From Touchstone Magazine:

Her Mother's Glory

Rape is one of the hardest of abortion cases. But my wife is not a tragic victim. She is the happy mother of four children.

By Robert Hart

I promised myself that I would not be the stereotypical father of the bride, like Spencer Tracy, who hates to give away his little girl. But as I walked her down the aisle, and approached the moment she would become a full-grown, married lady, I felt everything I had determined not to feel. Very far from my mind was the story of her strange origins. It is always far from my mind, unless something--usually in the news--reminds me.

One time I was reminded of it was in 2003, when an infamous "abortion ship" stopped off a port in Poland in order to make its "services" available to Polish women. Polish law restricts abortions to cases in which the mother's life is threatened, to cases of incest, and to cases of rape. Compared to the ease with which most women in the Western world can obtain legal abortion for any reason, in fact for no reason at all, and at just about any time during pregnancy, Poland is better. But pro-life? No, sadly, no.

Of my four children, my daughter alone is the one I adopted. I never exactly forget the fact; it simply passes out of conscious thought since it does not matter, for she is, in every way that counts, my daughter, my first child. Over the years, I have always felt what a father ought to feel.

When she was eleven, she suffered a staph infection, and Diane and I feared we would lose her. This was the second time in her short life that she was in danger of dying. The first time she was in danger she did not face an impersonal disease, but determined persons: when her mother had to fight against intruding social workers, and the whole system, for the right to make the choice that her baby would be born. After all, when a woman has been made pregnant through rape, it is not only her right, but her duty, to do the "honorable thing." At least, so it seemed from all the pressure put on her in those months. She was upsetting the expectations and demands that "liberated" women have no right to upset. She was refusing the "sacrament" of abortion.

What a terrible thing she did. For a woman to bear a child when abortion seemed so justified, so necessary, when the pregnancy was the result of rape-well, it was certainly anti-social behavior. She was coerced into seeing a psychiatrist who could help her overcome the obvious defect known to Christians as principle. He might even have cured her of maternal instinct and the malady called love.

But all those years ago I knew nothing of what had happened, only that she was suddenly gone, nowhere to be found. Why had this girl vanished from our hometown in Maryland without a trace? When I discovered her whereabouts, 3,000 miles away in California, I hastened to call her. I had expected, had hoped, to have seen her in those months. "I have a baby girl," she told me.

"Are you married?"

"No."

"I see. Well, as a Christian I hope you have repented of..."

"Well, it was from rape, actually."

I found that she would not put up her child for adoption. She was willing to live as a single mother because she could not be sure that a couple would raise her child to believe in Jesus Christ. She decided to keep the baby; and God rewarded her by giving her a wonderful, not to mention dashingly handsome, husband.

I never think of my daughter’s origins and the strange circumstances of her early life unless something brings them to mind; for example, the disappointing remarks of a "conservative" radio talk-show host. This fellow talks a lot about his Catholic faith and Irish heritage, so it was with some astonishment that I heard him defending his view that abortion in cases of rape may be justified. "After all," he pointed out, "it’s not the same as when it’s someone’s fault that she is pregnant. I just think it’s different." He certainly did not get this idea from the Catholic Church.

I remembered back over twenty years ago hearing the same convoluted reasoning from Christians, some Catholic, some evangelical. I recall a very evangelical and Charismatic lady asking me, "But if it was rape, why didn’t she get an abortion?" I thought about the king of Judah, the one who would not execute the sons of his father’s assassins because of the Law of God, which says "the children shall not be put to death for the sins of the fathers, nor the fathers for the sins of the children" (2 Chronicles 25:4; Deuteronomy 24:16).

Where did the "conservative" radio talk-show host get the idea that pregnancy is a penalty? If it is a penalty, it might be unjust for the innocent to bear it. But what if it is not a penalty? What if it is the healing that God might give to a woman who has suffered a violent attack? What if the Author of Life takes the opportunity to do good from someone’s evil? The injustice done to Joseph resulted in the saving of his life, and that of millions of people, foreshadowing the good done for the whole world by the unjust crucifixion of a young rabbi from Nazareth. It is ever the way of God to make good come from the evil that men do.

Just who is it that these well-meaning people, such as the very Charismatic lady and the talk-show host, would sentence to death?

I remember the very wide eyes of a ten-month-old baby girl looking up at me, having just arrived by plane from California with her mother. I remember her first steps across my parents’ living-room floor. After her mother and I were married, I remember the first Christmas in our apartment, and her excitement at the wonder of a lit and decorated tree. She had names for us from Winnie the Pooh. I was Pooh, she was Piglet, and as she looked at her mom, now pregnant with the first of our three sons, she said, "And mom’s the kangaroo."

Her very first day of school I remember watching her bravely walking into the classroom, as a lady laughed at the sight of my perplexity-a feeling of mingled loss and pride that was small compared to what I felt when I gave her in marriage to a fine young man. I remember her saying to him, "I do," and pledging her life not only to him but also to any children they are blessed with, and to God who blesses them.

She is a young lady who spreads joy wherever she goes. She has a place in the lives of many, not only her new husband, her parents, and her brothers, but many who know her well, and many who have met her in passing-a unique place that no one else could fill. She is happy by nature at 23, married, an avid reader, a good friend, a serious Christian. This is the person that these well-meaning people were willing to sentence to death. Oh, not now, not when they can see her; but when she was in danger the first time, in the womb and hidden from view.

My wife is not living the life of a tragic victim. She is the happy mother of four children, and would not wish to part with any of them. My daughter learned of her origin after she was over twenty years of age and it became obvious that the truth could not be hidden without confusion. Someone had taken pictures of her as a three-year-old, at the wedding of her parents. I had been warned, "Never tell her, it would devastate her to know."

Not so. Rather, the mystery was unsettling, and the truth was welcome. You see, it did not matter. She had always known that God is the Author of Life—all life. Every human being is made in his image, and that means everything when a child is raised to understand that the image of God became more than an abstract idea in Hebrew Scripture when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And it was enough for her that she has a mother and a father who love her.

For both Diane and me, the details of our daughter’s early life and strange origins are very much out of mind, far from conscious thought. That is, unless something brings them to mind, such as realizing that it is time to tell our story for the benefit of others who are caught in what seem like desperate circumstances, and who need the courage to make the decision to let the Author of Life do his healing and creative work, bringing light out of darkness and good out of evil: who need to make the decision of love.

Robert Hart is an Anglican priest and the Vicar of St. Andrew’s Chapel, a Continuing Anglican parish in Easton, Maryland, where he lives with his wife and three of their four children. 

From The New York Times:

Quiet Times, but Lots of Laughs, in the Years After 'Tonight'
By Nick Madigan

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 - There were only a few places where Johnny Carson let his hair down. The poker table was one of them.

Mr. Carson's notorious off-screen reserve dissipated during the monthly poker games that the film producer Daniel Melnick held for years at his house in the Hollywood Hills. The regulars included a panoply of well-known names, like Steve Martin, Neil Simon, Chevy Chase, Carl Reiner and Barry Diller.

"In our game we all became adolescents," Mr. Melnick, who had known Mr. Carson since their early days in television in New York, said in an interview this week, after receiving news of the former "Tonight" show host's death on Sunday.

"There was a lot of kibitzing, a lot of laughing," Mr. Melnick said. "We were a little more raucous than we'd be under other conditions."

Still, Mr. Melnick said, he always had to warn Mr. Carson in advance if he planned to invite a new player to the game, usually to fill the chair of an absent regular. It was a long drive from Mr. Carson's home in Malibu, and he did not like surprises.

"John was not comfortable playing with someone he didn't know," Mr. Melnick said. "I'd have to brief him beforehand."

Mr. Melnick, a producer on two of Mr. Martin's movies, "Roxanne" (1987) and "L.A. Story" (1991), said the poker games were still being held, in Mr. Martin's house, and that Mr. Carson had played as recently as last month.

"He looked fine to me," Mr. Melnick said. "We knew about the emphysema, but he wasn't carrying oxygen. He looked tanned from spending all that time on the boat."

Johnny Carson's shyness, which he readily acknowledged, was one of the paradoxes of his character, and it became startlingly evident after his retirement from a 30-year run on NBC's "Tonight" show in 1992, when he disappeared from public view and refused virtually all requests for interviews and personal appearances. He focused on tennis, spent a lot of time on his yacht, immersed himself in books, and learned Russian and Swahili. And he played cards.

After his retirement, Mr. Carson also supervised the editing and marketing of the videotape and DVD compilations of his years on the "Tonight" show, working with his nephew, Jeff Sotzing, the president of Carson Entertainment.

"He and I put those together," Mr. Sotzing said. "We had to see which segments worked and which didn't work."

Mr. Carson continued to write after leaving the "Tonight" show. He occasionally sent jokes to David Letterman, host of CBS's "Late Show." Mr. Letterman used some of them in his monologues. Mr. Carson also wrote for The New Yorker after his retirement.

In November, Mr. Carson donated more than $5 million to the University of Nebraska, his alma mater, in Lincoln, and also made substantial donations to a number of institutions in Norfolk, Neb., the town in which he grew up. He gave more than $2 million to a cancer treatment center in the town, and $500,000 to the local library, among other gifts. A memorial to Mr. Carson is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at the Johnny Carson Theater at the high school in Norfolk.

After Mr. Carson retired from "Tonight," Ed McMahon, who sat next to him on the couch for three decades, saw considerably less of the host. "We'd meet for lunch maybe three or four times a year," he recalled. "But after a time I felt I was intruding. For the last year or so I only talked to him on the phone."

Ed Hookstratten, a Beverly Hills lawyer who represented Mr. Carson for 15 years, said his client "was very much a man of privacy."

"He would do the show, get in his car, go home, have dinner with his wife and relax," Mr. Hookstratten said. "He did not need people socially. He loved tennis, and he loved his yacht. After he retired, he moved his office onto his yacht, and he'd go there daily."

