4 Years ago: the world lost a great Historian

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr:Sir, it has been a major honor to read your historical books. You were one of my favorite presidential historians, thanks for the wonderful books that you have written and enlighten me to become a presidential historian myself, remembering you 4 years later, may you rest in peace!



Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian whose more than 20 books shaped discussions for two generations about America’s past, and who himself was a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan, most notably while serving in the Kennedy White House, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 89.

His death, at New York Downtown Hospital, was caused by a heart attack he suffered earlier during a family dinner at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse, his son Stephen said.Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He argued that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history.

The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy, for the president’s use in writing his history, became, after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, grist for Mr. Schlesinger’s own account, “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” It won both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.

His 1978 book on the president’s brother, “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” lauded the subject as the most politically creative man of his time. But he acknowledged that Robert had played a larger role in trying to overthrow President Fidel Castro of Cuba than Mr. Schlesinger had acknowledged in “A Thousand Days.”

Mr. Schlesinger worked on both brothers’ presidential campaigns, and some critics suggested he had trouble separating history from sentiment. Gore Vidal called “A Thousand Days” a political novel, and many noted that the book ignored the president’s sexual wanderings. Others were unhappy that he told so much, particularly in asserting that the president had been unhappy with his secretary of state, Dean Rusk.

Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he could not stroll down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.

“He is willing to argue that the search for an understanding of the past is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a path to the understanding of our own time,” Alan Brinkley, the historian, wrote.

Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. He was a lifelong aficionado of perfectly blended martinis. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist. In New York, he was a man about town, whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.

In the McCarthy era and beyond, he was a leader of anti-Communist liberals and a fierce partisan. He called for the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, which never happened, and just as passionately denounced that of President Bill Clinton, when it did.

In his last book, “War and the American Presidency,” published in 2004, Mr. Schlesinger challenged the foundations of the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, calling the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath “a ghastly mess.” He said the president’s curbs on civil liberties would have the same result as similar actions throughout American history.

“We hate ourselves in the morning,” he wrote.

However liberal, he was not a slave to what came to be called political correctness. He spiritedly defended the old-fashioned American melting pot against proponents of multiculturalism, the idea that ethnicities should retain separate identities and even celebrate them. He elicited tides of criticism by comparing Afrocentrism to the Ku Klux Klan.

History and its telling, quite literally, ran in Mr. Schlesinger’s blood. One of his reputed ancestors was George Bancroft, who over 40 years starting in 1834 wrote the monumental 12-volume “History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent.” His father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, was an immensely influential historian who led the way in making social history a genuine discipline.

In his early teens, the son changed his middle name from Bancroft to Meier, his father’s middle name, and began calling himself junior. He would later adopt and develop many of his father’s ideas about history, including the theory that history moves in cycles from liberal to conservative periods. His father gave him the idea for his Harvard honors thesis.

But the younger Mr. Schlesinger, for all the tradition he embodied, had a refreshing streak of informality. While working in the Kennedy White House, he found time to review movies for Show magazine. He also admitted his mistakes. One, he said, was neglecting to mention President Jackson’s brutal treatment of the Indians in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Age of Jackson.” It was published when he was 27, and is still standard reading.

The book rejected earlier interpretations linking the rise of Jacksonian democracy with westward expansion. Instead, it gave greater importance to a coalition of intellectuals and workers in the Northeast who were determined to check the growing power of business.

The book sold more than 90,000 copies in its first year and won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for history.

His multivolume history of the New Deal, “The Age of Roosevelt,” began in 1957 with “The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933,” continued in 1959 with “The Coming of the New Deal” and culminated in 1960 with “The Politics of Upheaval.” The first volume won two prestigious awards for history-writing, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Frederic Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. The book was praised for capturing the interplay between ideas and action, stressing tensions similar to those Mr. Schlesinger had described in the Jackson era.

“This book clearly launches one of the important historical enterprises of our time,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Saturday Review.

Mr. Schlesinger never stopped seeming like the brightest student in every class, “the eternal Quiz Kid,” in Time magazine’s phrase. He had no advanced degrees, but his scholarly output, not to mention reams of articles for popular publications like TV Guide and Ladies Home Journal, dwarfed those who did. Even as a child he felt a duty to manage conversations, not to say monopolize them.

An article in The New York Times magazine in 1965 told of his mother asking him to be quiet so she could make her point.

“Mother, how can I be quiet if you insist upon making statements that are not factually accurate,” the boy, then 11 or 12, replied.

Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 15, 1917, the elder of the two sons of Arthur Meier Schlesinger and the former Elizabeth Bancroft. The younger Mr. Schlesinger wrote approvingly that Bancroft the historian, who may have been his distant cousin, was a presidential ghostwriter and bon vivant in addition to being called the father of American history.

It was his father whom “young Arthur,” as he was known, idolized. His argument that urban labor was behind much of the upheaval in Jackson’s time was taken up and brilliantly expanded by his son.

The younger Schlesinger, in the first volume of his memoirs, “A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950” (2000), called his childhood “sunny.” He spent his earliest years in Iowa City, where his father was on the faculty of the University of Iowa. The family moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1924, when his father was appointed to the Harvard faculty. Arthur Sr. later became chairman of the Harvard history department.

Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a civics teacher informed Arthur’s class that inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

He graduated at 15, but the family felt he was too young to go to Harvard. So, while his father was on sabbatical, the whole family took a long trip around the world. Mr. Schlesinger then went on to Harvard and graduated summa cum laude.

Beginning in boyhood he socialized with his father’s intellectually powerful friends, from the humorist James Thurber to the novelist John Dos Pasos. When he was 14, he met H. L. Mencken, and later corresponded with him. At Harvard, he became friendly with such leading intellectual lights as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

Mr. Schlesinger later became part of the powerful circle surrounding the journalist Joseph Alsop, a group that included Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, W. Averell Harriman, former governor of New York, and the lawyer Clark Clifford. Mr. Schlesinger met Mr. Kennedy, then a senator, at an Alsop soiree. His impression: “Kennedy seemed very sincere and not unintelligent, but kind of on the conservative side.”

Mr. Schlesinger, partly through his appreciation of history, fully realized his good fortune. “I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people,” he wrote.

A huge part of his luck was his father, who guided much of his early research. The elder Arthur suggested the topic for his senior honors: Orestes A. Brownson, a 19th-century journalist, novelist and theologian. It was published by Little, Brown in 1938. Henry Steele Commager in The New York Times Book Review, said the book introduced “a new and distinguished talent in the field of historical portraiture.”

Mr. Schlesinger spent a year in England on a fellowship at Peterhouse College of Cambridge University, then returned to Harvard, where he had been selected to be one of the first crop of Junior Fellows. Their research was supported for three years, but they were not allowed to pursue Ph.D.’s, a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill.

While a fellow, Mr. Schlesinger married Marian Cannon, whom he had met during his junior year at Harvard. Her sister was married to John King Fairbank, the eminent sinologist. The Schlesingers had twins, Stephen and Katharine, and two more children, Christina and Andrew. They were divorced in 1970.

He married Alexandra Emmet the next year. They had a boy, Robert, named for Robert F. Kennedy. She had a son from a previous marriage, Peter Allan. Stephen and Andrew Schlesinger are editing their father’s journals from 1952 to 1998 and plan to publish them in the fall.As a Harvard fellow, Mr. Schlesinger managed to pound out 4,000 to 5,000 words a day on the Jackson work as his year-old twins frolicked around his desk. His work on the book was interrupted by World War II. Bad eyesight precluded him from the military, so he got a job as a writer for the Office of War Information. One assignment was writing a message from President Roosevelt to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mr. Schlesinger doubted the president saw such masterpieces.

He next served in the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, in Washington, London and Paris. Immediately after the war, Mr. Schlesinger went to Washington as a freelance journalist for Fortune and other magazines. After 15 months, in 1946, he accepted an associate professorship at Harvard. He was so nervous teaching that he vomited before each class; eventually his presentation became so deft that his History 169 course was the department’s most popular offering.

He began to carve out a political identity, one committed to the social goals of the New Deal and staunchly anti-Communist. In 1947, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action, the best-known liberal pressure group.

In 1949, Mr. Schlesinger solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism with his book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.” Inspired by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he argued that pragmatic, reform-minded liberalism, limited in scope, was the best that man could hope for politically.

“Problems will always torment us,” he wrote, “because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.”

Starting with writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson in both his presidential campaigns, Mr. Schlesinger was a player in big-time Democratic politics. Even though Senator Barry Goldwater tried to have him fired from the Kennedy White House because of his liberal bias, one of Mr. Goldwater’s colleagues paid Mr. Schlesinger something of a compliment.

As quoted anonymously in “The Making of the President, 1964” by Theodore H. White, the Goldwater associate said: “At least you got to say this for a liberal s.o.b. like Schlesinger — when his candidates go into action, he’s there writing speeches for them.”

And books. One of his major contributions to the Kennedy campaign was a book, “Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?” Under Nixon, the book concluded, the country would “sink into mediocrity and cant and payola and boredom.” Kennedy meant rising to “the splendor of our ideals.”

On Jan. 9, 1961, a gray, chilly, afternoon, President-elect Kennedy dropped by Mr. Schlesinger’s house on Irving Street in Cambridge. He asked the professor to be a special assistant in the White House. Mr. Schlesinger answered, “If you think I can help, I would like to come.”

In their 1970 book, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers suggest that the new president saw some political risk in hiring such an unabashed liberal. He decided to keep the appointment quiet until another liberal, Chester Bowles, was confirmed as under secretary of state.

The authors, both Kennedy aides, said they asked Mr. Kennedy if he took Mr. Schlesinger on to write the official history of the administration. Mr. Kennedy said he would write it himself.

“But Arthur will probably write his own,” the president said, “and it will be better for us if he’s in the White House, seeing what goes on, instead of reading about it in The New York Times and Time magazine.”

Time later described Mr. Schlesinger’s role in the Kennedy administration as a bridge to the intelligentsia as well as to the Adlai Stevenson-Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party. If the president wanted to meet the intellectual Isaiah Berlin or the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Mr. Schlesinger arranged it. The president was said to enjoy Mr. Schlesinger’s gossip during weekly lunches, although he rarely attended the brainy seminars Robert Kennedy asked Mr. Schlesinger to organize.

