Living to be 100 years old is statistically extraordinary. But some centenarians can be called remarkable for reasons beyond having reached a phenomenally advanced age.
Lawrence Walsh became a naturalized American citizen at age 10, eight years after his father, hoping for a somewhat more prosperous existence, relocated the family from Port Maitland, Nova Scotia to Queens, N.Y. Seemingly embodying the American dream, Walsh graduated from high school, worked his way through college and then earned a law degree from Columbia University.
He excelled as part of Manhattan District Attorney (and later two-time presidential candidate) Thomas Dewey’s team of young prosecutors charged with snuffing out the widespread corruption and racketeering that plagued New York City in the late 1930s. Later, Walsh became a federal judge, and after that, served as chief deputy attorney general during the second Eisenhower administration. He was best known, however, as the independent counsel assigned to getting to the bottom of the Iran-Contra scandal during the 1980s. Walsh’s dogged work exposed several high-ranking government officials who had schemed to illegally sell weapons to Iran, a nation which at the time, was the subject of an American arms embargo.
The conspirators allegedly hoped to secure the release of seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a radical group with Iranian ties, while at the same time secretly funding an organization working to overthrow the left-leaning government of Nicaragua. Ultimately, Walsh’s investigation resulted in the indictment of 14 Reagan administration members and the convictions of 11 of them.
Randolph Thrower grew up in Georgia and earned a law degree from Atlanta’s Emory University in 1936. After serving in the Marine Corps during World War II, he returned to his home state and resumed his career as a lawyer. Thrower ran for a congressional seat there in 1956, but not surprisingly was unsuccessful, given that his incumbent Democratic opponent was an ardent segregationist.
Thrower headed the Internal Revenue Service from 1969-71, earning brief notoriety not for the quality of his work (which by nearly all accounts was top-notch), but because of his dismissal by the man who had appointed him, ostensibly to overhaul federal tax policies. Thrower had refused to follow the orders of Richard Nixon’s underlings to conduct tax audits on specific individuals considered “enemies of the administration.” Among those the commander in chief wanted targeted were anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and every Democratic senator up for re-election in 1970.
Thrower requested a meeting with the president to inform him of the actions of his subordinates, but the incensed Nixon’s response was to have him fired. Recordings released decades later revealed the sort of tax commissioner Nixon really desired.
“I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch,” the soon-to-be-disgraced president said, further specifying, “”¦ he will do what he is told, every income tax return I want to see, I’ll see (and) ”¦ he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.”
Both Lawrence Walsh and Randolph Thrower were men of conscience, dedicated public servants and lifelong Republicans, though each was ultimately pilloried by members of his party less enthralled over the bringing down of corrupt public officials than they were incensed over the nominal damage doing so did to the GOP’s brand.
They also shared one other distinction: Each was a centenarian. Lawrence Walsh was 102 years old when he died last week in Oklahoma City; Thrower was a more callow 100 when he passed away earlier this month in Atlanta.
Few people survive 10 decades or more. According to the World Health Organization, the tiny principality of Monaco leads the planet’s 193 listed nations in life expectancy, but even its citizens can only anticipate a mere 86.5 years of life. The United States is 35th on the WHO’s list; our aggregate national life expectancy is 79.8 years, just a fraction below Costa Rica’s. But Americans are still in a pretty healthy place, sandwiched between numbers 12 (Canadians live an average of 82.5 years) and 50 (Mexicans last an average of 77.2). There are far worse continents on which to live: the bottom 29 countries listed are all in Africa. The lowest life expectancy in the world for a non-African state is unsurprising: Residents of Afghanistan can expect to expire at 60.
Achieving a three-digit age isn’t as rare as it used to be. There were more than 53,000 American centenarians at the time of the 2010 census. But that’s still only 17.3 per 100,000 people. It could be reasonably argued that referring to someone as a “remarkable centenarian” is a redundancy.
However, in the cases of Lawrence Walsh and Randolph Thrower, it most certainly is not.
— Andy Young is a teacher at a local high school. While he is nowhere near becoming a centenarian, he recently learned that he has already lived longer than the average Ugandan will.
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