William W. Kaufmann, 90, a close adviser to seven defense secretaries and a major proponent of a shift away from the early Cold War strategy of mass nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union, died Dec. 14 in Woburn, Mass., said his wife, the former Julia Alexander.
Kaufmann was a special assistant to every secretary of defense in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, responsible for preparing the annual report to Congress on the Defense Department’s overall military strategy and budget.
“He was one of those shadowy people from the Cold War era who had a great deal of influence behind the scenes and no appetite for the limelight,” said Fred M. Kaplan, the national defense columnist for Slate magazine.
Sir Bernard Crick, 79, a prominent democratic socialist and political theorist who also wrote the first complete biography of George Orwell, one of his heroes, died Friday in Edinburgh, Scotland, of cancer, The Guardian of London reported.
Crick, a moderate socialist, believed in gradual reform, social equality and the importance of citizen participation.
He often served as an adviser to top Labor politicians and in recent years devised the civics exam that new arrivals to Britain must pass before becoming citizens or permanent residents.
But it was “George Orwell: A Life,” published in 1980 and widely praised for its wealth of detail and its shrewd analysis of Orwell’s politics, that stood as his finest achievement.
In 2002, he was knighted for “services to citizenship in schools and to political studies.”
The New York Times
