by Ann Wroe
Cuba’s cradle-to-grave health care had in fact done little for him. He did not consult a doctor until he was around 115, and never went to hospital until the last few days of his life. Had he needed care earlier it would have been astonishingly good for a developing country, but standards are lower now than in the past. Money has been siphoned elsewhere, to “health tourism”; ordinary patients must bring their own lightbulbs and bedsheets. Cuba’s best levels of health care, like its centenarians, are put on display mostly to show the world what it can do.
And what of that other elderly man, bearded and now frail, recovering slowly from “intestinal bleeding”, but still the longest-serving ruler in the world? Why, says his optimistic doctor, he may still survive to 125; for he is lucky enough to live in Cuba, the site of the Fountain of Youth.
Eugene McCarthy
Eugene Joseph McCarthy, a maverick presidential candidate, died on December 10th 2005, aged 89
WHEN Eugene McCarthy was making his first and most famous attempt on the presidency, in 1968, he was often asked why he was running. It was a good question. And he had a good answer:
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds:
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
This fragment of Yeats seemed to epitomise the man who quoted it. Irishness, daring, puckish humour, wilful solitariness, a sense of the pervading importance of higher things, were all delivered with professorial elegance by a man once described as “Thomas Aquinas in a suit”. Two criticisms only could be made. First, that it was delivered in the white heat of one of America’s nastiest election campaigns, to crowds chafing for more solid fare. And, second, that it was not true.
Mr McCarthy’s peculiar political career was driven not by the impulse of delight but, in fairly equal measure, by principle and pique. His model of political behaviour was Thomas More, a witty but pig-headed martyr for his beliefs in Tudor England; his training ground was the hockey field at the various Catholic institutions at which he was educated, on which his desire to win could be shockingly intense. In political life, he kept his ambition well buried under layers of diffidence and urbanity. But he had some, and when he was slighted he did not forget.
His decision to oppose Lyndon Johnson in 1968 was a case in point. Mr McCarthy had come ardently to oppose the Vietnam war. He also could not help remembering that Johnson had humiliated him at the 1964 Democratic convention, choosing Hubert Humphrey, rather than him, as his running-mate at the last minute. He thought Johnson “a barbarian”, determined to barge his way through any kind of checks and balances to prosecute the war. But the Senate had no desire to curb him. Someone, therefore, had to take the debate to the public. That someone (no one else being brave enough) would have to be Eugene McCarthy.
His campaign was odd in the extreme. He did not call himself a candidate, but an “accidental instrument” to express the will of the country. He knew he could not win. By challenging Johnson, he simply hoped to force the convention open for someone else. In fact, he came so close to Johnson in the New Hampshire primary that the president realised he was doomed, and soon quit the race. The nomination went eventually to Humphrey, no improvement in Mr McCarthy’s view. But he had managed to shake his party to its foundations.
He had also mobilised the young, inspiring them to shave off their beards and get knocking on doors in a way not seen again until Howard Dean’s insurgency in 2004. The radicals of the anti-war movement did not take to him, however, nor he to them. As riots raged in the streets of Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention, Mr McCarthy, watching from the windows of the Hilton hotel, said the scene below reminded him of the Battle of Lake Trasimeno in the Punic Wars.
He was a politician, yet he despised politics. In the House, where he sat for Minnesota’s Fourth District from 1949 to 1959, he would pointedly read books in committee meetings. In the Senate, where he served from 1959 to 1971, he seemed bored, and was often absent. Instinctively shy, he hated pressing the flesh or canvassing for money. He once compared politics to being a football coach: “You have to be smart enough to know the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”
Was it important to him? His opinions could be hard to sift, sometimes far to the left of his party, sometimes conservative.He believed in “redistributive justice”, a relic of his youthful days in the Catholic Worker movement, but endorsed Ronald Reagan. He also opposed all limits on political donations as crimps on freedom of speech. That freedom was his passion in politics. Accordingly he hated the stale old bunfight between Republicans and Democrats, and left the Democrats in 1972 to become an independent.
His three later forays into presidential politics were embarrassing and looked self-indulgent. But Mr McCarthy believed he could still shake Americans out of their political torpor. The irony was that the Democrats, responding in part to the shock he had administered, became increasingly a party of the elite and intellectual rather than the working man.
He might never have entered politics at all. As a young man, he almost became a monk. In his home town, a small German-Catholic community lost in the Minnesota prairie, to take orders was the highest career. He tried the novitiate for a year, but was thrown out for intellectual pride.
The same pride tortured him in politics. His mind was too acute and freewheeling to suffer its restrictions. Norman Mailer, meeting him in 1968 at a fundraiser in Harvard, found him drooping and baggy-eyed, longing to be rescued. Some weeks later, he saw him in Chicago. He had just definitively abandoned the race, and was dining and joking with friends. He was free. And Mr Mailer suddenly glimpsed in him then the perfect president, “harder than the hardest alloys of steel”.
