good fist of things. Forces beyond his control helped somewhat. The galloping inflation he inherited was cooled by a mild recession; sky-high energy prices fell gradually of their own accord; Vietnam

  was definitively lost to the Vietcong, and the last American troops had no option but to leave. The post-Watergate Congress swarmed with cocky, virtuous Democrats, but Mr Ford, an instinctive fiscal conservative, managed to veto most of the spending bills he disliked. He also refused – with a certain pleasure, it seemed at the time – to bail out the bankrupt Democratic city of New York.

  He felt proud, looking back, of what he had done to bind up his damaged country. Under him, Nixon’s besieged White House became a relaxed and open place, in which a large loping golden retriever shadowed the large loping president, and the powers assumed by the executive branch began to be scaled back again. America, still outraged by the pardon, did not thank him, ejecting him in 1976 in favour of a Georgia peanut farmer. That hurt; for all his diffidence in coming to the job, Mr Ford had grown to like the life of a president, and so had Betty. But he “wasn’t going to sit and cry about it”. He would smoke his pipe, write his memoirs, and play golf with Bob Hope.

  The curious wondered what made him sovery assured in the top job; for, despite all his tumblings on the ski-slopes or down the steps of Air Force One, assured he was. Mr Ford gave pious credit to his mother, who had made him recite Kipling’s “If” whenever he got in a temper, and whose rule-of-the-house had been “Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.” Cod psychologists noted that Mr Ford revered his paint-seller stepfather and had a soft spot for another Midwestern retailer, Harry Truman; both, perhaps, had inspired him to be decent, conciliatory and industrious.

  He himself, in retirement, was still surprised at what he had done. Oddly, he remarked, he had never felt “more secure, more certain of myself”, than when he was in the White House, at the top of the tree. Some might say that he had never had enough imagination to be scared.

  Antonio Fortich

  Antonio Fortich, fighting bishop of the Philippines, died on July 2nd 2003, aged 89

  The ceremonial opening of the Martial Law Museum in Manila in 1999 was carried out by Antonio Fortich, a bishop in the Roman Catholic church. He was handed wire-cutters and snipped through the barbed wire that was thought more appropriate to the occasion than a ribbon. Those who had suffered under the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos felt that the bishop had done as much as any public figure in the Philippines to oppose the dictatorship. More than that the bishop, known to his supporters as Commander Tony, was still in fighting mood long after Marcos had been deposed. The museum conveyed a “sense

  of horror”, he said, but for millions of people in the Philippines their horrors had not ended when Marcos quit in 1986. The subsequent restoration of democracy had meant little to his own people in Negros.

  Negros is a large island in the southern Philippines. Antonio Fortich was bishop of Bacolod, its main town. Negros has long been the sugar bowl of the country. From an aircraft you can see a vast stretch of green cane that covers much of the land. The United States expanded Negros’s sugar industry when it took possession of the Philippines after defeating Spain in 1898, and it continued to be its main export market after the Philippines gained independence in 1946. The landowning families of Negros, mostly of Spanish stock, became rich, providing welfare for their sugar workers in return for subservience. But America eventually developed its own sugar industry. In the 1980s the price of Philippine sugar crashed.

  The sugar barons were no longer making money, and the welfare system for the workers was collapsing. Hundreds of children were dying of malnutrition. Bishop Fortich said that what was known as tiempo muerto (the dead season, after the sugar has been harvested) had expanded and become tiempo del muerto (a time of death). The island, he believed, could become a “social volcano”.

  The poor in Negros turn to the church or the communists. In its hunt for communists, the army made Negros an area of “low-intensity conflict”. Many communists were killed, but many innocent people died too, either because they were accused of helping the communists or because they were caught in crossfire. Bishop Fortich rushed to a church hall in Negros where 500 villagers were being threatened by army “death squads” and persuaded the soldiers to leave. He once showed reporters a dead sparrow he had found. The bird, he said, was just like any poor citizen caught in the crossfire of contending ideological forces. The bishop had the sparrow stuffed and mounted and kept it on his desk.

