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I first met John Thornton in March of 2019 at a conference hosted by Facebook in Denver for backers of local journalism. This was during the first Trump administration, a time when Facebook still evinced modest interest in supporting news publishers in service to democracy. The event, “Accelerate: Local News,” was sponsored with the Online News Association and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Weeks earlier, Thornton had launched the American Journalism Project (AJP), an effort to take what had worked at the Texas Tribune, which he had founded in 2008, and seed newsrooms in communities across America where newspapers had disappeared or deteriorated beyond recognition. Thornton told me that total charitable giving to local news was only about a tenth of what Americans give each year to the performing arts. Journalism, he said, needs at least as much philanthropic commitment.

I had been skeptical about whether nonprofit journalism could ever achieve the reach and scale of legacy media. But at the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Times, where I observed how difficult it was for traditional papers to become digital-first and reach new audiences. 

The next time we spoke was in July of 2021, near his house in Montecito, California, where he helped persuade me to take on the editorship of the Texas Tribune. He was dressed in shorts and flip-flops—not something I expected of a venture capitalist—and we got burgers and tacos from a roadside shack in Carpinteria. We sat on plastic chairs and talked for hours. I was hooked. 

Thornton died on Saturday near his primary residence, in Austin, eleven days before he was to have turned sixty. The cause was suicide, according to his wife, Erin Driscoll Thornton. She said that he had suffered from depression for most of his life, and that three years ago, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. 

Sarabeth Berman, the chief executive of AJP,  met Thornton in December of 2019 when he was recruiting her to join his nonprofit startup. They both had busy travel schedules, and wound up meeting in a terminal at Reagan Washington National Airport. “My immediate impression was that he was a surprising champion of local news,” Berman told me. “He had this Texas swagger, seemed like an accomplished financier, and used swashbuckling metaphors. It was exceedingly clear that he was committed to the mission of revitalizing local news around the country and that it was essential to saving democracy.

“He was so clear-eyed about the problem and also clear-eyed that, given market failure, it was obvious our society was struggling because of the lack of local news, and that there was an opportunity here for philanthropy,” she added. “My immediate reaction was: I can learn so much from this guy. “ 

At the most recent AJP board meeting, in February, Thornton exhorted fellow board members to build local-news philanthropy into a national movement, one that would draw Americans to the side of ensuring a public good—reliable news and information—in communities across the country. (Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and the publisher of CJR, serves on the AJP board.) 

“He loved the AJP as though it was family, and he treated us like family,” Berman said. “Those of us close to him did know he was struggling. I hoped the demons wouldn’t win.” 

John Douglas Thornton was born on April 9, 1965, in Wichita, Kansas. He had a difficult childhood: his father, after losing a job in accounting, never found his footing, and drank heavily. John was a bright student who enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio. He received an MBA at Stanford and began his career at McKinsey & Company. He then moved into venture capital: he joined Austin Ventures in 1991, leading investments in software startups. He ultimately served as managing  partner, overseeing four billion dollars in assets under management.  Later, he cofounded Elsewhere Partners, a private equity firm investing in software companies outside of traditional financial hubs.

In 2006, as the news business was starting to crater, Thornton and colleagues at Austin Ventures began looking into investing in newspapers, including his hometown paper, the Austin American-Statesman, which was then owned by Cox Enterprises. (Cox initially put the paper on the market in 2008, then sold it to Gannett in 2017. It was recently acquired by Hearst.)

Thornton sought out a fellow Austinite—Evan Smith, the publisher and former editor of Texas Monthly—for advice. The two men had known each other socially—Smith is fifty-eight, and a fellow graduate of a liberal arts school, Hamilton College. “John and I ran in circles that overlapped, but we never did any business together, nor was that something I ever imagined would happen,” Smith said. “By late 2007, he began to talk to me about this idea.  He was concerned about the decline of journalism in Texas, so he came out of the process of looking at the Statesman concluding two things: one, there is not a good business model for a for-profit newspaper, and two, capital-J journalism needs to be saved. I was basically his thought partner. He wanted to create a new news organization, and he thought that nonprofit was the way to go.” 

Thornton recruited Smith from Texas Monthly, where he had worked for seventeen years, as the founding CEO and editor in chief of the Texas Tribune. “We were jumping into this abyss,” Smith recalled. “I described us as Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff, but without the kiss.” The pair recruited a veteran reporter—Ross Ramsey, who was running a successful email newsletter on Texas politics—as a third founder. 

“There is no question it was a risk and there was no guarantee it would work,” Smith said. Thornton committed two million dollars of an initial four million in seed funding—a million dollars at launch and a gift of a million (which had to be matched) in the second year. From the outset, Thornton insisted on “revenue promiscuity”—the new entity couldn’t be solely reliant on major donors. It had to get grants from foundations, support from individual members, sponsorships from corporations and universities, and revenue from live events. “Either it was going to be sustainable, or it was not going to happen,” Smith recalled.  

Before long, other journalism entrepreneurs started coming to the Tribune for advice, and founded new nonprofit newsrooms based on the Tribune model, among them the Nevada Independent (founded in 2010), CalMatters (2015), and Mississippi Today (2016). Emily Ramshaw, who had joined the Tribune from the Dallas Morning News and rose to the rank of editor in chief, left the Tribune in 2019 to cofound her own nonprofit newsroom, The 19th News, which focuses on gender and public policy. (Ramshaw and I serve on the board of the Pulitzer Prizes.) 

