Thanksgiving is in the books, the tryptophan has worn off, and you have apparently nothing to do in your life but read this rag. Look at it this way, it is less time you are spending internet shopping the endless stream of Black Friday sales that now span some two months. So you’re actually saving money by dithering away your time on this dreck. This one is long. Enjoy.
A lot of luminaries departed for the hereinafter this month but to me the big loss was that of Shane MacGowan, dying at 65, which in itself is a marvel of human longevity against all odds. The lead singer of the Pogues (originally the Pogue Mahones (a corruption of Pog mo thoin) meaning “Kiss my ass in Gaelic which the record company had them shorten to the Pogues) started drinking at age five when he was given Guinness at night to help him sleep. He went on to ingest pretty much anything that could be found. Sinead O’Connor wrote that she was once in a psychiatric hospital locked in a ward “where there is more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan’s dressing room.” MacGowan himself was quoted as saying that “self-abuse, or whatever you wanna call it, is also incredibly creative.” O’Connor, not herself a goody-two-shoes, once called the police to inform them that MacGowan was in possession of heroin. He was not happy with her about that but did kick the heroin habit due to her intervention. they remained life-long soulmates. MacGowan was a literate and a gifted songwriter who was ignited by punk music, performing in a band, the Nipple Erectors. When punk began to wane, he got the idea to forge punk with traditional Irish music and the Pogues were born. He once said that he “was ashamed that he didn’t have the guts to join the IRA- and the Pogues was my way of overcoming that.” Michael Wilson of the New York Times said it better than I ever could when he wrote that MacGowan “left behind a body of work without precedent or peer, merging traditional Irish music and punk rock that could be overheated and sublime, jaded and big hearted, earthy and wistful.” I never really understand what some of those words mean but they sound damned good. The album “If I Could Fall From Grace With God,” is a tour de force. I first heard it at my cousin Dave’s house. The Christmas classic (at least in some circles) “Fairytale of New York,” is an ode to love, New York and Christmas. Only an Irish love song could contain the line: “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, Happy Christmas your ass, I thank God it’s our last.” MacGowan defended the use of the worked faggot saying that it made the character more authentic. The line was sung by the great Kirsty MacColl (who died in a boating accident in December 2000) who was then married to the album’s producer Steve Lillywhite. MacGowan’s self-abuse, however, caused him to be thrown out of his own band because he would miss gigs and fall-down drunk when he did show. He did rejoin the band for reunion tours. He recorded two albums as Shane MacGowan and the Popes and “Crock of Gold” is also brilliant. Upon his death, Michael Higgins, the Irish President, wrote ‘[h]is words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history… The genius of Shane’s contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams – of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing sides of life that so many turn away from.” I’ll leave it there.
Speaking of people who would not turn away from seeing sides of life that others chose to dismiss, the First Lady Rosalyn Carter died this month at 96. She was an amazing woman who, while she raised the profile of First Lady’s, by doing such things as attending Cabinet meetings, which at the time was viewed as blasphemous, she knew not to upstage her husband. President Carter has been in hospice for about 37 years. She was in and out in two days. She knew how to get it done. She and her husband have had an amazing life just doing good. Her husband was a bright guy who just didn’t’ know how to navigate the politics of Washington but he was true to himself and she was right there by his side as an equal partner the entire time, even if at times he had lust in his heart for others. Who amongst us… Who also isn’t envious of what they had. They go back quite a ways. Jimmy Carter’s mother helped deliver the future First Lady and a few days later took her son Jimmy to see the new kid in town. Mrs. Carter’s playmate as a youth was Jimmy’s younger sister Ruth and the two would plot ways to get her older brother to notice her. He eventually did and the couple were married for 77 years. Mrs. Carter had an incredible work ethic and shared her husband’s passion for human rights and she could wield a mean hammer in support of Habitat for Humanity, for which they were pretty much the highest profile volunteers. Their work was not just for photo shoots. They would spend weeks working for the charity building homes. Her real cause, long before it became in vogue, was mental health. She worked at destigmatizing it and lobbying for assistance in the field for years. When her husband left the Navy and informed her that they were returning to Plains so that he could run the family business, she was inconsolable. She didn’t want the small-town life and she said the argument over that was the worst they ever had. She eventually got out and all the way to the White House. While her husband claimed not to get the politics (and he was right), she said it was in her DNA and she often dealt with that part of his career. Her handwriting was all over his speeches and when he gave his blunderous speech about turning down the thermostats (65 during the day and 55 at night), which he did at the White House, she begged him to turn up the heat but he froze her out. Once he made up his mind, there was no way to change it, she said. When her husband was the Georgia Governor, Mary Prince, a woman from prison work-release serving time for murder, got assigned to the staff at the Governor’s mansion. The Carters took a liking to her, believed she was wrongly convicted, assigned her to be the nanny to their daughter Amy and when they went to the White House they asked her to come with them. In order to get that done, the President had to be appointed as her parole officer. She was eventually pardoned but it illustrates their belief in people regardless of their circumstances. Mrs. Carter once told the New York Times: “I’m not doing what I’m doing for people to write about it. I’m doing it for the people I can help. And I really believe that I can help.” That sums up a truly great life and one I wish today’s elected officials would follow.