Malcolm McLean
Malcolm Purcell McLean, pioneer of container ships, died on May 25th 2001, aged 87
THE first container ship was an elderly oil tanker, the Ideal X, whose deck had been strengthened to accommodate 58 well-filled boxes each some 30ft (9 metres) long. Malcolm McLean, normally an unemotional man, as befitted his Scottish ancestry, watched with a twinge of anxiety as the ship left Port Newark in New Jersey. Would the boxes survive the long journey down the east coast, into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Houston? Or might some of the boxes, or all of them, be swept unrecoverably into the sea, as some doubters had predicted? Would the valuable cargoes themselves arrive undamaged after the Ideal X, described by a reporter as an “old bucket of bolts”, had been buffeted by Atlantic gales?
They seemed reasonable worries at the time, but even had the Ideal X sunk, the probability is that containerisation would have only been delayed for a year or two. Trade was ready for it. Mr McLean had the determination to push aside the initial obstacles. In fact the first voyage went without a hitch. Mr McLean’s pioneer clients were delighted with the savings made by moving their freight from roads to sea. April 26th 1956, the day the Ideal X sailed, is seen as a marker in maritime history. On the 40th anniversary in 1996, by which time around 90% of world trade was moving in containers on specially designed ships, New York threw a party for Mr McLean, variously described as shipping’s “man of the century” and the inventor of “the greatest advance in packaging since the paper bag”. Bill Clinton simply said, accurately, that containerisation had helped to “fuel the world’s economy”.
Mr McLean disliked fuss. He was polite to reporters but avoided publicity. He hated the telephone, preferring to conduct a business discussion face to face. He liked, he said “to look someone in the eye”. You could have a frank talk. That was how they did business in Maxton, North Carolina, where he was brought up.
He was a farmer’s son, one of seven children. His first business transaction was selling eggs for his mother, taking a small commission. But in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, farming was one of the worst-hit industries. Mr McLean got a job at a petrol station and saved enough money to buy a secondhand lorry, calling himself, grandly, the McLean Trucking Company. H
e did well enough to buy five more lorries, hired drivers for them, but continued to drive himself.
He said the idea that gave birth to containerisation came to him one day in 1937. He had delivered a load of cotton bales to the port of Hoboken, for shipment abroad. In later life Mr McLean recalled the moment to American Skipper, a magazine:
I had to wait most of the day to deliver the bales, sitting there in my truck, watching stevedores load other cargo. It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money. I watched them take each crate off a truck and slip it into a sling, which would then lift the crate into the hold of the ship. Once there, every sling had to be unloaded, and the cargo stowed properly. The thought occurred to me, as I waited around that day, that it would be easier to lift my trailer up and, without any of its contents being touched, put it on the ship.
Mr McLean did not rush to pursue the idea. First, he set out to become rich. By 1940 he had 30 lorries. In 1955, when he had decided that containerisation was the future, he sold his trucking business for $6m, equivalent to $40m today.
It seems unlikely that Mr McLean was the first to notice that the “break-bulk” shipping of goods, as it was called, could be improved on. There used to be a rather romantic train called the Golden Arrow which each evening travelled from London to Paris, the coaches crossing the English Channel by ship without the passengers having to get out. No doubt there are other examples. Perhaps the Romans thought of it. All the idea needed was an enthusiast.
But for centuries the trade of the world had depended on there being a vast labour force at every port to handle goods in manageable quantities. So why change? For Mr McLean the lure was lower costs. Moving a shipload of containers from the north to the south of the United States, as happened in the voyage of the Ideal X, was itself cheaper than trucking the containers individually. As the cost of dock labour was reduced, savings of as much as 25% could be passed onto the shippers. As containerisation spread around the world, ships were turned round more quickly with more savings.
In 1969, when Mr McLean sold for $160m his share in Sea-Land, the business he had created, it was the world’s biggest container carrier. He guessed, correctly, that container ships would grow and grow. The latest are over 1,oooft in length, as fast
as speedboats, accommodating hundreds of containers, and with small crews. Mr McLean said approvingly, “People are never going to pay a lot of money just to move things.” He never really retired. He devised a way of moving a patient from a stretcher to a hospital bed with the minimum of discomfort. He started a pig farm, which had the reputation of being one of the cleanest in the United States. In Maxton, he said, the farmers always treated their pigs decently.
George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly, jazzman and writer, died on July 5th 2007, aged 80
AMONG his many guilty pleasures – Marlboro Lights, Irish whiskey, bacon and eggs, blue jokes, smoke-filled dives where the music wandered on till four in the morning, voracious sex with good-looking men and women – George Melly especially liked to fish. The man famous for red, green and cream striped suits, red fedoras and a huge, rude, laughing mouth could often be found quite still, thigh-deep in the Usk or the Teifi, preparing to cast as soon as a bold trout tickled the surface of the water. And the singer whose party piece, when touring with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, was to scamper round the stage and groom the clarinettist’s head during his rendition of “Organ Grinder Blues”, would admit that his thoughts on the river bank were of poppies, midges, Magritte and clouds.