“When for-profit news organizations started failing right and left, John focused on finding not-for-profit models that would provide financial independence by including a broader range of income, commercial as well as philanthropic, all in service of the function assigned to the press in the Constitution: informing the citizenry,” Ibargüen told me. Thornton knew how to proselytize: In a 2010 article in CJR, he called public-service journalism “a public good just like national defense, clean air, clean water.”

Elizabeth Green—the founder of the education news site Chalkbeat, which, like the Tribune, was founded in 2008—was introduced to Thornton in June of 2017 by Jennifer Preston, who oversaw journalism grantmaking at the Knight Foundation, and Peter Lattman, who plays a similar role at the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic arm of Laurene Powell Jobs. Green was living in DC, Thornton in Austin; her background was journalistic, his financial; she was wearing sneakers, he Louis Vuitton loafers. “It was so powerful to have this person, who didn’t need to make his life’s work local news in any way, devote his life’s work to this,” she said. “We became business partners and friends. We’d talk at all hours of the night. He’d recruit any contact he had, for donations or talent. 

“John was a man who used the power and privilege he had for good,” she added. “People would return his phone calls, and he is great at building relationships and building a fund. I recruited the talent, and I was able to close because I was the living example of the value proposition that we were making. We had a shared vision for what the country needed. I knew how that worked in the social sector, and he knew the private sector.” 

In Texas, Thornton and Smith had strong opinions and strong personalities—as I witnessed during my three years as editor of the Tribune—and their relationship was tested in March of 2021, when the Tribune’s editorial director, Stacy-Marie Ishmael, and chief product officer, Millie Tran, resigned after a year on the job, amid the exhaustion and turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I started at the Tribune, in September of that year, the environment was still fragile. During my tenure, I built on the journalistic foundation that Ramshaw and Ishmael had laid and helped the Tribune transition from Smith to the new CEO, Sonal Shah.

In 2022, all three cofounders of the Tribune passed the torch. Ramsey retired in May. Thornton stepped down from the Tribune’s board. Smith moved on to a new role as a senior adviser to both the Tribune and Emerson Collective  at the end of that year. “John did not suffer fools, and he did not suffer impostors,” Smith told me. “There is no one who cut through the day-to-day bullshit of relationships better than J.T. You never hung up from a call or left a meeting with John Thornton wondering what he really thought.”  

Thornton was a lifelong Democrat. As a child, he had a teddy bear named Muskie, named after the Maine senator and later secretary of state, Edmund S. Muskie. After Trump’s first presidential election, he was devastated—and it was that feeling, in large part, that drove him to conceive of what became AJP. He was joined by Green, who was his cofounder. They recruited Berman to serve as CEO, and she was soon joined by Michael Ouimette, now the chief investment officer at AJP.

“For J.T., journalism was synonymous with public service,” his wife told me. “He had so much faith, belief, and respect in Sarabeth and Michael. He let them call the plays and recognized that they’re the ones operating it.” Along with his wife, Thornton is survived by two stepsons, Wyatt Driscoll and Wade Driscoll. His first marriage, to Julie Blakeslee, ended in divorce.  

“John was a visionary with a practical streak,” Ibargüen said. “He was tenacious and unafraid, open-minded and opinionated. He was loyal and generous to his friends and a great promoter of his collaborators.”

Evan Smith: “People who will never know John Thornton’s name will owe him a debt because they have reliable, credible, independent news in their communities. Their communities are smarter, better, and healthier.” 

If you or someone you know is struggling, please know that you are not alone. Call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Last week, the book was closed on what many consider the golden era of heavyweight boxing. The great George Foreman passed away and the boxing world is suffering the loss of his jovial, thoughtful presence as a commentator and pundit.

Sport can only become bigger than balls and strikes when there is a story, something to get excited about. George Foreman’s transformation was perhaps one of the greatest tales in boxing history. Ten years away from the limelight allowed him to change from the angry, entitled colossus, with every physical gift in abundance, into a calm, calculating veteran who was now the underdog in many of his biggest fights.

I have written about George Foreman’s influences before, but much of that article is lost to the winds of the internet. What makes Foreman a remarkable study is that in addition to having some of the greatest natural gifts in the history of heavyweight boxing, he was apprenticed to several slick old masters and trainers.

The Saddler / Sadler Influence

Early in his career, Foreman fell in with Dick Sadler. Sadler was a failed boxer himself, who tried his hand at coaching when he was enlisted for the Second World War.  Sadler was the cousin of the featherweight great, Sandy Saddler. The difference in their surnames might seem odd, but in the first half of the twentieth century genealogies were still being split by errors on birth certificates and immigration documents. Many famous black boxers from the generation before Foreman claim to not know their real age due to lack of documentation.

Dick Sadler had worked with Archie Moore and Sonny Liston before Foreman became his chief charge. And Sandy Saddler was also in Foreman’s corner in the early days of his professional career. The similarities between Sandy Saddler and George Foreman are obvious in the “handsy” way in which both fought. Where a ‘normal’ fighter will only reach out to parry his opponent’s jab offline, or take it in the palm of his hand near the target, Saddler and Foreman both reached out constantly to stifle and stuff the jab before it even got going.

It is not an attractive style of fighting. Muhammad Ali famously called George Foreman “The Mummy” for the Hammer Horror style march he made towards his opponent with both hands extended. Both Foreman and Saddler would often get hit by a jab and follow the opponent’s hand back, as if they could parry it in the aftermath—but in fact, they were stifling the next punch and closing in on their opponent.