Mr. Schlesinger distinguished himself early in the administration by being one of the few in the White House to question the invasion of Cuba planned by the Eisenhower administration. But he then became a loyal soldier, telling reporters a misleading story that the Cuban exiles landing at the Bay of Pigs were no greater than 400 when in fact they numbered 1,400.

In a discussion of that ill-fated action afterward, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, reminded the president that Mr. Schlesinger had written a memo opposing the invasion. “That will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book about my administration,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Only he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.”

After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson kept Mr. Schlesinger on but gave him virtually nothing to do. He resigned in January 1964. Mr. Schlesinger soon wrote an article saying that John Kennedy had not really wanted Mr. Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate but that he had picked him for political reasons.

Mr. Schlesinger, who had resigned from Harvard when his leave of absence expired in 1962, worked on his Kennedy book and for the first few months of 1966 was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He then joined the faculty of the City University of New York as Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities.

He settled in Manhattan, where he remained until his death. His visibility was high — from the society pages to the column he wrote for the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal to television appearances. He continued to protect the Kennedy image despite steady disclosures that smudged it. In 1996, he angered conservatives by selecting historians for a poll that found Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had been “high average” presidents and President Ronald Reagan “low average.”

His writing was ceaseless, including the book and articles criticizing the Iraq war. In “The Imperial Presidency” (1973), he argued that President Richard M. Nixon had so magnified the powers of the president that he must be impeached. In a review, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan, retorted that Mr. Schlesinger had applied different standards to Democratic presidents.

In 1978, Mr. Schlesinger scored a literary and commercial triumph with “Robert Kennedy and His Times.” In The New York Times Book Review, Garry Wills, who had once called Mr. Schlesinger “a Kennedy courtier,” rated the work “learned and thorough.” It won a National Book Award.

In the book, Mr. Schlesinger compared the brothers: “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”

Mr. Schlesinger had hoped that Robert would ignite a new spirit of liberalism but grew disappointed when Jimmy Carter rose to lead the party in 1976. He considered Mr. Carter woefully conservative and did not vote for him in either of his campaigns. He worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1980.

In 1991, Mr. Schlesinger provoked a backlash with “The Disuniting of America,” an attack on the emergent “multicultural society” in which he said Afrocentrists claimed superiority and demanded that their separate identity be honored by schools and other institutions.

The novelist Ishmael Reed denounced Mr. Schlesinger as a “follower of David Duke,” the former Ku Klux Klan leader. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. caricatured Mr. Schlesinger’s arguments as a demand for “cultural white-face.”

Mr. Schlesinger was nonplussed. He frequently described himself as an unreconstructed New Dealer whose basic thinking had changed little in a half century.

“What the hell,” he answered when questioned by The Washington Post about his attack on multiculturalism. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”

Mr. Schlesinger continued to write articles, sign petitions and last year received an award from the National Portrait Gallery for his presidential service. His failing health prevented him from attending the funeral of his good friend John Kenneth Galbraith last May.

Mr. Schlesinger’s son Stephen read some words he had written about Mr. Galbraith: “Underneath his joy in combat, he was a do-gooder in the dark of night.”


Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (October 15, 1917–February 28, 2007) born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger, was an American historian and social critic whose work explored the American liberalism of political leaders including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian"to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the transition period to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days.

In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times several years later.

He popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration by writing the book The Imperial Presidency. He also was an avid supporter of Harry Truman.

“ If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself."

Kennedy Administration:
After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that he serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter." Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961 he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President. He worked primarily on Latin American Affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House.


In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation" that would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the President, stating that "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions."

During the Cabinet deliberations he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion. Along with his friend, Senator William Fulbright, Schlesinger sent several memos to the President opposing the strike; however, during the meetings he held back his opinion, reluctant to undermine the President's desire for a unanimous decision.

Following the overt failure of the invasion, Schlesinger later lamented "In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room . . . I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion." After the furor died down, Kennedy joked that Schlesinger "wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive!"

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Schlesinger was not a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) but helped UN Ambassador Stevenson draft his presentation of the crisis to the UN Security Council.

After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy Administration called A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1965.



As a prominent Democrat and historian, Schlesinger maintained a very active social life. His wide circle of friends and associates included politicians, actors, writers and artists spanning several decades. Among his friends and associates were President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy, Adlai E. Stevenson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, John Kenneth Galbraith, Averell and Pamela Harriman, Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith, Ethel Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Marietta Peabody Tree, Ben Bradlee, Joseph Alsop, Evangeline Bruce, William vanden Heuvel, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Philip and Katherine Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Walter Lippmann, President Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, George McGovern, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, Richard Goodwin, Al Gore, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton.


Democratic activist:
Among the founders of Americans for Democratic Action
Speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson's two presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956
Speechwriter for John F. Kennedy's campaign in 1960
1961-1964 Special Assistant to the President for Latin American affairs and speechwriting.
Speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy's campaign in 1968
Speechwriter for George McGovern's campaign in 1972
Active in the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy in 1980
From May 2005 to his death, he was a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

Death:
Mr. Schlesinger died on February 28, 2007, at the age of 89. According to The New York Times he experienced cardiac arrest while dining out with family members in Manhattan. The newspapers have dubbed him a "historian of power."

Writings:
His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, while harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 for his book The Age of Jackson, and another in the Biography category in 1966 for A Thousand Days.

His 1986 book The Cycles of American History was an early work on cycles in politics in the United States; it was influenced by his father's work on cycles.

He became a leading opponent of multiculturalism in the 1980s and articulated this stance in his book The Disuniting of America (1991).

In his book The Politics of Hope (1962), Schlesinger terms conservatives the "party of the past" and liberals "the party of hope" and calls for overcoming the division between both parties.

Published posthumously in 2007, Journals 1952-2000 is the 894-page distillation of 6,000 pages of Schlesinger diaries on a wide variety of subjects, edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger.

This is a list of his published works: *1939 Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress

1945 The Age of Jackson
1949 The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom
1950 What About Communism?
1951 The General and the President, and the Future of American Foreign Policy
1957 The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. I)
1958 The Coming of the New Deal: 1933-1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II)
1960 The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III)
1960 Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?
1962 The Politics of Hope
1963 Paths of American Thought (ed. with Morton White)
1965 A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
1965 The MacArthur Controversy and American Foreign Policy
1967 Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966
1967 Congress and the Presidency: Their Role in Modern Times
1968 Violence: America in the Sixties
1969 The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power, and Violence in America
1970 The Origins of the Cold War
1973 The Imperial Presidency — reissued in 1989 (with epilogue) & 2004
1978 Robert Kennedy and His Times
1983 Creativity in Statecraft
1986 Cycles of American History
1988 JFK Remembered
1988 War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt
1990 Is the Cold War Over?
1991 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
2000 A Life in the 20th Century, Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950
2004 War and the American Presidency
2007 Journals 1952-2000''
He also wrote a book about Cleopatra.

Schlesinger's papers will be available at the New York Public Library.

Awards:
1946 Pulitzer Prize for History - The Age of Jackson
1958 Bancroft Prize - The Crisis of the Old Order
1958 Francis Parkman Prize - The Crisis of the Old Order
1965 National Book Award - A Thousand Days
1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography - A Thousand Days
1979 National Book Award - Robert Kennedy and His Times
1998 National Humanities Medal
2003 Four Freedoms Award
2006 Paul Peck Award
2006 Medal Awarded by Elmhurst College to an individual who exemplifies the ideals of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr. Schlesinger was greatly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr

230 years ago Richard Stockton died

Richard Stockton: Sir, you will be remembered as the first person from New Jersey to sign the Declaration of Independence, an American lawyer, jurist, and legislator, thank you for being part of American History, remembering you after 230 years, may you rest in peace!


Richard Stockton (October 1, 1730 – February 28, 1781) was an American lawyer, jurist, legislator, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Richard Stockton, son of a wealthy landowner and judge, was born in 1730 at Morven, the family estate and his lifelong home, at Princeton, N.J. After a preparatory education at West Nottingham Academy, in Rising Sun, Md., he graduated in 1748 from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), then in Newark but relocated 8 years hence at Princeton. In 1754 he completed an apprenticeship with a Newark lawyer and joined the bar. The next year, he wed poetess Annis Boudinot, by whom he had two sons and four daughters. By the mid-1760's he was recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in the Middle Colonies.

Like his father a patron of the College of New Jersey, in 1766 Stockton sailed on its behalf to Scotland to recruit Rev. John Witherspoon for the presidency. Aiding in this endeavor, complicated by the opposition of Witherspoon's wife, was Benjamin Rush, a fellow alumnus then enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. In 1768, the year after Stockton's departure, Witherspoon finally accepted.

Stockton resumed his law practice, spending his spare hours at Morven breeding choice cattle and horses, collecting art objects, and expanding his library. Yet, though he had sometime before expressed disinterest in public life, in 1768 he began a 6-year term on the executive council of New Jersey and then sat on the provincial Supreme Court (1774-76).

Stockton became associated with the Revolutionary movement during its initial stages. In 1764 he advocated American representation in Parliament, but during the Stamp Act crisis the next year questioned its right to control the Colonies at all. By 1774, though dreading the possibility of war, he was espousing colonial self-rule under the Crown. Elected to Congress 2 years later, he voted for independence and signed the Declaration. That same year, he met defeat in a bid for the New Jersey governorship, but rejected the chance to become first chief justice of the State Supreme Court to remain in Congress.

Late in 1776 fate turned against Stockton. In November, while inspecting the northern Continental Army in upper New York State with fellow Congressman George Clymer, Stockton hurried home when he learned of the British invasion of New Jersey and removed his family to a friend's home in Monmouth County. While he was there, Loyalists informed the British, who captured and imprisoned him under harsh conditions at Perth Amboy, N.J., and later in New York. A formal remonstrance from Congress and other efforts to obtain his exchange resulted in his release, in poor physical condition, sometime in 1777. To add to his woes, he found that the British had pillaged and partially burned Morven. Still an invalid, he died at Princeton in 1781 at the age of 50. He is buried at the Stony Brook Quaker Meeting House Cemetery.

Later days and legacy

Stockton and his wife had six children, four daughters and two sons: Julia Stockton (married to Benjamin Rush, also a signer of the Declaration), Mary, Susan, Richard, Lucius and Abigail.

Stockton died at his family's estate in Princeton on February 28, 1781, and was buried at the Stony Brook Meeting House and Cemetery.