While I am on the subject of great ladies, Maryanne Trump Barry died at 86. Unlike her better known, younger brother, she was the standard for style and elegance. She was a great judge who ruled with legal acumen and commons sense. It’s a shame that most of the obits focus on the fact that she resigned from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals due to Trump family finances and was captured on tape trashing her brother. She was always a person who spoke what she thought whether it would be received well or not. She was a champion of woman’s rights but didn’t buy into all the political correctness. She wanted people, women especially, to suck it up as I am sure she had done. I am told that when interviewing clerks she would occasionally light up a cigarette to see how they would react. She was also a fan of the Rob Roy and didn’t mince words. She would have made a great Attorney General. She went to law school after raising her son and became a federal prosecutor before getting on the bench. She became the highest ranking woman in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey at the time. I am sure her brother’s contacts (he was then just a loud-mouthed real estate entrepreneur) assisted her in gaining her judgeship but no one gets on the federal bench without help. The true test is how they comport themselves once they get the gig and she acquitted herself admirably. She worked hard at her craft. While at the prosecutor’s Office she met and married John Barry who was a brilliant attorney. Their marriage was great and she took a big hit when he died. In a speech before the Federal Bar, she talked about their marriage and it sounded like the Carter’s with an edge. She eventually was elevated to the Third Circuit but I think part of her missed the interaction with attorneys at the trial court level. Having appeared before her with some regularity, I can say she was a pleasure to be before. She wasn’t one to go in unprepared before. She didn’t suffer fools or unprepared attorneys. She understood the majesty of the Court but could mix it up with the best of them, keeping Bruce Cutler in order when he tried a case before her. She was a joy of a person, much unlike her brother, and she will be missed by federal practitioners.
Henry Kissinger died at 100. People are generally of two minds about him; some seeing him as a great statesman and others as a war criminal. I am firmly in the former camp. I believe we need diplomats like him today. He didn’t always get it right but he always got it. The only person to ever serve as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time, he had his hand in national diplomacy for over 50 years, advising a dozen presidents from Kennedy to Biden. He was the force behind opening up China and forcing détente with Russia. He negotiated America out of the Vietnam War and received the Nobel Peace prize for his work which was very controversial as was much of what he did; as is most of what diplomats do. North Vietnam’s President Le Duc Tho was also awarded the prize but he turned it down. Two years later, after the fall of Saigon, Kissinger offered to return the award but his offer was declined. He donated the money he received for the award to the children of American servicemen killed or missing in action in the war. He is blamed for the carpet bombing of Cambodia which violated international law and killed some 50,000 Cambodian civilians. He explained this by saying that he had only bad choices to choose from which was most probably true. According to Condoleeza Rice, “Henry Kissinger was a towering world figure, a strategic thinker and easily one of the most influential Secretaries of State in American history.… Henry never stopped learning, never stopped thinking, and never stopped looking for answers to the world’s hard problems.” I have some stories about him from when he was in residence at the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills but I think it’s better I leave you with Secretary Rice’s comments. I’ll just say that Kissinger had no peer.
