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AARC President Jim Lesar’s Unanswered 2010 Letter to Rep. Nancy Pelosi

17 January, 2020.

On Wednesday, 14 January 2020, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered remarks on the Floor of the House of Representatives in support of H.Res. 24, nancy pelosiimpeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for incitement of insurrection.  She concluded her remarks with the following paragraphs referring to President Kennedy:

“In a speech he was prepared to give in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was to say, ‘We in this country, in this generation are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility.’ That we may be worthy.

President Kennedy was assassinated before he could deliver those words to the nation, but they resonate more even now, in our time, in this place. Let us be worthy of our power and responsibility that what Lincoln thought was the world’s ‘last best hope,’ the United States of America, may long survive.

My fellow Members, my fellow Americans, we cannot escape history. Let us embrace our duty, fulfill our oath and honor the trust of our nation. And we pray that God will continue to bless America.”

Following is the letter sent to Speaker Pelosi on 4 July 2010 by AARC co-founder and president, James H. Lesar* on the subjects of congressional oversight of the CIA, a summary of George Joannides’ role as CIA liaison to the HSCA, the status of withheld JFK assassination documents, and the correlation between a decline in public trust of the American government, and the secrecy surrounding a number of federal agencies in their response to congressional investigations of President Kennedy’s murder.  As of this date, Mr. Lesar is still awaiting a response from the office of Speaker Pelosi.

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* Mr. Lesar’s 2010 letter to Speaker Pelosi was written as a private citizen with decades of experience as an investigator and litigator on issues of relevance pertaining to President Kennedy’s murder and other political assassinations.

Related:

Speaker Pelosi’s Floor Speech on H.Res. 24, Impeaching Donald John Trump

Speaker Pelosi’s Floor Speech on H.Res. 24, Impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for Incitement of Insurrection – Passed the House 232 to 197

H.Res.24 – Impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

January 14, 2021 – Washington, D.C. – On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered remarks on the Floor of the House of Representatives in support of H.Res. 24, nancy pelosiimpeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for incitement of insurrection.  Below are the Speaker’s remarks:

Speaker Pelosi.  Thank you, Madam Speaker.  I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership.

Madam Speaker, in his annual address to our predecessors in Congress, in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln spoke of the duty of the patriot in an hour of decisive crisis for the American people.  ‘Fellow citizens,’ he said, ‘We cannot escape history.  We will be remembered in spite of ourselves.  No personal significance or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.  The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.  We – even we here,’ he said, ‘hold the power and bear the responsibility.’

In the Bible, St. Paul wrote, ‘Think on these things.’  We must think on what Lincoln told us.  We, even here – even us here – hold the power and bear the responsibility.  We, you and I, hold in trust the power that derives most directly from the people of the United States, and we bear the responsibility to fulfill that oath that we all swear before God and before one another: the oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so help us God.

We know that we face enemies of the Constitution.  We know we experienced the insurrection that violated the sanctity of the people’s Capitol and attempted to overturn the duly recorded will of the American people.  And we know that the President of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion, against our common country.

He must go.  He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love.  Since the presidential election in November – an election the President lost – he has repeatedly held about – lied about the outcome, sowed self-serving doubt about democracy and unconstitutionally sought to influence state officials to repeal reality.  And, then, came that day of fire we all experienced.

The President must be impeached, and, I believe, the President must be convicted by the Senate, a constitutional remedy that will ensure that the republic will be safe from this man who is so resolutely determined to tear down the things that we hold dear and that hold us together.

It gives me no pleasure to say this.  It breaks my heart.  It should break your heart.  It should break all of our hearts.  For your presence in this hallowed Chamber is testament to your love for our country, for America, and to your faith in the work of our Founders to create a more perfect union.

Those insurrectionists were not patriots.  They were not part of a political base to be catered to and managed.  They were domestic terrorists, and justice must prevail.

But they did not appear out of a vacuum.  They were sent here, sent here by the President, with words such as a cry to ‘fight like hell.’

Words matter.  Truth matters.  Accountability matters.

In his public exhortations to them, the President saw the insurrectionists not as the foes of freedom, as they are, but as the means to a terrible goal, the goal of his personally clinging to power.  The goal of thwarting the will of the people.  The goal of ending, in a fiery and bloody clash nearly two and a half centuries of our democracy.

