Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave Cosmopolitan Its Purr, Dies at 90

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Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997.

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: August 13, 2012

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

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Ms. Brown with her husband, David, at their home in 1970.

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Ms. Brown in 1997.

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The Hearst Corporation, Cosmopolitan’s publisher, said in a news release that she died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital after a brief stay there. She lived in Manhattan.

As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Ms. Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. The look of women’s magazines on the newsstand today — a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines — is due in no small part to her influence.

Before she arrived at Cosmopolitan, Ms. Brown had already shaken the collective consciousness with her best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl.” Published in 1962, the year before Betty Friedan ignited the modern women’s movement with “The Feminine Mystique,” it taught unmarried women how to look their best, have delicious affairs and ultimately bag a man for keeps, all in breathless, aphoristic prose. (Ms. Brown was a former advertising copywriter.)

By turns celebrated and castigated, Ms. Brown was for decades a highly visible, though barely visible, public presence. A tiny, fragile-looking woman who favored big jewelry, fishnet stockings and minidresses till she was well into her 80s, she was a regular guest at society soirees and appeared often on television. At 5 feet 4, she remained a wraithlike hundred pounds throughout her adult life. That weight, she often said, was five pounds above her ideal.

Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles.

Few magazines have been identified so closely with a single editor as Cosmopolitan was with Ms. Brown. Before she took over, Cosmopolitan, like its competitors, was every inch a postwar product. Its target reader was a married suburbanite, preoccupied with maintaining the perfect figure, raising the perfect child and making the perfect Jell-O salad.

Ms. Brown tossed the children and the Jell-O, though she kept the diet advice with a vengeance. Yes, readers would need to land Mr. Right someday — the magazine left little doubt that he was still every woman’s grail. But in an era in which an unmarried woman was called an old maid at 23, the new Cosmopolitan gave readers license not to settle for settling down with just anyone, and to enjoy the search with blissful abandon for however long it took. Sex as an end in itself was perfectly fine, the magazine assured them. As a means to an end — the right husband, the right career, the right designer labels — it was better still.

In Ms. Brown’s hands, Cosmopolitan anticipated “Sex and the City” by three decades.

Gone was the housewife, apron in tow. In her place was That Cosmopolitan Girl, the idealized reader on whom Ms. Brown and her advertisers firmly trained their sights. Unencumbered by husband and children, the Cosmo Girl was self-made, sexual and supremely ambitious, a potent amalgam of Ragged Dick, Sammy Glick and Holly Golightly. She looked great, wore fabulous clothes and had an unabashedly good time when those clothes came off.

Forty-three when she took the magazine’s helm, Ms. Brown often described the Cosmo Girl as the young woman she had been — or dreamed of being — 20 years before.

A child of the Ozarks, Helen Marie Gurley was born on Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Ark., the younger of two daughters of a family of modest means. Her father, Ira, was a schoolteacher, as her mother, the former Cleo Sisco, had been before her marriage.

“I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me — ordinary, hillbilly and poor — and I repudiated it from the time I was 7 years old,” Ms. Brown wrote in her book“Having It All” (1982).

When Helen was a baby, Ira Gurley was elected to the state legislature, and the family moved to Little Rock. In 1932, when she was 10, Ira was killed in an elevator accident, leaving her mother depressed and impoverished. In 1937, Mrs. Gurley moved with her daughters to Los Angeles. There, Helen’s older sister, Mary, contracted polio; she spent the rest of her life paralyzed from the waist down and in later years battled alcoholism.

Though Helen graduated as valedictorian of her high school class, she feared she could never transcend her family circumstances. At a time when a young woman’s main chance was to marry well, she felt ill equipped for the task. She did not consider herself pretty, she wrote years afterward, and had rampant, intractable acne. In “Having It All,” she coined the word “mouseburger” to describe young women like her. [mouseburger, n., pejorative,< mouse + -burger. A physically unprepossessing woman with little money and few prospects. Cf. milquetoast, said of men].

Helen Gurley persevered. She studied briefly at Texas State College for Women (it is nowTexas Women’s University), but with no money to continue, she returned to Los Angeles and enrolled in secretarial school, from which she graduated in 1941.

Around this time she had a short, inadvertent career as an escort. At 19, as Ms. Brown recounted in her memoir “I’m Wild Again” (2000), she answered a newspaper advertisement seeking young women for “social evenings.” She needed to support her mother and sister: What could be simpler, she reasoned, than earning $5 for going on a date? On her first outing, she and her gentleman caller parked and kissed a bit before the full extent of her responsibilities dawned on her. She fled with her $5 and her virtue.

She went on to hold a string of secretarial jobs — 17 by her own count — and discovered the measure of security that sex could bring. At every office, or so it seemed, there were bosses eager to fondle and dandle. In exchange, there might be a fur or an apartment or the wherewithal to keep her family going a little longer.

Helen Gurley eventually became an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles, first with Foote, Cone & Belding and later with Kenyon & Eckhardt. In 1959 she married David Brown, , a former managing editor of Cosmopolitan who had become a Hollywood producer. “I look after him like a geisha girl,” she told The New York Times in 1970.

Mr. Brown, who produced “Jaws” and other well-known films, died in 2010; the couple had no children. Ms. Brown’s sister, Mary Gurley Alford, died before her.

This year Ms. Brown gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities, both of which Mr. Brown had attended, to create the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Brown found herself at loose ends and cast about for a project. Her husband, who had recently stumbled on a cache of letters she had written in her 20s to a married man who was smitten with her, persuaded her to write “Sex and the Single Girl.”

Though the book seems almost quaint today (“An affair can last from one night to forever”), it caused a sensation when it was published in 1962 by Bernard Geis Associates. It sold millions of copies, turned Ms. Brown into a household name and inspired a movie of the same title starring Natalie Wood, released in 1964.