Stockton's oldest son Richard was an eminent lawyer and later a Senator from New Jersey. His son, Commodore Robert Field Stockton, was a hero of the War of 1812, and in 1846 became the first military governor of California and later a Senator from New Jersey.

In 1888, the state of New Jersey donated a marble statue of Stockton to the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol. He is one of only six signers to be honored.

In 1969, the New Jersey Legislature passed legislation establishing a state college which was named after Stockton, to honor the memory of New Jersey's signer of the Declaration of Independence. Richard Stockton College of New Jersey is the current name for this educational institution which was previously known under the names Stockton State College and Richard Stockton State College.

Stockton's name is also well known amongst travelers as well, as one of the southbound rest areas of the New Jersey Turnpike, south of Interstate 195.

Remembering the last living American veteran of World War I.

Buckles (wearing the World War I Victory Medal and the Army of Occupation Medal) with United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Here is at the age of 106

Frank Woodruff Buckles: Sir, you will be remembered as one of the last three surviving World War I veterans in the world, and was the last living American veteran of World War I, also the oldest verified World War I veteran in the world, and the second-oldest male military veteran in the world, thanks for your service, may you rest in peace!

Age 16 serving in World War I

Frank Woodruff Buckles (February 1, 1901 – February 27, 2011) was one of the last three surviving World War I veterans in the world, and was the last living American veteran of World War I. At the time of his death, Buckles was also the oldest verified World War I veteran in the world, and the second-oldest male military veteran in the world.

He lived at Gap View Farm, in Charles Town, West Virginia, and was the Honorary Chairman of the World War I Memorial Foundation. During World War II, Buckles was taken prisoner by the Japanese as a civilian.



Biography:

Buckles was born in Bethany, Missouri. He enlisted in the United States Army at the beginning of America's involvement in World War I in April 1917. Only 16 years old at the time, Buckles was asked by his recruiter to show a birth certificate. Later Buckles said of that event:

“ I was just 16 and didn’t look a day older. I confess to you that I lied to more than one recruiter. I gave them my solemn word that I was 18, but I’d left my birth certificate back home in the family Bible. They’d take one look at me and laugh and tell me to go home before my mother noticed I was gone. Somehow I got the idea that telling an even bigger whopper was the way to go. So I told the next recruiter that I was 21 and darned if he didn’t sign me up on the spot! I enlisted in the Army on 14 August 1917."

Before being accepted into the United States Army, he was turned down by the Marine Corps due to his slight weight.

In 1917, Buckles was sent to Europe on the RMS Carpathia, which had rescued RMS Titanic survivors five years earlier. While on the Carpathia, Buckles spoke with crewmembers who had taken part in the rescue of Titanic survivors. During the war Buckles served in England and France, driving ambulances and motorcycles for the Army's 1st Fort Riley Casual Detachment. After the Armistice in 1918, Buckles escorted prisoners of war back to Germany. Following his discharge in 1920.

Last years:

Buckles lived near Charles Town, West Virginia. Buckles stated in an interview with The Washington Post on Veterans' Day 2007 that he believed the United States should go to war only "when it's an emergency."[7][8] When asked about the secret of his long life, Buckles replied: "Hope," adding, "[W]hen you start to die... don't." He also said the reason he had lived so long was that, "I never got in a hurry."

The U.S. Library of Congress included Buckles in its Veterans History Project and has audio, video and pictorial information on Buckles's experiences in both world wars, including a full 148-minute video interview. Buckles' life was featured on the Memorial Day 2007 episode of NBC Nightly News.

For the past four years, photographer David DeJonge has been documenting and interviewing Frank for a 2012 estimated release of a feature length documentary on the life of Frank Buckles entitled "Pershing's Last Patriot". There is also a fundraising campaign on kickstarter.com where donations are encouraged toward the production of the film.

On February 4, 2008, with the death of 108-year-old Harry Richard Landis, Buckles became the last surviving American World War I veteran.

On March 6, 2008, he met with President George W. Bush at the White House. The same day, he attended the opening of a Pentagon exhibit featuring photos of nine centenarian World War I veterans created by historian and photographer David DeJonge.

Buckles said that when he died, he would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was eligible for cremation and placement in a columbarium at Arlington, but expressed a desire for burial there, which he was not eligible for under current Arlington policy, which requires a veteran to have a Medal of Honor, Purple Heart, or have been killed in action.

Friends and family members took up his cause, but made no headway until a relative, Ken Buckles, contacted Ross Perot, whom Frank had met at a history seminar in 2001. Within two weeks, Perot had successfully intervened with the White House, and on March 19, 2008, Buckles received special approval for underground burial at Arlington.

The French and the British will send delegates to his funeral. The French plan to send a Defence Ministry official and hope to send two honor guards and pallbearers. The British will send the air-vice marshal and possibly the British Ambassador.

Buckles was the Honorary Chairman of the World War I Memorial Foundation, which seeks refurbishment of the District of Columbia War Memorial and its establishment as the National World War I Memorial on the National Mall. Buckles appeared before Congress on December 3, 2009, advocating on behalf of such legislation.

On February 1, 2010, on Buckles's 109th birthday, his official biographer announced that he will be completing a film—currently in production—on Buckles's life. The film is a cumulative work of three years of interviews and intimate moments gathered by DeJonge as he traveled the nation with Buckles.

Months away from his 110th birthday, in autumn 2010, Buckles was still giving media interviews. Buckles reached supercentenarian status upon his 110th birthday, on February 1, 2011.

On February 27, 2011, 26 days after his 110th birthday, Buckles died of natural causes.

Awards:

For his service during World War I, Buckles received (from the U.S. Government) the World War I Victory Medal, the Army of Occupation of Germany Medal, and qualified for four Overseas Service Bars. In addition, French president Jacques Chirac awarded him France's Légion d'honneur.

On May 25, 2008, Buckles received the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ Gold Medal of Merit at the Liberty Memorial. He sat for a portrait taken by David DeJonge that will hang in the National World War I Museum, as "the last surviving link."

Buckles received the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry's Knight Commander of the Court of Honour (KCCH) on Sept. 24, 2008. The KCCH is the last honor bestowed by the Southern Jurisdiction prior to the 33°. The ceremony was hosted by Ronald Seale, 33°, Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A. The keynote address was provided by James Peake, Secretary of Veteran Affairs.

On this day after 10 years, a beloved teacher of mine from High School died

On this day 10 years ago, a man who influenced me into the world of politics, passed away after playing a charitable basketball game for the heart! Here is to you, Mister Kevin Sheehy, thanks for the great memories!


Beloved Tottenville High School teacher Kevin Sheehy, 57, collapses during a faculty-student basketball game for the Heart Association.

Tottenville High School teacher and community activist Kevin L. Sheehy, 57, collapsed and died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon in the school gymnasium while playing a benefit basketball game for the American Heart Association.

Stunned students and colleagues watched from the stands as school officials tried to revive Sheehy, who had crumpled to the floor just before he was to come out of the student-faculty game in the third period.

The students were ushered out of the gym when medics arrived. Continued resuscitation efforts failed to revive him.

A native Staten Islander and Tottenville graduate who spent more than 30 years in front of the blackboard of his alma mater, Sheehy was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m. in Staten Island University Hospital, Prince's Bay.

Recognized as a man who devoted unimaginable hours of time and energy to his students and his community, Sheehy, the recipient of the 2000 Patrick Daly Memorial Award, was always ready to respond above and beyond to a worthy cause.

Yesterday, the cause was Hoops for Hearts Day at Tottenville, the day the school's faculty challenges a team of students in a basketball game with all proceeds benefiting the American Heart Association. He was to continue his Valentine's celebration last night by surprising his wife, Elaine, with dinner at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, where cabaret legend Bobby Short was giving a benefit concert.

Instead, the Island was left mourning the man who gave his heart to everything he did.

With a smile on his face yesterday afternoon, Sheehy, the faculty team coach, shuffled around the court, enjoying the camaraderie more than the competition. He suddenly crouched over during the third period and fell to the gym floor.

The cheering stopped. Stunned and silent, the audience watched as school officials rushed to the court to administer CPR.

When medics arrived, students were ushered out of the school, and technicians repeatedly tried to revive Sheehy. Scared and concerned, students continuously called the school for updates.

Jim Munson, coach of the Tottenville Pirates football team, described the atmosphere in the gym as somber.

"It happened in front of a gymnasium full of kids," he said. "The kids were unbelievable. They just sat there pulling for him to come through. He was Tottenville High School." Classes were scheduled to resume today and grief counselors were expected to be on hand for students and faculty.

Sheehy's goal was to get one foul shot in during the game, according to John Tuminaro, Tottenville's principal. While Tuminaro couldn't recall if Sheehy scored during the game, it is clear he won the hearts of the Tottenville and Staten Island community.

Sheehy had been perfecting his jump shot in the days leading up to the game on the playground of PS 4 in Arden Heights while waiting for his wife to finish her day of teaching.

Munson, a Tottenville graduate, said Sheehy was prepping to take his last foul shot and was then planning to sit out the rest of the game when he collapsed.

"We immediately started to attend to him," Munson said. "It was a tough day for all of us. You can't replace guys like Kevin Sheehy. He was a dear man, a very good man."

Student Prathima Nandivada was holding Sheehy's keys and a gold ring when he collapsed on the gym floor.

"He gave me his ring and his keys to hold while he played because he said he didn't want to hurt his hand," said the 16-year-old junior, who was selling tickets at the door. "I have a similar ring on my finger and of course mine is much smaller than his. When it happened, I put his over my ring and I just held it there. They tried to take it twice, but I wouldn't let go of it."

Eventually, Prathima turned over the keys and the ring to an assistant principal, but said Sheehy will always hold a special place in her heart.

"What can I say about Mr. Sheehy," said the Young Ambassador and treasurer of the junior class. "He is by far the most amazing man I have ever met in my entire life. Up until the minute he left us, he was always thinking about tomorrow. It was always more, more, more. Nothing he did was ever enough. He always had new hopes, new plans, it was always about the future and never about himself."

Community activist Sheehy was a Renaissance man who balanced his career with politics and community activism. He earned a bachelor of science degree in biology from Wagner College, where he also received a master of science degree in science education, a master's degree in business administration and an honorary doctorate of science degree. His love for Wagner, where he was a longtime member of the board of trustees, was much like his love for Tottenville.

