Milestones, Feb. 11, 1974

Died. Murray M. Chotiner, 64, longtime adviser to Richard Nixon; of a blood clot resulting from an auto accident; in Washington, B.C. Alternately good-natured and blunt, Chotiner was a sharp Los Angeles criminal lawyer and a cunning, bare-knuckled politician who first met Nixon during the 1946 congressional campaign and advised him to depict his opponent, Jerry Voorhis, as an ally of Communism. Chotiner planned a similar strategy for Nixon’s 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Chotiner advised Nixon at the time of his famous “Checkers” speech in 1952, but their relationship was temporarily dissolved in 1956 when Chotiner was called before a Senate subcommittee to explain his dealings with clothing manufacturers accused of Government kickbacks. He reappeared on the White House staff in 1970 as a special counsel, and recently admitted having hired two journalists at $1,000 a week to supply the 1972 Nixon campaign for re-election with special information on George McGovern.

Died. H.E. (for Herbert Ernest) Bates, 68, novelist and short story writer; after a brief illness; in Canterbury, England. In the tradition of Thomas Hardy, Bates celebrated rural England in most of his 50 or so books. During World War II, he was commissioned by the R. A.F. to write fiction about the war; Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), about a British bomber pilot shot down over French soil, was one of the outstanding results. Bates was best known in the U.S. for The Darling Buds of May (1958), a novel about the zany fruit-picking, scrap-dealing Larkin family that was made into the movie The Mating Game.

Died. General George Grivas, 75, head of the successful underground Cypriot revolt against the British in the late 1950s and of a guerrilla movement fighting for the union of Cyprus and Greece (see THE WORLD).

Died. Major General Sir Edward L. Spears, 87, British soldier, diplomat and war historian; in London. A lifelong Francophile, Spears was sent as Winston Churchill’s personal representative to the crumbling French Third Republic in 1940, later wrote about the fall of France in Assignment to Catastrophe. Spears devised Charles de Gaulle’s last-minute escape to London and helped him organize the Free French forces. Spears’ first wife was the American-born novelist Mary Borden (Margin of Error), who died in 1968.

Died. Samuel Goldwyn, 91, a founding father of Hollywood’s film industry and a leading independent producer for nearly 50 years (see SHOW BUSINESS).