1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [12]
Bork, Robert H. (1927– ) A strict constructionist (believer that law should be guided by the framers’ original understanding of the U.S. Constitution), Bork served as solicitor general in Richard M. Nixon’s Department of Justice from 1972 to 1977. President Nixon elevated him to acting attorney general in 1973 after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than obey Nixon’s order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox after Cox demanded the president’s tapes of Oval Office conversations. Bork obeyed the order and fired Cox in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” which hastened the president’s downfall. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court. After an intensely heated debate, the Senate rejected his nomination.
Bourke-White, Margaret (1906–1971) White (she later added her mother’s maiden name to make Bourke-White) turned her photographic hobby into a profession as an industrial photographer and then as a photojournalist working for Fortune and then for Life. She photographed extensively in Depression-era America and in Germany and the Soviet Union before World War II, then covered the bloody Italian campaign during the war. She accompanied General George Patton’s Third Army into Germany and documented the horrors of the concentration camps. After World War II, she photographed Gandhi in India and served as a correspondent in the Korean War.
Bowie, Jim (1796?–1836) Born in Kentucky, Bowie became a Louisiana sugar planter and a New Orleans man-about-town. Reportedly, he decided to move to Texas (then a Mexican possession) after killing a man in a duel. He became a Mexican citizen, obtained land grants from the Mexican government, then joined other American colonists in resisting Mexican attempts to curb the influx of American settlers. He joined the Texas independence movement and was co-commander (with Colonel William B. Travis) in the defense of the improvised fortress at the Alamo (in San Antonio) when it was overrun by forces under Mexican dictator Santa Anna on March 6, 1836. Bowie was slain with the other Alamo defenders and was immortalized in ballad, song, and (later) film and television portrayals. His name is also memorialized in the fearsome broad-bladed knife he (or his brother, Rezin) invented: the Bowie knife.
Bradbury, Ray (1920– ) Beginning with his first published story in 1940, Bradbury used highly inventive science fiction as an instrument of social criticism. The Martian Chronicles (1950) is a science fiction classic that evokes an idyllic Martian civilization corrupted by greed-driven explorers and exploiters from Earth, while Fahrenheit 451 (1953) depicts a society in which technology has displaced imagination, love, liberty, and free thought, and in which reading has become a capital crime and books fit solely for burning.
Braddock, James J. (1905–1974) After rising rapidly in a prizefighting career that began in 1926, Braddock lost a title bout in 1929, then, during the Great Depression, descended into poverty and obscurity, only to reemerge by defeating heavyweight champ Max Baer on June 13, 1935, capping a comeback so fast and so startling that sports writer Damon Runyon dubbed him the “Cinderella Man.” Braddock was a hero to millions of hard-pressed men and women in Depression-era America, who learned that you can be down without being out.
Bradford, William (1590–1657) As governor of the Massachusetts Plymouth colony for three decades, Bradford played a critical role in the colony’s survival and early growth. His History of Plymouth Plantation, which covers the colony from its founding in 1620 to 1647, is a remarkable window into early American settlement and Puritan