Name	CBS Broadcasting Inc. (CBS)
Logo
Type	Broadcast radio network and television network
Branding	"Only CBS"
Country	United States
Available	National
Founder	(as CBS) William S. Paley
Slogan	Only CBS
Motto	America's Most Watched Network
Owner	Independent (1927–1995)Westinghouse Electric (renamed CBS Corp. in 1997) (1995–2000)Viacom (2000–2005)CBS Corporation (2006–present)
Key people	Leslie Moonves, Chairman of CBS,Nancy Tellem (President of CBS Network Television Entertainment)
Launch date	September 18, 1927 (radio) July 1, 1941 (television)
Picture format	480i (SDTV)720p/1080i (HDTV)
Former names	United Independent Broadcasters (1927)Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System (1927–1928)Columbia Broadcasting System (1928–1995 in official usage)
Callsign meaning	Columbia Broadcasting System (former legal name)
Website	cbs.com

CBS Broadcasting Inc. (CBS) is a major US television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of the company's logo. It has also been called the "Tiffany Network", which alludes to the perceived high quality of CBS programming during the tenure of its founder William S. Paley (1901–90). It can also refer to some of CBS's first demonstrations of color television, which were held in a former Tiffany & Co. building in New York City in 1950, thus earning it the name "Color broadcasting system" back when such a feat was innovative.

The network has its origins in United Independent Broadcasters Inc., a collection of 16 radio stations that was bought by William S. Paley in 1928 and renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. Under Paley's guidance, CBS would first become one of the largest radio networks in the United States and then one of the big three American broadcast television networks. In 1974, CBS dropped its full name and became known simply as CBS, Inc. The Westinghouse Electric Corporation acquired the network in 1995 and eventually adopted the name of the company it had bought to become CBS Corporation. In 2000, CBS came under the control of Viacom, which coincidentally had begun as a spin-off of CBS in 1971. In late 2005, Viacom split itself and reestablished CBS Corporation with the CBS television network at its core. CBS Corporation is controlled by Sumner Redstone through National Amusements, its parent. For most of its existence, CBS has been the most watched network in the United States, most recently in 2010.

History

Early years

The origins of CBS date back to the creation, on January 21, 1927, in Chicago, of the "United Independent Broadcasters" network. Established by New York talent agent Arthur Judson, United soon looked for additional investors; the Columbia Phonograph Company (manufacturers of Columbia Records), rescued the company in April 1927, and as a result, the network was renamed "Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System." Columbia Phonographic went on the air on September 18, 1927, from flagship station WOR in Newark, New Jersey, and 15 affiliates

Unable to sell enough air time to advertisers, on January 18, 1929, Columbia sold the network for $400,000 to William S. Paley, son of a Philadelphia cigar manufacturer. With Columbia's removal, Paley streamlined the corporate name to "Columbia Broadcasting System." Paley believed in the power of radio advertising; his family's company had seen their "La Palina" cigar become a best-seller after young William convinced his elders to advertise it on Philadelphia station WCAU, one of Columbia's affiliates.

CBS's radio affiliation growth

In November 1927, Columbia paid $410,000 to A.H. Grebe's Atlantic Broadcasting Company for a small Brooklyn station, WABC, which would become the network's flagship station. WABC was quickly upgraded, and the signal relocated to a stronger frequency, 860 kHz. (The station moved to a new frequency, 880 kHz, in the FCC's 1941 reassignment of stations; in 1946, WABC was re-named WCBS.) It was where much of CBS's programming originated; other owned-and-operated stations were KNX Los Angeles, KCBS San Francisco (originally KQW), WBBM Chicago, WJSV Washington, D.C. (later WTOP, which moved to the FM dial in 2005; the AM facility today is WFED, also a secondary CBS affiliate), KMOX St. Louis, and WCCO Minneapolis. These remain the core affiliates of the CBS Radio Network today, with WCBS still the flagship, and all except WTOP and WFED (both Bonneville Broadcasting properties) owned by CBS Radio.

Later in 1928, another investor, Paramount Pictures (who ironically would eventually be co-owned with CBS, see below), bought Columbia stock, and for a time it was thought the network would be renamed "Paramount Radio". Any chance of further Paramount involvement ended with the 1929 stock market crash; the near-bankrupt studio sold its shares back to CBS in 1932.

As the third national network, CBS soon had more affiliates than either of NBC's two, in part because of a more generous rate of payment to affiliates. NBC's owner and founder of RCA, David Sarnoff, believed in technology, so NBC's affiliates had the latest RCA equipment, and were often the best-established stations, or were on "clear channel" frequencies. Paley believed in the power of programming, and CBS quickly established itself as the home of many popular musical and comedy stars, among them Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, George Burns & Gracie Allen, and Kate Smith. In 1938, NBC and CBS each opened studios in Hollywood to attract movieland's top talent to their networks – NBC at Radio City on Sunset and Vine, CBS two blocks away at Columbia Square.

CBS launches an independent news division

In the hard times of the early 1930s, CBS radio broadened its offerings; having refused an AP franchise for news, Paley launched an independent news division, shaped in its first years by Paley's vice-president, former The New York Times man Ed Klauber, and news director Paul White. Another early hire, in 1935, was Edward R. Murrow, brought in as "Director of Talks." It was Murrow's reports, particularly during the dark days of the London Blitz, which contributed to CBS News's image for on-the-spot coverage. As European news chief and later head of the news division, Murrow assembled a team of reporters and editors that propelled CBS News to the forefront of the industry.

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast (October 30, 1938)

On October 30, 1938, CBS gained a taste of infamy when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Its unique format, a contemporary version of the story in the form of faux news broadcasts, had many CBS listeners panicked into believing invaders from Mars were actually devastating Grover's Mill, New Jersey, despite three disclaimers during the broadcast that it was a work of fiction. CBS would later revive the format for television in the 1990s for Without Warning, which told the story of asteroids crashing to Earth, but the television format allowed for disclaimers to air at every commercial break, avoiding a replay of what happened in 1938.

Also in 1938, CBS bought American Record Corporation, the parent of its former investor Columbia Records.

CBS recruits Edmund A. Chester

Before the onset of World War II, CBS recruited Edmund A. Chester from his position as Bureau Chief for Latin America at Associated Press to serve as Director of Latin American Relations and Director of Short Wave Broadcasts for the CBS radio network (1940). In this capacity, Mr. Chester coordinated the development of the Network of the Americas (La Cadena de las Americas) with the Department of State, the Office for Inter-American Affairs (as chaired by Nelson Rockefeller) and Voice of America. This network provided vital news and cultural programming throughout South America and Central America during the crucial World War II era and fostered diplomatic relations between the United States of America and the less developed nations of the continent. It featured such popular radio broadcasts as Viva América which showcased leading musical talent from both North and South America accompanied by the CBS Pan American Orchestra under the musical direction of Alfredo Antonini. The post war era also marked the beginning of CBS's dominance in the field of radio as well.

CBS as a dominant radio broadcaster

As long as radio was the dominant advertising medium, CBS dominated broadcasting. All through the 1950s and 1960s, CBS programs were often the highest-rated. A much-publicized "talent raid" on NBC in the mid-1940s brought Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Amos 'n' Andy into the CBS fold. Paley also was an innovator in creating original programming; since broadcasting's earliest days, time had been sold to advertising agencies in half- or full-hour blocks. The ad agencies, not the networks, would then create the program to fill the time, thus it was " 'The Johnson's Wax Program', with Fibber McGee and Molly", or " 'The Pepsodent Show', with Bob Hope." At Paley's urging, beginning in the mid-1940s, CBS began creating its own programs; among the long-running shows that came from this project were You Are There (born as CBS Was There), My Favorite Husband (starring Lucille Ball; the show proved a kind of blueprint for her big CBS television hit I Love Lucy), Our Miss Brooks (whose star, Eve Arden, was encouraged personally by Paley to try out for the title role), Gunsmoke and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. In time this idea was carried further, selling ad time by the minute, so ad agencies no longer had complete control over what went out over "Paley's air".

The end of prime time radio on CBS

CBS moved at a deliberate pace into television; as late as 1950 it owned only one station; radio continued to be the backbone of the company. Gradually, as the television network took shape, big radio stars began to drift to television. The radio soap opera The Guiding Light moved to television in 1952 and aired until September 18, 2009; Burns & Allen made the move in 1950; Lucille Ball a year later; Our Miss Brooks in 1952 (though it continued simultaneously on radio for its full television life). The high-rated Jack Benny Program ended in 1955, and Edgar Bergen's Sunday-night show went off the air in 1957. When CBS announced in 1956 that its radio operations had lost money, while the television network had made money, it was clear where the future lay. When the soap opera Ma Perkins went off the air November 25, 1960 only eight, relatively minor series remained. Prime time radio ended on September 30, 1962, when Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense aired for the final time.

CBS's radio programming after 1972

After the retirement of talk-show pioneer Arthur Godfrey in April 1972, CBS radio programming consisted of hourly news broadcast and an extensive schedule of news features, known in the 1970s as Dimension, and commentaries, including the well received Spectrum series of commentaries which evolved into the Point/Counterpoint feature on the television network's 60 Minutes and First Line Report, a well-regarded news and analysis feature delivered by CBS correspondents and offered to the CBS radio stations. The network also continued to offer traditional radio programming through its nightly CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the lone holdout of old-style programming, from 1974 through 1982. The CBS Radio Network continues to this day, but offers primarily its well-regarded newscasts, including its centerpiece "World News Roundup" in the morning and evening, and news-related features like "The Osgood File" and "Harry Smith Reporting" as well as other talk properties.

The television years: expansion and growth

CBS's first television broadcasts were experimental, often only for one hour a day, and reaching a limited area in and around New York City (over station W2XAB channel 2, later called WCBW and finally WCBS-TV). To catch up with rival RCA, CBS bought Hytron Laboratories in 1939, and immediately moved into set production and color broadcasting. Though there were many competing patents and systems, RCA dictated the content of the FCC's technical standards, and grabbed the spotlight from CBS, DuMont and others by introducing television to the general public at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The FCC began licensing commercial television stations on July 1, 1941; the first license went to RCA and NBC's WNBT (now WNBC); the second license, issued that same day, was to WCBW, (now WCBS). CBS-Hytron offered a practical color system in 1941, but it was not compatible with the black-and-white standards set down by RCA. In time, and after considerable dithering, the FCC rejected CBS's technology in favor of that by RCA.

During the World War II years, commercial television broadcasting was reduced dramatically. Toward the end of the war, commercial television began to ramp up again, with an increased level of programming evident in the 1945–1947 period on the three New York television stations which operated in those years (the local stations of NBC, CBS and DuMont) But as RCA and DuMont raced to establish networks and offer upgraded programming, CBS lagged, advocating an industry-wide shift and re-start to UHF for their incompatible (with black and white) color system. Only in 1950, when NBC was dominant in television and black and white transmission was widespread, did CBS begin to buy or build their own stations (outside of New York) in Los Angeles, Chicago and other major cities. Up to that point, CBS programming was seen on such stations as KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles, which CBS—as a bit of insurance and to guarantee program clearance in Los Angeles—quickly purchased a 50% interest in, partnering with the Los Angeles Times newspaper. CBS then sold their interest in KTTV (which today is the West Coast flagship of the Fox network) and purchased outright Los Angeles pioneer station KTSL (Channel 2) in 1950, renaming it KNXT (after CBS's existing Los Angeles radio property, KNX), later to become KCBS-TV. The "talent raid" on NBC of the mid-forties had brought over established radio stars; they now became stars of CBS television as well. One reluctant CBS star refused to bring her radio show, "My Favorite Husband", to television unless the network would re-cast the show with her real-life husband in the lead. Paley and network president Frank Stanton had so little faith in the future of Lucille Ball's series, re-dubbed I Love Lucy, that they granted her wish and allowed the husband, Desi Arnaz, to take financial control of the production. This was the making of the Ball-Arnaz Desilu empire, and became the template for series production to this day.

In the late 1940s, CBS offered the first live television coverage of the proceedings of the United Nations General Assembly (1949). This journalistic tour-de-force was under the direction of Edmund A. Chester, who was appointed to the post of Director for News, Special Events and Sports at CBS Television in 1948.

As television came to the forefront of American entertainment and information, CBS dominated television as it once had radio. In 1953, the CBS television network would make its first profit, and would maintain dominance on television between the years 1955 and 1976 as well

While the "rural" shows got the axe, new hits, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Kojak and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour took their place and kept CBS at the top of the ratings through the early '70s. The majority of these hits were overseen by then East Coast vice president Alan Wagner. Also, 60 Minutes moved to 7 p.m. ET on Sundays in 1976 and became an unexpected hit.

Silverman also first developed his strategy of spinning new shows off an established hit while at CBS, with Rhoda and Phyllis spun from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude and The Jeffersons spun from All in the Family and Good Times from Maude.

After Silverman's departure, CBS dropped behind ABC in the 1976–77 season, but still rated strongly, based on its earlier hits and some new ones: One Day at a Time, Alice, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Dukes of Hazzard (suspiciously "rural") and, the biggest hit of the early '80s, Dallas.

By 1982, ABC had run out of steam, NBC was in dire straits with many failed programming efforts greenlighted by Silverman during his 1978 to 1981 tenure there, and CBS once more nosed ahead, courtesy of Dallas (and its spin-off Knots Landing), Falcon Crest, Magnum, P.I., Simon & Simon and 60 Minutes. CBS also broadcast the popular NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament every March beginning in 1982 (taking over for NBC). There were a few new hits — Kate & Allie, Newhart, Cagney & Lacey, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Murder, She Wrote — but the resurgence was short-lived.

1986–2002: Tiffany Network in distress

In 1984, The Cosby Show and Miami Vice debuted on NBC and grabbed high ratings immediately, bringing that network back to first place by the 1985–1986 season along with other huge hits Family Ties, The Golden Girls, LA Law, and 227. ABC had in turn also rebounded with hits like Dynasty, Who's the Boss?, Hotel, and Growing Pains. By the 1988–1989 season, CBS had fallen to third place behind both ABC and NBC, and had some major rebuilding to do.

Ironically, some of the groundwork had been laid as the network fell in the ratings, with hits Simon & Simon, Falcon Crest, Murder, She Wrote, Kate & Allie and Newhart still on the schedule from the most recent resurgence, and future hits Designing Women, Murphy Brown, Jake and the Fatman, and 48 Hourshaving recently debuted. Plus, CBS was still getting decent ratings from 60 Minutes, Dallas and Knots Landing. But the ratngs for Dallas were a far cry from what they were in the early 1980's. During the early 1990s, the network would bolster its sports lineup by adding Major League Baseball telecasts and the Winter Olympics.

Under network president Jeff Sagansky, the network was able to get strong ratings from new shows , Touched by an Angel, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Walker, Texas Ranger, and a resurgent Jake and the Fatman during this period, and CBS was able to reclaim the first place crown briefly, in the 1992–1993 season, though its demographics skewed older than ABC, NBC or even Fox, with its relatively limited presence at that time. In 1993, the network made a breakthrough in establishing a successful late night talk show franchise to compete with NBC's Tonight Show when it signed David Letterman away from NBC after the Late Night host was passed over as Johnny Carson's successor on Tonight in favor of Jay Leno. However, CBS' would soon suffer a major blow in a move that would change American television forever.

In 1993, the fledgling Fox network outbid CBS for the rights to air the National Football League, resulting in several stations switching to Fox. The loss of the NFL, along with an ill-fated effort to court younger viewers, led to a drop in CBS' ratings. The network also dropped its MLB coverage (after losing approximately $500 million over a four year span) in 1993 and NBC, which already aired the Summer Olympics, took over coverage of the Winter Olympics beginning with the 2002 Games.

Still, CBS was able to produce some hits, such as Cosby, The Nanny, and Everybody Loves Raymond, and would regain the NFL (taking over the American Football Conference package from NBC) in 1998.

2002–present: Return to top spot, rivalry with Fox

Another turning point for CBS came in the summer of 2000 when it debuted the summer reality show Survivor, which became a surprise summer hit for the network. In January 2001, CBS debuted the second season of the show after its airing of the Super Bowl and scheduled it Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET, and moved the police procedural (which had debuted that fall Fridays at 9 p.m. ET) to Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET and was both able to chip away at and eventually beat NBC's Thursday night lineup, and attract younger viewers to the network.

CBS has had additional successes with police procedurals Cold Case, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, NCIS, and The Mentalist, along with CSI spinoffs and , and sitcoms Everybody Loves Raymond, The King of Queens, Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory and The New Adventures of Old Christine.

During the 2007–08 season, Fox ranked as the top-rated network, primarily due to its reliance on American Idol. However, according to Nielsen, CBS ended up as the top-rated network for the 2008–2009 and 2009-2010 seasons. The two tend to nearly equal one another in the 18-34, 18-49, and 25-54 demographics, although Fox typically wins these by the narrowest of margins.

The conglomerate

During the 1960s, CBS began an effort to diversify, and looked for suitable investments. In 1965, it acquired electric guitar maker Fender from Leo Fender, who agreed to sell his company due to health problems. The purchase also included that of Rhodes electric pianos, which had already been acquired by Fender. This and other acquisitions led to a restructuring of the corporation into various operating groups and divisions; the quality of the products coming out of these acquired companies was extremely lower, hence the term "pre-CBS" (meaning higher, sought after quality) and "CBS" (mass produced lower quality).

In other diversification attempts, CBS would buy (and later sell) sports teams (especially the New York Yankees baseball club), book and magazine publishers (Fawcett Publications including Woman's Day, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston), map-makers, toy manufacturers (Gabriel Toys, Child Guidance, Wonder Products), and other properties.

As William Paley aged, he tried to find the one person who could follow in his footsteps. However, numerous successors-in-waiting came and went. By the mid-1980s, the investor Laurence Tisch had begun to acquire substantial holdings in CBS. Eventually he gained Paley's confidence, and with his support took control of CBS in 1986.

Tisch's sole interest was turning profits. When CBS faltered, under-performing units were given the axe. Among the first properties to go was the Columbia Records group, which had been part of the company since 1938. Tisch also shut down in 1986 the CBS Technology Center in Stamford, which had started in New York City in the 1930s as CBS Laboratories and evolved to be the company's technology Research and development unit.

Columbia Records

Columbia Records was a record label owned by CBS since 1938. In 1962, CBS launched CBS Records to market Columbia recordings outside North America. In 1966, CBS Records was made a separate subsidiary of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. CBS sold the CBS Records Group to the Japanese conglomerate Sony in 1988 initiating the Japanese buying spree of US companies (MCA, Pebble Beach Co., Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building, et al.) that continued into the 1990s. The record label company was re-christened Sony Music Entertainment in 1991, as Sony had a short term license on the CBS name.

Sony purchased from EMI its rights to the Columbia Records name outside the US, Canada, Spain and Japan. Sony now uses Columbia Records as a label name in all countries except Japan, where Sony Records remains their flagship label. Sony acquired the Spanish rights when Sony Music merged with Bertelsmann subsidiary BMG in 2004 as Sony BMG, co-owned by Sony and Bertelsmann. Sony bought out BMG's share in 2008.

CBS Corporation revived CBS Records in 2006.

Publishing

CBS entered the publishing business in 1967 by acquiring Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who published trade books, textbooks, and the magazine Field & Stream. The next year, CBS added the medical publisher Saunders to Holt, Rinehart & Winston. In 1971, CBS acquired Bond/Parkhurst, the publisher of Road & Track and Cycle World.

CBS greatly expanded its magazine business by purchasing Fawcett Publications in 1974, bringing in such magazines as Woman's Day. It acquired the majority of the Ziff Davis publications in 1984.

CBS sold its book publishing businesses in 1985. The educational publishing division, which retained the name Holt, Rinehart & Winston, was sold to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; the trade book division, renamed Henry Holt and Company, was sold to the West German publisher Holtzbrinck.

CBS exited the magazine business by selling the unit to its executive Peter Diamandis. Diamandis sold the magazines to Hachette Filipacchi Médias in 1988, forming Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.

CBS Musical Instruments division

Forming the CBS Musical Instruments division, the company also acquired Steinway pianos, Gemeinhardt flutes, Lyon & Healy harps, Rodgers (institutional) organs, Gulbransen home organs, Electro-Music Inc. (Leslie speakers), and Rogers Drums. The last musical purchase was the 1981 acquisition of the assets of then-bankrupt ARP Instruments, developer of electronic synthesizers.

Between 1965 and 1985 the quality of Fender guitars and amplifiers declined significantly. Encouraged by outraged Fender fans, CBS Musical Instruments division executives executed a leveraged buyout in 1985 and created FMIC, the Fender Musical Instrument Corporation. At the same time, CBS divested itself of Rodgers, along with Steinway and Gemeinhardt, all of which were purchased by Steinway Musical Properties. The other musical instruments properties were also liquidated.

Film production

CBS made a brief, unsuccessful move into film production in the late 1960s, creating Cinema Center Films. This profit-free unit was shut down in 1972; today the distribution rights to the Cinema Center library rest with Paramount Pictures for home video (via CBS Home Entertainment) and theatrical release, and with CBS Paramount Television for TV distribution (most other ancillary rights remain with CBS). It released such films as The Reivers (1969), starring Steve McQueen, and the musical Scrooge (1970), starring Albert Finney.

Yet ten years later, in 1982, CBS took another try at Hollywood, in a joint venture with Columbia Pictures and HBO called TriStar Pictures. Despite releasing such box office successes as The Natural, Places in the Heart, and , CBS felt the studio was not making a profit and in 1985, sold its stake in TriStar to The Coca-Cola Company, Columbia Pictures' owner at the time.

In 2007, CBS Corp. announced its desire to get back into the feature film business slowly launching CBS Films and hiring key executives in the Spring of 2008 to startup the new venture. The name CBS Films was actually used once before in 1953 when the name was briefly used for CBS's distributor of off-network and first-run syndicated programming to local TV stations in the United States and abroad.

Home video

CBS entered into the home video market, when joined with MGM to form MGM/CBS Home Video in 1978, but the joint venture was broken by 1982. CBS joined another studio: 20th Century Fox, to form CBS/Fox Video. CBS's duty was to release some of the movies by TriStar Pictures under the CBS/Fox Video label.

Gabriel Toys

CBS entered the video game market briefly, through its acquisition of Gabriel Toys (renamed CBS Toys), publishing several arcade adaptations and original titles under the name "CBS Electronics", for the Atari 2600, and other consoles and computers, also producing one of the first karaoke recording/players. CBS Electronics also distributed all Coleco-related video game products in Canada, including the ColecoVision. CBS later sold Gabriel Toys to View-Master, which eventually ended up as part of Mattel.

Venture to the UK

On 14 September 2009, it was revealed that the international arm of CBS, CBS Studios International, struck a joint venture deal with Chellomedia to launch six CBS-branded channels in the UK during 2009. The new channels would replace Zone Romantica, Zone Thriller, Zone Horror and Zone Reality, plus timeshift services Zone Horror +1 and Zone Reality +1. On 1 October 2009, it was announced that CBS Reality, CBS Reality +1, CBS Drama and CBS Action would launch on 16 November 2009 replacing Zone Reality, Zone Reality +1, Zone Romantica and Zone Thriller respectively. On 5 April 2010, Zone Horror and Zone Horror +1 were rebranded as Horror Channel and Horror Channel +1.

New owners

By the early 1990s, profits had fallen as a result of competition from cable companies, video rentals, and the high cost of programming. About 20 former CBS affiliates switched to the rapidly rising Fox Television Network in the mid 1990s, while many television markets across the country (e.g. KDFX in Palm Springs, California and KECY in Yuma, Arizona reportedly the first to do so in August 1994) lost their CBS affiliate for awhile. CBS ratings were acceptable, but the network struggled with an image of stodginess. Laurence Tisch lost interest and sought a new buyer. in Manhattan, home to the Late Show with David Letterman]]

Westinghouse Electric Corporation

In 1995, Westinghouse Electric Corporation acquired CBS for $5.4 billion. As one of the major broadcasting group owners of commercial radio and television stations (as Group W) since 1920, Westinghouse sought to transition from a station operator into a major media company with its purchase of CBS. This was followed in 1997 with the $4.9-billion purchase of Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, owner of more than 150 radio stations. Also that year, Westinghouse began the CBS Cable division by acquiring two existing cable channels (Gaylord's The Nashville Network and Country Music Television) and starting a new one (CBS Eye on People, which was later sold to Discovery Communications).

Following the Infinity purchase, operation and sales responsibilities for the CBS Radio Network was handed to Infinity, which turned management over to Westwood One, a company Infinity managed. WWO is a major radio program syndicator that had previously purchased the Mutual Broadcasting System, NBC's radio networks and the rights to use the "NBC Radio Networks" name. For a time, CBS Radio, NBC Radio Networks and CNN's radio news services were all under the WWO umbrella.