Okay, I coached little league baseball for a time and while I had a few good players who cared about the game, most of my players were there because their parents signed them up and they thought that playing the field was more about daydreaming than watching the play evolve at the plate. We lost far more games than we won but my job as their coach was to say something good about each of them after every game and never criticize their effort, even if no effort was expended. That is because, I was told and I believe, that the measure of a little league coach and all coaches of youth sports, is not your won-loss record, but whether your kids come back to play next season. Youth sports should be fun and not competitive. Get kids involved, let them check out the game, and if they take to it, start teaching them the basics of the sport so they can become proficient. At some point, however, fun turns into competition and coaching becomes more about winning than having fun. Thus, by the time kids go to high school and try out for competitive teams, and certainly in college, (especially D-1 where kids can dream about the pros), you don’t want some mamby-pamby coach who coddles kids and doesn’t push them to the outer limits of their abilities. You want someone who will challenge them to be the best and, at times, get in their face if they are not reaching their potential. That environment is not for everyone and certainly not for me but that is why I am writing this refuse and not playing professional sports for millions of dollars. Great coaches challenge their kids. Coach K, Nick Saban, Woody Hayes, Pat Summit and Bobby Hurley, Sr. None of these coaches were coddlers and some took it to extremes and went too far. All of them, though, got the best out of their players. As Coach Lombardi famously said; in sports “winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.” One of the true subscribers of that edict, Bobby Knight, died this month at 83. You can say a lot about Coach Knight and I will touch on some of the good and bad, but he won. Three national titles at Indiana where basketball is more a religious experience than it is a sport. And perhaps the most impressive thing about his kids is that they went to class. They were in school and school is where Knight believed they should be. Then on the Court.
I believe, and I am probably in the minority here, that if you want to be the best you can be at something, it is hard work and you need to be pushed. Coach Knight pushed. Now I would not subject myself to that sort of treatment, but as I said, I wallow in mediocrity. Great leaders push their people and that means having uncomfortable moments with them. Buddy Rich is to me the greatest drummer who ever picked up a pair of sticks. He was also an incredible bandleader but if you were in his band, you had better have tough skin. He would often take the band back to the bus during breaks and lace into them. His rants are well-known among musicians. Many were shocked at his rants, but to me, that only made him more impressive a craftsman. Coach K did not take poor playing well and those who are old enough, remember Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, famously punching Clemson’s Charlie Bauman after he intercepted the football in the 1978 Gator Bowl. That punch cost Hayes his job. I am not condoning this behavior and certainly great coaches, say, John Wooden, would never engage in such conduct, but many do and many find that a motivator. Obviously, given today’s atmosphere, the thought of berating a player for poor play could get a coach fired, although being a winning coach covers up a lot of bad behavior. My point is that if you want to be the very best at what you do, especially in sports, a gentle person may not be the guy or gal to get you there. If I want to be great, Mr. Rogers ain’t gonna be my coach because the playing of big-time sports, is not like being in someone’s neighborhood.
Which brings us to coach Knight. He is on everybody’s list of the greatest coaches, if not on their list of greatest human beings. In his career, he won 903 games, three National Championships, was coach of the year 12 times, one more time than his team won the Big Ten championship, and an Olympic gold Medalist. He coached Indiana for 29 years. In 1975-76, his team went a perfect 32-0. Coupled with the prior year, his team went 64-1. He didn’t get there by being a pussycat. Todd Jadlow was a forward who played for Knight in Indiana. He has told of Knight breaking a clipboard over his head, squeezing his testicles and making the players run laps while they barked like dogs. All that said, Jadlow told ESPN that “I still have a lot of respect for him and look at him as a father figure.” Many of his players went on to get careers and have talked about their love-hate relationship with him. He was a perfectionist with a temper. He was also philanthropic and fiercely loyal to his players. As time went on, however, players left the program because of the demands he placed on them and his manner of treatment. Kids today are not the kids of yesterday. In a game against Purdue, he hurled a chair across the court after being called for a technical foul. While coaching the American team in the Pan American games in Puerto Rico, he was thrown out of the first game for arguing with a referee and later got into a fight with a security guard and, although many who saw it said that the guard was at fault, Knight was arrested and charged with assault. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to six months in jail. Puerto Rico attempted to have him extradited to serve his sentence but the Governor of Indiana refused to sign the extradition papers. He was still chosen to coach the Olympic basketball team after that incident. What got him fired at Indiana was a tape of him grabbing a player and seemingly choking him. After a suspension, he was told any similar activity would get him fired. A few months later a student yelled at him “what’s up Knight,” and he apparently grabbed the kid and admonished him for knot calling him Coach. The kid could have called him unemployed because that is what the coach was after that. Knight did not return to Indiana for 20 years. He later coached at Texas Tech for six and a half years, taking the Red Raiders to three NCAA tournaments. By today’s standards Knight looks like an ogre but in the time when he coached, he was close to being a god in Indiana. Times changed and Knight refused to change with them because he believed in getting the best out of his players by getting in their faces. You can quibble with the tactics but not the results. Knight was uncompromising and preferred it that way. For me, I have to respect that.
