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Andrew Mellon’s son, Paul Mellon was married to Mary Conover Brown. While they were married they had a daughter, Catherine Conover.
Catherine Conover is one of U.S. Senator John Warner’s ex-wives. Senator Warner, a Republican who currently represents Virginia, also has the distinction of claiming actress Elizabeth Taylor as ex-wife.
The list of Taylor’s ex-husbands is a long, including singer Eddie Fisher, who himself has been married several times. One of Fisher’s ex-wives was the actress Debbie Reynolds.
Actress Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, is an ex-wife of pop singer Paul Simon – Muckety That!
There’s been much speculation this week that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine may be “very, very high” on Barack Obama’s VP shortlist, as Politico has described it.
We have no insider knowledge of the vetting process, but the parallels between Kaine and Obama – both of whom are Harvard-educated attorneys with Kansas roots and a civil rights orientation – help explain their unusual chemistry. But those similarities could also prove a liability for the Democratic ticket.
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Like Obama and his wife, both Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, a lawyer and former judge, graduated from Harvard Law School. Holton and Michelle Obama also attended Princeton, although at different times.
That background no doubt attests to both couples’ smarts, but at a time when so many Americans are wary of intellectual achievers whom they see as elitists, the notion of four Harvard-educated lawyers in the White House may not play well in some quarters. (Perhaps that’s why The New Republic has posted a video of Kaine riffing on a harmonica with a blue-grass band as evidence he might cut it with regular folks.)
Kaine, 50, an early Obama supporter, also shares Obama’s preoccupation with civil rights. After graduating from Harvard, Kaine had a law practice specializing in representing people who had been denied housing opportunities because of race or disability. He also taught legal ethics for six years at the University of Richmond Law School.
Like the presumptive Democratic nominee, he boasts of a bipartisan orientation, an assertion that owes less to his record in the Virginia statehouse than the fact that his father-in-law, Linwood Holton, was the state’s Republican governor from 1970 to 1974.
Howard Fineman over at MSNBC points out that Holton, who is about to turn 85, remains a hero to liberal Democrats and African Americans in the Old Dominion.
Back in the 1970s, when public school busing and racial integration was creating a new faction of the GOP — one appealing to the fears and prejudices of working-class white southerners — Holton stood his ground.
As governor of Virginia, he sent his children, including his daughter, Anne, to public schools in Richmond to prove his point.
The political friendship between Kaine and Obama is said to have begun shortly after Obama spoke before the Democratic convention in 2004. At Kaine’s invitation, Obama came to Virginia to campaign for him in 2005 as he ran for governor.
Kaine reciprocated last year by becoming the first prominent elected official outside of Illinois to endorse Obama for president.
It may be relevant too, as Fineman suggests, that the two men share a political consultant – the Benenson Strategy Group whose founder, Joel Benenson is advising Obama. The group’s principal consultant, Peter Brodnitz, who gained his reputation handling Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, is advising Kaine.
Kaine does bring some things to a Democratic ticket that Obama lacks. A practicing Catholic who spent close to a year working as a missionary in Honduras, Kaine would presumably appeal to swing Catholic voters, even though political scientist Larry Sabato points out, “he is pro-choice in effect while projecting a pro-life image and accepting of the death penalty despite personal opposition to it.”
Kaine is also fluent in Spanish and would presumably appeal to growing numbers of Latino voters.
Most critically, if he could help Obama win Virginia, which has voted Republican in 13 of the last 14 presidential contests, that could give Obama a decisive Electoral College advantage, according to Sabato.
On the negative side, however, those skeptical of Obama’s readiness to lead the nation may feel the same way about Kaine. With scant background in military and foreign policy, in particular, Kaine would be unlikely to reassure those who have trouble seeing Obama as commander in chief.
Although Kaine has more executive experience than Obama as a sitting governor and a former mayor of Richmond, many pundits there say his record of achievement as a state leader is mixed, in part because he has been unable to move much through a Republican-controlled state legislature.
Finally, as someone relatively new to the Big Leagues, he could hammer away at the Democrats’ change theme – but that would cut both ways since he has little national name recognition.
Which is to say, he might be “Obama squared “– a smart, charismatic and a formidable campaigner, but without enough of a track record to make his promise of change seem credible.
