This week is the anniversary of the United States dropping TWO ATOMIC BOMBS on non-combatant Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No other nation in world history has done so.

Steve Villano

August 6, 2026

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0-ED5g3YwMs?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

(Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sun Is Burning,” song protesting Nuclear Weapons, and the use of the first two Atomic Bombs by the US upon hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Copyright by Simon & Garfunkel, 1964)

Don’t let Donald Trump’s, Pete Hegseth’s and Bibi Netanyahu’s endless bombardment of lies about Iran, Muslim nations, and other so-called “Terrorist States” vaporize US history into thin air the way hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens were slaughtered by our own country at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 81 years ago this week.

And, don’t get distracted by the culture of American corporate glee that celebrates August 6, as “National Root Beer Float Day.” Really.

For those of us who still have memory, and don’t believe in whitewashing our history, we have to keep reminding our children and grandchildren that, yes, our country really did commit two back-to-back massive War Crimes against civilian populations, killing, burning and radiating more than 200,000 humans beings. And that contrary to the prevailing corporate and political narrative, committing such War Crimes was not necessary to win World War II.

Hitler was already dead for 3 months, when the first bomb was dropped, the Nazis had surrendered, and Victory in Europe was already celebrated by the Allied Forces on May 8, 1945. The original legitimate justification for the US Manhattan Project—to beat the Nazis to developing an Atomic Bomb so they couldn’t use it against the world—no longer existed. Hitler was now dead. And, the Japanese—with nowhere near the scientific sophistication of the Germans or the US,—were about to surrender.

But, don’t take my word for it. Instead, listen to the warnings of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who had just defeated the Nazis and liberated thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

Before the decision to use the bombs in World War II was made, in the summer of 1945, Eisenhower—just off the battlefield—expressed his strong reservations to President Harry Truman’s Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was leading the charge to use the weapons because we had them. General Eisenhower, the most revered military leader in the United States at the time, made his position clear to Stimson:

“ I told him I was against it (using the bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon…”

However, what happened after the end of War World II in Europe and the dropping of the first Atomic bomb on Hiroshima just a few months later, was a carefully calculated plan of American diplomatic intimidation, aimed more at impressing Soviet leader Josef Stalin who, with Truman and Winston Churchill, were negotiating over the future of Post-War Europe at the Potsdam Conference in a Soviet-occupied part of Germany, according to historian Gar Alperovitz, in his masterful book of that period, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima & Potsdam—the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (Vintage Books, 1965, New York, N.Y.)

A growing chorus of battle-hardened military leaders like Eisenhower, strongly opposed sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians as human pawns in an international power struggle between the US and Russia. Admiral William D. Leahy, the most senior Naval Officer on duty during WW II, called the Atomic Bomb “barbarous,” and of “no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Perhaps the most damning assessment of the Truman/Stimson decision to drop the unnecessary and apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction upon the people of Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki three days later, came from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey:

“ Certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the War, and even if no invasion had been planned.”

And, even the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur stated numerous times before his death, that he believed the Atomic Bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view. In fact, as Oppenheimer himself later said, the original reason for developing the Bomb to beat the Nazis, morphed into something else:

“I don’t think there was a time where we worked harder at the speed up (of the development of the bomb) than in the period after the German surrender.”

Then, why did we then become the first and only nation in world history to drop, not one, but two nuclear weapons on civilian populations, despite the fears of some scientists, that even a test of the Bomb might set fire to the atmosphere and consume the globe in flames? Why did we do it, if the Atomic Bombs were no longer necessary to defeat the Germans or the Japanese and end World War II?

Some answers, like the outcomes of many criminal trials, reveal themselves in details, dates and bold face:

• · FDR died of a heart attack on April 12, 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term of office, elevating Harry Truman—inexperienced in foreign policy and who never previously met either Winston Churchill or Josef Stalin —to the Presidency;
• · Hitler killed himself a few weeks later on April 30, 1945, effectively ending the War in Europe;
• · One week later, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the Allied Forces declared Victory in Europe;
• · On July 15, 1945, President Truman arrives on a Sunday afternoon for the crucial Potsdam Conference, scheduled to begin on July 17^th.
• · On July 16, 1945, the US Manhattan Project’s “Trinity Test” of the Atomic Bomb—the first Nuclear Test in world history—was carried out in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 210 miles south of Los Alamos.
• · The following day, on July 17, 1945, the Potsdam Conference– to negotiate the terms for the end of World War II– began in a Soviet occupied part of Germany, just outside of Berlin. In attendance were Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Soviet Leader Josef Stalin. It was the first time Truman met either Churchill or Stalin.
• · July 24, 1945, Truman tells Stalin at Potsdam that the United States had successfully detonated the world’s first Atomic bomb the previous week;
• · July 25, 1945, the formal order to use the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of war against Japan was given by Secretary of War Stimson, with President Truman’s approval.
• · The Potsdam Conference concluded on August 2, 1945. The Soviet Union had not yet declared war on Japan, an important consideration for the US, to preclude Russia’s designs for expansion in the Far East;
• · August 6, 1945, the first American Atomic Bomb is dropped on Hiroshima killing 100,000 to 150,000 people;
• · August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declares war on Japan, at 11 pm that evening, the night before the second US Atomic Bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, and Russian forces invade mineral rich Manchuria, then under Japanese control;
• · August 9, 1945, the second American Atomic Bomb—six times the size and strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—is dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000-100,000 people.
• · August 14, 1945, Japan surrenders, ending World War II.

