Tributes To Those We Lost in 2013

Remembering the many influential and controversial people who died in 2013

Chinua Achebe
Novelist, 92 By Radhika Jones Dec. 09, 20130

Craig Ruttle / AP

Chinua Achebe grew up loving stories. He was born in southeastern Nigeria in 1930 in the village of Ogidi. His parents converted to Christianity and traveled as evangelists. He attended a prestigious secondary school and studied English literature at University College in Ibadan. Along the way, he had an epiphany: If an English village populated by Jane Austen could be the setting for universal stories, why couldnt a Nigerian village? His debut novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), set in an Igbo community on the cusp of colonization, became a worldwide best seller. There is that great proverb, Achebe told the Paris Review in 1994, that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Achebe spoke for the lions. He was called the father of African literature, not just symbolically: as the founding editor of the Heinemann series on African literature, he helped bring hundreds of novels by African writers to a global audience. He taught at universities in Africa and the West, assigning Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness and challenging students to see the humanity in the black men Conrad depicted as savages. He collected virtually every honor except the Nobel Prize, an omission that his death on March 21 at 82 seals into permanence. But his stories will be loved as long as people love storiesthe true mark of civilization, as he knew. This text originally appeared in the April 8 issue of TIME magazine.

Donald Byrd
Jazz trumpeter, 80 By Nate Rawlings Dec. 09, 20130

It wasnt long after Donald Byrd landed in New York City in 1955 that he began playing jazz trumpet with some of the greatsamong them John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Max Roachsoon becoming one of the pivotal performers of the then new hard bop. But his most popular album, 1973s Black Byrd, was panned by critics, who shuddered at its intermingling of jazz and pop. He shot back, Im creative. Im not recreative. I dont follow what everybody else does. A devoted educator, Byrd, who died Feb. 4 at 80, taught for decades at Howard University and other schools, where he molded a new generation of jazz musicians even as he advanced the art itself.

Tom Clancy
Author, 66

Joe McNally / Getty Images

Best-selling author Tom Clancy was an English major at Baltimores Loyola College and he had a dream of writing a novel. As a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history, his dream came true with his first effort, The Hunt for Red October (1984). He has since written more than a dozen novels, which have a blend of realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. Ten of the novels, including The Teeth of the Tiger (Berkley, 2004), feature the character Jack Ryan, former stock broker and CIA employee. Mr. Clancys nonfiction works include a series of guided tours of Americas warfighting assets, Submarine, Armored Cav, Fighter Wing, Marine, and Airborne. He lived in Maryland. What made his books so popular throughout the world, especially among the military, was how he immersed himself in the things he wrote about. He studied and talked to so many people. He wasnt sneaking into classified facilities. He was able to gain this extraordinary knowledge by reading, studying and talking to folks. Toms books were incredibly accurate. He didnt invent impossible schemes. He invented things that could happen. Some things that actually have happened over the years bear some resemblance to scenarios that he put together. Tom could sense things and see things in a way that others couldnt.

Van Cliburn
Classical pianist, 78 By Richard Lacayo Dec. 09, 20130

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

At the height of the Cold War, even a piano could be an instrument in the great contest between East and West. That was the lesson of the victory of 23-year-old Van Cliburn in the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow. A beanpole Texan with hands that spanned 12 keys, Cliburn, who died Feb. 27, instantly became a celebrity far beyond the classical-music world. A huge hit with the Russian peoplehis win had been secretly okayed by Nikita Khrushchevhe was welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. Yet though he was a greatly gifted musician, Cliburns early stardom may have thwarted his musical growth. His concert and recording income skyrocketed, but many critics were lukewarm about his later attempts to move beyond his youthful repertory.