"We had a board of trustees meeting and I was with him yesterday all day and he looked quite chipper," said Dr. Norman Smith, the president of Wagner College who considered Sheehy a close friend. "He had been on our board 14 years, one of the longest serving members. He was an icon and a tremendous cheerleader on the Wagner campus."

Smith said it was Sheehy's spirit he will remember the most.

"He had such a positive attitude, was a great guy in every way," he said. "I don't know how he did it all, between the high school and Wagner College and all the other things he was doing in the community. He was a role model for generations of students who graduated Wagner College."

In 1959, while still a student at Wagner, Sheehy began working at Dean Witter Co. on Wall Street. By 1961, he was working 12- to 14-hour days and co-founded the company's mutual funds sales division. Still, his love of Tottenville nagged at him and he was active in the school's alumni association.

In 1967, he gave up Wall Street and began teaching at New Dorp High School. Three years later, he returned to Luten Avenue and never looked back.

In December, Sheehy was award the Patrick Daly Memorial Award by Borough President Guy V. Molinari. The award was established eight years ago following the 1992 murder of New Dorp resident Patrick Daly, who was principal of PS 15 in Brooklyn.

"Kevin was always there at so many different things at the same time," Molinari said. "He was my Patrick Daly winner and I don't know of anybody who was recognized that was more humble and grateful. I look back and I am so grateful that I was able to get him that award. This is an enormous loss."

In August, Sheehy accepted the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Community Services Award, the New York State AFL-CIO's highest honor, which is bestowed on a union leader who addresses union and community issues through service and volunteerism. He was Tottenville's chapter leader to the UFT and a national delegate to the American Federation of Teachers.

Sheehy was also a delegate to the New York State United Federation of Teachers and a member of the citywide United Federation of Teachers Finance Committee. He was named to "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" and was often voted Tottenville's teacher of the year.

He served as chairman of the school's Mentor Committee and headed the school's Young Ambassadors program, which pairs students with elected officials and takes trips to City Hall, Albany and Washington.

Sheehy played a key role last March in Project Hospitality's Dine Out Against Hunger event by assembling 25 Tottenville High School students to act as volunteer "ambassadors" at participating Island restaurants.

He instilled a sense of community spirit and obligation in many students by inviting community leaders to the school to celebrate Women in History Month and by organizing a walk around the school grounds to acknowledge Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Sheehy demonstrated a compassion for students with special needs and challenges. Several years ago, he helped Jack Ameduri, a student at the Hungerford School, receive a diploma from Tottenville High School. He mentored the young man and saw that he was duly acknowledged for his participation in a school beautification program.

With his students, he held fund-raisers each year for the Staten Island Children's Campaign.

"He was a lovely man," said Mike Fortunato, campaign president. "He got his children involved with us and gave us a generous donation every year. This is a huge loss for all of Staten Island."

Sheehy served as president of the Greenbelt Conservancy, and was the former president of the Friends of Snug Harbor and the South Shore Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was a member of Molinari's Greenbelt advisory committee and a member of the board of trustees and a founding member of the Noble Maritime Collection. He owned a large set of original John Noble lithographs.

"He was very devoted to John Noble," said Erin Urban, director of the Noble Museum. "He was devoted to the museum. He was a warm, friendly person who loved children especially."

In many ways, Sheehy was Staten Island's unofficial mayor, meeting and greeting people wherever he went with a warm smile and a strong handshake or gentle hug. Though he dabbled in politics, he never won an elected post.

Sheehy was rare gem, showing up at then-Republican Rep. Guy Molinari's victory party in 1984 with a bottle of champagne to toast his opponent in the congressional race.

"He was a very good campaigner, a tough opponent," Molinari recalled. "He blew me away on election night, when who walks in but my opponent. It was unheard of. He was a real person and that's the measure of the man. That's what this guy was all about. He exuded class and dignity. He toasted me in front of everybody. Very few people in our society have the class and dignity to do something like this."

Coining him "Mr. Tottenville" and a "true purple," the school color, faculty, both past and present!


February 15, 2000

Kevin Sheehy, 57, collapses during a faculty-student basketball game for the Heart Association.


Tottenville High School teacher and community activist Kevin L. Sheehy, 57, collapsed and died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon in the school gymnasium while playing a benefit basketball game for the American Heart Association.

Stunned students and colleagues watched from the stands as school officials tried to revive Sheehy, who had crumpled to the floor just before he was to come out of the student-faculty game in the third period.

The students were ushered out of the gym when medics arrived. Continued resuscitation efforts failed to revive him.

A native Staten Islander and Tottenville graduate who spent more than 30 years in front of the blackboard of his alma mater, Sheehy was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m. in Staten Island University Hospital, Prince's Bay.

Recognized as a man who devoted unimaginable hours of time and energy to his students and his community, Sheehy, the recipient of the 2000 Patrick Daly Memorial Award, was always ready to respond above and beyond to a worthy cause.

Yesterday, the cause was Hoops for Hearts Day at Tottenville, the day the school's faculty challenges a team of students in a basketball game with all proceeds benefiting the American Heart Association. He was to continue his Valentine's celebration last night by surprising his wife, Elaine, with dinner at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, where cabaret legend Bobby Short was giving a benefit concert.

Instead, the Island was left mourning the man who gave his heart to everything he did.

With a smile on his face yesterday afternoon, Sheehy, the faculty team coach, shuffled around the court, enjoying the camaraderie more than the competition. He suddenly crouched over during the third period and fell to the gym floor.

The cheering stopped. Stunned and silent, the audience watched as school officials rushed to the court to administer CPR.

When medics arrived, students were ushered out of the school, and technicians repeatedly tried to revive Sheehy. Scared and concerned, students continuously called the school for updates.

Jim Munson, coach of the Tottenville Pirates football team, described the atmosphere in the gym as somber.

"It happened in front of a gymnasium full of kids," he said. "The kids were unbelievable. They just sat there pulling for him to come through. He was Tottenville High School." Classes were scheduled to resume today and grief counselors were expected to be on hand for students and faculty.

Sheehy's goal was to get one foul shot in during the game, according to John Tuminaro, Tottenville's principal. While Tuminaro couldn't recall if Sheehy scored during the game, it is clear he won the hearts of the Tottenville and Staten Island community.

Sheehy had been perfecting his jump shot in the days leading up to the game on the playground of PS 4 in Arden Heights while waiting for his wife to finish her day of teaching.

Munson, a Tottenville graduate, said Sheehy was prepping to take his last foul shot and was then planning to sit out the rest of the game when he collapsed.

"We immediately started to attend to him," Munson said. "It was a tough day for all of us. You can't replace guys like Kevin Sheehy. He was a dear man, a very good man."

Student Prathima Nandivada was holding Sheehy's keys and a gold ring when he collapsed on the gym floor.

"He gave me his ring and his keys to hold while he played because he said he didn't want to hurt his hand," said the 16-year-old junior, who was selling tickets at the door. "I have a similar ring on my finger and of course mine is much smaller than his. When it happened, I put his over my ring and I just held it there. They tried to take it twice, but I wouldn't let go of it."

Eventually, Prathima turned over the keys and the ring to an assistant principal, but said Sheehy will always hold a special place in her heart.

"What can I say about Mr. Sheehy," said the Young Ambassador and treasurer of the junior class. "He is by far the most amazing man I have ever met in my entire life. Up until the minute he left us, he was always thinking about tomorrow. It was always more, more, more. Nothing he did was ever enough. He always had new hopes, new plans, it was always about the future and never about himself."

Community activist Sheehy was a Renaissance man who balanced his career with politics and community activism. He earned a bachelor of science degree in biology from Wagner College, where he also received a master of science degree in science education, a master's degree in business administration and an honorary doctorate of science degree. His love for Wagner, where he was a longtime member of the board of trustees, was much like his love for Tottenville.

"We had a board of trustees meeting and I was with him yesterday all day and he looked quite chipper," said Dr. Norman Smith, the president of Wagner College who considered Sheehy a close friend. "He had been on our board 14 years, one of the longest serving members. He was an icon and a tremendous cheerleader on the Wagner campus."

Smith said it was Sheehy's spirit he will remember the most.

"He had such a positive attitude, was a great guy in every way," he said. "I don't know how he did it all, between the high school and Wagner College and all the other things he was doing in the community. He was a role model for generations of students who graduated Wagner College."

In 1959, while still a student at Wagner, Sheehy began working at Dean Witter Co. on Wall Street. By 1961, he was working 12- to 14-hour days and co-founded the company's mutual funds sales division. Still, his love of Tottenville nagged at him and he was active in the school's alumni association.

In 1967, he gave up Wall Street and began teaching at New Dorp High School. Three years later, he returned to Luten Avenue and never looked back.

In December, Sheehy was award the Patrick Daly Memorial Award by Borough President Guy V. Molinari. The award was established eight years ago following the 1992 murder of New Dorp resident Patrick Daly, who was principal of PS 15 in Brooklyn.

"Kevin was always there at so many different things at the same time," Molinari said. "He was my Patrick Daly winner and I don't know of anybody who was recognized that was more humble and grateful. I look back and I am so grateful that I was able to get him that award. This is an enormous loss."

In August, Sheehy accepted the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Community Services Award, the New York State AFL-CIO's highest honor, which is bestowed on a union leader who addresses union and community issues through service and volunteerism. He was Tottenville's chapter leader to the UFT and a national delegate to the American Federation of Teachers.

Sheehy was also a delegate to the New York State United Federation of Teachers and a member of the citywide United Federation of Teachers Finance Committee. He was named to "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" and was often voted Tottenville's teacher of the year.

He served as chairman of the school's Mentor Committee and headed the school's Young Ambassadors program, which pairs students with elected officials and takes trips to City Hall, Albany and Washington.

Sheehy played a key role last March in Project Hospitality's Dine Out Against Hunger event by assembling 25 Tottenville High School students to act as volunteer "ambassadors" at participating Island restaurants.

He instilled a sense of community spirit and obligation in many students by inviting community leaders to the school to celebrate Women in History Month and by organizing a walk around the school grounds to acknowledge Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Sheehy demonstrated a compassion for students with special needs and challenges. Several years ago, he helped Jack Ameduri, a student at the Hungerford School, receive a diploma from Tottenville High School. He mentored the young man and saw that he was duly acknowledged for his participation in a school beautification program.