The evidence of the world’s first Nuclear weapons being used as tools to intimidate Stalin and Russia—more than as weapons to defeat Japan—is followed to its logical conclusion by Alperovitz in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam:

“It might explain why none of the highest civilian officials seriously questioned the use of the bomb as Eisenhower did; for having reversed the basic direction of diplomatic strategy because of the Atomic Bomb, it would have been very difficult for anyone subsequently to challenge an idea which had come to dominate all calculations of high policy…Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed primarily to impress the world (specifically Stalin) with the need to accept America’s plan for a stable and lasting peace?”

Truman’s hand-picked Secretary of State James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, meeting with Manhattan Project scientists in May, 1945, told them that it was necessary for the Bomb to be “successful” because “our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”

Testifying before Congress some years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project and was adamently opposed to using the Atomic Bomb on civilian populations, admitted that the obsession with post-War stability was the “problem” of Russia:

“Much of the discussion revolved around the question raised by Secretary Stimson as to whether there was any hope at all of using this development (of the bomb) to get less barbarous relations with the Russians.”

A few hundred deaths of Americans in proximity to the New Mexico bomb-test site, and the incineration of a few hundred thousand Japanese children, women and men, were, by those cold calculations, simply the inhumane, collateral damage of war, in a world gone completely mad.

Think about that the next time you hear Trump, or Hegseth, or Netanyahu rant about not letting Iran develop a nuclear weapon because that ancient culture is not civilized enough to control its use. Defining which nations are “terrorist states,” depends upon who is crafting and using the definition, as well as the weaponsof mass destruction, which are the very essence of abject terror against humanity.

Things have gotten so bad in the Trump Mob family, that on the day the Soprano’s “Big Pussy” died, actor BD Wong–the fascinating White Rose in “Mr. Robot,” –expressed sympathy for Jeanine Pirro.

Steve Villano

Aug 02, 2026

(The wickedly smart White Rose—played by the actor BD Wong—from the USA Network series “Mr. Robot,” which ran for four years, from 2015-2019. The character of White Rose was the transgender leader of the Dark Army, a Chinese Hacker Group. The remarkable Wong, a star of stage, television and movies, and a long-time activist for progressive causes, won a TONY Award for his portrayal of Song Liling, in “M. Butterfly.” This spring in Philadelphia, Wong will do a one-person show of “The Glass Menagerie.”)

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She and Trump,

Are BOTH Hyenas.

Devouring humans,

Destroying Justice;

They kept their promise;’

They simply eat us…

Don’t cry for Jeanine,

Because her boss is meaner….

The truth is,

She isn’t sober;

Trump isn’t either—

He’s drunk on power,

She’s just hungover,

From all devoured.

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She chose her poison.

All through her wild days,

Her mad existence,

She kept her focus,

The camera’s gaze,

And Liquid subsistence.

Trump hired kickback

Contractors, Pirro-ina;

For massive paint jobs,

A whitewash cleana…

The truth is,

There were no poolboys,

Just mob-upped bagmen,

Out to fool all US boys.

Don’t cry for pickled Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She picked a hero,

To charge as vandal.

All through her wild days,

Her legal record,

The same such scandal.

Don’t cry for Jeanine (hiccup!) Pirro,

Who knew the mad king,

Was just like Nero;

He burned down justice,

To lie and steal more.

And give himself,

The keys to jails’ door.

And all Pirro got,

Was one more good pour…..

Don’t cry for her,

White Rosina,

The truth is,

She sold her soul.

To the Flaccid Weiner.

All through their wild days,

Of star-fucked fantasy,

They kept their focus,

On fame’s apostasy….

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

She may sound tougher,

But her soul’s no cleaner,

Then the Reflecting Pool,

Wrecked by Little Weiner.

The truth is,

What turned it greener,

Was a reflection,

Of ALL of their

Scummy demeanor…

Dr. Fauci used the force of his intellect, his integrity, his honesty and his devotion to the truth just like someone else we know, love and trust.

Steve Villano

Jul 30, 2026

(Artwork created by Bob Englehardt for Cagle Cartoons, 2020)

Six years ago this month, I published a piece about Dr. Tony Fauci assuring him that many of us had his back. And, it wasn’t just because we are both passionate Italians from Brooklyn who believe public service is a sacred calling.

Nope, many of us who worked in the HIV/AIDS field and have admired his life-saving work for decades, would do everything in our power to protect him, amidst the craziness and back-biting of the failing first Trump Administration in the summer of 2020, during the COVID Pandemic. He was the only truth-teller in a land of liars, conspiracy freaks, frauds and flim-flam artists, and our very lives depended upon his integrity, courage and devotion to science. He was our Yoda.