Mr. Carson spent a good deal of time traveling, often in the company of Bob Wright, the chairman and chief executive of NBC Universal, and Mr. Wright's wife, Suzanne. They went to Africa in 1994, England the following year and Scotland the year after that, among other places. They visited the San Juan Islands on Mr. Carson's yacht, the Serengeti.

Mr. Wright, who estimated that about 90 percent of his relationship with Mr. Carson was "outside the workplace," said the former "Tonight" host was "not reclusive at all."

David Steinberg, the Canadian comedian and director who was a frequent guest and guest host on "Tonight," said in an interview that most people who came into contact with Mr. Carson did not really know him.

"You do the show, but you don't necessarily hang out with him," Mr. Steinberg said. "He was socially comfortable only in his own small group - very at ease. But if we had lunch together, he'd be witty, well-read and always knew what was happening in the world."

More than anything, Mr. Carson "hated phoniness and he hated show-business phonies," said Mr. Steinberg, a director of the HBO show "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Mr. Steinberg surmised that Mr. Carson would have been glad to avoid the commotion over his passing, especially the many laudatory television interviews this week with comedians who had appeared on "Tonight" as Mr. Carson's guests - people like David Brenner, Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles.

"He would probably say that his death was a boon to a lot of comedians who haven't been on TV for a while, including me," Mr. Steinberg said.

Mr. Steinberg said that, after retirement, Mr. Carson remained "very accessible to his friends" and that the two saw each other every so often for lunch or dinner.

Four or five years ago, when Mr. Steinberg was booked for a stand-up night at the Moonlight Tango Cafe in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Carson called to make a reservation.

"When I heard he was coming it was as scary as could be for me," Mr. Steinberg recalled. "It electrified the room."

He said that in honor of Mr. Carson and his wife, Alexis, Mr. Steinberg built his routine around his stints on the "Tonight" show but did not force its former host to take a bow.

"Noooo!" Mr. Steinberg said, feigning horror. "He wouldn't have liked that."

Mr. Melnick, whose poker games became a hot ticket not only because of the heady company but because he had a fabulous cook, said Mr. Carson, a dexterous magician, was not an extraordinary player.

"He wasn't cheating - he lost as much as he won," Mr. Melnick said. "But he was really good with his hands. He'd run a quarter through his knuckles to stay limber. I think he and Steve Martin became magicians because it was probably a way, in adolescence, to deal with shyness."

Mr. Simon, the playwright and screenwriter, remembered the poker games as a friendly, low-stakes affair, full of banter.

"No one came to make a lot of money," he said. "And Johnny was quiet at the table. When he said something, it was funny. He didn't come to make jokes; he came to listen to jokes. When Johnny laughed, I really had a charge.

"I was the worst player," Mr. Simon said, laughing, "and he was the second worst."

Despite Mr. Carson's comedic gifts, Mr. Simon said, "he wasn't like so many comics, who want to push their comedy at you - they're in your nose, and you want them to back off. Not him."

After Mr. Carson's retirement, he occasionally invited Mr. Simon to the Malibu house to play tennis.

"I saw him socially a little, but he didn't go out much," Mr. Simon said. "It amazed me that he was able to pull away and stay away from it all after he left. I was amazed to see that he would stay at home and write jokes for David Letterman."

From FrontPageMagazine.com:

Copts and Robbers
By Robert Spencer

At Jihad Watch we have received a large number of inquiries, both sober and frenzied, about the Coptic family found murdered in Jersey City last week.

As is well known, the Copts in Jersey City and elsewhere have many suspicions about this crime. But when they have voiced these suspicions, they have been frequently denounced as “Islamophobes” – an all-purpose term of abuse used to silence criticism of Islam and of Muslims. And Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio is dismissive of the idea that the killings were religiously motivated: “Is it possible? Yes. Do we have anything that gives us reason to believe this is what it was, factually? No. Nothing indicates that was the prime motivation for this. That we can clearly say.” The media has widely accepted the idea that it was just a robbery.
Yet law enforcement officials have received information from at least one Copt — a close friend of the Armanious family — indicating that the crime was indeed religiously motivated. This family friend has said that an imam in Jersey City declared this Christian family’s blood “halal,” (i.e., licit to shed), because of their proselytizing activities among Muslims. He has named — by name — a suspect in this crime, whose motive was religious and who has fled the country.
 
Perhaps there is nothing to this. Perhaps the man who has fled is innocent. But even if he is, the Copts have had perfectly cogent reasons for their suspicions. The Armanious family was outspoken in trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. Hossam Armanious vigorously spread his faith at PalTalk, and his 15-year-old daughter Sylvia displayed similar zeal at Dickinson High School. There is credible evidence that for this activity the family received a death threat. In light of all that, it may be that what needs to be justified is the idea that their deaths were in fact unrelated to that proselytizing activity. Islamic law, the Sharia, has traditionally made it a capital offense both for a Muslim to leave Islam, and for a non-Muslim to attempt to convert a Muslim. Many Muslims take such laws very seriously. The Theo van Gogh murder in the Netherlands indicates that at least some will not hesitate to enforce Sharia penalties even in the lands of the infidels.
 
But if the killer is never caught, which is a distinct possibility since he could be half a world away by now, Muslim spokesmen will attribute the suspicions of the Copts to a “climate of hysteria” against Muslims, and portray themselves — as they do so often — as victims.
 
Still, a larger question remains. If the Armanious family did in fact receive a death threat related to their proselytizing on Pal Talk, what are the implications for our free society? If the murders were indeed, as many Copts suspect, a warning to them not to proselytize among Muslims, what does that mean for the free exchange of ideas that has always been one of the central values – perhaps the central value – of the American polity?
 
The mainstream media has done a poor job of covering this case. It has not bothered to explain that the difficulties Copts experience in Egypt are not “old” or even “centuries-old” (as the New York Times put it) — they are as old as when the Muslim invaders first conquered Coptic Christian Egypt. They don’t come from anything Copts have said or done to Muslims, but from the supremacist nature of Islamic beliefs. But in the media in general there has been no understanding of this and no discussion of the Sharia — or of how apostates in Islam are to be treated, or of what punishment is to be meted out to those who dare (as the Armanious family dared) not to act as the despised and cowed minority they were in Egypt, but as free and equal and proud citizens of this country.
 
No statement has come from the Hudson County Prosecutors Office that shows any sign that that Office has considered these questions, or fully investigated the Copts’ suspicions and allegations. This may not have been a Sharia-inspired killing on American soil, but nothing that has yet come from Edward DeFazio or anyone else seems to deal adequately with the indications that it was. White House Wilsonians seem intent on bringing “democracy” to Iraq, as if that will somehow solve the problem of Islam, and of the jihad that they persist in identifying solely by one of its tools, terrorism. Meanwhile, an unknown number of Muslims in the United States — possibly including the killer of the Armanious family — are working to solve the problems of Islam by laboring, in one way or another, to bring Sharia to this country.
 
But few are paying attention to that.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

From the Opinion Journal:

He-e-e-e-re's the Johnny I Wrote For

His eye was always on the ball, no matter what was going on in the bleachers.
By Raymond Siller

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

On my first day working on "The Tonight Show," back in 1969, I was shown a series of small rooms, each occupied by a man reading newspapers. These guys were writers like me, and they were reading with intensity; the looks on their faces suggested anxiety bordering on desperation. They were hunting for sources for the day's monologue.
Johnny Carson had built a formidable reputation based on his keen observations of that day's news events. He never told his writers what subjects to choose. It was up to each man to harvest a crop of jokes from the dailies, which Johnny himself would stitch into an eight-minute routine. That first day, three hours after I sat down at my typewriter, I'd sweated out the required four pages of monologue. One joke out of my 16 would make it on the air.

Five minutes before the taping, I paced in the hall outside the studio. Suddenly Johnny appeared. He opened the studio door. Then, glancing back at me, he cleared his throat to speak to his new writer. I couldn't wait to hear the wisdom the late-night king was about to impart.

"There's no business like show business . . . . Bull----!"

My first 13-week stint with Carson included the most-watched program in the history of television to that point--45 million viewers tuned in to see the wedding of Tiny Tim, a stringy-haired, falsetto-voiced, ukelele-playing singer, to Miss Vicky, his young bride. (Later that week, Johnny used another joke of mine: "Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky are on their honeymoon. There are already signs of trouble in the marriage. Last night, Miss Vicky hung a sign on their hotel room doorknob that read 'Disturb.'") For me, the job was going well. I averaged a respectable two or three jokes a night. Then Dick Cavett's assistant called to say that "ABC plans to put Dick on at 11:30 opposite Carson! He'd like you to rejoin his staff!"

By now I had become comfortable at the Carson show, but felt an obligation to honor the promise I'd earlier made to Dick to go back to work with him if he got a new show. But first I asked for a goodbye meeting with Johnny.

"I understand you're gonna be leaving us."

"Yes, I am."

"You're going back to Dick's new show opposite me."

"Dick gave me my first shot as a writer. I promised to come back if he ever got another show."

"I understand. (SMILING) Well, tell Dick I wish him luck . . . (WINKING) but not that much."

A classy thing for Johnny to say. And he took me back five years later, after I moved to L.A. to write for Bob Hope. I missed the pressure and challenge of Carson's daily monologues and sketches.

The rap on Carson was that he was aloof. If he was at times standoffish, he might have been driven by a need for self-preservation. When Johnny showed up at a Hollywood party, stars pounced on him for a shot on his TV couch. When in public, he was never free of his fans. It must have been hard for someone with his power to have a lot of close friends. Associates, maybe. Colleagues, sure. But do-or-die guys? Your friends are usually your peers. How many peers could he have?

Probably his closest friend was Buddy Rich. In April 1987, the feisty drummer succumbed to a battle with cancer. The news reached Johnny an hour before taping. When I brought some material up to his office, he was red-eyed.

There was talk of canceling the show, but he decided to go on. He refused to disappoint the tourists. Carson got through the program like the pro that he was.

When you were that sought after, the first rule was to screen your calls. One day I buzzed Johnny from my office. His secretary must have been in the ladies' room. The phone rang a dozen times. With no way to monitor the phone, he picked up and spoke into his mouthpiece...as Aunt Blabby.