This is not theoretical and this is not motivated by partisanship.  I stand before you today as an officer of the Constitution, as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  I stand before you as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a daughter.  A daughter whose father proudly served in this Congress: Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. from Maryland.  One of the first Italian Americans to serve in the Congress.  And I stand here before you today as the noblest of things: a citizen of the United States of America.

With my voice and my vote, with a plea to all of you, Democrats and Republicans, I ask you to search your souls and answer these questions.  Is the President’s war on democracy in keeping with the Constitution?

Were his words to an insurrectionary mob a high crime and misdemeanor?

Do we not have a duty to our oath to do all we Constitutionally can to protect our nation and our democracy from the appetites and ambitions of a man who has self-evidently demonstrated that he is a vital threat to liberty, to self-government and to the rule of law?

Our country is divided.  We all know that.  There are lies abroad in the land, spread by a desperate President who feels his power slipping away.  We know that too.  But I know this as well, that we here in this House have a sacred obligation to stand for truth, to stand up for the Constitution, to stand as guardians of the republic.

In a speech he was prepared to give in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was to say, ‘We in this country, in this generation are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.  We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility.’  That we may be worthy.

President Kennedy was assassinated before he could deliver those words to the nation, but they resonate more even now, in our time, in this place.  Let us be worthy of our power and responsibility that what Lincoln thought was the world’s ‘last best hope,’ the United States of America, may long survive.

My fellow Members, my fellow Americans, we cannot escape history.  Let us embrace our duty, fulfill our oath and honor the trust of our nation.  And we pray that God will continue to bless America.

I thank you, Madam Speaker, and yield back.

Source: Speaker Nancy Pelosi

 

Mark Schlefer, who helped write FOIA legislation, dies at 98

Mark P. Schlefer at his home in Putney, VT in 2015.

Mark P. Schlefer at his home in Putney, VT in 2015. (John Nopper)

By Louie Estrada
Dec. 21, 2020 at 12:32 p.m. EST

From a young age, maritime and shipping lawyer Mark P. Schlefer liked to challenge authority.

Why, he asked as a child, did he have to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at his elementary school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? Why, he asked at 22, wasn’t he allowed inside an officers’ club in France for a glass of champagne to toast Germany’s surrender at the end of World War II, especially after surviving 36 combat missions as a bombardier-navigator? Why, he asked a few years later as a young father, was it that the Washington-area private schools attended by his children largely excluded Black students?

His willingness to ask questions of people in power carried over to his professional life and led to his role in the development of the Freedom of Information Act, the landmark legislation providing citizens with a tool to keep the government open and honest.

Mr. Schlefer, a former Washington resident, died Nov. 2 at his home in Putney, Vt. The cause was cardiorespiratory arrest, said a daughter, Katharine Schlefer Dodge. He was 98.

In the early 1960s, while practicing law, Mr. Schlefer questioned why his client, the shipping company Pacific Far East Line, was denied permission from the U.S. Maritime Commission to conduct business in the Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. He was frustrated when the commission told him its reasoning was confidential.

He scheduled a meeting with the American Bar Association to suggest the drafting of a bill to gain access to government documents. He soon joined two lawyers affiliated with the ABA who had already begun working on such a bill and, together, they drafted the original version of the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, Mr. Schlefer recounted in a 2016 Washington Post opinion column.

Mr. Schlefer in 2015. (John Nopper)

After the bill won the ABA’s endorsement at its convention in Chicago, Mr. Schlefer met with Rep. John Moss (D-Calif.), who had been campaigning against government secrecy for more than a decade.

“I had planned just to leave [the draft of the bill] with him, but he asked me to sit,” Mr. Schlefer wrote in The Post. “After reading it slowly and carefully, he looked up and said, ‘Mr. Schlefer, I’ll deliver the House. You deliver the Senate.’ ”

Through a well-connected friend, Mr. Schlefer eventually persuaded Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland (D-Miss.) to hold a hearing on FOIA legislation.

Moss remained the driving force of the FOIA legislation through Congress as it underwent revisions giving courts power to exempt certain internal agency documents related to executive privilege, national security, personnel records and criminal investigations.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act into law on July 4, 1966. It has been amended several times since and remains a primary and often-used tool for making government decision-making open to public view, Mr. Schlefer wrote.