Already coming under attack from anti-vaxxers, anti-science nut jobs, and QAnon crazies surrounding Trump, I urged Dr. Fauci to speak the unfettered truth about how Donald Trump was incompetently & ignorantly mishandling the federal response to the COVID 19 pandemic, resulting in, ultimately, over one-million infections and deaths in the United States. Trump’s abject stupidity (“Just ingest bleach”), and his malignant incompetence (“one day, like a miracle, it will go away”) were killing us and many people we loved, including the 92-year old matriarch of our own family.

At almost the precise time I was suggesting that he blow-the-whistle on the Trump Administration’s anti-science idiocy and preventable harm being done to tens of thousands of people, Dr. Fauci was struggling to stem the catastrophe of Covid-19 from within that negligent Administration, since he still had Trump’s support and respect, and he was polling as the most trusted public official in the nation. Yet, like Generals James Mattis and Mark Milley who held their noses and battled to save the country from within, Fauci used the force of his intelligence and commitment to public service to survive, but he could not hide his growing misgivings to himself over what was happening before his own eyes. To preserve his sanity and sort things out, he kept a “private” diary for three years.

On August 4, 2020, as we learned from Dr. Fauci’s private diaries just released this week, Fauci complained that:

“Trump is desperate and doesn’t understand the pandemic.”

Four days later, Dr. Fauci’s private observations became even more dire: ‘

“POTUS acting even more erratically.”

We tried to warn Fauci, at the peak of his popularity, to step out and bring the Science-denying sociopaths in the Trump Administration tumbling down, but his great sense of duty, idealism and ego got in his way. Plus, at that time, was willing to believe the endless depth of the dunderheadedness and depravity of Donald Trump and the people propping him up. Things began to take an even more dangerous turn, as the pandemic raged on, and Fauci wrote about it:

Fauci diary, August 31, 2020: “Trump stoking violence and racial tension in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon (in the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations.)…embracing false claims by RightWing QAnon groups about deaths relative to COVID-19. QAnon is saying that all the other deaths had nothing to do with COVID-19. The POTUS loves this and is tweeting that Fauci & Birx (Deborah) shut down the country for only 9,000 deaths. What an idiot! “

The actual cumulative COVID-19 death toll in the United States at that time in 2020 was 206,005 reported deaths, with overall confirmed cases approaching 7.2 million cases, making QAnon crackpot conspiracists—whom Trump was trusting for information—approximately 200,000 deaths off the actual total.

As the 2020 Election approached —an election which Joe Biden won by over 9 million popular votes, and 306 to 232 Electoral votes—things got worse. Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary entry of October 15, 2020:

“ As the election nears, the cases increase and surges are more inevitable as we enter cooler weather. Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control. A true embarrassment.”

Two days before the 2020 Election, which Trump would lose, Trump was bonkers. Fauci wrote that Trump told him:

“You constantly drop bombs on me (by telling the truth); everybody wants me to fire you—you have to be more helpful.

Death threats against Dr. Fauci, his wife and his three daughters, had ratcheted up as the election approached, and for the balance of the year bodyguard protection became a necessity. The vitriol and viciousness aimed at Fauci and his family grew more virulent after Trump lost the election, as Trump was spinning out even more into an “alternate universe,” as Fauci wrote.

Only 10 days after the election on November 13, 2020, Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary:

“ Continued surge: 138,000 new infections yesterday. POTUS has no interest at all in the pandemic. He’s focused on blocking Biden from being POTUS; he is embarrassing the USA….craziness has overtaken the country.”

Even after Biden became President, and Dr. Fauci became his top Medical Advisor, Fauci was increasingly appalled by Trump’s behavior. He wrote in his diary on March 29, 2021, two months into the Biden Administration:

“Trump is truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

Dr. Fauci could have just as well been describing the spoiled child of Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, an eye doctor who cannot see straight because of his insane jealously of Dr. Fauci’s distinguished medical and scientific career, or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s HHS Secretary with no medical background, who lead the anti-vaccine movement in the United States for more than two decades, spreading destructive & widely disproven lies about autism and childhood vaccines.

Fauci’s immense public popularity continued into Biden’s presidency, as the Pandemic proceeded to spread and the first COVID vaccines were administered on a broad scale at the very beginning of Biden’s term, despite opposition by Trump supporters around the country, and anti-vaxxers. RJK Jr., in November, 2021, published a scurrilous book about Dr. Fauci (“The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy & Public Health”). The Science Based Medicine website called Kennedy’s lie-infected screed “a conspiracy theory extravaganza.”

Still, the garbage-dump of a book amplified the drumbeat of hysterical attacks against Anthony Fauci, as his power over the nation’s public health priorities grew during the first two years of the Biden Administration. Fauci left the Biden Administration at the end of 2022.

But the hatred of Fauci and his positive influence on the nation’s public health, by RFK, Jr., and the juvenile mean-girl Senator Rand Paul, festered for years. When Trump was elected President in 2024, RFK, Jr., was appointed head of HHS, and stacked the agency that has enormous influence over public health with the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists who set out to dismantle much of the work Dr. Fauci accomplished over five decades of public service. Senator Paul became Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Kennedy, who famously claimed to have snorted cocaine off of dirty toilet seats to prove he wasn’t afraid of germs or parasites, assigned some of his most rabid anti-Fauci staff members to comb through three years of contemporaneous notes which Fauci made on government computers over three years, from 2019-2022, during the height of the COVID Pandemic.