, Westwood One continues to distribute CBS radio programming, but as a self-managed company that put itself up for sale and found a buyer for a significant amount of its stock.

CBS also owned CBS Telenoticias, a Spanish-language news network.

In that same year of 1997, Westinghouse changed its name to CBS Corporation, and corporate headquarters were moved from Pittsburgh to New York. And to underline the change in emphasis, all non-entertainment assets were put up for sale. Another 90 radio stations were added to Infinity's portfolio in 1998 with the acquisition of American Radio Systems Corporation for $2.6 billion.

In 1999, CBS paid $2.5 billion to acquire King World Productions, a television syndication company whose programs include The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. By the end of 1999, all pre-CBS elements of Westinghouse's industrial past (beyond retaining rights to the name for brand licensing purposes) were gone.

Viacom

By the 1990s, CBS had become a broadcasting giant, but in 1999 entertainment conglomerate Viacom, a company created years earlier to syndicate old CBS series, announced it was taking over CBS in a deal valued at $37 billion. Following completion of this effort in 2000, Viacom was ranked as the second-largest entertainment company in the world.

CBS Corporation and CBS Studios

Having assembled all the elements of a communications empire, Viacom found that the promised synergy was not there, and at the end of 2005 it split itself in two. CBS became the center of a new company, CBS Corporation, which included the broadcasting elements, Paramount Television's production operations (renamed CBS Television Studios), UPN (which later merged with Time Warner's The WB into The CW), Viacom Outdoor advertising (renamed CBS Outdoor), Showtime, Simon & Schuster, and Paramount Parks, which the company sold in May 2006. It is the legal successor to the old Viacom.

The second company, keeping the Viacom name, kept Paramount Pictures, assorted MTV Networks, BET, and, until May 2007, Famous Music, which was sold to Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

As a result of the aforementioned Viacom/CBS corporate split, as well as other acquisitions over recent years, CBS (under the moniker CBS Studios) owns a massive television library spanning over six decades; these include not only CBS in-house productions and network programs, but also programs aired originally on competing networks. Shows in this library include I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Honeymooners, Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, Little House on the Prairie (US TV rights only), , The Brady Bunch, Cheers, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Evening Shade, and , among others.

Both CBS Corporation and the new Viacom are still owned by Sumner Redstone's company, National Amusements. As such, Paramount Home Entertainment continues to handle DVD distribution for the CBS library.

Coverage and availability

ACNielsen estimated in 2003 that CBS can be seen in 96.98% of all American households, reaching 103,421,270 homes in the United States. CBS has 204 VHF and UHF affiliated stations in the U.S. and U.S. possessions. CBS is also carried on cable television across Canada, via its affiliates, as well as in Bermuda, via local affiliate ZBM-TV.

CBS.com

CBS.com is a website that has games, online sports and more.

Logos and slogans

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CBS unveiled its Eye Device logo on October 17, 1951. Before that, from the 1940s through 1951, CBS Television used an oval spotlight on the block letters C-B-S. The Eye device was conceived by William Golden based on a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign as well as a Shaker drawing. (While commonly attributed to Golden, there is speculation that at least some design work on the symbol may have been done by another CBS staff designer, Georg Olden, one of the first African-Americans to attract some attention in the postwar graphic design field.) The Eye device made its broadcasting debut on October 20, 1951. The following season, as Golden prepared a new "ident", CBS President Frank Stanton insisted on keeping the Eye device and using it as much as possible. (Golden died unexpectedly in 1959, and was replaced by one of his top assistants, Lou Dorfsman, who would go on to oversee all print and on-air graphics for CBS for the next thirty years.)

An example of CBS Television Network's imaging (and the distinction between the television and radio networks) may be seen in a video of The Jack Benny Program from 1953; the video appears to be converted from kinescope, and "unscoped" or unedited. One sees the program as very nearly one would have seen it live on CBS. Don Wilson is the program announcer, but also voices a promo for Private Secretary, which starred Ann Sothern and alternated weekly with Jack Benny on the CBS schedule. Benny continued to appear on CBS radio and television at that time, and Wilson makes a promo announcement at the end of the broadcast for Benny's radio program on the CBS Radio Network. The program closes with the "CBS Television Network" ID slide (the "CBS eye" over a field of clouds with the words "CBS Television Network" superimposed over the eye). There is, however, no voiceover accompanying the ID slide. It is unclear whether it was simply absent from the recording or never originally broadcast.

The CBS eye is now an American icon. While the symbol's settings have changed, the Eye device itself has not been redesigned in its entire history. In the network's new graphic identity created by Trollbäck + Company in 2006, the eye is being placed in a "trademark" position on show titles, days of the week and descriptive words, an approach highly respecting the value of the eye. The eye logo has frequently been copied or borrowed by television networks around the world, notable examples being the Austrian Broadcasting System (ORF) which used to use a red version of the eye logo, Associated TeleVision in the United Kingdom, Frecuencia Latina in Peru, Nippon Television in Japan and Rede Bandeirantes in Brazil. The logo is alternately known as the Eyemark, which was also the name of CBS's domestic and international syndication divisions in the mid-to-late 1990s before the King World acquisition and Viacom merger.

1980s

Through the years, CBS has developed several notable image campaigns, and several of the network's most well-known slogans date from the 1980s. 1981s "Reach for the Stars" used a space-themed campaign to capitalize on both CBS's stellar improvement in the ratings and the historic launch of the space shuttle Columbia. 1982s "Great Moments" juxtaposed scenes from classic CBS programming such as "I Love Lucy" with scenes from the network's then-current classics such as "Dallas" and "M*A*S*H". From 1983 through 1986, CBS (by now firmly atop the ratings) featured a campaign based on the slogan "We've Got the Touch". Vocals for the campaign's jingle were contributed by Richie Havens (1983–84 and 1984–85), Aaron Neville (1984–85) and Kenny Rogers (1985–86). The 1986–87 programming season ushered in the "Share the Spirit of CBS" campaign, the network's first to use full-out computer graphics and DVE effects. Unlike most network campaign promos, the full length version of Share the Spirit not only showed a brief clip preview of each new fall series, but also utilized the CGI effects to map out the entire fall schedule by night. The success of that campaign led to the 1987–88 "CBSpirit" campaign. Most CBSpirit promos utilized a procession of show clips once again. However, the new graphic motif was a swirling (or "swishing") blue line, that was used to represent "the spirit". The full length promo, like the previous year, had a special portion that identified new fall shows, but the mapped-out fall schedule shot was abandoned.

For the 1988–89 season, CBS unveiled its new image campaign, officially known as "Television You Can Feel" but more commonly identified as "You Can Feel It On CBS". The goal was to convey a more sensual, new-age image through distinguished, advanced-looking computer graphics and soothing music, backgrounding images and clips of emotionally powerful scenes and characters. However, it was this season in which CBS began its ratings free fall, the deepest in the network's history. CBS ended the decade with "Get Ready for CBS". The 1989–90 version was a very ambitious campaign that attempted to elevate CBS out of last place (among the major networks); the motif was network stars interacting with each other in a remote studio set, getting ready for photo and TV shoots, as well as for the new season on CBS. The high-energy promo song and the campaign's practices saw many variations across the country as every CBS affiliate participated in it, as per a network mandate. Also, for the first time in history, CBS became the first broadcast network to team with a national retailer to encourage viewership, with the CBS/Kmart Get Ready Giveaway.

1990s

For the 1990–91 season, the campaign featured a new jingle—The Temptations offered an altered version of their hit "Get Ready". The early 1990s featured less-than-memorable campaigns, with simplified taglines such as "This is CBS" (1992) and "You're On CBS" (1995). Eventually, the advertising department gained momentum again late in the decade with Welcome Home to a CBS Night (1996–1997), simplified to Welcome Home (1997–1999) and succeeded by the spin-off campaign The Address is CBS (1999–2000).

2000s

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, CBS's ratings resurgence was backed by their "It's All Here" campaign, and their strategy led, in 2005, to the proclamation that they were "America's Most Watched Network". Their most-recent campaign, beginning in 2006, proclaims "We Are CBS" with the voice of Don LaFontaine. , the network has shifted to a campaign entitled "Only CBS" in which the network proclaims several unique qualities it has.

Promos

Especially during the 1960s, the three major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, would show elaborate promos during the summer months of their upcoming fall schedule of that year. In 1961, CBS took the unusual step of airing a program entitled CBS Fall Preview Special: Seven Wonderful Nights, using, not the usual television voiceovers, but stars of several CBS shows to promote the upcoming shows, stars such as Ed Sullivan (The Ed Sullivan Show), Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), and Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale (Perry Mason). The stars would appear and show previews of the entire lineup for one specific day of the week.

Programming

As of fall 2010, CBS operates on an 87½-hour regular network programming schedule. It provides 22 hours of prime time programming to affiliated stations: 8–11 p.m. Monday to Saturday (all times ET/PT) and 7–11 p.m. on Sundays. Programming is also provided 10 a.m.–3 p.m. weekdays (game shows The Price Is Right and Let's Make a Deal, soaps The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, and talk show The Talk); 7–9 a.m. weekdays and Saturdays (The Early Show); CBS News Sunday Morning, nightly editions of the CBS Evening News, the Sunday political talk show Face the Nation, a 2½-hour early morning news program Up to the Minute and CBS Morning News; the late night talk shows Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson; and a three-hour Saturday morning live-action/animation block under the name Cookie Jar TV.

In addition, sports programming routinely appears on the weekends, although with a somewhat unpredictable schedule (mostly between noon and 7:00 p.m. ET).

Daytime

CBS's daytime schedule is the home of the popular long-running game show The Price Is Right. The Price is Right, which began production in 1972, is notable as the longest continuously running daytime game show on network television. After being hosted by Bob Barker for 35 years, the show has been hosted by actor/comedian Drew Carey since 2007. The network is also home to a new version of the classic game show Let's Make a Deal, hosted by singer/comedian Wayne Brady.

CBS introduced a new talk show titled The Talk on October 18, 2010. The show is similar to ABC's The View with a panel of hosts including Julie Chen, Sara Gilbert, Sharon Osbourne, Holly Robinson Peete, Leah Remini and Marissa Jaret Winokur. The show will address motherhood and other contemporary issues in a candid environment.

, CBS Daytime airs only two daytime soap operas each weekday: The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful.

Notable daytime soaps that once aired on CBS include As the World Turns (1956–2010), Guiding Light (1952–2009), which began on radio in 1937, Love of Life (1951–80), Search for Tomorrow (1951–82), which later moved to NBC, The Secret Storm (1954–1974), The Edge of Night (1956–75), which later moved to ABC, and Capitol (1982–87).

Notable daytime game shows that once aired on CBS include Match Game (1973–79), Tattletales (1974–78 and 1982–84), The $10/25,000 Pyramid (1973–74 and 1982–88), Press Your Luck (1983–86), Card Sharks (1986–89), Family Feud (1988–93), and Wheel of Fortune (1989–1991). CBS games that also aired in prime time include Beat the Clock (1950–58 and 1979–80), To Tell the Truth (1956–68) and Password (1961–67, and a 2008 prime time revival). Two long-running primetime-only games were the panel shows What's My Line? (1950–67) and I've Got a Secret (1952–68, 1976).

Children's programming

CBS broadcast the live action series Captain Kangaroo on weekday mornings from 1955 through 1982, and on Saturdays through 1984. From 1971 through 1986, the CBS News department produced one-minute In the News segments broadcast between other Saturday morning programs. Otherwise, in regards to children's programming, CBS has aired mostly animated series for kids, such as the original version of Scooby-Doo, Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, Garfield and Friends and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In 1997, CBS began broadcasting Wheel 2000, and was broadcasting it simultaneously with GSN.

In September 1998, CBS began contracting out to other companies to provide programming and material for their Saturday morning schedule. The first of these special blocks was CBS Kidshow, which featured programming from Canada's Nelvana studio. It aired on CBS Saturday mornings from 1998 to 2000, with shows like Anatole, Mythic Warriors, Rescue Heroes, and Flying Rhino Junior High. Its tagline was, "The CBS Kids Show: Get in the Act."

In 2000, CBS's deal with Nelvana ended. They then began a deal with Nickelodeon (owned by CBS's former parent company Viacom, which at one time was a subsidiary of CBS) to air its Nick Jr. programming under the banner Nick Jr. on CBS. as part of a three-year deal which includes distribution of selected Formula One auto races on tape delay. KOL Secret Slumber Party on CBS premiered in September of that year; in the inaugural line-up, two of the programs were new shows, one aired in syndication in 2005 and three were pre-2006 shows. In mid-2007, KOL withdrew sponsorship from CBS's Saturday Morning Block and the name was changed to KEWLopolis on CBS. Complimenting CBS's 2007 line-up was Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, and Sushi Pack. On February 24, 2009, it was announced that CBS renewed its contract with Cookie Jar for another three seasons, through 2012. On September 19, 2009, KEWLopolis has been changed into Cookie Jar TV.

Animated primetime holiday specials

CBS was the original broadcast network for the animated primetime holiday specials based on the comic strip Peanuts, beginning with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. Over thirty holiday Peanuts specials (each for a specific holiday such as Halloween) were broadcast on CBS from that time until 2000, when ABC acquired the broadcast rights. CBS also aired several primetime animated specials based on the work of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), beginning with How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, produced in stop motion by the Rankin/Bass studio, has been another annual holiday staple of CBS since 1972, but that special originated on NBC in 1964.

All of these animated specials, from 1973 until 1990, began with a fondly remembered opening animated logo which showed the words "A CBS Special Presentation" in colorful lettering. The word "SPECIAL", repeated in multiple colors, slowly zoomed out from the frame in a spinning counterclockwise motion against a black background, and rapidly zoomed back into frame as a single word, in white, at the end; the logo was accompanied by a jazzy yet majestic up-tempo fanfare (believed to be incidental music from the CBS crime drama Hawaii Five-O) with dramatic horns and percussion (this appeared at the beginning of all CBS specials of the period (such as the Miss USA pageants and the annual Kennedy Center Honors presentation), not just animated ones). (This opening logo was presumably designed by, or under the supervision of, longtime CBS creative director Lou Dorfsman, who oversaw print and on-air graphics for CBS for nearly thirty years, replacing William Golden, who died in 1959.)

Classical music specials

CBS was also responsible for telecasting the series of Young People's Concerts conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Telecast every few months between 1958 and 1972, first in black-and-white and then switching to color in 1966, these programs introduced millions of children to classical music through the eloquent commentaries by Maestro Bernstein. They were nominated for several Emmy Awards, and were among the first programs ever broadcast from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

In December 1977, CBS was the first network to telecast the Baryshnikov staging of The Nutcracker starring the Russian dancer along with Gelsey Kirkland – a version of the famous ballet that would become a television classic, and remains so today. The production later moved to PBS.

In April 1986, CBS presented a slightly abbreviated version of Horowitz in Moscow, a live piano recital by Vladimir Horowitz, arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century. It marked Horowitz's return to Russia after more than sixty years. The program was shown as an episode of the series CBS News Sunday Morning (9:00 A.M. in the U.S. is 4:00 P.M. in Russia). It was so successful that CBS repeated it a mere two months later by popular demand, this time on videotape, rather than live. In later years, the program was shown as a stand-alone special on PBS, and the current DVD of it omits the Charles Kuralt commentary, but includes additional selections not heard on the CBS telecast.

In 1986, CBS telecast in primetime, in what was now a rare move for a commercial network station, since most primetime classical music specials were now relegated to PBS and A&E;. The program was a concert commemorating the re-opening of Carnegie Hall after its complete renovation. It featured, along with luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein, popular music artists such as Frank Sinatra.

International broadcasts

CBS programs are shown outside the US. For instance, CBS News is shown for a few hours a day on satellite channel Orbit News in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The CBS Evening News is shown in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy on Sky News, despite the fact that Sky is part of News Corporation (owners of Fox News Channel).

In the UK, CBS took over 6 of Chello Zone's channels in 2009. These were the first channels branded CBS outside the US. The channels are called CBS Action, CBS Drama, and CBS Reality, while CBS Reality has a timeshifted (+1) channel as well. Other channels as part of the deal are The Horror Channel and its timeshifted channel.

In Australia, Network Ten has an output deal with CBS Paramount giving them rights to carry the programs Jericho, Dr. Phil, Late Show with David Letterman, NCIS and Numb3rs as well access to stories from 60 Minutes (the rights of which have been sold to the Nine Network which broadcasts their own 60 Minutes).

In Bermuda, there is a CBS affiliate owned by the state-run Bermuda Broadcasting Company using the callsign ZBM.

In Canada, CBS, like all major American TV networks, is carried in the basic program package of all cable and satellite providers. The broadcast is shown almost exactly the same in Canada as in the United States. However, CBS's programming on Canadian cable and satellite systems are subject to the practice of "simsubbing", in which a signal of a Canadian station is placed over CBS's signal, if the programming at that time is the same. As well, many Canadians live close enough to a major American city to pick up the over the air broadcast signal of an American CBS affiliate with an antenna.

In Hong Kong, CBS evening news is aired live in the early morning and the local networks have an agreement to rebroadcast sections 12 hours later to fill up the local news programs when they have insufficient content to report.

The CBS Evening News is seen in the Philippines via satellite on Q-TV (a sister network of broadcaster GMA Network) while The Early Show is shown in that country on the Lifestyle Network. Studio 23 and Maxx, channels owned by broadcaster ABS-CBN in the Philippines show The Late Show with David Letterman.

Controversy

In 1982, the network aired the documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, asserting General William Westmoreland deliberately misled the public about the Vietnam War in order to maintain public support. Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit that was ultimately settled in exchange for an on-air clarification. However, an internal study found that the documentary had violated CBS News Standards.

In 1995, CBS refused to air a segment of 60 Minutes that would have featured an interview with a former president of research and development for Brown & Williamson, the nation's third largest tobacco company. The controversy raised questions about the legal roles in decision making and whether journalistic standards should be compromised despite legal pressures and threats. The decision nevertheless sent shock waves throughout the television industry, the journalism community, and the country. This incident was the basis for the 1999 film by Michael Mann, The Insider.

In 2001, Bernard Goldberg, who was a reporter with CBS for 28 years, had his book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, published. This book heavily criticized the media, and some CBS reporters and news anchors in particular, such as Dan Rather. Goldberg accused CBS of having a liberal bias in most of their news.

In 2004, the FCC imposed a record $550,000 fine on CBS for its broadcast of a Super Bowl half-time show (produced by then sister-unit MTV) in which singer Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed. It was the largest fine ever for a violation of federal decency laws. Following the incident CBS apologized to its viewers and denied foreknowledge of the event, which was broadcast live on TV. In 2008, a Philadelphia federal court annulled the fine imposed on CBS, labelling it "arbitrary and capricious".

CBS aired a controversial episode of 60 Minutes, which questioned U.S. President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. Following allegations of forgery, CBS News admitted that documents used in the story had not been properly authenticated. The following January, CBS fired four people connected to the preparation of the news-segment. Former network news anchor Dan Rather has filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS, contending the story, and his termination, were mishandled.

In 2006, CBS announced it would air only three of its NFL games per week in high definition. The move created some outrage among fans, with some accusing the network of being "cheap."

In 2007, retired Army Major Gen. John Batiste, consultant to CBS News, appeared in a political ad for VoteVets.org critical of President Bush and the war in Iraq. Two days later, CBS stated that appearing in the ad violated Batiste's contract with them and the agreement was terminated.

Partnership

CBS is partner with Wetpaint, a wiki farm company. CBS also has engaged in "egg-vertising", a campaign in the Fall of 2006, which etched television advertisements in 35 million eggs across North America.

See also

CBS Cable, the company's early (and abortive) foray into cable broadcasting.

CBS Daytime

CBS Interactive

CBS Kidshow

CBS Mobile

CBS News

CBS Radio

CBS Radio Network

CBS Sports

CBS Studio Center

CBS Television City

CBS Television Distribution

CBS Television Stations

CBS Productions

Cookie Jar TV

The CW Television Network

List of assets owned by CBS

List of CBS affiliates, arranged by market

List of CBS affiliates, arranged by state

List of programs broadcast by CBS

List of shows previously aired by CBS

Westmoreland v. CBS

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

CBS at YouTube

CBS Eye-dentity Logo Guidelines website

Category:American television networks CBS television network Category:Peabody Award winners Category:Orphan initialisms Category:Companies established in 1927 Category:1927 establishments in the United States Category:New York Yankees owners

Name	Walter Cronkite
Caption	Cronkite in 2004
Birthname	Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr.
Birth date	November 04, 1916 was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–81). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Although he reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombing in World War II, the Nuremberg trials, combat in the Vietnam War, He had remote Dutch ancestry on his father's side, the family surname originally being Krankheyt.

A second bulletin arrived as Cronkite was reading the first one, which detailed the severity of President Kennedy's wounds:

Just before the bulletin cut out, a CBS News staffer was heard saying "Connally too," apparently having just heard the news that Texas Governor John Connally had also been shot while riding in the Presidential limousine with his wife Nellie and Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy.

CBS then rejoined the telecast of ATWT during a commercial break. A commercial for Instant Nescafe coffee and a sponsor bumper (for Best Foods) for the first half of the show that had just completed were then aired, followed by a bumper for the scheduled episode of Route 66 to air that night and a twenty-second station identification break for the CBS affiliates. Just as ATWT was set to return from break, with show announcer Dan McCullough set to announce the sponsor of the second half of the program (Carnation), CBS News broke in with the bumper slide a second time. This bulletin saw Cronkite report in greater detail about the assassination attempt on the President, while also breaking the news of Governor Connally's shooting.

Cronkite then recapped the events as they had happened: that the President and Governor Connally had been shot and were in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital, and no one knew their condition as yet. He then reminded the viewers that CBS News would continue to provide updates as more information came in.

CBS then decided to return to ATWT, which was now midway through its second segment. The cast had continued to perform live while Cronkite's bulletins broke into the broadcast, unaware of events in Dallas (because the episode was also taped for delayed broadcast purposes, they were not informed of what had happened until after it ended). ATWT then took another scheduled commercial break. The segment before the break would be the last anyone would see of a CBS program - or any network's programming, for that matter- until Tuesday, November 26.

In the middle of a Friskies pet food commercial, the "CBS News Bulletin" bumper slide broke in for the third time. Once again, Cronkite filed an audio-only report:

This particular bulletin went into even more detail than the other two, as for the first time Cronkite detailed where the shooting victims were wounded (Kennedy had been shot in the head, Connally in the chest). At the conclusion of the bulletin, Cronkite told viewers to stay tuned for further details, perhaps implying that the network would be returning to regular programming. However, Cronkite remained on the air for the next ten minutes, continuing to read bulletins as they were handed to him, followed by recapping the events as they were known and interspersing the new information he had received where appropriate. He also brought up recent instances of assassination attempts against sitting Presidents (including the murder of Mayor of Chicago Anton Cermak in a botched assassination attempt on then-President-elect Franklin Roosevelt), as well as a recent attack on United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson in Dallas, which had resulted in extra security measures being taken for Kennedy's visit to the city. He also received word that Congressman Albert Thomas of Texas had been told that for the moment the President and Governor were still alive, which was the first report that gave any indication of their condition.

By 2:00 EST, Cronkite was informed that the camera was ready, and he told the viewers over the air that CBS would be taking a station identification break so that affiliates could join the network. Within twenty seconds, all the CBS affiliates (with the exception of KRLD in Dallas, which was covering the tragedy locally) joined the network's coverage. Cronkite appeared on-air in shirt and tie but without his suit coat, given the urgent nature of the story, and opened with this:

However, the connection was not available at the time and the camera stayed trained on Cronkite in the newsroom. After a few seconds, Cronkite started speaking again, but shortly after he had begun, the broadcast abruptly cut into the meeting, where Barker, KRLD's news director, was reporting (a director could be heard on-air saying "Okay, go ahead. Switch it" while Cronkite was talking). Just before the feed switched to the Dallas Trade Mart meeting, Cronkite informed the viewers that the members of the Trade Mart had just been informed of the President's shooting and that Congressman Jim Wright was telling reporters that both the President and Governor were alive, but both were in serious condition.

The feed then switched to Dallas, with Barker reporting about the incident and the meeting that was to take place. A few minutes after they switched, Barker was told by a fellow reporter, Dick Wheeler, at the meeting that Kennedy was in very critical condition. The scene returned to Cronkite shortly after that, who relayed some more information, but returned to Dallas as a prayer was being said for Kennedy. After the prayer was said, Barker said that there was an unofficial report circulating that President Kennedy had in fact died from his wounds.