I got a taste of his life following the show's 25th anniversary special. He hosted a lavish party for the staff aboard the Queen Mary, the former ocean liner that was now a hotel and tourist complex in Long Beach. When the party wound down, Johnny invited six of us up to the lounge for a nightcap. We were barely seated when a sap with a snootful materialized at our table. He got into Johnny's face in an ugly way, asserting how unfunny and untalented he was. Johnny rope-a-doped the insults until the rube ran out of steam and vaporized.

Johnny was serious about the show. Off-camera, he'd banter back and forth with humor and small talk, but we quickly got down to business. He was disciplined, with a low tolerance for incompetence. His eye was on the ball no matter what was going on in the bleachers.

He could be self-absorbed. In my first years as head writer, I sported a mustache. One day on vacation, I shaved it off. Three months later, after seeing me daily, Johnny looked up at me and said, "Hey, you shave your mustache?"

And he had moody moments. Sometimes they lasted for weeks. During those periods, he hated the guests, the production staff, and most of all the writing. Fred deCordova would call me with a whispered heads-up on the moods.

But Johnny often did the right thing by me. He took the time to record a taped greeting to my parents for their 50th anniversary party. However, at the end of his remarks, lest anyone catch him in a moment of sentiment, he added, "This is in lieu of a raise for your son." I showed him the completed tape, which included my tribute to my parents stating how we loved each other but found it hard to say the words. Johnny said how much that reminded him of the relationship he had with his own parents.

The supermarket tabloids that reported on Johnny's divorces missed his visit to his grade-school teacher in Nebraska on her 100th birthday. Or his donation of a million dollars to a Nebraska Cancer Center. Or when he helped out the widow of Ray Combs, who hosted "Family Feud" and had done standup comedy on "The Tonight Show."

The show was a major part of his life, the home base desk his comfort zone. Even at rehearsals, he never plopped on the couch. He sat behind that desk. Sitting onstage waiting for stagehands to strike a set for rehearsal, he would sing "April in Paris." Always those three words. And just those three words.

He kept up to date by reading the papers and gorging on TV, digesting the indigestible. On vacations, he called me with usually good workable concepts. He seemed happiest thinking up ideas for bits.

He wasn't so coy that he didn't realize he was a star. But he wasn't full of himself, either. Each audience had a distinct personality, and there were nights when they laughed at nothing. The stare back disturbed him. He recalled in all seriousness when the monologue once went down the dumper three nights straight he was ready to quit the business.

Another time, Johnny had been feeling under the weather. The next day he told me, "Thank God for Robin Williams last night. I was off my game and he saved my ass."

Johnny had good instincts about what was right for him. He knew his audiences' boredom threshold. His was lower. He'd tire of a reference before the audience and order us to drop it. He wouldn't pile on an easy target.

Johnny wouldn't produce a circus that happened to be televised. He knew when to give guests the hook before they peaked and then move on. He didn't overwhelm or overpower. He wasn't a manic performer, so he was a welcome guest in your home.

But one day in 1992 he did leave. For good.

In 1995, I had lunch with Johnny and expressed surprise that he hadn't been back on TV. He said he didn't want to be like Bob Hope, doing specials for the sake of doing them. He said Lucille Ball shouldn't have come back doing pratfalls in her 70s.

That rainy day in Malibu, Johnny didn't act like my boss. I had quit "The Tonight Show" in December 1988, tired after 15 years of relentless pressure. We were just two unemployed guys who once worked together--shooting the breeze, telling war stories. Then we waved goodbye.

When Johnny's mother died in 1985, I'd sent him a condolence letter. He'd sent a note back, thanking me for my thoughts. Then he'd added: "Guess who's next?" Johnny felt the need to break the sadness by falling back on his sense of humor. For the past few days, America has been doing the same.

Mr. Siller was a staff writer for Johnny Carson in New York in 1969, and in Los Angeles from 1974 through 1988--the last 12 of those years as head writer.

From The New York Times:

The Man in Front of the Curtain
By Steve Martin

Los Angeles

Dear Johnny,

This letter comes a little late.

I remember seeing the tape of my first appearance on your show, on a home recording, a reel-to-reel Sony prototype video recorder, probably around 1972. What my friends and I ended up watching was not me, but you. It's almost impossible to look away from oneself onscreen, but you made it possible, because there were lessons in what you did. You and Jack Benny taught me about generosity toward other comedians, about the appreciation of the plight of the pro, as valuable as any lessons I ever learned.

Your gift - though I'm sure you wouldn't have called it a gift - was, as I see it, a blend of modesty and confidence. You wanted to do the job and do it well. You allowed the spirit of your idols, Stan Laurel and Jonathan Winters among them, to creep into you, and you found a way to twist their inspiration and make it new. In you I saw simplicity, joy, politeness, sympathy. Your death reminds me of the loss of America's innocence, the distance we have come from your sly, boyish leers to our flagrant, overstated embarrassments for parents and children.

If I could wake you up for a minute, I would ask you to tell me how good you thought you were. "Between you and me," I think you would whisper, "I know I was great in a subtle, secret way." I think you would also say: "I enjoyed and understood the delights of split-second timing, of watching a comedian squirm and then rescue himself, of the surprises that arise from the fractional seconds of desperation when the comedian senses that the end of his sentence might fall to silence."

Your Nebraskan pragmatism - and knowledge of the magician's tricks - tilted you toward the sciences, especially astronomy. (Maybe this is why the occultists, future predictors, spoon-benders or mind readers on your show never left without having been challenged.) You knew how to treat everyone, from the pompous actor to the nervous actress, and which to give the appropriate kindness. You enjoyed the unflappable grannies who knitted log-cabin quilts, as well as the Vegas pros who machine-gunned the audience into hysterical fits. You were host to writers, children, intellectuals and nitwits and served them all well, and served the audience by your curiosity and tolerance. You gave each guest the benefit of the doubt, and in this way you exemplified an American ideal: you're nuts but you're welcome here.

We loved watching baby tigers paw you and koalas relieve themselves on you and seeing you in your swami hat or Tarzan loincloth, and we loved hearing Ed's ripostes and watching you glare at him as though you were going to fire him, but we knew you weren't.

We, the millions whom you affected, will weep inside when we see the reruns, the clips of you walking out from behind the curtain, the moment in the monologue when a joke bombed; we'll recall your deep appreciation of both genuine and struggling talent.

Because you retreated into retirement so completely, let me thank you, in death, for the things I couldn't quite say to you in life. Thank you for the opportunity you gave me and others, and thank you - despite divisive wars and undulating political strife - for the one hour a night across 30 years of American life when we were entertained purely, delightfully and wisely.

Steve Martin is the author of "The Pleasure of My Company."

From The Telegraph UK:

Europe has taken over the Holocaust
By Mark Steyn

According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of panEuropean Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.

I have some sympathy for that 62 per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of 60 years ago is gone - its great power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, its need for lebens-raum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?

"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's largely a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.

From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to say - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.

Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."

Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat's official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as to barely qualify as "moral equivalence".

I'm not a Jew, though since September 11 I've been assumed to be one. Nor am I, philosophically, a Zionist. Had I been British foreign secretary, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years ago. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it.

As for the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state, that's a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.

But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively a wrecked people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign if impeccably multilateral coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.

Americans and Europeans will never agree on this, and the demographic reality - the Islamisation of Europe - will only widen the chasm in the years ahead. But, if I were a European Jew, I would feel this week's observances bordered on cultural appropriation. The old defence against charges of anti-Semitism was: "But some of my best friends are Jewish." As the ancient hatreds rise again across the Continent, the political establishment's defence is: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish.

A brilliant, sobering analysis by Mark Helprin from Opinion Journal:

Our Blindness
We have ample forewarning. But will we ever act?
BY Mark Helprin

Monday, January 24, 2005

A hundred years ago, Republican presidential incumbent Theodore Roosevelt had just defeated the now obscure Judge Alton B. Parker, the army had long been fighting Muslim insurrectionists in the Philippines and was recasting itself to fight insurgencies, reformers were concerned with the environment and money politics, and the country's meat supply was viewed with suspicion.

Those absorbing passions would nonetheless prove completely irrelevant to the influenza pandemic that little more than a decade later would kill 50 million people, including half a million Americans; to the rise of Germany, Japan, and Russia; and to the century's three great wars.

Our own absorbing passions, which are remarkably similar, have blinded us in the same way. We have yet to find a serviceable framework for the application of our military power in the war on terrorism; in view of potential catastrophes of which we have a great deal of forewarning, we have yet to provide adequately for what used to be called civil defense; and we have no policy in regard to China's steady cultivation of power that soon will vie with our own. Though any one of these things is capable of dominating the coming century, not one has been properly addressed.

God help the army that must fight for an idea rather than an objective. After somehow failing to argue competently on behalf of a patently justifiable invasion, and as its more specious arguments were collapsing, the Bush administration then pivoted with breathtaking enthusiasm to nation building, something so Clinton-tinged that it had previously been held in contempt. The more that nation building in Iraq is in doubt, the more the mission creeps into a doubling of bets in hope of covering those that are lost. Now the goal is to reforge the politics, and perforce the culture, not merely of Iraq but of the billion-strong Islamic world from Morocco to the South Seas. That--evangelical democracy writ overwhelmingly large--is the manic idea for which the army must fight.

But no law of nature says a democracy is incapable of supporting terrorism, so even if every Islamic capital were to become a kind of Westminster with curlicues, the objective of suppressing terrorism might still find its death in the inadequacy of the premise. Even if all the Islamic states became democracies, the kind of democracies they might become might not be the kind of democracies wrongly presumed to be incapable of supporting terrorism. And if Iraq were to become the kind of democracy that is the kind wrongly presumed (and for more than a short period), there is no evidence whatsoever that other Arab or Islamic states, without benefit of occupying armies, would follow. And if they did, how long might it last? They do not need Iraq as an example, they have Britain and Denmark, and their problem is not that they require a demonstration, but rather their culture, history, and secret police.