Dubbed, “The Fauci Diaries,” it’s took Kennedy’s malevolent minions some eight full months to assemble Fauci’s writings—a staffing decision made at precisely the same time HHS made deep staff cuts and failed to control cases of Measles and Cyclospora induced diarrhea exploding across the United States. Once completed, RFK, Jr., in another act of personal revenge against Fauci, handed over more than 1,000 pages of “The Fauci Diaries,” to GOP Senator Rand Paul, who was chairing a Senate Homeland Security Hearing looking into the origins of COVID.

The Kentucky Republican’s kangaroo-court of a hearing enabled Paul, an insecure, arch enemy of Dr. Fauci going back years, to verbally abuse Fauci and demand that Fauci’s attorney be tossed out of the Senate hearing room. It also provided a platform to Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, to shout at Fauci, “Who the Fuck do you think you are? Do you feel like you are in deep shit?” Those questions were odd, coming from Moreno who has not raised any questions to his own son-in-law, about the domestic violence charges filed by Moreno’s own daughter against his son-in-law—GOP Ohio Congressman Max Miller—for violence against her and against Moreno’s young granddaughter. Moreno’s Ohio voters may have been wondering how hard he’d fight for them, if he wouldn’t fight for his own daughter and young granddaughter. The Fauci show-hearing gave Moreno the chance to act tough.

Senator Paul’s sham Hearing also shined a spotlight on the Lex Luther-like bulging head of one of the biggest hypocrites in US Senate history, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. Scott, whose former health care company—which he oversaw— was found guilty of committing a $1.7 billion in Medicare fraud—self-righteously & shamelessly grilled the leading public health advocate in the nation’s history about Fauci’s record of combatting the most deadly pandemic in U.S. history. Scott, shameless as always, did this with a fraudulent sense of high dudgeon, despite his company being found guilty of committing 14 felonies of defrauding the US government. To avoid prison time by taking responsibility for the egregious crimes, Rick Scott, instead, took the Fifth Amendment 75 times, AND pocketed $350 million from American taxpayers whom he stuck with the bill for his fraud upon the US Treasury.

Ironically, Trump Administration officials and Republican Senators and their right-wing media maggots have been whining about the fact that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights some 100 times, despite Rick Scott’s record of cheating US Taxpayers by taking the Fifth Amendent 75 times, and Donald Trump—who once famously said “only the Mob takes the Fifth”—invoking his 5th Amendment rights over 400 times in a civil deposition in NY involving his companies defrauding New York State out of over $450 million. Two years ealier in the same case, Trump’s son Eric, a key officer in the Trump Organization, took the Fifth more than 500 times.

Now, at 85 years old, it’s more important than ever for Tony Fauci to know that those of us who have witnessed, first hand, the great advances he guided in medical science and infectious disease research, treatment and care—particularly in the area of HIV/AIDS— during his 54 years of stellar public service, will never be forget his achievements, nor allow them to be minimized.

No one else, before or after Dr. Fauci, has had the enormous capacity, credibility, knowledge, record of accomplishment, depth of expertise, passion for public health, and track record in getting a huge bureaucracy to move into action as Anthony Fauci exercised on behalf of all Americans in battling a cascade of serious public health challenges.

No puerile histrionics by Rand Paul; no feigned outrage by Bernie Moreno—who won’t even protect his own daughter and granddaughter from domestic abuse; and no transparently hypocritical hyperbole by Florida’s utterly corrupt Medicare Fraud King Rick Scott, can undo the historic accomplishments in public health, and public service, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

With Fauci, the Force is strong.

My brother Michael would have been 86 years old this week. He had many talents, including as a creative cook and an engineer; he lives on in my book as a gentle & loving man, who lost his way.

Steve Villano

Jul 21, 2026

(My book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother” Heliotrope Books, N.Y.—available on Amazon—and my brother Michael Villano, as I remember him.)

My brother Michael, nine years older than me, would have been 86-years old this week. He’s been on my mind a lot lately, since my son has just co-authored a book about the great chefs and winemakers in California’s wine country, and my brother was a first-rate chef.

He was my first hero, a calm gentle presence in my chaotic early life, the opposite of my father whose temper could explode as quickly as the steam boilers he labored over in the bowels of the basement of a rich man’s office tower in mid-town Manhattan. Gifted with patience, my brother Michael would assemble all of the toys my father had no patience, or time, for putting together.

I always saw my brother through my mother’s eyes, and that view was rose-colored, gentle and perfect, even when my brother’s life veered into a far different direction in later years. To my mother, to me, my brother was always there, ready to help, to calm the waters.

