Milestones Sep. 10, 2007

DIED

When a bomb exploded at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, security guard Richard Jewell helped evacuate the area and was hailed as a hero. Days later the FBI leaked his name as its primary suspect. The media savaged him; FBI agents tore through the home he shared with his mother and ripped family photos. After investigators exonerated Jewell that year, he sued and settled with NBC and other media and got a rare apology from AG Janet Reno. In 2005, Eric Rudolph confessed to the attack. Jewell died, apparently of natural causes, at his Georgia home. He was 44.

Moroccans call the nation’s postindependence era, from the 1960s to the ’80s, the “years of lead,” a time when hundreds of political dissidents were jailed or “disappeared.” The architect of the repression: longtime Interior Minister Driss Basri, King Hassan II’s closest aide. Armed with a vast web of informers, Basri repeatedly quashed popular uprisings in the ’80s and ’90s. (“I’m not Jesus Christ,” he once said. “If someone slaps my right cheek, I do not turn the left.”) Fired in 1999 by Hassan’s son and successor, Mohammed VI, he died in self-imposed exile in Paris of a lung infection. He was 69.

His day jobs included hawking jewelry and driving a cab. In 1987, in the rare-book room of the New York Public Library, history buff Philip Masters discovered a 1719 book about a pirate’s trial in 1718–the year the storied Queen Anne’s Revenge was lost near North Carolina. Masters connected the dots, finding a reference that made him think he could locate where the Blackbeard-hijacked ship had sunk. Masters contacted experts and secured permits, and in 1996 divers unearthed an unusually complete wreck widely believed to be the Revenge. Masters was 70 and had cancer.

Some fans wondered why, over a half-century, the acutely perceptive, humane, funny writer Grace Paley, above, published just three books of short stories. The mother of two and self-described “combative pacifist,” who said she was too “interruptible” to write a novel, had other equally important stuff to do. She was a visible political agitator, visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War, rallying antinuke protesters, and handing out antiwar leaflets on her Greenwich Village street corner. Among the first writers to celebrate the lives of ordinary mothers and wives–with her pitch-perfect ear for the Yiddish-tinged dialogue she grew up with in New York City–Paley won critical raves, the prestigious Rea award and a cult following. She was 84.

Not many coaches would have had the temerity to bench Wilt Chamberlain in the final moments of a championship game. But for the earthy, profane, hyper-animated Butch Van Breda Kolff, above, who held 13 head-coaching jobs in a 30-year career, the 1969 decision was no big deal–even though his Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics and V.B.K., as he was known, was fired. An ex–New York Knick, he coached teams including the Detroit Pistons, the Phoenix Suns and Bill Bradley’s Princeton squad–and treasured teamwork and unselfishness above all. “Life isn’t much different than [basketball],” he once said. “If it’s run right, with precision, with good, honest effort, it’s a thing of beauty.” He was 84.

In the early 1960s, as the first director of the biomedical-research arm of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, physicist John Gofman, who had helped develop the atom bomb, was asked to look into the health effects of ionizing radiation. His conclusion–that the risk from low levels of exposure was 20 times as high as stated by the government–enraged the Atomic Energy Commission, which unsuccessfully tried to stop Gofman and colleague Arthur Tamplin from publishing the data. Suddenly an industry pariah and a reluctant “father” of the antinuclear movement, Gofman went on to found the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility and most recently argued that radiation was overused by doctors. He was 88.

ACQUITTED A military court cleared Lieut. Colonel Steven Jordan, 49, the only officer to go to trial for abuses at Abu Ghraib, of all responsibility for the events, leaving the harshest punishments to low-ranking soldiers. The former director of the prison’s interrogation center and the last of 12 to be tried, Jordan was found guilty on one count of disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation, for which he faces a maximum of five years in prison. “After today,” said Jordan, “I hope the wounds of Abu Ghraib can start to heal.”