In 1963, the Browns moved to New York. Two years later, the Hearst Corporation asked Ms. Brown to take over Cosmopolitan, one of its less prepossessing magazines. Becalmed in the doldrums, Cosmopolitan favored articles on home and hearth, along with uplifting discussions of current affairs (“The Lyndon Johnson Only His Family Knows”).

Ms. Brown had never held an editing job, but her influence on Cosmopolitan was swift and certain: she did not so much revamp the magazine as vamp it.

Where just months earlier Cosmo’s covers had featured photos of demure, high-collared girl-next-door types like Mary Tyler Moore, Ms. Brown’s first issue, July 1965, showed a voluptuous blond model whose deep cleavage was barely contained by her plunging neckline.

What Cosmopolitan’s previous cover lines had lacked in pith and punch (“Diabetes: Will Your Children Inherit It?”), Ms. Brown’s more than made up for. “World’s Greatest Lover — What it was like to be wooed by him!,” her inaugural cover proclaimed. Ms. Brown was not shy about disclosing the fact that in her 32 years with the magazine, her husband wrote all the cover lines.

Readers and advertisers flocked to the new Cosmo. When Ms. Brown took over, the magazine had a circulation of less than 800,000; at its height, in the 1980s, circulation approached three million.

Ms. Brown’s magazine did not find favor with everyone. In 1970, a group of feminists led by Kate Millett staged a sit-in at Ms. Brown’s office, protesting what they saw as her retrograde vision of womanhood. Even several nude male centerfolds (Burt Reynolds, April 1972; Arnold Schwarzenegger, August 1977) were for many of Cosmopolitan’s critics insufficient counterweights.

But in retrospect, Ms. Brown’s work seems strikingly apolitical, beholden mostly to the politics of personal advancement. (In “Having It All,” she compares herself, favorably, to Eva Peron.) The advice she offered Cosmopolitan’s readers on winning the right friends and influencing the right people was squarely in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, if less vertically inclined.

Ms. Brown was declared a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995. Like many landmarks, she had much restoration work done, which she spoke of candidly: a nose job, breast augmentation, face-lifts, eye lifts and injections of silicone and fat into her face to keep wrinkles at bay, among other procedures.

But while she could offset the physical tolls of aging, Ms. Brown could not always keep pace with changing times. She drew wide criticism for publishing an article in the January 1988 issue of Cosmopolitan that played down the risk of AIDS for heterosexual women. In the 1990s, when prominent men like Justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Robert Packwood were facing accusations of sexual harassment, Ms. Brown publicly disdained the charges, arguing that sexual attention from men is almost always flattering. Her remarks angered many feminists.

In 1996, with circulation declining and the public perception that Ms. Brown had lost touch with her readers growing, Hearst announced that she would step down the next year as Cosmopolitan’s editor in chief. Ms. Brown’s last issue was February 1997; she was succeeded by Bonnie Fuller, the founding editor of the American edition of Marie Clairemagazine.

Ms. Brown stayed on as the editor of Cosmopolitan’s international editions, continuing to work from an office appointed with pink silk walls, leopard-print carpet and a cushion embroidered with the maxim “Good Girls Go to Heaven/Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” ”

A biography of Ms. Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” by Jennifer Scanlon, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

Ms. Brown’s other books include “Sex and the Office” (1964), “Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook” (1969) and “Sex and the New Single Girl” (1970), all published by Bernard Geis. In 1993, William Morrow published “The Late Show,” ,” Ms. Brown’s advice book for women over 50, in which she suggests that as women age and the supply of available men dwindles, they should simply appropriate their friends’ husbands for jaunty recreational sex.

Perhaps none of these things — not the books, not the unabashed look of Cosmopolitan and its legion of imitators, not the giddy pleasure with which American women embraced sex without shame — would have happened quite as soon if Ms. Brown had heeded a single piece of advice. In 1962, just before “Sex and the Single Girl” was due to be published, she received a telegram from her mother. In an interview with CNN in 1998, Ms. Brown recalled its contents.

“dear helen,” it read. “if you move very quickly, i think we can stop publication of the book.”

Highlights From the Archives

Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave Cosmopolitan Its Purr, Dies at 90
By MARGALIT FOX

Ms. Brown, who wrote the best-selling book “Sex and the Single Girl,” was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women.August 14, 2012BUSINESSOBITUARY (OBIT)

ARTICLES ABOUT HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan's Longtime Editor, Dies at 90
By MARGALIT FOX

Ms. Brown ran the magazine for more than three decades, giving it the sexually frank tone it was known for.August 13, 2012


How Cosmo Conquered the World
By EDITH ZIMMERMAN

Yes, there is a Cosmo for pretty much every country you can think of. Selling American friskiness has never been, like, so awesome.August 03, 2012, Friday


Helen Gurley Brown Gives $30 Million for Media Innovation at Columbia and Stanford
By BRIAN STELTER

The former editor of Cosmopolitan is financing an institute on media innovation on both campuses, at Columbia's journalism school and Stanford's school of engineering. Her total gift to the journalism school was its largest ever.January 30, 2012


Bad Girls, Good Sense: A Helen Gurley Brown Quiz
By PAT RYAN

“Sex and the Single Girl” set out some surprisingly homespun guidelines and strict rules for personal finance. Test your knowledge with our quiz.May 24, 2009, Sunday


Miniskirt Lib
By GINIA BELLAFANTE

A biography calls Helen Gurley Brown a trailblazing feminist.April 26, 2009, Sunday


Helen Gurley Brown: The Original Carrie Bradshaw
By DWIGHT GARNER

Jennifer Scanlon’s biography of Helen Gurley Brown charts her rise from growing up in poverty to editing Cosmopolitan, and argues that she deserves more credit as a pioneering feminist.April 22, 2009, Wednesday
T