  Bishop Fortich said he did not support any ideology. But in the Philippines, as in Latin America, not even a priest can escape politics. For many in authority priests are still considered to be as dangerous as in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Bishop Fortich’s superior, Cardinal Jaime Sin, archbishop of Manila, provides guidelines to his clergy: like the bishop, he thundered in the pulpit against the iniquities of Marcos, but granted him the blessings of the church.

  Bishop Fortich probably stretched the guidelin
es. He spoke against the hanging judges of Manila who called themselves the Guillotine Club. He was one of the first people to alert the government to the activities of timber bandits who had stripped hundreds of acres of forest in Negros. He supported the election of Joseph Estrada as president of the Philippines; it was clear that he was the overwhelming choice of the ordinary people, sick of successive governments being run for the benefit of the rich. He persuaded the president to release 200political prisoners. It was only when it became clear that Mr Estrada had betrayed his supporters by lining his pockets that the bishop withdrew his support.

  In keeping his flock together, he sought to show that the church was a better fighter for their interests than the communists. He said the sugar barons should be more generous to their workers. Cutting sugar cane, swinging a machete all day and loading lorries is a tough job, made worse in the suffocating heat by having to wear thick clothing to provide protection from the sharp leaves. After paying his employer for food a worker might be left with only a few pesos at the end of a month. To tide him over he would get in debt, which would grow year by year.

  Bishop Fortich set up a co-operative composed of small landowners and sugar workers, to show what could be done. He wanted the great sugar estates broken up and land distributed to small farmers, who would grow other crops. The Philippines no longer exports sugar. To satisfy its sweet tooth, most years it imports some, at a price lower than the home-grown cane. The sugar barons accused the bishop of being a traitor to his class: after all, his parents had themselves been landowners in Negros. As a warning, a hand grenade was lobbed into his house in Bacolod.

  He was nominated for a Nobel peace prize, praised by Pope John Paul II, and many of his followers thought of him as a saint. Cardinal Sin said that he was sure that, in heaven, the bishop would “intercede for us”.

  Janet Frame

  Janet Frame, a chronicler of mental turmoil, died on January 29th 2004, aged 79

  “THIS book ... is a work of fiction. None of the characters, including Istina Movet, portrays a living person.” The disclaimer to Janet Frame’s second novel, “Faces in the Water”, published in 1961, fooled no one. Istina Movet was herself in the thinnest disguise, enduring the full barbarities of the treatment of mental illness in New Zealand in the mid-20th century.

  Miss Frame was first institutionalised in 1945, when she was 21. The doctors diagnosed incipient schizophrenia. As she explained it, a great gap had opened up between herself and the world, “drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammer-nosed sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears.” No comforting god appeared to remove “the foreign ideas, the glass beads of fantasy, the bent hair-pins of unreason” embedded in her mind. She needed “treatment” – electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin.

  Every part of this therapy was horrific to her. The sleek, cream-painted machine with its knobs and lights; the smell of methylated spirits, rubbed on her temples so that the shock would take; the grey woollen socks she would compulsively wear on treatment days, “to ward off death”; the stifled, choking cries of other patients; and the shock itself, a trap-door dropping open on darkness. As she came round afterwards, her tears kept falling “in a grief that you cannot name”.

  For almost a decade, Miss Frame moved in and out of institutions. Since electric-shock treatment did little for her, it was decided in 1952 that she needed a lobotomy. She had often seen such patients returning from the hospital, “with plaster over their shaven heads ... and the pupils of their eyes large and dark as if filled with ink.” Now she, too, was to be “changed” into someone biddable and quiet.

  But she had also been writing while in hospital. In the nick of time, “The Lagoon”, a collection of short stories, was published and won New Zealand’s highest literary prize. “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed,” said Seacliff’s chief surgeon. As Miss Frame later agreed, “My writing saved me.”

  It was to go on doing so. “Faces in the Water” was written as a therapeutic exercise on the advice of her psychiatrist at London’s Maudsley hospital, where she admitted herself as an outpatient in 1957. To the end of her life she used writing as therapy, not caring whether she was published. Her autobiography (which was made into the film “An Angel at My Table” in 1990) was meant to set the record straight and show that she was not disturbed. She loathed being labelled a “mad genius”.