After several minutes, Cronkite reported that the President had been given blood transfusions and two priests had been called into the room. He also played an audio report by KRLD's Jim Underwood, recounting that someone had been arrested in the assassination attempt at the Texas School Book Depository. After Underwood's report, Cronkite was told that KRLD was reporting that that the President was dead, which had been heard in Barker's previous report. The coverage went back to Dallas, where Barker reiterated his previous report- that there was an unconfirmed statement that Kennedy was dead, but the source, a doctor at Parkland Hospital who said this to Barker directly, "would normally be a good one." Approximately three minutes later, Barker declared the assassination to be confirmed, although neither the Associated nor the United Presses had done so. Barker retracted the statement moments later, saying that there was no absolute confirmation. Shortly thereafter CBS stopped showing KRLD's coverage and returned to its own coverage of the incident, and as he had been doing Cronkite reported the events as they were known. At 2:27 EST, Cronkite reported that Father Oscar Huber, one of the priests called into the room, had administered the Last Rites to the President, but as far as anyone knew the President was still alive and no official source had confirmed the reports from Barker.

Within ten seconds of that report, word reached Cronkite of another report that had been given by Dallas-based correspondent Dan Rather to CBS Radio. At 2:22 EST, while CBS' news coverage was still focused at the Dallas Trade Mart, Rather called executive Mort Dank and said, in regards to Kennedy's condition, "I think he's dead." While this was not an official confirmation of the death of the President, which had yet to be relayed, CBS radio newscaster [[Alan Jackson (broadcaster)| Allan Jackson]] was handed a sheet of paper saying that Kennedy was in fact dead and reported as if the incident was officially confirmed. Five minutes later, after some debate over whether or not to mention it, Cronkite relayed the following information to the viewing audience:

Since Rather's report, as he had delivered it, only theorized that the President was dead, and no word to that effect had come from any wire service, Cronkite stressed that the report was not an official confirmation of the President's death and continued to report on the incident as if the President was still alive, relaying that Father Huber, who had told reporters on the scene that he had to pull back a sheet covering Kennedy's body to perform the Last Rites on him, didn't believe that the President was dead at the time he entered the room.

Less than two minutes later, Cronkite received a report that the two priests who were with Kennedy were now saying that he was dead, and declared that that was as close to official as they could get. However, he continued to stress that there was no official confirmation from the hospital of Kennedy's death, although through the tone of his voice Cronkite seemed to resign himself to that being the most likely outcome. Cronkite continued to await official word from Parkland Hospital while recapping the events, including receiving word that government sources were now saying that the President was dead. (It should be noted that the same report reached all three major networks, but only ABC took it as official word of the assassination.) After briefly speaking about what Kennedy had done earlier that day, Cronkite noted that it was now apparent that the President was dead(even though the official bulletin had, of course, not arrived yet), saying that his plane from Fort Worth "flew him to his rendezvous with death, apparently, in Dallas, Texas."

Immediately after that, at approximately 2:38 p.m. EST, Cronkite was remarking on the increased security presence in Dallas for the President's visit for fear of protests, again bringing up the assault on Adlai Stevenson. While he was speaking, one of two news editors who had been standing by the newsroom's two wire machines pulled a bulletin from the Associated Press machine and began walking toward Cronkite's desk with it.

Just as he had said that, the editor handed Cronkite the bulletin. Cronkite stopped speaking, put on his eyeglasses, looked over the bulletin sheet for a moment, took off his glasses, and made the official announcement:

After making that announcement, Cronkite paused briefly, put his glasses back on, and swallowed hard to maintain his composure. With noticeable emotion in his voice he intoned the next sentence of the news report:"

In a 2003 CBS special commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination, Cronkite said that he was standing at the United Press wire machine when the bulletin broke and was clamoring to get on the air as fast as was possible. Recalling his reaction upon having the death confirmed to him, he said:

Vietnam War

In mid-February 1968, on the urging of his executive producer Ernest Leiser, Cronkite and Leiser journeyed to Vietnam to cover the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. They were invited to dine with General Creighton Abrams, the current commander of all forces in Vietnam who Cronkite knew from World War II. According to Leiser, Abrams told Cronkite, "we cannot win this Goddamned war, and we ought to find a dignified way out."

Upon return, Cronkite and Leiser wrote separate editorial reports based on that trip. Cronkite, an excellent writer, preferred Leiser's text over his own. Following Cronkite's editorial report, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." This account has been questioned in a recent publication on journalistic accuracy. Several weeks later, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Cronkite was anchoring the CBS network coverage as violence and protests occurred outside the convention, as well as scuffles inside the convention hall. When Dan Rather was punched to the floor (on camera) by security personnel, Cronkite commented, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."

Other historic events

.]] The first publicly transmitted, live trans-Atlantic program, was broadcast via the Telstar satellite on July 23, 1962 at 3:00 p.m. EDT, and Cronkite was one of the main presenters in this multinational broadcast. The broadcast was made possible in Europe by Eurovision and in North America by NBC, CBS, ABC, and the CBC. While a videotaped report by Peter Kalischer about the apparently successful Vietnam war peace talks was being shown to the nation, Johnson's press secretary Tom Johnson (no relative of Lyndon Johnson) telephoned Cronkite to inform him of Johnson's death. CBS cut abruptly from the report at 6:38 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to Cronkite, who was still speaking to Johnson on the phone. After holding up a finger to pause and let Johnson finish, he broke the news to the nation that the former President had died, then continued to speak with Johnson (who was not patched through to the air) for a few more seconds to gather whatever remaining details he could, then hung up the phone and relayed those details to the audience. During the final ten minutes of that broadcast, Cronkite reported on the death, giving a retrospective on the life of nation's 36th president, and announced that CBS would air a special on Lyndon Johnson later that evening. This story was re-told on a 2007 CBS-TV special honoring Cronkite's 90th birthday. Tom Johnson later became president of CNN.

NBC-TV's Garrick Utley, anchoring NBC Nightly News that evening, also interrupted his newscast in order to break the story, doing so about three minutes after Cronkite on CBS. ABC, however, did not cover the story at all, since, at the time, that network fed its evening newscast to local stations at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, even though many affiliates tape-delayed the broadcast to air at 6:30 or 7:00 p.m.

In December 1963, Cronkite introduced The Beatles to the United States by airing a four-minute story on band on the CBS Evening News.

Retirement

On February 14, 1980, Cronkite announced that he intended to retire from the CBS Evening News; at the time, CBS had a policy of mandatory retirement by age 65. Although sometimes compared to a father figure or an uncle figure, in an interview about his retirement he described himself as being more like a "comfortable old shoe" to his audience. His last day in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News was on March 6, 1981; he was succeeded the following Monday by Dan Rather.

Cronkite's farewell statement:

Other activities

at the White House, 1981]]

Reporting

As he had promised on his last show as anchor in 1981, Cronkite continued to broadcast occasionally as a special correspondent for CBS, CNN, and NPR into the 21st century; one such occasion was Cronkite anchoring the second space flight by John Glenn in 1998 as he had Glenn's first in 1962. In 1983, he reported on the British General Election for the ITV current affairs series World In Action, interviewing, among many others, the victorious Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Cronkite hosted the annual Vienna New Year's Concert on PBS from 1985 to 2008, succeeded by Julie Andrews in 2009. For many years, until 2002, he was also the host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.

In 1998, Cronkite hosted the 90-minute documentary, Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, produced by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. The film documented Silicon Valley's rise from the origin of Stanford University to the current high-technology powerhouse. The documentary was broadcast on PBS throughout the United States and in 26 countries. Prior to 2004, he could also be seen in the opening movie 'Back to Neverland' shown in the Walt Disney World attraction, The Magic of Disney Animation, interviewing Robin Williams as if he is still on the CBS News channel, ending his on-camera time with his famous catchphrase. In the featurette, Cronkite describes the steps taken in the creation of an animated film, while Robin Williams becomes an animated character (and even becomes Walter Cronkite, impersonating his voice). He also was shown inviting Disney guests and tourists to the Disney Classics Theater.

On May 21, 1999, Walter Cronkite participated in a panel discussion on Integrity in the Media with Ben Bradlee and Mike McCurry at the Connecticut Forum in Hartford, Connecticut. Cronkite provided a particularly funny anecdote about taking a picture from a house in Houston, Texas where a newsworthy event occurred and being praised for getting a unique photograph, only to find out later that the city desk had provided him with the wrong address.

Voice-overs

Cronkite narrated the IMAX film about the Space Shuttle, The Dream is Alive, released in 1985. From May 26, 1986 to August 15, 1994, he was the narrator's voice in the EPCOT Center attraction, Spaceship Earth, at Walt Disney World. He provided the pivotal voice of Captain Neweyes in the 1993 animated film , delivering his trademark line at the end. In 1995, he made an appearance on Broadway, providing the voice of the titular book in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Cronkite was a finalist for NASA's Journalist in Space program, which mirrored the Teacher in Space Project, an opportunity that was suspended after the Challenger disaster in 1986. He recorded voice-overs for the 1995 film Apollo 13, modifying the script he was given to make it more "Cronkitian." In 2002, Cronkite was the voice of Benjamin Franklin in all 40 episodes of the educational television cartoon Liberty's Kids, which included a news segment ending with "And that's the way it is on...[a historic date]." His distinctive voice provided the narration for the television ads of the University of Texas at Austin, his alma mater, with its 'We're Texas' ad campaign.

He held amateur radio operator license KB2GSD and narrated a 2003 American Radio Relay League documentary explaining amateur radio's role in disaster relief. Unusually, Cronkite was a Novice-class licensee—the entry level license—for his entire, and long, tenure in the hobby.

On February 15, 2005, he went into the studio at CBS to record narration for WCC Chatham Radio, a documentary about Guglielmo Marconi and his Chatham station, which became the busiest ship-to-shore wireless station in North America from 1914 to 1994. The documentary was directed by Christopher Seufert of Mooncusser Films and premiered at the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center in April 2005. In 2006, Cronkite hosted the World War One Living History Project, a program honoring America's final handful of veterans from the First World War. The program was created by Treehouse Productions and aired on NPR on November 11, 2006. In May 2009, Legacy of War, produced by PBS, was released. Cronkite chronicles, over archive footage, the events following World War II that resulted in America's rise as the dominant world power.

Prior to his death, "Uncle Walter" hosted a number of TV specials and was featured in interviews about the times and events that occurred during his career as America's "most trusted" man. Cronkite was the chairman of The Interfaith Alliance. In 2006, he presented the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award to actor and activist George Clooney on behalf of his organization at its annual dinner in New York.

Cronkite was a vocal advocate for free airtime for political candidates. and Common Cause, for instance, on an unsuccessful lobbying effort to have an amendment added to the McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001 that would have required TV broadcast companies to provide free airtime to candidates. Cronkite criticized the present system of campaign finance which allows elections to "be purchased" by special interests, and he noted that all the European democracies "provide their candidates with extensive free airtime." During the elections held in 2000, the amount spent by candidates in the major TV markets approached $1 billion. "What our campaign asks is that the television industry yield just a tiny percentage of that windfall, less than 1 percent, to fund free airtime."

He was a member of the Constitution Project's bipartisan Liberty and Security Committee. He also supported the nonprofit world hunger organization Heifer International.

In 1998, he supported President Bill Clinton during Clinton's impeachment trial. He was also a proponent of limited world government on the American federalist model, writing fund-raising letters for the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions). In accepting the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the ceremony at the United Nations, Cronkite said: :"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen."

Cronkite contrasted his support for accountable global government with the opposition to it by politically active Christian fundamentalists in the United States: :"Even as with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the United Nations is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation’s conscience.They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil! Well join me… I'm glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan."

In 2003, Cronkite, who owned property on Martha's Vineyard,

Cronkite spoke out against the War on Drugs in support of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing a fundraising letter and appearing in advertisements on behalf of the DPA. In the letter, Cronkite wrote: "Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens. I am speaking of the war on drugs. And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure." from March 30, 1940 until her death from cancer. They had three children: Nancy Cronkite, Mary Kathleen (Kathy) Cronkite, and Walter Leland (Chip) Cronkite III (who is married to actress Deborah Rush); Peter Cronkite is currently attending Horace Mann School. Walter attends Hamilton College, having graduated from the same school.

In late 2005 Cronkite began dating opera singer Joanna Simon, Carly Simon's older sister. Of their relationship Cronkite stated in an interview for the New York Post in January 2006: "We are keeping company, as the old phrase used to be."

Cronkite was an avid sailor and a member of the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary, with the honorary rank of commodore.

Death

In late June 2009, Cronkite was reported to be terminally ill. He died on July 17, 2009, at his home in New York City, at the age of 92. He is believed to have died from cerebrovascular disease. Cronkite's funeral took place on July 23, 2009 at St. Bartholomew's Church in midtown Manhattan, New York City. At his funeral, his friends noted his love of music, including, recently, drumming. He was cremated and his remains buried next to his wife, Betsy, in the family plot at a cemetery in Kansas City.

Legacy

Public credibility and trustfulness

For many years, until a decade after he left his post as anchor, Cronkite was considered one of the most trusted figures in the United States. In contrast, Americans average about 165 words per minute, and fast, difficult-to-understand talkers speak close to 200 words per minute.

Awards and honors

In 1968, the faculty of the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University voted to award Cronkite the Carr Van Anda Award "for enduring contributions to journalism." In 1970, Cronkite received a "Freedom of the Press" George Polk Award. Among Cronkite's numerous awards were four Peabody awards for excellence in broadcasting. Cronkite made the trip to Arizona annually to present the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to a leader in the field of media.

"The values that Mr. Cronkite embodies – excellence, integrity, accuracy, fairness, objectivity – we try to instill in our students each and every day. There is no better role model for our faculty or our students." said Dean Christopher Callahan.

The school, with approximately 1,200 majors, is widely regarded as one of the top journalism schools in the country. It is housed in a new facility in downtown Phoenix that is equipped with 14 digital newsrooms and computer labs, two TV studios, 280 digital student work stations, the Cronkite Theater, the First Amendment Forum, and new technology. The school's students regularly finish at the top of national collegiate journalism competitions, such as the Hearst Journalism Awards program and the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Awards. In 2009, students won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for college print reporting.

In 2008, The state-of-the-art journalism education complex in the heart of ASU's Downtown Phoenix campus was also built in his honor. The Walter Cronkite Regents Chair in Communication seats the Texas College of Communications dean. Occupying 293 linear feet (almost 90 metres) of shelf space, the papers document Cronkite's journalism career. Amongst the collected material are Cronkite's early beginnings while he still lived in Houston. They encompass his coverage of World War II as a United Press International correspondent, where he cemented his reputation by taking on hazardous overseas assignments. as he compiled an oral history to write his autobiography, A Reporter's Life, which was published in 1996.

As a newsman, Cronkite devoted his attention to the early days of the space program, and the "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration honoured Cronkite on February 28, 2006. Michael Coats, director of NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, presented Cronkite with the Ambassador of Exploration Award. Cronkite was the first non-astronaut thus honoured.

NASA presented Cronkite with a moon rock sample from the early Apollo expeditions spanning 1969 to 1972. Cronkite passed on the Moon rock to Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas at Austin, and it became part of the collection at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Carleton said at this occasion, "We are deeply honored by Walter Cronkite’s decision to entrust this prestigious award to the Center for American History. The Center already serves as the proud steward of his professional and personal papers, which include his coverage of the space program for CBS News. It is especially fitting that the archive documenting Walter's distinguished career should also include one of the Moon rocks that the heroic astronauts of the Apollo program brought to Earth."

References

Further reading

External links

Cronkite: Eyewitness to a Century - Exhibit at The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum''

Remembering Walter Cronkite - slideshow by Life Magazine

AP Obituary in the New York Times

Walter Cronkite, Iconic Anchor, Is Dead, The New York Times, July 17, 2009

RIP Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite - Daily Telegraph obituary

Celebrating Cronkite while Ignoring what he did by Glenn Greenwald, Salon Magazine

Cronkite's 1968 Dissent on Vietnam Helped Save Thousands of Lives by Greg Mitchell

Anchorman Was Critical of Media Consolidation, Wars in Vietnam and Iraq by Democracy Now!

Web ZIne from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University

The Walter Cronkite Papers, the University of Texas at Austin

Cronkite's personal blog

Walter Cronkite Archive of American Television Interview

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Category:1916 births Category:2009 deaths Category:60 Minutes correspondents Category:Amateur radio people Category:American anti-Vietnam War activists Category:American bloggers Category:American broadcast news analysts Category:American Episcopalians Category:American game show hosts Category:American people of Dutch descent Category:American television news anchors Category:American television personalities Category:American television reporters and correspondents Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in New York Category:Deaths from stroke Category:Drug policy reform activists Category:Peabody Award winners Category:People from St. Joseph, Missouri Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Space advocacy Category:University of Texas at Austin alumni Category:War correspondents Category:World federalists

Name	Sir Richard Branson
Title	Sir
Caption	Branson at the Time 100 Gala, 4 May 2010.
Birth name	Richard Charles Nicholas Branson
Birth date	July 18, 1950
Birth place	Blackheath, London,England, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Residence	London, England
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Years active	1966–Present
Known	Chairman of Virgin Group
Networth	$4 billion (2010)
Spouse	(divorced)
Children	3

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is a British industrialist, best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 companies.

His first successful business venture was a magazine called Student when aged 16. In 1970, he set up an audio record mail-order business. In 1972, he opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, later known as Virgin Megastores. Branson's Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s—as he set up Virgin Atlantic Airways and expanded the Virgin Records music label.

Richard Branson is the 212th richest person in the world according to Forbes' 2010 list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of approximately £2.97 billion (US$4.0billion).

Early life

Branson was born at Stonefield Nursing Home, a home for children with special needs, in Blackheath, London, the son of barrister Edward James Branson and Eve Branson. His grandfather, the Right Honourable Sir George Arthur Harwin Branson, was a judge of the High Court of Justice and a Privy Councillor. Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School (now Bishopsgate School) until the age of thirteen. He then attended Stowe School until the age of sixteen. Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student, but later discovered his ability to connect with others.

Personal life

Branson is the eldest of four siblings. He has two sisters, Lindi and Vanessa Branson. His brother, Ted, followed in their father's footsteps and became a barrister. Branson's poor academic records contrasted with excellent performance in sports, especially swimming.

With Lady Joan Templeman he has two children, Holly (b. 1981) and Sam (b. 1985). He revealed in an interview with Piers Morgan that he and wife Joan had a daughter named Clare Sarah who died when she was just four days old in 1979. The couple wed—at their daughter Holly's suggestion when she was eight years old—in 1989 at Necker Island, a island in the British Virgin Islands that Branson owns. He also owns land on the Caribbean Islands of Antigua and Barbuda. Holly Branson is now a doctor. Branson is a supporter of Oxford United.

In 1998, Branson released his autobiography, titled Losing My Virginity, an international bestseller.

Branson was deeply saddened by the disappearance of fellow adventurer Steve Fossett in September 2007; and, the following month, he wrote an article for Time magazine, titled "My Friend, Steve Fossett".

Influences

Branson has stated in a number of interviews that he derives much influence from non-fiction books. He most commonly names Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, explaining that Mandela is "one of the most inspiring men I have ever met and had the honour to call my friend." Owing to his interest in humanitarian and ecological issues, Branson also lists Al Gore's best-selling book, An Inconvenient Truth and The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock amongst his favourites. According to Branson's own book, Screw It, Let's do It. Lessons in Life, he is also a huge fan of works by Jung Chang.

Record business

Branson started business after he travelled across the English Channel and purchased crates of "cut-out" records from a record discounter. He sold the records out of the boot of his car to retail outlets in London. He continued selling cut-outs through a record mail order business in 1970. Trading under the name "Virgin", he sold records for considerably less than the "High Street" outlets, especially the chain W. H. Smith. The name "Virgin" was suggested by one of Branson's early employees because they were all new at business. At the time, many products were sold under restrictive marketing agreements that limited discounting, despite efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to limit so-called resale price maintenance. In effect, Branson began the series of changes that led to large-scale discounting of recorded music.

Branson eventually started a record shop in Oxford Street in London and, shortly after, launched the record label Virgin Records with Nik Powell. Branson earned enough money from his record store to buy a country estate, in which he installed a recording studio. He leased out studio time to fledgling artists, including multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.

In 1971, Branson was arrested and charged for selling records in Virgin stores that had been declared export stock. He settled out-of-court with UK Customs and Excise with an agreement to repay the unpaid tax and a fine. Branson's mother Eve re-mortgaged the family home to help pay the settlement. Branson says that he wept when the sale was completed since the record business had been the birth of the Virgin Empire. He later formed V2 Records to re-enter the music business.

Business ventures

Branson formed Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984, launched Virgin Mobile in 1999, Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000. He was 9th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2006, worth just over £3 billion. Branson wrote in his autobiography of the decision to start an airline:

In 1993, Branson took what many saw as being one of his riskier business exploits by entering into the railway business. Virgin Trains won the franchises for the former Intercity West Coast and Cross-Country sectors of British Rail. Launched with the usual Branson fanfare with promises of new high-tech tilting trains and enhanced levels of service, Virgin Trains soon ran into problems with the rolling stock and infrastructure it had inherited from British Rail. The company's reputation was almost irreversibly damaged in the late 1990s as it struggled to make trains reliably run on time while it awaited the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line and the arrival of new rolling stock.

Virgin acquired European short-haul airline Euro Belgian Airlines in 1996 and renamed it Virgin Express. In 2006, the airline was merged with SN Brussels Airlines forming Brussels Airlines. It also started a national airline based in Nigeria, called Virgin Nigeria. Another airline, Virgin America, began flying out of the San Francisco International Airport in August 2007. Branson has also developed a Virgin Cola brand and even a Virgin Vodka brand, which has not been a very successful enterprise. As a consequence of these lacklustre performers, the satirical British fortnightly magazine Private Eye has been critical of Branson and his companies (see Private Eye image caption).

After the so-called campaign of "dirty tricks", British Airways settled the case, giving £500,000 to Branson and a further £110,000 to his airline and had to pay legal fees of up to £3 million. Branson divided his compensation (the so-called "BA bonus") among his staff.

On 25 September 2004, Branson announced the signing of a deal under which a new space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, will license the technology behind Spaceship One—funded by Microsoft co-Founder Paul Allen and designed by legendary American aeronautical engineer and visionary Burt Rutan—to take paying passengers into suborbital space. Virgin Galactic (wholly owned by Virgin Group) plans to make flights available to the public with tickets priced at US$200,000 using Scaled Composites White Knight Two.

Branson's next venture with the Virgin group is Virgin Fuels, which is set to respond to global warming and exploit the recent spike in fuel costs by offering a revolutionary, cheaper fuel for automobiles and, in the near future, aircraft. Branson has stated that he was formerly a global warming sceptic and was influenced in his decision by a breakfast meeting with Al Gore.

Branson has been tagged as a "transformational leader" in the management lexicon, with his maverick strategies and his stress on the Virgin Group as an organisation driven on informality and information, one that is bottom-heavy rather than strangled by top-level management.

On 21 September 2006, Branson pledged to invest the profits of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains in research for environmentally friendly fuels. The investment is estimated to be worth $3 billion.

On 4 July 2006, Branson sold his Virgin Mobile company to UK cable TV, broadband, and telephone company NTL/ for almost £1 billion. As part of the sale, the company pays a minimum of £8.5 million per year to use the Virgin name and Branson became the company's largest shareholder. The new company was launched with much fanfare and publicity on 8 February 2007, under the name Virgin Media. The decision to merge his Virgin Media Company with NTL was in order to integrate both of the companies' compatible parts of commerce. Branson used to own three quarters of Virgin Mobile, whereas now he owns 15 percent of the new Virgin Media company.

In 2006, Branson formed Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, an entertainment company focussed on creating new stories and characters for a global audience. The company was founded with author Deepak Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, and entrepreneurs Sharad Devarajan and Gotham Chopra.

Branson also launched the Virgin Health Bank on 1 February 2007, offering parents-to-be the opportunity to store their baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells in private and public stem cell banks.

In June 2006, a tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led US and UK competition authorities to investigate price-fixing attempts between Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. In August 2007, British Airways was fined £271 million over the allegations. Virgin Atlantic was given immunity for tipping off the authorities and received no fine—a controversial decision the Office of Fair Trading defended as being in the public interest.

On 9 February 2007, Branson announced the setting up of a new Global science and technology prize—The Virgin Earth Challenge—in the belief that history has shown that prizes of this nature encourage technological advancements for the good of mankind. The Virgin Earth Challenge will award $25 million to the individual or group who are able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects. This removal must have long-term effects and contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate.

