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Haynes Johnson, Journalist and Author, Dies at 81

May 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Haynes Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, television commentator and author known in particular for his long association with The Washington Post, died on Friday in Bethesda, Md. He was 81.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Kathryn A. Oberly, said.

Mr. Johnson, who joined The Post in 1969, was variously a writer, editor and columnist there before his retirement in 1994. He was previously a reporter on The Washington Evening Star, where he won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the civil rights movement in Selma, Ala., and its aftermath.

In his four decades in journalism, Mr. Johnson was widely esteemed for his coverage of domestic affairs in general and of the capital in particular.

Reviewing Mr. Johnson’s book about the Carter administration, “In the Absence of Power,” in The Washington Post Book World in 1980, the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson called him “one of the most perceptive, the best-informed, and the most levelheaded reporters in Washington.”

Mr. Johnson wrote more than a dozen books in all, including “Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years” (1991), “Divided We Fall: Gambling With History in the Nineties” (1994), “The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years” (2001) and “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (2005).

On television, he was a member of the original panel of the PBS program “Washington Week in Review,” first broadcast in 1967, and appeared on it regularly through the mid-1990s. Mr. Johnson was also a regular presence on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and in the late 1970s was a weekly commentator on the “Today” show.

Haynes Bonner Johnson was born in New York City on July 9, 1931. His mother, the former Emmie Ludie Adams, was a pianist; his father, Malcolm, was a newspaperman with The New York Sun. For The Sun, the elder Mr. Johnson won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for his 24-part series, “Crime on the Waterfront.”

That series, which exposed the unsavory, often violent alliance of labor unions and organized crime on New York’s docks, inspired “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 film starring Marlon Brando.

As a youth, Haynes Johnson worked as a copy boy on The Sun before earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. After Army service stateside during the Korean War, he earned a master’s in American history from the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. Johnson was a reporter on The Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware before joining The Evening Star in 1957. There, he covered a wide swath of national news, including the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and the epochal Selma-to-Montgomery marches of March 1965.

Later that year, several months after reporting on the civil rights protesters’ hard-won gains, Mr. Johnson returned to Selma to record the struggle’s less visible aftereffects.

The result was a special report, “Selma Revisited,” published in The Evening Star on July 26, 1965. In it, Mr. Johnson chronicled the discontents that had emerged among the city’s blacks as they found their goals of equitable employment, housing and education even harder to realize than they had anticipated.

“Their leaders are struggling to regain precious momentum, but many of those who followed them so patiently are frankly bewildered and disillusioned,” he wrote. “Selma’s Negro community is, in fact, in an hour of new and more subtle crisis — a tragic crisis when it is contrasted with the soaring hopes and selfless devotion they and their friends demonstrated here such a short time ago.”

Mr. Johnson joined The Post as a national correspondent, where his portfolio included many presidential campaigns; he was later an assistant managing editor as well as a columnist there. He was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his coverage in The Post of the impact of the recession on communities nationwide.

At his death, Mr. Johnson held the Knight chair of public affairs journalism at the University of Maryland.

His other books include “Lyndon” (1973, with Richard Harwood); “The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point” (1996, with David S. Broder); and “The Battle for America, 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election” (2009, with Dan Balz).

Mr. Johnson’s first marriage, to Julia Erwin; ended in divorce. A resident of Washington, he is survived by his second wife, Ms. Oberly, a judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals; three siblings, Michael, Paul and Sarah Johnson; five children from his first marriage, Stephen, David M., Katherine Autin, Sarah Johnson and Elizabeth Koeller; a stepson, Michael Goelzer; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Johnson’s father, Malcolm, died in 1976, at 71. With Haynes Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize a decade earlier, the two men became the first father-and-son writers to win the award.

“My father couldn’t believe it,” Haynes Johnson told United Press International in 1966, describing his win. “I’m really more pleased for him than for myself.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/business/media/haynes-johnson-journalist-and-author-dies-at-81.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks Blog: A Car Towing Tale of Woe

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A car being towed in New York City.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A car being towed in New York City.

When we were looking for a home in a new city a few years ago, my family took a welcome break from house hunting to eat dinner.

We emerged from the restaurant just in time to see our car speed by — on the back of a tow truck. Apparently, we had mistakenly entered the incorrect parking space number in an automatic payment machine. We had paid — for the wrong space. So an alert local towing firm had pounced.

Our little adventure ended an hour or so later, after we tracked down the location of the tow lot and retrieved our car. The tow operator didn’t want to hear our argument about having paid for the wrong space, and the children were cranky, so we just paid the fee and went on our way.