Mark Pascal Schlefer was born in Manhattan on May 9, 1922, to stockbroker parents. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943 and its law school in 1949. Between degrees, he served in the Army Air Forces in Europe during World War II. (He had been turned away from an officers’ club — despite holding the rank of lieutenant — by an unpleasant sergeant, but Mr. Schlefer appealed successfully to a serviceman of higher rank.)

Mr. Schlefer moved to Washington in 1951 and appeared to be in line for a legal position at the State Department, but the job never materialized. He learned later that his application had been flagged as a problem because his wife’s aunt, Carol Weiss King, was a prominent immigration lawyer who had represented left-wing radicals threatened with deportation.

He spent most of his career with the law firm Radner, Zito, Kominers & Fort, which later became Fort & Schlefer.

His wife of 70 years, the former Marion King, died in 2015. In addition to his daughter, of Putney, survivors include two other children, Jonathan Schlefer of Boston and Ellen Schlefer of Durham, N.H.; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In 1963, after Mr. Schlefer grew distressed about the lack of racial diversity among students at his children’s private schools, he co-founded what is now the Black Student Fund to provide tuition assistance for minority families at Washington-area private schools.

He also served as board chairman of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, which lobbies for nuclear arms control. He moved to Putney from Washington in 2005 and retired from law practice two years later.

His most enduring contribution to the law remained the FOIA legislation.

“Those of us who drafted the legislation and worked to obtain its enactment never expected the statute to have the long-term importance that it has achieved,” Mr. Schlefer wrote in his self-published biography, “Incidents in a Life: The War is Over, I’d Like a Glass of Champagne.” “We had a local problem, and we sought to fix it. In fact, we ended by fixing a crucial national problem.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

 

 

Neil Sheehan, reporter who obtained Pentagon Papers, dies at 84

Jan. 7 (UPI) — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Neil Sheehan died on Thursday, his family said. He was 84.

Sheehan’s wife, Susan Sheehan, and daughter, Catherine Sheehan Bruno, said the Vietnam War correspondent known for obtaining the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times died due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, The Times and Politico reported.

Born on Oct. 27, 1936, in Holyoke, Mass., Sheehan graduated from Harvard in 1958 and joined the Army, where he worked as a journalist. He moonlighted for UPI at the agency’s Asian headquarters in Tokyo.

Upon leaving the Army in 1962, UPI hired Sheehan and sent him to work in Saigon as a staff correspondent. There, observing the destruction and bloodshed of war, he first began to question the United States’ role in Vietnam.

He gained a reputation as one of the so-called “fearless threesome” of war correspondents, which included Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and David Halberstam of The Times. They became known for digging up details about the war that challenged the more upbeat daily military briefings, The Washington Post reported.

“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1966. “I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict this suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends.”

After establishing himself as a reputable reporter, The Times hired Sheehan in 1964 and and sent him to Vietnam.

Seven years later, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, leaked the Pentagon papers to Sheehan, providing 7,000 pages of classified documents revealing that the government was deceptive about U.S. prospects for victory in the war.

The Nixon administration obtained an injunction against the publication of the report, saying national security was at stake.

The issue was taken to the Supreme Court, which on June 30, 1971, ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish their stories

The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in public service in 1972 for the Pentagon Papers coverage and its editors praised Sheehan for obtaining the documents.

After the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Sheehan published his book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989 as he described his disillusionment with the war.

Phyllis McGuire, Last of a Singing Sisters Act, Dies at 89

Phyllis McGuire, Last of a Singing Sisters Act, Dies at 89

Starting in the ’50s, the McGuire Sisters were one of America’s most popular vocal groups, their three-part harmonies a balm to audiences rattled by rock ’n’ roll.

The McGuire Sisters in 1953 — from left, Christine, Phyllis and Dorothy. They became staples of television variety shows.

The McGuire Sisters in 1953 — from left, Christine, Phyllis and Dorothy. They became staples of television variety shows.Credit…Associated Press

By Robert D. McFadden

Phyllis McGuire, the lead singer and last surviving member of the McGuire Sisters, who bewitched teenage America in the 1950s with chart-topping renditions of “Sincerely” and “Sugartime” in a sweet, innocent harmony that went with car fins, charm bracelets and duck-tail haircuts, died on Tuesday at her home in Las Vegas. She was 89.

