David Souter, 85, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice who dismayed Republicans by siding with liberals on some of America’s most contentious social issues after his appointment by President George H.W. Bush, died peacefully at his home Thursday in New Hampshire, the court said in a statement released Friday. The statement didn’t give a cause of death.
Known for his Spartan lifestyle, aversion to technology and dislike of Washington, D.C., Souter served on the Supreme Court for 19 years before stepping down at the relatively young age of 69 to return to his native New Hampshire in 2009.
As a justice, he supported gay and abortion rights, limits on government support for religion and restrictions on the death penalty, making him one of the court’s most liberal members. Activists on the right who were disappointed with his votes made “no more Souters” their rallying cry for future nominees, demanding a paper trail that documented conservative judicial instincts.
Richard “Dick” Crews, 89, a sports pioneer who was the first Black player on the University of Washington men’s basketball team, died early Monday morning in hospice after battling with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Crews, a 5-foot-11 point guard, made history 70 years ago when he integrated a UW team coached by Tippy Dye in 1955.
In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story published in 2004, Crews said Dye received pressure to kick him off and keep him on the team. “He said he wasn’t going to keep me on the team, and [Garfield High boys basketball coach] Bob Tate asked him, ‘Why wouldn’t you keep him? He’s one of your best players,’ ” Crews recalls. “He said, ‘There’s some alums who don’t want to see him represent the university.’
“People lobbied him and he gave in.”
Crews finished his collegiate career in the starting lineup while averaging 5 points and 3.2 rebounds — personal bests. During three seasons (1955-58), he appeared in 65 games and averaged 3.4 points on 30.8% shooting and 2.5 rebounds.
Ruth A. Davis, 81, who grew up in the segregated South and rose through the Foreign Service to become the first Black woman to lead its training and personnel operations and achieve the rank of career ambassador, the highest for diplomats, died May 3 at a hospital in Washington, D.C. The cause was pneumonia, and she also had multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, said her sister, Eugenia Davis Clements.
Davis, who had grown up in Atlanta in the 1940s and ’50s, said her ambitions were forged by the “scars of segregation and discrimination” as well as the glimmers of hope in newly independent African countries in the 1960s. Initially aspiring to a career in social work, she returned from studying overseas determined “to be on the ground in Africa as the nation-building process began,” she told an interviewer with the American Foreign Service Association. “What better way to do this than as a U.S. diplomat?”
As consul general in Barcelona, Spain, from 1987 to 1991, Davis helped plan U.S. participation in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and lobby successfully for the 1996 Games in Atlanta. Her work in Spain was followed by stints as ambassador to the small and newly democratic West African nation of Benin and as principal deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs. From 1997 to 2001, Davis was the first African American director of the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s chief language and training school just across the Potomac River in Virginia, where she helped create the School of Leadership and Management. Davis, who received a blizzard of professional honors, was promoted to career ambassador in 2002. She retired in 2009 as senior adviser in the Bureau of African Affairs.
Joe Louis Walker, 75, a raspy-voiced singer and guitarist who took an expansive approach to the blues, recording gritty, down-home albums as well as acclaimed records incorporating gospel, soul, jazz and rock, died April 30 at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The cause was a cardiac-related illness.
Walker liked to say that he grew up in “guitar heaven,” getting a musical education in 1960s San Francisco while listening to his parents’ collection of 78-rpm blues records, singing in a choir at his grandmother’s church, and going to rock and blues concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium.
Before long, Walker was hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and opening for musicians including Thelonious Monk, the jazz pianist, and Muddy Waters, who introduced him to a slower form of the Chicago blues. He also found a teacher and roommate in guitarist Mike Bloomfield, a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who steered Walker toward gigs and auditions, critiqued his playing after shows, and taught him different tunings.
Walker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.
Warren I. Cohen, 90, a preeminent scholar of U.S. diplomatic history who illuminated in erudite yet accessible works the complex, evolving American relationship with China and the rest of Asia, died April 30 at a hospital in Washington, D.C. The cause was aspiration pneumonia.
In an academic environment in which many professors hone narrowly defined areas of expertise, he demonstrated — with his dozen or more books exploring Cold War history as well as U.S.-Asian relations — the enduring value of a generalist.
Cohen was most known for his scholarship on China. His book “America’s Response to China” has been perhaps the most widely used textbook on U.S.-Chinese relations since its publication in 1971, the year national security adviser Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing. He was sought after also for his analysis of diplomatic ties with Asian countries beyond China. In another widely read book, “East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engagement With the World” (2000), he examined international relations from the perspective of China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia.
Cohen was for years a professor at Michigan State University before moving in 1993 to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to be nearer to his wife, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, a noted scholar of U.S.-China relations and a professor at Georgetown University. They were fixtures of the foreign policy community in Washington, D.C. — a “Cold War history love story,” as John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale University historian regarded as a foremost scholar of that era, reflected in an interview.
Robert A.G. Monks, 91, a lawyer and businessman from a prominent Massachusetts family who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate three times but found a calling in his 40s as an influential defender of shareholder rights, died April 29 at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The cause was pancreatic cancer.
While campaigning during a Republican primary there in 1972, he noticed “big, slick bubbles of industrial discharge” in a river, Monks wrote in an unpublished memoir. That and other signs of pollution made him wonder how corporate behavior could be better controlled. His answer was to persuade shareholders to assert their ownership rights by pressuring corporate executives to act more responsibly toward society at large. This epiphany, as he described it, ultimately gave him the sense of purpose and direction he had been seeking.
Eve Kugler, 94, a German-born Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as a 10-year-old child to the United States, when by chance another child fell ill and couldn’t use her ticket, passing her the spot, died April 23 at a hospital in London. The cause was cancer.
Throughout her life, Kugler said, “the guilt I felt for securing a place of safety at the expense of a sick child never left me.”
First in the United States, and later in her adopted home of England, Kugler became a devoted memory-keeper for the victims of the Holocaust, speaking indefatigably to schoolchildren, traveling with students and others to Nazi concentration camps, and offering herself as a living witness to the dangers of ethnic, religious and racial hatred.
Julia Parsons, 104, a U.S. Navy code breaker during World War II who was among the last survivors of a top-secret team of women that unscrambled messages to and from German U-boats, died on April 18 in Aspinwall, Pa.
A lover of puzzles and crosswords while growing up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, Parsons deciphered German military messages that had been created by an Enigma machine, a typewriter-size device with a keyboard wired to internal rotors, which generated millions of codes. Her efforts provided Allied forces with information critical to evading, attacking and sinking enemy submarines.
Bill Aitken, 90, a self-described “founding father of the hippies” who hitchhiked from England to India in 1959 and became a literary guru for generations of wanderers with books that explored the subcontinent’s rivers and railways and the spiritual quest that shaped his life, died April 16 at a hospital in Dehradun, India. Aitken’s death, from injuries suffered in a fall at his home in the shadow of the Himalayas, was confirmed by Karan Madhok, editor of the Chakkar, an Indian arts journal.
His more than a dozen books — mixing travelogue, history, and doses of his dry wit and self-reflection — became staples in the contemporary Western syllabus of Indian adventures. Yet the Scottish-born Aitken was also widely celebrated in India’s literary circles as among the European writers who strove to see poetry in something as simple as a little-used rail spur or as grand as a mountain vista.