Sam Roberts

The cause was congestive heart failure and complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter, Jennifer Cray, said.

Trained in college as an anthropologist, Cray invited readers along as he quenched his curiosity about American life and American figures in 18 book-length odysseys.

He delved into broad subjects, including police misconduct and medical care (“The Big Blue Line” in 1967 and “In Failing Health,” in 1970) and entrepreneurship (“Levi’s: The Story of Levi Strauss &amp; Co.” in 1978 and “Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times” in 1981).

And he mined folklore, assembling “The Erotic Muse: A Completely Uncensored Collection of the Songs Everyone Knows and No One Has Written Down Before” and “Bawdy Ballads” (both in 1969) and several sequels.

His “Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie” (2004), the music critic Robert Christgau wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “vividly conveys how difficult Guthrie’s life was and how heroic his achievement.”

The author Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University professor and Guthrie fan, told The Times in 2012 that the “two great biographies” of Guthrie were by Cray and political columnist Joe Klein (“Woody Guthrie: A Life,” 1980).

“Ed was a meticulous craftsman of American biography with a penchant for deep research,” Brinkley said in an email. “What mattered most to Ed was being a judicious judge of the past. There are no false notes in his body of work.”

In 2010, Cray and Bill Nowlin were nominated for a Grammy Award for writing the liner notes for “My Dusty Road,” a four-CD set of Guthrie’s music released the year before by Rounders Records.

Reviewing “Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren” (1997) in The Times, Herbert Mitgang described the book’s view of Warren as “idealized,” but added that its account of decision making by the court made the profile a “readable and innovative work.”

His Warren biography won the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.

Professor Joe Saltzman, a former colleague at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where Cray also taught, said in an email, “Although his books were not best-sellers, they always offered solid reporting and new insights into his subjects.”

In “Burden of Proof: The Case of Juan Corona” (1973), Cray, who worked as an investigator for the defense, argued that Corona was convicted in 1973 of killing 25 migrant workers because he had failed to prove his innocence even though the burden of proof was on the prosecution.

His conviction was voided because of what an appeals court ruled was incompetent legal representation. Corona was convicted again, still insisting he was innocent, but in 2011 he admitted his crimes at a parole hearing. He died in March while serving 25 concurrent life sentences in prison.

Edward Beryl Cray was born on July 3, 1933, in Cleveland to Max and Sara (Negin) Cray. His mother was a teacher, and his father, a French Canadian, was a truck driver.

Growing up in California, Ed was a newsboy for The Los Angeles Mirror and a copy boy for The Los Angeles Daily News as a teenager. After serving in the Army in Korea, he enrolled in the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated in 1957.

In addition to writing freelance articles, from 1965 to 1970, he was the director of publications for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and later a publicist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1976, took a leave in 1983 to help The Los Angeles Times establish a training program for minority journalists, and retired as a professor of journalism in the Annenberg School in 2014.

In 2017, Cray moved from Santa Monica to Palo Alto. In addition to his daughter, Jennifer Cray, from his marriage to Marjorie Lee, which ended in divorce, he is survived by a stepdaughter, Naomi Kovacs; a stepson, Josh Kovacs; and two granddaughters. His second wife, Diane Markson Kovacs, whom he married in 1985, died in 2006.

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Ed Cray, Biographer of Woody Guthrie and Earl Warren, Dies at 86

Ed Cray, a journalist and educator who explored a broad spectrum of Americana with well-regarded biographies of Woody Guthrie, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the California serial killer Juan Corona, George C. Marshall and the bluejeans maker Levi Strauss, died on Oct. 8 in Palo Alto, California. He was 86.

Her death was confirmed by Jane Kallir, director of the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, which Kallir’s grandfather, Otto Kallir, founded in 1940.

Bachert first worked at the gallery as a secretary. She became co-director with Jane Kallir after Otto Kallir’s death in 1978 and remained in that position until last year, when she moved (she avoided saying “retired”) full time to her second home, in Vermont.

“I could have retired 20 years ago, but I can’t unglue myself,” she told The New York Times in 2015. “I’m too connected. It’s my baby.”

Bachert (pronounced BACK-ert) figured prominently in the art world for decades as a lonely nonconformist among the early- and mid-20th-century Francophile arbiters of modernism.

Working with Otto Kallir, she championed the careers of virtually unknown expressionists, both men and women, among them Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Erich Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin and Max Liebermann.

“We don’t do pretty pictures — our art is tough,” she told The Times. “If we have people who come in saying, ‘I’m looking for a picture that works over my fireplace,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.’”

The gallery organized the first American shows by Klimt and Schiele. “We really put them on the map,” Bachert said.

Even in the late 1950s, drawings by Schiele priced as low as $10 went unsold. But the market’s resistance to German and Austrian art eventually dissipated.

An early-20th-century Schiele drawing recently sold at auction for about $2.2 million. In 2006, cosmetics heir and collector Ronald Lauder paid $135 million for Klimt’s painting “Women in Gold,” which he hung in his Neue Galerie in Manhattan, named for Otto Kallir’s original gallery in Vienna.

