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DISASTER PLANNING: Hilton learned of the CIA’s plans to move against Fidel Castro.
Stanford News Service |
HE TIPPED OFF THE WORLD ABOUT INVASION
Ronald Hilton, professor emeritus of Romance languages, was a proud workaholic. Well into his 90s, Hilton would wake at 3 a.m. and listen first to the Russian news out of Moscow, then the German news out of Berlin, and finally the French news out of Paris. In 1960, his avidity for international affairs found him on a research trip to Guatemala, where he learned that Cuban exiles were training for a secret mission. His report blew the whistle on a CIA attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Hilton, a pioneer in Latin American studies, died February 20. He was 95.
Hilton was born in Torquay, England, and thrived under the tutorial system at Oxford University. In 1944, he came to Stanford and established the Institute of Hispanic American and Luso-Brazilian Studies and its Hispanic American Report, a journal that filled a void in coverage of Central and South America. In that journal, which became a source for a report in The Nation, Hilton described the Bay of Pigs preparations.
After the outspoken Hilton resigned from the Hispanic American Studies Program in 1964, he made his focus more global. He founded the California Institute of International Studies—later renamed the World Association of International Studies—and began publishing the quarterly World Affairs Report.
He taught himself Russian—and, his daughter Mary Hilton Huyck says, sounded so much like a native speaker that he once was scolded for eating in the foreigners’ section of a Soviet restaurant.
His daughter says that one of his proudest accomplishments at Stanford was founding Bolívar House, now home to the Center for Latin American Studies.
Hilton is survived by his wife, Mary Bowie Hilton; his daughter; and three grandchildren.
AT THE LIMIT OF SET THEORY
Mathematical trailblazer and professor emeritus Paul Joseph Cohen died March 23 of lung disease. He was 72.
Cohen determined that a fundamental math question called the continuum hypothesis could not be solved using the axioms of set theory and was therefore not provable. In 1964, he won the American Mathematical Society’s Bôcher Memorial Prize for analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal, the math world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for logic. He also won the 1967 National Medal of Science and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Academy of Sciences.
Survivors include his wife of 44 years, Christina; three sons, Eric, ’86, Steven, ’86, and Charles, ’96; one sister; and one brother.
CHAMPION OF EAST PALO ALTO
Believing that the East Palo Alto community should be able to set its own agenda, civil rights activist Barbara Maxwell Mouton, ’72, led ballot efforts that resulted—after a court battle decided by the state Supreme Court—in the city’s incorporation in 1982. She died March 13 of liver failure. She was 82.
Mouton, who had been an administrator at Nairobi Day School, served as mayor of East Palo Alto from 1983 to 1986 and a city council member for four years afterward. Her civic involvements included Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, the Girls’ Club of the Mid-Peninsula and the Community Development Institute.
She was predeceased by her husband, David, and son David Jr., and survived by six children—Maisha, Lauriene and Martin Mouton, and Barbara George, Manon Patterson and Robin Blair. |