An example of Foreman working this style to great effect can be seen in his bout against Ted Gulick. Foreman stifles most of Gulick’s straight hitting, ducks the looping blows Gulick is forced to try and throw around the outside of Foreman’s gloves, and sneaks in his own jab and uppercut whenever he gets the chance.

At the end of the bout, Dick Sadler got in the ring and gave an interview where he explained over the replay that the goal was to stop the punch before it even started. Sadler was a man who clearly had an enormous impact, but we lack a written record of his thoughts on boxing. This interview is about as good an insight into his fighting philosophies as I have found.

Sadler was apparently extremely protective of Foreman—obviously realizing the raw talent he had on his hands—but split from Foreman on bad terms after the Rumble in the Jungle, ending up in the corners of both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in later years.

Sandy Saddler was one of the all-time great punchers. Not always in the same, one punch knockout sense that Foreman often was, but he clobbered many of the best featherweights of his era and maintained a 70% knockout rate in almost 150 recorded bouts. In fact Ring Magazine’s famous list of the 100 greatest punchers in boxing put Foreman as the ninth greatest, and Saddler at fifth. A towering, gangly featherweight, Saddler excelled in cutting the ring and forcing the inside fight.

A natural left hander, Saddler checked his opponent’s hands and then entered behind hard left hooks to the head and body. This seems like a perfect place to slot in old George’s knockout of Ken Lakusta. A lead left hook to the body, to set up a rare leaping left hook to the head.

Saddler also made great use of the wide right to the body. This is one of boxing’s most underrated punches, not having the magical effects of the left hand to the liver. But as a ring cutting tool it is second to none, and it is no coincidence that very few fighters were able to dance away from Saddler or Foreman for long.

Foreman was a rough customer in the ring, and even as a jovial old man he snuck in low blows and elbows where he could. But if Foreman was rough, Saddler was filthy. Of his four fights with Willie Pep he won one due to separating Pep’s shoulder in the clinch, and that was not even what boxing fans considered “the dirty one.” One of Saddler’s best weapons, as a left handed orthodox fighter, was to hold with his right hand and hammer in uppercuts with his lead hand.

This was one level of foul—holding and hitting being an acceptable form of cheating in bursts—but then Sandy would begin deliberately missing his uppercuts and letting his elbow drag along the opponent’s face.

Dick Sadler and Sandy Saddler clearly prioritized teaching Foreman a handsy style of fighting, and from early on he was recognized as a “shover”. In The Fight, Norman Mailer recalls that during the build up to the Rumble in the Jungle, Muhamamd Ali berated the press over Foreman’s reputation as a puncher.

“Foreman’s nothing but a hard-push puncher. He can’t hit! He’s never knocked a man out. He had Frazier down six times, couldn’t knock him out. He had José Roman, a nobody, down four times, couldn’t knock him out! Norton down four times! That’s not a puncher. Foreman just pushes people down.”

This is quite interesting given Foreman’s own remarks following his victory over Michael Moorer to reclaim the heavyweight title. Foreman stated that because there was no three knockdown rule he had a harder job trying to punish Moorer to the point that when he went down he could not beat the count. Perhaps Foreman felt if there had been a three knockdown rule he could have punch-pushed his way to a victory sooner.

The Old Mongoose

In that short interview in the ring after the Gilick fight, Foreman and Sadler made reference to using Gilick as training wheels for a possible fight with then world champion Joe Frazier. In Foreman’s fights with Frazier you can see him at his most handsy—whether he was pushing on Frazier’s shoulders, or pushing Frazier’s gloves into his chest, or pulling Frazier around by the head—he never let Frazier get set.

The Old Mongoose was one of Foreman’s biggest influences throughout his career. While Dick Sadler was Foreman’s main mentor during his first run, he was an outcast after the Rumble in the Jungle. Gil Clancy coached Foreman from after Zaire to his unofficial first retirement. Angelo Dundee—having been devoted to Foreman’s nemesis, Ali—teamed up with Foreman once his comeback became a serious story in the heavyweight division. But Archie Moore was a feature in Foreman’s camp throughout his life. Moore was in Foreman’s corner in Zaire in 1974, and when Foreman challenged Evander Holyfield in 1991.  

Moore likely gelled with Foreman because he believed in the primacy of the punch. Moore scored the most knockouts in professional boxing history, and continued knocking fighters out well into his forties. The older he got, the more adamant Moore became that a good fighter needs to be able to blast his way out of trouble.

Old Foreman even adopted the cross-armed guard: a trademark of Archie Moore. With Moore it was a true platform for counter-offence, he bounced between a square-on cross arm guard—to set up the counter left hook—and a bladed shoulder rolling guard—to set up the counter right hand. Foreman’s cross armed guard was more a hinderance to be worked around than an effective fortification, as he lumbered forward after men who were quite often afraid to set their feet and trade with him.  

Sonny’s Shadow and Gil Clancy

Sonny Liston is a figure who looms large in Foreman’s story. Perhaps part of this is due to his position as Muhammad Ali’s previous foil. The idea that Foreman trained at Liston’s side to take revenge on his behalf is perfect for a boxing manga, but the truth seems to be that Liston acquired the services of Foreman as a sparring partner. Foreman was an Olympic gold medalist but a raw, inexperienced professional: the sort of fighter to give Liston good work, but unlikely to wind up fighting Liston in the professional ranks.

