Obituaries

Mary Skinner was a remarkable woman who had an extraordinary life. Mary was born in New York in 1936. Mary’s mother (Maidee) had been born in Bremen in 1913, but the family emigrated to the United States during the first world war. After the war Mary’s mother returned to Germany to stay with relatives and friends; in 1933, however, her mother decided to bring her back to New York City. Mary’s father (Joe Moore) was a medical practitioner who started his long career working for the US Government eradicating malaria in the Georgia Sea Isles and then with the health provider Kaiser Permanente before going into private practice. Both of Mary’s parents had strong sympathies with the political left, despite coming from affluent backgrounds. After a brief period in upstate New York, they moved to California, settling ultimately in Inverness on the beautiful Port Reyes coast.

Mary was such a cosmopolitan figure – in the course of her life she was to live in America, Africa and Europe – that it would be foolish to associate her too closely with any particular place. Yet I am sure that California was a key element in her complex personality: apparently ‘laid back’ yet dauntingly energetic, pleasure-loving yet highly principled, unfazed and eternally optimistic.

Politically, Mary was always a Rawlsian liberal and quite to the Left of the Democratic Party. Anyone who thinks that Buckingham was the exclusive preserve of hide-bound reactionaries should remember Mary Skinner.

So, after study and teaching in the United States, research with her then husband David in Africa and research in Oxford, Mary came to Buckingham, and it is on her time with us that I want to concentrate. Perhaps the thing that most impressed lazy British colleagues – like me – was Mary’s amazing energy. She thought nothing of rushing up to London for a party, catching an early train back to Buckingham, teaching all day and then returning to London for another social event.

Read the full obituary here.

Beloved husband of Jane Casey Hughes died January 2, 2023, age 97. Supremely knowledgeable about world history and U.S. foreign affairs, Hughes was a voice of reason inside the Johnson administration on the Vietnam War. He came to Washington in 1955 as legislative counsel to Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Hughes then served Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 1961-1969, as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. From 1971-1991 he was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1965 Hughes helped compose a memo from Vice President Humphrey to President Johnson warning about the negative effects of the proposed intensification of the war in Vietnam. Johnson did not take the advice. Hughes's off-the-record speeches during that period have been published in Speaking Up and Speaking Out. Several of his speeches to Anglo-American audiences have been published in Oxford After Dinner. The lighter moments of his career in diplomacy and the foundation world have also appeared in book form as Anecdotage. In person as well as in print, Hughes was known for his intelligence and charm. (A full biography of Hughes, by intellectual historian Bruce L.R. Smith is entitled The Last Gentleman.) Hughes's friend Sanford Ungar, former director of the Voice of America, once wrote, "If there is anyone in Washington who can credibly lay claim to the moniker of "smartest person in the room"-any room, anytime-it is Tom Hughes. There is also a good chance, in most rooms he steps into, that he is the funniest, the best piano player, and has the clearest memory for historical detail." A native of Mankato MN, Hughes was immensely proud of his small-town roots and of his Welsh and German forebears. A national debate champion in high school and college, Hughes in 1944, age 18, was elected national president of Student Federalists, working for a postwar union of democracies. In 1944 he spoke at both the Republican and Democratic conventions, and in 1945 attended the founding conference of the United Nation in San Francisco. After graduating from Carleton College in 1947, Hughes was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (Balliol). (Under President Nixon in 1969-1970, he was Deputy Chief of Mission in the American Embassy in London, a short but happy return to England.) Following a Yale Law School degree and Air Force service, Hughes made the move to Capitol Hill first as legislative counsel to Rep. Chester Bowles (D-CT) before joining Senator Humphrey's staff. Hughes's first wife, journalist and designer Jean Hurlburt Reiman, died in 1993. In 1995 Hughes married Jane Casey Kuczynski, a former reporter for the Voice of America, who survives him. Also surviving are a sister Mrs. Marianne Hughes Nordholm of Oak Park Heights, MN; and two sons from his first marriage - Thomas Evan Hughes (and wife Lynn McCary) of Brooklyn, NY and Allan Cameron Hughes of Athens, GA. Also surviving are a nephew and nieces Bradford Nordholm, Sarah Davis, Karen Anderson, and their children. Three Kuczynski stepchildren and five step-grand- children also survive.

The purinergic signalling and the broader scientific and medical communities lost a pioneer of purinergic research within Australia and abroad. Jim was both an outstanding scientist and clinician, still active in these roles until his passing, symbolising his great commitment to and energy and enthusiasm for high-quality science from the bench to bedside. In his final days, he was reading research articles, and discussing with his former student, mentee and long-term collaborator, Dr. Ben J. Gu, their project relating to P2X receptors and early-stage apoptotic platelets. Jim was deeply admired, respected, and liked by his students, staff, peers, and patients, being commonly described as a “gentleman”. Jim is remembered by his wife Karin, children Malcolm and Kirsten, and six grandchildren.