With his students, he held fund-raisers each year for the Staten Island Children's Campaign.

"He was a lovely man," said Mike Fortunato, campaign president. "He got his children involved with us and gave us a generous donation every year. This is a huge loss for all of Staten Island."

Sheehy served as president of the Greenbelt Conservancy, and was the former president of the Friends of Snug Harbor and the South Shore Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was a member of Molinari's Greenbelt advisory committee and a member of the board of trustees and a founding member of the Noble Maritime Collection. He owned a large set of original John Noble lithographs.

"He was very devoted to John Noble," said Erin Urban, director of the Noble Museum. "He was devoted to the museum. He was a warm, friendly person who loved children especially."

In many ways, Sheehy was Staten Island's unofficial mayor, meeting and greeting people wherever he went with a warm smile and a strong handshake or gentle hug. Though he dabbled in politics, he never won an elected post.

Sheehy was rare gem, showing up at then-Republican Rep. Guy Molinari's victory party in 1984 with a bottle of champagne to toast his opponent in the congressional race.

"He was a very good campaigner, a tough opponent," Molinari recalled. "He blew me away on election night, when who walks in but my opponent. It was unheard of. He was a real person and that's the measure of the man. That's what this guy was all about. He exuded class and dignity. He toasted me in front of everybody. Very few people in our society have the class and dignity to do something like this."

Coining him "Mr. Tottenville" and a "true purple," the school color, faculty, both past and present, said no one will ever love the school more than Mr. Sheehy.

"He lived and breathed this building," said Steven Roseman, assistant principal.

The school will be forever scarred by his death, said Linda Barbato, a former Parent Teacher Association president who worked closely with Sheehy from 1997 to 1999. "There was not enough he could do for the kids, the parents, the teachers. He was the quintessential example of dedication."

His death was totally unexpected, noted Michael Marotta, principal from 1992 to 1999. An unmatched model for students, he was also a strong advocate for teachers, Marotta said.

Eleanor O'Connor, principal of Staten Island Technical High School, arrived at Tottenville yesterday shortly after she received word of Sheehy's death. "He was the heart of so many programs on Staten Island. He was a tremendous human being, vibrant and charming."

"The school is like a family and this death is like losing a family member," she said.

Sheehy has left behind dozens of students who will remember him as an inspiration and a guiding light.

"He was like a grandfather to me," said Jessica Belnavis, a 17-year-old junior who was one of Sheehy's Young Ambassadors.

"I am just in shock he is no longer living," said Jessica, who ran for freshman class president at Sheehy's prodding. Jessica won her first campaign and went on to become president of the sophomore and junior class. "He was such a big influence on my life. School will be so much more different without him, without popping my head into his office and saying 'Hi, Mr. Sheehy.' It's going to be really hard."

Councilman Jerome X. O'Donovan (D-North Shore), a longtime friend, recalled the days when Mr. Sheehy tended bar at Demyan's Hofbrau, a popular restaurant and tavern in Stapleton owned by the late Jack Demyan, the restaurateur, artist and prankster.

"He worked in the old Hofbrau in our college days," O'Donovan said. "When I came home from college, I was always there. He was just a wonderful person, a man of great Irish wit, an intelligent man. I know in my heart all of the Tottenville students and alumni will miss him."

Republican Rep. Vito Fossella called Sheehy "one of a kind."

"I was fortunate to have spent a good deal of time working with Kevin on many projects," Fossella said. "For Kevin, teaching was not just his profession, but a passion that seemed to grow stronger with the years. The mark of a truly special teacher is one who leaves an impression on his students that lasts a lifetime. Kevin's legacy will be the thousands of young men and women who had the good fortune to call him their teacher."

Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid-Island) said he was "absolutely floored" when he was told of Sheehy's death.

"He was simply one of the nicest human beings I have ever met in my life, in or out of government," he said. "I went to the Daly Awards and it was one of those nights I didn't have any other meetings and I could have taken the night off, but I thought it's about Kevin, let me go. I went and he was such an inspiration in his speech that I walked out of there with a bounce in my step. I wrote him a handwritten note the next day telling him that."

Oddo said he hopes the tragedy will propel his effort to have automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) portable devices used to shock a heart back into rhythm in city buildings, mass transportation hubs, fitness centers and other public places.

"Maybe in his own unique way, now he is going to push the issue to the forefront," he said. "Maybe Kevin Sheehy's last contribution to the Staten Island community will be the highlighting of the need to have these things in schools and public buildings."

"One word to sum up Kevin Sheehy is class, all-around class" said Councilman Stephen Fiala (R-South Shore), who was to attend a Black History Month event with Mr. Sheehy at Tottenville tomorrow. "I know they say we are all expendable, but not everyone is and Tottenville just lost a very, very important figure in its community."

Fiala had recently agreed to fund $250,000 this year and next year to bring a regulation pool to the school if Sheehy's Young Ambassadors could match the funds.

"I just had a meeting with Kevin and the Young Ambassadors and they jokingly said we should name it the Sheehy Center, so this is kind of scary," Fiala said. "Kevin was a great lobbyist for Tottenville. I am really shocked and saddened."

The school is no stranger to tragedy, as many are still mourning the loss of Andrea Melendez, a recent graduate who fell eight stories to her death down the stairwell of her dormitory at Columbia University in December. She was one of Sheehy's favorites.

As with Ms. Melendez's death, students and faculty will grieve as a school and support one another, Tuminaro noted. "There will be a void, but we'll pull together," he said.

"I never saw anyone as interested and caring as he was in making sure his students did well and were just a part of the community," said Eleanor Conforti, District 31 community school board chairwoman. "I know Tottenville High School will miss him terribly. You know, it is fitting how he died. He died exactly the way he lived with his students."

In addition to his wife, Elaine, Sheehy is survived by one son, Kevin. The family lives in Smoke Rise, N.J.

120 years ago today, General William Tecumseh Sherman died

General, thank you serving this nation in the time of need during the Civil War, you were truly a brillant mind in defeating the enemy, remembering you after 120 years ago today, may you rest in peace!


William Tecumseh Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the "scorched earth" policies that he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States. Military historian B. H. Liddell Hart famously declared that Sherman was "the first modern general."

Sherman served under General Ulysses S. Grant in 1862 and 1863 during the campaigns that led to the fall of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and culminated with the routing of the Confederate armies in the state of Tennessee.

In 1864, Sherman succeeded Grant as the Union commander in the western theater of the war. He proceeded to lead his troops to the capture of the city of Atlanta, a military success that contributed to the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln. Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and the Carolinas further undermined the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting. He accepted the surrender of all the Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in April 1865.

When Grant assumed the U.S. presidency in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as Commanding General of the Army (1869–83). As such, he was responsible for the U.S. Army conduct in the Indian Wars over the next 15 years, in the western United States. He steadfastly refused to be drawn into politics and in 1875 published his Memoirs, one of the best-known firsthand accounts of the Civil War.

Strategies:

General Sherman's record as a tactician was mixed, and his military legacy rests primarily on his command of logistics and on his brilliance as a strategist. The influential 20th century British military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart ranked Sherman as one of the most important strategists in the annals of war, along with Scipio Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon Bonaparte, T. E. Lawrence, and Erwin Rommel.

Liddell Hart credited Sherman with mastery of maneuver warfare (also known as the "indirect approach"), as demonstrated by his series of turning movements against Johnston during the Atlanta Campaign. Liddell Hart also stated that study of Sherman's campaigns had contributed significantly to his own "theory of strategy and tactics in mechanized warfare", which had in turn influenced Heinz Guderian's doctrine of Blitzkrieg and Rommel's use of tanks during the Second World War.

Another WWII-era student of Liddell Hart's writings about Sherman was George S. Patton, who "'spent a long vacation studying Sherman's campaigns on the ground in Georgia and the Carolinas, with the aid of [LH's] book'" and later "'carried out his [bold] plans, in super-Sherman style'".

Sherman's greatest contribution to the war, the strategy of total warfare—endorsed by General Grant and President Lincoln—has been the subject of much controversy. Sherman himself downplayed his role in conducting total war, often saying that he was simply carrying out orders as best he could in order to fulfill his part of Grant's master plan for ending the war.


Like Grant, Sherman was convinced that the Confederacy's strategic, economic, and psychological ability to wage further war needed to be definitively crushed if the fighting were to end. Therefore, he believed that the North had to conduct its campaign as a war of conquest and employ scorched earth tactics to break the backbone of the rebellion, which he called "hard war".

Sherman's advance through Georgia and South Carolina was characterized by widespread destruction of civilian supplies and infrastructure. Although looting was officially forbidden, historians disagree on how well this regulation was enforced. The speed and efficiency of the destruction by Sherman's army was remarkable. The practice of bending rails around trees, leaving behind what came to be known as Sherman's neckties, made repairs difficult. Accusations that civilians were targeted and war crimes were committed on the march have made Sherman a controversial figure to this day, particularly in the South.


The damage done by Sherman was almost entirely limited to the destruction of property. Though exact figures are not available, the loss of civilian life appears to have been very small.

Consuming supplies, wrecking infrastructure, and undermining morale were Sherman's stated goals, and several of his Southern contemporaries noted this and commented on it. For instance, Alabama-born Major Henry Hitchcock, who served in Sherman's staff, declared that "it is a terrible thing to consume and destroy the sustenance of thousands of people", but if the scorched earth strategy served "to paralyze their husbands and fathers who are fighting ... it is mercy in the end."

The severity of the destructive acts by Union troops was significantly greater in South Carolina than in Georgia or North Carolina. This appears to have been a consequence of the animosity among both Union soldiers and officers to the state that they regarded as the "cockpit of secession". One of the most serious accusations against Sherman was that he allowed his troops to burn the city of Columbia.

In 1867, Gen. O.O. Howard, commander of Sherman's 15th Corps, reportedly said, "It is useless to deny that our troops burnt Columbia, for I saw them in the act." However, Sherman himself stated that "[i]f I had made up my mind to burn Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village; but I did not do it ..."