Branson also announced that he would be joined in the adjudication of the Prize by a panel of five judges, all world authorities in their respective fields: Al Gore, Sir Crispin Tickell, Tim Flannery, James E. Hansen, and James Lovelock. The panel of judges will be assisted in their deliberations by The Climate Group and Special Advisor to The Virgin Earth Prize Judges, Steve Howard.

Richard Branson got involved with football when he sponsored Nuneaton Borough for their January 2006 FA Cup 3rd round game against Middlesbrough. The game ended 1-1, and the Virgin brand was also on Nuneaton Borough's shirts for the replay which they eventually lost 2-5.

In August 2007, Branson announced that he bought a 20 percent stake in Malaysia's AirAsia X.

On 13 October 2007, Branson's Virgin Group sought to add Northern Rock to its empire after submitting an offer that would result in Branson personally owning 30% of the company, changing the company's name from Northern Rock to Virgin Money. The Daily Mail ran a campaign against his bid and Liberal Democrats' financial spokesperson Vince Cable suggested in the House of Commons that Branson's criminal conviction for tax evasion might be felt by some as a good enough reason not to trust him with public money .

On 10 January 2008, Branson's Virgin Healthcare announced that it would open a chain of health care clinics that would offer conventional medical care alongside homoeopathic and complementary therapies. The Financial Times reported that Ben Bradshaw, UK's health minister, welcomed the launch. "I am pleased that Virgin Healthcare is proposing to work with GPs to help develop more integrated services for patients."

Plans where GPs could be paid for referring National Health Service (NHS) patients to private Virgin services were abandoned in June 2008. The BMA warned the plan would "damage clinical objectivity", there would be a financial incentive for GPs to push patients towards the Virgin services at the centre. Plans to take over an NHS Practice in Swindon were subsequently abandoned in late September 2008.

In February 2009, Branson's Virgin organisation were reported as bidding to buy the former Honda Formula One team. Branson later stated an interest in Formula One but claimed that, before the Virgin brand became involved with Honda or any other team, Formula One would have to develop a more economically efficient and environmentally responsible image. At the start of the 2009 formula one season on 28 March, it was announced that Virgin would be sponsoring the new Brawn GP team., with discussions also under way about introducing a less "dirty" fuel in the medium term. After the end of the season and the subsequent purchase of Brawn GP by Mercedes, Branson invested in an 80% buyout of Manor Grand Prix with the team being renamed to Virgin Racing.

Branson and Tony Fernandes, owner of Air Asia and Lotus F1 Racing, had a bet for the 2010 F1 season where the team's boss should work on the winner's airline for a day dressed as a stewardess. Fernandes escaped as the winner of the bet, as Lotus Racing ended 10th in the championship, while Virgin Racing ended 12th and last.

Branson's Ninety Acres Culinary Center in New Jersey will open in December 2009 with a restaurant run by chef David Felton, cooking school, wine school and working farm. The culinary center is the first phase to turn Natirar, the King of Morocco’s former estate, into a luxury resort, spa and culinary center.

Humanitarian initiatives

In the late 1990s, Branson and musician Peter Gabriel discussed with Nelson Mandela their idea of a small, dedicated group of leaders, working objectively and without any vested personal interest to solve difficult global conflicts.

On 18 July 2007, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nelson Mandela announced the formation of a new group, The Elders, in a speech he delivered on the occasion of his 89th birthday. The founding members of this group are Desmond Tutu, Graça Machel, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson, and Muhammad Yunus. Fundraising activity to support the school is notably achieved by the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, sponsored by Virgin Group, at its yearly event, where places to join Richard Branson on trips to South Africa to provide coaching and mentoring to students are auctioned to attendees. In 2009, Jason Luckhurst and Boyd Kershaw of Practicus, Martin Ainscough of the Ainscough Group and Matthew Riley of Daisy Communications helped raise £150,000 through the auction.

In September 2007, Richard Branson chaired the jury of the first Picnic Green Challenge, a €500,000 award for best new green initiative, set up by the Dutch "Postcode Loterij" (ZIP code Lottery) and the PICNIC Network of creative professionals. The first Green Challenge was won by Qurrent with the Qbox.

Branson was the first celebrity guest for the popular charity fund raisers, Reserve Dinners, raising over $75,000 in one evening towards his Virgin Unite charity.

In March 2008, Richard Branson hosted an environmental gathering at his private island, Necker Island, in the Caribbean with several prominent entrepreneurs, celebrities, and world leaders. They discussed global warming-related problems facing the world, hoping that this meeting will be a precursor to many more future discussions regarding similar problems. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Larry Page of Google were in attendance.

On 8 May 2009, Branson took over Mia Farrow's hunger strike in protest of the Sudanese government expulsion of aid groups from the Darfur region. He concluded his scheduled 3-day fast on 11 May. Later that year, he joined the project Soldiers of Peace, a movie against all wars and for a global peace.

World record attempts

Richard Branson made several world record-breaking attempts after 1985, when in the spirit of the Blue Riband he attempted the fastest Atlantic Ocean crossing. His first attempt in the "Virgin Atlantic Challenger" led to the boat capsizing in British waters and a rescue by RAF helicopter, which received wide media coverage. Some newspapers called for Branson to reimburse the government for the rescue cost. In 1986, in his "Virgin Atlantic Challenger II", with sailing expert Daniel McCarthy, he beat the record by two hours. A year later his hot air balloon "Virgin Atlantic Flyer" crossed the Atlantic. This was the largest balloon at 2.3 million cubic feet (65,000 m³), and the first hot-air balloon crossing the Atlantic.

In January 1991, Branson crossed the Pacific from Japan to Arctic Canada, , in a balloon of . This broke the record, with a speed of .

Between 1995 and 1998 Branson, Per Lindstrand and Steve Fossett made attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. In late 1998 they made a record-breaking flight from Morocco to Hawaii but were unable to complete a global flight before Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones in Breitling Orbiter 3 in March 1999.

In March 2004, Branson set a record by travelling from Dover to Calais in a Gibbs Aquada, in 1 hour, 40 minutes, and 6 seconds, the fastest crossing of the English Channel in an amphibious vehicle. The previous record of six hours was set by two Frenchmen. The cast of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond, attempted to break this record in an amphibious vehicle which they had constructed, and, while successfully crossing the channel, did not break the record of Branson.

In September 2008 Branson and his children made an unsuccessful attempt at an Eastbound record crossing of the Atlantic ocean under sail in the sloop Virgin Money. The boat, also known as Speedboat, is owned by NYYC member Alex Jackson, who was a co-skipper on this passage, with Branson and Mike Sanderson. After 2 days, 4 hours, winds of force 7 to 9 (strong gale), and seas of , a 'monster wave' destroyed the spinnaker, washed a ten-man life raft overboard and severely ripped the mainsail. She eventually continued to St. George's, Bermuda. In March 2010 Richard tried for the world record of putting a round of golf in the dark at the Black Light Mini Golf in The Docklands, Melbourne, Australia. He succeeded in getting 41 on the par 45 course.

Television, film, and print

.]] Branson has guest starred, usually playing himself, on several television shows, including Friends, Baywatch, Birds of a Feather, Only Fools and Horses, The Day Today, a special episode of the comedy Goodness Gracious Me and Tripping Over. Branson made several appearances during the nineties on the BBC Saturday morning show Live & Kicking, where he was referred to as 'the pickle man' by comedy act Trev and Simon (in reference to Branston Pickle). Branson also appears in a cameo early in XTC's "Generals and Majors" video.

He was also the star of a reality television show on Fox called (2004), in which sixteen contestants were tested for their entrepreneurship and sense of adventure. It did not succeed as a rival show to Donald Trump's The Apprentice and only lasted one season.

His high public profile often leaves him open as a figure of satire—the 2000 AD series Zenith features a parody of Branson as a super villain, as the comic's publisher and favoured distributor and the Virgin group were in competition at the time. He is also caricatured in The Simpsons episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love" as the tycoon Arthur Fortune, and as the ballooning megalomaniac Richard Chutney (a pun on Branson, as in Branston Pickle) in Believe Nothing. The character Grandson Richard 39 in Terry Pratchett's Wings is modelled on Branson.

He has a cameo appearance in several films: Around the World in 80 Days (2004), where he played a hot-air balloon operator; Superman Returns, where he was credited as a 'Shuttle Engineer' and appeared alongside his son, Sam, with a Virgin Galactic-style commercial suborbital shuttle at the centre of his storyline. He also has a cameo in the James Bond film Casino Royale. Here, he is seen as a passenger going through Miami Airport security check-in and being frisked – several Virgin Atlantic planes appear soon after. British Airways edited out Branson's cameo in their in-flight screening of the movie.

He makes a number of brief and disjointed appearances in the cult classic documentary Derek and Clive Get the Horn which follows the exploits of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore recording their last comedy album. Branson and his mother were also featured in the documentary film, Lemonade Stories. In early 2006 on Rove Live, Rove McManus and Sir Richard pushed each other into a swimming pool fully clothed live on TV during a "Live at your house" episode.

Branson is a Star Trek fan and named his new spaceship VSS Enterprise in honour of the famous Star Trek ships, and in 2006, offered actor William Shatner a free ride on the inaugural space launch of Virgin Galactic. In an interview in Time magazine, 10 August 2009, Shatner claims that Branson approached him asking how much he would pay for a ride on the spaceship. In response, Shatner asked "how much would you pay me to do it?"

In August 2007, Branson announced on The Colbert Report that he had named a new aircraft Air Colbert. He later doused political satirist and talk show host Stephen Colbert with water from his mug. Branson subsequently took a retaliatory splash from Colbert. The interview quickly ended, with both laughing as shown on the episode aired on Comedy Central on 22 August 2007. The interview was promoted on The Report as the Colbert-Branson Interview Trainwreck. Branson then made a cameo appearance on The Soup playing an intern working under Joel McHale who had been warned against getting into water fights with Stephen Colbert, and being subsequently fired.

In March 2008 he made a small appearance in a budget Bollywood action film alongside Neha Dhupia. Branson caused a stir in the Indian media as he turned Dhupia upside down on a stage.

In July 2010, Branson narrated Australian sailor Jessica Watson's documentary about her solo sailing trip around the world. It premiered on ONEHD on 16 August 2010.

Politics

Branson was knighted in 1999 for "services to entrepreneurship" and presented as a millennium icon. In the 1980s, he was briefly given the post of "litter Tsar" by Margaret Thatcher—charged with "keeping Britain tidy". He was again seen as close to the government when the Labour Party came to power in 1997. In 2005 he declared that there were only negligible differences between the two main parties on economic matters. He has frequently been mentioned as a candidate for Mayor of London, and polls have suggested he would be a viable candidate, though he has yet to express interest.

Business practices

Branson's business empire is owned by a complicated series of offshore trusts and companies. The Sunday Times stated that his wealth is calculated at £3.065 billion; if he were to retire to his Caribbean island and liquidate all of this he would pay relatively little in tax.

When Virgin Mobile launched its service in Canada on 1 March 2005, the use of "naughty nurses" in its advertising triggered The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario to demand an apology from Branson and an immediate stop to the campaign, and called on members to boycott Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile spokeswoman Paula Lash said the company never intended to offend anyone, but was not about to pull the advertising.

When Virgin Mobile included "super hot holiday" wrapping paper with the December 2005 issue of youth magazine Vice, as part of the Hot Box promotion, the wrapping paper contained illustrated Christmas angels, where the male angel is touching the female's breast, while the female angel has her hand on the male's genitals. Famous Players stopped its partnership deals with Virgin Mobile after a complaint.

Honours

In 1993, Branson was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Technology from Loughborough University.

In the New Years Honours list dated 30 December 1999, HM The Queen signified her intention to confer the honour of Knight bachelor on him for his "services to entrepreneurship". He was knighted by HRH The Prince of Wales on 30 March 2000 at an investiture in Buckingham Palace.

Also, in 2000, Branson received the 'Tony Jannus Award' for his accomplishments in commercial air transportation.

Branson is the patron of several charities, including the International Rescue Corps and Prisoners Abroad, a registered charity which supports Britons who are detained outside of the UK.

Branson appears at No. 85 on the 2002 list of "100 Greatest Britons" (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public). Sir Richard also ranks No. 86 on Channel 4's 2003 list of "100 Worst Britons". Sir Richard was also ranked in 2007's Time Magazine "Top 100 Most Influential People in the World". In 2009, Branson was voted the UK's "Celebrity Dream Boss" in an opinion poll by Cancer Research UK.

On 7 December 2007, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon presented Branson with the United Nations Correspondents Association Citizen of the World Award for his support for environmental and humanitarian causes.

See also

Virgin Group

Virgin Earth Challenge

List of Richard Branson's business ventures

Notes

References

Branson, Richard. Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, And Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way, 1999, Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0-8129-3229-3

Branson, Richard. Losing My Virginity, Revised Edition First Published in Great Britain by Virgin Books Limited, London, 2002

Branson, Sir Richard and Prescott, Colin. To the Edge of Space: The Adventures of a Balloonist, 2000, Box tree. ISBN 0-7522-1865-4

Branson, Sir Richard. Sir Richard Branson, the Autobiography, 2002, Longman. ISBN 0-582-51224-7

Branson, Sir Richard. Losing my virginity: The autobiography, 2005, ISBN 0-7535-1020-0

Bower, Tom. Branson, 2001, ISBN 1-84115-400-8

Branson, Sir Richard. Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons in Life, 2006, ISBN 0-7535-1099-5

Branson, Sir Richard. Screw It, Let's Do It Expanded: Lessons in Life and Business, 2007, ISBN 0-7535-1149-7

Specter, Michael. Branson's Luck". The New Yorker, 14 May 2007, pp. 114–25.

Bibliography

External links

Virgin Group Website

Sir Richard Branson on Twitter

"Richard Branson's Page" on virgin.com

"Richard Branson's Blog" on virgin.com

"Richard Branson's autobiography" on virgin.com

Richard Branson's Interview on India Infoline

Richard Branson's Virgin Success

Gonzo Way of Branding Fast Company magazine article on Sir Richard Branson

TED Talks: Richard Branson's life at 30,000 feet at TED in 2007

PICNIC Green Challenge

Lemonade Stories, a documentary film featuring Richard Branson and his mother, Eve Branson.

Richard Branson Charlie Rose interviews

Profile on BBC News dated 27 September 2004

Interview on BBC World Service 24 November 2006

Video of Richard Branson speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival, 5 July 2007

Branson Interview on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, 27 June 2008

Richard Branson at Random House Australia

One of 2010 most influential tycoons

Entrepreneur Spotlight: Richard Branson

Category:1944 births Category:British billionaires Category:British music industry executives Category:Britannia Trophy winners Category:English aviators Category:English balloonists Category:English businesspeople Category:Formula One people Category:Knights Bachelor Category:Living people Category:Old Stoics Category:People from Blackheath, London Category:Segrave Trophy recipients Category:Virgin Group

:''This article is about the British novelist. For the wife of American football quarterback Archie Manning and mother of Cooper, Peyton, and Eli Manning, see their respective articles.

Name	Olivia Manning
Alt	Manning as a young woman. She looks into the camera with a serious expression. Short, wavy hair is topped by a hat with veiling.
Birthdate	March 02, 1908
Birthplace	Portsmouth
Deathdate
Deathplace	Isle of Wight
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	British}}

Olivia Mary Manning CBE (2 March 1908 – 23 July 1980) was a British novelist, poet, writer and reviewer. Her fiction and non-fiction, frequently detailing journeys and personal odysseys, were principally set in England, Ireland, Europe and the Middle East. She often wrote from her personal experience, though her books also demonstrate strengths in imaginative writing. Her books are widely admired for her artistic eye and vivid descriptions of place.

Manning's youth was divided between Portsmouth and Ireland, giving her what she described as "the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere". She attended art school, and moved to London, where her first serious novel, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937. In August 1939 she married R.D. Smith ("Reggie"), a British Council lecturer posted in Bucharest, Romania, and subsequently in Greece, Egypt and Palestine as the Nazis over-ran Eastern Europe. Her experiences formed the basis for her best known work, the six novels making up The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. The overall quality of her output was considered uneven by critics, but this series, published between 1960 and 1980, was described by Anthony Burgess as "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer".

Manning returned to London after the war and lived there until her death, writing poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, reviews, and drama for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Both Manning and her husband had affairs, but they never contemplated divorce. Her relationships with writers such as Stevie Smith and Iris Murdoch were difficult, as an insecure Manning was jealous of their greater success. Her constant grumbling about all manner of subjects is reflected in her nickname, "Olivia Moaning", but Reggie never wavered in his role as his wife's principal supporter and encourager, confident that her talent would ultimately be recognised. As she had feared, real fame only came after her death in 1980, when an adaptation of Fortunes of War was televised in 1987.

Manning's books have received limited critical attention; as during her life, opinions are divided, particularly about her characterisation and portrayal of other cultures. Her works tend to minimize issues of gender, and are not easily classified as feminist literature. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has highlighted Manning's importance as a woman writer of war fiction and of the British Empire in decline. Her works are critical of war, racism, colonialism and imperialism, and examine themes of displacement and physical and emotional alienation.

Early years

Olivia Manning was born in North End, Portsmouth on 2 March 1908.

Manning adored her lively, handsome, womanising father who entertained others by singing Gilbert and Sullivan and reciting poetry he had memorized during long sea voyages. In contrast, her mother was bossy and domineering, with a "mind as rigid as cast-iron", and there were constant marital disputes. The initially warm relationship between mother and daughter became strained after the birth of Manning's brother Oliver in 1913; delicate and frequently ill, he was the centre of his mother's attention, much to the displeasure of Manning, who made several childish attempts to harm him. This unhappy, insecure childhood left a lasting mark on her work and personality. Schoolmates described her as shy and prone to tantrums; her tendency to tell boastful tall-tales about her family led to ostracism by her peers. Supported by her father, Manning read and wrote extensively, preferring novels, especially those by H. Rider Haggard. Her mother discouraged such pursuits, and confiscated material she thought unsuitable; when she found her daughter reading the Times Literary Supplement she scolded that "young men do not like women who read papers like that", and that Manning should focus on marketable job skills, such as typing.

Indeed, when financial circumstances forced Manning to leave school at sixteen, she worked as a typist, and spent some time as a junior in a beauty salon. A talented artist, she took evening classes at the Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, where a fellow student described her as intellectual and aloof. In May 1928, she had a painting selected for an exhibition at Southsea, and was subsequently offered a one woman show of her works. Manning seemed to be poised for a career as an artist, but she had meanwhile continued her interest in literature, and at the age of twenty determined instead to be writer. Her artist's eye is apparent in her later intense descriptions of landscapes. Manning also wrote two literary novels, neither of which was accepted for publication. However, her second manuscript sufficiently impressed Edward Garnett, literary editor at Jonathan Cape, that he asked his assistant Hamish Miles to write her a note of encouragement. Miles, a respected and well-connected literary advisor and translator in his late thirties, invited Manning to visit if she were ever in London.

Short of food and money, Manning spent long hours writing after work. Miles took Manning under his wing, dazzling her with dinners, literary conversation and gossip, and providing unaccustomed support. A married man with two children, he told Manning that his wife was an invalid and no longer able to tolerate sex; they soon became lovers. Manning later recalled that "sex for both of them was the motivating charm of life."

A case of mistaken identity involving an artist with a similar name led Manning to a better-paid job antiquing furniture, at which she worked for more than two years, still writing in her spare time. She recalled this as "one of the happiest seasons" of her life. With Miles' encouragement she completed a novel, The Wind Changes, and saw it published by Jonathan Cape in April 1937. The novel, set in Dublin in June 1921 during "The Troubles", revolved around a woman torn between an Irish patriot and an English writer with pro-Republican sympathies. It was well received, with one reviewer commenting that "the novel shows unusual promise". Soon after, however, Miles learnt that he had an inoperable brain tumour, and disappeared from Manning's life. Since the affair had been kept secret she had difficulty obtaining information about him, and could not afford to visit him in the Edinburgh hospital where he lay dying. She lost her job at Peter Jones, moved to a well-paid job at the Medici Society, but was sacked when she refused her boss's order to give up novel-writing in the evening so as to conserve her energy for the day job. Manning obtained other work assessing new novels for their potential as films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but by the time she had saved sufficient money for a trip to Edinburgh, Miles was too ill to see her. He died in December 1937.

Miles did not normally introduce his literary friends to each other, but before his death he had been forced by circumstance to introduce Manning to the poet Stevie Smith. The two developed an immediate rapport The son of a Manchester toolmaker, he had studied at Birmingham University, where he had been coached by the left-wing poet Louis McNeice and founded the Birmingham Socialist Society. According to the British intelligence organisation MI5, Reggie had been recruited as a communist spy by Anthony Blunt on a visit to Cambridge University in 1938.

When he met Manning, Reggie was on leave from his British Council position as a lecturer in Romania. He had diligently prepared himself for the introduction to Manning by reading her works, and felt that her book The Wind Changes showed "signs of genius". He described Manning as a jolie laide, possessing lovely hair, hands, eyes and skin though an overlong nose, and fell in love at first sight. When he borrowed a half-crown from her on their first meeting, and repaid it the next day, he knew they would marry. A few days after the wedding, the couple received word that Reggie had been recalled to Bucharest. They left within a matter of hours; Manning later wrote to Stevie Smith from Romania asking her to find out what had happened to their flat and to take care of her books while she was away. Between the two world wars, Romania had looked to France to guarantee its security against German territorial aspirations. However, the impact of the Munich Agreement (1938), German-Soviet Nonagression Pact (1939), and the Fall of France (1940) increased German influence and control of the country, and included demands that Romania cede territory and resources.

The Smiths initially rented a flat, but later moved in with the diplomat Adam Watson, who was working with the British Legation. Those who knew Manning at the time described her as a shy, provincial girl who had little experience with other cultures. She was both dazzled and appalled by Romania. The café society, with its wit and gossip, appealed to her, but she was repelled by the peasantry and the aggressive, often mutilated, beggars.

Manning spent her days writing; her main project was a book about Henry Morton Stanley and his search for Emin Pasha, but she also maintained an intimate correspondence with Stevie Smith, which was full of Bloomsbury gossip and intrigue. and soon to transferred by Romania to Hungary as part of the August 1940 Second Vienna Award imposed by the Germans and Italians. Like many of her experiences, the interview was to be incorporated into a future work; others included her impromptu baptism of Reggie with cold tea because she feared being separated from him after death, and Reggie's production of a Shakespeare play, in which she was promised a prime role that was given to another.

Reggie was relentlessly gregarious, and throughout his life, his warmth, wit and friendliness earned him many friends and drinking companions. In contrast, Manning was reticent and uncomfortable in social settings, and remained in the background. She acted, in her own words, as a "camp-follower", trailing after Reggie as he went from bar to bar, often choosing to go home early and alone. While Manning remained faithful to Reggie during the war, their friend Ivor Porter was to report that Reggie had numerous affairs.

The approaching war and rise of fascism and the Iron Guard in Romania disconcerted and frightened Manning.

Greece and Egypt

Manning was subject to anxieties bordering on paranoia throughout her life. She had good reason to be concerned about Reggie, however, who travelled from Romania to Greece on the German Lufthansa airline – Lufthansa planes were sometimes diverted to Axis countries. He arrived safely, however, bringing a rucksack, a suitcase full of books, but no appropriate clothes for work. Reggie relaunched his hectic social life, but his wife interacted little with the expatriate community, focussing instead on her writing. Nevertheless, this was a happy time for Manning; "Romania is abroad," said Manning, "but Greece is home". Manning had her admirers, including Terence Spencer, a British Council lecturer who acted as her companion while Reggie was busy with other activities – he later appeared as the character Charles Warden in Friends and Heroes, the third book of The Balkan Trilogy. Soon after their arrival, Greece entered the war against the Axis. battle flag on the Acropolis, Athens, 1941|alt= refer to caption]] In spite of early successes against invading Italian forces, by April 1941 the country was at risk of invasion from the Germans; in a later poem Manning recalled the "horror and terror of defeat" of a people she had grown to love. The British Council advised its staff to evacuate, and on April 18 Manning and Reggie left Piraeus for Egypt on the Erebus, the last civilian ship to leave Greece.

For the three dangerous days of the passage to Alexandria the passengers subsisted on oranges and wine. On board with the Smiths were the novelist Robert Liddell, the Welsh poet Harold Edwards, and their wives– the Smiths shared a cramped cabin with the Edwardses. Mrs. Edwards had brought with her a hat box full of expensive Parisian hats, which Manning kept placing in the passageway outside the cabin, and from whence Mrs. Edwards kept returning it. The two were not on speaking terms by the end of the voyage, but Manning had the last word: when Mrs. Edwards later opened her hatbox she found that Manning had crushed the hats with a chamberpot.