But things didn’t go so easily for Robert Pelkey of Manchester, N.H., who sued a towing firm after it hauled away his car and then sold it, even though his lawyer told the towing firm he hadn’t abandoned it and wanted it back.

The towing firm invoked a federal transportation law to argue that his claim under a New Hampshire consumer law was invalid. The towing suit made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which this week found in Mr. Pelkey’s favor.

Here’s Mr. Pelkey’s tale of towing woe. In February 2007, a firm called Dan’s City Used Cars towed Mr. Pelkey’s 2004 Honda Civic from its parking spot because he had failed to move it during a snowstorm, per the policy of his apartment complex.

It turned out that Mr. Pelkey was ill, and ended up in the hospital to have his foot amputated shortly after the car was towed. He suffered a heart attack while in the hospital, and stayed there for nearly two months, according to a brief filed by his lawyers.

A notification mailed by Dan’s City to Mr. Pelkey was returned, according to the court’s opinion, so the firm scheduled the car for auction. When Mr. Pelkey did return home and found that his car was gone, his lawyer located the car and offered to pay any charges owed to reclaim it. But Dan’s City sold it anyway, without paying Mr. Pelkey anything for it.

Mr. Pelkey sued under a state consumer law and the state’s highest court found in Mr. Pelkey’s favor, but Dan’s City appealed to the United States Supreme Court. On Monday, the court ruled that the federal law didn’t trump Mr. Pelkey’s claim and that his suit was valid. So he may yet be compensated for his troubles.

Adina Rosenbaum, a lawyer for Public Citizen and Mr. Pelkey’s co-counsel, said the Supreme Court “affirmed that people can bring state law cases against towing companies that tow their cars and sell them against the owners’ wishes.”

Katherine Strickland, a lawyer for Dan’s City, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Have you ever had a car towed? What was your experience? And how much did it cost to have it returned to you?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/a-car-towing-tale-of-woe/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Cultural Studies: Hurricane Sandy Reveals a Life Unplugged

November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

If they wanted to talk to a friend, they had to do it in person. If their first post-storm instincts were to check a weather app, they resigned themselves to battery-run radios.

As the full scope of the storm’s damage became obvious, it was clear these inconveniences were hardly grave. And because most children, and adults, eventually found some kind of connection via an unaffected neighbor (or Starbucks), the withdrawal was often more of a tech diet than a total fast.

But the storm provided a rare glimpse of a life lived offline. It drove some children crazy, while others managed to embrace the experience of a digital slowdown. It also produced some unexpected ammunition for parents already eager to curb the digital obsessions of their children.

Early this year, when Michelle Obama revealed rather draconian rules about technology for her daughters (no TV, cellphones or computers during the week except for homework), Pam Abel Davis of South Orange, N.J., used the news to threaten her tech-addled children with Obama-esque regulations. “My son in first grade signed a pledge for ‘TV turnoff’ during the week to win a gold medal,” said Ms. Davis, a senior program officer at the Robin Hood Foundation. “But it was too much. He said, ‘Mom, let’s just go for the silver.’ ”

The storm hit Ms. Davis’s neighborhood hard but spared her home, which became a charging station for friends of her daughter, Lucy Reynal, 13. Then last Sunday, electricity was shut off while fallen trees were cleared from the road, and within minutes the house emptied out, no longer useful to the teenage power vultures.

“Lucy almost had a heart attack when the Wi-Fi went down, until she saw pictures of the devastation all around us,” Ms. Davis said. “I had just bought a hand-cranked phone charger, thinking it would be a kitschy Hanukkah gift. We were winding it ferociously, sweating and running out of breath.”

Hegemony over the car adapter that provided precious power resembled a scene from “Lord of the Flies,” according to Gail Horwood of Scarsdale, N.Y., an executive at a consumer health care company. Bridget, 15, and Lila, 11, unearthed every ancient defunct flip phone in the family’s past and tried to arrange sleepovers where they could recharge. There was a throwback moment: Lila had to study for a test of state capitals, so as the lights were flickering just before the blackout, she found a childhood jigsaw puzzle of the United States. But any resourceful return to old-school methods were not expected to last.

“Not a chance,” Ms. Horwood said. “It’s a digital world, and they live in it.”

The Zanders of South Salem, N.Y., experienced a blackout last year, “so we’re getting good at the 1800s in our house,” said Lauren Handel Zander, who runs an executive life-coaching company. Her three children “live for Mommy’s iPad,” she said, likening the first days of the blackout to rehab. “It’s like coming off drugs,” she said. “There’s a 48-hour withdrawal until they’re not asking about the TV every other minute.”