Sherman's official report on the burning placed the blame on Confederate Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton III, who Sherman said had ordered the burning of cotton in the streets. In his memoirs, Sherman said, "In my official report of this conflagration I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton, and confess I did so pointedly to shake the faith of his people in him, for he was in my opinion a braggart and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina." Historian James M. McPherson has concluded that:

The fullest and most dispassionate study of this controversy blames all parties in varying proportions—including the Confederate authorities for the disorder that characterized the evacuation of Columbia, leaving thousands of cotton bales on the streets (some of them burning) and huge quantities of liquor undestroyed ... Sherman did not deliberately burn Columbia; a majority of Union soldiers, including the general himself, worked through the night to put out the fires.

In this general connection, it is also noteworthy that Sherman and his subordinates took steps to protect Raleigh, North Carolina, from acts of revenge after the assassination of President Lincoln.


Autobiography and memoirs:

Sheet music for "Sherman's March to the Sea"Around 1868, Sherman wrote (or at least began) a "private" recollection for his children about his life before the Civil War–identified now as his unpublished "Autobiography, 1828-1861". This manuscript is held by the Ohio Historical Society. Much of the material in it would eventually be incorporated in revised form in his memoirs.

In 1875, ten years after the end of the Civil War, Sherman became one of the first Civil War generals to publish a memoir.[118] His Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. By Himself, published by D. Appleton & Co., in two volumes, began with the year 1846 (when the Mexican War began) and ended with a chapter about the “military lessons of the [civil] war” (1875 edition: Volume I; Volume II ).

The memoirs were controversial, and sparked complaints from many quarters. Grant (serving as President when Sherman’s memoirs first appeared) later remarked that others had told him that Sherman treated Grant unfairly but "when I finished the book, I found I approved every word; that ... it was a true book, an honorable book, creditable to Sherman, just to his companions — to myself particularly so — just such a book as I expected Sherman would write."

In 1886, after the publication of Grant’s memoirs, Sherman produced a "second edition, revised and corrected" of his memoirs with Appleton. The new edition added a second preface, a chapter about his life up to 1846, a chapter concerning the post-war period (ending with his 1884 retirement from the army), several appendices, portraits, improved maps, and an index (1886 edition: Volume I, Volume II).

For the most part, Sherman refused to revise his original text on the ground that "I disclaim the character of historian, but assume to be a witness on the stand before the great tribunal of history" and "any witness who may disagree with me should publish his own version of [the] facts in the truthful narration of which he is interested." However, Sherman did add the appendices, in which he published the views of some others.


Sherman in his later years, in civilian evening clothesSubsequently, Sherman shifted to the publishing house of Charles L. Webster & Co., the publisher of Grant’s memoirs. The new publishing house brought out a "third edition, revised and corrected" in 1890. This difficult-to-find edition was substantively identical to the second (except for the probable omission of Sherman's short 1875 and 1886 prefaces).

After Sherman died in 1891, there were dueling new editions of his memoirs. His first publisher, Appleton, reissued the original (1875) edition with two new chapters about Sherman’s later years added by the journalist W. Fletcher Johnson (1891 Johnson edition: Volume I, Volume II).

Meanwhile, Charles L. Webster & Co. issued a "fourth edition, revised, corrected, and complete" with the text of Sherman’s second edition, a new chapter prepared under the auspices of the Sherman family bringing the general’s life from his retirement to his death and funeral, and an appreciation by politician James G. Blaine (who was related to Sherman's wife). Unfortunately, this edition omits Sherman’s prefaces to the 1875 and 1886 editions (1891 Blaine edition: Volume I, Volume II).

In 1904 and 1913, Sherman’s youngest son (Philemon Tecumseh Sherman) republished the memoirs, ironically with Appleton (not Charles L. Webster & Co.). This was designated as a "second edition, revised and corrected". This edition contains Sherman’s two prefaces, his 1886 text, and the materials added in the 1891 Blaine edition. Thus, this virtually invisible edition of Sherman's memoirs is actually the most comprehensive version.

There are many modern editions of Sherman’s memoirs. The edition most useful for research purposes is the 1990 Library of America version, edited by Charles Royster. It contains the entire text of Sherman’s 1886 edition, together with annotations, a note on the text, and a detailed chronology of Sherman’s life. Missing from this edition is the useful biographical material contained in the 1891 Johnson and Blaine editions.

Published correspondence:

Many of Sherman's official war-time letters (and other items) appear in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Some of these letters are rather personal in nature, rather than relating directly to operational activities of the army. There also are at least five published collections of Sherman correspondence:

Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865, edited by Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999) – a large collection of war-time letters (November 1860 to May 1865).


Sherman at War, edited by Joseph H. Ewing (Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1992) – approximately thirty war time letters to Sherman's father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, and one of his brothers-in-law, Philemon B. Ewing.
Home Letters of General Sherman, edited by M.A. DeWolfe Howe (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1909) – edited letters to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, from 1837 to 1888.


The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between General Sherman and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, edited by Rachel Sherman Thorndike (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1894) – edited letters to his brother, Senator John Sherman, from 1837 to 1891.
General W.T. Sherman as College President, edited by Walter L. Fleming (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1912) – edited letters and other documents from Sherman's 1859–1861 service as superintendent of the Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy.

Death and posterity:

Sherman died in New York City on 14 February 1891.

On 19 February, there was a funeral service held at his home, followed by a military procession. Sherman's body was then transported to St. Louis, where another service was conducted on 21 February 1891 at a local Catholic church. His son, Thomas Ewing Sherman, a Jesuit priest, presided over his father's funeral mass.

General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate officer who had commanded the resistance to Sherman's troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer in New York City. It was a bitterly cold day and a friend of Johnston, fearing that the general might become ill, asked him to put on his hat.

Johnston famously replied: "If I were in [Sherman's] place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat." Johnston did catch a serious cold and died one month later of pneumonia.

Sherman is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. Major memorials to Sherman include the gilded bronze equestrian statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the main entrance to Central Park in New York City and the major monument by Carl Rohl-Smith near President's Park in Washington, D.C. Other posthumous tributes include the naming of the World War II M4 Sherman tank and the "General Sherman" Giant Sequoia tree, the most massive documented single-trunk tree in the world.

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN was born at Lancaster, Ohio, on 8 February 1820; upon his father's death, was adopted into the family of Thomas Ewing, 1829; was educated in a local academy, then attended the United States Military Academy, 1836-1840; was commissioned a second lieutenant, July 1840, and posted to the 3d Cavalry in Florida; was promoted to first lieutenant, November 1841, and served at various southern stations; served in California during the Mexican War as adjutant and aide to Generals Stephen W. Kearny, Persifor F. Smith, and Richard B. Mason, 1847-1850; married Ellen Ewing, 1850; was appointed captain, September 1850, and assigned to commissary duty in St. Louis and New Orleans, 1850-1853; resigned his commission, September 1853; engaged unsuccessfully in banking and law, 1853-1859, then successfully as superintendent of a military college at Alexandria, Louisiana, 1859-1861; was reappointed in the Regular Army as colonel, 13th Infantry, May 1861; was appointed brigadier general of volunteers, May 1861, and commanded a brigade at Bull Run in July; served in Missouri and Kentucky and commanded the Department of the Cumberland and the District of Paducah, 1861-1862; was appointed major general of volunteers, May 1862; commanded a division in the Tennessee-Mississippi campaigns and was wounded at Shiloh, April 1862; commanded the District of Memphis and the Vicksburg expedition 1862; commanded the XV Corps in the Vicksburg operations to its surrender and was appointed brigadier general in the Regular Army, July 1863; commanded the Army of the Tennessee in the Chattanooga-Knoxville operations, 1863-1864; commanded the Division of the Mississippi, 1864-1865, leading the Union forces in the invasion of Georgia; was promoted to major general, August 1864; commanded the Armies of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia in the final operations in the South, receiving the surrender of Confederate forces there, April 1865; was promoted to lieutenant general while in command of the Division of the Mississippi, July 1866; was on a special mission to Mexico, November-December 1866; commanded the Division of the Missouri, 1866-1869; was promoted to general, March 1869; was commanding general of the United States Army, 8 March 1869-1 November 1883; was acting secretary of war, 6 September-25 October 1869; sought to establish senior officer control over bureau heads, pressed for Army control over Indian affairs, urged consolidation of troops at strategic locations, and established a school for infantry and cavalry; retired from active service, February 1884; died in New York City on 14 February 1891.


The Artist

Daniel Huntington (1816-1906) painted the portraits of presidents and generals, writers and artists, Astors and Vanderbilts during seventy productive years as a working artist. About a thousand of his twelve-hundred known works are portraits; of these, fifteen are of secretaries of war and two of secretaries ad interim who also were incumbent commanding generals (Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman). Army records indicate that Huntington painted Sherman and Grant from life at a fee of $300 per portrait. His portrait of General William T. Sherman came into Army holdings in 1875, and is reproduced from the Army Art Collection.

Today is the 82nd birthday of Servant of God Father Vincent Capodanno

Servant of God Father Vincent Capodanno:

As an Staten Islander and a Catholic, I am honored to hear about your story throughout different counts about your life especially on this day, remembering you today, thank you for your bravery and courage and will of God in helping other soliders in the time of the Vietnam War. Thank you and I hope that the Vatican gets your approval and you can become a saint! happy 82nd birthday!




Servant of God Vincent Robert Capodanno (February 13, 1929 – September 4, 1967) was a United States Navy Roman Catholic chaplain and a posthumous recipient of America's highest military decoration — the Medal of Honor — for actions during the Vietnam War.

BiographyVincent R. Capodanno was born in Staten Island, New York, on February 13, 1929. He graduated from Curtis High School, Staten Island, and attended Fordham University for a year before entering the Maryknoll Missionary Seminary in Ossining, New York. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in June 1957.

Father Capodanno's first assignment as a missionary was with aboriginal Taiwanese in the mountains of Taiwan where he served in a parish and later in a school. After seven years, Father Capodanno returned to the United States for leave and then was assigned to a Maryknoll school in Hong Kong.

Capodanno's relatives now reside in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Arizona.

Military service:
In December 1965, Father Capodanno received his commission as a lieutenant in the Navy Chaplain Corps. He was assigned to the First Marine Division in Vietnam in April 1966.

At 4:30 am, September 4, 1967, during Operation Swift in the Thang Binh District of the Que Son Valley, elements of the 1st Battalion 5th Marines encountered a large North Vietnamese unit of approximately 2500 men near the village of Dong Son. The outnumbered and disorganized Company D was in need of reinforcements. By 9:14 am, twenty-six Marines were confirmed dead and another company of Marines was committed to the battle. At 9:25 am, the commander of 1st Battalion 5th Marine requested further reinforcements.