Arriving in Alexandria, the refugees gratefully devoured the food provided by the British military, but learned that the swastika was now flying over the Acropolis. Manning's first impressions of Egypt were of squalor and unreality: "For weeks we lived in a state of recoil". From Alexandria they went by train to Cairo, where they renewed contact with Adam Watson, who was now Second Secretary at the British Embassy. He invited them to stay at his Garden City flat that overlooked the embassy.

Though nominally an independent country, Egypt had been effectively under British control since the late nineteenth century. With the outbreak of war, and under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, the country was under virtual occupation by the British. At this stage in the war, the Germans were advancing apparently unstoppably across the desert towards Egypt, and Cairo was rife with rumours and alarms. Manning was jittery and fearful. She was constantly anxious about illness, and was indeed frequently unwell. Concerned, Reggie suggested that it might be best if she returned to England, but she retorted "Wherever we go, we go together. If we return home, we both go. I won't have the war separating us. End of story." Her father had made her a firm believer in the British Empire and the benefits it had brought the world, and Manning was a patriotic Briton, confident of ultimate Allied success. In Egypt, however, she confronted the fact that British occupation had never been popular. Reggie quickly discovered the Anglo-Egyptian Union in Zamalek, where he drank and talked politics and poetry. As usual he was well-liked, and according to Lawrence Durrell often had a string of disreputable friends with him.

Manning was incensed that the British Council did not immediately find a job for Reggie, whom she considered one of their most brilliant teachers. She took her revenge by writing scurrilous verse about the Council's representative, C.F.A. Dundas, later immortalized as the ineffectual Colin Gracey in Fortunes of War. Manning's characters were often based on real people though she never drew precisely from life. She also resented that Amy Smart, wife of Walter Smart and frequent patron of artists, poets and writers in Cairo, paid so little attention to her and Reggie; she later took revenge in a similar way.

In October 1941, Reggie was offered a post as lecturer at Farouk University in Alexandria. The couple moved from Cairo to share a flat with fellow teacher Robert Liddell. The Germans regularly bombed the city, and the raids terrified Manning, who irritated by insisting that all three descend to the air raid shelter whenever the sirens wailed. Almost immediately after arriving in Alexandria came devastating news of her brother Oliver's death in a plane crash. The emotional upset this caused prevented her from writing novels for several years. In her spare time, she worked on Guests at the Marriage, an unpublished prototype for The Balkan Trilogy, as well as short stories and poetry, Over the years, Stevie had brooded over Manning's desertion of their friendship to marry Reggie, and around this time her jealousy took an overt form; in 1942 she wrote a poem entitled "Murder", in which a man stands beside a grave and admits "My hand brought Reggie Smith to this strait bed — / Well, fare his soul well, fear not I the dead".

During her time in the Egypt, Manning became a contributor to two Middle East-based literary magazines, "Desert Poets" and "Personal Landscapes", founded by Bernard Spencer, Lawrence Durrell, and Robin Fedden. The latter sought to explore the "personal landscapes" of writers experiencing exile during the war. The founders, like Manning, maintained a strong attachment to Greece rather than an artistic and intellectual engagement with Egypt. In remembering the departure from Greece, Manning wrote "We faced the sea / Knowing until the day of our return we would be / Exiles from a country not our own." During their time in Egypt and Palestine, Manning and her husband maintained close links with refugee Greek writers, including translating and editing the work of George Seferis and Elie Papadimitriou.

In 1942, Reggie was appointed as Controller of English and Arabic Programming at the Palestine Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem; the job was to begin in the fall, but in early July, with the German troops rapidly advancing on Egypt, he persuaded Manning to go ahead to Jerusalem to "prepare the way".

Palestine

The couple were to spend three years in Jerusalem. On arrival, Manning approached the Palestine Post for a job, and was soon appointed a reviewer. Between 1943 and 1944 she served as press assistant at Jerusalem's Public Information office, and then moved to the same position at the British Council office in Jerusalem.

In 1944, Manning became pregnant; the couple were overjoyed and Manning relaxed, becoming less critical of others, including her own mother, with whom she had long had a difficult relationship. Uncharacteristically, she rested, walked, painted and even knitted. In the seventh month, however, the baby died in utero, and as was the practice at the time, Manning was obliged to wait two difficult months to deliver her dead child. "I am like a walking cemetery", she sorrowfully repeated during this period. Grief-stricken, Manning became paranoid, constantly afraid that Reggie would be assassinated. Reggie decided that she was having a nervous breakdown, and in October 1944 accompanied her to Cyprus for a month's holiday. Returning to Jerusalem, she was still far from well, and the poet Louis Lawler noticed the discontent of this "strange and difficult woman", and Reggie's "wonderfully patient" behaviour, despite Manning calling her husband by his last name throughout the period. Manning never fully recovered from her loss, and was rarely to talk or write of it. She was unable to have further children and in the future directed her maternal feelings towards animals, especially cats.

Post-war England

After a brief stay with her still grieving parents in heavily bombed Portsmouth, Manning moved into a London flat. Reggie arrived during the summer of 1945, and found a job in the Features Department of the BBC. He was identified as a Communist spy by MI5 in 1947, and placed under surveillance. According to his file, Reggie had been working to increase Soviet influence in Romania and the Middle East throughout the war. She completed her book on Stanley and Emin Pasha, titled The Remarkable Expedition in the UK and The Reluctant Rescue in the US, which was published in 1947, and subsequently reissued in 1985. The book received generally good reviews, but remains comparatively unknown. In 1948, her book of short stories, Growing Up, was published by Heinemann, with the title story a fictionalised account of her affair with Hamish Miles. Manning was to remain with the publisher until 1974.

; subject of the book The Remarkable Expedition|alt= a head and shoulders engraving of a bearded man wearing a buttoned up jacket, round spectacles and an Eastern-style hat]]

After living in a series of rented flats, in 1951 the couple moved to a house in St. John's Wood, where they sublet rooms to lodgers such as the actors Julian Mitchell and Tony Richardson. Fuelled by plenty of gin and tonic to cover her shyness, Manning could be a witty participant in London's literary scene; as in childhood she was given to making boastful inventions, such as claiming a family relationship to Marie Belloc Lowndes and that she had received a marriage proposal from Anthony Burgess the morning after his wife's death. Her insecurities also showed in other ways: she was very anxious about finances, and always alert for ways to make and save money. After the war both she and Reggie were unfaithful. At parties, Reggie would regularly ask other women if they were interested in extramarital encounters, while Manning claimed to have had affairs with both William Gerhardie and Henry Green, and engaged in an unrequited pursuit of her lodger, Tony Richardson. Jerry Slattery, her doctor, became her long-term lover; her affair came as a shock to Reggie, who felt he must have disappointed his wife. However, after a difficult start, Reggie adjusted and soon became close friends with Jerry. Manning's adultery in some ways made it easier for Reggie to justify his own frequent affairs, including his longstanding relationship with Diana Robson, who was to become his second wife. Manning never paid undue attention to his infidelities, usually responding, "you know what Reggie's like". The two never contemplated divorce, believing that marriage was a life-long commitment.

Manning's first post-war novel, Artist Among the Missing, an evocative account of life in the Middle East, was published in 1949, and received mixed reviews. She worked on an Irish travel book, The Dreaming Shore, which drew on her Anglo-Irish upbringing, but proved "a millstone" as it required multiple expensive journeys to Ireland. The book was notable for her view that Ireland would one day be united. Manning continued the series of publications with A School for Love, published in 1951. The novel concerned a boy growing up in Palestine during the Second World War. With its publication, Reggie, on whom Manning relied heavily for literary judgment, help and support, boasted that "My Olivia is what might be called an established author". The novel was generally well-received, but faced the possibility of a libel suit from Clarissa Graves, sister of Robert on whom Miss Bohun, one of the novel's characters, may have been based.

Manning supplemented her book writing by reviewing for The Spectator, The Sunday Times, The Observer, Punch and others, as well as making occasional contributions to the Palestine Post. Her fourth novel, A Different Face, was published in 1953. Set in a drab city based on Manning's hometown of Portsmouth, it chronicled the main character's attempts to leave his birthplace. The book was not well-reviewed, and as was frequently the case, Manning felt slighted, feeling that she did not get the reviews she deserved. Neurotic self-doubt and perfectionism made her difficult and easily offended, and she was very aware of younger writers outstripping her. Manning knew that she was spiteful, but could not help herself, frequently critiquing writer friends to others. However, she consistently praised and admired Ivy Compton-Burnett to whom she had been introduced in 1945, and whose friendship she greatly valued. She complained about her publisher Heinemann and her lack of recognition from her peers: Anthony Powell called her "the world's worst grumbler", and the publisher remembered that she was "never an easy author to handle." A friend gave her the nickname "Olivia Moaning", which was picked up by others, much to Manning's annoyance.

In 1955 Manning published The Doves of Venus, which drew on her experiences in London in the 1930s; the two friends, Ellie Parsons and Nancy Claypole, bore similarities to Manning and Stevie Smith. In the book, an isolated Ellie seeks to escape a stultifying mother. The reviews were generally favourable, but Manning was not satisfied. Perhaps annoyed at her depiction in the novel, Stevie Smith wrote what Manning described as a "bitchy review"; the two great friends barely spoke thereafter, despite Smith's efforts at a rapprochement. Eventually, however, Manning grudgingly forgave her: learning of Smith's final illness, she remarked that "Well, if she's really ill, we'll have to let bygones be bygones."

Much time and focus were given to animals, especially the Siamese cats of which Manning was especially fond. She was very concerned about the health and comfort of her pets, taking them on visits to friends, along with hot water bottles for them in case the temperature dropped. She frequently sacked vets – telling one "I do not pay you to tell me that there is nothing wrong with my animal" – and trying animal faith healers at times. Additionally, she was a committed supporter of organisations combating animal cruelty. Her love and interest in cats was illustrated in her book Extraordinary Cats, published in 1967.

In December 1956, Manning published My Husband Cartwright, a series of twelve sketches about Reggie that had originally appeared in Punch. It was not widely reviewed, and as usual Manning was frustrated and annoyed. The book was to be a precursor of her portrait of her husband in Fortunes of War, detailing comic episodes that highlighted Reggie's character, including his gregarious nature and interest in social issues: "My husband Cartwright is a lover of his fellow-men. Lovers of their fellow-men can be maddening [...] While lecturing abroad he suddenly conceived a resentment of 'sights' especially 'useless' sights, such as ruins or tombs. You might suppose that were it not for such distractions as Tiberias, the Valley of the Kings or Hadrian's Villa, tourists abroad would occupy themselves solely in alleviating poverty."

The Balkan Trilogy and other works

Between 1956 and 1964 Manning's main project was The Balkan Trilogy, a sequence of three novels based on her experiences during the Second World War; as usual she was supported and encouraged by Reggie. The books describe the marriage of Harriet and Guy Pringle as they live and work in Romania and Greece, ending with their escape to Alexandria in 1941 just ahead of the Germans. Guy, a man at once admirable and unsatisfactory, and Harriet, a woman alternately proud and impatient, move from early passion to acceptance of difference. Manning described the books as long chapters of an autobiography, and early versions were written in the first person. There was significant fictionalisation, however. While Manning had been 31 and Reggie 25 at the outset of war, Manning's alter ego Harriet Pringle was a mere 21, and her husband a year older. Manning was a writer by profession, while her creation was not. The first book in the trilogy, The Great Fortune, received mixed reviews, but subsequent volumes, The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes were generally well-received; Anthony Burgess announced that Manning was "among the most accomplished of our women novelists" and comparisons were made to Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. There were a few carping voices, and as usual, they ignited Manning's ire.

Following the publication of the final volume of The Balkan Trilogy in 1965, Manning worked on her cat memoir and a collection of short stories, A Romantic Hero and Other Stories, both of which were published in 1967. Another novel, The Play Room (published as The Camperlea Girls in the US), appeared in 1969. The book of short stories and The Play Room both contained homosexual themes, a topic which interested Manning. The latter was a less than successful exploration of the lives and interests of adolescents, though the reviews were generally encouraging. A film version was proposed, and Ken Annakin asked her to write the script. The movie, with more explicit lesbian scenes than the book, was all but made before the money ran out; a second version, with a very different script, was also developed but came to nothing. "Everything fizzled out", she said. "I wasted a lot of time and that is something which you cannot afford to do when you are sixty"; in keeping with her obfuscations about her age, she was actually sixty-two.

The Levant Trilogy

The 1970s brought a number of changes to the household: the couple moved to a smaller apartment following Reggie's early retirement from the BBC and 1972 appointment as a lecturer at the New University of Ulster in Coleraine. The couple subsequently lived apart for long periods, as Manning rejected the idea moving to Ireland.

Manning was always a close observer of life, and gifted with a photographic memory. The book is one of Manning's lesser-known books, and she was disappointed that it was not shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Early in 1975 Manning began The Danger Tree, which for a time she described as "The Fourth Part of the Balkan Trilogy"; in the event, it became the first novel in The Levant Trilogy, continuing the story of the Pringles in the Middle East. The first book proved "a long struggle" to write, in part because of Manning's lack of confidence in her powers of invention: the book juxtaposes the Desert War experiences of a young officer, Simon Boulderstone, with the securer lives of the Pringles and their circle. Manning, fascinated by sibling relationships, and remembering the death of her own brother, also examined the relationship between Simon and his elder brother, Hugo. She felt inadequate in her ability to write about soldiers and military scenes; initial reviewers agreed, finding her writing unconvincing and improbable, though subsequent reviewers have been considerably kinder. during the Desert War|alt=period photo of helmeted soldiers with rifles running through dust and smoke]] While some parts of the book were inventions, she also made use of real-life incidents. The opening chapter of The Danger Tree describes the accidental death of the young son of Sir Desmond and Lady Hooper. The incident was based on fact: Sir Walter and Lady Amy Smart's eight-year-old boy was killed when he picked up a stick bomb while on a desert picnic in January 1943. Just as described in the novel, his grief-stricken parents had tried to feed the dead boy through a hole in his cheek. whom she had known in Jerusalem. Like Pratt, Haggard committed suicide on a train from Cairo to Palestine, but in Haggard's case it followed the end of a relationship with a beautiful Egyptian woman, rather than unrequited homosexual love. After years of complaints about her publisher Heinemann, Manning moved to Weidenfeld & Nicholson, and remained with them until the end of her life. The Danger Tree was a considerable critical success, and though Manning was disappointed yet again that her novel was not shortlisted for the Booker prize, the Yorkshire Post selected it as their Best Novel of 1977. This award followed her 1976 appointment to the Commander of the British Empire.

Final years

Manning was deeply affected by the sudden death in 1977 of Jerry Slattery, her lover and confidant for more than a quarter of a century. Manning's last years were also made difficult by physical deterioration; arthritis increasingly affected her, leading to hip replacements in 1976 and in 1979, and she suffered ongoing poor health related to amoebic dysentery caught in the Middle East. Nevertheless, Manning began work of the final novel in The Levant Trilogy, The Sum of Things, in which Harriet agrees to sail home to the UK, but having said goodbye to Guy, changes her mind. The novel describes Harriet's travels in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, observes Guy's supposed widowerhood in Cairo after he hears of the sinking of Harriet's ship, and follows Simon Boulderstone's injury during the battle of El Alamein and subsequent recovery.

The Sum of Things was published posthumously, for on 4 July 1980 Manning suffered a severe stroke while visiting friends in the Isle of Wight. She died in hospital on 23 July; somewhat typically, Reggie, having been recalled from Ireland, was not present when she died. He could not bear to see her "fade away" and had gone to London to keep himself busy. Manning had long predicted that the frequently tardy Reggie would be late for her funeral, and he almost was. In addition, his mourning period, characterized by abrupt transitions from weeping to almost hysterical mirth, was precisely how Manning had imagined Guy Pringle's reaction to Harriet's supposed death in The Sum of Things. Manning was cremated and her ashes buried at Billingham Manor on the Isle of Wight.

Manning had long complained about the lack of recognition she had received as a writer, and was not consoled when her husband and friends responded that her talent would be recognized, and her works read for years to come. "I want to be really famous now, Now", she retorted. As it happened, her renown and readership developed substantially after her death; a television serialisation of Fortunes of War starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh finally came to fruition in 1987, bringing her work to a wider audience.

Work

Reception

The posthumous popularity of Fortunes of War notwithstanding, most of Manning's books are rarely read and have received little critical attention. Of her books, only Fortunes of War, School for Love, The Doves of Venus, The Rain Forest and A Romantic Hero remain in print. Some of her novels, most often Fortunes of War, have been translated into French, German, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Greek, Romanian and Hebrew. and critique stereotyped and caricatured portrayals of ethnic and religious groups. Her plots are often described as journeys, odysseys and quests in both literal and metaphorical senses. including physical, cultural and historical aspects have been widely admired, and the critic Walter Allen complimented her "painter's eye for the visible world". and for Manning's inability to "conceal her antipathy towards all things Romanian." Excerpts from the novels have been reprinted in collections of women's war writing. Theodore Steinberg argues for the Fortunes of War to be seen as an epic novel, noting its broad scope and the large cast of interesting characters set at a pivotal point of history. As with other epic novels, the books examine intertwined personal and national themes. There are frequent references to the Fall of Troy, including Guy Pringle's production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in which British expatriates play themselves while Romania and Europe mirror the doomed Troy. In Steinberg's perspective, the books also challenge the typically male genre conventions of the epic novel by viewing the war principally through the eyes of a female character "who frequently contrasts her perceptions with those of the men who surround her". In contrast, Adam Piette views the novel sequence as a failed epic, the product of a Cold War desire to repress change as illustrated by "Harriet's self-pityingly dogged focus on their marriage" without dealing with the radicalism of the war, and fate of its victims as represented by Guy and his political engagement.

Other works

Manning's other works have largely been described as precursors to the two trilogies. Two books set in Jerusalem, The Artist Among the Missing (1949) and School for Love (1951), her first commercial and critical success, are also first steps in exploring themes such war, colonialism and British imperialism. Her book The Remarkable Expedition (1947) about Emin Pasha and Henry Stanley was generally well reviewed, and when reissued in 1985 was praised for its humour, story telling and fairness to both subjects. A travel book about Ireland The Dreaming Shore (1950) received a mixed review even from her old friend Louis MacNeice, but extracts from this and other of Manning's Irish writing have subsequently been admired and anthologised. Manning's book Extraordinary cats (1967) proved to be chiefly about Manning's own well-loved pets, and Stevie Smith's review in the Sunday Times complained that Manning's book was "more agitated than original." She also published two collections of short stories, the well-reviewed Growing Up (1946) and A Romantic Hero and Other Stories (1967); the latter included eight stories from the earlier volume, and is imbued with a sense of mortality.

Themes

War

In contrast to other women's war fiction of the period, Manning's works do not recount life on the home front. Instead, her Irish and Second World War fiction observe combatants and non-combatants at the front and behind the lines. Wars, in Manning's view, are battles for place and influence, and "with her range of images and illusions, Manning reminds us that wars over land have been a constant." Her books do not celebrate British heroism nor the innocence of civilians, emphasising instead that the causes and dangers of war come as much from within as from without, with the gravest threats coming from fellow Britons. Military men are far from heroic, and official British responses are presented as farcical. In the Fortunes of War, the conflict is viewed largely from the perspective of a civilian woman, an observer, though later books include Simon Boulderstone's soldier's view of battle. but later commentators have describing her depiction of battle as vivid, poignant and largely convincing. and repetition – of stories, events and deaths – used to give "the impression of lives trapped in an endless war" for which there is no end in sight.

Colonialism and imperialism

A major theme of Manning's works is the British empire in decline. "British imperialism is shown to be a corrupt and self-serving system, which not only deserves to be dismantled but which is actually on the verge of being dismantled", writes Steinberg. The British characters in Manning's novels almost all assume the legitimacy of British superiority and imperialism and struggle with their position as oppressors who are unwelcome in countries they have been brought up to believe welcome their colonising influence. while characters such as Guy, Prince Yakimov and Sophie seek to exert various forms of power and authority over others, reflecting in microcosm the national conflicts and imperialism of the British Empire.

In The Artist Among the Missing (1949), Manning illustrates the racial tensions that are created when imperialism and multiculturalism mix, and, as in her other war novels, evaluates the political bind in which the British seek to defeat racist Nazism while upholding British colonial exploitation. The School for Love (1951) is the tale of an orphaned boy's journey of disillusionment in a city that is home to Arabs, Jews and a repressive, colonial presence represented in the novel by the cold, self-righteous, and anti-Semitic character of Miss Bohun.

Manning explores these themes not only in her major novels set in Europe and the Middle East, but also in her Irish fiction, The Wind Changes (1937) and eight short stories which were mostly written early in her career. In keeping with colonial construction of exoticism in Western literature, however, "otherness" is increasingly domesticated as characters recognise, with greater exposure to the country, links to Western culture. While Manning supported the rights of women, particularly equal literary fees, she had no sympathy for the Women's Movement, writing that "[t]hey make such an exhibition of themselves. None can be said to be beauties. Most have faces like porridge." In Manning's books, the word "feminine" is used in a derogatory sense, and tends to be associated with female complacency, foolishness, artifice and deviousness, and early in her career she obscured her gender using a pseudonym and initials. Manning found it easier to create male characters, In contrast, Treglown hypothesised that it reflected Manning's ongoing grieving for her stillborn child.

Notes

References

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Category:1908 births Category:1980 deaths Category:British novelists Category:People from Portsmouth

Name	Lady Gaga
Img alt	Portrait of a young, pale-skinned Caucasian female with blond hair
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta
Born	March 28, 1986New York City, U.S.
Instrument	Vocals, piano, synthesizer, keytar
Genre	Pop, dance
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, performance artist, record producer, dancer, businesswoman
Years active	2005–present
Label	Def Jam, Cherrytree, Streamline, Kon Live, Interscope
Url

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American pop singer-songwriter. She began performing in the rock music scene of New York City's Lower East Side in 2003 and enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She soon signed with Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records. During her early time at Interscope, she worked as a songwriter for fellow label artists and captured the attention of Akon, who recognized her vocal abilities, and signed her to his own label, Kon Live Distribution.

Gaga came to prominence following the release of her debut studio album The Fame (2008), which was a commercial success and achieved international popularity with the singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". The album reached number one on the record charts of six countries, accomplished positions within the top-ten worldwide, and topped the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart while simultaneously peaking at number two on the Billboard 200 chart in the United States. Achieving similar worldwide success, the follow-up EP The Fame Monster (2009), produced a further two global chart-topping singles "Bad Romance" and "Telephone" and allowed her to embark on a second global headlining concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, just months after having finished her first, The Fame Ball Tour. Her second studio album, Born This Way, is scheduled for release in 2011.

Inspired by glam rock artists like David Bowie and Queen, as well as pop singers such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga is well-recognized for her outré sense of style as a recording artist, in fashion, in performance and in her music videos. Her contributions to the music industry have garnered her numerous achievements including two Grammy Awards, amongst twelve nominations; two Guinness World Records; and the estimated sale of fifteen million albums and fifty-one million singles worldwide. Billboard named her as the Artist of the Year in 2010 and ranked her as the 73rd Artist of the 2000s decade. Gaga has been included in Time magazine's annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world as well as Forbes' list of the 100 Most Powerful and Influential celebrities in the world. Forbes also placed her at number seven on their annual list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women.

Life and career

1986–2004: Early life

Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in New York City on March 28, 1986, the eldest child of Joseph Germanotta, an internet entrepreneur, and Cynthia (née Bissett). She learned to play piano from the age of four, went on to write her first piano ballad at 13 and began performing at open mike nights by age 14. Gaga was raised a Roman Catholic. At the age of 11, Gaga attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, but has stressed that she does not come from a wealthy background, saying that her parents "both came from lower-class families, so we've worked for everything – my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father."

An avid thespian in high school musicals, Gaga portrayed lead roles as Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. She described her academic life in high school as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview, "I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn’t fit in, and I felt like a freak." Acquaintances dispute that she did not fit in school. "She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1," recalled a former high school classmate. Referring to her "expressive, free spirit", Gaga told Elle magazine "I'm left-handed!"

