1960

Sometimes what 1960 classmates do that's truly distinguished never gets mentioned in these notes, because it's over, the results are known to all, well before it can get in.

That's certainly true with GeorgeLiebmann's candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. On September 15 he lost in the Republican primary.

The odds were undoubtedly always against him. George is a Republican in a state that has gone mostly Democratic in recent years, and the incumbent Democrat, Barbara Mikulski, was a heavy favorite to be reelected.

But, even having lost, George deserves the highest honors for waging an honest and intellectually respectable campaign that focused always on important issues like education welfare, and the need for character in government. He scorned 30-second soundbites in favor of intricately reasoned issues papers.

I was also personally pleased that he won an endorsement from the Baltimore Sun, a Times-Mirror newspaper. The Sun called George "an astute Baltimore lawyer...who presents thoughtful, conservative positions."

Many of you will have noticed the move by Mort Kondracke from the weekly John McLaughlin food fight-like news commentary show to the Fox News Channel, where he is appearing daily with Brit Hume on an analysis of the day's news and weekly with Fred Barnes on the Beltway Boys. It's a richly deserved advance in his career.

But, worthy even more of our admiration, Mort has become chairman of an advocacy group called America's Campaign for Medical Breakthroughs, which is calling for a doubling in the next five years of the budget of the National Institutes of Health. The point he makes is that the U.S. research effort toward curing major diseases is, by comparison with other government endeavors, vastly underfunded. Mort can be contacted by e-mail at .

Mort's wife, Millecent, has Parkinson's disease, and Mort is also on the board of the Parkinson Action Network. So a challenge in his personal life has led Mort toward imaginative new endeavors in his outstanding career.

Bob Hager, another well-known journalist in our class, is, as I write, in Nova Scotia, where his air crash expertise is contributing mightily to NBC's coverage of the Swiss Air tragedy.

Some of us, meanwhile, are just off on pleasure trips. There's a place in every life for those.

I'm signed up on a weeklong Dartmouth trip to Big Bend National Park in Texas. Imagine my pleasure, when I got the manifest of IS, to find our classmates Don Black and Steve Carroll on the same trip.

Jim Adler tells me that he, Paul Cantor's family, Rich Roesch, and Al Roberts and their wives are off this very weekend to the Telluride Film Festival in gorgeous south-western Colorado, an event that is a long-time time favorite of Paul's, who could not go at the last moment because of stock market responsibilities.

Well, if I were to mention every glorious excursion taken by members of our class, there'd be no room in this magazine for anything thing else.

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