Hugo Chavez
President of Venezuela, 58 By Tim Padgett Dec. 09, 20130

Reuters

Like his idol, Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez was one of the most garrulous and pugnacious leaders Latin America has ever known. That makes his death in Caracas on March 5, at age 58, after a long and secrecy-shrouded fight with a cancer whose type he refused to disclose, feel all the more incongruous: Chvez, who for all of his 14-year rule was as loud and ubiquitous a fixture in Venezuela and Latin America as salsa music on the sidewalks, departed the stage in uncharacteristic silence after not having been seen or heard from publicly for three months. Chvez liked to call himself a 21st century socialist, and he hoped that being democratically elected would obscure the fact that he didnt govern all that democratically. It didnt. In reality he was a throwback to the dogmatic and authoritarian 20th century socialism of Castro, and to the 19th century caudillo tradition of Chvezs demigod, South American independence hero Simn Bolvar. Critics viewed him as a vulgar populist given to gratuitous Yanqui bashing and an erratic and messianic retro-revolutionary whose countrys vast petrowealth let him indulge his Marxist nostalgia. Supporters, by contrast, praised him for toppling Venezuelas criminally corrupt oligarchy, steering much of Venezuelas oil riches to the barrios for a change and enfranchising its poor, reopening the door for the Latin American left. Still, whatever Chvezs legacy is, Washington and the rest of the world need to remember the unmistakable reasons for his rise to power chief among them a failure to build the kind of democratic institutions in Latin America that can close the regions unconscionable wealth gap. That flaw still lingers, which is why the memory of Chvez should too.

Douglas Engelbart
Inventor, 88 By Harry McCracken Dec. 09, 20130

Rue des Archives / Getty Images

When Doug Engelbart died on July 2 at 88, virtually every headline identified him as the inventor of the computer mouse. But the visionary computer scientists work in the 1950s and 60s was so prescient and influential in so many ways that remembering him solely for his ubiquitous pointing device is a little like praising the Wright brothers for their pioneering role in the history of propellers. In an era when interacting with computers involved feeding punch cards into a mainframe and most of the people doing the interacting were scientists, Engelbart saw computers as a way for ordinary human beings to augment their intellect. Then he set about building the necessary tools to make that not just possible but easy. Beginning in 1959 at the Stanford Research Institute, he spearheaded groundbreaking work on graphical user interfaces, hypertext, videoconferencing, networking and other fundamentals of personal computing that were later commercialized in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Other people got rich off Engelbarts ideas, but his monuments are all around uson our desktops, in our hands and everywhere else that we use electronic devices as extensions of our brains.

David Frost
TV journalist, 74 By James Poniewozik Dec. 09, 20130

Ron Galella / WireImage / Getty Images

David Frost, who died Aug. 31 at 74, was much more than the man who interviewed President Nixon. He had a career in the U.K. spanning the possibilities of TV presenting: satire (That Was the Week That Was), entertainment hosting and serious political interviews. But his signature program, the series of interviews with the ex-President in 1977, which became the most watched political interview ever, combined the many aspects of his career. It was part newsmaker interrogation, part psychological inquiry, part drama and a good part theater. The multisegment interviewchronicled in the play and 2008 movie Frost/Nixonended up being a lengthy interrogation of Nixons betrayal of the public trust. Frost had a reputation as a glib creature of showbiz, but with Nixon he was steady, determined andmaybe rarest in the hurry-up medium of TVpatient. Frosts blowdried reputation may have gotten him the interview, but he showed up as a journalist. His most lasting influence was as an on-camera natural who proved that an interview set could be simultaneously a stage and a courtroom. This text originally appeared in the Sept. 16 issue of TIME magazine.

James Gandolfini
Actor, 51 By James Poniewozik Dec. 09, 20130

Matt Carr / Getty Images

One day in 1999, James Gandolfini walked down a driveway in a bathrobe, picked up the newspaper and changed television forever. If back then you were watching this new HBO drama with the title that seemed to be about opera, then you know how much talent the world lost when he died, suddenly and too soon, at age 51 on June 19 in Rome. But with his forceful, charismatic, yet subtle performance as a suburban mobster, Gandolfini changed the TV you watched even if youve never watched a minute of The Sopranos. Without Gandolfini, there would be no Tony not as we know him. And without Tony, there would be no Walter White, no Vic Mackey, no Carrie Mathison. Through Tony, Gandolfini wrote the blueprint for the modern, complicated TV antihero; he took the wall between stand-up TV good guys and wicked bad guys and bashed it down with a baseball bat. And without The Sopranos, becoming a smash pop-culture phenom by telling an incredibly sophisticated story, its hard to imagine the now widespread belief that TV could be as rich, great, relevant, moving, conversation-driving and significant as any contemporary movie or even novel. To look at him, Gandolfini was just the kind of guy you might cast for a New Jersey titan of waste management, bullheaded and terrifying and thus all the more ironic when squinched into a therapists-office chair. But he immediately brought so much more to life in Tony: his intelligence, his sadness, his fear, his selfpity, his mamas-boy wrath. And those eyes; Gandolfini could concentrate all of Tonys physicality and criminal cunning into them, as those black pellets darted about and he conceived a lie to tell Carmela, or a way out of a business bind. It would have been an easy thing for Gandolfini to make us fear Tony Soprano. It would have been a neat parlor trick to make us love him. James Gandolfini in sync with Chase and a peerless cast of co-stars made us understand Tony, in all his pathetic, charismatic devilry. And that was the work of an artist.