James Saville Wiley was born in Sydney on the 9^th of June 1936. His father was a doctor and had served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps during World War 1. From 1956 to 1964, Jim served in the Australian Army Reserve rising to the rank of Lieutenant. In 1958, Jim was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for both his academic and athletic prowess (as a schoolboy he had won state championships in the 880 yard and mile events and in 1956 he trialled for the Melbourne Olympics). Jim undertook a BSc at the University of Oxford (1959–1962). Following his return to Australia, he obtained an MBBS (1965) and an MD (1973) from the University of Sydney. He continued his medical training as a junior resident medical officer (1966–1967) and fellow in haematology (1967–1968) at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. Jim held several medical and research positions throughout his long and prosperous career including positions at the Hammersmith Hospital, London (1971), and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1971–1975), the place at which he would later develop a life-long passion for purinergic signalling. Jim was devoted to the care of patients with haematological disorders and was a fellow of both the Royal Australian College of Physicians and Royal College of Pathologists Australia.

Read the full obituary here.

A tribute from Rhodes Scholar RW Johnson (Natal & Magdalen 1964).

"I first heard of Charles Simkins at Oxford. I was friendly with the two Politics tutors at Balliol College, Steven Lukes and Bill Weinstein and often used to lunch with them there. Thanks to its stellar reputation in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics), Balliol always attracted a record number of often wonderful PPE applicants. (The phrase most associated with Balliol has always been “effortless superiority”.)

Sometimes at lunch Bill and Steven would mention a particularly outstanding student. I remember them mentioning Charles Simkins in that regard. Like my own college, Magdalen, Balliol attracted many Rhodes Scholars and Charles had arrived on that ticket, having graduated from Wits where he’d also served on the SRC.

Like another Balliol South African, Martin Legassick, Charles had initially started as a physicist but had then been captivated by the social sciences. I use that phrase deliberately because Charles was a true PPE man, fascinated by all three subjects. He could as easily have been a sociologist, a philosopher or a political scientist as the economist he became. He was, too, no slouch as a demographer.

I only got to know Charles later and was immediately struck by the subtlety and complexity of his intelligence. In analysing any subject he would juggle a large number of factors which were very different in kind, showing the same sort of subtle appreciation as would have been employed by specialists in any one of half a dozen disciplines. In my experience people with such minds are rare birds indeed.

I had known academics at Oxbridge, Harvard and Stanford who were clearly Charles’s intellectual inferior and I was struck by the fact that Charles had not ventured into those pastures, as he undoubtedly could have. Instead, he never seems to have hesitated about returning to South Africa where he spent his life struggling for the liberal cause against the tide.

Under apartheid Charles’s work for black trade unions earned him a banning order and restriction to a small geographic area but he never spoke of this or laid claim to any role in the struggle. He was a quiet, modest and very gentle man, entirely without personal political ambition. It was something of a surprise to learn that he was a High Church Anglican and I suspect that, like many South African liberals, he was influenced by the missionary tradition and saw opposition to apartheid as a moral imperative rather than a political act.

Charles passed through Oxford in early 1995 and dined with me in Magdalen. I told him I was thinking of coming back out to South Africa to re-found the Helen Suzman Foundation. He encouraged me but warned me that I would face an ideologically hostile climate – “The ANC and the Nats both hate liberals. You may not last long.” This was indeed the truth and I often thought of that conversation in the six years that followed.

Having taught in a number of South African universities, Charles ended up as the Helen Suzman professor of economics at Wits. But in the New South Africa the English-speaking universities had become tricky ground.

Charles’s department included a non-South African black lecturer who neglected his teaching so that Charles frequently had to step in to fill the gaps with extra lectures. This man then put in for promotion. Charles understandably turned this down but was then accused of racism by the angry lecturer.

The vice-chancellor then summoned Charles, prejudged the case by threatening Charles with dire reprisals – and then set up an enquiry. The enquiry found that Charles, though not a racist, had “missed opportunities for transformation”. As so often in such cases, the incident was a huge cause of nervous strain for Charles and permanently cast a shadow over him in the eyes of many students. It was an absurd inversion of justice.

I talked to Charles not long after this. He told me he had responded by ensuring that he taught only technical economics at Wits, avoiding all exploration of any wider issues. In this way he could avoid all mention of anything that might be deemed political or, worse still, “controversial”.

Instead, he worked on the real debates, controversies and interesting questions purely for off-campus organizations like the SAIRR, the Helen Suzman Foundation and other NGOs. This meant, of course, that Wits had become a complete negation of what a university ought to be. “On every corridor there is someone acting as an ideological commissar”, Charles said.

For this reason Charles soon resigned from Wits in order to teach at St Augustine’s (Roman Catholic) college. That a leading scholar should give up a prestigious chair at Wits for a post at a much smaller and less prestigious college speaks volumes. The point was that at St Augustine’s there was still academic freedom. Happily, Charles was then able to devote himself to his research post at the Helen Suzman Foundation, which he found highly congenial.

For the last decade of his life Charles devoted himself to the care of his seriously ill wife, Rae. He was a completely unselfish man and never complained. Then, in the last year, he became seriously ill himself, emerging from the ICU only in time to see Rae die. In his last few weeks he was prone to hallucinations. Once he told a friend that he had just been enjoying “a wonderful conversation with Bill Johnson”.

