John McQuaid

Recently, two friends in their forties have died – way too early. Rebecca Lipkin had breast cancer. Bill Cahir was a Marine killed in Afghanistan yesterday. They had little in common except journalism backgrounds, a great vitality and sense of adventure, and a basic graciousness. They have been, and will be, memorialized by people who knew them longer and/or better than I, but I wanted to write a bit about them here.

Bill Cahir and I worked together at the (now closed) Newhouse News Service for several years. He worked for a Newhouse-owned chain of small papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (covering, among other things, staunch conservative Rep. Pat Toomey, now a PA Republican Senate candidate). He humorously endured the gentle hazing our colleague Bruce Alpert put newcomers to the bureau through – typically, the assignment of extremely trivial stories by fictional editors. He chatted up my kids when we all found ourselves at the office one weekend, managing to get a full account of their recent school experiences than I ever had.

Post-9/11, he felt a calling and joined the Marine Reserve. He was 34 at the time, a lot older than the usual age for recruitment. Frankly, it seemed kind of crazy to to most of us at the Newhouse bureau (many of us were, of course, both out of shape and wary of authority and the kind of total commitment being a Marine requires). Bill agonized over the decision and all its possible consequences, as Dave Wood recalls here.

But as Bill tells it in this piece, he was persistent and managed to talk his way in. He came from a different world than most other Marines: he was a college-educated professional who chatted with members of Congress every day. He was also, basically, an old man trying to keep up with young men almost half his age. Yet he did. And when he returned to the office between boot camp graduation and his first assignment, the change was remarkable. He was leaner and meaner, of course. But he also was more focused and self-assured; the man damn nearly glowed. He had found what he was looking for and it agreed with him. He worried – a little – that being away from the Marines even for a short while would erode some of that physical and mental edge.

His unique skillset – intelligence, education, life experience, extraordinary focus and determination – is the kind that the U.S. needs in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill did two tours in Iraq in a Marine Civil Affairs Group – the people who work with local towns and villages, smoothing the often rocky path for peacekeeping and rebuilding. Bill came back and worked at Newhouse for a while, but it was clear he was moving in a new direction; he left journalism and last year ran for Congress in Pennsylvania, narrowly losing the Democratic primary. Later, it was back to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province where all we know so far is that he was killed by “enemy fire.” He leaves a wife, Rene, who is pregnant with twins.

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I met Rebecca Lipkin at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston – which, as you may remember, was inexplicably given over the religious right, leading to night after night of scorn and invective that would make even Sarah Palin blanch (well, maybe not). I can still hear the College Republicans roaming the vicinity of Astrodome, chanting “Bush-Quayle ’92!” day after day. A friend had recommended I go introduce myself to Rebecca, and I have a clear memory of finding her in the tented warren of media workspaces in the heat. She was a treat – good humored and, in a crazy and frenzied environment, eminently sane. We agreed to meet up later in Washington, where I lived and she was soon to, and we hung out intermittently thereafter. She was very funny and forthright. At a shiva for her, a friend recalled how she had discovered a piece of metal in a deli sandwich, sent them a strongly-worded letter intimating a lawsuit (though she had not actually eaten the sandwich in question) and gotten them to pay up. Her sister, a lawyer, noted that she declined to represent Rebecca in small claims court.

She was extraordinarily good at what she did. Working as a producer for ABC News, she traveled the country during the 1990s, usually working with reporter Carole Simpson. Half the time I called she was on the road. Later, she worked for Nightline, where among other things she recruited Frank McCourt – he of the archetypal miserable Irish childhood – to return to Ireland to document its economic renaissance. She and McCourt died on the same day, July 19. On Facebook, a friend imagined them knocking back pints together somewhere, smiling down on us.

Since 2001, she was a principal architect of Al Jazeera English, based in London, where she joked about writing a book called “A Jew at Al Jazeera.” I regret I never got a chance to visit her there. Rebecca was a good friend: always ready to listen, open to new things. In Washington there’s a power-journalism hierarchy that she was a part of and I was not, which in my experience can sometimes make things awkward – but never did. She helped my wife and me find an apartment in the housing complex where she lived. She hooked me up with other influential journalists when I was promoting my book.

When she came down with inflammatory breast cancer two years ago – one of the rarer and most deadly forms of the disease – she resolved to fight it aggressively, and did so with typical grace and humor, filing a series of video breast cancer diva diaries which are interesting, informative – and, naturally, good TV. She should have been on camera more often.

A Rebecca Lipkin memorial page can be found here.

I don’t like bloggy displays of sentiment, but obviously, life is short – too short sometimes. Cherish it. Give each moment its due.