The Zander children did enjoy the unusual undivided attention of a working mom. “Mommy got parked,” Ms. Zander said ruefully. “I’m not as ‘on’ if my kid is attached to one of those devices. I played Clue. I haven’t played Clue in a very long time. We got to hang out more, which was an entire family adjustment, but it’s a good problem to have.”

Among the parents who spoke with pride about newfound family time when their children were forced offline, there were honest admissions about the joy-kill of too much bonding. One 10-year-old boy in Lower Manhattan sweetly told his mother, “This gives us a chance to talk.” After three hours of “and that’s why they need to ditch Sanchez and make Tebow the starter,” she was silently pleading for someone to turn the power on.

“For the first three days, I was full of maternal pride,” said Marjorie Ingall, a writer in the East Village. “’Look at my children: reading by candlelight, cutting out paper dolls, engaged in such brilliant imaginative play. We are so ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Then Day 3 hit and the charm of screenless togetherness wore off. I was genuinely concerned that we were all going to kill each other.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/fashion/hurricane-sandy-reveals-a-life-unplugged.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Medicare Plan for Payments Irks Hospitals

May 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The administration plans to establish “Medicare spending per beneficiary” as a new measure of hospital performance, just like the mortality rate for heart attack patients and the infection rate for surgery patients.

Hospitals could be held accountable not only for the cost of the care they provide, but also for the cost of services performed by doctors and other health care providers in the 90 days after a Medicare patient leaves the hospital.

This plan has drawn fire from hospitals, which say they have little control over services provided after a patient’s discharge — and, in many cases, do not even know about them. More generally, they are apprehensive about Medicare’s plans to reward and penalize hospitals based on untested measures of efficiency that include spending per beneficiary.

A major goal of the new health care law, often overlooked, is to improve “the quality and efficiency of health care” by linking payments to the performance of health care providers. The new Medicare initiative, known as value-based purchasing, will redistribute money among more than 3,100 hospitals.

Medicare will begin computing performance scores in July, for monetary rewards and penalties that start in October 2012.

The desire to reward hospitals for high-quality care is not new or controversial. The idea can be traced back to a bipartisan bill introduced in Congress in 2005, when Democrats and Republicans were still working together on health care. However, adding in “efficiency” is entirely new and controversial, as no consensus exists on how to define or measure the efficiency of health care providers.

The new health care law directs the secretary of health and human services to develop “efficiency measures, including measures of Medicare spending per beneficiary.” Obama administration officials will decide how to calculate spending per beneficiary and how to use it in paying hospitals.

Administration officials hope such efforts will slow the growth of Medicare without risking the political firestorm that burned Republicans who tried to remake the program this year.

In calculating Medicare spending per beneficiary, the administration said, it wants to count costs generated during a hospital stay, the three days before it and the 90 days afterward. This, it said, will encourage hospitals to coordinate care “in an efficient manner over an extended time period.”

If, for example, an 83-year-old woman is admitted to a hospital with a broken hip, she might have hip replacement surgery and then be released to a nursing home or a rehabilitation hospital. When she recovers, she might return to her own home, but still visit doctors and physical therapists or receive care from a home health agency. If she develops a serious infection, she might go back to the hospital within 90 days.

The new measure of Medicare spending per beneficiary would include all these costs, which — federal officials say — could be reduced by better coordination of care and communication among providers.

Here, in simplified form, is an example offered by federal officials to show how the rewards might work. If Medicare spends an average of $9,125 per beneficiary at a particular hospital and if the comparable figure for all hospitals nationwide is $12,467, the hospital would receive high marks — 9 points out of a possible 10 awarded for efficiency. This measure, combined with measures of quality, would be used to compute an overall performance score for the hospital. Based on this score, Medicare would pay a higher or lower percentage of each claim filed by the hospital.

Federal officials are still working out details, including how to distribute the money.

Charles N. Kahn III, president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned companies, said he supported efforts to pay hospitals according to their performance. But he said the administration was “off track” in trying to hold hospitals accountable for what Medicare spends on patients two or three months after they leave the hospital.

“That’s unrealistic, beyond the pale,” Mr. Kahn said.

Since 2004, Medicare has provided financial incentives to hospitals to report on the quality of care, using widely accepted clinical measures.

Much of the information is posted on a government Web site (hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), but it has not been used as a basis for paying hospitals.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3a8fc40c50ca69a7cc4fe719626bf9cd

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