Farewell to Those Who Left

By Hugh Sidey; Richard Schickel; Tom Brokaw; Unmesh Kher; Matthew Cooper; Joel Stein

BOB HOPE

"He gets laughter wherever he goes, from men who need laughter."

JOHN STEINBECK, novelist, in a 1943 newspaper column praising the comedian's contribution in entertaining U.S. troops overseas during World War II

DR. ROBERT ATKINS

"The whole idea the diet doesn't work when you go off of it--that's the whole point. Why would you go off of it? Here is a diet that's fun to eat... We've got real human beings who have been on this diet, and they'll tell you exactly what happens. They've never felt better in their life."

Popularizer of the high-protein, low-carb diet, in an interview on CNN's Crossfire, 1999

KATHARINE HEPBURN

"I have become a familiar. I am very aware of that now. I'm like the Statue of Liberty to a lot of people."

The Hollywood star, in her 1991 autobiography Me: Stories of My Life

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN ELEGANT EGGHEAD

Pat Moynihan is up there in my pantheon of great characters, along with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, two of the four Presidents for whom he worked. I encountered him inside the mournful White House the night of John Kennedy's assassination. He stood mute, tears coursing down his cheeks. Then he filched a picture of J.F.K. and joyfully told the world of his loving larceny. He held that picture to his heart the rest of his life. Once in Nixon's White House I listened to Moynihan expound on Schumpeterian economics while the snout of an opened champagne bottle peeked out of a desk drawer. "Pat's great," Nixon once told me, "as long as you get to him before noon." For my dime, he was great after noon or any other time, following the Churchillian example of being able for a few crucial years to get more out of alcohol than it got out of him. I once ran into him at the palatial Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., working on one of his many books. He was dressed in grungy Nikes, rumpled chinos and a fashionable Turnbull & Asser shirt. The complete Moynihan: casual elegance, mindfully engaged in explaining the difficult world beyond. --By Hugh Sidey

ELIA KAZAN THE LISTENER

"The wonderful thing about him," Elia Kazan once said of his greatest actor, Marlon Brando, "is the ambivalence--between a soft, yearning, girlish side and a dissatisfaction that is violent and can be dangerous." Danger was the business of the tireless and insinuating Kazan in the 1940s and '50s, when he was something no one before or since has been: simultaneously America's leading theatrical (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman) and movie (On the Waterfront) director. He was not so much a great imagist as a great listener to, manipulator and appreciator of, the sometimes dissonant music of volatile personalities. What he sought was not so much acting, the way it had been conventionally understood, as it was heartbreaking, sometimes heart-stopping, moments of emotional reality that transcended the dramatic conventions of whatever we were watching. Kazan permanently changed the standards by which performances are made and judged. Actors were no longer expected merely to pose prettily or speak resonantly; they were supposed to expose the secrets of the human soul. That, rather than his controversial congressional testimony against former communists, is his enduring legacy. --By Richard Schickel

DAVID BRINKLEY ICON, ICONOCLAST

On television David Brinkley was medium cool, a reserved man with a well-advertised wry style, but off the air he had a broad mischievous streak. He liked poker, shooting pool, betting the ponies, practical jokes and small, elegant dinner parties heavy on gossip and one-liners. Around the office, David, an icon who was iconoclastic, had a special affection for the staff rogues, like a production assistant who was fearless in her needling comments on self-important network executives. But it was his manner on air that endeared him to generations of viewers. I learned so much from just watching him on long election nights or during political conventions and national crises. Television is a visual medium of fleeting images, and David used words with great precision to complement those images, not simply to provide captions. The day after Robert F. Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, a hearse and a motorcade carrying Kennedy family members made their way to the airport. David let that somber scene play out silently for a few moments and then said, as I remember, "For the second time in less than five years, a Kennedy widow is in a car behind her husband's body, headed for an airport in a Western city, for the long trip home so the national mourning may begin." --By Tom Brokaw

ALTHEA GIBSON

"I am not a racially conscious person. I don't want to be... I'm a tennis player, not a Negro tennis player."

African-American Wimbledon and U.S. Open tennis champion, in her autobiography, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody

IDI AMIN A MODEL DESPOT

He was not just Uganda's President for Life. He was, Idi Amin insisted, also the King of Scotland and the Conqueror of the British Empire. To many who heard his inane pronouncements on television and watched him dance buffoonishly in the streets even as he dismantled his nation's economy, the 300-lb., 6-ft. 4-in. dictator seemed more like Africa's leading clown. But to those who endured his tyranny for eight years in the 1970s, he seemed a nightmare that had lasted too long.