At age 17, Gaga gained early admission to the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and lived in a NYU dorm on 11th Street. There she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, social issues and politics. Gaga felt that she was more creative than some of her classmates. "Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," she said. By the second semester of her sophomore year, she withdrew from the school to focus on her musical career. Her father agreed to pay her rent for a year, on the condition that she re-enroll for Tisch if she was unsuccessful. "I left my entire family, got the cheapest apartment I could find, and ate shit until somebody would listen," she said. Shortly after, her former management company introduced her to songwriter and producer RedOne, whom they also managed. The first song she produced with RedOne was "Boys Boys Boys", She also started the Stefani Germanotta Band with some friends from NYU. They recorded an extended play of their ballads at a studio underneath a liquor store in New Jersey, becoming a local fixture at the downtown Lower East Side club scene. Music producer Rob Fusari, who helped her write some of her earlier songs, compared some of her vocal harmonies to that of Freddie Mercury. He explained,

She was known thereafter as Lady Gaga. The pair began playing gigs at downtown club venues like the Mercury Lounge, The Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall, with their live performance art piece known as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue." Billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow", their act was a low-fi tribute to 1970s variety acts. In August 2007, Gaga and Starlight were invited to play at the American Lollapalooza music festival. The show was critically acclaimed, and their performance received positive reviews.

Fusari sent the songs he produced with Gaga to his friend, producer and record executive Vincent Herbert. Herbert was quick to sign her to his label Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records, upon its establishment in 2007. She credited Herbert as the man who discovered her, adding "I really feel like we made pop history, and we're gonna keep going." While Gaga was writing at Interscope, singer-songwriter Akon recognized her vocal abilities when she sang a reference vocal for one of his tracks in studio. He then convinced Interscope-Geffen-A&M; Chairman and CEO Jimmy Iovine to form a joint deal by having her also sign with his own label Kon Live Distribution Gaga continued her collaboration with RedOne in the recording studio for a week on her debut album The album peaked at number one in United Kingdom, Canada, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Ireland, and the top-five in Australia, the United States and fifteen other countries. Worldwide, The Fame has sold over fourteen million copies. Its lead single "Just Dance" topped the charts in six countries – Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States – and later received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Dance Recording. The following single "Poker Face" was an even greater success, reaching number-one in almost all major music markets in the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States. It won the award for Best Dance Recording at the 52nd Grammy Awards, over nominations for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. The Fame was nominated for Album of the Year; it won the Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album. Although her first concert tour happened as an opening act for fellow Interscope pop group, the reformed New Kids on the Block, she ultimately headlined her own worldwide concert tour, The Fame Ball Tour, which was critically appreciated and began in March 2009; culminating in September of that year. The cover of the annual "Hot 100" issue of Rolling Stone in May 2009 featured a semi-nude Gaga wearing only strategically placed plastic bubbles. She was nominated for a total of nine awards at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, winning the award for Best New Artist, while her single "Paparazzi" won two awards for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects. In October, Gaga received Billboard magazine's Rising Star of 2009 award. She attended the Human Rights Campaign's "National Dinner" the same month, before marching in the National Equality March for the equal protection of LGBT people in all matters governed by US civil law in Washington, D.C.

|alt= Profile of a young blond woman. Her hair falls in waves up to her shoulders. She wears a purple leotard with visible sequins attached. Ample bosom, arm and leg are visible.]] Written over the course of 2008–09, The Fame Monster, a collection of eight songs, was released in November 2009. Each song, dealing with the darker side of fame from personal experience while she travelled the world, is expressed through a monster metaphor. Its first single "Bad Romance" topped the charts in eighteen countries, while reaching the top-two in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. In the US, Gaga became the first artist in digital history to have three singles (along with "Just Dance" and "Poker Face") to pass the four million mark in digital sales. The song received a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance while its accompanying music video was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video. The album's second single "Telephone", which features singer Beyoncé, was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals and became Gaga's fourth UK number-one single while its accompanying music video, although controversial, was met mostly positive reception from contemporary critics: praising her for "the musicality and showmanship of Michael Jackson and the powerful sexuality and provocative instincts of Madonna." Her following single "Alejandro" paired Gaga with fashion photographer Steven Klein for a music video similarly as controversial – critics complimented its idea and dark nature, but the Catholic League attacked Gaga for her use of blasphemy. Despite the controversy surrounding her music videos, they have made Gaga one of the first artists to gain over one billion viral views on video-sharing website YouTube. Musically, The Fame Monster has also received abundant success. Equating to the amount of Grammy nominations her debut received, The Fame Monster garnered a total of six – among them Best Pop Vocal Album and her second-consecutive nomination for Album of the Year. The success of the album allowed Gaga to embark on her second headlining worldwide concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, just weeks after the release of The Fame Monster and months after having finished her first. Upon finishing in May 2011, the critically acclaimed and commercially accomplished concert tour will have ran for over one and a half years. Additionally, Gaga has performed other songs from the album at international events like the 2009 Royal Variety Performance where she sang "Speechless", a power ballad, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II; the 52nd Grammy Awards where her opening performance consisted of the song "Poker Face" and a piano duet of "Speechless" in a medley of "Your Song" with Elton John; and the 2010 BRIT Awards where a performance of an acoustic rendition of "Telephone" followed by "Dance in the Dark" dedicated to the late fashion designer and close friend, Alexander McQueen, supplemented her hat-trick win at the awards ceremony.

Barbara Walters chose Gaga as one the "10 Most Fascinating People of 2009" for her annual ABC News special. When interviewed by the journalist, Gaga dismissed the claim that she is intersex as an urban legend. Responding to a question on this issue, she stated, "At first it was very strange and everyone sorta said, 'That's really quite a story!' But in a sense, I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny." Excited about bringing back Polaroid and "combining it with the digital era", Gaga was named Chief Creative Officer for a line of imaging products for the international optic company in January 2010 with the intent of creating fashion, technology and photography products. Her production team, Mermaid Music LLC, was sued in March by Rob Fusari; claiming that he was entitled to a 20% share of its earnings. Gaga's lawyer, Charles Ortner, described the agreement with Fusari as "unlawful" and declined to comment, however, five months later, the New York Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In April, Gaga was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the year. While giving an interview to The Times, Gaga hinted at having Systemic lupus erythematosus, commonly referred to as lupus, which is a connective tissue disease. She later confirmed with Larry King that she does not have lupus but "the results were borderline positive".

2010–present: Born This Way

Gaga's second studio album and third major release Born This Way, whose title was announced during her acceptance speech for Video of the Year at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, will be released on May 23, 2011. Its arrival will follow the release of its lead single on February 13, 2011. These dates were tweeted by Gaga at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 2011. Described as "a marriage of electronic music with major [...] metal or rock 'n' roll, pop, anthemic style melodies with really sledge-hammering dance beats", Born This Way will be Gaga's third release in three years. She stated, "It came so quickly. I've been working on [the album] for months, and I feel very strongly that it's finished right now. Some artists take years. I don't. I write music every day." With two tracks already confirmed by Gaga – one she has been performing during The Monster Ball Tour, she has referred to the album as "the greatest" of the decade about "what keeps us up at night and what makes us afraid." Likening Born This Way to "bad kids going to church" that are "having fun on a high level", Gaga characterized her new music as "something so much deeper than a wig or lipstick or a fucking meat dress" and upon hearing it, Akon remarked that she will take music to the "next level."

Lending her vocal talent elsewhere, Gaga also paired with Elton John to record an original duet for the soundtrack to the forthcoming animated Disney feature film Gnomeo and Juliet. The song, titled "Hello, Hello", is scheduled for release in February 2011.

Musical style and influences

Gaga has been influenced by glam rock artists such as David Bowie and Queen, as well as pop music artists such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. The Queen song "Radio Ga Ga" inspired her stage name, "Lady Gaga". She commented: "I adored Freddie Mercury and Queen had a hit called 'Radio Gaga'. That's why I love the name [...] Freddie was unique – one of the biggest personalities in the whole of pop music."

Gaga's vocals have drawn frequent comparison to those of Madonna and Gwen Stefani, while the structure of her music is said to echo classic 1980s pop and 1990s Europop. While reviewing her debut album The Fame, The Sunday Times asserted "in combining music, fashion, art and technology, Lady GaGa evokes Madonna, Gwen Stefani circa 'Hollaback Girl', Kylie Minogue 2001 or Grace Jones right now." Similarly, The Boston Globe critic Sarah Rodman commented that she draws "obvious inspirations from Madonna to Gwen Stefani... in [her] girlish but sturdy pipes and bubbly beats." Though her lyrics are said to lack intellectual stimulation, "[she] does manage to get you moving and grooving at an almost effortless pace." Music critic Simon Reynolds wrote that "Everything about Gaga came from electroclash, except the music, which wasn't particularly 1980s, just ruthlessly catchy naughties pop glazed with Auto-Tune and undergirded with R&B;-ish beats.

Gaga has identified fashion as a major influence. Her love of fashion came from her mother, who she stated was "always very well kept and beautiful." Entertainment Weekly put her outfits on its end of the decade "best-of" list, saying, "Whether it's a dress made of Muppets or strategically placed bubbles, Gaga's outré ensembles brought performance art into the mainstream."

Critical reception of Gaga's music, fashion sense and persona are mixed. Her status as a role model, trailblazer and fashion icon is by turns affirmed and denied. Gaga's albums have received mostly positive reviews, Her role as a self-esteem booster for her fans is also lauded, as is her role in breathing life into the fashion industry. Her performances are described as "highly entertaining and innovative"; in particular, the blood-spurting performance of "Paparazzi" at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards was described as "eye-popping" by MTV. She continued the "blood soaked" theme in The Monster Ball Tour, in which she wore a revealing leather corset and is "attacked" by a performer dressed in black who gnaws on her throat, causing "blood" to spurt down her chest, after which she lies "dying" in a pool of blood. Her performances of that scene in Manchester, England triggered protests from family groups and fans in the aftermath of a local tragedy, in which a taxi driver had murdered 12 people. "What happened in Bradford is very fresh in people's minds and given all the violence which happened in Cumbria just hours earlier, it was insensitive," said Lynn Costello of Mothers Against Violence. Chris Rock later defended her flamboyant, provocative behavior. "Well, she's Lady Gaga," he said. "She's not 'Lady Behave Yourself.' Do you want great behavior from a person named Gaga? Is this what you were expecting?" She later returned to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards wearing a dress which was supplemented by boots, a purse and a hat—each fabricated from the flesh of a dead animal. The dress, named Time magazine's Fashion Statement of 2010 and more widely known as the "meat dress", was made by Argentinian designer Franc Fernandez and received divided opinions—evoking the attention of worldwide media but invoking the fury of animal rights organization PETA. Gaga, however, later denied any intention of causing disrespect to any person or organization and wished for the dress to be interpreted as a statement of human rights with focus upon those in the LGBT community.

Gaga's treatment of her fans as "Little Monsters" has inspired criticism, due to the highly commercial nature of her music and image. Camille Paglia wrote a cover story "Lady Gaga and the death of sex" on September 12, 2010, in The Sunday Times in which she asserts that Gaga "is more an identity thief than an erotic taboo breaker, a mainstream manufactured product who claims to be singing for the freaks, the rebellious and the dispossessed when she is none of those."

Public image

Contrary to her outré style, the New York Post described her early look as like "a refugee from Jersey Shore" with "big black hair, heavy eye makeup and tight, revealing clothes." She has another six known tattoos, among them a peace symbol, which was inspired by John Lennon whom she stated was her hero, Towards the end of 2008, comparisons were made between the fashions of Gaga and fellow recording artist Christina Aguilera that noted similarities in their styling, hair, and make-up. Comparisons continued into 2010 when Aguilera released the music video of her single "Not Myself Tonight". Critics noted similarities between the song and its accompanying music video with Gaga's video for "Bad Romance". There have also been similar comparisons made between Gaga's style and that of fashion icon Dale Bozzio from the band Missing Persons. Some have considered their respective images to be strikingly parallel although fans of Missing Persons note that Bozzio had pioneered the look more than thirty years earlier.

Gaga's influence on modern culture and society has provoked the University of South Carolina into offering a full-time course titled "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame" in the objective of unravelling "the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga with respect to her music, videos, fashion, and other artistic endeavors".

Philanthropy

Besides her career in music, Gaga has enhanced her repertoire as a philanthropist who has contributed to various charities and humanitarianism works.

Although declining an invitation to record a benefit song, Gaga held a concert of The Monster Ball Tour following the 2010 Haiti earthquake and dedicated it to the country’s reconstruction relief fund. This concert, held at the Radio City Music Hall, New York, on January 24, 2010, donated any received revenue to the relief fund while, in addition, all profits from sales of products on Gaga’s official online store on that same day were donated. Gaga announced that an estimated total of $500,000 was collected for the fund.

Gaga also contributes in the fight against HIV and AIDS with the focus upon educating young women about the risks of the disease. In collaboration with Cyndi Lauper, Gaga joined forces with MAC Cosmetics to launch a line of lipstick under their supplementary cosmetic line, Viva Glam. Titled Viva Glam Gaga and Viva Glam Cyndi for each contributor respectively, all net proceeds of the lipstick line were donated to the cosmetic company’s campaign to prevent HIV and AIDS worldwide. In a press release, Gaga declared, "I don't want Viva Glam to be just a lipstick you buy to help a cause. I want it to be a reminder when you go out at night to put a condom in your purse right next to your lipstick."

, October 11, 2009|alt=A blond woman speaking on a kiosk. She wears a white shirt and black glasses. Behind her, the balcony of a building is visible.]] Gaga attributes much of her early success as a mainstream artist to her gay fans and is considered to be a rising gay icon. Early in her career she had difficulty getting radio airplay, and stated, "The turning point for me was the gay community. I've got so many gay fans and they're so loyal to me and they really lifted me up. They'll always stand by me and I'll always stand by them. It's not an easy thing to create a fanbase." She thanked FlyLife, a Manhattan-based LGBT marketing company with whom her label Interscope works, in the liner notes of The Fame, saying, "I love you so much. You were the first heartbeat in this project, and your support and brilliance means the world to me. I will always fight for the gay community hand in hand with this incredible team." One of her first televised performances was in May 2008 at the NewNowNext Awards, an awards show aired by the LGBT television network Logo, where she sang her song "Just Dance". In June of the same year, she performed the song again at the San Francisco Pride event.

After The Fame was released, she revealed that the song "Poker Face" was about her bisexuality. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she spoke about how her boyfriends tended to react to her bisexuality, saying "The fact that I'm into women, they're all intimidated by it. It makes them uncomfortable. They're like, 'I don't need to have a threesome. I'm happy with just you'." She proclaimed that the October 11, 2009, National Equality March rally on the national mall was "the single most important event of her career." As she exited, she left with an exultant "Bless God and bless the gays," At the rally, she performed a cover of John Lennon's "Imagine" declaring that "I'm not going to [play] one of my songs tonight because tonight is not about me, it's about you." She changed the original lyrics of the song to reflect the death of Matthew Shepard, a college student murdered because of his sexuality. In September 2010, she spoke at a rally in favor of repealing the US military's Don't ask, don't tell policy, which prohibits lesbian, gay and bisexual people from serving openly, and released an online video urging her fans to contact their Senators in an effort to get the policy overturned. Editors of The Advocate commented that she had become the "fierce advocate" for gays and lesbians that future president Barack Obama had promised to be during his campaign.

Discography

The Fame (2008)

The Fame Monster (2009)

Born This Way (2011)

Tours

The Fame Ball Tour (2009)

The Monster Ball Tour (2009–11)

Awards and nominations

See also

Honorific nicknames in popular music

List of best-selling music artists

References

Further reading

External links

Year in Gaga: A Provocative 2010 — slideshow by Life magazine

Category:1986 births Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American dance musicians Category:American electronic musicians Category:American female pop singers Category:American musicians of Italian descent Category:American singer-songwriters Category:Bisexual musicians Category:BRIT Award winners Category:English-language singers Category:Feminist artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Interscope Records artists Category:Keytarists Category:LGBT musicians from the United States Category:LGBT rights activists from the United States Category:Living people Category:New York University alumni Category:Singers from New York Category:Sony/ATV Music Publishing artists Category:Wonky Pop acts

Name	Justin Bieber
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Justin Drew Bieber
Born	March 01, 1994
Origin	Stratford, Ontario, Canada
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, piano, percussion,
Genre	Pop, R&B; ( , born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian pop-R&B; singer. Bieber was discovered in 2008 by Scooter Braun, who happened to come across Bieber's videos on YouTube and later became his manager. Braun arranged for him to meet with Usher in Atlanta, Georgia, and Bieber was soon signed to Raymond Braun Media Group (RBMG), a joint venture between Braun and Usher, and then to a recording contract with Island Records offered by L.A. Reid. His first full studio release, My World 2.0, was released on March 23, 2010 and has since received similar success; it debuted at number one and within the top ten of several countries and was certified platinum in the United States. It was preceded by the worldwide top-ten single, "Baby," in January 2010.
Name	Bieber, Justin
Short description	Canadian singer
Date of birth	March 1, 1994
Place of birth	Stratford, Ontario, Canada

Category:1994 births Category:Living people Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:Canadian child singers Category:Canadian dance musicians Category:Canadian expatriate musicians in the United States Category:Canadian Internet personalities Category:Canadian male singers Category:Canadian pop singers Category:Canadian rhythm and blues singers Category:Hip hop singers Category:Island Records artists Category:Musicians from Atlanta, Georgia Category:Musicians from Ontario Category:People from Stratford, Ontario Category:Canadian people of German descent

Name	Hillary Rodham Clinton
Office	67th United States Secretary of State
President	Barack Obama
Deputy	Jim Steinberg
Term start	January 21, 2009
Predecessor	Condoleezza Rice
Jr/sr2	United States Senator
State2	New York
Term start2	January 3, 2001
Term end2	January 21, 2009
Preceded2	Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Succeeded2	Kirsten Gillibrand
Office3	First Lady of the United States
Term start3	January 20, 1993
Term end3	January 20, 2001
Preceded3	Barbara Bush
Succeeded3	Laura Bush
Office4	First Lady of Arkansas
Term start4	January 11, 1983
Term end4	December 12, 1992
Predecessor4	Gay Daniels White
Successor4	Betty Tucker
Term start5	January 9, 1979
Term end5	January 19, 1981
Predecessor5	Barbara Pryor
Successor5	Gay Daniels White
Birth date	October 26, 1947
Birth place	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Bill Clinton
Children	Chelsea
Residence	Chappaqua, United States
Alma mater	Wellesley CollegeYale Law School
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Methodist
Signature	Hillary Rodham Clinton Signature.svg
Website	Official website

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (; born October 26, 1947) is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham first attracted national attention in 1969 for her remarks as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. She embarked on a career in law after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973. Following a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas in 1974 and married Bill Clinton in 1975. Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977 and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, she successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas's education system. She sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.

In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her years as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

After moving to the state of New York, Clinton was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2000. That election marked the first time an American First Lady had run for public office; Clinton was also the first female senator to represent the state. In the Senate, she initially supported the Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, including a vote for the Iraq War Resolution. She subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the war in Iraq and on most domestic issues. Senator Clinton was reelected by a wide margin in 2006. In the 2008 presidential nomination race, Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost to Senator Barack Obama. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first former First Lady to serve in a president's cabinet.

Early life and education

Early life

Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in a United Methodist family, first in Chicago and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois. Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was the son of Welsh and English immigrants; he managed a successful small business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell, was a homemaker of English, Scottish, French, French Canadian, and Welsh descent. She participated in swimming, baseball, and other sports. For her senior year, she was redistricted to Maine South High School, where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in the top five percent of her class of 1965. Her mother wanted her to have an independent, professional career,

Raised in a politically conservative household, at age thirteen Rodham helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's classic The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1962.

College

In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science. During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans; with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group, she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke. She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. In contrast to the 1960s current that advocated radical actions against the political system, she sought to work for change within it. In her junior year, Rodham became a supporter of the antiwar presidential nomination campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy. In early 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association and served through early 1969; In 1969, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Her speech received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes. She was featured in an article published in Life magazine, due to the response to a part of her speech that criticized Senator Edward Brooke, who had spoken before her at the commencement. She also appeared on Irv Kupcinet's nationally syndicated television talk show as well as in Illinois and New England newspapers. That summer, she worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).

Law school

Rodham then entered Yale Law School, where she served on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital Edelman later became a significant mentor. She was recruited by political advisor Anne Wexler to work on the 1970 campaign of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Duffey, with Rodham later crediting Wexler with providing her first job in politics.

In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. The firm was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members); Clinton canceled his original summer plans, in order to live with her in California; the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton. Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined. Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals" and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.

Marriage and family, law career and First Lady of Arkansas

From the East Coast to Arkansas

During her postgraduate study, Rodham served as staff attorney for Edelman's newly founded Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children. During 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard Nussbaum, Wright thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president. Meanwhile, Clinton had repeatedly asked her to marry him, and she continued to demur. However, after failing the District of Columbia bar exam and passing the Arkansas exam, Rodham came to a key decision. As she later wrote, "I chose to follow my heart instead of my head". She thus followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were brighter. Clinton was then teaching law and running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his home state. In August 1974, she moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and became one of only two female faculty members in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where Bill Clinton also was. She gave classes in criminal law, where she was considered a rigorous teacher and tough grader, and was the first director of the school's legal aid clinic. She still harbored doubts about marriage, concerned that her separate identity would be lost and that her accomplishments would be viewed in the light of someone else's.

Early Arkansas years

of Little Rock from 1977 to 1979 while he was Arkansas Attorney General.]] Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975, and Hillary finally agreed to marry. Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room. She announced she was keeping the name Hillary Rodham, although her decision upset their mothers. Bill Clinton had lost the congressional race in 1974, but in November 1976 was elected Arkansas Attorney General, and so the couple moved to the state capital of Little Rock. There, in February 1977, Rodham joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence. She specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property law

Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977 and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979. The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted. while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,

In 1977, Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund. Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana) appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981. From mid-1978 to mid-1980, she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so. During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.

Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–1981, 1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year, where she successfully secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.

In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm. From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband. During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures contracts; an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months. The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time. she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law to campaign for him full-time. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was named chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, where she sought to reform the state's court-sanctioned public education system. In one of the Clinton governorship's most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association, to establish mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and classroom size. She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.

Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than the other partners, as she billed fewer hours, but still made more than $200,000 in her final year there. She seldom did trial work,

From 1982 to 1988, Clinton was on board of directors, sometimes as chair, of the New World Foundation, which funded a variety of New Left interest groups. From 1987 to 1991, she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it. When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary considered running, but private polls were unfavorable and, in the end, he ran and was reelected for the final time.

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992) and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992). In addition to her positions with nonprofit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992) and Lafarge (1990–1992). TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law. Once there, she pushed successfully for Wal-Mart to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, was largely unsuccessful in a campaign for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.

Bill Clinton presidential campaign of 1992

Hillary Clinton received sustained national attention for the first time when her husband became a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1992. Before the New Hampshire primary, tabloid publications printed claims that Bill Clinton had had an extramarital affair with Arkansas lounge singer Gennifer Flowers. In response, the Clintons appeared together on 60 Minutes, where Bill Clinton denied the affair but acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage." This joint appearance was credited with rescuing his campaign. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton made culturally disparaging remarks about Tammy Wynette and her outlook on marriage, and about women staying home and baking cookies and having teas, that were ill-considered by her own admission. Bill Clinton said that in electing him, the nation would "get two for the price of one", referring to the prominent role his wife would assume. Beginning with Daniel Wattenberg's August 1992 The American Spectator article "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock", Hillary Clinton's own past ideological and ethical record came under conservative attack. At least twenty other articles in major publications also drew comparisons between her and Lady Macbeth.

First Lady of the United States

Role as First Lady

When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States, and announced that she would be using that form of her name. She was the first First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career up to the time of entering the White House. She was part of the innermost circle vetting appointments to the new administration, and her choices filled at least eleven top-level positions and dozens more lower-level ones. She is regarded as the most openly empowered presidential wife in American history, save for Eleanor Roosevelt.

on Marine One, 1993. ]] Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters were well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency. Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents", or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary". The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a First Lady were enough to send Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. from the time she came to Washington, she also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures. Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul" and that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium." Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas, to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as First Lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.

Health care and other policy initiatives

favorable and unfavorable ratings, 1992–1996 ]] In January 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Hillary Clinton to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education reform. She privately urged that passage of health care reform be given higher priority than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (which she was also unenthusiastic about the merits of). The recommendation of the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan, a comprehensive proposal that would require employers to provide health coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance organizations. Its opponents quickly derided the plan as "Hillarycare"; some protesters against it became vitriolic, and during a July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, she was forced to wear a bulletproof vest at times. The plan did not receive enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, although Democrats controlled both chambers, and the proposal was abandoned in September 1994. Republicans made the Clinton health care plan a major campaign issue of the 1994 midterm elections, which saw a net Republican gain of fifty-three seats in the House election and seven in the Senate election, winning control of both; many analysts and pollsters found the plan to be a major factor in the Democrats' defeat, especially among independent voters. The White House subsequently sought to downplay Hillary Clinton's role in shaping policy. Opponents of universal health care would continue to use "Hillarycare" as a pejorative label for similar plans by others.