Foreman’s stories about Liston portray him as a father figure, a kind man, and a man with a surprising sense of humour. These do not undo the many negative tales attached to Liston’s name, but as we are talking about the flattening and division of Foreman into two different characters for the ease of television, Foreman’s own stories help to provide a more three-dimensional picture of Liston, who was clearly a complicated man.

Before Ali fought Foreman in Zaire, he went on a rant (captured in the brilliant When We Were Kings) insisting that Liston “…hit harder than George. His reach was longer than George. He was a better boxer than George. And I’m better now than I was back then.” The George Foreman that Ali drew out in that fight was considerably sloppier and wilder than Liston. That is a fight I must have watched fifty times and yet I am still surprised by how Foreman’s jab is snapping Ali’s head back out in the open through the early rounds, and how it disappears as Ali is able to coax Foreman to the ropes and convince him to open up and swing.

Liston and Foreman both owned tremendous jabs. Not the flicking, low energy weapon that Muhammad Ali had, but rather a damaging, jolting left straight. With the lower quality footage of the sixties and seventies, Young Foreman’s hand often seems to apparate where his opponent’s skull should be. He seems to pump his arm out and back as if it is meeting no resistance at all, while his opponent’s head is forced to yield to the fist that wants to occupy the same space. George Chuvalo is famed for having one of the all time great chins: having never been knocked down despite fighting Frazier, Foreman, Patterson and some other great hitters. Foreman still achieved the TKO, when the referee became uncomfortable watching Foreman’s jab pound Chuvalo’s head as if he were trying to hammer in a fencepost.  

The tricks of Sandy Saddler and Archie Moore are so uncommon in the wider world of boxing that their influence on George Foreman is obvious. Sonny Liston did not teach George Foreman—an Olympic gold medalist—to jab. There is footage of Foreman ahead of the Olympics, “teaching” some younger boxers the jab while moving in four directions. He demonstrates a lovely jab, combined with advancing, retreating, and side stepping footwork, and he stresses the jab’s importance. Young George knew the rules of boxing, he simply had the same problem as any great puncher: he cast off the jab as soon as he felt he had reached the part of the fight where he could punch with both hands.

Old George, with ten years of teaching the rudiments to others, placed new emphasis on the jab. His stance was higher—as if he were out for a stroll—but the jab led the charge. Old George had realized that the jab is the thing that happens when nothing else is going on in boxing. It takes no effort, it provides the least opportunity for a counter, and when Foreman threw it, it hurt. We can perhaps credit the memory of Sonny Liston for Old George prioritizing the jab, but we should also give thought to Gil Clancy. Clancy was the longtime coach of the brilliant Emille Griffith, one of the slickest boxers of the 1960s.

Clancy’s time with Foreman fell in a strange period. Post-Zaire, Foreman was loathed by the public, and his attempt to reignite interest in his career with an exhibition against five different men in one night fell flat. Muhammad Ali was ringside, providing commentary for the television broadcast, and also heckling Foreman and coaching Foreman’s opponents. He told each to go to the ropes and let Foreman punch himself out. Foreman flew into a rage when the journeymen he had picked tried to operate the rope-a-dope. Here he struggles to land anything meaningful and drags his man back out into the middle of the ring.

Charlie Polite, whose record was around 13-30, was the fourth man in the ring with Foreman. He adhered to Ali’s advice and became the first of the five to drag Foreman through the full three rounds. Foreman was so exhausted that his last opponent survived the distance as well. Muhammad Ali repeatedly noted “this kid is a good fighter!” to which Howard Cossel would retort “I disagree, champ, Charlie Polite is not a good fighter.” I add that only because this line was repeated in terrible Cossell impressions ad infinitum by the children in the Slack household. Along with Foreman’s indignant post-fight insistence that you “can’t fight on no ropes!”

The lesson of Foreman vs The Five was a reiteration of Zaire. He was punching too hard, to often, to too little effect, and it was wearing him out. His barnburner with Ron Lyle was not the best showing of his work with Gil Clancy to try and fight more methodically, but his rematch with Joe Frazier was a masterpiece. Never did Young Foreman look sharper and more disciplined than on that night in 1976. Frazier was coming off the gruelling Thrilla in Manilla. Frazier had been almost entirely blind in that fight, but he had acquired a contact lens for his working eye for the Foreman fight and appeared—for the first time in his life—able to see the punches coming.

Foreman jabbed beautifully to set up combinations. He read Frazier’s movements and threw his punches to where Frazier would be. It took him longer to get the knockout than in the first fight, against an older Frazier, but he did it by picking Frazier apart, rather than overwhelming him in a firefight.

Young Foreman only had a couple more fights after the Frazier rematch, culminating in the scrap with Jimmy Young. Young is one of the bit players in that golden age of heavyweight boxing. In spite of never holding a major title, he lost a controversial decision to Muhammad Ali that many feel Ali’s celebrity swayed, lost a close split decision to Ken Norton, and he became the only man other than Ali to beat Young George Foreman.

If you removed Jimmy Young altogether, the fight was Foreman against his instincts. Foreman did some lovely jabbing, he hooked well off the jab and used dextrous punching supported by his power.