The Palm Eastern Mortuary in Las Vegas confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Ms. McGuire, with her older sisters Christine and Dorothy, shot to success overnight after winning the televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts” contest in 1952. Over the next 15 years, they were one of the nation’s most popular vocal groups, singing on the television variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Andy Williams and Red Skelton, on nightclub circuits across the country and on records that sold millions.

The sisters epitomized a 1950s sensibility that held up a standard of unreal perfection, wearing identical coifs, dresses and smiles, moving with synchronized precision and blending voices in wholesome songs for simpler times. Their music, like that of Perry Como, Patti Page and other stars who appealed to white, middle-class audiences, contrasted starkly with the rock ’n’ roll craze that was taking the world by storm in the mid-to-late ’50s.

In 1965, as the trio’s popularity began to fade, Phyllis McGuire’s image as the honey-blonde girl next door was shattered by published reports linking her romantically with Sam Giancana, a Chicago mobster with reputed ties to the Kennedy administration and a Central Intelligence Agency plot to enlist the Mafia in what proved to be unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Ms. McGuire with the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana at a nightclub in 1962. Their relationship shattered her girl-next-door image. 

Ms. McGuire with the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana at a nightclub in 1962. Their relationship shattered her girl-next-door image. Credit…Associated Press

 

Mr. Giancana and Ms. McGuire, who had been followed by federal agents for several years, appeared before a grand jury in Chicago. He refused to answer questions and was jailed for contempt. She testified that she had met him in Las Vegas in 1961, traveled with him to Europe, the Caribbean and elsewhere and accepted his gifts in a continuing relationship. She was aware that he was a reputed gangster, she said, but insisted that she knew nothing of his underworld activities.

“It makes me look terrible,” she told reporters afterward. “It would be different if I were on my own, but I’m not a single — I’m part of a trio. My sisters and my parents — they’re brokenhearted about this.”

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The McGuire Sisters retired from public appearances in 1968, Christine and Dorothy to raise families, Phyllis to continue as a soloist. She appeared regularly in Las Vegas, where she lived for the rest of her life in a mansion with a swan moat and a replica of the Eiffel Tower rising through the roof.

After serving a year for contempt, Mr. Giancana was released, and he fled to Mexico, where he lived in exile until arrested by the Mexican authorities in 1974. Deported to the United States, he agreed to testify in a prosecution of organized crime in Chicago but was killed by an unknown assailant at his home in 1975.

Ms. McGuire remained unapologetic about her relationship with Mr. Giancana. “Sam was the greatest teacher I ever could have had,” she told Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair in 1989. “He was so wise about so many things. Sam is always depicted as unattractive. He wasn’t. He was a very nice-looking man. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t drive a pink Cadillac, like they used to say.”

In 1985, the sisters reunited for a comeback and performed for almost two decades at casinos and clubs in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere. They sang their own hits, 1950s pop hits and Broadway show tunes, and Phyllis did impersonations of Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Pearl Bailey and Ethel Merman.

“They take me back to the olden times, the beautiful times,” Barbara Pattison, a fan in Toronto, told People magazine as the comeback began. “They are not loud and they are not distant. They bring back the beauty in music.”

Ms. McGuire in a celebratory mood in 1995 at her home in Las Vegas. She sang regularly at clubs and casinos in the city. 

Ms. McGuire in a celebratory mood in 1995 at her home in Las Vegas. She sang regularly at clubs and casinos in the city. Credit…Lennox McLendon/Associated Press

Phyllis McGuire was born in Middletown, Ohio, on Feb. 14, 1931, the youngest of three daughters of Asa and Lillie (Fultz) McGuire. Her mother was a minister of the First Church of God in Miamisburg, Ohio., and her father was a steelworker. The sisters began singing in church when Phyllis was 4. They performed at weddings and other services, then at veterans’ hospitals and military bases.

Phyllis’s 1952 marriage to Neal Van Ells, a broadcaster, ended in divorce in 1956. They had no children. Dorothy McGuire died in 2012, and Christine died in 2019. She is survived by nieces and nephews. Her longtime companion, Mike Davis, an oil and gas magnate, died in 2016.