Along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she was a force behind the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents could not provide them with health coverage, and conducted outreach efforts on behalf of enrolling children in the program once it became law. She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare. She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health. The First Lady worked to investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as the Gulf War syndrome. As First Lady, Clinton hosted numerous White House conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997), on Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997), and on Children and Adolescents (2000). She also hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Teenagers (2000) and the first-ever White House Conference on Philanthropy (1999).

Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-traveled First Lady held by Pat Nixon. She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a soft power role in U.S. diplomacy. A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan. Clinton was troubled by the plight of women she encountered, but found a warm response from the people of the countries she visited and a gained better relationship with the American press corps. The trip was a transformative experience for her and presaged her eventual career in diplomacy. declaring "that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights" She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries. It and Clinton's own visits encouraged women to make themselves heard in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Whitewater and other investigations

The Whitewater controversy was the focus of media attention from the publication of a New York Times report during the 1992 presidential campaign, and throughout her time as First Lady. The Clintons had lost their late-1970s investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation; at the same time, their partners in that investment, Jim and Susan McDougal, operated Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan institution that retained the legal services of Rose Law Firm Independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Clinton's legal billing records; she said she did not know where they were. The delayed appearance of the records sparked intense interest and another investigation about how they surfaced and where they had been; After the discovery of the records, on January 26, 1996, Clinton made history by becoming the first First Lady to be subpoenaed to testify before a Federal grand jury. After several Independent Counsels had investigated, a final report was issued in 2000 that stated there was insufficient evidence that either Clinton had engaged in criminal wrongdoing. The 1996 discovery of a two-year-old White House memo caused the investigation to focus more on whether Hillary Clinton had orchestrated the firings and whether the statements she made to investigators about her role in the firings were true. The 2000 final Independent Counsel report concluded she was involved in the firings and that she had made "factually false" statements, but that there was insufficient evidence that she knew the statements were false, or knew that her actions would lead to firings, to prosecute her. Following deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's July 1993 suicide, allegations were made that Hillary Clinton had ordered the removal of potentially damaging files (related to Whitewater or other matters) from Foster's office on the night of his death. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated this, and by 1999, Starr was reported to be holding the investigation open, despite his staff having told him there was no case to be made. When Starr's successor Robert Ray issued his final Whitewater reports in 2000, no claims were made against Hillary Clinton regarding this. In March 1994 newspaper reports revealed her spectacular profits from cattle futures trading in 1978–1979; allegations were made in the press of conflict of interest and disguised bribery, An outgrowth of the Travelgate investigation was the June 1996 discovery of improper White House access to hundreds of FBI background reports on former Republican White House employees, an affair that some called "". The 2000 final Independent Counsel report found no substantial or credible evidence that Hillary Clinton had any role or showed any misconduct in the matter.

Lewinsky scandal

favorable and unfavorable ratings, 1997–2000 Events surrounding the Lewinsky scandal eventually led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. When the allegations against her husband were first made public, Hillary Clinton stated that they were the result of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", characterizing the Lewinsky charges as the latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Clinton political enemies rather than any wrongdoing by her husband. She later said that she had been misled by her husband's initial claims that no affair had taken place. After the evidence of President Clinton's encounters with Lewinsky became incontrovertible, she issued a public statement reaffirming her commitment to their marriage, but privately was reported to be furious at him and was unsure if she wanted to stay in the marriage.

There was a variety of public reactions to Hillary Clinton after this: some women admired her strength and poise in private matters made public, some sympathized with her as a victim of her husband's insensitive behavior, others criticized her as being an enabler to her husband's indiscretions, while still others accused her of cynically staying in a failed marriage as a way of keeping or even fostering her own political influence. In her 2003 memoir, she would attribute her decision to stay married to "a love that has persisted for decades" and add: "No one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met."

Traditional duties

Clinton initiated and was Founding Chair of the Save America's Treasures program, a national effort that matched federal funds to private donations to preserve and restore historic items and sites, including the flag that inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the First Ladies Historic Site in Canton, Ohio. and hosted Millennium Evenings, a series of lectures that discussed futures studies, one of which became the first live simultaneous webcast from the White House.

In the White House, Clinton placed donated handicrafts of contemporary American artisans, such as pottery and glassware, on rotating display in the state rooms. the redecoration of the Treaty Room into the presidential study along 19th century lines, and the redecoration of the Map Room to how it looked during World War II. Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. She became the first First Lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election. However, Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having developments in his personal life become very public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives representing New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state's politics before this race. Clinton began her campaign by visiting every county in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. During the campaign, she devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent. She was sworn in as United States Senator on January 3, 2001.

United States Senator

First term

by Vice President Al Gore in the Old Senate Chamber, as President Clinton and daughter Chelsea look on. January 3, 2001.]] Upon entering the Senate, Clinton maintained a low public profile and built relationships with senators from both parties. She forged alliances with religiously inclined senators by becoming a regular participant in the Senate Prayer Breakfast.

Clinton has served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–2002), Committee on Armed Services (since 2003), Committee on Environment and Public Works (since 2001), She is also a Commissioner of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (since 2001).

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Clinton sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in her state. Working with New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, she was instrumental in quickly securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment. She subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders. Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, she worked to address some of the civil liberties concerns with it, before voting in favor of a compromise renewed act in March 2006 that gained large majority support.

Clinton strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government. Clinton voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which authorized United States President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq, should such action be required to enforce a United Nations Security Council Resolution after pursuing with diplomatic efforts.

After the Iraq War began, Clinton made trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit American troops stationed there. On a visit to Iraq in February 2005, Clinton noted that the insurgency had failed to disrupt the democratic elections held earlier, and that parts of the country were functioning well. Noting that war deployments were draining regular and reserve forces, she cointroduced legislation to increase the size of the regular United States Army by 80,000 soldiers to ease the strain. In late 2005, Clinton said that while immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake, Bush's pledge to stay "until the job is done" was also misguided, as it gave Iraqis "an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves." Her stance caused frustration among those in the Democratic Party who favored immediate withdrawal. Clinton supported retaining and improving health benefits for veterans, and lobbied against the closure of several military bases. favorable and unfavorable ratings, 2001–2009

In 2005, Clinton called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how hidden sex scenes showed up in the controversial video game . Along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, she introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, intended to protect children from inappropriate content found in video games. In 2004 and 2006, Clinton voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment that sought to prohibit same-sex marriage.

Looking to establish a "progressive infrastructure" to rival that of American conservatism, Clinton played a formative role in conversations that led to the 2003 founding of former Clinton administration chief of staff John Podesta's Center for American Progress, shared aides with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, founded in 2003, and advised the Clintons' former antagonist David Brock's Media Matters for America, created in 2004. Following the 2004 Senate elections, she successfully pushed new Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid to create a Senate war room to handle daily political messaging.

Reelection campaign of 2006

In November 2004, Clinton announced that she would seek a second Senate term. The early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, withdrew from the contest after several months of poor campaign performance. Clinton easily won the Democratic nomination over opposition from antiwar activist Jonathan Tasini. Clinton's eventual opponents in the general election were Republican candidate John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, along with several third-party candidates. She won the election on November 7, 2006, with 67 percent of the vote to Spencer's 31 percent, carrying all but four of New York's sixty-two counties. Clinton spent $36 million for her reelection, more than any other candidate for Senate in the 2006 elections did. Some Democrats criticized her for spending too much in a one-sided contest, while some supporters were concerned she did not leave more funds for a potential presidential bid in 2008. In the following months, she transferred $10 million of her Senate funds toward her presidential campaign.

Second term

Navy Admiral Mike Mullen responds to a question during his 2007 confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.]]

Clinton opposed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007. In March 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by a deadline; it passed almost completely along party lines but was subsequently vetoed by President Bush. In May 2007, a compromise war funding bill that removed withdrawal deadlines but tied funding to progress benchmarks for the Iraqi government passed the Senate by a vote of 80-14 and would be signed by Bush; Clinton was one of those who voted against it. Clinton responded to General David Petraeus's September 2007 Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq by saying, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."

In March 2007, in response to the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy, Clinton called on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. In May and June 2007, regarding the high-profile, hotly debated comprehensive immigration reform bill known as the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, Clinton cast several votes in support of the bill, which eventually failed to gain cloture.

As the financial crisis of 2007–2008 reached a peak with the liquidity crisis of September 2008, Clinton supported the proposed bailout of United States financial system, voting in favor of the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, saying that it represented the interests of the American people. It passed the Senate 74–25.

Presidential campaign of 2008

Clinton had been preparing for a potential candidacy for United States President since at least early 2003. On January 20, 2007, Clinton announced via her web site the formation of a presidential exploratory committee for the United States presidential election of 2008; she stated, "I'm in, and I'm in to win." No woman had ever been nominated by a major party for President of the United States. In April 2007, the Clintons liquidated a blind trust, that had been established when Bill Clinton became president in 1993, to avoid the possibility of ethical conflicts or political embarrassments in the trust as Hillary Clinton undertook her presidential race. Later disclosure statements revealed that the couple's worth was now upwards of $50 million,

Clinton led candidates competing for the Democratic nomination in opinion polls for the election throughout the first half of 2007. Most polls placed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as Clinton's closest competitors. Clinton and Obama both set records for early fundraising, swapping the money lead each quarter. By September 2007, polling in the first six states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses showed that Clinton was leading in all of them, with the races being closest in Iowa and South Carolina. By the following month, national polls showed Clinton far ahead of Democratic competitors. At the end of October, Clinton suffered a rare poor debate performance against Obama, Edwards, and her other opponents. Obama's message of "change" began to resonate with the Democratic electorate better than Clinton's message of "experience".

in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before Super Tuesday 2008.]] In the first vote of 2008, she placed third in the January 3 Iowa Democratic caucus to Obama and Edwards. Obama gained ground in national polling in the next few days, with all polls predicting a victory for him in the New Hampshire primary. However, Clinton gained a surprise win there on January 8, defeating Obama narrowly. Explanations for her New Hampshire comeback varied but often centered on her being seen more sympathetically, especially by women, after her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke while responding to a voter's question the day before the election. The nature of the contest fractured in the next few days. Several remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and a remark by Hillary Clinton concerning Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon B. Johnson, were perceived by many as, accidentally or intentionally, limiting Obama as a racially oriented candidate or otherwise denying the post-racial significance and accomplishments of his campaign. Despite attempts by both Hillary Clinton and Obama to downplay the issue, Democratic voting became more polarized as a result, with Clinton losing much of her support among African Americans. She lost by a two-to-one margin to Obama in the January 26 South Carolina primary, setting up, with Edwards soon dropping out, an intense two-person contest for the twenty-two February 5 Super Tuesday states. Bill Clinton had made more statements attracting criticism for their perceived racial implications late in the South Carolina campaign, and his role was seen as damaging enough to her that a wave of supporters within and outside of the campaign said the former President "needs to stop." On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the largest states, such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, while Obama won more states; they almost evenly split the total popular vote. But Obama was gaining more pledged delegates for his share of the popular vote due to better exploitation of the Democratic proportional allocation rules.

rally in support of her former rival, Barack Obama; October 2008.]] The Clinton campaign had counted on winning the nomination by Super Tuesday, and was unprepared financially and logistically for a prolonged effort; lagging in Internet fundraising, Clinton began loaning her campaign money. Obama won the next eleven February caucuses and primaries across the country, often by large margins, and took a significant pledged delegate lead over Clinton. On March 4, Clinton broke the string of losses by winning in Ohio among other places, Throughout the campaign, Obama dominated caucuses, which the Clinton campaign largely ignored organizing for. Obama did well in primaries where African Americans or younger, college-educated, or more affluent voters were heavily represented; Clinton did well in primaries where Hispanics or older, non-college-educated, or working-class white voters predominated. Some Democratic party leaders expressed concern that the drawn-out campaign between the two could damage the winner in the general election contest against Republican presumptive nominee John McCain, especially if an eventual triumph for Clinton was won via party-appointed superdelegates. On April 22, she won the Pennsylvania primary, and kept her campaign alive. She won some of the remaining contests, and indeed, over the last three months of the campaign she won more delegates, states, and votes than Obama, but it was not enough to overcome Obama's lead. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama, declaring, "The way to continue our fight now to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama." By campaign's end, Clinton had won 1,640 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,763; at the time of the clinching, Clinton had 286 superdelegates to Obama's 395, with those numbers widening to 256 versus 438 once Obama was acknowledged the winner. with both breaking the previous record. Clinton also eclipsed, by a very large margin, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's 1972 mark for most primaries and delegates won by a woman. Clinton gave a passionate speech supporting Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and campaigned frequently for him in Fall 2008, which concluded with his victory over McCain in the general election on November 4. Clinton's campaign ended up severely in debt; she owed millions of dollars to outside vendors and wrote off the $13 million that she lent it herself.

Secretary of State

Nomination and confirmation

holds the Bible.]] In mid-November 2008, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration, and on November 21, reports indicated that she had accepted the position. On December 1, President-elect Obama formally announced that Clinton would be his nominee for Secretary of State. Clinton said she was reluctant to leave the Senate, but that the new position represented a "difficult and exciting adventure".

The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008. Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, Clinton's public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day. She became the first former First Lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.

Tenure

in April 2009]] Clinton spent her initial days as Secretary of State telephoning dozens of world leaders and indicating that U.S. foreign policy would change direction: "We have a lot of damage to repair." She advocated an expanded role in global economic issues for the State Department and cited the need for an increased U.S. diplomatic presence, especially in Iraq where the Defense Department had conducted diplomatic missions. She pushed for a larger international affairs budget; In March 2009, Clinton prevailed over Vice President Joe Biden on an internal debate to send an additional 20,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. An elbow fracture and subsequent painful recuperation caused Clinton to miss two foreign trips in June 2009 amid media speculation about her level of influence within the administration. Clinton returned to the diplomatic scene sitting down with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who agreed on a U.S.-backed proposal to begin talks with the Micheletti government. Clinton announced the most ambitious of her departmental reforms, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which establishes specific objectives for the State Department’s diplomatic missions abroad; it is modeled after a similar process in the Defense Department that she was familiar with from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee. (The first such review was issued in late 2010 and called for the U.S. leading through "civilian power" as a cost-effective way of responding to international challenges and defusing crises.) In September, Clinton unveiled the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative at the annual meeting of her husband's Clinton Global Initiative. The new initiative seeks to battle hunger worldwide as a strategic part of U.S. foreign policy, rather than just react to food shortage emergencies as they occur, and emphasizes the role of women farmers. The same month, when asked about her political future, she said: “I have absolutely no interest in running for president again. None. None.”

In a major speech in January 2010, Clinton drew analogies between the Iron Curtain and the free and unfree Internet. Chinese officials reacted negatively towards it, and it garnered attention as the first time a senior American official had clearly defined the Internet as a key element of American foreign policy. By mid-2010, Clinton and Obama had forged a good working relationship; she was a team player within the administration and a defender of it to the outside, and was careful that neither she nor her husband would upstage him. She met with him weekly, but did not have the close, daily relationship that some of her predecessors had had with their presidents. Clinton assumed a prominent role in the September 2010 resumption of direct talks in the stalled peace process in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, after having cajoled the reluctant parties to the table. In late November 2010, Clinton led the U.S. damage control effort after WikiLeaks released confidential State Department cables containing blunt statements and assessments by U.S. and foreign diplomats. A few of the cables released by WikiLeaks concerned Clinton directly: they revealed that directions to members of the foreign service, written by the CIA, had gone out in 2009 under her (systematically attached) name to gather biometric and other personal details on foreign diplomats, including officials of the United Nations and U.S. allies.

Political positions

Kevin Rudd in March 2008]] In a Gallup poll conducted during May 2005, 54 percent of respondents considered Clinton a liberal, 30 percent considered her a moderate, and 9 percent considered her a conservative.

Several organizations attempted to measure Clinton's place on the political spectrum scientifically using her Senate votes. National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 in the political spectrum, relative to the then-current Senate, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal's subsequent rankings placed her as the 32nd-most liberal senator in 2006 and 16th-most liberal senator in 2007. A 2004 analysis by political scientists Joshua D. Clinton of Princeton University, Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers of Stanford University found her to be likely the sixth-to-eighth-most liberal Senator. The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rated her votes from 2003 through 2006 as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three areas: Economic, Social, and Foreign; averaged for the four years, the ratings are: Economic = 75 liberal, 23 conservative; Social = 83 liberal, 6 conservative; Foreign = 66 liberal, 30 conservative. Average = 75 liberal, 20 conservative.

Interest groups also gave Clinton scores based on how well her Senate votes aligned with the positions of the group. Through 2008, she had an average lifetime 90 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action and a lifetime 8 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.

Writings and recordings

As First Lady of the United States, Clinton published a weekly syndicated newspaper column titled "Talking It Over" from 1995 to 2000, distributed by Creators Syndicate. It focused on her experiences and those of women, children and families she met during her travels around the world.

Other books released by Clinton when she was First Lady include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and (2000). In 2001, she wrote an afterword to the children's book Beatrice's Goat.

In 2003, Clinton released a 562-page autobiography, Living History. In anticipation of high sales, publisher Simon & Schuster paid Clinton a near-record advance of $8 million. The book set a first-week sales record for a nonfiction work, went on to sell more than one million copies in the first month following publication, and was translated into twelve foreign languages. Clinton's audio recording of the book earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Cultural and political image

Hillary Clinton has frequently been featured in the media and popular culture from a wide spectrum of perspectives. In 1995, New York Times writer Todd Purdum labeled Clinton "the First Lady as Rorschach test", Clinton has often been described in the popular media as a polarizing figure, James Madison University political science professor Valerie Sulfaro's 2007 study used the American National Election Studies' "feeling thermometer" polls, which measure the degree of opinion about a political figure, to find that such polls during Clinton's First Lady years confirm the "conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing figure", with the added insight that "affect towards Mrs. Clinton as first lady tended to be very positive or very negative, with a fairly constant one fourth of respondents feeling ambivalent or neutral." University of California, San Diego political science professor Gary Jacobson's 2006 study of partisan polarization found that in a state-by-state survey of job approval ratings of the state's senators, Clinton had the fourth-largest partisan difference of any senator, with a 50 percentage point difference in approval between New York's Democrats and Republicans. Northern Illinois University political science professor Barbara Burrell's 2000 study found that Clinton's Gallup poll favorability numbers broke sharply along partisan lines throughout her time as First Lady, with 70 to 90 percent of Democrats typically viewing her favorably while 20 to 40 percent of Republicans did not. University of Wisconsin–Madison political science professor Charles Franklin analyzed her record of favorable versus unfavorable ratings in public opinion polls, and found that there was more variation in them during her First Lady years than her Senate years. The Senate years showed favorable ratings around 50 percent and unfavorable ratings in the mid-40 percent range; Franklin noted that, "This sharp split is, of course, one of the more widely remarked aspects of Sen. Clinton's public image." Troy further wrote that Hillary Clinton "has been uniquely controversial and contradictory since she first appeared on the national radar screen in 1992"

for fifteen years. Her professional career and political involvement set the stage for public reaction to her as First Lady.]] Burrell's study found women consistently rating Clinton more favorably than men by about ten percentage points during her First Lady years. In particular, Anderson states there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found political cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.

Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different perspectives. A 2006 survey by The New York Observer found "a virtual cottage industry" of "anti-Clinton literature", put out by Regnery Publishing and other conservative imprints, Van Natta, Jr., found that Republican and conservative groups viewed her as a reliable "bogeyman" to mention in fundraising letters,

Going into the early stages of her presidential campaign for 2008, a Time magazine cover showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate". By December 2007, communications professor Jamieson observed that there was a large amount of misogyny present about Clinton on the Internet, up to and including Facebook and other sites devoted to depictions reducing Clinton to sexual humiliation. that "We know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle." Newsweek editor Jon Meacham summed the relationship between Clinton and the American public by saying that the New Hampshire events, "brought an odd truth to light: though Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the periphery or in the middle of national life for decades ... she is one of the most recognizable but least understood figures in American politics." She gained consistently high approval ratings, and her favorable-unfavorable ratings during 2010 were easily the highest of any active, nationally prominent American political figure. She continued to do well in Gallup's most admired man and woman poll; in 2010 she was named the most admired woman by Americans for the ninth straight time and the fifteenth overall.

Awards and honors

Clinton has received many awards and honors during her career from American and international organizations for her activities concerning health, women, and children.

Electoral history

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

;Official sites Official Biography of First Lady Clinton

}}

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Name	David Letterman
Caption	Speaking at the opening of the Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute (September 2009)
Pseudonym	Earl Hofert
Birth name	David Michael Letterman
Birth date	April 12, 1947
Birth place	Indianapolis, Indiana
Notable work	Host of Late Night with David Letterman (NBC)Host of Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)
Signature	David Letterman Autograph.svg

}} David Michael Letterman (born April 12, 1947) is an American television host and comedian. He hosts the late night television talk show, Late Show with David Letterman broadcast on CBS. Letterman has been a fixture on late night television since the 1982 debut of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC. Only Letterman's friend and mentor Johnny Carson has had a longer late-night hosting career. was a florist; his mother Dorothy Letterman (née Hofert, now Dorothy Mengering), a Presbyterian church secretary of German descent, is an occasional figure on the show, usually at holidays and birthdays. He has an older sister Janice and a younger sister Gretchen.

Letterman lived on the north side of Indianapolis (Broad Ripple area), not far from Speedway, IN, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and he enjoyed collecting model cars, including racers. In 2000, he told an interviewer for Esquire that, while growing up, he admired his father's ability to tell jokes and be the life of the party. Harry Joseph Letterman survived a heart attack at age 36, when David was a young boy. The fear of losing his father was constantly with Letterman as he grew up. The elder Letterman died of a second heart attack at age 57.

Letterman attended his hometown's Broad Ripple High School at the same time as Marilyn Tucker Quayle (wife of the former Vice President) who lived nearby, and worked as a stock boy at the local Atlas supermarket. According to the Ball State Daily News, he originally had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades weren't good enough, so he decided to attend Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. He is a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity, and he graduated from what was then the Department of Radio and Television, in 1969. A self-described average student, Letterman endowed a scholarship for what he called "C students" at Ball State.

Though he registered for the draft and passed his physical after graduating from College, he avoided military service in Vietnam due to receiving a draft lottery number of 352 (out of 365).

Letterman began his broadcasting career as an announcer and newscaster at the college's student-run radio station—WBST—a 10-watt campus station which now is part of Indiana public radio. He was fired for treating classical music with irreverence.

Letterman credits Paul Dixon—host of the Paul Dixon Show, a Cincinnati-based talk show also shown in Indianapolis while Letterman was growing up—for inspiring his choice of career: :"I was just out of college [in 1969], and I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And then all the sudden I saw him doing it [on TV]. And I thought: That's really what I want to do!"

Weatherman

Letterman began his career as a radio talk show host on WNTS (AM), and on Indianapolis television station WLWI (now called WTHR) as a local anchor and weatherman. He received some recognition for his unpredictable on-air behavior, which included congratulating a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane and predicting hail stones "the size of canned hams." (To this day he occasionally gives out canned hams on his show). He would also occasionally report the weather and the day's very high and low temps for fictitious cities ("Eight inches of snow in Bingree and surrounding areas."). He also starred in a local kiddie show, made wisecracks as host of a late night TV show called "Freeze-Dried Movies" (he once acted out a scene from "Godzilla" using plastic dinosaurs), and hosted a talk show that aired early on Saturday mornings called "Clover Power," in which he interviewed 4-H members about their projects.

In 1971, Letterman appeared as a pit road reporter for ABC Sports' tape-delayed coverage of the Indianapolis 500.

Move to Los Angeles

In 1975, encouraged by his then-wife Michelle and several of his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, Letterman moved to Los Angeles, California, with hope of becoming a comedy writer. He started off by writing material for comedian Jimmie Walker. He also began performing stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store, a famed comedy club and proving ground for young comics.

Letterman appeared in the summer of 1977 on the short-lived Starland Vocal Band Show. He has since joked about how fortunate he was that nobody would ever see his performance on the program (due to its low ratings).

Letterman had a stint as a cast member on Mary Tyler Moore's variety show, Mary; a guest appearance on Mork & Mindy (as a parody of EST leader Werner Erhard); and appearances on game shows such as The $20,000 Pyramid, The Gong Show, Password Plus and Liar's Club. He also hosted a 1977 pilot for a game show entitled The Riddlers that was never picked up. His dry, sarcastic humor caught the attention of scouts for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and Letterman was soon a regular guest on the show. Letterman became a favorite of Carson's and was a regular guest host for the show beginning in 1978. Letterman personally credits Carson as the person who influenced his career the most.