But Young was a tricky counter puncher, and each time he bounced a right hand off Foreman’s head, it was a rag before a bull. Foreman went wild and swung himself out again. In the last two rounds, every Foreman swing missed by a mile, and every Young connection sent Foreman off balance, culminating in a late knockdown.

If Foreman’s story is true, it was in the locker room after this fight that he found God. I have no reason to doubt him because following this fight, Foreman disappeared for ten years with nary a word to the public. The man who returned was a complete juxtaposition to the George Foreman that the world loved to cheer against.

The early 1990s heavyweight division was not cut from the same cloth as the 1970s heavyweight division, but that does not undo the fact that Foreman was a forty year old, overweight, out of practice preacher. Once it became clear that he was not there as part of a circus, and he really could keep up with the young guns, the fans could not help but embrace George Foreman.

Watching Foreman reclaim the heavyweight title, wearing the same shorts in which he had fallen in Zaire, is enough to move many grown men to tears. The fact that Foreman is no longer with us only makes it more potent. But with age, Foreman had mellowed, and by learning to control his anger he was able to look for his spots and demonstrate the many tricks he had learned working with some of the finest fighters in history.

Old Foreman’s Tricks

We have already discussed Foreman’s extensive use of the wide right, but Foreman had a second trick punch that looked similar. This one was a little more sinister. Where most of Foreman’s wide rights were powerful, athletic looking movements, it sometimes looked as though his body lost all co-ordination and fired the muscles in the wrong order. The result was this high elbow, almost overhand punch to the body.

It looked absurd, and yet multiple opponents hit the deck off the blow. Look closer and you will notice that this shot is an awkward kidney punch. A wide right to a bladed opponent can hit the kidney, but if the fighter is squared up, that target is behind him.  

I cannot claim that this punch was entirely unique to Big George, but I have yet to see another fighter use it. It has all the appearances of a fighter simply spazzing out, but whether he was angry Young George, or methodical Old George, Foreman never abandoned this punch.

Then there was the uppercut. Perhaps two heavyweights have best embodied the idea of the uppercut: George Foreman and Mike Tyson. The Tyson / Demato philosophy is that the hand must drop to perform an uppercut, so the fighter keeps it in his guard and goes with it. He slips or changes level in order to keep his guard tight, and then comes up with the uppercut. George Foreman was more in the Looney Tunes style of uppercutting. His hand came down out of his guard, and traced a big circle in under the opponent’s chin.

It was Foreman’s excellence with the right uppercut that made him such a menace for the great Joe Frazier. I have recounted many times that the moment Joe Frazier won the heavyweight title, my grandfather became adamant that any inch over six foot was actually a disadvantage to a heavyweight. It was simply more to get inside and more for Frazier to hit. Frazier, like Patterson, Dempsey and later, Tyson, made opponent’s punch down to him and hammered them with hooks as their hands came down to hit him. Getting up in their chest, folding his arms in a cross-armed guard, and bobbing up and down, Frazier clattered off counter left hooks almost completely blind. But at some point, he caught everyone he fought. 

The right uppercut and the left hook are natural enemies. The right uppercut involves unguarding the right side of the head for a moment longer than a nice right straight because it has to travel below the line of the target, up to the target, and then get back. The left hook does not leave such a blatant opening for the counter right uppercut, but many left hookers come out of a crouch or a weave. Bent over fighters are the most susceptible to the uppercut. So Foreman vs Frazier became a gunfight, where Foreman landed right uppercuts as Frazier dipped in, then ate hard left hooks on his completely exposed right side.

Archie Moore could be heard screaming “underneath, underneath” from Foreman’s corner throughout the first Frazier fight. Foreman’s uppercut hurt Frazier when he ducked onto it, and lifted him onto Foreman’s own left hook when Frazier pulled back.

But there is a misconception that Foreman’s uppercut was only this looping, cartoon-like blow. In truth Foreman had a great variety of uppercuts off both hands. A constant through his career was the short left uppercut. Often he approached by palming the opponent’s lead and then jumped in with the left uppercut as Sandy Saddler used to. It was this punch that spelled the beginning of the end for Ken Norton.

Foreman also had a habit of keeping his thumb pointing back towards him. This vertical fist uppercut has a couple of advantages: it can slide between a double forearms cover-up more easily, and it forces the uppercutting fighter to keep his elbow tight. Try throwing a left uppercut immediately off the jab, and then try doing the same without rotating the fist on the uppercut and you might surprise yourself with how much quicker it feels.

Foreman did not fight many southpaws, but against Michael Moorer he found great success with a vertical fist right uppercut, that shot up between Moorer’s goalposts guard.

Most famously he knocked out Gerry Cooney with this. Having knocked Cooney down once, he waltzed across the ring, appeared from behind the referee, and slid down the side of Cooney, knocking him unconscious.

But he had done the same thing against Joe Frazier in their first fight, almost twenty years earlier. Once again, Foreman applied this bit of sneakiness as the referee restarted the action off a knockdown.

And this brings us to another of Foreman’s uppercuts. Sometimes Foreman would try to lean out to the same side he was throwing the uppercut from, and connect his left uppercut as a counter to the jab or right straight. This one was the property of Old Foreman, it seems as though Young Foreman never had the patience to counter-punch all that effectively.

In fact the more of Old Foreman you watch, the more you come to think that the slow, looping blows are a stylistic choice. Clearly Foreman was capable of shortening up punches and hurting opponents with eight inch blows that didn’t have anywhere near the same wind up. Evander Holyfield gave an interview saying that the trouble he had with Foreman was that he would slip Foreman’s punch, move back to position, and then get hit by the punch he had tried to avoid. He portrayed Foreman’s slower punches as being disruptive in the same way as slowball pitches.