Father Capodanno went among the wounded and dying, giving last rites and taking care of his Marines. Wounded once in the face and having his hand almost severed, he went to help a wounded corpsman only yards from an enemy machinegun and was killed. His body was recovered and interred in his family's plot in Saint Peters Cemetery, West New Brighton, Staten Island, New York.

On December 27, 1968, then Secretary of the Navy Paul Ignatius notified the Capodanno family that Lieutenant Capodanno would posthumously be awarded the Medal of Honor in recognition of his selfless sacrifice. The official ceremony was held January 7, 1969.

Cause for Canonization:
On May 19, 2002, Capodanno's Cause for Canonization was officially opened, and so he is now referred to as a Servant of God.

In May 2004 the Initial Documentation was submitted to The Congregation for the Causes of Saints with CatholicMil acting as Petitioner and Father Daniel Mode named Postulator.

On May 21, 2006 a Public Decree of Servant of God was issued by the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA. The statement was made by Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien in Washington D.C.

Today is the 100th birthday of President Ronald Wilson Reagan

This is one of my favorite photographs of Blessed Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Wilson Regan



Mr. President, When I was born during your presidency in 1982, I remember seeing on tv and doing remarkable speeches, you are truly a gifted actor and president, thank you for breaking the infamous "0" curse and defeating the Communism,you are one of my top favorite presidents, remembering you today, happy 100th birthday!


Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989), the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975) and prior to that, a Hollywood actor.

Reagan was born in Tampico in Whiteside County, Illinois, reared in Dixon in Lee County, Illinois, and educated at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology. Upon his graduation, Reagan first moved to Iowa to work as a radio broadcaster and then in 1937 to Los Angeles, California. He began a career as an actor, first in films and later television, appearing in over 50 movie productions and earning enough success to become a famous, publicly recognized figure.

Some of his most notable roles are in Knute Rockne, All American and Kings Row. Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and election in 1980.

As president, Reagan implemented sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics," advocated reducing tax rates to spur economic growth, controlling the money supply to reduce inflation, deregulation of the economy, and reducing government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, took a hard line against labor unions, and ordered military actions in Grenada. He was reelected in a landslide in 1984, proclaiming it was "Morning in America."

His second term was primarily marked by foreign matters, such as the ending of the Cold War, the bombing of Libya, and the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair. Publicly describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," he supported anti-Communist movements worldwide and spent his first term forgoing the strategy of détente by ordering a massive military buildup in an arms race with the USSR. Reagan negotiated with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating in the INF Treaty and the decrease of both countries' nuclear arsenals.

Reagan left office in 1989. In 1994, the former president disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease earlier in the year; he died ten years later at the age of 93. He ranks highly in public opinion polls of U.S. Presidents, and is a conservative icon.


Early life
Ronald Reagan as a teenager in Dixon, IllinoisRonald Wilson Reagan was born in an apartment on the second floor of a commercial building in Tampico, Illinois on February 6, 1911, to John Edward "Jack" Reagan and Nelle Wilson Reagan. Reagan's father was of Irish Catholic ancestry, while his mother had Scots-English ancestors.

Reagan had one older brother, Neil "Moon" Reagan (1908–1996), who became an advertising executive. As a boy, Reagan's father nicknamed his son "Dutch," due to his "fat little Dutchman"-like appearance, and his "Dutchboy" haircut; the nickname stuck with him throughout his youth.

Reagan's family briefly lived in several towns and cities in Illinois, including Monmouth, Galesburg and Chicago, until 1919, when they returned to Tampico and lived above the H.C. Pitney Variety Store. After his election as president, residing in the upstairs White House private quarters, Reagan would quip that he was "living above the store again".

According to Paul Kengor, author of God and Ronald Reagan, Reagan had a particularly strong faith in the goodness of people, which stemmed from the optimistic faith of his mother, Nelle, and the Disciples of Christ faith,which he was baptized into in 1922.

For the time, Reagan was unusual in his opposition to racial discrimination, and recalled a time in Dixon when the local inn would not allow black people to stay there. Reagan brought them back to his house, where his mother invited them to stay the night and have breakfast the next morning.

Following the closure of the Pitney Store in late 1920, the Reagans moved to Dixon; the midwestern "small universe" had a lasting impression on Reagan. He attended Dixon High School, where he developed interests in acting, sports, and storytelling.

His first job was as a lifeguard at the Rock River in Lowell Park, near Dixon, in 1926. Reagan performed 77 rescues as a lifeguard, noting that he notched a mark on a wooden log for every life he saved. Reagan attended Eureka College, where he became a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and majored in economics and sociology. He developed a reputation as a jack of all trades, excelling in campus politics, sports and theater. He was a member of the football team, captain of the swim team and was elected student body president. As student president, Reagan notably led a student revolt against the college president after he tried to cut back the faculty.


Death:
Death and state funeral of Ronald Reagan
Reagan died at his home in Bel Air, California on the afternoon of June 5, 2004. A short time after his death, Nancy Reagan released a statement saying: "My family and I would like the world to know that President Ronald Reagan has died after 10 years of Alzheimer's Disease at 93 years of age. We appreciate everyone's prayers." President George W. Bush declared June 11 a National Day of Mourning, and international tributes came in from around the world.

Reagan's body was taken to the Kingsley and Gates Funeral Home in Santa Monica, California later in the day, where well-wishers paid tribute by laying flowers and American flags in the grass. On June 7, his body was removed and taken to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where a brief family funeral was held. His body lay in repose in the Library lobby until June 9; over 100,000 people viewed the coffin.

On June 9, Reagan's body was flown to Washington, D.C. where he became the tenth United States president to lie in state; in thirty-four hours, 104,684 people filed past the coffin.

On June 11, a state funeral was conducted in the Washington National Cathedral, and presided over by President George W. Bush. Eulogies were given by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and both Presidents Bush. Also in attendance were Mikhail Gorbachev, and many world leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and interim presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and Ghazi al-Yawer of Iraq.

After the funeral, the Reagan entourage was flown back to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, where another service was held, and President Reagan was interred. At the time of his death, Reagan was the longest-lived president in U.S. history, having lived 93 years and 120 days (2 years, 8 months, and 23 days longer than John Adams, whose record he surpassed). He is now the second longest-lived president, just 45 days fewer than Gerald Ford. He was the first United States president to die in the 21st century, and his was the first state funeral in the United States since that of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973.

His burial site is inscribed with the words he delivered at the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: "I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and that there is purpose and worth to each and every life."

Legacy;

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library was dedicated on November 4. 1991. Supporters have pointed to a more efficient and prosperous economy and a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Critics argue that his economic policies caused huge budget deficits, quadrupling the United States national debt, and that the Iran-Contra affair lowered American credibility.

As time has passed, he has generally come to be viewed in a more positive light, and ranks highly among presidents in many public opinion polls.[268] In presidential surveys he has consistently been ranked in the first and second quartiles, with more recent surveys generally ranking Reagan in the first quartile of U.S. presidents.

Edwin Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation, said that Reagan "helped create a safer, freer world" and said of his economic policies: "He took an America suffering from 'malaise'... and made its citizens believe again in their destiny."

However, Mark Weisbrot, co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said that Reagan's "economic policies were mostly a failure," and Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post stated that Reagan was "a far more controversial figure in his time than the largely gushing obits on television would suggest".

Many conservative and liberal scholars agree that Reagan has been the most influential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaving his imprint on American politics, diplomacy, culture, and economics. Since he left office, historians have reached a consensus, as summarized by British historian M. J. Heale, who finds that scholars now concur that Reagan rehabilitated conservatism, turned the nation to the right, practiced a pragmatic conservatism that balanced ideology and the constraints of politics, revived faith in the presidency and in American self respect, and contributed to victory in the Cold War.


List of honors named for Ronald Reagan

Reagan received a number of awards in his pre- and post-presidential years. Following his election as president, Reagan received a lifetime gold membership in the Screen Actors Guild, as well as the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award.

In 1989, Reagan was made an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, one of the highest British orders (this entitled him to the use of the post-nominal letters "GCB" but, as a foreigner, not to be known as "Sir Ronald Reagan"); only two American presidents have received this honor, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Reagan was also named an honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. Japan awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum in 1989; he was the second American president to receive the order and the first to have it given to him for personal reasons (Dwight D. Eisenhower received it as a commemoration of U.S.-Japanese relations).


Former President Ronald Reagan returns to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush in 1993.

On January 18, 1993, Reagan's former Vice-President and sitting President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States can bestow. Reagan was also awarded the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom, the highest honor bestowed by Republican members of the Senate.

On Reagan's 87th birthday, in 1998, Washington National Airport was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport by a bill signed into law by President Clinton.

That year, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center was dedicated in Washington, D.C. He was among 18 included in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, from a poll conducted of the American people in 1999; two years later, USS Ronald Reagan was christened by Nancy Reagan and the United States Navy. It is one of few Navy ships christened in honor of a living person and the first aircraft carrier to be named in honor of a living former president.


A bronze statue of Reagan stands in the Capitol rotunda as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.Congress authorized the creation of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site in Dixon, Illinois in 2002, pending federal purchase of the property.

On May 16 of that year, Nancy Reagan accepted the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress, on behalf of the president and herself.

Following Reagan's death, the United States Postal Service issued a President Ronald Reagan commemorative postage stamp in 2005. Later in the year, CNN, along with the editors of Time magazine, named him the "most fascinating person" of the network's first 25 years; Time listed Reagan one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century as well. The Discovery Channel asked its viewers to vote for The Greatest American in an unscientific poll on June 26, 2005; Reagan received the honorary title.

In 2006, Reagan was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.

Every year since 2002, California Governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger have proclaimed February 6 "Ronald Reagan Day" in the state of California in honor of their most famous predecessor.[331] In 2010, Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 944,authored by Senator George Runner, to make every February 6 Ronald Reagan Day in California.

In 2007, Polish President Lech Kaczyński posthumously conferred on Reagan the highest Polish distinction, the Order of the White Eagle, saying that Reagan had inspired the Polish people to work for change and helped to unseat the repressive communist regime; Kaczyński said it "would not have been possible if it was not for the tough-mindedness, determination, and feeling of mission of President Ronald Reagan". Reagan backed the nation of Poland throughout his presidency, supporting the anti-communist Solidarity movement, along with Blessed Pope John Paul II.