NBC

Morning show

On June 23, 1980, Letterman was given his own morning comedy show on NBC, The David Letterman Show. It was originally 90 minutes long, but was shortened to 60 minutes in August. The show was a critical success, winning two Emmy Awards, but was a ratings disappointment and was canceled in October 1980.

Late Night with David Letterman

NBC kept Letterman under contract to try him in a different time slot. Late Night with David Letterman debuted February 1, 1982; the first guest on the first show was Bill Murray. The show ran weeknights at 12:30 a.m. Eastern Time, immediately following The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It was seen as being edgy and unpredictable, and soon developed a cult following (particularly among college students). Letterman's reputation as an interviewer was borne out in verbal sparring matches with Cher (who even called him an asshole on the show), Shirley MacLaine, Charles Grodin, and Madonna. The show also featured inventive comedy segments and running characters, in a style heavily influenced by the 1950s and '60s programs of Steve Allen. Although Ernie Kovacs is often cited as an influence on the show, Letterman has denied this. In the final months of his first stint as host of The Tonight Show, Leno beat Letterman in the ratings by a 1.3 million viewer margin (5.2 million to 3.9 million), and Nightline and The Late Show were virtually tied. Once O'Brien took over Tonight, however, Letterman closed the gap in the ratings. O'Brien initially drove the median age of Tonight Show viewers from 55 to 45, with most older viewers opting to watch The Late Show instead.

Letterman's shows have garnered both critical and industry praise, receiving 67 Emmy Award nominations, winning twelve times in his first 20 years in late night television. From 1993–2009, Letterman ranked higher than Leno in the annual Harris Poll of Nation's Favorite TV Personality twelve times. Leno was higher than Letterman on that poll three times during the same period, in 1998, 2007, and 2008.

Hosting the Academy Awards

On March 27, 1995, Letterman acted as the host for the 67th Academy Awards ceremony. Critics blasted Letterman for what they deemed a poor hosting of the Oscars, noting that his irreverent style undermined the traditional importance and glamor of the event. In a joke about their unusual names (inspired by a similar joke by Woody Allen), he started off by introducing Uma Thurman to Oprah Winfrey, and then the both of them to Keanu Reeves: "Uma...Oprah! Oprah...Uma! Oprah, Uma...Keanu!" This and many of his other jokes fell flat. Although Letterman attracted the highest ratings to the annual telecast since 1983, many felt that the bad publicity garnered by Letterman's hosting caused a decline in the Late Show's ratings.

Letterman recycled the apparent debacle into a long-running gag. On his first show after the Oscars, he joked, "Looking back, I had no idea that thing was being televised." He lampooned his stint in the following year, during Billy Crystal's opening Oscar skit, which also parodied the plane-crashing scenes from that year's chief nominated film, The English Patient.

For years afterward, Letterman recounted his horrible hosting at the Oscars, although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences still holds Letterman in high regard and it has been rumored they have asked him to host the Oscars again. On September 7, 2010, he made an appearance on the premier of the 14th season of The View, and confirmed the rumors.

Heart surgery hiatus

On January 14, 2000, a routine check-up revealed that an artery in Letterman's heart was severely constricted. He was rushed to emergency surgery for a quintuple bypass.

During the initial weeks of his recovery, reruns of the Late Show were shown and introduced by friends of Letterman including Drew Barrymore, including Dr. O. Wayne Isom and physician Louis Aronne, who frequently appears on the show. In a show of emotion, Letterman was nearly in tears as he thanked the health care team with the words "These are the people who saved my life!" The episode earned an Emmy nomination. For a number of episodes, Letterman continued to crack jokes about his bypass, including saying, "Bypass surgery: it's when doctors surgically create new blood flow to your heart. A bypass is what happened to me when I didn't get The Tonight Show! It's a whole different thing." In a later running gag he lobbied his home state of Indiana to rename the freeway circling Indianapolis (I-465) "The David Letterman Bypass." He also featured a montage of faux news coverage of his bypass surgery, which included a clip of Dave's heart for sale on the Home Shopping Network. Letterman became friends with his doctors and nurses. In 2008, a Rolling Stone interview stated "he hosted a doctor and nurse who'd helped perform the emergency quintuple-bypass heart surgery that saved his life in 2000. 'These are people who were complete strangers when they opened my chest,' he says. 'And now, eight years later, they're among my best friends.' "

Additionally, Letterman invited the band Foo Fighters to play "Everlong", introducing them as "my favorite band, playing my favorite song." During a later Foo Fighters appearance, Letterman said that Foo Fighters had been in the middle of a South American tour which they canceled to come play on his comeback episode.

Letterman again handed over the reins of the show to several guest hosts (including Bill Cosby, Brad Garrett, Elvis Costello, John McEnroe, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Bonnie Hunt, Luke Wilson and bandleader Paul Shaffer) in February 2003, when he was diagnosed with a severe case of shingles. Later that year, Letterman made regular use of guest hosts—including Tom Arnold and Kelsey Grammer—for new shows broadcast on Fridays. In March 2007, Adam Sandler—who had been scheduled to be the lead guest—served as a guest host while Letterman was ill with a stomach virus.

Re-signing with CBS

In March 2002, as Letterman's contract with CBS neared expiration, ABC offered him the time slot for long-running news program Nightline with Ted Koppel. Letterman was interested as he believed he could never match Leno's ratings at CBS due to weaker lead-ins from the network's late local news programs, but was reluctant to replace Koppel. Letterman addressed his decision to re-sign on the air, stating that he was content at CBS and that he had great respect for Koppel.

On December 4, 2006, CBS revealed that David Letterman signed a new contract to host The Late Show with David Letterman through the fall of 2010. "I'm thrilled to be continuing on at CBS," said Letterman. "At my age you really don't want to have to learn a new commute." Letterman further joked about the subject by pulling up his right pants leg, revealing a tattoo, presumably temporary, of the ABC logo.

"Thirteen years ago, David Letterman put CBS late night on the map and in the process became one of the defining icons of our network," said Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation. "His presence on our air is an ongoing source of pride, and the creativity and imagination that the Late Show puts forth every night is an ongoing display of the highest quality entertainment. We are truly honored that one of the most revered and talented entertainers of our time will continue to call CBS 'home.'"

According to a 2007 article in Forbes magazine, Letterman earned $40 million a year. A 2009 article in The New York Times, however, said his salary was estimated at $32 million per year.

In June 2009, Letterman and CBS reached agreement to extend his contract to host The Late Show until August 2012. His previous contract had been set to expire in 2010. thus allowing his show to come back on air on January 2, 2008. On his first episode since being off air, he surprised the viewing audience with his newly grown beard, which signified solidarity with the strike. His beard was shaved off during the show on January 7, 2008.

Letterman and Carson

NBC's decision to select Jay Leno and not Letterman to succeed Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show was an embarrassment to Carson, who had all but promised the succession to Letterman. Letterman maintained a close relationship with Carson through his break with NBC. Three years after he left for CBS, HBO produced a made-for-television movie called The Late Shift, based on a book by New York Times reporter Bill Carter, chronicling the battle between Letterman and Leno for the coveted Tonight Show hosting spot. Letterman would mock the film for months afterward, specifically on how the actor playing him, John Michael Higgins, did not resemble him in the least. ("They took a guy who looked nothing like me and with make-up and special camera angles, turned him into a guy who looked nothing like me, with red hair.")

Carson later made a few cameo appearances as a guest on Letterman's show. Carson's final television appearance came May 13, 1994 on a Late Show episode taped in Los Angeles, when he made a surprise appearance during a 'Top 10 list' segment. The audience went wild as Letterman stood up and proudly invited Carson to sit at his desk. The applause was so protracted that Carson was unable to say anything, and he finally returned backstage as the applause continued (it was later explained that Carson had laryngitis, though Carson can be heard talking to Letterman during his appearance).

In early 2005, it was revealed that Carson still kept up with current events and late-night TV right up to his death that year, and that he occasionally sent jokes to Letterman, who used these jokes in his monologue; according to CBS senior vice president Peter Lassally (a onetime producer for both men), Carson got "a big kick out of it." Letterman would do a characteristic Johnny Carson golf swing after delivering one of Carson's jokes. In a tribute to Carson, all of the opening monologue jokes during the first show following Carson's death were written by Carson.

Lassally also claimed that Carson had always believed Letterman, not Leno, to be his "rightful successor." Letterman also frequently employs some of Carson's trademark bits on his show, including "Carnac the Magnificent" (with Paul Shaffer as Carnac), "Stump the Band" and the "Week in Review."

Letterman and Oprah Winfrey

On September 10, 2007, Letterman made his first appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He shared pictures of his son and live-in girlfriend. The so-called feud between Letterman and Winfrey apparently ended in 2005 when Winfrey appeared on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman on December 2, in an event Letterman jokingly referred to as "the Super Bowl of Love". Oprah had previously appeared on Letterman's show when he was hosting NBC's Late Night on May 2, 1989.

Winfrey and Letterman also appeared together in a Late Show promo that aired during CBS's coverage of Super Bowl XLI in February 2007, with the two sitting next to each other on the couch watching the game. Since the game was played between the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears, the Indianapolis-born Letterman wears a Peyton Manning jersey, while Winfrey—who tapes her show in Chicago—is in a Brian Urlacher jersey. Three years later, during CBS's coverage of Super Bowl XLIV, the two appeared again, this time with Winfrey sitting on a couch between Letterman and Jay Leno. The appearance was Letterman's idea: Leno flew to New York City in an NBC corporate jet, sneaking into the Ed Sullivan Theater during the Late Show's February 4 taping wearing a disguise, meeting Winfrey and Letterman at a living room set created in the theater's balcony where they taped their promo.

Other projects

Worldwide Pants

Letterman started his own production company—Worldwide Pants Incorporated—which produced his show and several others, including Everybody Loves Raymond , The Late Late Show, and several critically-acclaimed, but short-lived television series for Bonnie Hunt. Worldwide Pants also produced the dramedy program Ed, which aired on NBC from 2000–2004. It was Letterman's first association with NBC since he left the network in 1993. During Ed's run, the star, Tom Cavanagh, appeared as a guest on The Late Show several times.

In 2005, Worldwide Pants produced its first feature film, Strangers with Candy, which was a prequel to the Comedy Central TV series of the same title. In 2007, Worldwide Pants produced the ABC comedy series, Knights of Prosperity.

Worldwide Pants made significant news in December 2007 when it was announced that Letterman's company had independently negotiated its own contract with the Writers Guild of America, East, thus allowing Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and their writers to return to work, while the union continued its strike against production companies, networks and studios who had not reached an agreement.

Rahal Letterman Racing

Rahal Letterman Racing (RLR) is an auto racing team that currently races in the American Le Mans Series, and part-time in the Indy Racing League. It is co-owned by 1986 Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal and Letterman himself, and is based in Hilliard, Ohio. The team won the 2004 Indianapolis 500 with driver Buddy Rice. Letterman was a pit reporter for ABC in the 1971 Indianapolis 500. The $21 million, David Letterman Communication and Media Building opened for the 2007 Fall semester. It features state-of-the-art recording equipment and facilities. Thousands of Ball State students, faculty, and local residents welcomed Letterman back to Indiana. Letterman's emotional speech touched on his struggles as a college student and his late father, and also included the "top ten good things about having your name on a building."

Letterman received the honor for his dedication to the university throughout his career as a comedian. Letterman finished with, "If reasonable people can put my name on a $21 million building, anything is possible."

Letterman also received a Sagamore of the Wabash from Governor Mitch Daniels.

Record company

In late April 2010, several music industry websites reported that David Letterman started a record label named Clear Entertainment/C.E. Music and signed his first artist, Runner Runner. Lucy Walsh announced on her myspace page that she has been signed by David Letterman and Clear Entertainment/C.E. Music and is working on her album.

Appearances in other media

Letterman appeared in issue 239 of the Marvel comic book The Avengers, in which the title characters are guests on Late Night. A parody of Letterman, called "David Endocrine", is gassed to death along with his bandleader named "Paul" and their audience in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Letterman provided vocals for the Warren Zevon song "Hit Somebody" from My Ride's Here, and provided the voice for Butt-head's father in the 1996 animated film, Beavis and Butt-head Do America. He also had a cameo in the feature film Cabin Boy, with Chris Elliott, who worked as a writer on Letterman's show. In this and other appearances, Letterman is listed in the credits as "Earl Hofert", the name of Letterman's maternal grandfather. He also appeared as himself in the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts as well as the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, in a few episodes of Garry Shandling's 1990s TV series The Larry Sanders Show and in "The Abstinence", a 1996 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. Letterman also appeared in the pilot episode of the short-lived 1986 series "Coach Toast".

Personal life

Marriages and long-term relationships

In 1969, Letterman married Michelle Cook; the marriage ended by divorce in 1977. He also had a long-term relationship with former head writer and producer on Late Night, Merrill Markoe. In fact, Markoe was the mind behind several Late Night staples, such as "Stupid Pet/Human Tricks".

Letterman has a son, Harry Joseph Letterman (born in 2003), with Regina Lasko. Harry is named after Letterman's father. In 2005, police discovered a plot to kidnap Harry Letterman and ransom him for $5 million. Kelly Frank, a house painter who had worked for Letterman, was charged in the conspiracy.

Letterman and Lasko, who had been together since 1986, wed during a quiet courthouse civil ceremony in Choteau, Montana, on March 19, 2009. Letterman announced the marriage during the taping of his March 23 show, shortly after congratulating Bruce Willis for getting married the previous week. Letterman told the audience he nearly missed the ceremony because his truck became stuck in mud two miles from their house. The family resides in North Salem, New York, on a estate.

Stalking incidents

Beginning in May 1988, Letterman was stalked by Margaret Mary Ray, a woman suffering from schizophrenia. Letterman occasionally referenced her in his show, although not by name. She committed suicide in 1998. Letterman publicly expressed sympathy upon her death.

Extortion attempt and revelation of affairs

On his October 1, 2009 show, Letterman announced that he had been the victim of an extortion attempt by someone threatening to reveal that he had had sex with several of his female employees. He confirmed the relationships.

Letterman stated that three weeks earlier (on September 9, 2009) someone had left a package in his car with material he said he would write into a screenplay and a book if Letterman did not pay him $2 million. Letterman said that he contacted the Manhattan District Attorney's office, ultimately cooperating with them to conduct a sting operation involving giving the man a phony check. The extortionist, Robert J. "Joe" Halderman, a producer of the CBS true crime journalism series 48 Hours, was subsequently arrested after trying to deposit the check. He was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury and pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted grand larceny on October 2, 2009. Birkitt had until recently lived with Halderman, who is alleged to have copied Birkitt's personal diary and to have used it, along with private emails, in the blackmail package.

On October 3, 2009, a former CBS employee, Holly Hester, announced that she and Letterman had engaged in a year-long "secret" affair in the early 1990s while she was his intern and a student at New York University.

In the days following the initial announcement of the affairs and the arrest, several prominent women, including Kathie Lee Gifford, co-host of NBC's Today Show, and NBC news anchor Ann Curry questioned whether Letterman's affairs with subordinates created an unfair working environment. A spokesman for Worldwide Pants said that the company's sexual harassment policy did not prohibit sexual relationships between managers and employees. According to business news reporter Eve Tahmincioglu, "CBS suppliers are supposed to follow the company's business conduct policies" and the CBS 2008 Business Conduct Statement states that "If a consenting romantic or sexual relationship between a supervisor and a direct or indirect subordinate should develop, CBS requires the supervisor to disclose this information to his or her Company's Human Resources Department..."

On October 5, 2009, Letterman devoted a segment of his show to a public apology to his wife and staff. Three days later, Worldwide Pants announced that Birkitt had been placed on a "paid leave of absence" from the Late Show. On October 15, CBS News announced that the company's Chief Investigative Correspondent, Armen Keteyian, had been assigned to conduct an "in-depth investigation" into Halderman's blackmail of Letterman.

On March 9, 2010, Halderman pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny and served a 6-month jail sentence, followed by probation and community service.

Awards

In his capacities as either a writer, producer, performer, or as part of a writing team, David Letterman is among the most nominated people in Emmy Award history with 52 nominations, winning two Daytime Emmys and five Primetime Emmys since 1981. His nomination record is second only to producer Jac Venza, who holds the record for the most Emmy nominations for an individual (57). Letterman has been nominated every year since 1984, when he first appeared on late night television as the host of Late Night with David Letterman. Additionally, he has won four American Comedy Awards.

References

External links

David Letterman's Feb. 24, 1978 appearance on 90 Minutes Live

Official Late Show biography

1999 article on Letterman from Salon.com

Tape of Letterman announcing affairs/extortion attempt on Late Show

Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:American people of German descent Category:American television talk show hosts Category:Ball State University alumni Category:Daytime Emmy Award winners Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Indianapolis, Indiana television anchors Category:Indy Racing League owners Category:People from Indianapolis, Indiana Category:Weather presenters

Name	Arnel Pineda
Landscape	no
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Arnel Pineda
Born	September 05, 1967 Sampaloc, Manila, Philippines
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, bandurria
Genre	Rock, Hard rock, Soft rock, OPM
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Voice type(s)	Tenor
Years active	1982–Present
Label	Universal Music Group
Associated acts	Ijos Band, Amo, New Age, Most W@nted, The Zoo, Journey

Arnel Pineda (born September 5, 1967) is a Filipino singer-songwriter and is currently the lead singer of the American rock band Journey. Pineda has had a successful musical career in Asia for the last 25 years.

Biography

Arnel Pineda was born in Sampaloc, Manila, in the Philippines. His mother instilled his love for singing at an early age, encouraging him to sing along to songs from his favourite singers like Karen Carpenter and Barbra Streisand. Growing up, his parents entered him in many singing contests.

His mother, who had been suffering from rheumatic heart disease, died when he was thirteen. Her illness had left their family deep in debt. Being 6 months or one year behind on their rented apartment and unable to sufficiently provide for the family, his father decided to move out and ask relatives to take in Pineda's siblings. To ease his father's burden, Pineda quit school and volunteered to strike out on his own.

For about two years his life was spent out on the streets, sleeping wherever he could: in public parks, or on a narrow bench outside a friend's crowded house. He earned meager money by collecting glass bottles, newspapers, and scrap metal and selling them to recyclers. He would also go to the pier with his friends and take on odd jobs like cleaning scrap metal and docked ships. He didn't have much to eat, sometimes rationing a small package of Marie biscuit as his meal for two days. Despite all these hardships he tried to remain optimistic about his future.

Singing career

In 1982, when Pineda was 15 years old, he became the lead singer of the Filipino musical group called Ijos Band. He used to sing in Shakey's Taft. In 1986, some members of Yjoz formed a group called Amo. Amo entered and won the Rock Wars contest in the Philippines.

In 1988, Amo entered and won the Philippines leg of the Yamaha World Band Explosion. They went on to the finals in Hong Kong, but were not qualified to win due to a technicality. The rules stated the winning song had to be an original composition. However, they also stated that the song entry in the finals had to be the same song with which the band won their country's leg of the competition. Amo's winning song in the Philippines was Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", obviously not an original. After the contest, the band continued as Amo, performing live. They opened for Robert Palmer in Manila in 1989. He returned to Hong Kong and resumed singing with his band. In 1998, the owner of Igor's, the premiere theme restaurant/nightclub in Hong Kong, asked New Age to perform there. Dressed in skeleton outfits, they called themselves "The Rolling Bones". On their only day off, Sundays, the band often performed at Filipino community events.

In 2005, Arnel recorded the theme song of the short-lived Filipino radio show "Dayo". A band named The Visitors was briefly formed for promotion purposes of the "Dayo" soundtrack consisting of three members from Ijos/Yjoz, Amo, New Age and Most W@nted. Neal Schon of Journey contacted Noel Gomez, a longtime fan and friend of Pineda who uploaded many of these videos, to ask for Pineda's contact information. Schon sent an e-mail to Pineda inviting him to audition for Journey. Pineda initially dismissed the e-mail as a hoax, but after being persuaded by Gomez, he finally replied to Schon's e-mail. Ten minutes later, Pineda received a phone call from Schon. On August 12, Pineda, along with his manager Bert de Leon, flew to Marin County, just north of San Francisco, for a two-day audition. The star-struck Pineda was welcomed warmly but he described the audition as "nerve-wracking, tense". On December 5, 2007, Pineda was announced as the lead singer of Journey. CNN Headline News ran the story as part of their "News to Me" segment.

Pineda debuted as the lead singer of Journey on February 21, 2008 at the Viña del Mar International Song Festival held at the Quinta Vergara Amphitheater in Viña del Mar, Chile.

Chilean media acclaimed Pineda's performance (translated to English): "The new vocalist fit very well with the band, his vocal aptitudes shining through, which are very similar to the legendary musician of the band, Steve Perry." Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain described Pineda's performance in a radio interview: "We went to Chile just recently, where we had never played and they went crazy, they absolutely went nuts...Arnel's first show — talk about a stressful thing — we had a televised concert for 25 million people...Is the guy a winner? Yeah, he's a winner. He's a clutch player."

Journey returned to the US for a private Remax Convention event at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on March 6, 2008, then performed at Las Vegas' Planet Hollywood on March 8, 2008 (this concert was recorded and used, in part, for the Revelation DVD).

On February 1, 2009 he performed with Journey at the Super Bowl XLIII Pregame Show.

Revelation album and tour

Journey's first album with Pineda, Revelation, debuted at No. 5 in the Billboard Top 200 album charts in the week following its release (released June 3, 2008), and remained in the Top 20 for six weeks. It was certified gold by the RIAA with more than 336,000 units sold within the first few days. It achieved platinum status by October 1, 2008.

The US version of the album (distributed exclusively through Wal-Mart) consists of 11 new songs and 11 re-recorded classics, plus a live in-concert DVD filmed during the March 8, 2008 concert in Las Vegas. The European version distributed through Frontiers Records contains 11 new songs, 11 re-recorded classics, plus one new bonus track, but does not include the DVD. All of the music on Revelation was produced by Kevin Shirley (who previously worked with Journey on their Platinum-certified Trial by Fire album).

Jonathan Cain described the album in an interview: "We recorded our greatest hits with our brand new singer from the Philippines, Arnel Pineda, and it's unbelievable when you listen to it. We paid a lot of attention to the details because everybody loves those hits and we weren't about to step all over it. We've got that and a brand new CD as well, and then there's a bonus DVD of what the band looks like now, about an hour of songs... It's a 3-disc package... We're excited because we think Arnel is the future for our franchise... We knew that if we were ever gonna move on, we had to get somebody that was really gonna be our future and sound like Journey is supposed to sound...I think Journey fans are in for a real treat."

Journey's 2008 tour accompanying the release of Revelation began on June 8, 2008, in Spain, followed by four dates in Germany, and one date in the Netherlands. Journey toured the United Kingdom and Ireland from June 17 through June 28, 2008. The US tour (with Heart and Cheap Trick) began on July 9, 2008, in Denver, Colorado, and continued through October 4, 2008, in Albuquerque, NM. Many dates were already sold out, well in advance. Pineda celebrated his 41st birthday on September 5, 2008 during a concert at the Molson Amphitheater in Toronto, Canada. In September 2008, Journey performed back-to-back sold-out concerts at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Pineda sang in 57 concerts during the 2008 Journey World Tour. Journey's recent visit to the United States Gulf Coast performing at the Wharf Amphitheater, Orange Beach, Alabama and at the Pensacola Civic Center, Pensacola, Florida was a tremendous hit due to the large Filipino communities living in that area.

In the second leg of the tour, Journey went on an Asian–Hawaiian tour, going to Tokyo, Japan, Nagoya Japan, Osaka Japan, Manila Philippines, Macau China, Kahului Hawaii, Honolulu (2) Hawaii, and Waikoloa, Hawaii. The Manila concert was released as a live concert DVD. Total concert revenue for Journey in 2008 was $35,695,481.

Filmography

Television

ASAP

''ABS-CBN

Eat Bulaga! (Guest)

Boy and Kris (Guest)

Ellen Degeneres Show

CBS Early Show (Guest with Journey)

The Oprah Winfrey Show (Guest with Journey)

Discography

Solo albums

Arnel Pineda (1999)

With Zoo

Zoology (2007)

With Journey

Revelation (2008)

Journey: Live in Manila (2009, DVD)

Other lead vocals

South Border — The Way We Do (track "Looking Glass") (2001)

References

External links

Arnel Pineda Official Site

Arnel Pineda Foundation-US Headquarters-Non-Profit Charity

Arnel Pineda Foundation Inc. - Philippines

Category:Living people Category:1967 births Category:Filipino guitarists Category:Filipino male singers Category:Filipino singer-songwriters Category:Filipino rock singers Category:Filipino television personalities Category:Journey (band) members Category:People from Manila