Milestones

By Richard Lacayo, Elizabeth L. Bland, Lina Lofaro, Sora Song And Rebecca Winters Monday, Aug. 18, 2003
    • DIED. IDI AMIN, 80, utterly ruthless former dictator of Uganda; in Saudi Arabia, where he lived a life of luxury in exile with one of several wives and 22 of his children. During an eight-year reign that plunged a prosperous nation into desperate poverty, the onetime military boxing champ used slaughter as a form of statecraft. The son of a peasant farmer and a mother who practiced sorcery, the nearly illiterate Amin joined the British colonial army in 1946. Nine years after Uganda achieved independence in 1962, he led a successful coup, then embarked on murderous campaigns against political opponents and rival ethnic groups that left as many as 500,000 dead. He also expelled tens of thousands of Asian traders, depriving Uganda of much of its business class. Amin was ousted at last in April 1979, after Tanzanian troops, responding to a Ugandan invasion, entered the capital, Kampala, and forced him to flee.

    DIED. GREGORY HINES, 57, modernizer of the ancient art of tap dancing; in Los Angeles. Like Sammy Davis Jr., he was a kid in a family song-and-dance act — Hines, Hines & Dad — and went on to star in a multitude of media: as singer (combining for duets with Luther Vandross), as movie star (swapping moves with Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights, cracking wise with Billy Crystal in Running Scared), as TV actor (playing '30s tap master Bill Robinson in Bojangles) and as Tony-winning Broadway headliner (in Jelly's Last Jam). His greatest gift, however, was in his feet, which hit the amplified floor like Chinese firecrackers, broke from standard 4/4 time into daring sprung rhythms and inspired Savion Glover and the new breed of hip-hop tappers.


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    DIED. HERB BROOKS, 66, who coached the most famous U.S. ice-hockey victory, the Miracle on Ice, at the 1980 Lake Placid, N.Y., Winter Olympics; in an auto accident, near Forest Lake, Minn. A hockey obsessive known for his strategic imagination and nose-to-nose motivation, he adapted Team U.S.A.'s training and tactics to the wide-open European-style game and convinced his team of amateurs that they were destined to beat the hockey powerhouse that was then the Soviet national team. They did, 4-3, in a game that instantly became famous. They next beat Finland to win the gold medal. He went on to coach four NHL teams, including the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh Penguins, and returned to the Olympics last year to coach Team U.S.A. to a silver medal.

    DIED. LADY DIANA MOSLEY, 93, most scandalous and, some thought, most beautiful of the six famous Mitford sisters; in Paris. She left her first husband, heir to the Guinness brewing fortune, to run away with Sir Oswald Mosley, the widely hated head of Britain's fascist party. After spending some of the war years in a London prison, she and her husband moved to Paris, where she continued to dazzle her frequent guests and write rigorous book reviews. Of Hitler, she said, in 2000, "I was fond of him. Very, very fond."