The Seasoned Woman

To the Editor: I keep wondering if your reviewer Toni Bentley and I read the same book, Gail Sheehy's ''Sex and the Seasoned Woman'' (Feb. 5). Bentley says Sheehy's ''prose is sloppy and frequently awkward.'' Hardly. Gail doesn't know how to write that way. Bentley also seriously objects to the premise of the book -- that women over 50 can and should continue to be sexual creatures, to have sex with a partner, if available, alone if necessary. Why is Toni Bentley so upset with this premise?...March 05, 2006, Sunday


Injecting Silicone, and Risk
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Liquid silicone has been regaining popularity, as doctors use it off-label to fill wrinkles, furrows and acne scars or add volume to lips and cheeks.January 26, 2006, Thursday


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Quasimodo Would Feel at Home
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

LEW FRANKFORT'S apartment at the Beresford just got a little bigger. Last year, Mr. Frankfort, the chairman and chief executive of Coach, the leather goods company, bought a four-story apartment that extends into one of the three towers in the Emery Roth-designed landmark at Central Park West and 81st Street. The seller was Bob Weinstein, a co-founder and former co-chairman of Miramax Films. Mr. Frankfort embarked on a complete renovation of the apartment and also entered into talks with t...November 20, 2005, Sunday


Casual Relationships, Yes. Casual Sex, Not Really.
By ALEX WILLIAMS

Mating rituals today owe as much to Doris Day as they do to Samantha Jones.April 03, 2005, Sunday


The Big City; Kept Women: Nearly Extinct For a Reason
By JOHN TIERNEY

IT was billed as Girls' Nite for Helen Gurley Brown and a select group of customers at Henri Bendel, which seemed the ideal opportunity for a sociological inquiry: Whither the kept woman? Several dozen elegant ladies, world-class shoppers of all ages, gathered in the Fifth Avenue store Thursday evening to sip wine, watch a makeup demonstration and listen to Mrs. Brown discuss her new memoir, ''I'm Wild Again'' (St. Martin's Press). She started with the section titled ''The Year of Being Kep...April 08, 2000, Saturday


First 'Cosmopolitan Girl' Reveals a Secret
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

Helen Gurley Brown, the 76-year-old former editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, has come clean in her new memoir, ''I'm Wild Again: Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts'' (St. Martin's Press). In a chapter titled ''The Year of Being Kept (But Not Very Well),'' she reveals for the first time that she had a financial arrangement when she was 24 with an older, married man who, in exchange for rent and a nominal secretarial job, had a sexual relationship with her. According to he...January 31, 2000, Monday


The Dance Of the Images
By PHOEBE HOBAN

THE disco song ''Bad Girls'' boomed throughout the marble-floored duplex penthouse, which was a study in shocking pink: candelabras wreathed in magenta feather boas sat on pink-velvet-draped tables. On the balcony over Fifth Avenue, a row of brightly lighted mannequins looked like high-fashion gargoyles. A small army of caterers dressed like Las Vegas showgirls wore red dynel wigs. But the glitzy decorations paled in comparison to the guest list for the party given on Monday night by the son...October 12, 1997, Sunday


Is Helen Gurley Brown the Captain or the Ship Itself?
By ROBIN POGREBIN

Sitting amid the pink silk walls and leopard-print carpet of her office, listening to this nearly 75-year-old woman talk about love and sex as if she were still 23, the question arises: Can there possibly be life for Cosmopolitan magazine after Helen Gurley Brown? Indeed, these days, Ms. Brown seems to be wondering what life can possibly offer her after Cosmopolitan. ''There isn't any question that I feel some grief for the loss of the product,'' Ms. Brown said. ''Because I loved having a m...January 13, 1997, Monday




Helen Gurley Brown Navigator

A list of resources from around the Web about Helen Gurley Brown as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.
Brown Institute for Media Innovation
OTHER COVERAGE
How Cosmo Changed the World
Cosmopolitan
Helenism
The New Yorker, May 11, 2009
The Woman Who Made it Good to be Bad
Salon, Apr. 12, 2009
Helen Gurley Brown
Vanity Fair, Aug. 2007
VIDEOS
Helen Gurley Brown … A Woman for All Seasons
PBS, Dec. 02, 1989
The Modern Woman
PBS, Mar. 11, 1981

Helen Gurley Brown, Groundbreaking Cosmopolitan Editor, Has Died at 90

JOHN HUDSON3:35 PM ET

Helen Gurley Brown, the former editor-in-chief of ​Cosmopolitan magazine and the woman most often credited with building it into an international empire, has died at age 90, according to the magazine's publisher, Hearst Corporation. Brown passed away this morning at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Colombia after a brief hospitalization, but no cause of death has been released yet. “Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation, in a statement. “She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”

News of her death follows a lengthy article about the global growth of Cosmo in The New York Times Magazine, which called her the "patron saint" of Cosmopolitan magazine's editorial mission.  As recently as January, she donated $30 million to Columbia's J-School and Stanford's engineering school to establish a joint "institute for media innovation." Here's the press release from Hearst:

HELEN GURLEY BROWN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS, COSMOPOLITAN & AUTHOR OF SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL, DEAD AT 90

Gurley Brown Redefined Womanhood for Many Women and Built Cosmopolitan Into Global Media Juggernaut

NEW YORK, August 13, 2012 – Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazines’ 64 international editions and one of the world’s most popular and influential editors, died today at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. She was 90.

Widely heralded as a legend, Gurley Brown’s impact on popular culture and society reached around the globe, first with her 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, and then for the more than three decades she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way rarely replicated by editors. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the bible of “single girls” worldwide and remains the magazine of “fun, fearless, females” to this day.

“Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation. “She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential ‘Cosmo girl.’ She will be greatly missed.”

“Helen was an inspiration, a true success story. Her energy, enthusiasm and true passion for women’s issues unleashed a platform for women worldwide,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines. “She brought the subject that every woman wanted to know about but nobody talked about, to life, literally, in Cosmo’s pages.”

