A proud liberal writer has left us - Philip Hamburger of the New Yorker

[Democat]

Philip Hamburger, our friend and colleague at the magazine for sixty-five years, spent the last few months of his life watching the President of the United States on television with the volume turned up high. Philip was not impressed. In fact, at lunch at his apartment on East Eightieth Street a month ago, he put down his fork and said, “They’ve never made one more foolish.”

Philip, who died last week, was a liberal, old-fashioned and proud of it, and he tended to waver between fierce affection (for F.D.R., J.F.K., Clinton) and constant disdain (for Nixon, Reagan, George W.). As a reporter, he loved to go to Washington for the inaugurations. He attended his first when he was eighteen, in 1933—it was F.D.R.’s first, too—and he watched the proceedings from a tree.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040503ta_talk_remnick

He will be missed.

[the Kelly Gang]

1. vale Philip Hamburger

[NJCher]

2. Article states that his wife passed away a year and a half ago

It also excerpts this appropriate passage from his writing. Here he speaks of leaving his cottage on Cape Cod to go back to NY for the winter:

A piercing blue sky, gentle ocean breeze, low humidity, clean air. But what Seamus Heaney has called “the ache of summer” is increasingly palpable. Darkness will clamp down earlier and more suddenly this evening—one moment a rich, haunting Maxfield Parrish blue, the next pitch-black and night. Hard to face, but wouldn’t you know, summer is ending and it is time for memories. . . . Night is falling. There is a chill in the air. Winter will come. And go.

Poignant. We will miss you, Phillip.


Cher