BOB: What do you want for your birthday? LUCINDA: I don’t know BOB: Jewelry? LUCINDA: You’ve given me so much jewelry, sweetheart. BOB: A blouse? LUCINDA: I have enough of those. BOB: A computer thing? LUCINDA: TMT, honey, (too much technology!) BOB: You must want something…? LUCINDA: Just a card would be fine, sweetheart.… Continue Reading
Have you noticed that debates on some conservative TV stations feature well-dressed, articulate politicos and weak, shapeless liberals? Do you notice that the volume is slightly lowered when the liberal speaks? In turn, you can find just the opposite state of affairs on liberal channels. Censorship, if more subtle than in some other nations, is… Continue Reading
We were in the elevator when Bob leaned over and unexpectedly kissed me on the lips. “I think the book has made us closer,” he said. “It’s been a springboard that’s brought us back to the beginning, when we first fell in love.” This was the beginning of a short but startling observation. After three… Continue Reading
How hazardous it is to write about someone you love. In ‘Timeless,’ I was determined to create an honest picture of Bob Morgenthau, but I also had an interest in keeping our marriage intact. Therefore, I insisted he read every draft of my memoir, even though I had kept journals of our 38 years together.… Continue Reading
This post is the fourth in a five-part series, originally published by United Press International on September 18, 1970, for which Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. (Link to PARTS I, II, or III) The final nine months of Diana Oughton’s life were absorbed almost entirely by the disintegration of the Students for… Continue Reading
Young women flocking to join ISIS, aware that they will be beaten and mistreated, bring to mind the seeds of terrorism planted by women and men during America’s futile war against Vietnam. Political terror was once born of idealism, now it has become bloodlust. Back in the sixties and seventies, the violent branch of the… Continue Reading
This post is the third in a five-part series, originally published by United Press International on September 16, 1970, for which Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. (Click here for PART I or PART II) The Diana Oughton who returned from Guatemala in the fall of 1965 was not… Continue Reading
As Father’s Day draws near, I think of how my father and my husband are alike. Here is a passage from my new book, Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me: “I believe that love is no accident, no whisper from a random universe. It comes from deeper channels of longing and recognition: a collection of tiny lights… Continue Reading
Eleanor Roosevelt and Elinor Morgenthau, wife of FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., were fast friends and that was partly due to the similarity of their natures. They were women of their time and had iron fists inside velvet gloves. While with their famous husbands, they stepped back to let them take center stage, but… Continue Reading
By Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers (Originally Published September 16, 1970) By the time she had graduated from Bryn Mawr in June of 1963, Diana Oughton had traveled among the poor in the byways of Europe and worked closely with children in one of Philadelphia’s decaying ghettos, but she did not really begin to learn… Continue Reading