Foreman was capable not only of tempo shifts, but his big wind ups allowed him to draw out and follow opponents. Against Dwight Muhammad Qawi—washed up by that point but still an elusive target—Foreman did brilliant combination work, varying his speed and power. Take a look at how Foreman loads up his left uppercut and uses the lag time to read and follow Qawi’s head movement.

The differences between Young Foreman and Old Foreman are pretty stark on a technical level. He adopted the cross guard, he focused on his jab, he gave away rounds to set up the big blows. But the most notable changes in Foreman were more subtle and came in his demeanour.

The public facing side of Old Foreman was a preacher, but also a showman and a businessman. He never turned down a chance to get his brand over. While seriously pursuing the world heavyweight title he also found time to film a full season of a failed sitcom called George, and to become the face of a grill that can now be found in college dorms the world over.

You could perhaps judge Foreman for vanity—or perhaps more accurately for loving to be loved. But when you consider the hatred he received for the sin of being born with the physical gifts to make beating the world’s best fighters a trivial task, it is hard not to vicariously enjoy the adoration he received for choosing to pursue that Impossible Dream in his second act.

Updated March 28, 2025, at 6:02 p.m.

Interim Harvard Dean of Social Science David M. Cutler ’87 dismissed the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies on Wednesday, according to a faculty member familiar with the situation — a dramatic shakeup at a center that has come under fire for its programming on Israel and Palestine.

The CMES’ director, professor of Turkish Studies Cemal Kafadar, and its associate director, History professor Rosie Bsheer, were both forced to leave their posts, according to the faculty member.

Global Health professor Salmaan A. Keshavjee — the center’s interim director while Kafadar was on leave — will continue to hold his post.

The departures come after the CMES has repeatedly faced public criticism from Harvard affiliates who have alleged that some of the center’s programming has been antisemitic and has failed to represent Israeli perspectives.

Amid a mounting pressure campaign by the Trump administration, Harvard’s peers have begun shuttering or overhauling programs that the White House says require supervision. At Columbia University, where the Trump administration announced $400 million in federal funding cuts, administrators acceded to White House demands to place the school’s Middle Eastern studies programs under closer administrative supervision.

Cutler announced in an email to some center affiliates, which was obtained by The Crimson, that Kafadar would depart from his CMES directorship at the end of the year. Cutler thanked Kafadar for his work at CMES before asking colleagues to suggest potential candidates for future leadership by April 16.

“I would value your thoughts on who, in addition to intellectual leadership and a compelling vision for the Center, would also bring the necessary administrative skills to be successful in this crucial role,” Cutler wrote.

Cutler’s email did not give a reason for Kafadar’s departure. Bsheer was not named in the email.

A spokesperson for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences declined to comment. Bsheer, Keshavjee, and Kafadar also did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday afternoon.

The apparent firings are an especially notable move from Cutler, an economist who is only expected to hold the Social Science divisional deanship for one semester while Dean Lawrence D. Bobo is on leave.

Kafadar is on leave for the 2024-2025 academic year. Keshavjee, who is also affiliated with the Anthropology department and is Adams House faculty dean, has served as the center’s interim director in his absence.

In recent days, Harvard has moved to publicly distance itself from programs that have come under fire for alleged antisemitism or for affiliates’ criticism of Israel. The Harvard School of Public Health recently suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, yielding to repeated demands to break ties with the institution.

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers wrote in a March post on X that a February panel at CMES about “Israel’s war in Lebanon” was “very likely” antisemitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which Harvard adopted as part of a settlement agreement in January.

A report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, an alumni advocacy group, in May accused the CMES of demonizing Israel as the “last remaining colonial settler power embodying the world’s worst evils: racism, apartheid, and genocide.”

The report accused the CMES of disproportionately focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict relative to other regions or issues. It included a laundry list of events that the report’s authors deemed suspicious, unbalanced, or objectionable. One student, quoted anonymously in the report, singled out Kafadar for expressing pro-Palestine views to his students.

Kafadar and Bsheer will remain in their faculty positions.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Correction: March 28, 2025

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Global Health professor Salmaan A. Keshavjee had left the Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ interim directorship. In fact, Keshavjee will remain in his interim position through the end of the semester.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.

Today, after 24 hours where the Trump administration stonewalled and lied about the full scope of “Signalgate,” The Atlantic went ahead and published the full group chat, including operational details and a participants’ list that it had previously withheld because Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris turn out to be more responsible with the nation’s secrets than the most senior members of the president’s Cabinet.

Across the last 48 hours, “Signalgate” has morphed from one scandal — the insane inclusion of one of the nation’s top journalists in one of the world’s most elite and secret group chats into what I think is best thought of as five distinct but overlapping scandals, as well as providing some fascinating political insight into who has power and how decisions get made in Trump II.