Vo Nguyen Giap
Vietnamese general, 102 By Mark Thompson Dec. 09, 20130

Dennis Gray / AP

Most military commanders would be happy winning a single war. Giap, the North Vietnamese general who died Oct. 4 at 102, could claim two. His 1954 defeat of French troops at Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French Indochina. Then, as his nations Defense Minister in 1968, the self-taught strategist oversaw the Tet offensive against American forces that hastened the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the ultimate fall of South Vietnam. Second in standing only to his mentor, North Vietnams communist leader Ho Chi Minh, Giap was ruthless, willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his fellow Vietnamese. Any American commander who took the same vast losses would not have lasted three weeks, said Army General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. But Westmorelands infamous enemy body counts didnt count what mattered. The Vietnamese were fighting for their homeland, and Washington seemed unable to grasp that it was largely nationalism, not communism, that fueled Vietnams bloody efforts to rid itself of outsiders. This text originally appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of TIME magazine.

Nelson Mandela
Former President of South Africa, 95 By Richard Stengel Dec. 09, 20130

Louise Gubb / Corbis

Nelson Mandela was always uncomfortable talking about his own death. But not because he was afraid or in doubt. Mandela, who died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, was uncomfortable because he understood that people wanted him to offer homilies about death and he had none to give. He was an utterly unsentimental man. I once asked him about his mortality while we were out walking one morning in the Transkei, the remote area of South Africa where he was born. He looked around at the green and tranquil landscape and said something about how he would be joining his ancestors. Men come and men go, he later said. I have come and I will go when my time comes. Mandela might have been a more sentimental man if so much had not been taken away from him. His freedom. His ability to choose the path of his life. His eldest son. Two great-grandchildren. Nothing in his life was permanent except the oppression he and his people were under. And everything he might have had he sacrificed to achieve the freedom of his people. But all the crude jailers, tiny cells and bumptious white apartheid leaders could not take away his pride, his dignity and his sense of justice. In many ways, the image of Nelson Mandela has become a kind of fairy tale: he is the last noble man, a figure of heroic achievement. Indeed, his life has followed the narrative of the archetypal hero, of great suffering followed by redemption. But as he said to me and to many others over the years, I am not a saint. And he wasnt. As a young revolutionary, he was fiery and rowdy. He originally wanted to exclude Indians and communists from the freedom struggle. He was the founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress, and was considered South Africas No 1. terrorist in the 1950s. He admired Gandhi, who started his own freedom struggle in South Africa in the 1890s, but as he explained to me, he regarded nonviolence as a tactic, not a principle. If it was the most successful means to the freedom of his people, he would embrace it. If it was not, he would abandon it. And he did. But like Gandhi, like Lincoln, like Churchill, he was doggedly, obstinately right about one overarching thing, and he never lost sight of that. Stengel is the former managing editor of TIME