If we could transform Germany and Japan, then why not Iraq? Approximately 150,000 troops occupy Iraq, which has a population of 26 million and shares long open borders with sympathetic Arab and Islamic countries where popular sentiment condemns America. The Iraqi army was dispersed but neither destroyed nor fully disarmed. The country is divided into three armed nations. Its cities are intact.

In contrast, on the day of Germany's surrender, Eisenhower had three million Americans under his command--61 divisions, battle hardened. Other Western forces pushed the total to 4.5 million in 93 divisions. And then there were the Russians, who poured 2.5 million troops into the Berlin sector alone. All in all, close to 10 million soldiers had converged upon a demoralized German population of 70 million that had suffered more than four million dead and 10 million wounded, captured, or missing. No sympathizers existed, no friendly borders. The cities had been razed. Germany had been broken, but even after this was clear, more than 700,000 occupation troops remained, with millions close by. The situation in Japan was much the same: a country with a disciplined, homogenous population, no allies, sealed borders, its cities half burnt, more than three million dead, a million wounded, missing, or captured, its revered emperor having capitulated, and nearly half a million troops in occupation. And whereas both Germany and Japan had been democracies in varying degree, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of terrifying autocrats since the beginning of human history.

To succeed, a paradigm of "invade, reconstruct, and transform" requires the decisive defeat, disarmament, and political isolation of the enemy; the demoralization of his population and destruction of its political beliefs; and the presence, at the end of hostilities, of overwhelming force. With U.S. military capacity virtually unchanged since the Clinton years, and a potentially heavy draw upon American forces in other crises, the paradigm is untenable. Though against all odds it may succeed temporarily in Iraq, it is premised upon succeeding in far too many other places of fierce and longstanding antipathy to what we represent.

An impressive civil-defense effort has been made, but only relative to the absence of anything before it. It isn't a question of gaps in the fence here and there, but of sections of the fence here and there. Four and a half years after September 11th, air cargo is still not x-rayed; illegal immigration and drug smuggling prove that the borders are porous; simulated attacks are almost always a walk-over for the red-teams; and the nature of chemical, nuclear, and biological terrorism remains such that merely rattling terrorist networks is insufficient.

Although nuclear detonations in American cities are not to be slighted, still, the greatest and most likely perils are natural epidemics and biological warfare. A common belief among public health experts is that a viral shift such as that which caused the 1918-19 pandemic is almost certain. Estimates of the number of dead run to the hundreds of millions world-wide and scores of millions in the U.S. If nature fails to deliver an epidemic, it is unfortunately easy for a highly trained terrorist, by genetic manipulation, to create a super-virulent pathogen with a nearly 100% rate of mortality. Natural or artificial epidemics are collectively the greatest threat this country has ever faced, and will not be exceeded for decades to come. But though the biological sciences advance day by day and could put up a spirited defense, they can do so only if efforts are begun now on a scale several orders of magnitude beyond what is scheduled. Given current plans and preparations, this will not occur, and the greatest enemy the country has ever known will have no opposition.

By taking intelligent advantage of the fertile relation between economic development and military capacity, China will be able to leverage its extraordinary growth into superpower parity with the United States. Without the destruction of Chinese social and political equilibrium, this is only a matter of time. And just as we had no policy for dealing with the rise of Germany, Japan, and (prior to the late 1940s) Russia, we have none here.

But with the exception of South Korea, which chafes under our protection and may eventually break from the fold, our major allies in the Pacific are islands, and conveniently in this regard our strengths are the air, the sea, space, and amphibious warfare. We have not since the Korean War been able to face China on the mainland, but if we vigorously augment what we do best, we and our allies--by deterrence and maneuver rather than war--can hold the chain of islands well into the coming century or longer, after which our objective would be to contest the open ocean. China's objective is to establish a defensive line to the east of the chain, and it is building up its navy accordingly. But we, to prepare for the coming maritime century in the Pacific, are forcing naval strength to its lowest levels since the 1930s.

Uneven and ineffective application of military power, vulnerability to mass terrorism and natural epidemics, blindness to the rise of a great competitor: matters like these, that may seem remote and abstract, are seldom as remote and abstract as they seem. A hundred years ago, our predecessors, unable to sense what had already begun, did not know the price they would pay as the century wore on. But, as the century wore on, that price was exacted without mercy.

Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

From Baton Rouge television News 2:

Supreme Court justice urges Christians to live fearlessly
By PENNY BROWN ROBERTS

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday that people of faith should not fear being viewed by "educated circles" as "fools for Christ."

The justice -- in Baton Rouge to address the Knights of Columbus Council 969 centennial celebration without charging a fee -- told a largely Roman Catholic crowd of 350 at the Holiday Inn Select that there's nothing wrong with "traditional Christianity."

"To believe in traditional Christianity is something else," Scalia said. "For the son of God to be born of a virgin? I mean, really. To believe that he rose from the dead and bodily ascended into heaven? How utterly ridiculous. To believe in miracles? Or that those who obey God will rise from the dead and those who do not will burn in hell?

"God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools ... and he has not been disappointed."

Scalia praised "traditional Catholics" who say the rosary, go on pilgrimages, kneel during the Eucharist and "follow religiously the teaching of the pope," adding that "intellect and reason need not be laid aside for religion. It is not irrational to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses who had nothing to gain. There is something wrong with rejecting a priori (deductively) the existence of miracles."

The outspoken conservative justice -- known for his views on religion in America -- didn't shy from them during his visit to south Louisiana Saturday. He didn't discuss any specific issues before the high court, but did tell those in attendance they had "no greater model" for their faith than St. Thomas More.

The Catholic martyr and considered the patron saint of lawyers, repudiated Martin Luther and refused to endorse King Henry VIII's plan to divorce Katherine of Aragon or recognize the king as the supreme head of the Church of England. More was found guilty of treason and beheaded in 1535.

"I find it hard to understand people who revere Thomas More but who themselves selectively oppose the teachings of the pope," said Scalia, widely cited as a potential nominee for the position of chief justice when William Rehnquist leaves the bench.

"If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."

President Ronald Reagan named Scalia to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1982. Four years later, Scalia was nominated and unanimously confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, taking the seat vacated when was elevated to the court's top post.

The Catholic justice -- raised in the New York City Borough of Queens, and the father of nine children, one of them a priest -- has become an anti-abortion hero to many in the American political right and a leading conservative voice on the court.

He has described himself as an "originalist," following the Constitution as written by the Founding Fathers, rather than interpreting it to reflect the changing times.

In November, while speaking to an interfaith conference at a Manhattan synagogue, Scalia made headlines by saying that a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.

More than a year ago, he removed himself from the Supreme Court's review of whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance after mentioning the case in a speech and complaining that courts are stripping God from public life.

Last year, Scalia cast one of two dissenting votes in a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling that states may deny taxpayer-funded scholarships to divinity students. And in 2000, he stood with a majority of the court in upholding the constitutionality of taxpayer funding for parochial school materials in a Jefferson Parish case.

Louis McHardy, a Baton Rouge native who is retired executive director of the Nevada-based National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, called Scalia "one of the nation's heroes."

"His message to me is that our constitution is all-encompassing," said McHardy, who attended Saturday's banquet. "It takes into consideration all points of view."

Rev. Miles Walsh, pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Church and Knights of Columbus chaplain, said Scalia's address convinced him that the justice is "committed to the transcendent principles he believes in."

The Knights of Columbus Baton Rouge Council 969 was founded in January 1905 by 30 men who were charter members. The organization founded the LSU Catholic Center, and over the years has supported orphanages, mental health facilities and hospitals.

From The Los Angeles Times:

So ends an era

* Johnny Carson, an intensely private man, was also an institution. He exits having left a lasting imprint on television.

By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer

Johnny CARSON, who died Sunday at his home in Malibu, didn't invent the late-night talk show — he inherited "The Tonight Show" from Jack Paar, who inherited it from Steve Allen — but he made it an institution, and with three decades at its helm, became one himself in the bargain. So bound up was the host with his show that it was (informally) "The Johnny Carson Show," even when Carson wasn't hosting it, and — apart from an occasional cameo or nightclub appearance or hosting of the Oscars — he did little else after taking it over in 1962, at the age of 36, and virtually nothing else after leaving it, 30 years later.

It's the rare person who merits the word "institution." It isn't enough to have been good at something. One must stand for a web of cultural effects, and have stood for them over a long period of time, and represented a moment in history in such a way that one's individual passing spells the end of an era. (Jay Leno, who occupies Carson's old seat, is not an institution — he merely inhabits one.) Performers like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, each the ne plus ultra of not only an art but of a historical moment, took worlds with them when they left.

Carson's end was sneakier. The most private of public figures — "Johnny packs a tight suitcase," sidekick Ed McMahon told Nora Ephron for a 1968 biography — his absence from view seemed paradoxically to mean that he would go on forever, presiding like a watchful god over the form he more than anyone created and codified. (It was something of a shock to learn that he would have turned 80 this year.)

Unlike with Sinatra or Astaire, there weren't a multitude of old movies, reruns or CDs to keep him alive in the public mind, yet his influence is everywhere, multiplied through a legion of talk show hosts (and sidekicks, bandleaders, couches), each of whom owes him a debt. He is the Platonic ideal of late-night talk-show host, of whom all other late-night talk-show hosts are but imperfect reflections. His influence extends even beyond the borders of the actual, as he is the model as well for Garry Shandling's talk show and Jerry Langford, the character played by Jerry Lewis in Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy."

My own memories of "The Tonight Show" are tied to the late '60s and early '70s, when it was a treat to stay up late and see what the adults were doing. The show then was, among other things, a forum for a passing generation of great comics — the likes of Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Groucho Marx, who, like Carson, were usually funnier ad-libbing than reading scripted material. Given the volume of material on the nightly show, and the speed with which it had to be produced, it was a given that much would fail, and making fun of the failures became a routine in itself.