He could build anything—a four-poster bed, a bicycle, or a house like the one he constructed in Paradise Valley, Arizona, when Arizona was still an undiscovered paradise. I once watched him cook a meal from scratch for two dozen people, each ingredient carefully chosen, each choice delicately considered, each course, better than the one before. I was mesmerized by his short, stubby fingers and how much they looked like our mother’s. In a different time, in a different life, with different financial backers than those who dragged him down, my brother could have become one of the great chefs of the world. Who knows? He may have even been featured in my son’s book.

My brother’s life and mine, diverged sharply over the last several decades of his life. As I detailed in my own book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, N.Y., 2017) Michael worked with the Gambino Crime family and John Gotti as a “bagman,” during the same time I was working with New York State Governor, Mario M. Cuomo—the most prominent Italian-American public official in the United States, a model of integrity who revered the Rule of Law.

I knew, first-hand, that Mario Cuomo had no connections to the Mob, because I did. And my brother and his organized crime associates talked openly how “Mario Cuomo was unreachable,” and how Donald Trump—who slobbered all over them in New York’s construction industry– was a cash-cow they loved to bully, because he would do anything they demanded, terrified of their toughness. Kind of like how Trump still rolls over for another gangster today, Vladimir Putin.

My idolization of my brother Michael turned into sadness, anger, sorrow and then, in the end, love again. He had lost his way, made a cascade of mistakes, and got sucked into a whirlpool of debt and obligation and personal loyalty he could not escape.

On my brother’s 70^th birthday, in 2010, we met for lunch at a waterside restaurant in Northport, Long Island, facing Crab Meadow beach. I told him I was working on my book, and had been since 1988, when he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for income tax invasion.

“Just like Al Capone,” he would joke, referring to the tax evasion convictions, which I didn’t find too funny because of the pain it put so many of us through.

Each time Donald Trump compares his, thus far, 34 Felony convictions to the 23 that Capone had, as if to prove he was tougher and more of a criminal outlaw than Capone, I am reminded of my brother’s braggadocio.

I told Michael I was the only one who could tell this story, and the only one who would do justice to it. He agreed, and was very supportive, even enthused about it.

“Just don’t rat anybody out,” he said to me, in typical New York mob fashion.

I smiled at him.

“That would be kind of hard, Michael, since everyone is dead,” I said.

John Gotti was already dead for 8 years, at age 61, and my brother was no longer involved with the Gambino Crime family. It was 17 years since I worked for Mario Cuomo, and I was now running a non-profit organization and living with my family in Northern California.

In early Spring, 2014, I learned that my brother was battling pancreatic cancer. I no longer had an unlimited amount of time, nor did he. I wanted to finish this story I had been working on for nearly 30 years, so he could read it before he died.

I could not write fast enough. In November, 2014, my brother Michael lost his 9-month long battle with pancreatic cancer. My manuscript now had an added purpose: to give new life and meaning to the memories of my brother, complicated as they were, and to our relationship.

Then, within 60 days of my brother’s death, Mario Cuomo died. I had run out of excuses for not finishing my book. All of the principal characters were dead, but me. And no one else had written the story to give me a final reprieve, as I had hoped, so the only option left was for me to tell it myself; to excise this growth from inside me.

Ironically, after my book was published in the summer of 2017, there were a number of people who wished it had never been written. Sure, as Pete Hamill noted when he wrote “A Drinking Life,” family members hate when “one of their own,” tells the stories everyone was trying to hide.

My family was no different than Hamill’s. My mother died 10 years earlier so I didn’t have to worry about her being upset about “airing our dirty laundry.” In fact, I purposely postponed telling the story as non-fiction for 14 full years before my mother died.

In 1992, I had lunch with the elegant Italian-American writer Gay Talese, at one of his favorite restaurants around the corner from his E. 61^st townhouse in Manhattan. Talese had asked Mario Cuomo to write a book-jacket blurb for his autobiography Unto the Sons, and the Governor delegated the task to me since he had no time to read the book, and knew I loved Talese’s writing.

Talese and I talked a bit about his book, his family, and about the difficulty Italian-American writers experienced in revealing family secrets. As a probing journalist, Talese wanted to know what my family secrets were. I told him that I had written two fictionalized versions of the story—each one, approximately 500 pages.

Talese looked straight at me and told me that such a powerful and unique story begged to be told as non-fiction, a form or writing he favored. He challenged me to do a 10-page outline for a non-fiction book over the next few weeks.

When I got back to him, my “10-page outline” had grown to a 154-page annotated and detailed outline, complete with quotes, contemporaneous notes and sources. Talese took one look at the tome and told me: “You’ve got the book right here.”

“There’s only one problem with it, Gay,” I said. “I won’t publish this story in non-fiction form while my mother is alive, and while Mario Cuomo is still Governor. It would kill my mother, and it could be distorted to be used against Cuomo.”

So, I sat on the story for years, work-shopping it as fiction, as a stage play, or as a screenplay. My brother Michael may have been fine with the non-fiction story of our lives—even a little titillated by it– but his surviving family was not, despite my painstakingly portraying my brother as my life-long hero, and as a good man, who simply lost his way.

The Cuomo family hated it, and expressed to me through confidants that “the book should have never been written.” They were not happy with having Mario Cuomo’s name in the same book as someone affiliated with “the Mob.”