Larry McMurtry’s latest book, titled simply Books, is a memoir of his many decades as a book dealer. One of his favorite activities, he writes, has always been buying books. Lots of books. His personal library at his home in Archer City, Texas, numbers 28,000 volumes and his bookstore there has nearly 400,000 volumes spread over several buildings.
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There might have been a time when criticism like that bothered McMurtry. Early on in his career he wore a t-shirt that read “a minor regional novelist,” referring to himself, or what he perceived critics thought of him.
But a Pulitzer Prize (for Lonesome Dove) and an Academy Award (screenwriter on Brokeback Mountain) pretty much eliminate any use of the word “minor” in reference to his nearly 50-year writing career.
McMurtry is happy to be working and still writing.
During an appearance in Dallas earlier this month with his Brokeback co-screenwriter, Diana Ossana, McMurtry was asked how their collaboration began.
McMurtry had a heart attack and bypass surgery in the early 1990s and afterward he just showed up at Ossana’s house, he said.
According to the Dallas Observer, which covered the event, Ossana then interrupted McMurtry.
“I thought he would just be there for three days, but he stayed three years,” she said. “He quit writing. But not only that, he stopped reading as well. He was one of those people who read seven newspapers a day and maybe 10 books a week. He just sat on the couch. He became an outline of himself.”
McMurtry refused to write without Ossana’s help, the Observer said.
“I was very badly wounded,” McMurtry said. “I didn’t even go into my bookshop for five years. And that’s a big deal for me.”
In Books, McMurtry talks briefly about his bout with depression.
McMurtry’s newest book is indeed a bit rambling and disorganized, but if you like rummaging in antiquarian bookstores, it is never dull.
He writes a little about his own writing and about his son, James, a singer-songwriter. (John Mellencamp produced James McMurtry’s first album.) But, mainly, Books is about buying books and selling books, an enduring passion for McMurtry.
In one short chapter, McMurtry writes about coming across a fat copy of The Whale, the British title for Moby-Dick, in a group of books he was trying to buy. The copy had been owned by a prominent British author and editor who was trying to shorten the Herman Melville classic to make it more salable.
“He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through ‘Call me Ishmael,’” McMurtry writes of the British editor.
A setback for the Bush administration came from a Bush appointee and former Kenneth Starr associate today.
Federal Judge John D. Bates ruled that two Bush staffers, one no longer at the White House, do not have absolute immunity from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.
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“The Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law,” Bates wrote in his 92-page decision.
Bates stresses that his decision is “very limited.” Nonetheless, it contrasts with two earlier decisions, both controversial, in which he sided with the White House.
In 2002, Bates dismissed the General Accounting Office’s attempt to have Vice President Dick Cheney reveal the names of the members of his energy task force. Bates ruled that the GAO did not have standing to sue.
In 2007, Bates threw out a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, against Cheney and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s aide.
Plame had sued on the grounds that Cheney and Libby helped reveal to the press that she was a CIA operative.
Bates dismissed that lawsuit for jurisdictional reasons, as well.
If it stands, today’s decision means that Harriet Miers, the former Bush White House counsel, and Joshua Bolton, the current White House chief of staff, have to appear before the judiciary committee.
They could at that time choose not to respond, Bates wrote.
The committee subpoenaed Miers and Bolton to testify in the matter of the forced resignation of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Democrats have argued that the attorneys were asked to leave for political reasons.
The White House insisted that Miers and Bolton had immunity because of their positions in the executive branch.
The judiciary committee then sued.
Bates, 61, was named to the district court in 2001 by Bush.
A graduate of Wesleyan University and University of Maryland’s School of Law, he was in the U.S. Army for three years, serving a tour in Vietnam.
Later, he clerked for a federal judge and was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
From 1995 to mid-1997, Bates was deputy independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation headed by Kenneth Starr.
In 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court appointed Bates to serve on the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management.
In 2006, Chief Justice John Roberts, Rehnquist’s successor, appointed Bates to the U.S. Intelligence Foreign Surveillance Court.
The court decides on requests for surveillance warrants against foreign intelligence agents.
The White House did not indicate today whether it would appeal Bates’ decision. Earlier news reports speculated that the case would be appealed, regardless of outcome.
In his ruling, Bates encourages both the White House and the judiciary committee to “resume their discourse and negotiations in an effort to resolve their differences constructively, while recognizing each branch’s essential role.”
