"Information on Mr. Cockburn's survivors was not immediately available" does not speak well for the Times' reportorial skills.
On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:47 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/business/media/alexander-cockburn-left-
> wing-writer-dies-at-71.html?_r=1
>
> July 21, 2012
> Alexander Cockburn, Left-Wing Writer, Is Dead at 71
> By COLIN MOYNIHAN
> Alexander Cockburn, the acerbic left-wing journalist and author who
> though born in Scotland thrived in the political and cultural
> battlegrounds of the United States, died on Friday in Germany. He was 71.
>
> The cause was cancer, said Jeffrey St. Clair, a friend and colleague. Mr.
> St. Clair announced Mr. Cockburn's death Saturday on CounterPunch, the
> Web site that the two men edited. Mr. Cockburn kept his illness a secret,
> Mr. St. Clair, added, and continued writing almost until the end of his
> life.
>
> "His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and
> deadly as ever," Mr. St. Clair wrote.
>
> He had regular columns in ideologically disparate publications like The
> Nation and The Wall Street Journal and became known as an unapologetic
> leftist of the sort who appeared to take pleasure in condemning what he
> saw as the outrages of the right and what he often considered the
> tepidness and timidity of the American liberal establishment.
>
> Wayne Barrett, who worked with Mr. Cockburn at The Village Voice in the
> 1980s, recalled him in a telephone interview as "a punishing writer."
>
> "He had a remarkable mind and he could write so quickly."
>
> At The Voice, Mr. Cockburn co-wrote, with James Ridgeway, a political
> column. He wrote another column called Press Clips, which often condemned
> what he saw as the ethical failings of other journalists.
>
> But Mr. Cockburn, who often fiercely opposed Israeli policies in the
> Middle East, was dismissed from The Voice in 1984 after The Boston
> Phoenix reported that he had accepted a $10,000 grant from group that
> critics called pro-Arab.
>
> Mr. Cockburn said he had taken the money for a book project and had
> planned to return it.
>
> That particular book was never written, but after leaving The Voice, he
> wrote several books, including a collection of essays called "Corruptions
> of Empire," "The Golden Age Is in Us: Journeys and Encounters, 1987-1994"
> and "The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the
> Amazon," written with Susanna Hecht.
>
> Mr. Cockburn grew up in Ireland and graduated from Oxford. Among his
> ancestors was Sir George Cockburn, an English admiral who helped burn
> down the White House in 1814.
>
> But his attachment to left-wing journalism and controversy was forged
> very early on. His father, Claud Cockburn, while covering the Spanish
> Civil War for The Daily Worker, joined the Republican forces.
>
> In London, Alexander Cockburn worked for The Times Literary Supplement
> and The New Statesman before becoming a permanent resident of the United
> States in 1973.
>
> He joined The Nation as a columnist and took that magazine's old rivalry
> with The New Republic to a new level. He referred to the contents of The
> New Republic as "the weekly catchment of drivel."
>
> After Martin Peretz, the publisher of the The New Republic, suffered a
> fainting spell in Paris in the late 1980s, Mr. Cockburn gleefully noted
> that this had occurred at an expensive restaurant where patrons were "so
> bloated that they have to be rubbed down with Vaseline to squeeze through
> the door."
>
> But when Mr. Cockburn wrote a column drastically revising downward the
> number of deaths attributable to Stalin, Mr. Peretz suggested that Mr.
> Cockburn "has a sentimental interest in this controversy but not the
> credentials to evaluate it." Mr. Cockburn famously feuded with
> Christopher Hitchens, who was not only another British expatriate but a
> writer for The Nation as well, over a variety of polarizing issues.
>
> When Mr. Hitchens died of cancer last year, Mr. Cockburn did not mince
> words in a remembrance of his former friend on CounterPunch.
>
> "He courted the label 'contrarian,' " Mr. Cockburn said of Mr. Hitchens,
> "but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the
> expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly
> discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have
> enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair."
>
> Information on Mr. Cockburn's survivors was not immediately available.
>
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math