“Why,” I responded, “Only Cuomos are supposed to write books? Only their versions of stories are to be told?”

It did not matter how much I explained that the book was written as an eye-witness account of how Cuomo had NO mob connections; that I wanted to definitively dispel the vicious, ethnically prejudiced rumors that because Cuomo was Italian he must be “mobbed up.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, and I wrote the book to give first-hand evidence to that.

To the Cuomo’s none of that mattered. They were worried about the headlines linking the name “Cuomo” with any mention of the Mob, even if it was to prove those rumors were all lies. Astounding.

In settling on “Tightrope’s” full title, I rebuffed the suggestion from marketing people to put “The Mob” in the book’s title, to sell many more books. I rejected that suggestion, not just to protect Mario Cuomo from malevolent screen shots, but because my life was not torn between me and The Mob, but between me and my brother, who happened to work for the Mob.

In the end, it was my story; nurtured inside me for more than three decades; told over years in parts to therapists, friends and colleagues; recorded in dozens of notebooks, memos and papers kept contemporaneously from my years of working with Mario Cuomo; and from my endless days of witnessing my brother’s criminal record unfold in Federal court, and, finally, being the only family member present to watch him get sentenced to prison.

My brother is dead 12 years now, and each time I go back and re-read a portion of my book about him, he is still alive, and, I’d like to think, wishing he had followed a different recipe for his life and been more in tune with the kind, good person I knew and loved.

Singer/Songwriter/Citizen Activist Harry Chapin died in a car crash 45 years ago. In the documentary “When In Doubt, Do Something,” which I worked on with Rick Korn, we examined Harry’s life.

Steve Villano

Jul 18, 2026

(45 years ago this month, singer/songwriter/activist Harry Chapin was killed in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. He was 38 years old.

In addition to recording 12 Albums, and performing some 2000 concerts over a 10-year career, Chapin co-founded the International world hunger organization, WHYHunger, with former Catholic Priest and social justice advocate Bill Ayres

That really wasn’t too much of a surprise since Harry’s great aunt was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, and a force in progressive social action going back to her opposition to the US involvement in WWI, and her being jailed and beaten for demanding voting rights for women.

Working with then-Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and President Jimmy Carter, Harry Chapin pushed hard for the creation of the first — and only — Presidential Commission on Hunger in US History in 1980. It still stands as the only American Hunger Commission ever created.

With WHYHunger — 51 years after it’s founding — still fighting hunger and the broader issues of poverty and income inequality, and Harry Chapin Food Banks feeding tens of thousands of Americans across this nation each year — Chapin’s music, his messages of social justice, and his work for social change are more important and relevant today than they have ever been.

Six years ago, I had the privilege of working on a documentary film: “Harry Chapin: When In Doubt, Do Something.” The unique, socially conscious documentary, was produced, written and directed by Rick Korn, S.A. Baron and one of Harry’s sons, Jason Chapin. It has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, Amazon Video, Netflix and on airline flights nationwide, and is still available on streaming services.)

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When Harry Chapin was killed in a motor vehicle accident on the Long Island Expressway, July 16, 1981, the news was slow to spread.

It wasn’t like when Elvis died four years earlier, nor when John Lennon was assassinated only seven months before, on December 9, 1980, just two days after Harry Chapin’s 38th and final birthday.

Then, the news of the deaths of those legends travelled at the speed of sound, like giant trees falling in the center of media forests. Everyone knew instantly. The whole world went dark for a time, as if someone pulled out the plug.

Despite their similarities of age, Elvis was 42, and Lennon, 40, Chapin’s musical career never came near those heights, with Cats in the Cradle being his only #1 top 40 hit, over a span of 10 years, 12 albums, and hundreds of poems and stories put to song.

Fellow Long Island musician, Billy Joel, who produced 33 top 40 hits, and performed before over 100 sell-out crowds at Madison Square Garden, recalled Harry’s many kindnesses toward him in the “dog eat dog business” of music.

“I was the opening act for him at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis (now the Stifel Theatre) in 1973–74, “ Joel said in an interview at his Motorcycle shop and museum in Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY.

“He was the headliner. He plugged me to his own audience. ‘How about that Billy Joel,’ he said. That was so gentlemanly of him, and, I never forgot that.”

Years later when the five-time Grammy Award winning Joel’s star rose faster and higher than Chapin’s, Harry opened for him, and Billy made a point of saying “we worked together, and we always worked really well as a show.’

Harry Chapin was not in the rarified league of John Lennon, Elvis or even Billy Joel when it came to fame. Few musicians were. But, regarding humanitarian work, few celebrities came close to Chapin, nor did many try to follow his lead, until after he was gone. Harry had created a Humanitarian Hall of Fame for performers who could translate their popularity into a permanent public good, and there were few stars applying to get in.

“In Harry’s case, he was literally the only artist in those days doing great humanitarian work,” said the late Ken Kragen, Chapin’s manager from 1976 until his death.

“ That’s what really made him unique. He was the only artist getting something done on the issues of hunger and poverty. He was very, very committed.”

