Died. Athina Niarchos, 45, fifth wife of Greek Shipping Baron Stavros Niarchos and ex-spouse of his arch rival Aristotle Onassis; of an apparent heart attack; at the Niarchos town house in Paris. Blonde, willowy Tina had already been through two marriages (14 years with Onassis, ten with John Spencer-Churchill, now the Duke of Marlborough) before her sensational 1971 wedding to Niarchos: it was just five months after her divorce from the duke and 17 months after the death of her older sister Eugenie, Niarchos' third wife, from what was officially ruled to be an overdose of sleeping pills. Tina's death was discovered by a maid as she brought breakfast to her bedroom, while Niarchos was asleep in another room.

-Died. Luther H. Hodges, 76, former Governor of North Carolina and Secretary of Commerce; of an apparent heart attack; in Chapel Hill, N.C. A sharecropper's son who worked his way through the University of North Carolina by waiting on tables, Hodges left a career as a textile executive at 52 to help run the Marshall Plan in postwar West Germany. As Governor from 1954 to 1960, he was successful not only in guiding North Carolina through a pe riod of racial tension but also in attracting an impressive influx of industry--an achievement that helped earn him the Commerce post in John Kennedy's Cabinet. With characteristic vigor, he promoted exports to Communist countries, arguing: "Sell them anything they can eat, drink or smoke."

-Died. V.K. Krishna Menon, 77, virulently anti-Western former Indian Defense Minister and delegate to the United Nations; of an apparent heart attack; in New Delhi. Son of a wealthy lawyer, Menon was an ascetic, acerbic, anticolonialist firebrand who lived in London and agitated against British rule in India for 28 years until independence came in 1947. His intimate friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, led to a series of high-level government posts. At the U.N. in the 1950s, Menon regularly scourged U.S. "imperialism," although he condoned Moscow's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. As Defense Minister Menon's failure to prepare for the 1962 Chinese assault on India's fragile defenses along the Himalayan border led to Nehru's greatest governmental crisis--and to Menon's own political demise.

Died. Paul G. Hoffman, 83, statesman and global philanthropist; in New York City. A born salesman, Hoffman quit college at 18 to sell Studebakers in Los Angeles, cleared his first million at age 34 and became president of Studebaker ten years later. Impressed by his success in turning the ailing auto firm around, President Truman asked him in 1948 to head the Marshall Plan; over the next 2% years Hoffman dispensed more than $10 billion to revive Western Europe's war-shattered economy in a successful effort that brilliantly proved his argument that "prosperity is the best antidote to Communism." As chief of the United Nations Development Program, from 1959 to 1972, he spent his "most fascinating" years funding projects ranging from dam surveys to locust extermination in a hundred countries.

-Died. Henry Joel Cadbury, 90, Quaker peace activist and longtime head of the American Friends Service Committee, which he helped found in World War I to provide conscientious objectors with humanitarian alternatives (such as ambulance driving) to bearing arms in what he regarded as "a wholly unjustified" conflict; in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

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