Her and her husband David Brown’s philanthropy also left an indelible mark on journalism: In January, Gurley Brown gave $30 million to Columbia and Stanford Universities. The gift created the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, housed at both Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Engineering at Stanford. The center represents the “increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts,” both schools announced. The journalism school said its $18 million share was the largest donation in its 100-year history.

Gurley Brown’s husband, David, who died in 2010, attended both universities and was a movie producer whose films included  Jaws, The Sting and The Verdict.

She also gave the papers, notes, and correspondence that document her career—and publishing in the late 20th century—to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The woman who redefined womanhood for many coming of age at that time, was born in Green Forest, Ark., on February 18, 1922, to Ira and Cleo Gurley, both school teachers. The family moved to Little Rock when Ira was elected to the state legislature. He died in an elevator accident when Helen was 10 years old. After trying to support Helen and her older sister Mary in Depression-era Arkansas, Cleo Gurley moved them to Los Angeles in the late 1930s. There, Gurley Brown excelled socially and academically, graduating from high school as class valedictorian.

She spent a year at the Texas State College for Women and returned home to put herself through Woodbury Business College. Her mother and sister, who had contracted polio, depended on her financial support for the rest of their lives. In 1941, with her business degree, Gurley Brown took on a series of secretarial jobs.

She was later to urge her readers to plan their financial lives wisely, writing  “Being smart about money is sexy.” A careful spender her whole life, she was said to bring her lunch to work almost every day for the more than 30 years she spent at Hearst.

It was her 17th job, at the advertising agency Foote, Cone, and Belding, that launched her future success. As executive secretary to Don Belding, Gurley Brown’s work ethic and witty notes impressed both her boss and his wife, who suggested she try her hand at writing advertising copy. She proved her talent, winning prizes for her copy. By the late 1950s, she had become the highest-paid female copywriter on the West Coast and one of the few to be listed in Who’s Who of American Women. (She is also recognized in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in The World, and the World Book of Facts.)

In 1959, at the age of 37, Gurley Brown married Brown, 43, then a film executive at 20th Century Fox Studios, and later an independent producer. During their marriage, Brown was a partner behind many of Gurley Brown’s projects, even writing Cosmo cover lines. It was he who persuaded her to write a book about her life as a single woman. The result, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), took the nation—and then globe—by storm.

On the bestseller lists for more than a year, Sex and the Single Girl has been published in 28 countries and translated into 16 languages. The book encouraged young women to enjoy being single, find fulfillment in work and non-marital relationships with men, and take pleasure in sex. When Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique ushered in the modern women’s movement a year later, the two works and their authors helped lead the growing national dialogue about the place of women in society and popular culture. Quick on the stiletto heels of her first success, Gurley Brown wrote the 1964 bestseller, Sex and the Office.

Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Sex and the Single Girl for what was then the highest price ever paid for a non-fiction title. The 1964 film starred Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda.

The Browns then worked together to keep Helen in the public eye. She wrote a syndicated newspaper advice column and made record albums and radio spots. The pair pitched plays, television shows, more books, and new magazines for single women. One, a magazine called Femme, attracted the interest of Hearst Magazines. But instead of a new title, they agreed to let her try to revive Cosmopolitan magazine.

In July 1965, Gurley Brown, the woman who famously said, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere,” officially became editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and launched it into publishing history. She was Cosmo’s tireless editor-in-chief, growing the magazine in the 1980s to 300 pages, a third of which were highly lucrative advertisements. Since then, its sales and advertising have risen spectacularly. Today Cosmopolitan is the top-selling young women’s magazines in the world, with 64 international editions and is published in 35 languages and distributed in more than 100 countries. In 1997, Gurley Brown left the flagship magazine to be editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan’s growing international editions.

Gurley Brown’s vision—and spectacular success—was to remodel the then-conservative Cosmopolitan. She once said she accomplished this because, “My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.”

She featured sexy cover models, provocative content, and a fresh point of view that appealed to young women. She was a highly visible magazine editor and personality, authoring The Single Girl’s Cookbook (1969) and Sex and the New Single Girl (1971), an updated version of her first book, and making TV show guest appearances. At one point, she was said to be so popular that she was the 10th-most-frequent guest on “The Tonight Show.” In the 1980s, she had a weekly spot on Good Morning America and briefly hosted her own show, A View From Cosmo, on Lifetime.

She and Brown, who were married for 51 years, were anchors in the New York publishing and Hollywood film communities, as he and partner Richard Zanuck produced some of the era’s most memorable movies, among them, Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. When asked by an interviewer in 2006 to what she attributed her long, happy marriage, Gurley Brown answered, “I married the right man. He is kind, compassionate and generous, not just to me, but to a lot of other people. You need to marry a decent, caring person.”

Named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the U.S. five times by The World Almanac, Gurley Brown continued to write books, some 11 in all. They include The Outrageous Opinions of Helen Gurley Brown (1967); the 1982 bestseller, Having It All; The Late Show: A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women over 50 (1993); and a writing guide, The Writer’s Rules: The Power of Positive Prose—How to Create It and Get It Published (1988). Her definitive memoir, I'm Wild Again: Snippets From My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts, was published in 2000. A biography of Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, by Jennifer Scanlon, was published in 2009.

Just recently, Advertising Age named her among 100 women who have made an impact on advertising during the past century.

For her exemplary contributions to magazine journalism, Gurley Brown was awarded a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications in 1985. In 1986, the Hearst Corporation established a chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in her name, the Helen Gurley Brown Research Professorship. 

She was inducted into the Publisher’s Hall of Fame in 1988, taking her place with such publishing originals as Henry Luce, DeWitt Wallace, Harold Ross, and Norman Cousins.

The Magazine Publishers of America honored Helen Gurley Brown with the 1995 Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the magazine publishing industry’s highest honor. Gurley Brown was the first woman recipient. She received the 1996 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame Award.