I wish that had indeed been the case but even so, I treasure the thought and the story. Charles not only had a magnificent intellect. He was a lovely man with almost all the virtues and, as far as I could see, none of the vices at all. While I live, I shall miss him."

The Rhodes Trust is deeply grateful that Charles remembered the Trust in his Will.

Carey Parker, who helped shape and shepherd to passage some of the most significant federal laws of the past 50 years as the chief legislative aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), becoming an eminence of Capitol Hill in his own right, died Dec. 4 at a rehabilitation center in McLean, Va. He was 88.

Mr. Parker was 34 years old, a Rhodes scholar with a Harvard law degree, when he joined Kennedy’s office in 1969. Scarcely six months earlier, the senator’s brother Robert, a U.S. senator from New York then seeking the 1968 Democratic nomination for president, had been fatally shot in California.

Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, Robert’s death left Ted the only surviving Kennedy son and, as a senator still in his first full term, the heir to his family’s political legacy.

Over the next four decades, through tragedy and controversy, Ted Kennedy emerged as one of the most consequential senators of his era. He oversaw a large office of staffers who shared his commitment to civil rights, social justice and other central tenets of liberalism. But by all accounts, no aide did more behind the scenes than Mr. Parker to translate Kennedy’s ideals into legislation, or to support him as he assumed his mantle as the “lion of the Senate.”

“He was my father’s alter ego,” Patrick J. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s youngest child and a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, said of Mr. Parker in an interview, recalling how the senator relied on Mr. Parker’s “brilliance” to “advance their common cause.”

Mr. Parker was hired as a legislative assistant but soon took on responsibilities far outstripping the title. In his recently published biography “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” author John A. Farrell described Mr. Parker as “something of a Senate legend” and one of Kennedy’s “matchless assets.”

On matters of legislation, he “had the first word with the senator and the last word with the senator,” Jeff Blattner, who served as chief counsel to Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

Like Kennedy, Mr. Parker was a skilled negotiator, ever attuned to the needs and ambitions of colleagues on both sides of the political aisle. Also like Kennedy, he had a capacious mind for the intricacies of policy on matters ranging from voting rights to health care to tax policy to apartheid in South Africa and peace in Northern Ireland.

The senator devoted years to health care and social services. Working closely with Mr. Parker, he helped pass laws, including the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (often called HIPAA), the 1997 law that created what is now the Children’s Health Insurance Program (widely known as CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed in 2010, a year after Kennedy died.

“America,” he declared, “is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks.”

Bork’s nomination was ultimately rejected by the Senate in one of the most divisive battles over a judicial nomination to that point. “It certainly served its purpose,” Mr. Parker said of the speech in a 2008 oral history with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

In 1994, during the Clinton administration, Mr. Parker helped shepherd through the Senate confirmation of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who had served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was chairman.

Mr. Parker was a key adviser to Kennedy during the 1980 presidential election, in which Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy’s bid was unsuccessful, but it gave him the platform for one of the most memorable speeches of his career, his address at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Kennedy speechwriter Bob Shrum drafted the remarks but credited Mr. Parker with refining them.

In the speech, Kennedy congratulated Carter on his victory and said that “for me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.”

But “for all those whose cares have been our concern,” he declared, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

William Carey Parker II was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 3, 1934. His father was a physician, and his mother was a church volunteer.

He grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and was a 1952 graduate of the private Haverford School in Haverford, Pa. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1956, studied as a Rhodes scholar at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, and received a PhD in the sciences from what is now Rockefeller University in New York in 1963.

Inspired by Kennedy’s 1960 inaugural address, in which he called on Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” Mr. Parker pursued a career in public service.

He received a bachelor of laws degree from Harvard University in 1965, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and served as a special assistant in the Justice Department’s criminal division before joining Ted Kennedy’s staff. During their early years together, they played a key role in lowering the voting age to 18 from 21, a goal achieved with the ratification in 1971 of the 26th Amendment.

Kennedy so valued Mr. Parker’s service that, in an unusual arrangement, he used his personal wealth and money from his political action fund to supplement Mr. Parker’s Senate salary. Mr. Parker served the senator until Kennedy’s death from brain cancer, and remained on the office staff under Paul G. Kirk Jr., who held the Senate seat until Republican Scott Brown’s victory in a 2010 special election.

Mr. Parker was a longtime resident of the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. His wife of 57 years, the former Betsy Libby, died in January. Survivors include two daughters, Annie Parker Dalgleish of Vienna, Va., and Catherine Parker of Seattle; a brother; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Parker cared little for the dinners and cocktail parties where congressional hobnobbers often gather. He worked through lunch every day, dining at his desk on an egg salad sandwich purchased from the Senate cafeteria.

He did, however, confess to enjoying the Kennedy office holiday parties, in which the snowy-haired senator would sometimes dress up as Santa Claus. One year, Kennedy went as Barney, the purple Tyrannosaurus rex of the children’s television show, in a self-deprecating nod to jabs at him as an aging “dinosaur” of Capitol Hill. Another year, Kennedy, the “lion of the Senate,” donned a costume from “The Lion King.”

Mr. Parker, ever content to let the senator shine, wore his normal attire. “I was just standing in the background,” he said.