I do not remember a single joke Carson ever told, but I can say with some certainty that he was funny — and more than funny, he was fun. (Though one detected a sort of sternness lurking deeper within.) He was the definition of the perfect host — one who puts his guests at ease, who becomes part of his own party, who makes the mechanics of fun invisible. Like David Letterman, he was a hip Midwesterner, obviously smart but not off-puttingly intellectual, a one-of-a-kind regular guy, who dressed well but not too well.

Carson was serious about his work — his senior thesis was about how to write comedy — but above all he had the capacity to be delighted, which created an atmosphere of delight. Mostly, I remember him laughing. It was this quality of total enjoyment that made Carson's departure from the air, as now from the world, seem outrageously premature.

From The Los Angeles Times:

'Tonight Show' Was the Brass Ring for Comedians
By Paul Brownfield, Times Staff Writer

Backstage before her first appearance on "The Tonight Show" in 1985, Roseanne Barr read a letter she had written to herself years before, dreaming of this moment. "This is the beginning of your life, for She who is and is not yet," the letter said in part, as recounted in a profile of the comic by the New Yorker's John Lahr.

Much has been and will be said about how Johnny Carson "discovered" Roseanne, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling and Robin Williams. But they all had managers and club careers by the time their debut on "The Tonight Show" happened. Carson didn't discover them; what he did was take them by the hand and say, "Here, America."

I can't think of the last time a comedian went on a talk show and, in essence, was introduced to the nation — or even to the entertainment industry. The platform, if not the performances, no longer exists, not since Carson created it during the three decades that he ruled late night as host of the only game in town.

Carson was good for comedians, but he was even better for comedy. He created space in his show for up-and-coming talent to do their acts before a nationwide audience. He also made it an event, a showcase, for which competition was fierce (you first had to gain the hard-won approval of "The Tonight Show" talent coordinator Jim McCawley, who scouted Los Angeles clubs like a kind of prophet of either your future or your doom).

Once on the show, there were barometers to gauge whether or not you had arrived. Did Johnny give you the OK sign or even, perhaps, wave you over to the couch?
Shandling, noting in a 1991 interview with The Times that he didn't get to the couch after his first appearance, joked that "when you go to Johnny's house, you stand the first few times you are there."

It sounds somewhat officious, the lordly position that he created over the stand-up world, and there were odd undertones of betrayal to the attempts by Joan Rivers and Arsenio Hall to have competing late-night shows, to say nothing of the Shakespearean drama that unfolded before "The Tonight Show" went to Jay Leno instead of Carson's favored son, Letterman.

Whatever was happening backstage, the rewards for the viewer were tangible. If Carson functioned as a paterfamilias for new comics, he got cheerfully and shrewdly out of the way of the established ones — usually because Carson thought they were a riot and wanted to continue to interact with them. In this way, he taught us how to appreciate a comic, to intuit his appreciation, whether the act was Steven Wright or Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield or Rivers — among the comedians, as I recall it, who had the ability to reduce Carson to tears.

If Leno has struggled in the role of Carson's successor — not in the ratings, where "The Tonight Show" has long remained No. 1, although with increased competition from Letterman's "Late Show"— it is partly in the perception that he has failed to honor this kingmaker part of Carson's legacy.

It should be said that many of the people who have criticized Leno are comics who don't get on his show, but the argument is moot, anyway. There is no one show anymore; there are many, all confronting ratings pressures that pull their producers and bookers away from introducing new talent.

Today, a comic on a talk show is, if not an anomaly, then just a comic on a talk show. A talk show that more than likely has as its host someone who used to be a comic and who spends the first 15 or 20 minutes of his or her show establishing who in the room is funniest, behaving like, well, a comic, so that by the time the other comic comes on — deep into the show, by which time you're asleep — it feels like filler.

Carson was not this kind of host, in part because he hadn't come from a brutally competitive club scene (further proof that he wasn't really a comic but skilled at interpersonal communication). On "The Tonight Show" he came out with a monologue and a desk bit, but when he introduced a comedian he made it clear that he was bringing out a kind of — dare we say it — artist. Someone whose skills were different from whatever talents Carson brought to the occasion of a late-night talk show.

We could feel his interest in them — a young Albert Brooks, an older Henny Youngman. Leno debuted on Carson in 1977, appeared a few more times in the ensuing months, then endured a seven-year drought.

But the point was to build a new set of material that would get past "The Tonight Show" gatekeepers. Since then, the ground has shifted. Although Leno, Letterman and Conan O'Brien have used their success to form production companies that develop sitcoms on which they serve as executive producers, none has created the kind of training ground that Carson did.

A few weeks ago a comedian friend left a message on my voice mail saying he was going to be on "The Late Show with David Letterman." I set my TiVo to record the spot and watched the following morning, as I was putting on my shoes to go out. My comic friend did well enough — the laughs he got didn't seem juiced, and after his brief set Letterman, who always looks stricken these days, came over and shook his hand. My friend wore a suit. The only thing missing was the sense that his career would now change.

From Tom Shales, the finest appreciation of Carson I've read so far.

From washingtonpost.com:

'Tonight' And Forever
Johnny Carson, the Late-Night Host Whose Best Act Was Himself

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer

We've had 13 years to get over saying a painful goodbye to Johnny Carson. Now we have to start all over again. Even though he stayed almost completely out of the public eye since stepping down as host of "The Tonight Show," this time the pain is much worse.

There is absolutely no chance Johnny will come back now, even for an instant. Early Sunday morning, the great comedy star, who became known as "the king of late night" for his amazing longevity and class, died, at 79, of emphysema. On his last show, he expressed sorrow that his son Rick, victim of a car crash, couldn't be there with the rest of his family to make it a "perfect evening."

"But I guess life does what it's supposed to do," he said, "and you accept it and move on."

Still, it's awfully hard to accept the loss of a man who was like a next-door neighbor to 20 million people, dropping by to end the day with a few laughs, even when there seemed so little in the world to laugh about, always agreeable and always at his most ingratiating. Johnny Carson always managed to find something to amuse us, usually something deflating the pompous and the self-important -- two faults of which he was never guilty himself.

"And so it has come to this," he told us on his last "Tonight" show ever. "I am one of the lucky people in the world. I found something that I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it." That speaks to part of what made Carson so magnetic and infectious, what made him such a pleasure to have in the house: We didn't watch the show, we watched him, and in addition to being entertained by him, we enjoyed watching him be entertained by others.

His delight at the discovery of some newfound comic talent -- he and his staff probably discovered more of that than anyone else in the history of show business -- was palpable; he'd laugh so hard that his chair would almost roll out from under him. When Bette Midler sang a farewell "One for My Baby" to him on the penultimate show, a camera caught Midler in the foreground singing and Johnny in the background sniffing tearfully, and we felt not like intruders on a private moment but like close friends who'd been invited to share it.

Carson has been called an Everyman figure, but that would be fitting only if every man were hilarious. He not only had brilliant timing and a lightning-quick mind for ad libs, he had a unique talent for turning bum jokes into gold. If a punch line elicited silence or groans from the studio audience, Carson would make a funny crack about how bad the joke was, or pull down the overhead microphone and say into it, "Attention Kmart shoppers" or, in the darkest hours, break into a soft-shoe dance with Doc Severinsen leading the band in "Tea for Two."

Ed McMahon, Carson's longtime announcer, seemed to laugh with particular gusto at these demonstrations of desperation. Sometimes Carson grew philosophical about the strange enjoyment people got from the clunkers and from seeing him squirm.

"It's like I'm up on a ledge and the crowd below is yelling, 'Jump! Jump!' " he said.

"He was the best," David Letterman declared in a statement yesterday from St. Bart's, where he and his family are vacationing. He called Carson "a star and a gentleman" and said there wasn't a night when he didn't ask himself how "Johnny" would have done something.

Peter Lassally, a close friend of Carson's who'd joined the show as a producer in 1970, was shocked and despondent at Carson's death, especially since Carson had been having such a joyful retirement. "After he left the show, he became so much more open and gentle," Lassally recalled from his home in Malibu. "He was so much sweeter and relaxed, and it was so much fun to be with him."

Speaking often by phone in addition to sharing occasional nights out, Lassally said, he and Carson would "talk about how terrible the world situation was -- politics, books, things in the news. He was always interested in the world outside of show business. He would also call when he was watching a really bad television show, especially something live, and he'd ask if I was watching it too. If I wasn't, I'd turn it on, and we'd laugh hysterically just at how bad it was. He never failed to call when something was really, really awful."

Carson didn't miss doing "The Tonight Show," but he may have missed doing the monologue. It was Lassally who revealed just last week that Carson would occasionally write a joke about some item in the news and send it off to Letterman, and that those jokes would sometimes end up in Letterman's monologue. He'd been doing this for more than a year, Lassally said yesterday. Carson found Letterman "strange" but always liked him and would have preferred that Letterman, not Jay Leno, succeed him at the "Tonight Show" desk.

Lassally revealed the secret about the jokes because he was trying to get inquiring TV columnists off the topic of Carson's health, not wanting to discuss it any more than necessary. The National Enquirer had splashed a story about Carson being rushed to the hospital on its front page, and the tabloid is usually accurate when dealing with stories of celebrity illness. Lassally hadn't heard from Carson for three weeks, he said yesterday, and Carson's voice hadn't sounded very healthy on the phone -- high-pitched and raspy.

Carson was a heavy smoker for years, and when he started as "Tonight" host, with the show still originating from NBC Studios in New York, smoke was always wafting up from an ashtray on his desk. He eventually tried to avoid taking puffs while on camera, and -- chided by such guests as Tony Randall -- finally gave up smoking altogether. But permanent damage may have been done.

Hundreds and hundreds of guests passed through "The Tonight Show" talking to Johnny over those 30 years, most of them plugging movies or TV shows or books. Carson made it all entertaining with his sharp wit and self-deprecating humor. There were also regular scripted comedy segments in which Carson would wear a costume and play a wacky character, a kind of throwback to the vaudeville era and to showbiz as Carson -- though hardly any of today's stars -- remembered it.