When asked in 2006 about the social firestorm called Sex and the Single Girl that ignited her long, iconic editorial career, Gurley Brown explained, “Before I wrote my book, the thought was that sex was for men and women only caved in to please men. But I wrote what I knew to be true—that sex is pleasurable for both women and men.”

Donations may be made to The Pussycat Foundation, c/o Karen Sanborn, Hearst Corp., 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, to fund media innovation at Columbia and Stanford Universities. A fall memorial will be announced at a later date.

How did they do it? Romney campaign explains how it kept the biggest secret in politics

By Garrett Haake and Alex Moe, NBC News

WASHINGTON & JANESVILLE, Wisc. -- Mitt Romney's months-long vice presidential selection process came to a close one week ago in a dining room in suburban Massachusetts, where Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, dressed casually to avoid detection during commercial flights, told Romney he would accept the GOP candidate's offer to join the ticket.

For the Romney campaign, Ryan's meeting with Romney, in the dining room of chief vetter Beth Myers last Sunday, was the result of a process that began in April, and wound through several secrecy-cloaked months without major leaks before culminating in Saturday's rollout in Virginia.

Even the rollout was an example of both a flawlessly executed bit of secrecy and stagecraft and improvisation when events did not go as the campaign planned. Myers told reporters the Romney campaign originally planned to announce the pick Friday in New Hampshire, but with Ryan attending a memorial service for the victims of a shooting at a Sikh temple in his district, the plans were changed to Saturday.

All of this information was a closely guarded secret until Saturday night, when Myers, in charge of VP vetting, offered reporters a glimpse inside the process.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney talks with senior adviser Beth Myers aboard his campaign plane before taking off Aug. 2 in Centennial, Colo.

The vet
“I had one directive: The candidates must be qualified to take office on day one,” Myers said of her appointment to head the VP search on April 16. “Around May 1 we created a short list.”

Throughout the process, Myers said, one thing was clear: "This was Mitt’s decision.”

Myers chose not to disclose a full list of who was considered for the No. 2 spot, but many of the names have leaked out: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were vetted, as were Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Portman and McDonnell received calls Friday night to inform them they were not the pick.

Myers told reporters she established a system, approved by Romney, to quietly vet candidates after asking if they were interested in the job. A team of lawyers worked with Myers in a secure room of the campaign's Boston headquarters. No copies were made of any documents, and everything was locked in a safe when the team left at night. No documents were allowed out of the room.

Romney tries to define Ryan before Democrats do

Included in the data collected by Myers and her team: congressional voting records, an exhaustive questionnaire and "several years" of tax returns -- she did not say how many. Romney has come under fire from Democrats and many in the media for his refusal to release more than two years of returns, despite reports he released several times that amount when he himself was vetted as a possible ticket-mate for John McCain in 2008.

Throughout May and June, Myers and her team pored over data, presenting information to Romney, who discussed his thinking with a small group of advisers, including the campaign manager, senior strategists and close aides. When the Romney campaign convened a retreat for top donors with major GOP figures in Utah in mid-June, Myers met with several contenders to clear up lingering issues and ask follow-up questions.

“He [Romney] talked with a lot of people,” Myers said, adding that she felt it was important to keep her own opinion to herself. “I did not share my thoughts on who I thought it should be”

The vetting of Ryan – or at least when he began to know about it -- lasted nearly six weeks. Just days before the June 5 gubernatorial recall election in the Badger State, the congressman’s staff started compiling hundreds of pages of documents to submit to the Romney campaign, such as public statements and op-ed pieces.

Ryan never let on publicly whether he was being vetted or not throughout the summer months. He always dismissed questions surrounding his VP possibilities. That, sources say, played into Ryan’s strategy: keep expectations of VP possibilities incredibly low and just be a team player.

On July 2, the day she was famously photographed in Wolfeboro, N.H., meeting with Romney on his back porch, Myers presented her boss with completed dossiers on the final candidates for him to absorb.

On Aug. 1, when Romney returned from his week-long foreign trip, he was ready to make a decision. He met with Myers in her office in Boston and placed a call to Ryan. Could they meet in person for a discussion?

The offer
By August, reporters had begun to whittle down the short list of possible candidates and to keep a close eye on the top contenders. Despite this, on Aug. 5, Ryan quietly slipped out of his home and, dressed casually and wearing a hat and sunglasses to obscure his appearance, drove to Chicago, where he boarded a flight to Hartford, Conn.

There, an unlikely emissary was waiting for him in a rented car: Myers’ 19-year-old son, Curt, who picked Ryan up and drove him from Hartford to Brookline, Mass., and his mother’s dining room, where Romney was waiting, having been driven down from Wolfeboro that morning by Secret Service agents.

Obama gets his target with pick of Ryan

Romney described the meeting to reporters traveling aboard his plane Saturday night.

"We talked about the campaign and how it would be run and talked about how we’d work together if we get the White House," Romney said. "What the relationship would be, how we’d interact and be involved in important decisions. But we talked about our families, what this meant for them, what kind of challenge it meant -- those are the topics we discussed.”

Ryan also met with a handful of top Romney staffers, and when Romney officially extended the offer to join the ticket, the seven-term congressman was thrilled, if not surprised.

"By the time we met in person I kind of knew it was going to happen, and I was very humbled," Ryan told reporters Saturday. "It was the biggest honor I’ve ever been given in my life.... I Love this country dearly, and I feel we have an opportunity to fix things once and for all."

When the shooting happened Sunday at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., Ryan handled the fallout from Massachusetts, never telling his staff exactly where he was. If it wasn’t for the unforeseen tragedy that took place in Wisconsin’s 1^st District that day, Ryan’s staff likely never would have known their boss was out of state at all. He flew back that night, undetected.