Let’s break down the five scandals first, any one of which should be cause for resignations, congressional hearings, criminal investigations, or even a special prosecutor:

1) A massive leak of sensitive information. This is the clear, first-order, simplest-to-understand scandal: The president’s own national security advisor added a top journalist to a text thread and then the secretary of defense posted a bunch of classified information and the nation’s top officials debated and then celebrated a successful military action without being clear that they were doing so in front of one of the most experienced national security analysts of our time. Late Monday, Pete Hegseth — in something that can only be described as a drunken-frat-boy-angling-for-a-late-night fight-in-a-college-bar rant — attacked Jeffrey Goldberg and largely seemed to deride the entire thing as a hoax. “Nobody was texting war plans,” he said, despite a National Security Council confirmation saying the conversation thread appeared to be authentic. 

The spin since has focused on how this wasn’t any ole big deal and nothing anyone should bother caring about, but the full publication of the group chat’s operational details make clear that at the very least the information shared would have been appropriately classified at the “secret” level. In fact, the information in the chat — specific details, including the aircraft, weapons, and timing of an impending military action, is as basic a level of obviously classified information as one can get. In fact, following the Pentagon’s own guidance, it’s even clear that one should bias towards overclassifying “overall operational plans” at the start of an operation. Here’s a graphic prepared by a former CIA attorney putting side-by-side the text thread and the classification guidelines:

Any denials or obfuscation or too-cute-by-half arguments about whether this was technically a “classified war plan” is belied by the simplest public understanding of the texts and their content. This is, as Joe Biden would say, a BFD.

2) Perjury to Congress. The release of the full texts today by The Atlantic make clear that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe danced all the way up to the line multiple times yesterday of perjuring themselves before a congressional hearing—and, almost certainly, over it. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” DNI Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday during a previously scheduled annual “worldwide threats” hearing.

She and Ratcliffe repeated versions of that quote many times, and we should be rightly concerned — and worried and horrified! — about how casually two of the nation’s most senior national security officials misled (and, more accurately, lied to) Congress and the American people under oath. Congress should be outraged over this on both sides of the aisle. Once the perjury starts, checks and balances start to fall aside. As I wrote on Monday: There is no shame in this administration — and that, in and of itself, should deeply deeply concern us as citizens. A functioning democracy requires public officials capable of shame and embarrassment and accountability.

3) A clear (and clearly criminal) violation of the Federal Records Act. I also wrote Monday hours after the first publication that the whole event indicates that the Trump administration is clearly conducting business on Signal as a way to evade conversations being rightly preserved under the Federal Records Act. It’s clear from how they engage on the thread that this is routine — and it makes clear there are probably all sorts of Signal group chats taking place simultaneously on other troubling topics. Surely the same Signal text threads existed on other topics — like, for instance, the decision to ignore a court order stopping the extraordinary rendition of those hundreds of detainees to a life of slave labor in El Salvador. Surely Stephen Miller, who was a major participant on the Waltz-Hegseth Signal group had the same communications going about the detainee flights—and probably other topics.

Now we have even more clear evidence: The new, full Signal chat shows how Mike Waltz changed the Signal group chat “disappearing messages” timeline from one week to four weeks — that is about as clear a sign of “intent” as a prosecutor could hope to find if you conducting a criminal investigation into an official’s attempts to circumvent the Federal Records Act by destroying protected government communications and records. He actively changed the setting!

There are a million questions to be answered now in court — and, one hopes, congressional hearings will dig into these violations with anywhere near the enthusiasm that we spent years of hearings about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

To me, the Signal group chat is best understood as an artifact of the January 6^th investigation: The Trump team is operating less like a government and more like a mafia family — it learned the danger from the text messages uncovered by the January 6^th Committee investigation and now doesn’t want to leave a trace about debate and decisions.

4) A government IT scandal. Remember how exercised the entire national media and particularly the GOP (and even James Comey!) got over Hillary Clinton’s emails? This is way way way way worse—particularly at this exact moment in time.

A major part of the conversation I’ve had with former government officials over the last 48 hours has focused on what might be called the second-order scandal inside Signalgate: What devices, exactly, were these group chats being conducted on? There are two options, both troublesome for different reasons: The Cabinet members are either chatting away on their personal devices or they’ve installed Signal, a commercial application, on their government cell phones or desktop computers. Asked in yesterday’s hearing, Gabbard refused to say whether she was using a personal device or a government device. She didn’t answer because either answer is trouble.

To fully understand how compromising and worrisome this Signal exchange is, one needs to pull back and understand one of the biggest cybersecurity threats of the moment. For months, US officials have been pulling out their hair over a set of Chinese intrusions broadly known as “Salt Typhoon.” Salt Typhoon has been absolutely pillaging US telecom networks in recent months, in ways that it’s not even clear the US government and network providers fully understand six months later. Last fall, there was public reporting that Salt Typhoon had attempted to compromise Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s phones. It’s not clear at all that the government and telecom providers are out of the woods on Salt Typhoon yet.

All of which raises the question: Who else was reading the Signal group chat (and other Signal group chats)? Odds are non-zero that at least China and perhaps Russia would have been able to read those conversations too if they were happening on the officials’ personal devices—and perhaps even if they were happening on nonsecure government devices.

Sure, Signal messages are encrypted between devices, but they are not encrypted if you get access to the underlying device — that’s routinely how law enforcement is able to uncover conspiracies among people who think they’re communicating securely. So if Salt Typhoon or another so-called “Advanced Persistent Threat” from a foreign adversary has successfully exploited the personal devices of a Cabinet official or, say, Vice President Vance, there’s every possibility they read the chat too. And if the officials instead are installing Signal on their official government devices or, particularly, their government desktops, that doesn’t bode well for how seriously their taking their own “infosec.” (There’s good reason to believe that the Trump administration is installing Signal on the devices of senior officials, against the government’s own recommendations.) As one former senior US official said to me yesterday: “Once you own the phone or PC, game over. You have all the chats unencrypted.”

