Milestones Dec. 18, 2006

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DIED. Elliot Welles, 79, Vienna-born Holocaust survivor who, as longtime director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League's task force on war criminals, became one of the most influential and relentless Nazi hunters in the U.S.; in New York City. Welles got his start seeking to avenge the murder of his mother, who had been executed in the woods near Riga, Latvia, where his family had recently been deported. Haunted by the face and name of the officer who ordered her transport, Welles, with the help of the Justice Department, tracked him down in Germany--where the man was put on trial in 1976 and convicted.

DIED. Kenneth Taylor, 86, who, with squadron mate George Welch, became the first U.S. Army Air Force pilots to get airborne immediately after the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor; in Tucson, Ariz. Taylor, then 21, was on his first assignment at Hawaii's Wheeler Field, and had spent the previous night in black tie at an officers' club fete. Hearing machine-gun fire, he grabbed Welch--and his tuxedo pants--and drove to their planes. Under fire, he and Welch shot down six enemy planes. "I wasn't in the least bit terrified," he later said. "I was too young and too stupid to realize that I was in a lot of danger."

DIED. Jeane Kirkpatrick, 80, erudite, acerbic first female U.S. ambassador to the U.N., whose impassioned neoconservatism and blunt assessments of Democrats made her a G.O.P. star; in Bethesda, Md. Disgusted with what she perceived as the U.S.'s weak image under Jimmy Carter, the longtime Democrat, who did not formally switch parties until 1985, became publicly known as an ardent anticommunist and one of Ronald Reagan's closest foreign policy advisers. She helped Reagan distinguish between unfriendly Marxist "totalitarian" regimes and acceptable, rightist "authoritarian" ones; lambasted targets from the Soviet Union to the U.N. Security Council; and in a speech at the '84 Republican Convention, dryly derided Democrats as the "blame America first" party. In her later years, she remained a leading conservative voice and rallied for a formal declaration of war after 9/11. Of her Reagan-era positions she once explained, "We were concerned about the weakening of Western will."