The House Budget Committee chairman kept his schedule intact for the entire week leading up to the announcement including spending three days filming commercials for his congressional re-election campaign. Ryan never let out his secret to his campaign staffers, who were working 12-hour days with him on the ads. They will begin airing next month in his district – in Wisconsin, you can appear on the ballot as both a vice presidential candidate and running for a congressional seat.

Ryan spent the middle of the week traveling in northwest Wisconsin stumping for local candidates – all along knowing his life was about to change. But these long car rides gave him plenty of private time to speak with his longtime friend and chief of staff about his new role.

Escape from Wisconsin
Keeping the Romney/Ryan pairing a secret for the next week proved to be an Olympian challenge. A boomlet of support for the Ryan candidacy drew increased scrutiny, and reporters such as NBC's Alex Moe were staking out Ryan's home, chatting with the candidate and his family and keeping tabs on their movement, lest they slip away again undetected.

Myers said she thought Moe might be close to solving the mystery.

“She did a great job,” Myers said of Moe, whom Ryan likened to a family member in a recent interview. “We knew we had to be very diligent in throwing her off the scent.”

And diligent they were, moving Ryan's family undetected while he was attending the Friday memorial service. Ryan told reporters earlier in the week his family was planning a trip to Colorado, departing on Saturday, so packing seemed unremarkable.

Early Friday morning, the congressman’s trusted chief of staff, Andy Speth, arrived in his red pickup to take Ryan to the memorial service, with reporters in tow.

Ryan returned home in the early afternoon and went inside through the back as he was locked out of his side door, telling reporters who stood watching on the sidewalk he must have forgotten his keys. That would be the last time anyone saw the congressman in Janesville, because sometime after 3 p.m., he exited his home into the back yard (where reporters couldn’t see) and went into the woods.

"I grew up in those woods. The house I grew up in backs up to the house I live in, so I know those woods like the back of my hand.  So it wasn’t too hard to walk through them. So I just went out my back door, went through the gully in the woods I grew up playing in. I walked past the tree that has my own tree fort I built back there," Ryan said.

Escaping via the woods isn’t something new for Ryan, either. It is a tactic the congressman has been forced to use before due to protesters in front of his house. Ryan is used to cutting through the bushes.

Waiting a couple of hundred yards on the other side: Speth, who took Ryan and his family to an airport in neighboring Illinois, where a private plane would whisk them to Virginia.

Back at the house, Ryan's sister-in-law, intentionally left behind, turned out the lights just as news was beginning to leak that Romney would announce his pick Saturday, turning the eyes of the world on the town of Janesville. 

When Moe knocked on the congressman's door that night, after NBC News confirmed he would be the vice presidential nominee, no one answered. Ryan was already hundreds of miles away.

The rollout
While Ryan was on his way to meet once again with the man at the top of the ticket, Romney was busy on the phones, informing other candidates from the short list that they had not been chosen. Portman and McDonnell received calls that night and may not have been the only ones. Romney had already called Pawlenty, a tireless advocate for the nominee and a staff favorite, on Monday.

When the Ryans landed in Elizabeth City, N.C., an hour south of Norfolk, they were whisked away to a Fairfield Inn hotel -- again, by Myers' son Curt -- and met by a handful of top Romney aides. The family ate takeout from Applebee’s with Myers, and worked on speech prep. Then, Myers said, as the campaign sent out an advisory telling the world that Romney would announce his choice the next morning, Myers turned off her phone.

Ryan placed a phone call to his mother around midnight to let her know he was in fact being tapped as Romney’s right-hand man. He called his siblings the next morning just hours before he gave the biggest speech of his life.

Ryan and his family loaded into two cars for Norfolk first thing Saturday and were driven to the USS Wisconsin, the site of the announcement. The rest is history.

 Campaign battle focuses on Ryan's Medicare redesign

6

hours

ago

In comments on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Ryan’s plan was far preferable to what President Barack Obama had done and would do to Medicare.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus discusses the impact that Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate will have on the Republican campaign.

Going on the counter-offensive, Priebus said “If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it’s Barack Obama. He’s the one who is destroying Medicare; we are the ones that are offering solutions” to preserve Medicare benefits for people who are at or near retirement age and to make the program fiscally sustainable for future taxpayers.

He alleged that Obama “stole $700 billion out of Medicare to fund European health care. We can go down that route, or we can put solutions on the table to big problems and have a debate.”

According to analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and the chief Medicare actuary, Obama’s health care overhaul will reduce future Medicare spending by between $400 billion and $600 billion in its first ten years. The Medicare provisions in the Affordable Care Act are designed to squeeze savings out of Medicare by pressing hospitals, hospices and other providers to become more efficient and by reducing spending on Medicare Advantage plans.

Ryan’s Medicare reform would gradually increase the Medicare eligibility age to 67. The phased-in increase in the eligibility age would start in 2023. Ryan’s proposal would also do away with Medicare’s open-ended payments for those born in 1958 and later. The Ryan Medicare plan would not apply to those now receiving Medicare benefits.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod contrasts the presidential candidates' stances on preservation of Medicare for seniors.

And Ryan has partnered with one democrat. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, in offering proposals to restructure Medicare by offering seniors a choice of different insurance plans and forcing plans to compete with each other in an attempt to achieve greater efficiency.

Priebus argued that, “If we go down the road this president wants to go down… Medicare will be changed forever: it will be bankrupt by 2024. Medicare is going broke. Every person in America watching this now knows that that’s true.”

Asked whether Romney embraces Ryan’s Medicare redesign plan, Priebus said the GOP presidential contender “appreciates and admires” what Ryan has proposed, but “Mitt Romney has his own plans.”

David Axelrod, the Obama campaign political strategist, told NBC’s David Gregory on Meet the Press that Romney’s selection of Ryan as his running mate “clarifies the choice” for voters to Obama’s benefit because Ryan is so clearly defined by his calls for reducing future spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other benefits.