In 1940, the Galerie St. Etienne held the first one-woman exhibition by Anna Mary Robertson Moses, the indomitable artist, born in 1860, whose primitive paintings had been discovered hanging in an upstate drugstore by Louis Caldor, an engineer with the New York City Department of Water Supply. They were rejected by other dealers, but Otto Kallir immediately recognized them as artistically meritorious and dispatched Bachert to visit and cultivate her.

The exhibition was followed by a display of Moses’ paintings at the Gimbels department store in Manhattan, a greeting card deal with Hallmark and a contract with the gallery, which secured the rights to her works and reproductions. Income from those sales and royalties helped the gallery pay for other art that was in lesser demand at the time.

“We often said, ‘Grandma supports Schiele,’” Bachert recalled in a 1993 interview with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Otto Kallir dedicated his biography, “Grandma Moses, American Primitive” (1947), to Bachert, who was his editor and the gallery’s liaison to Moses. She also assisted the artist while she dictated her memoir, “My Life’s History” (1951). Grandma Moses died in 1961.

“People often brand her work as nostalgic,” Bachert told The Hartford Courant in 1998. “It may be so for them. But Grandma Moses was not nostalgic. She was among the most unsentimental persons I ever knew. She had so much common sense and knowledge of life, and all that came through in her pictures.”

In an interview with the Rutland Daily Herald in 2001, Bachert said, “Grandma taught me many things about life and about the intrinsic value of art,” adding, “She really was like a grandmother to me.”

Hildegard Gina Bachert was born April 3, 1921, in Mannheim, Germany, to Gustav and Frieda (Reis) Bachert. Her father, a World War I veteran, was a lawyer.

As a child she was exposed to painting largely through picture postcards and what she called the “very mediocre, bourgeois” landscapes that hung in her family home. She was barred from visiting the Kunsthalle Mannheim museum in the 1930s because she was Jewish.

After the Nazis seized power and Hildegard was expelled from public school — also because she was Jewish — her parents insisted that she and her older sister, Edith, leave Germany. They were able to obtain visas through an uncle in Chicago, and in 1936 they settled in New York, where Hildegard graduated from George Washington High School. After their home was ransacked during Kristallnacht, her parents managed to join their daughters in 1939.

Hildegard was admitted to Oberlin College in Ohio, but, even with a scholarship, lacked enough money to attend. She enrolled instead in free night classes at Hunter College in Manhattan. Needing to find work, she lasted three days as a frazzled housekeeper and, through a printer friend, was hired as a secretary at the Karl Nierendorf gallery. It was there that she met Otto Kallir, who hired her after she promised to teach him English.

He had opened a gallery on West 57th Street, which describes itself as the oldest in the United States specializing in Austrian and German expressionism. He also assisted in the restitution of art looted during the Holocaust.

“My grandfather respected and appreciated her and gave her a very large role,” Jane Kallir said. “She had this enduring sense of a mission beyond herself and was really dedicated in service to the art.”

Bachert lived in an apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan decorated with furniture and other artifacts that her family had salvaged when they fled Germany. She never married and left no immediate survivors.

Seventy-eight years is a long time to work in one place. But, Bachert explained, she had never been a careerist. She preferred to feel that her talent was being tapped to its full potential, leaving her fulfilled in the knowledge that she had made a contribution that was appreciated.

“A 9-to-5 job never appealed to me,” she said in 1993. “I put in enormous amounts of hours — here, now, even more, because I have the responsibility of the gallery. I never worked harder than when I was older.

“Kallir felt that we should have more free time,” she added, “and he was the boss; he could say, ‘Take off.’ But now I’m the boss, and I never take off.”

Hildegard Bachert, 98, Dies; Championed Klimt, Schiele and Grandma Moses

Hildegard Bachert, who fled the Nazis as a teenager and joined a New York art gallery where, over a 78-year career, she helped introduce and popularize the works of German and Austrian expressionists and the folk art of Grandma Moses, died Oct. 17 in Brattleboro, Vermont. She was 98.

The cause was uveal melanoma, a cancer of the eye, his daughter Joanne Brandwood said.

Armstrong, and the investigators and prosecutors he enlisted to root out police corruption, succeeded by penetrating the previously inviolable blue wall of silence that had concealed systemic bribe-taking in police ranks. That code had led officers to overlook or even join in illegal activities — including the theft of cash and narcotics seized in drug raids — while impotent or complicit department brass saw no evil. Elected officials, too, ignored warnings, fearing a political backlash from police unions.

“The point is, everybody knew what was happening, and nobody would admit that it was happening,” Armstrong said in 2009 in an oral history interview for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “You know, kind of just looked the other way. What we did is, we took the rotten fish and dropped it on the table and said, ‘All right, deal with it.’”

The commission was appointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay after The New York Times published a series of articles by David Burnham that had been prompted in large part by two police whistleblowers, Frank Serpico and David Durk. The two reached out to The Times after neither high-ranking police officials nor City Hall had responded satisfactorily to their complaints.