He would don a wig and dress and be irreverent "Aunt Blabby," a character with more than a passing resemblance to Jonathan Winters as "Maude Frickert." When Carl Sagan was a popular figure, Carson -- an astronomy buff himself -- would do a dead-on Sagan impression, always talking about "billions and billions" of these or those in the solar system. To deliver the news of the future, Carson would turn himself into "Zontar Rather," and to divine questions without ever having seen the answers (because, as straight man McMahon explained, they had been kept in "a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls' porch since noon today"), Carson plopped a turban on his head and became "Carnac the Magnificent."

Answer: Sis boom bah. Question: What is the sound of a sheep exploding?

These and other bits -- Art Fern, the hammy commercial pitchman who kept interrupting the afternoon movie on an unnamed local TV station -- usually followed the monologue, which was the jewel in the turban for the show. Carson's best interviews, meanwhile, were not necessarily with movie or TV stars so much as the ones he did with small children and very old people, whom Carson always seemed to find awesome.

Kids were great because they weren't intimidated by cameras and lights. Little Zachary La Voy, a fledgling actor, kept peeking at himself in a monitor during a 1989 show now available on home video. Carson: "How do you think you look?" Little boy: "Cute!" Carson erupted in laughter.

He also very dependably got laughs from segments featuring wild animals brought to the studio by zoologists and other experts. Once when a leopard in a cage suddenly growled and swiped at Carson, Carson ran all the way across the studio floor and jumped into the arms of McMahon.

The show was almost always a joy to watch because Carson almost always took great joy in doing it.

Carson turned down all entreaties -- and there were dozens -- to come out of retirement for one show, one little sketch, one brief appearance. Except for a tiny appearance on Letterman's CBS show, Carson stayed away. During a 1993 interview, he revealed one of the main reasons for remaining out of the public eye: Bob Hope. Carson thought Hope seemed sad continuing to make appearances on television, even if only to stand up and wave, as he waded further and further into his nineties and grew increasingly infirm. Carson did not want to look pathetic, nor come across as someone who refused to leave the stage even though the hour had clearly come.

The tabloids occasionally printed sneaky photographs of Carson on his boat or walking in Malibu and appearing to be less trim and buoyant than he always was on "The Tonight Show." But for the most part, the prevailing image that Carson left us was of a man still full of vitality, mischief, irreverence and incomparable charm -- a man who still seemed boyish even as he crossed the boundary into his seventies.

"I hope when I find something I want to do and think you would like, I can come back," Carson said in his final remarks that last night. Faithful fans knew he was bluffing even then, and that it was unlikely he would ever return. Now it is official, though his image will always be available through one form of electronic legerdemain or another.

It can never be the same as when the multicolored curtains parted, the band played Johnny's theme (which he wrote with Paul Anka) and McMahon did his trademark "Heeeeeere's Johnny."

His death received almost marathon coverage on some of the news channels yesterday as though he had been a head of state. In a way, he was. New comedians couldn't really be popular until Carson had officially christened them with appearances on his show -- perhaps even including a few accolades from the master himself, or an invitation to sit down and chat on the couch.

When an especially celebrated person dies, it is often called the end of an era. But Johnny Carson's era didn't end yesterday; it ended many years earlier. One way or another, it's gone.

And yet there are times when you are watching a movie made in the past three decades and you hear a Carson show or his familiar theme music in the background, and suddenly you perk up, do a double take, and think maybe he never left and he'll be on again tonight after all.

When he left, Johnny said he would like to relive all 30 years over again. If only we could. If only we could.

From The New York Times>

The Joke-Writing Continued After the Curtain Went Down
By BILL CARTER

In the years immediately after Johnny Carson's decision to step down from the "Tonight" show, NBC executives fully expected that their signature star would become a latter-day version of Bob Hope - providing a special here and there, something that would pull in the millions of fans who never got over missing him at 11:35 each weeknight.

But Mr. Carson had made a different decision. "He knew he had given everything he had on the show, and that's how he wanted to be remembered," said Peter Lassally, his long-time executive producer and close friend.

Still, there was one part of his former life he simply could not leave behind entirely. Having spent 30 years reading and watching the news every day and instantly conjuring the events into monologue jokes, jokes that provided a running commentary on the political and cultural scene, Mr. Carson found he simply could not give up the routine.

"He really missed doing the monologue," Mr. Lassally said. "So he started doing them for me."

Sometimes once a week, sometimes more often, Mr. Carson would call Mr. Lassally and, over the phone, perform his little monologues - for an audience of one. "They were always funny," Mr. Lassally said, and one day about a year ago the jokes struck him as so funny that he had a suggestion.

"I told Johnny he should call Dave and give them to him," said Mr. Lassally, who, after Mr. Carson retired, went to work as executive producer for David Letterman.

Thus began a quiet collaboration, which delighted Mr. Carson in his final months. "He was like a little kid when Dave would do one of his jokes," Mr. Lassally said. "He was not blasé about any of it."

Of course, one reason Mr. Carson would never want to be public about the collaboration was that he never wanted to be seen taking sides in the enduring conflict between Mr. Letterman and Jay Leno, who succeeded him as host of "Tonight," over who was his rightful heir in late-night comedy.

Both stars issued statements yesterday on Mr. Carson's death.

Mr. Letterman said: "All of us who came after are pretenders. We will not see the likes of him again. He gave me a shot on his show and in doing so, he gave me a career. A night doesn't go by that I don't ask myself, 'What would Johnny have done?' "

Mr. Leno said: "No single individual has had as great an impact on television as Johnny. He was the gold standard. It's hard to believe he's actually gone. This is a tremendous loss for everyone who Johnny made laugh for so many years."

Mr. Lassally said he had become closer to Mr. Carson in the years after he left the air. "My fondest memory is him calling me every time there was something really awful on television and telling me, 'You've got to put this on.' Then we would watch together and giggle like schoolgirls about this terrible television show." Mr. Carson's strength, beyond his talent, was his sweeping appeal, Mr. Lassally said. "He was everything to everybody. He was your husband or your neighbor, your son or your friend."

But in that nightly monologue, he added, Mr. Carson was something else as well: "He was the voice of the people."

Roe at Thirty-Two, Redux

Dead Reckoning
Roe at 25.
By The Editors

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial piece appeared in the January 26, 1998, January 31, 2005, issue of National Review.

A quarter-century has passed since the Supreme Court struck down the laws of every state in the nation, in the name of a constitutional right to abortion it had just discovered. In Roe v. Wade, the Court prohibited any regulation of abortion in the first trimester, allowed only regulations pertaining to the health of the mother in the second, and mandated that any regulation in the third make an exception for maternal health. In the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, the Court insisted on the broadest definition of health — economic, familial, emotional. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon describes the result as the most radical pro-abortion policy in the democratic world. It permits abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason or for no reason. It has licensed the killing of some thirty-five million members of the human family so far.

The abortion regime was born in lies. In Britain (and in California, pre-Roe), the abortion lobby deceptively promoted legal revisions to allow "therapeutic" abortions and then defined every abortion as "therapeutic." The abortion lobby lied about Jane Roe, claiming her pregnancy resulted from a gang rape. It lied about the number of back-alley abortions. Justice Blackmun relied on fictitious history to argue, in Roe, that abortion had never been a common law crime.

The abortion regime is also sustained by lies. Its supporters constantly lie about the radicalism of Roe: even now, most Americans who "agree with Roe v. Wade" in polls think that it left third-term abortions illegal and restricted second-term abortions. They have lied about the frequency and "medical necessity" of partial-birth abortion. Then there are the euphemisms: "terminating a pregnancy," abortion "providers," "products of conception." "The fetus is only a potential human being" — as if it might as easily become an elk. "It should be between a woman and her doctor" — the latter an abortionist who has never met the woman before and who has a financial interest in her decision. This movement cannot speak the truth.

Roe's supporters said at the time that the widespread availability of abortion would lead to fewer unwanted pregnancies, hence less child abuse; it has not. They said that fewer women would die from back-alley abortions; the post-1940s decline in the number of women who died from abortions, the result of antibiotics, actually slowed after Roe — probably because the total number of abortions rose. They said it would reduce illegitimacy and child poverty, predictions that now seem like grim jokes.

Pro-lifers were, alas, more prescient. They claimed the West had started down the slippery slope of a progressive devaluation of human life. After the unborn would come the elderly and the infirm — more burdens to others; more obstacles to others' goals; probably better off dead, like "unwanted children." And so now we are debating whether to allow euthanasia, whether to create embryos for experimental purposes, whether to permit the killing of infants about to leave the womb.

And what greater claim on our protection, after all, does that infant have a moment after birth? He still lacks the attributes of "personhood" — rationality, autonomy, rich interactions — that pro-abortion philosophers consider the preconditions of a right to life. The argument boils down to this assertion: If we want to eliminate you and you cannot stop us, we are justified in doing it. Might makes right. Among intellectuals, infanticide is in the first phase of a movement from the unthinkable to the arguable to the debatable to the acceptable.

Everything abortion touches, it corrupts. It has corrupted family life. In the war between the sexes, abortion tilts the playing field toward predatory males, giving them another excuse for abandoning their offspring: She chose to carry the child; let her pay for her choice. Our law now says, in effect, that fatherhood has no meaning, and we are shocked that some men have learned that lesson too well. It has corrupted the Supreme Court, which has protected the abortion license even while tacitly admitting its lack of constitutional grounding. If the courts can invent such a right, unmoored in the text, tradition, or logic of the Constitution, then they can do almost anything; and so they have done. The law on everything from free speech to biotechnology has been distorted to accommodate abortionism. And abortion has deeply corrupted the practice of medicine, transforming healers into killers.

Most of all, perhaps, it has corrupted liberalism. For all its flaws, liberalism could until the early seventies claim a proud history of standing up for the powerless and downtrodden, of expanding the definition of the community for whom we pledge protection, of resisting the idea that might makes right. The Democratic Party has casually abandoned that legacy. Liberals' commitment to civil rights, it turns out, ends when the constituency in question can offer neither votes nor revenues.