Most people know Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, as the man behind Berkshire Hathaway (BH). Far fewer knew Charlie Munger who was really the engine that drove the investment vehicle. Munger died this month at 99. While Buffett started with an investment strategy of buying mediocre companies at cheap prices (of which BH itself was one), Munger taught him that it was better to buy great companies at mediocre prices. Together they built BH into a financial powerhouse. Munger acted as Buffett’s consigliore and according to Buffett, BH was built to Munger’s blueprint. Munger had an interesting life before BH. He was born in Omaha and at one point in his young life worked in Buffett’s grandfather’s grocery store. He studied mathematics in college but left to enlist in the Army during WWII. After his service, he, as the son of a lawyer, (and claiming to have a black belt in chutzpah) talked a Harvard Law School dean into admitting him to the school without a college degree. He graduated magna cum laude and passed up practicing with his father in Omaha for setting up a practice in Southern California. Munger, Tolles and Olsen is today a 200 lawyer firm. When his son died at nine of leukemia, he reassessed and realized that he would rather be one of his rich clients than be their lawyer. Using his math skills, he began investing and made millions. Although he knew of Buffett, he didn’t cross paths with him until 1959. When they met, there was an instant connection. According to Buffett’s first wife, “I think Warren felt Charlie was the smartest person he’d ever met and I think Charlie felt Warren was the smartest person he had ever met.” The two became inseparable talking on the phone for hours. Charlie from Los Angeles and Warren in Omaha. They soon joined forces and BH became a financial juggernaut. A $1,000 investment in BH in 1965 would be worth about $11 Million today. I know that sounds great but who had $1,000 in 1965? I had about $1.50. Anyway, suffice it to say Munger and Buffett did pretty well. While Munger was the architect of BH (Buffett said he was more the general contractor) Munger let Buffett take the lead and said little. In his private life, however, he was the talker and had a great sense of humor. When asked who in his life he felt the most grateful to he said it was his wife’s first husband. “I had the ungrudging love of this magnificent woman for 60 years simply by being a somewhat less awful husband than he was.” In the end, though, Munger goes out with the same amount of riches as a pauper because we haven’t yet figured out how to bring it with us. His heirs, though, are more well taken care of.
Drummers took it on the chin this month with George Brown, the drummer for Kool and the Gang passing at 74 and Aaron Spears, who drummed for the likes of Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande and Usher died at 47. Brown was a founding member of Kool and the Gang, with friends from Lincoln High School in Jersey City, helping to make what he described as the “sounds of happiness.” Like me, he saved up money from his paper route to buy his first set of drums and used the Buddy Rich rudiment book to learn the craft. Unlike me, he became a successful musician. Mr. Spears was one of those drummers who seemed to play with everyone so you have heard him you just didn’t know who he was. He came on people’s radar with a performance he did at a Modern Drummer festival which can be seen here. Steve Gadd would be proud.
I’ll be short here. Jeanne Knight, whose one hit, Mr. Big Stuff, for Stax records, died at 80. That was a great tune.