While making Las Vegas her home, for years she kept a Park Avenue apartment and then a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

After winning “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the sisters were regulars on Mr. Godfrey’s morning radio and television shows for six years. They made the covers of Life and Look magazines and signed with Coral Records, a Decca subsidiary. Their first Top 10 hit was “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” in 1954. “Sincerely” (1955) and “Sugartime” (1958) were No. 1 hits; they and “Picnic” (1956) each sold over a million copies.

The McGuire Sisters were one of the many white groups that covered 1950s R&B hits, many by Black artists, in what critics called blander versions though better-selling ones. They also sang for Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and for Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1995, an HBO movie, “Sugartime,” focused on the Giancana-McGuire affair, with John Turturro as the mobster and Mary-Louise Parker as Phyllis. The sisters gave their last big performance on a 2004 PBS special, “Magic Moments: The Best of ’50s Pop.” They were inducted into the National Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1994, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame in 2009.

Long past the customary retirement years for a singer, Ms. McGuire remained passionate about her career.

“I don’t fear living, and I don’t fear dying,” she told Vanity Fair in 1989. “You only live once, and I’m going to live it to the fullest, until away I go. And I’m going to continue singing as long as somebody wants me.”

READ more at THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Phyllis McGuire, star of popular 1950s vocal trio the McGuire Sisters, dies at 89

The McGuire Sisters in the late 1950s. From left, Christine, Phyllis and Dorothy McGuire.

The McGuire Sisters in the late 1950s. From left, Christine, Phyllis and Dorothy McGuire. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Matt Schudel
Jan. 2, 2021 at 9:56 p.m. EST

In the 1950s, when Elvis Presley was leading the rock-and-roll revolution, the McGuire Sisters were genteel holdovers from an earlier time.

In their proper, unthreatening way, Christine, Dorothy and Phyllis McGuire had a popularity rivaling that of Elvis himself. They were on countless magazine covers and TV shows, appeared in nightclubs and concert halls, and had 10 songs in the Billboard Top 20.

Their two No. 1 hits — “Sincerely” and “Sugartime” — reflected the trio’s sweet, earnest image. The sisters, who began singing in church in Ohio during the 1930s, had an uncanny sense of timing and close harmony matched by a perky, ever-smiling stage manner.

They were so close that they sometimes held hands as they sang or took their bows. Yet the spotlight seemed to shine the brightest on Phyllis McGuire, the youngest sister, who always stood in the center and sang the lead.

Phyllis McGuire and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in a London nightclub in 1962.

Phyllis McGuire and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in a London nightclub in 1962. (Associated Press)

Ms. McGuire, who was 89 and the last surviving McGuire sister, died Dec. 29 at her home in Las Vegas. Her death was announced in a paid notice in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper. The cause was not disclosed.

Even as musical tastes began to change, the McGuire Sisters kept going strong. By 1960, each of the sisters was earning more than $1 million a year.

After a final appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1968, they parted ways. Christine and Dorothy were married and raising families. Phyllis, who had been married once in the 1950s, was single and raising eyebrows.

Rumors began circulating, and then were confirmed without apology by Ms. McGuire, that she was the girlfriend of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana.

They had met in 1959, when Ms. McGuire and her sisters were performing at the Desert Inn, one of the Las Vegas casinos run by Giancana. “Who’s the one in the middle?” he reportedly asked.

Ms. McGuire, who had a weakness for the blackjack tables, ran up a debt of tens of thousands of dollars at the Desert Inn. Giancana, watching from afar, told his casino boss to “eat it” — or forgive the debt.

Thus began one of the most unlikely romances in show business. Giancana, who got his start as Al Capone’s driver in Chicago, was widowed, bald and in his 50s. He had been arrested dozens of times, linked to crimes from illegal gambling to murder, and had served time in prison.

Ms. McGuire was still in her 20s and had a public image as benign and carefully arranged as one of the McGuire Sisters’ hit songs. Giancana sent her lavish gifts of jewelry and furs and often met her overseas, wherever the sisters were performing. Strange as it may seem, everyone who knew them agreed they were in love.

“It’s amazing that it ever took place,” William F. Roemer Jr., an FBI agent who tracked Giancana for years, told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “She had everything. She had beauty. She had money. Yet, she fell in love with this gangster. I could never figure it out.”