Asked about Newt Gingrich’s comment when he was running for the GOP presidential nomination last year that Ryan’s Medicare design was “right-wing social engineering,” Axelrod said “I believe what Newt Gingrich said on your program. I believe it’s right-wing social engineering. I don’t believe they (Ryan and Romney) believe in that (Medicare) program”

He charged that the Romney campaign is “trying to distance themselves” from Ryan’s Medicare proposal.

He also contended that Ryan “rubber-stamped every aspect of the (George W.) Bush economic policy” from 2001 to 2008, including tax cuts, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a huge expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs, an expansion whose cost wasn’t offset by any increase in tax revenues.

Jason Reed / Reuters

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney introduces congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate during a campaign event at the retired battleship USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia, August 11.

But Priebus contended that Ryan’s boldness in taking on Medicare redesign and his frankness in discussing America’s fiscal challenges aren’t liabilities with voters, but advantages. “What America is starving for is not only people of their word to run for office but they’re hungering for people to govern like they campaigned.”

What Romney’s choice of Ryan proves, Priebus said, “is that Mitt Romney is willing to govern like he’s campaigned. It’s not enough to win, but we have to fix the problems that are facing this country.

Romney and Ryan are spending Sunday campaigning in Mooresville, and High Point, North Carolina and in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  Then Romney will had to Florida for campaigning on Monday while Ryan will split off and go to Iowa for a stop at the state fair in Des Moines. Romney campaign strategists say that Wisconsin and the other Great Lake states are now much more in play with Ryan on the ticket.

President George W. Bush nearly won Wisconsin in 2004 – losing to John Kerry by only 11,000 votes out of nearly 3 million total votes cast -- but Obama won it in 2008 with 56 percent of the vote.

In an interview on Meet the Press Sunday, Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin told Gregory that Ryan “has tremendous appeal to swing voters and independent voters in states like Wisconsin that are battleground states because he’s smart and he’s bold, but he listens and he relates well to voters all across the political spectrum. I think this (choice of Ryan) is a game changer and I think it shows just how courageous Mitt Romney is not just with this choice, but how courageous he’s willing to be to take on our fiscal and economic crises here in America….”

NBC's Garrett Haake contributed to this report.

2352 comments

We the corporations? Comment collapsed by the community

Its not that it focuses on his voucher program for medicare as much as it focuses on his (and Willards) top down ideology.

He wants to give tax cuts to the richest (for the THIRD time) while shifting the burden to the working class and poor. His idea on Medicare exemplifies this shift towards screwing those that worked their whole life.

Really, its the only republican plan so far in this Presidential election so people will understandably jump all over it and hang it on "Elect me to see my Plan" Rmoney...

• 243 votes

#1 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:20 AM EDT

kimb54.1

“Mitt Romney has his own plans.” Said Party Boss Reinhold Reince Priebus so once again we are left with... I can't tell you what we will do but... Trust Us.

• 190 votes

#1.1 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:25 AM EDT

DON9876543 Comment collapsed by the community

Obama has no plans for Medicare except let it go bankrupt before long. Denial of the problem is not a plan as far as I am concerned.

• 74 votes

#1.2 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:33 AM EDT

UnitedStates1776

You take the for-profit aspect out of any type of healthcare and like magic all the financial problems go away.

Healthcare should have never ever been a for-profit industry.

.

• 266 votes

#1.3 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:34 AM EDT

dal Comment collapsed by the community

Romney's only plan is to cut and tax. That is not a solution just more of a problem. Yeah, it looks good in math for Romney but bad in application for us all.

• 145 votes

#1.4 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:35 AM EDT

watt75 Comment collapsed by the community

Ryan has a plan and a budget which is more than Obama has. Doing nothing medicare will go broke. Ryan wants to give people under 55 a choice to participate in medicare as is or accept a voucher for private insurance. 55+ will have no change in medicare benefits. Ryan's plan puts the savings back into medicare, Obama is taking 500 BILLION out of medicare to fund Obamacare. Who exactly is gutting medicare? I encourage Americans to research this before November.

• 73 votes

#1.5 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:35 AM EDT

DON9876543 Comment collapsed by the community

UNited States, Profit motive does serve a purpose by at least giving an incentive to cut waste. Government has no incentive and a very poor track record.

• 42 votes

#1.6 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:41 AM EDT

cantakenomore Comment collapsed by the community

The liberals will continue with the same tired 'ol mantra...Republicans = tax cuts for the 1%ers. Republicans want dirty air and polluted water. Republicans kill the elderly. Republicans starve our children...

Really, libbies?? Really?....is that all you have? If so, it'll be a conservative landslide come this November.

• 52 votes

#1.7 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:44 AM EDT

kimb54.1

,

• 5 votes

#1.8 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:47 AM EDT

Shaking my head-2479300 Comment collapsed by the community

Ryan has proposed budgets, Harry and Co, with Obama's blessing won't even discuss it having produced NO Budget of thier own in all the time Obama has been in office. When Obama finally proposed one it was so outrageous and ruinous that even Harry and Co. would not pass it.

Now Obama has the unmitigated gall to call Ryan's plan to revamp Medicare a way for Ryan to say we can't afford to give our seniors the health care we promised them. Have you ever heard such a flagrang pot calling the kettle black statement in your life?? Obamataxcare just by being passed caused doubling of medication costs for a lot of seniors, now it is set to remove another $500 million from Medicare funds, the coverage and payment to doctors and hospitals is being reduced and all this done by Obama because as he has said many many times "we have to reduce these entitlements". OF course at the same time he has increased food stamps and welfare to unheard of proportions and provides health care the the hundreds of thousands of illegals he has stopped from being deported and wants to give work permits to while AMericans can't get jobs and more and more have to go to the government for help. WHAT a giantic hypocrit.