Kragen, who would, in the mid 1980’s organize two enormous events aimed at alleviating hunger and poverty — We Are The World, and Hands Across America — which raised tens of millions of dollars and global awareness about the urgency of alleviating human suffering, credited Harry Chapin with being the source of his inspiration.

“ I had this overwhelming feeling that Harry Chapin had crawled up inside me, and he was directing everything I was doing, “ Kragen said. “Suddenly, I became the doer of his will. It was one of the things that pushed me to keep going.”

Billy Joel, standing next to Cyndi Lauper among the dozens of major recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Quincy Jones, & Stevie Wonder participating in the 1985 recording of We Are The World which Kragen arranged, underscored that assessment of what made Harry Chapin stand out from everyone else in the music business a full decade earlier.

“He was inspiring how motivated he was to try to help others. He was like a saint to the point of being a martyr, “ said Joel, noting that Chapin, seven years older was like an older brother to him, and taught him the importance of giving back. “If there was a religious medal for musicians who helped other people, Harry’s face would be on it,” Joel said.

Harry’s unmistakable smiling face and lanky body were badly burned in a fiery car crash, when his tiny Volkswagen Rabbit with a flawed seat-belt mechanism, was rear-ended by a big truck bearing down on him.

Family members knew something was wrong when he was late for a significant meeting in NYC with his Business Manager, half-brother Jeb Hart, and top talent agent Shellie Schultz of ICM.

The meeting, blown-off the day before by Harry, had been rescheduled for July 16, by Jeb, who was now struggling to manage the day-to-day details of Harry’s musical career, out of sheer exasperation, to get Chapin to slow down a bit, concentrate more of his time and attention on his family and career, and devote less energy to the many social and political causes that were consuming him.

“Harry’s greatest quality, was his quality of inclusion, but he was just running, running on vapors, “ said Jeb, “and his career had become secondary. He was out of control. We were trying to get him to focus.”

In his decade of performing across the country, in venues that ranged from backyard barbeques to the Bottom Line Café, to big, sprawling concert halls, college campuses and the steps of the US Capitol Building, Harry Chapin did some 200 concerts per year, with nearly half of them being benefits for one non-profit or political cause or another, mostly fighting hunger and poverty.

From March, 1980 through July, 1981 — the final 16 months of his life — Harry Chapin juggled enough projects to fill a career: he finished his work on the nation’s first-ever Presidential Hunger Commission which he and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont (D-VT) were instrumental in getting President Jimmy Carter to create; participated in unique Radio “HungerThons” with WPLJ-DJ and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres raising millions of dollars for the World Hunger Year (WHYHunger) organization they jointly established; founded Long Island Cares with his wife, partner, conscience and “one-person think tank” Sandy Chapin, who gave birth to the idea of a Presidential Hunger Commission; performed with Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers at the funeral of his assassinated political hero, Allard Lowenstein; relentlessly conducted fundraising benefits across the United States for progressive Democratic candidates courageously combating the Reagan landslide of 1980; and gave the 2,000th concert of his career at the Bottom Line Café, in Manhattan over one weekend in January, 1981.

“Harry just couldn’t say ‘no’,” said Jeb Hart. “He had so many people he was talking to across a spectrum of causes and issues. He’d be making commitments to all of these entities in the midst of doing all these concerts.”

Chapin was involved with “good people,” as he liked to say, quoting Pete Seeger, long a role model for him in how to integrate his music into living a life that mattered on the most important social issues of the time.

In Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2019), author Jeff Place writes:

“Pete saw his music as a means to move mountains — to end racism, poverty, social injustice, political ineptitude and war. There was a reason behind every song Pete wrote or sang. They carried messages and taught lessons. They fostered hope or strength or both. Even the simply fun folksongs had a purpose: they made us feel happy and connected, which could lead to a respect for your fellows, or love for your neighbor, saving the earth from environmental disaster, or…”

Tom Chapin recalled a concert he, Harry and Pete did at Huntington High School, in early January, 1976, to benefit Huntington’s PAF Playhouse, the performing arts group which was a particular passion of Sandy Chapin’s, who was dedicated to arts and arts education.

“One of the students in the audience asked Pete if he thought that all of the benefits for good causes had made any difference, “Tom said. “Seeger responded with this trademark honesty. “ I don’t know,” he said to the student. “But, I do know this. I’ve met good people; people with live hearts, live eyes and live minds.”

“Such a perfect Pete answer,” Tom Chapin said. “Deflecting any credit, not putting down a young reporter’s slightly pushy question, and pointing out what the concerts had done for him personally. Harry and I never forgot it.”

Each used his celebrity to improve peoples lives; Each died in a terrible accident on July 16, at 38 years old, 18 years apart, which was their age difference.

Steve Villano

Jul 15, 2026

(JFK, Jr., & Harry Chapin: Lovers of Life; Brothers in Death.)

They were always there, right in front of me: Harry Chapin, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., linked in death on the same exact date — July 16.

They died 18 years apart, their age difference, when they were both killed in terrible accidents at 38 years old.