In 1961, FBI agents wiretapped their room in a Phoenix motel. Later, after being questioned about Giancana’s activities, Ms. McGuire pleaded ignorance. Federal authorities asked her to cooperate, with the implicit threat that her career would be ruined if her affair with a mafia kingpin were exposed.

“She said she would, but she never did,” Roemer said. “She never cooperated with us. She double-crossed us really.”

In 1965, Ms. McGuire testified before a grand jury investigating Giancana for racketeering. She admitted that they had a relationship and that she was aware of his reputation but maintained she knew nothing about his life of crime.

The revelation “really hurt our career,” Ms. McGuire told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “We were blacklisted for a while on TV. . . . We were America’s sweethearts, and for one of America’s sweethearts to be with that man . . . ”

Giancana went to prison for a year in 1965, then lived in Mexico and South America, where he was visited by Ms. McGuire. He later moved back to suburban Chicago and was cooking in his basement in 1975 when an assailant entered and shot him seven times in the head. The murder was never solved.

“I just knew that I liked the man,” Ms. McGuire told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “He was very nice to me. And if he had done all those things they said he did, I wondered why in God’s name he was on the street and not in jail.”

Phyllis Jean McGuire was born Feb. 14, 1931, in Middletown, Ohio, and grew up in the nearby town of Miamisburg.

Her father was a steelworker, and her mother was a minister. Phyllis was 4 when she and her sisters began singing in their mother’s church. (Christine was five years older than Phyllis, Dorothy three years older.) Before long, they were performing at weddings, revival meetings and the USO. They had a long engagement at a hotel in Dayton, Ohio, and appeared on radio and television.

In 1952, the McGuire Sisters moved to New York and landed an eight-week engagement on Kate Smith’s radio show. They later won a talent contest and were featured on Arthur Godfrey’s popular TV show. Their first Top 10 hits came in 1954, with “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight” and “Muskrat Ramble,” and “Sincerely” reached No. 1 in 1955.

Two years later, they recorded “Sugartime,” by Charlie Phillips and Odis Echols, which climbed to No. 1 in 1958 and became the sisters’ signature tune:

Sugar in the mornin’

Sugar in the evenin’

Sugar at suppertime

Be my little sugar

And love me all the time

Even before the sisters broke up in 1968, Phyllis McGuire began working on her own, including an acting role in the 1963 Frank Sinatra film “Come Blow Your Horn.”

By 1985, the McGuire Sisters were ready to launch a comeback, but they struggled to re-create the instinctive harmonies they had in their youth.

“We rehearsed eight hours a day, five days a week for six months,” Phyllis McGuire told the Tribune in 1989. “Then one day, after perspiring and toiling and worrying, we started rehearsing and all in the same instance we looked at each other and said, ‘My God, thank you, that’s it.’ We had it back.”

Wearing matching dresses and hairstyles, the sisters performed in nightclubs and concert venues until 2004. Dorothy McGuire died in 2012, Christine McGuire in 2018.

Phyllis McGuire’s early marriage to Neal Van Ells ended in divorce. After Giancana’s death, she was occasionally linked to wealthy men, but she never remarried and had no immediate survivors.

A 1995 HBO film, “Sugartime,” starring Mary-Louise Parker and John Turturro, portrayed Ms. McGuire’s life with Giancana. She denounced it as “riddled with blatant inaccuracies, exaggerations and distortions.”

In 1999, after Las Vegas police stopped her limousine and questioned her driver, the 68-year-old Ms. McGuire emerged from the car “screaming, waving and flailing her arms” and was arrested for head-butting and kicking a police officer. Charges were dropped after a plea deal.

Ms. McGuire was an astute investor, and it is widely believed that much of Giancana’s fortune came into her hands. She had a jewelry collection said to rival those of Elizabeth Taylor and Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.

She lived on one of the grandest estates in Las Vegas, in a house that contained, under its roof, a 40-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower and another of the Arc de Triomphe. Steel shutters could cover the bulletproof windows with the touch of a button. She had five gardeners and a pond with black swans floating by.

“I’m not ashamed of my past,” she told Vanity Fair, describing everything from music to the mob. “I was doing what I honestly felt.”

Read more at THE WASHINGTON POST