One of the most head-scratching aspects of this particular thread of scandal is how unnecessary it all was: Everyone in this group chat has entire teams of people who travel with them everywhere to allow them to have constant secure communications systems. They travel with classified devices and even entire portable “SCIFs,” Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, specially designed to protect against electronic eavesdropping; the government even installs SCIFs in their homes and they travel on expensive military aircraft with secure communications so they’re able to safely engage in classified conversations whenever needed. The fact they’re in a group text on, quite possible, their personal devices? Bonkers. 

This IT and cybersecurity scandal, by the way, is consistent with an administration that’s playing too fast and too loose with serious IT questions and secure communications systems: Just last week came word that Elon Musk has installed Starlink across the White House complex, which for anyone who understands the security of networks in a place like the White House, is just insanity.

5) Some light war crimes. Lost amid all the tumult of the context of the group chat is the content itself. You probably didn’t even realize until Signalgate broke Monday the US had even conducted military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen on the weekend of March 15-16^th . Most Americans — my brilliant and engaged readers aside, of course! — probably don’t even know who the Houthis are or why the US is launching airstrikes against them. Yet we’ve been engaged in a nearly two-year running naval battle with the Yemen-based group. (This is a good explainer by CFR’s Michael Froman if you want some background.) It’s one that’s been incredibly expensive to the US in dollars and very deadly on the Houthi side and in Yemen—and it’s basically never been a major headline in the US.

Reporting at the time last weekend estimated that the US attack discussed in the Signal group chat killed about 31 people, and now the new group chat screenshots gives us some fresh perspective, including this: We have clear documentary evidence of US officials targeting an entire civilian building to kill a single target.

According to local reports, most of those killed were women and children, and the Houthis’ political bureau described the attacks at the time as a “war crime” — and it appears they were probably technically correct. As my online friend Southpaw wrote, “Targeting an individual for assassination at a building known to be his romantic partner’s residence by collapsing the whole structure seems to me to fall squarely within the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on targeting civilian objects, and probably other defined war crimes as well.”

Now I should be clear: This is a scandal that all of us — every American — bears some responsibility for by 2025. It is not the sole fault of Trump II. Every presidential administration of the 21^st century has been remarkably casual about “Global War on Terror” strikes that have all the hallmarks of war crimes, operations targeting mostly “terrorists” that have killed hundreds and hundreds of civilians in probably a dozen different countries overseas. It’s a national disgrace, distinct and apart from the IT and national security implications of Signalgate, and one that deserves at least passing mention in any fulsome analysis of the text chains, even as the actual outrage that we all clutch our pearls about are only Scandals #1 - #4 above. (I actually wrote in 2021 my own article in The Atlantic about about how mistaken our entire national strategy has been since 9/11.)

We’re nearly 25 years after 9/11 now and our country has learned some terrible lessons from decades of drone strikes and air strikes and the widespread abuse of the Authorization of Use of Military Force to justify death and destruction in places from the front pages. Sometime that is not now and may not be anytime soon, we as a nation need to reckon with how casual we’ve gotten about using military force overseas against largely civilian targets in fights that the American people don’t really understand.

* * *

Now that we’ve gotten the political and security scandals out of the way, onto what is not necessarily a scandal but is a fascinating political insight that we can glean from the Signal group chat and resulting fall-out: Who holds the power in the Trump administration?

The full Signal chat provides some of the most “real” indications of where power lies in the Trump administration and how decision-making happens—and none of it is pretty.

The answer is shocking, but perhaps not surprising: Donald Trump isn’t that engaged in the policy of his administration, JD Vance is weak and powerless, and the only one that matters is Stephen Miller.

I wrote earlier this week about how fascinating it was to see how none of the senior officials seemed all that clear about what Donald Trump himself had wanted. The subsequent leaks of the full conversation only underscore how Stephen Miller — who, mind you, is not a national security official who would be normally involved in a military strike overseas — is the one who shuts down the debate over whether the action moves ahead: Miller, in fact, is only added to the group after people aren’t sure of the president’s wishes. Is Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, really not in a position to interpret the president’s own orders when it comes to military actions? He needs to call Stephen Miller for help? This is not a smooth functioning organization. Nor one where the president is sweating committing US lives to action or taking lives overseas.

Then we get to another part of the power dynamics we’re learning from the chat: JD Vance is powerless. Any other vice president in the last half-century could have and absolutely would have gotten the national security advisor immediately fired over this scandal. Let’s summarize it as such: The national security advisor accidentally included a top journalist in an exclusive backroom chat of the administration’s senior-most officials, where the vice president expressed his private disagreement with the president’s public policy decisions. How on earth can JD Vance let that stand?

The answer appears to be, simply: He doesn’t have the juice to get Waltz, who he doesn’t like in the first place, fired. Imagine what Kamala Harris would have done to Jake Sullivan if he’d been responsible for airing her disagreements with Biden in the press; imagine what Joe Biden would have done to Tom Donilon; or even what Dick Cheney would have done to Stephen Hadley? Any of them would have been cashiered by day’s end. The fact that Mike Waltz is still standing as the scandal enters day three shows us JD Vance is the weakest vice president we’ve had in decades.

Thanks for reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story, and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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