Ryan's plan is a proposal to keep the seniors of today on Medicare and those close to Medicare covered as promised and to devise a plan where seniors in the future will have some kind of assistance with medical coverage and care. HE at least tries to do something logical and budget concious rather than be a BS, give money we don't have politician like Obama and most in Washington. The Dems have stopped all Ryan's effort to get things going in the right direction. THis is a great team to save our economy, get jobs back and get rid of Obamataxcare. Heck, these two might even consider enforcing our laws as they should be and not catering to the people who attacked us and will do it again.

• 51 votes

#1.9 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:49 AM EDT

Byron Raum Comment collapsed by the community

It's rather interesting how Obama is being accused of not having a plan and doing nothing and is also being accused of cutting Medicare expenses at the same time - often in the same sentence.

The simple fact is that Obamcare focuses on efficiency of care. There is no guarantee that, Chicken Littles notwithstanding, Medicare would go bankrupt if we were able to improve the way we provide care. That is the focus of Obamacare's cuts.

The problem, of course, with increasing efficiency is that each Medicare patient becomes less of a cash cow for the industry. THAT is why Paul Ryan's plan does nothing to address efficiency per se. He isn't interested in a more health American public, he just wants to make sure taxpayer money keeps getting funneled away at the same rate.

The American healthcare consumer is woefully underinformed about the value of service he or she receives. When you are at a doctor's office, you don't get a menu of choices of the tests that you can choose and how much each costs. Giving seniors more choice means that they will be even more vulnerable to a doctor who just bought a fancy new machine and wants to make money off it. This is Paul Ryan's plan. Give them 6,000$, if they are lucky and they are healthy, great. If not, well, too bad.

• 126 votes

#1.10 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:49 AM EDT

Peshawar Jim Comment collapsed by the community

Other than cutting it by $500 billion over the next ten years, what is the Obama Plan for the sustainability of Medicare? Or Social Security? Or Medicaid?

I've seen nothing on any of these. Only criticism of those who are trying to save these programs. None are sustainable in their present form, so why is ending them "..as we know them" so radical. If nothing is done, they will collapse of their own weight - and not too long from now.

What is the Obama Plan?

• 34 votes

#1.11 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:49 AM EDT

Shaking my head-2479300 Comment collapsed by the community

dal

"looks good in math but bad for us"? Who be us??? Math is what is supposed to run a budget, not give aways we can't afford to buy votes. If Obama had any idea how math works we would not be in the mess we are in.

R & R for America after a looooooong devistating reign of insanity.

By the way there is no freaking 1%. Taxes are paid by the 47% and the rest are suckers off those 47%. And if you libs had your way, you'd tax the top tax payers to leaving our country. Who you gonna feed off of then?

• 27 votes

#1.12 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:51 AM EDT

watt75 Comment collapsed by the community

Obamacare does nothing to control healthcare costs....

• 30 votes

#1.13 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 11:53 AM EDT

bman80 Comment collapsed by the community

First of all, $500 billion is not being taken out of Medicare, all Obama wants to do is cut middle man(private insurance companies out of picture). Because the overcharge government too much for that coverage when government can do it in first place. If you actually get facts right may be you get informed. Ryan Plan is disaster. Voucher plan will increase seniors health plan by $6000 to $8000 a year, How do you expect the seniors on fixed income afford this?

• 139 votes

#1.14 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:04 PM EDT

Intellect-1949393 Comment collapsed by the community

I for one state that Willard has given up any hope for getting elected by his choice for a running mate. Actually the catch phrase "running mate" is exactly what Willard, et al, are doing. Running for cover with this choice. I would like to add that as a Miami U alumni I am ashamed to be affiliated with Ryan even though he does not reflect the values of Miami, in my humble opinion and experience, but those of the priveledged students he reflects that attend Miami U.

• 70 votes

#1.15 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:05 PM EDT

CuongDNguyen Comment collapsed by the community

@cantakenomore

Have you looked at Ryan's plan for starter? Those are hypothetical points that assume "what if". The main objective is to lower tax for the rich, increase tax for the middle class.

Really? How is that working for 12 years? And you say GOP is not about tax cut for the rich and oil corporations. Paint me the picture, but what they said betray what you are trying to say.

• 94 votes

#1.16 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:05 PM EDT

Byron Raum

UNited States, Profit motive does serve a purpose by at least giving an incentive to cut waste. Government has no incentive and a very poor track record.

Government has a very good record of managing healthcare. Every single advanced country in the world has a working healthcare system that involves government.

The reason OUR government is inefficient is because we outsource our government functions back out to private companies. That basically means that the profit motive serves a purpose to try to soak the taxpayer for every single possible dollar.

The cutting of waste doesn't benefit the customer - i.e. the taxpayer. It just enriches the CEO and the board of the private company.

Mitt Romney was marveling over how Israel manages to only pay 8% of its economy towards healthcare whereas we pay 18%. That's because Israel has one of the most Socialistic healthcare systems in the world.

Israelis aren't any less healthy than Americans - but they do pay less for their healthcare. A LOT less.

In general, private industry isn't that good at coming up with great ideas. Most of the biggest advances in society have come from government. Industry is good at taking those ideas to the general public, but doesn't really have the vision or time horizon to see way out into the future. That is the REAL problem with the profit motive. Instant gratification doesn't work very well with the need for investing in research.

• 116 votes

#1.17 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:06 PM EDT

johnQcitizen Comment collapsed by the community

hahaha the republican plan for the elderly.roll their beds into the forest and let them die.hahaha.think how much money the rich will save.vote republican

• 52 votes

#1.18 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:06 PM EDT

Lady Cat

Just remember the people making these plans will never have to depend on Medicaid. They get, for life, a private government plan that the average working person could never afford and remember it's free to them. No co-pays and it's paid for by the tax payers.

• 120 votes

#1.19 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:07 PM EDT

COYOTEHUNTER

Were damned if we do, and damned if we don't....The hell with the whole bunch i'm going moose hunting!....

• 18 votes

#1.20 - Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:09 PM EDT