Led by Whitman Knapp, who in 1972 was appointed a U.S. District Court judge, the panel revealed that corruption was by no means limited to the rotten apples Armstrong and his colleagues had caught in the act and persuaded to testify.

“We found that the barrel was completely tainted,” Armstrong said in the oral history.

Among the commission’s star witnesses was William R. Philips, an officer who was caught taking payoffs from Xaviera Hollander, the madam who wrote the bestselling book “The Happy Hooker.” (Recognized by a detective during his televised testimony, Phillips was charged in the 1968 murders of a pimp and a prostitute and was imprisoned for 32 years.)

“Frank Serpico had this statement,” Armstrong said, “which was ‘10% of the department is absolutely corrupt, 10% is absolutely honest and the other 80%, they wish they were honest.’”

Armstrong borrowed the last part of that quotation for the title of his 2012 book, “They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption.”

Armstrong’s interrogations led to the public shaming and in some cases punishment of corrupt officers. He acknowledged that his work did not suddenly instill scruples in the entire police force; but that 80%, he said, largely “turned around and became honest.”

“The line I have used is that you can still be corrupt, but now you have to lie about it,” he said. “You don’t brag about it.”

A tenacious prosecutor and a fierce advocate for his clients as a white-collar defense lawyer, Armstrong was both a law-and-order lawyer and a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“He pulled no punches in exposing the depth of corruption with a dramatic flair, and was unbowed in his attempt to determine the facts,” the former New York City police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in an email.

District Judge John F. Keenan, a former Armstrong colleague and special anti-corruption prosecutor, said, also by an email, “What Mike did really made the Knapp Commission, and the commission made the Police Department more honest.”

Michael Francis Armstrong was born on Dec. 14, 1932, in Manhattan to Joseph and Mary (Cassidy) Armstrong. His father was an advertising executive, his mother a homemaker.

After graduating from Bronxville High School in nearby Westchester County and considering a career in advertising, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale and was admitted to Harvard Law School. He interrupted his law studies to serve in the Air Force and, after being discharged as a first lieutenant, graduated in 1960.

He married Catherine Joan Brennan, who died in 1998.

In addition to their daughter Joanne, he is survived by two other daughters, Deirdre Armstrong and Margaret Weiner; 11 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; two sisters, Elizabeth Streeter and Mary Spitzer; and his partner, Gretchen Siebel. Two children, Catherine and Michael, died earlier.

As chief of the U.S. attorney’s securities fraud unit in New York in 1967, Armstrong successfully prosecuted the government’s case against Louis E. Wolfson, who was among the first corporate raiders. Wolfson and a business partner had been accused of selling unregistered shares in a company they controlled. The investigation implicated Justice Abe Fortas of the U.S. Supreme Court, and he resigned two years later.

In 1973, after serving for two years as chief counsel to the Knapp Commission, Armstrong was named interim Queens district attorney by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller following the indictment of the incumbent, Thomas J. Mackell, in a corruption scandal.

From the outset, Armstrong was disinclined to seek election for a full term. After getting a whiff of clubhouse cronyism, he became reluctant to engage in politics — so reluctant, he said, that he proclaimed to a reporter:

“You’re authorized to use this quote if I decide to run for public office. ‘No. 1, I believe there’s a Mafia and it’s all full of Italians. No. 2, I think it was a disgrace for the Irish to remain neutral in World War II. And No. 3, I sympathize with the Palestinians in the Middle East.’”

He added: “If I ever decide to run or think about running, I will know that you’re out there, with this quote. That will end it, for sure.”

In the 1980s Armstrong represented the children of Martha von Bülow in a civil suit against her husband, Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of trying to murder her. They asked that he be barred from inheriting her multimillion-dollar fortune. They settled their suit in 1987 when Claus von Bulow gave up his claim to their mother’s estate. (Sunny von Bülow, as she was known, remained in an irreversible coma from 1980 until her death in 2008.)

In other cases, Armstrong negotiated the surrender in 1974 of Jane L. Alpert, a fugitive leftist radical who had been sentenced in a wave of bombings in New York; represented Donald R. Manes, the Queens borough president, who later killed himself in a municipal corruption scandal; and supported the plea of Martin Tankeleff, whose conviction of murdering his parents when he was 17 in 1988 was vacated two decades later.

In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed Armstrong chairman of the Commission to Combat Police Corruption, which was recommended by a Knapp Commission-style inquiry headed by Milton Mollen, a former state judge and deputy mayor. Most recently, Armstrong was of counsel to McLaughlin &amp; Stern, a Manhattan-based firm.

Through films and books, the Serpico episode and the Knapp Commission have endured for decades as bench marks in the city’s fight against police misconduct, much to the surprise of some police critics — and of Armstrong himself.

“This whole thing was like a World War I airplane,” he once said. “You get a lot of baling wire and Scotch tape and you patch and patch and patch.

“Everyone kept saying we couldn’t do it, particularly with what little we had. Maybe we were able to do it just because we didn’t know it couldn’t be done.”