And sex. This had been his driving force since his first schoolboy fumbles at Stowe, first rampantly homosexual, then generously heterosexual, among anchor chains and on Hampstead Heath, in the backs of vans and in glorious pulsating piles on the floors of stately homes. And there was, he confessed (being the most shockingly confessional of writers), sheer orgiastic pleasure in the tug of a bloody great fish, the line screaming off the reel, the catch leaping from the water in a shower of diamonds, the net sliding under it and the fish laid, beautifully marked, on the grass. Phew! Time for a ciggie.
But Mr Melly liked fishing for another reason. As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”. Chance might give him a fish with the next cast; and chance shaped his drifting, exuberant, deep-drinking life, from Stowe to the wartime navy to art-dealing to journalism on the Observer, through a rich cast of queens, hoodlums, sailors, old trouts, whores and martinets, until in 1974 the career of a risqué jazz singer finally hooked him for good.
He sang for 30 years, stoutly and louchely fronting the Feetwarmers at Ronnie Scott’s and round the country, until he had to growl his Hoagy Carmichael numbers from a wheelchair. Mr Melly was possibly the most popular jazzman in Britain, and certainly the most outrageous.
Like all the addictions of his life, jazz burst on him at school. A friend’s study; a gramophone; an old 78, and the voice of Bessie Smith, straight out of Harlem.
Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me again. I don’t care.
Mr Melly sang Bessie, “Empress of the Blues”, more than anyone else. He would entreat her to possess him before a performance. But the Bessie that emerged from that quivering, beer-wet throat was partly a white, English, middle-class creature, drawn from music-hall turns and end-of-the-pier shows, dressed in bowlers and blazers, and with the plunk-plunk of a banjo never far away. Trad jazz, in the person of Mr Melly, Humphrey Lyttelton and a few others, limped through the 1960s and 1970s until out of sheer graft, longevity and good humour it came back into favour. He helped it survive.
Classlessness and anarchism drew him to jazz also. Though his background was
wealthy Liverpudlian, his inter-war fling with left-wing politics stayed with him for life. So, too, did other flirtations. On shore leave from the navy in “amusing” bell-bottoms in his roaring homosexual years, he admired a pimp encountered in Leeds in a mauve silk shirt and kipper tie, and the way Quentin Crisp’s painted toenails accessorised his golden sandals. The gay fetishes faded, though as “an old tart” he could always have his head turned by pretty boys; but sharp tailoring in eye-watering colours became his stock in trade.
This aesthetic streak pointed to yet another side of his sprawling personality. He knew about art, and had an eye for it, ever since his inclusion as a wide-eyed petit marin in the Surrealist circle round E.L.T. Mesens in Soho in the 1950s. On impulse he made surreal objects himself(a dead starfish caught in a mousetrap, a nude with Carnation Milk tins as her breasts), but he also learned to buy cleverly in a difficult market. One train trip back to Liverpool from London was spent in silent adoration of two new acquisitions by Max Ernst, propped on the opposite seat.
As old age advanced, Surrealism became an increasing comfort to him. It gave an aesthetic purpose to his multicoloured lines of pills, and to the hours spent in limbo in the scanner. Deafness reminded him of Surrealist word-games in which question and answer were unrelated, or only incidentally and wonderfully so:
What is reason?
A cloud eaten by the moon.
Fishing, too, was still a comfort. He imagined his cancer – for which he refused all treatment so that he could go on performing – as a tiny fish dangling at the end of his lung, wrinkling its whiskers, ready perhaps to be caught. And he often said that his favourite end, other than collapsing in the wings of a theatre with wild applause still ringing in his ears, would be to be discovered smiling on a riverbank with a big beautifully marked trout beside him, death and sex together.
Erich Mielke
Erich Mielke, East Germany’s secret police chief, died on May 22nd 2000, aged 92
After the East German state collapsed in 1989, revenge was in the air. At the top of many people’s lists for retribution, if not lynching, was Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. He was put on trial for being jointly r
esponsible, with the East German leader Erich Honecker, for the deaths of 49 people trying to escape to West Berlin over the Berlin Wall. The trial was abandoned, partly because the killings were proving hard to pin on those at the top, and partly because Honecker was dying, while Erich Mielke complained that he could not follow the proceedings.
Mr Mielke was put on trial again, this time, to many people’s astonishment, for murders he had been involved in back in 1931, in the days before Hitler came to power. On the orders of the Communist Party, he and a colleague had shot dead two policemen who had incensed the party by breaking up its demonstrations. Young Mielke had escaped, but the German police had never forgotten the murders of their finest. This time there was no problem of providing proof of his misdeed, and in 1993 he was sentenced to six years in prison; not enough, said some, but at least he had not eluded justice entirely.
Perhaps Erich Mielke was himself impressed that his police file had survived through more than 60 years of war and peace, passed on from regime to regime. It was a tribute to the thoroughness of German bureaucracy. Mr Mielke was an obsessive bureaucrat. His speciality was collecting personal data. Of course, all governments do this, democratic ones as well as dictatorships, as do commercial organisations; and laws are made to try to restrain their enthusiasm for intruding on the privacy of individuals.