Abortion-on-demand has, however, also called into being in America a pro-life movement comprising millions of ordinary citizens. Their largely unsung efforts to help pregnant women in distress have prevented countless abortions. And their political witness has helped maintain a pro-life ethic that has stopped millions more. The conversions of conscience have almost all been to the pro-life side — Bernard Nathanson, Nat Hentoff, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. The conversions of convenience have mostly gone the other way, mainly, politicians who wanted to get ahead in the Democratic Party — Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt. The fight against abortion has resulted in unprecedented dialogue and cooperation between Catholics and Protestants, first on moral values and now on theological ones. It has helped transform the Republican Party from a preserve of elite WASPs into a populist and conservative party.

True, few politicians of either party — with honorable exceptions like Henry Hyde, Chris Smith, Jesse Helms, Bob Casey, Charles Canady, and Rick Santorum — have provided leadership in the struggle. Not because opposition to abortion is unpopular — throughout the Roe era, 70 percent of the public has supported laws that would prohibit 90 percent of abortions — but because politicians, and even more the consultants and journalists and big-money donors to whom they listen, tend to move in elite circles where accepting abortion is de rigueur and pro-life advocacy at best an offense against good taste. Since everyone they know favors legal abortion, they understandably conclude that everyone does. But there is progress even here. The pro-abortion intellectual front is crumbling. Supporters of the license increasingly concede that what they support is, indeed, the taking of human life. Pro-lifers, their convictions rooted in firmer soil, have not had to make reciprocal concessions.

There can be little doubt that, left to the normal workings of democracy, abortion laws would generally be protective of infants in the womb. The main obstacle on our path to a society where every child is welcomed in life and protected in law, then, remains what it has always been: the Supreme Court. There abortionism is well entrenched; and last year the Court appeared to slam the door on the legal possibility of a congressional override of its decisions on abortion or anything else. By defining a practice at odds with our deep and settled moral convictions as part of the fundamental law of the land, the Supreme Court has created a slow-motion constitutional crisis. This is what comes of courting death.

From Cultural Revolutions Online:

Moral Calculus
by Tom Piatak

January 21, 2005

Over at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson admits that Bush’s inaugural speech represents “the first time that an American president has committed the United States to side with democratic reformers worldwide,” belying any claim that Bush’s speech is in any way conservative.  But Hanson still praises Bush’s “idealism” and scoffs at the “moral calculus” of Bush’s critics, even though Hanson feels that, if Bush is serious about his rhetoric, we are heading for confrontation with Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and doubtless much of the rest of the globe.

Of course, Bush’s critics would have to include the Founding Fathers, none of whom envisioned America’s role in the world as spreading democracy around the globe at gunpoint.  They would also include those of us appalled at the pictures out of Tal Afar in Iraq yesterday, where a U.S. patrol opened fire on a car, killing the parents and making orphans out of the five children in the car.  Particularly poignant was the picture of a young girl, crying and covered in her parents’ blood.  No amount of “idealism” can justify what happened to her, and the responsibility for her situation rests not with the soldiers who fired on her parents’ car—who are only seeking to defend themselves in a hostile and unfamiliar environment—but on those who sent the soldiers there in the first place, beginning with the “idealist” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Perhaps a good place to begin our moral calculus would be by opposing unnecessary wars that inevitably result in death, mayhem, and images like those out of Tal Afar, and by critically examining the gauzy abstractions used to justify such wars.

From Chronicles Online:

HOW AMERICANS WERE SEDUCED BY WAR
by Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later, Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders whom they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."

What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made they can avoid repeating it. In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, "The New American Militarism," Andrew J. Bacevich writes that we can avoid future disasters by understanding how our doctrines went wrong and by returning to the precepts laid down by our Founding Fathers, men of infinitely more wisdom than those currently holding reins of power.

Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran and soldier for 23 years, is a true conservative. He is an expert on US military strategy and a professor at Boston University. He describes how civilian strategists—especially Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall—not military leaders, transformed a strategy of deterrence that regarded war as a last resort into a strategy of naked aggression. The resulting "marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends" has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale."

The greatest threat to the United States is not terrorists but the neoconservative belief, to which President Bush is firmly committed, that American security and well-being depend on U.S. global hegemony and impressing U.S. values on the rest of the world. This belief resonates with a patriotic public. Bacevich writes, "in the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword."

If Americans persist in these misconceptions, America will "share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize."

Bacevich understands that the problem is not how to deal with terrorism but how to deal with the hubris, laden with catastrophe, that America is God's instrument for bringing history to its predetermined destination. Being assigned such an exalted role creates the delusion that America's virtue is unquestionable and its use of preemptive coercion is infallible, delusion that led to the "cakewalk war" that would entrench democracy in the Middle East and have the troops home in 90 days.

American hubris, which flows so freely from President Bush's mouth, explains why half the U.S. population yawns over the U.S. slaughter of Iraqi civilians and communist-style torture of Iraqi prisoners. The "cakewalk war" is now almost two years old and has claimed 10 percent of the U.S. occupation force as casualties. Yet, the delusion persists that the United States is prevailing in Iraq.

The new American militarism would be inconceivable, Bacevich writes, "were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals." Books written about "militant Islam" could equally describe militant evangelical Christianity. How did a Christian doctrine of love and peace become an apology for war?

Bacevich explains that evangelicals, aghast at Vietnam era protests of America's war against "godless communism," turned to the military as the repository of traditional American virtues. For evangelicals, endtimes doctrines converged eschatology with national security. Prophecies merged America's fate with Israel's. Islam inherited the role of godless communism and became the target of the war against evil. America emerged with the "same immensely elastic permission to use force previously accorded to Israel."

America's security and the well-being of the world are threatened by America's unwarranted belief in the efficacy of force. War is ungovernable: "The shattered reputations of generals and statesmen who presumed to bring it under control litter the 20th century. On those rare occasions when war has yielded a seemingly decisive outcome, as in 1918 or 1945, it has done so only after exacting a staggering price from victor and vanquished alike. Even then, in resolving one set of problems, 'good' wars have fostered resentments or created temptations, leading as often as not to further conflict."

The new American militarism has abandoned the Founding Fathers, deserted the Constitution, and unrestrained the executive. War is a first resort. Militarism is inconsistent with globalism and with American ideals. It will end in abject failure.

The world is a vast place. The United States has demonstrated that it cannot impose its will on a tiny part known as Iraq. American realism may yet reassert itself, dispel the fog of delusion, cleanse the body politic of the Jacobin spirit and lead the world by good example. But this happy outcome will require regime change in the United States.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Johnny Carson Dies at 79
1925-2005

"Tonight Show" TV host served America a smooth nightcap of celebrity banter, droll comedy and heartland charm for 30 years.

By Brian Lowry

Johnny Carson, who in three decades as host of "The Tonight Show" became one of America's most influential political satirists and the entertainment industry's most powerful figures, died today. He was 79.

His nephew, Jeff Sotzing, a former producer of "The Tonight Show," said Carson died peacefully, but declined to give a location or other details.

NBC said Carson died at his Malibu home of emphysema. He had suffered a heart attack and undergone quadruple bypass surgery in 1999.

Former NBC chairman Grant Tinker called Carson's run on "The Tonight Show" "the biggest and best television has ever been." When he announced his retirement in 1991, another comedy legend, Bob Hope, said it was "sort of a like a head falling off Mt. Rushmore."

The late-night host had become an extraordinarily private figure in recent years given the national stage he commanded for three decades. He seldom appeared in public-and, other than a few cameos on David Letterman's late-night show and a tribute to Bob Hope-completely eschewed television after leaving "The Tonight Show" on May 22, 1992, with a retrospective that drew an audience rivaling the Super Bowl.

"I bid you a very heartfelt good night," were his parting words.

Ed McMahon, the sidekick who always introduced Carson with "Heeeeere's Johnny!" today said the former talk show host was "like a brother to me."

"Our 34 years of working together, plus the 12 years since then, created a friendship which was professional, family-like and one of respect and great admiration," McMahon said in a statement. "When we ended our run on 'The Tonight Show" and my professional life continued, whenever a big career decision needed to be made, I always got the OK from 'the boss.'"

After years of silence, Carson spoke to Esquire magazine for a 2002 profile, reconfirming his belief that he had done the right thing in essentially disappearing from public view.

"I left at the right time," he said. "You've got to know when to get the hell off the stage, and the timing was right for me. The reason I really don't go back or do interviews is because I just let the work speak for itself."

From a cultural standpoint, Carson's nightly monologue developed a reputation as a bellwether in terms of the national mood. When Carson began making Watergate jokes, The New York Times wrote in 1975, "we knew it was permissible to ridicule the president, that Mr. Nixon was done for."

"The influence he had on the country was unique. He was the conscience of America," said Peter Lassally, Carson's producer for more than two decades, who noted that Carson was also extraordinarily even-handed, so much so that no one ever knew his personal political leanings.

Carson also had a major effect on television standards, lacing his monologue with sexual innuendo that once would have been unthinkable on television.

"Next to Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, he's had the single greatest influence on the content of television," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy. "He really created the monologue and turned it into a cultural barometer of political and social events. Many people got their take on what was acceptable from the monologue."

Carson himself said in a 1986 interview, "I knew from the monologue the very night that Spiro Agnew was suddenly in deep trouble. From a one-line observation I can get a response, a reaction . . . that may be the best indicator of how [someone] is perceived in this country."

If Carson's jokes reverberated in Washington, who appeared on "The Tonight Show" was seen for many years in Hollywood as a career-making platform, especially for stand-up comedians. Jerry Seinfeld called receiving the "OK" sign from Carson after his first appearance "the Holy Grail of comedy."

Being asked to sit down after a performance was a sign of validation and prestige. As comic Garry Shandling said a few years ago, "I didn't get to sit down on the couch the first time. It is sort of a benchmark to sit on the couch. When you go to Johnny's house, you stand the first few times you are there."

Introduced by Groucho Marx on his first show, Oct. 1, 1962, Carson went on to host more than 7,500 hours of television and weathered numerous late-night challenges, including competing shows featuring Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Alan Thicke, Joan Rivers and Pat Sajak that all came and went during his tenure.