Michael Armstrong, Who Led Probe of N.Y. Police Corruption, Dies at 86

Michael F. Armstrong, whose dogged pursuit and exposure of crooked cops as chief counsel to the Knapp Commission in the early 1970s was credited with smothering an ingrained culture of corruption in the New York City Police Department, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

Her death was confirmed by her niece Michelene Hallie, one of several nieces and nephews who survive her.

Gabriele (pronounced gab-ree-EL-ee) was believed to be the first singer to whom Douglas Moore gave the “Baby Doe” lyrics to audition as he was composing it at Columbia University. It was his signature opera.

Dolores Wilson played the title role in the work’s world premiere, in Central City, Colorado, in 1956. Gabriele starred as Baby Doe on the second night and in many subsequent performances that season.

“The Ballad of Baby Doe” not only became an American repertory standard (the role was performed by, among others, soprano Beverly Sills). It also inspired an organization of groupies, who call themselves DoeHeads, and who created a more-than-you-wanted-to-know website, including a recording of Gabriele singing “Gold Is a Fine Thing.”

Among the other popular arias from the opera are “Letter Aria,” “Willow Song,” “I Knew it Was Wrong” and “Always Through the Changing.”

The opera’s libretto, by John Latouche, was based on the storied real-life romance between silver magnate Horace Tabor and Elizabeth McCourt, known as Baby Doe, the estranged wife of a failed miner. Tabor lost his fortune and died in 1899; Baby Doe became a penniless recluse whose frozen body was found in 1935 near Tabor’s once-booming Matchless Mine.

Gabriele was also well known in New York as the co-owner, with her husband, Vito Pisa, of Chez Vito, a Manhattan supper club where roaming Hungarian violinists and singers, the proprietress included, serenaded diners seated on plush red velvet banquettes at candlelit tables. Patrons included Roy Cohn, Wernher von Braun, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Lene Madelyn Gabriele was born March 25, 1924, in Fairmont, West Virginia, a coal-mining city near Morgantown, to Costanzo Gabriele, a shoemaker from Italy, and Michelena (Potesta) Gabriele, a homemaker.

Singing was her passion, a pursuit encouraged by her parents and her teachers. After graduating from Fairmont State College (now University) with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1944, she studied voice, first in New York City and later in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship.

When she returned to New York in the early 1950s, she changed the spelling of her first name to Leyna, to make it clearer that it was pronounced LAY-nuh, with an Italian inflection.

In 1952 she was working as an office temp and living with a girlfriend from West Virginia who was dating a Hungarian violinist who played at Chez Vito. He told Gabriele that the supper club was looking to hire a singer.

She auditioned by singing “La Vie en Rose” and was hired at $40 a week. She took Pisa’s advice and learned “Core ’ngrato” (“Ungrateful Heart”), his favorite song, which became her signature. They married in 1954. (She sometimes went by the name Mrs. Pisa.) He died in 1966.

The cafe, which was originally on West 58th Street and then moved to East 60th Street, was frequented by Metropolitan Opera stars and other celebrities from the theater world, politics and other fields whose idle gossip or whispered negotiations might suddenly be curtailed by restaurant troubadours.

After Gabriele closed the cafe in 1973, she taught opera workshops at Princeton University and, with actor and director Walt Witcover, at the Masterworks Laboratory Theater at the State University of New York at Purchase.

Even while she was hosting and performing at the cafe, she continued to sing onstage. She appeared in the premieres of Jack Beeson’s opera “Hello, Out There” at Columbia University in 1954 and of Sergius Kagen’s “Hamlet” in Baltimore in 1963.

Reviewing her New York professional debut at Town Hall in 1958 for The New York Times, Eric Salzman praised her “musical sensitivity” and her “knack of sending forth beautifully controlled soft tones.”

Leyna Gabriele, 95, Dies; Soprano Who Sang in the First 'Baby Doe'

Leyna Gabriele, a lyric coloratura soprano who became a fan-club idol for playing the title role in the first production of the tragic rags-to-riches-to-rags opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” died Oct. 14 in Tarrytown, New York. She was 95.

His daughter Joanna Starr Hynes said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Hynes’ books “Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator” (1988), a memoir, and “The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War” (1997), a study of memoirs, diaries and other writing about war, delivered civilians to body-strewn battlefields and rat-infested trenches to “answer the essential question,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1995, “the one that people who weren’t there ask of the men who were: What was it like?”

Which was why, he explained, speaking as a prodigious consumer of war literature, “the best-known single sentence to come out of America’s part of World War II is not from a general’s dispatch or a politician’s speech.”

“It is three words from a common soldier whose name stood for every soldier: ‘Kilroy was here.’”

Each set of initials scratched on foreign monuments, each photograph or amateurish memoir, Hynes wrote, was like those three words — some GI’s impulsive pursuit of immortality in the face of death. “He was placing himself in history, “ he wrote, “recording that once in his life he had been present where great public events were happening.”

Enraptured by airplanes from childhood, Hynes flew 78 combat missions over the Pacific. He once described flying as “a life, like a sex life, that no normal guy would give up if he didn’t absolutely have to.”