Cory Monteith
Actor, 31 By James Poniewozik Dec. 09, 20130

Vera Anderson / WireImage / Getty Images

Cory Monteith, who played high school quarterback turned singer Finn Hudson on Glee, died on July 13, way too young, at 31, from a lethal combination of heroin and alcohol. As Monteith played him, Finn was often the heart and emotional anchor of a show that could take roller-coaster shifts in tone. But at its best, Glee has been rooted in something real: the struggles of small-town kids to become better than theyve been led to expect and their fear that their reality may not match their dreams. Finn embodied that predicament. The only thing he worried about more than his teammates ridicule for joining glee club was the potential of ending up a Lima loser who peaked in high school. Thats part of what made the climactic duet of the pilot episode, Dont Stop Believinwhich Monteith performed with Lea Michele, whom he would eventually date in real lifesuch a fitting emotional anthem. Both Glee and Monteith, who once spoke of an out of control adolescence and did a second stint in rehab this year, sold not only the optimism of that song but also the hint that merely believin would not always be enough. This text originally appeared in the July 29 issue of TIME magazine

Margaret Thatcher
British prime minister, 87 By Catherine Mayer Dec. 09, 20130

Express / Getty Images

Whatever you thought of Margaret Thatcher and during an unbroken stretch in office from 1979 to 90, the former Prime Minister, who died on April 8 after a stroke at the age of 87, attracted both passionate support and deep loathing you never doubted her force of will. The Iron Lady showed her mettle again and again, wrenching Britain, often brutally, out of a malaise and sense of all-encompassing failure that had blighted it for much of the era after the end of World War II. This meant not only facing down opponents but also critics in her own party, who ran scared as the strong economic medicine she prescribed sickened swaths of voters. To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say, she declared at the 1980 Conservative Party conference. You turn if you want to. The ladys not for turning. In the first few years of her first term in office, Thatcher squeezed inflation out of the British economy and made plain that those enterprises that could not compete in the modern world would not be rescued, as had been the case under her predecessors. As unemployment climbed and riots broke out in the cities, her position appeared precarious. But by 1982, the economy was beginning to show the first signs of life. That spring, she refused to accept that the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands was a done deal and dispatched her armed forces across the Atlantic to fight a fierce little war. Triumphant, she won re-election in 1983 and then took on the coal miners the vanguard of the old left-wing English working class crushing them in a yearlong strike. Throughout the 1980s, she was Ronald Reagans ideological soul mate, and together they reinvigorated political conservatism. By refusing to believe that history moved in only one direction, they led a challenge to Soviet communism that in the end saw its fall. Yet in a curious sense, the end of the Cold War was also Thatchers political undoing. She would not accept that a new, post-Soviet architecture was needed in Europe. Her obdurate stand against the continents closer political and economic integration helped foster divisions in her own party that would eventually lead to her ouster, in November 1990.

It was a rare defeat for someone who had beaten Britains class system and dusty attitudes to women in the workplace to rise to the summit of public life. As the first female Premier not only of Britain but also of any leading industrial democracy, Thatcher forged a template by which women anywhere might measure their ambitions.

Paul Walker
Actor, 40 By Justin Lin Dec. 09, 20130

William Volcov / Brazil Photo Press / LatinContentv / Getty Images

We were 48 hours from production on Fast & Furious and $3 million over budget. Paul showed up on set the first day, and we huddled in my trailer as I walked him through a new chase scene. He smiled and said, Cool, and off we went. He ran nonstop for three days. At times I knew he was beyond tired, but he knew how important it was to set the right tone from the start. Thats when I knew I had a true partner in Paul. During the press tour for Fast & Furious, we were outside a club in Moscow during a dreadful winter. Paul and I decided to do jumping jacks to keep warm. Thats the thing with Paulhe would never let his friend go do some goofy move alone. He was always there no matter what. It wasnt long before everyone joined us outside the club, doing jumping jacks in the snow. We were back from the rainy U.K. to shoot the final scenes for Fast 6, and we brought the rain back with us. We fought the weather for three days trying to get the perfect finish. With 20 minutes to go, we had to shoot the all-important barbecue scene. I knew this was going to be the last scene Id shoot in the Fast franchise and wanted it to be special. I pushed the crew and cast so hard, and we barely got it in the can. As we ran out of light on the last shot, I threw my headphones down in frustration and walked off to collect myself. I was beyond spent. Next thing I knew, there were two arms hugging me. It was Paul. He said, Thank you and walked off. That was the last moment I had with Paul on set and is what Paul was all about. Lin directed the four most recent Fast & Furious films This text originally appeared in the Dec. 16 issue of TIME magazine.