  Yet as her fame spread abroad, leading last October to her nomination for the Nobel prize for literature, she admitted that madness was a mantle for her. When her Maudsley doctors had told her that she was not schizophrenic, she remembered wistfully

  how ... I had accepted [my schizophrenia], how in the midst of the agony and terror of the acceptance I found the unexpected warmth, comfort, protection: how I had longed to be rid of the opinion but was unwilling to part with it. And even when I did not wear it openly I always had it by for emergency, to put on quickly, for shelter from the cruel world. And now it was gone ...

  If she was not mad, perhaps her strangeness, shyness and social ineptitude sprang from her background. She was born in Dunedin, in New Zealand’s far south. Her father worked on the railways,and the family moved constantly from small town to small town: Outram, Glenham, Wyndham, Oamaru. They were poor but artistic; her mother, a poet and Christadelphian, encouraged her children to “wondrous contemplation” of stones, stars and words.

  At four, Janet made up her first story. At around that age, too, she had what she described as “my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness”, as she stood on the long white road that ran past the Outram swamp and heard the wind sighing in the telephone wires. Already, “Outside” and “Inside” were in strong conflict in her life. At school, red-haired and gawky, she found her inner world of books taking over the “real” world, “the literature streaming through it like an array of beautiful ribbons through the branches of a green, growing tree.”

  As she grew older, having lost two sisters by drowning, she sought the Inside more and more: in imaginary diaries, in the huts where she hid to write, or in the linen cupboard at Seacliff, with its little dusty window looking over lawns to the sea:

  ... the prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair, violence, death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere.

  Miss Frame came to terms with the world eventually, but never needed its approval. Nor did she lose her restlessness. When she was nominated for the Nobel prize, an honour that did not excite her, she was asked how she would spend the prize money. She said she would use it to buy back New Zealand’s now-privatised railways, the fabric of her tortured past.

  Betty Friedan

  Betty Friedan, campaigner for women’s rights, died on February 4th 2006, aged 85

  ONCE upon a time, behind the door of almost every ranch house on almost every suburban street in America, a beautiful creature could be found. She wore a housecoat, sheer stockings and a turban that kept her hairstyle neat when she was dusting. Rubber gloves preserved her flawless hands as she washed the dishes after breakfast. Her husband’s homecoming was welcomed every day with new recipes from the Ladies’ Home Journal and, after lights out, complaisant sex.

  She had never been to college or, if she had, put her intelligence aside. Her life was to ferry children in the station wagon, make peanut-butter sandwiches, choose new drapes, do the laundry, arrange flowers. At eleven in the morning she would open her enormous refrigerator, cut a slice of pastel-frosted cake and wash down, with coffee, the pills that kept her smiling.

  For almost a decade, in the 1950s, Betty Friedan’s life was much like this. In her rambling house in Grandview-on-the-Hudson, New York, she brought up three children, cooked meals for her theatre-producer husband and “messed about” with home decoration. Obviously, she did not work in the proper sense of the word.
She was a wife and mother and, as a woman, was happy to be nothing else.

  One glance at Mrs Friedan, though, suggested that matters were more complicated. Short, stocky, with an enormous nose and hooded eyes, she was far from the sweet Bambi creature promoted in womens’ magazines. Argument-wise, she could give as good as she got, complete with smashing crockery and the whole gamut of screams. She had majored in psychology and won a research fellowship at Berkeley, though she gave it up when her boyfriend felt overshadowed. At college she had gone, dressed in twinset and pearls, to a squalid New York office to try to join the Communist Party. For years she had been a left-wing journalist, writing about race and sex discrimination for union news-sheets, and she had fearlessly gone on working after marriage until, on her second pregnancy, she had been fired in favour of a man.

  In Grandview-on-the-Hudson, her radicalism buried, Mrs Friedan asked: “Is this all?” Despite her education she was doing no better than her mother, whose misery had filled their nice house in Peoria with temper and recrimination. Her father, once a button-hawker, had risen to own a jeweller’s shop; her mother’s creativity began and ended at the front yard. Most women, Mrs Friedan believed, felt the same. In 1957 she surveyed 200 classmates from Smith College, now housewives, most desperate; but when she catalogued their despair in an article, no women’s magazine would publish it. Mrs Friedan determined to write a book, and in 1963 threw a firebomb into American society whose effects are still reverberating.