But the dozens of books he wrote, contributed to and edited were not all drenched in blood and guts. Among the more composed were his dissections of Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Edwardian novels and the work of W.H. Auden and his contemporaries.

Daniel Menaker, who studied under Hynes at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1949 to 1968, and who went on to become executive editor-in-chief of Random House, wrote of him in an email:

“Of the beginning of Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’— ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still’ — he asked, ‘Where are we here?’ Those of us insecure males who may have hesitated about the seeming effeteness of this kind of study decided it might be OK if taught by a fighter pilot, up from poverty, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for ‘heroism or extraordinary achievement.’”

Hynes had no doubt why he was there, as a critic and a teacher, although not everyone would have defined those roles in precisely the terms he used.

“Criticism is, as we have seen, not a way of reading and explaining literature, but a way of rewriting it,” he observed in “Flights of Passage.” “This confuses writers, who tend to think that critics are people competent to give credible and sensible interpretations of the content and intention of their work.”

University teachers, he added, are employed to “contest the prevailing paradigmatic hegemonies, to prove the absence of the author, the death of the subject, the incongruity of the reader, and also to invigilate examinations when required.”

Samuel Lynn Hynes Jr. was born on Aug. 29, 1925, in Chicago and grew up in Minneapolis. His mother, Barbara (Turner) Hynes, died when he was 5. During the Depression, Samuel Sr., seeking work, took Sam and his brother, Charles, across the country before returning to Chicago for a factory job on the South Side.

“All my working life I’ve had two vocations — flying and professing,” Hynes once wrote.

Watching others fly came first. As a young boy, arms outstretched, he would circle schoolmates in the playground, emulating World War I aces. He would also ride his bicycle to the local airport and gape at the rudimentary planes.

“I was not, even in imagination, a pilot,” he wrote in his memoir, “but I was a true believer in the religion of flight.”

He graduated from high school at 16 and in 1942 entered the University of Minnesota, where he studied under novelist Robert Penn Warren. He signed up for the Navy flight program there and was called up the next spring. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marines, he served in a Marine torpedo bombing squadron in the Caroline Islands and Okinawa. He was discharged as a major.

In 1944 he married Elizabeth Ann Igleheart, the sister of a fellow pilot; she died in 2008. In addition to his daughter Joanna, he is survived by another daughter, Miranda Preston; a granddaughter, Lucy; two grandsons, Alex Preston, a British novelist and critic, and Samuel Preston, lead singer of the English rock band the Ordinary Boys; and three great-grandchildren.

Hynes turned 21 two weeks after the war ended. He returned to the University of Minnesota and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1947. He then earned a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University under the GI Bill.

He joined the Swarthmore faculty to teach British literature and left in 1968 for Northwestern. He remained there until 1976, when he moved to Princeton. He retired as Woodrow Wilson professor of literature emeritus in 1990.

“I loved him, and I loved what he made us study,” Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who took Hynes’ freshman course, said by email. “I then proudly turned in my first paper, which he returned with a C+ and a very brief comment: ‘No thesis, no argument, hence no paper.’”

Hynes once described writing as “revealing oneself to excess.” Reviewing his book “The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s” (1977), Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Hynes “writes with exemplary grace and clarity, and with not a trace of the jargon and obscurantism that increasingly characterize the output of academic factories these days.”

He was an articulate speaker, too. He delivered authoritative commentary in all seven episodes of “The War,” Ken Burns’ 2007 documentary about World War II.

He defined it as “a violent and dangerous world where, out there in the darkness or just over the hill, strangers wait whose job it is to kill you.” In Vietnam, he wrote in “The Soldiers’ Tale,” “winning or losing could only be calculated by the number of people you had killed.” What war is not, he wrote, is “an occasional interruption of a normality called peace; it is a climate in which we live.”

Alex Preston, his grandson and literary executor, sought to reconcile Hynes’ roles as a gladiatorial warrior and a pensive professor who continued writing almost to the end. (His “The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War” was published in 2014, when he was 90.)

“He was basically still a child when he went to war, but it gave a shape to his life as a man and as a writer,” Preston said by email. “Writing was the way he understood the world and made sense of the mixture of fear and exultation that was his experience of the war.”

“He was never interested in the politics and posturing of academic life,” Preston added, “He was always a soldier, even when sitting in what was almost literally an ivory tower above Firestone Library in Princeton.”

Samuel Hynes, Professor Whose Books Taught Lessons of War, Dies at 94

Samuel Hynes, a self-described Midwestern yokel who soared as a heroic fighter pilot in World War II and returned, sobered by combat, to flourish as a scholar, teacher, literary critic and popular author, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by his son, Robert Gardiner Goelet.

The scion of a real estate dynasty, Goelet (pronounced guh-LET) was 52 when he married Alexandra Gardiner Creel in 1976. Under a trust from her aunt, she held Gardiners Island jointly with her idiosyncratic uncle Robert David Lion Gardiner, and when . Gardiner died in 2004, the Goelets took full possession of it — all 3,300 acres, 40 times the size of Central Park, complete with 27 miles of coastline, lush white pine and oak forests, colonial buildings, a 200-year-old windmill, a family cemetery and considerably more ospreys than people.