"Indeed, he is a clown when he chooses," his onetime Attorney General once noted. "Face to face, he is relaxed, simple and charming. But this is no more than a facade ... He kills rationally and coolly." To slake his thirst for absolute power and soothe a driving paranoia, Amin oversaw the murder of perhaps 500,000 Ugandans at the hands of torturers and executioners. His example was one of the most extreme, but hardly unique in the annals of 20th century despotism. Yet after being ousted in 1979, Amin, unlike Iraq's captured dictator, was allowed to spend his remaining years in comfortable exile, finally fading into a coma and dying unpunished--and unrepentant to the last. --By Unmesh Kher

GREGORY PECK

"He is U.S. cinema's first male idol to resist typing: the first to devote himself successfully to the art of acting."

TIME cover story on the film star, 1948

JOHN RITTER

"I know my voice sounds like I've got two fingers up my nose. But I've gotten over saying to myself, If I was only Robert Redford."

The TV comedy star, to a Washington Post writer, 1977

GREG0RY HINES

"He sweeps about gently and then lets loose with cataclysmic force... This man is human lightning, and he just can't be contained."

FRANK RICH in the New York Times, reviewing Hines' performance in Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway, 1981

EDWARD TELLER

"I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous."

Nuclear scientist who was a key developer of the atom bomb, and a rabid and controversial anticommunist in the 1950s

STROM THURMOND OLD GHOSTS

For years it had been rumored that Thurmond, a Senator from South Carolina, had fathered a black child, but it wasn't until Essie Mae Washington Williams came forward a few months after his death, at age 100, that it became clear the former segregationist leader who once inveighed against "mixing the races" had had his own entanglements. As 78-year-old Williams told it, she had been conceived while her mother worked as a domestic in the Thurmonds' home. Over the years, there were cash payments and moments of tenderness when the Senator and his daughter would occasionally meet. Williams stayed mum as Thurmond went from state legislator to Governor to segregationist presidential candidate and finally to the longest tenure of any Senator in history, 48 years. Confessing her heritage at last, she told reporters she finally felt "completely free." Her words seemed an appropriate epitaph for the complex Thurmond, who later became the first Southern Senator to hire a black staff member, and for an era in which attitudes about race were marked by ambiguity and often hypocrisy. --By Matthew Cooper

MADAME CHIANG KAI-SHEK

"Through her China has for millions of Americans ... become a modern nation."

PEARL S. BUCK, writing about the wife of the former Nationalist Chinese leader in LIFE magazine, 1943

"An actress [who has] ... a penchant for playing a part which produces falsity."

JOHN KING FAIRBANK, Harvard University China scholar, 1943

DONALD O'CONNOR

"Fit as a fiddle and ready for love, I can jump over the moon up above."

Lyrics from a song-and-dance number that O'Connor performed with Gene Kelly in the musical Singin' in the Rain

JOHNNY CASH

"The rhythms of life on the road are so predictable, so familiar. I've been out here 40 years now, and if you want to know what's really changed in all that time, I'll tell you. Back in 1957, there was no Extra Crispy."

Country singer, in his autobiography, Cash, 1997

ART CARNEY

"How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage?"

Actor best known for his role as Ralph Kramden's sidekick, sewer worker Ed Norton, on TV's The Honeymooners, to New York Post columnist Earl Wilson, 1974

FRED ROGERS HE MADE IT O.K. TO BE A WUSS

This writing gig, this is my Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where it is easy to be bold and honest and confrontational. But in my real life, I have always been shy and wussy, and Mr. Rogers' gentle-Americana Buddhism made me feel as if that was good. He knew that the only reassurance in the face of the Sendakian horrors of childhood--the uncertainty, the lack of control--is acceptance. His neighborhood wasn't a utopia--he lived alone in a small apartment with a fish tank--but a community where every type of person was nice to him because he accepted them.

I'd assuage my loneliness by jamming to my Mr. Rogers album all the time, but it wasn't until high school that I learned how politically radical Fred Rogers was. One of the toughest kids in the school, drunk, his gold chain hanging halfway down his already hairy chest, told me his dad would lock him and his brother in the closet every time he caught them watching Mr. Rogers, fearful the show would turn them into homosexuals. But even years later, at 18 years old and miles from a sweater vest, this kid still loved Mr. Rogers. And I realized how much worse my high school, and my world, would have been without him. --By Joel Stein