On June 3, 2009, Nancy Reagan unveiled a statue of her late husband in the United States Capitol rotunda. The statue represents the state of California in the National Statuary Hall Collection. Following Reagan's death, both major American political parties agreed to erect a statue of Reagan in the place of that of Thomas Starr King.[335] The day before, President Obama signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law, establishing a commission to plan activities to mark the upcoming centenary of Reagan's birth.



April 04, 2005, 7:53 a.m.
Freedom’s Men
The Cold War team of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan.

By Mark Riebling

Though Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan will be remembered as the pope and the president who defeated Communism, the exact nature of their relationship has remained elusive. Some journalists have posited a “holy alliance” between the two, with the CIA briefing the pope each Friday. Others, like George Weigel writing in National Review, have argued that “there was neither alliance nor conspiracy [but] a common purpose born of a set of shared convictions.”

Which view is more correct? The documentary record is incomplete, but clues to the answer may be found in formerly top-secret National Security Council files, now available at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. These materials reveal, often in granular detail, how the U.S. Vatican relationship evolved during Reagan’s first term. The documents describe the first contacts between the pope and the president; nuclear brinksmanship and disarmament; the Solidarity crisis in Poland; and Vice President George Bush's private 1984 meeting with the pope.

These papers yield tantalizing snapshots of buoyant goodwill and tireless diplomacy on both sides. There was, sometimes, a de facto alliance between this president and pope. But relations were not so close that they could be taken for granted by the president's men. In fact, the documents reveal a continuous scurrying to shore up Vatican support for U.S. policies. They also reveal a Vatican which acts politically, but always in a highly spiritual way.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the papers show that that, as late as 1984, the pope did not believe the Communist Polish government could be changed.


First Contacts
In February 1981, just over a year following his first triumphal visit to the U.S, Pope John Paul II planned to refuel for three hours in Anchorage, Alaska, en route home following a major pastoral trip to the Philippines, Japan, and Guam. National Security Council staffers recommended to Reagan, who had been in office only a few weeks, that he "establish an early, personal relationship with the Pope while welcoming him back to North American soil."

On February 5, NSC staffer James M. Rentschler proposed that a "Nanook-of-the-North mission" be mounted during the pope's Alaskan layover. Accordingly, when John Paul landed in Anchorage on February 25, the envoy-designate to the Vatican, William Wilson, handed him a letter from Reagan, stating: "...I hope you will not hesitate to use him [Wilson] as the channel for sensitive matters you or your associates may wish to communicate to me."


Nuclear Brinksmanship
On May 22, 1981, the pope's 61st birthday, Reagan sent Congressmen Peter Rodino to Rome with a personal letter for the pope, who was still hospitalized after the attempt on his life. "The qualities you exemplify," Reagan wrote, "remain a precious asset as we confront the growing dangers of the moment." Yet by November, as U.S.- Soviet negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear missiles began in Geneva, Switzerland, relations between the White House and Vatican were strained.

The Vatican Academy of Sciences was preparing a study on the dangers of nuclear war and the pope was preparing letters to Reagan and Brezhnev, urging disarmament. On November 11, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig appealed to the pope, through Cardinal Achille Silvestrini of the Vatican secretariat of state, not to morally equate U.S. and Soviet military might. The White House was worried, as Haig confided in a memo, about the "possible impact on support for defense programs needed in the west."

"It would be misleading, we believe, to imply in any way that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are equally responsible for having created the conditions that pose a danger of nuclear war," Haig wrote on November, 11, instructing Ambassador Wilson on the line to take with Silvestrini. "We would hope that His Holiness would give due weight to this consideration as he determines the most appropriate means of giving expression to the Church's views. "

The Vatican would not budge, however. The pope's November 25 letter on nuclear war, delivered simultaneously to Reagan and Brezhnev, implicitly blamed both the U.S. and the Soviets for moving the world toward Armageddon. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, attempted to diffuse the tensions in a December 15 visit to the Oval Office. But the White House did not reply to the pope's letter for nearly two months, when Reagan finally tried to put the best face on what was clearly a diplomatic defeat. "Your words of encouragement were welcome as we begin negotiations with the Soviet Union in Geneva for the elimination of all intermediate range nuclear missiles," Reagan wrote John Paul on January 16, 1982. "I reject, as you also do, Your Holiness, the doctrine that sees us as helpless creatures of inexorable fate."

This was the low point of Vatican-White House relations during the Reagan years. Yet tensions over the nuclear issue soon evaporated, as the pope's and the president's men made common cause against a Communist crackdown in the pope's homeland.


The Polish Crisis
On December 12-13, 1981, the Communist government of Poland arrested thousands of thousands of activists of the workers' movement known as Solidarnosc, or Solidarity. Over the next weeks the White House and the Vatican consulted closely on the events in Poland by telephone, cable, and through diplomatic representatives. "We seem to be overloading the Vatican circuits of late," Rentschler cautioned in one memo during this period. But a back channel for especially sensitive messages to the pope, established through his secretary, Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, in fact proved vital in coordinating Western sanctions against the Polish government and its Soviet sponsors.

"The United States will not let the Soviet Union dictate Poland's future with impunity," Reagan wrote the pope on December 29, 1981.

I am announcing today additional American measures aimed at raising the cost to the Russians of their continued violence against Poland. … Unfortunately, if these American measures are not accompanied by other Western countries, the Russians may decide to pursue repression, hoping to provoke a rupture within the Western world, while escaping the consequences of our measures. … I therefore ask your assistance in using your own suasion throughout the West in an attempt to achieve unity on these needed measures [economic sanctions on Poland and the Soviet Union]… I hope you will do whatever is in your power to stress these truths to the leaders of the West.

A week later, Cardinal Silvestrini called in Ambassador Wilson and handed him a letter from the pope, pledging support for the U.S. sanctions. Though John Paul worried about the impact of sanctions on the Polish people, he would stand with the president, even if he could not say so publicly.

Wilson's account of Silvestrini's remarks, in a January 6, 1982 cable to Haig, offers a rare window on the Vatican's philosophy of church-state relations.

The Vatican recognizes that the U.S. is a great power with global responsibilities. The United States must operate on the political plane and the Holy See does not comment on the political positions taken by governments. It is for each government to decide its political policies. The Holy See for its part operates on the moral plane. The two planes (politics and morality) can be complementary when they have the same objective. In this case they are complementary because both the Holy See and the United States have the same objective: the restoration of liberty to Poland.

The White House was ecstatic. "The Pope's letter makes it clear that he supports our policies and shares our goals," National Security Adviser William P. Clark wrote in a memo to Reagan January 11.

Reagan breached protocol, however, by referring to the pope's confidential letter in a January 20 press conference — citing it to refute German press reports that the Vatican did not support the hardline U.S. stance on Poland. The Vatican backed away from Reagan's statement, and Wilson had to sit down with John Paul to straighten matters out. "[T]he Pope made it clear he does in fact support our Polish policy, and sees his actions as complementary to ours," an NSC memo on the meeting reported. "However, he cannot be as publicly forthcoming in expressing this support as we would wish."

On February 23, NSC staffer Dennis C. Blair advised Clark: "You may wish to mention personally to the President that in the case of letters from friendly heads of state, it is safest to check with the sender before talking about the contents publicly."


Bush and the Pope
On February 15, 1984, Vice President George H. W. Bush concluded a trip to Europe and the USSR by meeting with the pope in Rome. As he flew back across the Atlantic on Air Force 2, Bush recorded his impressions in a secret cable to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane.
I just had a visit with the Holy Father which lasted about 55 minutes. The Holy Father looked well, spoke softly but with a great sincerity, leaning forward across the desk and looking right into my eyes. ....

I was received alone by the Holy Father [and] gave [him] our views on East-West with some emphasis on my meetings with [Soviet President Constantin] Chernenko yesterday. The Holy Father opined Chernenko was close to [former Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev; maybe that will be helpful. He [the Holy Father] was interested in lower [sic] of rhetoric. A lower tone of rhetoric, etc.

I then asked him if he had any advice for us on Poland. He discussed this for some time. … The most important problem is the question of human rights. … The government cannot be changed. Therefore you must influence [Polish leader General Wojciech] Jaruzelski to "have a more human face."


In light of the credit that has since been given the pope for influencing Poland's political evolution — an evolution widely seen as causing the collapse of the East Bloc and the end of the Cold War — his own assertion that the Polish government "cannot be changed" is intriguing. Perhaps it is a function of his greatness that this pope did not realize how powerful he truly was. Yet it is important to remember that his remarks were made a year before Gorbachev took power; and it was only with Gorbachev’s ascent that the Polish government could be changed.

The pope and vice president also discussed America's worsening relations with much of the Muslim world. "I brought him up to date on Lebanon," Bush recorded. "The Holy Father emphasized the importance of the Democratic character of the [Lebanese] state. He emphasized the need for coexistence between Christians and Moslems. He came back to the theme of coexistence several times."



The Verdict of History
Among the more lasting impressions conveyed by these papers is the sheer deference showed by Reagan’s working-level staffers toward the pope, even when the two sides were at odds over policy. Admiration for this pope’s spiritual leadership has stripped Protestant White House staffers of any evident cynicism. They pun about a papal "missile" on disarmament, but are in dead earnest in their respect, and at times even reverence, for the Holy Father. Reagan himself, in his letters to Pope John Paul II, admits to being uniquely inspired by the leadership of the pope. The letters have an intensely personal quality, a warmth and light, which is striking when compared to the no less sincere, but far more formalistic, expressions of solidarity made by FDR to the World War II pope, Pius XII.

The geopolitical dynamic would of course soon change, during Reagan's second term, with the 1985 ascent of Gorbachev. Historians will debate the extent to which Soviet changes were sparked by the insistence, of both Reagan and John Paul, on the fundamental importance of the dignity of the human person. But when the Soviets faced these two leaders of shared purpose and conviction, they faced their worst-case scenario: a moral-political meta-power. As Cardinal Silvestrini had said, “The two planes (politics and morality) can be complementary when they have the same objective.” That there was no formal Vatican alliance with the West only gave the pope’s moral stance all the more weight. Perhaps, ultimately, that was part of the essential genius of his policy.

— Mark Riebling