Obituaries - Dec. 9, 1999

* Laurie Shaffer Bottoms; Author, Educator

Laurie Shaffer Bottoms, 60, an author and educator who was the founding executive director of Kentucky’s Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Most recently the assistant head of Milken Community High School in Los Angeles, Bottoms wrote such books as “The Red and Black,” “The Poet and the Barbarians,” “Ten Years in the Writing Project,” “Education Envy,” “Making Room for Writing: The Writing Workshop” and “To My Student Teachers: Last Class Before Graduation.” Born in Towanda, Pa., Bottoms earned three degrees in English from the College of William and Mary and from Fordham University. She taught largely at private schools in Virginia, Connecticut and San Francisco--and at Sherman Oaks’ Buckley School--until she moved to Kentucky in 1990, when her husband, Thomas C. Boysen, was named the state’s education commissioner. In Lexington, Bottoms was assistant professor at the University of Kentucky College of Education and director of the Bluegrass Writing Project. At the same time, she created and directed the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. In 1988, she was a Dodge Fellow for the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. On Nov. 19 in Los Angeles of complications of lymphoma, pneumonia and bacterial meningitis.

Philip Elman; Former Federal Trade Commissioner

Philip Elman, 81, federal trade commissioner in the 1960s who was instrumental in forcing tobacco companies to post health warning labels on cigarette packs. An appointee of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Elman became known on the commission for his independence and willingness to scold fellow commissioners and corporate leaders for harming the public interest. One of his chief victories was persuading the commission to rule in favor of health warning labels on cigarette packs and the banning of cigarette advertising on television and radio. Congress later amended the ruling, limiting legislation to labels on packs and later to advertisements. In 1970, after serving nine years, Elman said he was in favor of disbanding the FTC, once called a “rest station for the politically faithful,” in favor of a single commissioner accountable to the president and Congress. Upon his retirement, Elman was called in a Washington Post editorial “one of the best men to serve on any of the agencies in recent years.” His tenure as a trade commissioner was preceded by a long Washington career. He spent 17 years as an assistant to the solicitor general of the Justice Department, where he specialized in desegregation cases. He was the principal author of the Justice Department’s friend of the court brief in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. Elman, who won a Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1967, remained active in his retirement as a volunteer mediator for the District of Columbia Superior Court and as a visiting law professor at Georgetown University and the University of Hawaii. On Nov. 30 of respiratory and renal failure at a Washington hospital.

Fritz Fischer; Author Said Germany Welcomed WWI

Fritz Fischer, 91, German historian who was vilified for his 1961 book arguing that Germany purposely went into World War I. Fischer, who was trained at the University of Erlangen and the University of Berlin, caused a scandal in his country when his book, “Germany’s Aims in the First World War,” was published. Fischer had discovered many unpublished documents that showed how Germany’s industrial and intellectual circles and its military supported an aggressive policy to make the nation a great world power. He rejected the theory that the country had been coerced into war through pressures from its allies and insisted that Germany had been planning an assault on Western Europe since 1892. Fischer was widely blamed for the “new war guilt” debate that subsequently swept the country. A critique in the New York Review of Books said it was “no wonder that Fischer’s book . . . has been the subject of violent controversy. . . . His arguments were too destructive of orthodox German mythology, his documentation too solid, simply to be brushed aside.” Most foreign historians accepted Fischer’s thesis. The longtime history professor at Hamburg University received three standing ovations from the 5,000 historians gathered in Washington in 1987 for an annual meeting of the American Historical Assn. Top German scholars, including Gerhard Ritter, once Fischer’s leading critic, later adopted his view of Germany’s pro-war posture heading into World War I. On Dec. 1 at his home in Hamburg.

Nilde Iotti; Italian Left-Wing Leader

Nilde Iotti, 79, one of Italy’s last wartime left-wing leaders. Nicknamed the “tsarina” or “the Red Queen” for her severe manners, Iotti served as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies from 1979 to 1992, the first woman to hold a top Italian institutional post. In her youth, Iotti was on the “Committee of 75” which drafted Italy’s post-World War II constitution. She was first elected deputy in the Constitutional Assembly in 1946, and rose to power with the Italian Communist Party, which she helped to rename the Democrats of the Left in 1991 following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Iotti had been a longtime companion of Italy’s postwar Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti and worked with him to further leftist causes. But her restraint and impartiality in Italy’s often acrimonious political scene was lauded by politicians across the political spectrum including her adversaries on the right. On Saturday in Rome of a heart attack.

Bethel Leslie; Broadway, Television Actress

Bethel Leslie, 70, a Broadway actress who also appeared on “Gunsmoke” and other small-screen series. Discovered at age 15 by producer George Abbott, Leslie was cast in the 1944 Broadway comedy “Snafu.” Within 10 years, she had appeared in 10 Broadway plays along with such stars as Fredric March, Sam Wanamaker and Helen Hayes. Her critically praised 1955 appearance in “Inherit the Wind” earned her a ticket to Hollywood, where she spent a decade and appeared on such shows as “Gunsmoke,” “Perry Mason” and “The Fugitive.” Her film debut was in 1963’s “Captain Newman, M.D.,” opposite Robert Duvall and Gregory Peck. She returned to New York in 1965 and spent the rest of her career in stage roles and television soap operas, taking occasional character parts in films. Her most recent motion picture appearance was as Marta Land in Kevin Costner’s “Message in a Bottle” earlier this year. Leslie also wrote, most notably for the soap “The Secret Storm.” She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1986 for her final stage role as the morphine-addicted mother in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” On Nov. 28 in New York City of cancer.

Donald Lloyd-Jones; Head of Geographical Society

Donald J. Lloyd-Jones, 68, president of the American Geographical Society. Lloyd-Jones had long been a fellow of the society, the nation’s oldest geographical organization, when he was named president in 1996. Professionally, Lloyd-Jones was an airline executive, working in planning and finance for American Airlines from 1957 to 1982 and then as president of Air Florida and of Western Airlines before its merger with Delta. He later was executive director of the American Express Bank’s aircraft finance group and president of its Aviation Services Inc. subsidiary. At the time of his death, Lloyd-Jones was chief financial officer of Air-TV, which plans to offer satellite television programming to airline passengers. He earned degrees in economics from Swarthmore College and Columbia University. On Monday in Stamford, Conn., of lung cancer.

C. Rodney Smith; Radio Free Europe Chief

C. Rodney Smith, 97, an Army major general who in retirement served as director of Radio Free Europe. As head of the broadcast agency from 1960 to 1967, Smith was said to have helped resuscitate its reputation in the wake of criticism that it beamed more propaganda than news behind the Iron Curtain. He also installed more powerful transmitters to increase the broadcast signal’s reach across Eastern Europe from the agency’s Munich headquarters. “He instilled a greater sense of relevance and a greater degree of [the agency’s] ability to work,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, who inspected Radio Free Europe in 1960 as a State Department consultant. Smith was born in Kanopolis, Kan., and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1926. On Nov. 28 at his home in Annandale, Va., of respiratory failure.