At the end, feeling NBC was maneuvering behind him to line up a replacement, Carson stunned the television world when he announced his plans to retire at an advertising presentation in 1991, setting off a flurry of debate and backstage jockeying to determine whether Letterman or Jay Leno should become his successor. Leno won the job, prompting Letterman to leave NBC for a competing show on CBS.

After leaving the network, Carson studiously avoided the spotlight, representing one of the industry's few stars who have been able to walk away. Friends said Carson remembered seeing one-time idols like Hope and Jack Benny near the end of their careers and wanted to avoid that scenario.

In 1979, at the age of 53, Carson said he couldn't see himself sitting at the desk in his 60s. Seven years later, he was still grappling with when to leave.

"I remember when [CBS President] Jim Aubrey canned Jack Benny, and that won't happen to me," Carson said. "I'll know when the time has come. The people tell you. . . .

"You don't just walk in and do what I do. You have to put it on the griddle, and it's from night to night. It's about momentum. That's why when I quit I won't come back to the same format. It's not like [golfer] Jack Nicklaus coming back to win the Masters."

Lassally called Carson's ability to shun celebrity at 66, when he could have easily continued to perform, and stay away despite entreaties to return "an elegant end to his career."

Friends frequently tried to coax him out of retirement. Steve Martin, a poker buddy, proposed that Carson make an appearance on the Academy Awards-which he hosted several times-and NBC Chairman Bob Wright pleaded with him to appear on the network's 75th anniversary special in May, 2002. Carson declined.

Nevertheless, he admitted in the Esquire interview that a decade after leaving "The Tonight Show" the program stayed with him, telling Esquire that he still had dreams where he was late for work and suddenly realized he was unprepared to go on.

"I wake up in a sweat," he said. "It's now been 10 years since I've been done with the job, but I will still be back there — it was two-thirds of my adult life, remember — and people will be as real and fresh and current as ever in the dream."

Later in his life, Carson did exhibit some signs of wanting to safeguard his legacy. In 2003, for example, he wrote the Wall St. Journal to correct a reference to the use of canned laughter on the program, stressing that he never did during his 30-year tenure.

"I don't mean to sound peevish," Carson said, "but I wouldn't want peoples' memories of 'The Tonight Show' to be dimmed because they believed the laughter they heard wasn't genuine."

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Carson, the host, was how effortless he made "The Tonight Show" look. His monologue, never rehearsed, seemed to perfectly capture the tone necessary to let people unwind. He also seemed to possess an innate understanding of the rhythms and pacing of television.

"It should be low-key," Carson once told reporter Rick Du Brow, then at the Herald-Examiner. "It's the end of the day. People watching don't want someone who looks like they're going to have a nervous breakdown."

Carson's demonstrated his ability to craft his own material during the Writers Guild of America strike in 1988. After two months of inactivity in which he respected picket lines, Carson returned to work while his staff of eight writers remained on strike, putting together his own monologues. At one point, he referred to the writers carrying "weird picket signs," with nothing written on them.

Some attribute part of Carson's vast appeal to his Midwestern roots and sensibility. Born in Corning, Iowa, Carson was raised in Norfolk, Neb., where he began his career as a teenager, performing a magic act he called "The Great Carsoni."

Unlike the comics he admired, many of whom were brought up in poverty, Carson enjoyed relative prosperity even during the Depression as the son of a district manager for the power company. He was a middle child, with an older sister, Catherine, and younger brother, Dick, who later worked as a director on "The Tonight Show" and other TV programs.

Carson served in the Navy (a ship he was on, the Pennsylvania, was torpedoed in August 1945, slaying nearly 20 of his crew mates) and subsequently attended the University of Nebraska. Honing his act by performing during college, after graduating he landed a job at a local radio station-WOW in Omaha-where he wrote comedy and announced commercials. Not long after the first TV station in the area signed on in 1949, Carson began hosting a 15-minute TV show, "Squirrel's Nest."

The comic moved to Los Angeles, in 1950 becoming a staff announcer at the local CBS station, KNXT, which led to his own program, "Carson's Cellar." He subsequently wrote for Red Skelton's TV show.

Carson ascended to network television at the age of 29, headlining a daytime show and substituting on CBS' "The Morning Show." In 1957, he became host of what become a popular ABC daytime show, "Who Do You Trust?," which first paired him with his long-time "Tonight Show" announcer, Ed McMahon.

When Jack Paar decided to leave "The Tonight Show," NBC saw Carson as the obvious replacement. Desperate to have him, the network used guest hosts for six months until Carson-who initially turned down the job-was free of his ABC contract.

His starting salary, $100,000 a year, eventually blossomed into millions (his earnings reportedly exceeded $20 million a year by 1990). Carson owned the sketches on his show as well, which were packaged and sold separately to TV stations under the name "Carson's Comedy Classics." His company also produced David Letterman's late-night NBC show and such prime-time programs as "Amen" and the movie "The Big Chill."

Still, Carson always remained detached from business matters, leaving them primarily in the hands of his attorney, Henry Bushkin, who he called "the Bombastic Bushkin" on the show. Bushkin was also Carson's closest friend, until a falling out later in his career severed both their professional and personal ties.

Carson moved "The Tonight Show" from New York to Burbank-which became another regular target for jokes-in 1972. He also pressed to cut the show from 90 minutes (it originally ran 1 hour and 45 minutes) to an hour in 1980 and threatened to quit to get the network to do so.

NBC resisted, resulting in a public and protracted contract negotiation. The network eventually caved in, however, giving Carson ownership of the show itself in the process. This was not surprising, since "The Tonight Show" accounted for nearly a fifth of the network's total profit.

Carson was equally successful as a headliner in Las Vegas, and he negotiated extended vacation time (as well as Mondays off) that allowed him to perform there frequently.

If Carson was a king in the entertainment world, his personal life was thornier. Carson remained an inordinately private person for such a public figure, but the facts that came out often seemed at odds with his genial on-screen image. A chain smoker, he married four times, wrestled with alcoholism and endured the death of one of his three sons, Rick, in a 1991 car accident at the age of 39.

Carson usually allowed his personal life to invade the show only in jest, but after that incident he fought back tears while eulogizing his son. After a much-publicized arrest for drunk driving in 1982, Carson had a policeman escort him onstage.

One of Carson's wives, Joanne, said the comic had focused on his career "because instinctively he knew the career would never let him down. He felt it would never betray him, and it never has betrayed him."

Although his first divorce became final in 1963, that relationship flared up in 1990 when his wife, Jody "Joan" Wolcott, the mother of all three children and his college sweetheart, demanded a nine-fold increase in her alimony payments, to $120,000 per year. Carson's attorneys called the request "a baldfaced holdup."

Carson was married to his fourth wife, Alexis, in 1987. The two met on the beach a few years prior and wed in a private ceremony at his Malibu home. His passions included astronomy and tennis, both as a player and fan, evidenced by his regular trips to the Wimbledon tournament in England.

"If I had given as much to marriage as I gave to 'The Tonight Show,' I'd probably have a hell of a marriage," Carson told the Times in '86. "But the fact is, I haven't given that, and there you have the simple reason for the failure of my marriages: I put the energy into the show."

For all the plaudits heaped on him, Carson's influence within Hollywood was equally legendary. Laurence Leamer claimed no other talk show would book him when he wrote "King of the Night," an unflattering 1989 biography of Carson, who he called "the most powerful person in Los Angeles." In the book, Leamer characterized him as a cold and ruthless individual, a womanizer who was both abusive with his wives and petty in his business dealings.

Carson freely admitted that he "never was a social animal." He didn't like being surrounded by people, drove himself to work and was extremely selective about his friends, spending lots of time in his sprawling hilltop Malibu estate, so large as to prompt comic Bob Newhart to quip, "Where's the gift shop?"

The build-up to Carson's final episode in 1992 became a national event. The Comedy Central network went dark during that hour, and Arsenio Hall aired reruns of his late-night series the last week out of deference to Carson.

Ratings swelled, with millions tuning in the penultimate night to see final guests Robin Williams and Bette Midler, the latter singing a memorable duet with Carson. His family attended the final "Tonight" taping, and Carson addressed his sons, Chris and Cory, in signing off.

"I realize that being an offspring of someone who is constantly in the public eye is not easy," Carson said. "So guys, I want you to know that I love you. I hope that your old man has not caused you too much discomfort."

Despite eschewing the public eye after leaving, Carson continued to maintain offices in Santa Monica, going in a few days a week. Company affairs-including the sale of "Tonight Show" videos that continued to sell briskly, marketed via TV "infomercials"-have been run by his nephew, Jeff Sotzing, who had been a producer on "The Tonight Show."

Carson also indulged his passion for the sea in his later years, sailing extensively on a specially equipped 130-foot yacht, the Serengeti-named, he said, for the region in Africa that captivated him on a trip there in the 1990s.

In fact, the night of NBC's anniversary, Carson was on his boat, on a trip that took him through the Panama Canal and to the Caribbean.

NBC's Wright told Esquire that he offered to send a helicopter to pick Carson up, but the host refused, saying his decision to stay away had "served me well."

Although Carson appeared in the 1964 movie "Looking for Love," which starred Connie Francis, he ultimately decided to focus his career almost exclusively on "The Tonight Show." Carson admitted he had "thought about movies for years" but felt movies didn't offer a terribly viable option because he was so well-known as himself. "[Robert] Redford can play a baseball player, but I'm playing me. Every night," he said.

Among the film offers Carson turned down was the chance to play a character modeled after him, opposite Robert De Niro, in the film "The King of Comedy," a role that ended up going to Jerry Lewis.

While he eschewed acting himself, Carson did host the Academy Awards on five occasions between 1979 and '84 (the exception being in '83). His own list of honors included six Emmys and the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award.

In a sense, Carson was the perfect personality for television-reflecting the generation following the great radio stars like Benny and Hope, one that grew up with the medium.

"I use the camera," Carson said. "I remember seeing a silent film from the '20s with Oliver Hardy sighing directly into the camera. I can't explain how perfect that sigh was. It's like trying to explain comedy."

Carson's nephew said there will be no memorial service.