Astronauts didn’t do too well either in November. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, which was the first spacecraft to orbit the moon, died at 95. He also commanded an earlier space exploration craft, Gemini 7. That craft successfully docked with Gemini 6A which was a maneuver that was to be needed in order to successfully land a man on the moon. Prior to just sitting back in a capsule as an astronaut, he was an Air Force fighter pilot which is where real pilots cut their teeth. He was known for his cat-like reflexes and split-second decision making. He earned his pilot’s license at 15 and attended West Point. The astronauts on his Appollo mission took turns reading passages from the Book of Genisis. He ended the telecast with “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.” At the end of a tumultuous 1968, the broadcast was a soothing and sobering message to the Country. That mission also sent us back the famous picture, known as Earthrise, which captured the earth rising over the moon. It was shot by William Anders. The Appollo 8 astronauts were named Time Magazine’s men of the year. After retiring, Borman ran Eastern Airlines which didn’t fly as well as his space missions did. All-in-all, pretty spectacular. Kenn Mattingly, who was bumped from the Apollo 13 mission that almost didn’t get back to earth, died at 87. It was exposure to the German Measles that kept him grounded on the flight where an oxygen tank exploded while the ship was 200,000 miles from earth; never a good thing. Mattingly played a key role in devising the plan that got his fellow astronauts back to earth in one piece. He later orbited the moon and piloted two shuttle missions. It will be his non-flight on Apollo 13, however, that will define his life. He always said, that all things being equal, he would have preferred to have been on the flight than not. Given how instrumental he was in planning the successful return, things worked out pretty well for everyone.
There is no way in the world you would get me to bungee jump. Not even out of a two story window. David Kirke, the person generally acknowledged to be the first person to actually bungee jump, died a natural death in spite of his penchant for daredevil acts, at the ripe old age of 78 which, as I get older, doesn’t seem as though it’s a ripe old age at all. Perhaps I should reserve the “ripe-old” appellation for those in three digits like Kissinger. Now I suspect it’s pretty scary to bungee jump but you can be relatively assured you will survive regardless of how harrowing the flight. Kirke, on the other hand, didn’t have such assurances when he made his maiden voyage. He nevertheless took the plunge as they say. Kirke was the founder of the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford University. Among some of the club’s pursuits was skateboarding at the running of the bulls in Pamplona, careening down a ski slope on a carousel horse, and heading down the slopes of Saint-Moritz on a grand piano. Attempting to cross the English Channel using a cluster of balloons netted him a conviction for flying without a license. It wasn’t all fund-and-games, however, as in one stunt that Kirk was not a part of, a 19 year-old biochemistry student agreed to be launched from a trebuchet (a form of catapult) but missed the net and died. The two other club members who launched him were charged with manslaughter but later acquitted. According to Kirke, “it was an extraordinary test case about the right to experiment, at personal risk, verses social responsibility.” But it was the bungee jumping, however, that garnered him the most acclaim. On the morning of April Fools day, 1979, he and two friends jumped from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK. The police had been tipped off and showed up when the jump was supposed to occur. Our intrepid heroes were late because they had been out late drinking the night before and were hung-over and moving slowly. The cops left the bridge before Kirke and his companions showed up. Kirke told the Bristol Post, “we hadn’t tested it or anything like that. We were called the Dangerous Sports Club and testing it wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous.” He did have some comfort in that one of his fellow jumpers went on to be the head of development at NASA. That said, though, his companions waited for Kirke to jump and survive before they joined him. “When the other guys came down, I thought, Whoopee, nobody’s dead.” By the time of the jump, the police had returned and they were all arrested. In a sort of Alice’s Restaurant scenario, the cops gave them the half-emptied bottles of red wine they showed up at the jump site with and the party continued at the jail. The group later jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and the sport took off from there. In summing it all up, Kirke said “it was a sort of casual, easy going recklessness. American novelists would call it the insouciance of youth, but there it was.” We need more of that.
Okay, it is late and this has been long. Next month has already started as Sandra Day O’Connor has died today; but more about that next month. Cheers.
Thank you for your wonderful write-up of Judge Barry, which gives us a great sense of who she was as a person and as a judge. When I interned in the U.S. Attorney's Office the summer after my 1L year (when you were overseeing the program), Judge Barry met with a few of us interns in her chambers, and she was delightful. May she rest in peace.