The couple went on to maintain the island as a bird sanctuary while restoring its colonial buildings and natural habitat. Goelet also established a large penguin reserve in Patagonia and collected some 20,000 bees and wasps, which he donated to the Museum of Natural History. A genus of bee found in Peru, Goeletapis, was named after him.

Independently wealthy, Goelet devoted much of his time to civic causes. By late 1975, when he was named president of the American Museum of Natural History, he had served in the same role at the New-York Historical Society and the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society). He was later the museum’s chairman, until 1989, when he retired from the post.

“He was really good at coming in when there was an emergency and pulling things together,” William G. Conway, a former president of the conservation society, said in a phone interview. “He got down and dirty.”

Robert Guestier Goelet, known as Bobby, was born on Sept. 28, 1923, in Amblainville, France, in a chateau nestled amid 10,000 acres owned by the family of his mother, Anne Marie (Guestier) Goelet. The Guestiers were partners in the wine merchants Barton &amp; Guestier. His father, Robert Walton Goelet, managed his inherited real estate, railways, hotels and other holdings from homes in New York, France and Newport, Rhode Island. In “Who’s Who in New York,” he listed himself as a “capitalist.”

The Goelets were originally French Huguenots. The first to arrive in America was 10-year-old Jacobus, who was brought from Amsterdam in 1676 by his widowed father. Jacobus’s grandson Peter, an ironmonger during the Revolutionary War, went on to invest in real estate — so successfully that by the end of the 19th century the family was said to own about 55 acres on Manhattan’s East Side, from Union Square to 48th Street.

The Gardiners also prospered from the beginning.

“We have always married into wealth,” the British newspaper The Daily Mail quoted Robert Gardiner as saying in 2003. “We covered all our bets. We were on both sides of the Revolution, and both sides of the Civil War. The Gardiner family always came out on top.”

The privateer Captain Kidd buried treasure on Gardiners Island. Julia Gardiner Tyler, the future wife of John Tyler, the 10th president, was born there.

Like the first immigrant Gardiner, Robert Goelet moved to New York before he was a teenager, arriving when he was 12. One result of his European upbringing, he told The New Yorker in 1976, was that he had never seen a baseball game, nor did he care to.

He graduated from the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts. During his sophomore year at Harvard, he enlisted in the Navy and was trained as a Helldiver bomber pilot, but he did not see combat. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1945.

Goelet was introduced to Creel, a graduate student in forestry and environmental studies, on a snowshoe hike in Harriman State Park, the vast tract straddling Rockland and Orange Counties in New York. They married on Gardiners Island.

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by a daughter, Alexandra Gardiner Goelet. The two children, who run the family investment office, say the island will be preserved through trusts as the family home and as a wildlife sanctuary in perpetuity.

Robert Gardiner, an old money blueblood to whom virtually everyone across the water in the Hamptons was nouveau riche, had anointed himself the “16th Lord of the Manor” of Gardiners Island, which his ancestors had bought from the Mantaukett Indians in 1639 for a large dog, a gun, some ammunition, rum and a handful of blankets.

Gardiner was married but had no heirs, touching off a splenetic three-decade legal imbroglio with his niece over maintenance costs and visitation rights on Gardiners Island. He accused Goelet of various incivilities, among them trying to run him over with a truck. Given the island’s demography and interpersonal discomposure, New York magazine described it in 1989 as a “wasps’ nest.”

Among his various civic activities, Goelet was the board president of the French Institute/Alliance Française and a board member of the National Audubon Society, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Phipps Houses, and Chemical Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), which was founded by an ancestor, Peter Goelet, in 1824.

In 1957 he became a director of Air America, the private air charter company that was covertly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. government authorities.

While Goelet was an ardent conservationist, his real estate holdings and his fiduciary role on the boards of cultural institutions sometimes clashed with his preservationist instincts.

He was poised to sell Lever House, the celebrated glass-box skyscraper on Park Avenue, to a developer, but the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission spared it from demolition.

The commission also blocked the New York Historical Society from building an apartment tower over its Central Park West headquarters; the tower had been Goelet’s solution when the society, its endowment eroded, was poised for bankruptcy.

When he was named president of the natural history museum, he expressed a boyish glee that went back to his days at the Brooks School. All those years ago, barred from participating in sports because of rheumatism, he had, as an alternative, taken to climbing trees to inspect birds’ nests.

“I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing,” he told The New York Times after his appointment by the museum. “I have a personal weakness for fish and birds. I’m nuts for fossils, and I have a healthy respect for poisonous snakes.”

Robert Goelet, New York Grandee and Naturalist, Dies at 96

Robert G. Goelet, a civic leader, naturalist and philanthropist whose marriage merged two families that date to 17th-century New Amsterdam and made the couple stewards of Gardiners Island, a storied sanctuary off the tip of Long Island, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.

The cause was a stroke, his son Andrew said.

Coe was instrumental in deciphering the Maya script and in translating and validating the authenticity of what became known as the Grolier Codex — a document found in a Mexican cave that was believed to have been written around the 13th century on fig bark. It is now considered the earliest existing manuscript in the Americas.