Chapin’s brief, shooting-star-of-a-life ended on July 16, 1981—45 years ago— in the fiery crash of a small car on the Long Island Expressway; JFK, Jr.’s, in the crash of a small aircraft—on July 16, 1999— somewhere off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

They were lovers of life and brothers in death, but their families — guided by strong women — and their mutual lust for life were intertwined in ways that one of Harry Chapin’s five children, Jason, would come to experience first-hand, in his work directly with JFK, Jr. and his “Reaching Up” non-profit organization.

The son of President John F. Kennedy founded “Reaching Up” in 1989 — eight years after Harry Chapin died — to give greater access to higher education and training to healthcare givers working with individuals with disabilities.

The organization’s work not only enlarged the scope of the Special Olympics founded by JFK, Jr.’s Aunt Eunice Shriver, but it also shared the compassion and common sense of the life-saving work done by a national non-profit co-founded by singer/songwriter Harry Chapin at the peak of his fame — “WhyHunger’ — still tackling food insecurity in local communities 50+ years after it was formed, as well as providing job skills to lift people out of poverty. Chapin and Kennedy were answering similar calls to serve others.

Jason Chapin, who worked with Governor Mario M. Cuomo and was elected to two, four-year terms on the New Castle Town Council in Westchester, County, NY, has, along with his four siblings — Jono, Jaime, Jen and Josh, and their mother Sandy — carried on Harry Chapin’s work forWhyHunger and local food banks since 1975. He is the only Chapin to know JFK, Jr., and work with the “Reaching Up” organization and its City University of New York partner (CUNY) from 1995 to 2001.

“John was extremely passionate and dedicated to the organization, “ Jason Chapin said. “ I will always remember our Board Meetings which John chaired. He politely greeted everyone in the room when he arrived. He attended all of the annual Reaching Up Kennedy Fellows Convocations and was very friendly with the Fellows.”

It was precisely the same way JFK, Jr., greeted me 30 years ago, at a non-profit breakfast at New York’s Plaza Hotel , which I attended as a guest of Jason Chapin’s. I was representing Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, where I was a Vice-President, and wearing a “We Believe in Brooklyn” button to boost Brooklyn’s visibility among the Manhattan political and media elite.

JFK, Jr., who sat a few seats away from me at the circular table, spotted my button as soon as we got seated. He leaned over to me and whispered

“My family believes in Brooklyn, too,” JFK, Jr. said.

“We still believe deeply in the Bed Stuy Redevelopment Project.”

The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Project was an important initiative started during the too short Senate term of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, when he was NY’s U.S. Senator, from 1965–68.

What JFK, Jr., did not know then was how important Jason Chapin’s grandfather, John Cashmore, was to his own father’s election as President of the United States in 1960. Cashmore, Brooklyn Borough President from 1940–1961, delivered 66% of Kings County’s vote to JFK, helping him beat Nixon in New York State by five percent, and win NY’s 45 electoral votes, giving Kennedy the 303 Electoral votes he needed to win the Presidency.

I mentioned to JFK, Jr. how important the Bed Stuy project was to Central Brooklyn, the community served by our public hospital, and how important his own father’s example of public service was to me in guiding my life’s work.

“You probably get tired of hearing that from so many people of my generation,” I said to JFK, Jr.

“I never get tired of hearing it,” he said. “It makes me proud to see how many people my father inspired.”

Over the four decades I’ve known Jason Chapin, I’ve heard him say, with unending politeness and grace, the exact same words about his father, when people tell him Harry Chapin inspired them to commit their lives to fighting poverty and hunger, or improving public health, or helping refugees find access to food or shelter.

“I’m always amazed by how many people my father reached, how many lives he touched,” Jason says again and again.

Harry Chapin, like many of the Kennedys (the glaring exception being Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of HHS) was determined to use his celebrity to do good, performing 2000 concerts during his 10-year music career, with half of them as benefits, raising more than $6 million to fight hunger, and millions more on his radio “Hungerthons” with WhyHunger co-founder and radio host Bill Ayres.

Ayres was a former Catholic priest who Marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963 — to pressure JFK, Jr’s father to enact Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation. He had already played a part in changing the world before he met Harry Chapin.

As with JFK, Jr., Chapin was encouraged to take his activism, courage and compassion full-time to Washington, and run for the U.S. Senate from New York, which neither man lived long enough to do.

Harry recognized, as JFK, Jr., did with the creation of “Reaching Up” in 1989, that his name attached to any project could attract politicians, the media, the public and funding to the cause.

Chapin’s crusade against hunger and poverty, and his successful campaign to create a Presidential Hunger Commission —the only such Commission ever created in the United States—with the help of former United States Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT.) and President Jimmy Carter, exhibited the same instincts that propelled JFK, Jr., to launch “Reaching Up” and George Magazine : they both knew that politics and pop culture had merged, and that those in a position to use their fame to improve human existence, and to demonstrate their love for life, had an urgent responsibility to do so.

Now, 45 years after Harry Chapin’s death and 27 years after JFK, Jr’s — both on July 16 — their lessons of lending their celebrity, and giving their lives, to improving the lives of others, are more crucial than ever before. Kennedy & Chapin intuitively understood that fame and fortune carried with them a soaring social responsibility to be fearless in the selfless, public-spirited service of others struggling to survive each day.