First exhibited at the Grolier Club in Manhattan in 1971, it is one of only four written Maya works known to have survived marauding Spanish conquistadors and purges by Roman Catholic priests.

Coe defied contemporary critics who believed that the Maya hieroglyphics had been randomly inscribed and did not represent a recorded language. Instead, he embraced a discovery by the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorozov, who deciphered phonetic syllables in the Maya writing system, which allowed the texts to be read and spoken in their original language as well as translated.

Coe spent much of his career exploring the written language, paintings and origins of societies that flourished in Mexico and Central America before the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century. He wrote of their invasion, “No imperial conquest has ever been so total, or a great people so shattered.”

But, in “Breaking the Maya Code” (1992), he theorized that anthropologists had never given the Maya adequate credit for their linguistic advances because of what he called “quasi-racism,” or an “unwillingness to grant the brown-skinned Maya a culture as complex as that of Europe, China or the Near East.”

Coe mined classical texts, probed dig sites with modern technological tools and popularized the emerging field of ecological archaeology, which studies how ancient civilizations related to their environment.

He was also regarded as a champion of the Olmec civilization, which predated the Maya by about 2,100 years. He found and salvaged many of the Olmec’s enormous basalt sculptures of human heads and argued that the Olmecs were the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica.

“He was always willing to take unpopular positions and prove them correct,” said Richard A. Diehl, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Alabama, who was a graduate student when he began working with Coe in 1966.

Reviewing “The Art of the Maya Scribe” (1997), which Coe wrote with Justin Kerr, Souren Melikian said in The International Herald Tribune, “The moment you open the book, you feel you have been handed keys to hitherto impenetrable secrets.”

Coe’s other books included “Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs” (1962), “The Maya” (1966), “The Maya Scribe and His World” (1973) and a memoir, “Final Report: An Archaeologist Excavates His Past” (2006). His book “Breaking the Maya Code” inspired a 2008 documentary.

After his wife, Sophie D. Coe, an anthropologist and food historian, died of cancer in 1994, Coe fulfilled his promise to finish her book “The True History of Chocolate.” It was published in 1996.

Michael Douglas Coe was born on May 14, 1929, in Manhattan and was raised on Planting Fields, a 400-acre estate in Oyster Bay, on Long Island; it is now a state park. His father, William Rogers Coe, was vice president of the Virginian Railroad and a grandson of Henry Huttleston Rogers, a founder of Standard Oil. His mother, Clover (Simonton) Coe, was a dress designer.

Michael originally hoped to become a writer. But at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, as a prize for his religious studies work, he won a copy of “The Book of a Thousand Tongues,” which translated the gospel of St. Mark into multiple languages. The book propelled him toward the study of anthropology.

“It hooked me from the beginning,” he said in a memoir.

After graduating from St. Paul’s, he enrolled at Harvard, where, he later said, he couldn’t find a relevant creative writing course. Then, while on a family vacation to the Yucatán, he toured the ancient Maya ruins at Chichen Itza and was mesmerized by the mysterious wall paintings and hieroglyphs he found there. When he returned to college, he switched his major from English literature to anthropology. He graduated in 1950.

A Harvard anthropology professor soon recruited him to the front lines of the Cold War. He went to work for a business organization in Taiwan that was actually a front for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was trying to subvert the nascent Communist regime in Beijing.

He later led an excavation in Guatemala and another in Veracruz, Mexico, and completed his doctorate in anthropology at Harvard in 1959.

He married Sophie Dobzhansky, a Radcliffe anthropology student and the daughter of the Russian émigré geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, in 1955. In addition to their son Andrew, also a food historian, he is survived by two other sons, Nicholas and Peter; two daughters, Sarah and Natalie Coe; and six grandchildren. His brother was the archaeologist William R. Coe II, from whom he was estranged for decades and who died in 2009.

Coe joined the Yale faculty in 1960 and became the Charles J. MacCurdy professor of anthropology emeritus in 1995. He was curator emeritus of the anthropology collection at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, where he had been curator from 1968 to 1994.

“We know much of what we do about ancient beliefs in the New World because of his insights and compilations of evidence,” Stephen D. Houston, chairman of the anthropology department at Brown University, said by email. “He was also peerless as a popularizer,” Houston said, because he wrote with “great verve and clarity.”

While he was best known for his work in the Americas, Coe also conducted comparative studies of ancient tropical forest societies, including the Khmer civilization in Cambodia, which he researched when he was in Taiwan.

In a 1978 essay, he presented a cautionary tale of what an archaeologist might erroneously conclude thousands of years in the future about the origins, chronology and architecture of the three churches on the historic New Haven Green, based only on an examination of their remains. He suggested that those hypothetical findings ought to humble his contemporaries who overconfidently draw conclusions about ancient civilizations.

“I notice that archaeologists who come up with neat models for prehistoric cultural events seem to feel that they are presenting us with some sort of reality,” he wrote. “It is lucky for these scholars that the long-dead subjects of their study cannot now contradict them.”

Michael Coe, Maya Scholar and Codebreaker, Is Dead at 90

Michael D. Coe, a Yale anthropologist who devoted his career to proving that the ancient Maya incubated an elaborate written language that had previously been undervalued by many scholars, died on Sept 25 in a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. He was 90.

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts medical examiner’s office, which had been awaiting the results of laboratory tests, ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Colleagues said Weitzman had grown increasingly despondent after being passed over for the Nobel Prize in economics last year and had left a note questioning whether he any longer had the mental acuity to contribute to his field.

Most economists have relied on a cost-benefit analysis when considering how ambitiously governments might try to reduce heat-trapping carbon emissions, either by imposing caps on how much can be emitted or by taxing the polluters.

But Weitzman demonstrated that such prevailing cost-benefit analyses understated the small but nevertheless credible risks that worst-case environmental damage posed to the world and its economy, from its agricultural production to its delivery of goods and services. Were governments to take these catastrophic scenarios into account more seriously, he said, they would be more vigorous in their efforts to slow or even reverse global warming.

Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at the Harvard Kennedy School and an author of international reports on climate change, said Weitzman had “developed very strong arguments of why — when analyzing the benefits and costs of proposed climate policies — it was essential, from an economic perspective, to take into account the possibility of catastrophic outcomes, despite the fact that their probability might be relatively small.”

In “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (2015), Weitzman and his co-author, Gernot Wagner, an economist at New York University, wrote: “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”

“Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad,” the authors concluded. “Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”

His analysis of the economics of climate change became known as the Dismal Theorem.

In an earlier influential paper, written in 1974, Weitzman questioned the conventional view among economists that taxing pollutants was a more effective way to curb them than setting limits on how much pollution could be generated.

He argued that each approach created its own ambiguities: Levying a tax makes it easy to predict the cost of the policy, but not how much companies will continue to pollute. Imposing a cap makes the amount of pollution quantifiable, but not the cost.

His analysis helped lay the groundwork for the so-called cap-and-trade alternative, which imposes a ceiling on pollutants but lets companies set the price in the marketplace by trading permits to pollute within those caps. Cap-and-trade programs have helped reduce acid rain pollution in the United States and are being used to tackle climate change in California and the European Union.

Weitzman addressed another broad economic challenge in his book “The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation” (1984), in which he proposed that the crippling nexus between unemployment and inflation could be severed by means of profit-sharing; in other words, by linking a substantial portion of workers’ income to a company’s revenue instead of paying a fixed wage.

“He thought of the question, not just the answer,” Stavins said, “and that requires a real spark of brilliance combined with his desire to address pressing real-world environmental problems.”

Weitzman was honored at a symposium at Harvard’s Kennedy School last October as he retired to take the title of research professor. The occasion was bittersweet: It came three days after the announcement of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he and many colleagues thought he would win.

The prize went to two other economists, Paul M. Romer, of New York University, and William D. Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale. Nordaus was cited for his own advances in environmental economics.

Nordhaus delivered the keynote speech at the Harvard symposium, in which he praised Weitzman for his “radically innovative spirit” in, among other things, positing his Dismal Theorem; assessing the negative impact of pollution on the gross national product; and underscoring the positive effects that gains in health care and education have on the GNP.

“Marty Weitzman was the pre-eminent environmental economist of the modern era, which is to say of all times,” Nordhaus said this week.

Colleagues said that Weitzman had been despondent after he did not win the Nobel, and that his emotional state worsened in the spring, when, for the first time in his career, a fellow economist pointed out a mistake in a completed but unpublished paper Weitzman had circulated.

In a typewritten note that was found after his death, Weitzman said his capacity to solve the kinds of difficult problems to which he had devoted his career was diminishing.

He was born Meyer Levinger on April 1, 1942, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Joseph and Helen (Tobias) Levinger. His mother died before he was 1; his father, after returning from military service in World War II, was apparently unable to care for the child, and he was placed in an orphanage. His adoptive parents, Samuel and Fannie (Katzelnick) Weitzman, who were elementary-school teachers, gave him the name Martin Lawrence Weitzman.

After completing high school in Levittown, New York, he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in math and physics, graduating in 1963. He earned a master’s in statistics and operations research at Stanford and a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He married Jennifer Brown Baverstam, a piano teacher and translator; she survives him. His survivors also include a daughter, Rodica Weitzman, from his marriage to Dorothy Earley, which ended in divorce; his stepchildren, Kristian, Madeleine, Sebastian and Oliver Baverstam; a sister, Barbara Sherman; and two grandchildren.

Weitzman taught at Yale, where he began his teaching career in 1967, and MIT before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989. Since 1992, he and Stavins conducted nearly 400 sessions of the Harvard Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy.

At one point, from a barren island he bought off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Weitzman spent a year or more immersing himself in Bayesian statistics, which focuses on probability.

Martin Weitzman, an inventive economist who argued that governments would see climate change as a more urgent matter to address if they took more seriously the small but real risks of the most catastrophic of outcomes, died Aug. 27 in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 77.

Sam Roberts

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