Milestones

HOSPITALIZED. Ezra Taft Benson, 86, politically conservative Mormon leader and former Secretary of Agriculture (1953-60) who last November became president of the 5.8 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; for evaluation; in Salt Lake City.

DIED. Joseph Kraft, 61, syndicated political columnist whose incisive views and access to world leaders made his prose must reading in the nation's capital and beyond for more than 20 years; of heart disease; in Washington. After working at the Washington Post and the New York Times in the 1950s, he became a speech writer for 1960 Presidential Candidate John Kennedy and in 1963 launched his thrice-weekly column. The globe-trotting, indefatigable Kraft wrote with erudite assurance, whether on the Middle East or Middle America. Once a staunch liberal who made Richard Nixon's enemies list, Kraft later took a more conservative tack, never losing his disdain for sloppy thinking or pat reasoning.

DIED. Christopher Isherwood, 81, British-born author whose fiction and nonfiction blended his real experiences with imagined ones, most notably in Goodbye to Berlin, his 1939 short-story collection about expatriates in decadent pre-Nazi Germany, which was adapted as I Am a Camera, a 1951 play and 1955 movie, and Cabaret, a 1966 Broadway musical and 1972 movie; of cancer; in Santa Monica, Calif. Always a rebel, he went to Berlin in 1929 to sample its illicit pleasures, as well as to visit his lifelong friend and sometime lover, W. H. Auden. An immigrant to the U.S. in 1939, Isherwood became an occasional Hollywood screenwriter and lecturer at various California campuses in his later years. He also wrote openly about his homosexuality in novels (A Single Man, 1964) and in his autobiographical Christopher and His Kind (1976).

DIED. Jaroslav Seifert, 84, Czechoslovak poet and winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Literature, whose lyric verse celebrating everyday life and the love of women was warmly admired in his homeland but little known elsewhere; in Prague.

DIED. Lucia Chase, 88, indomitable co-founder and, from 1945 to 1980, co-director and financial angel of the American Ballet Theatre, to which she helped transplant the traditions of the great European troupes and which she helped forge into one of the world's best companies; in New York City. With Co-Director Oliver Smith, she maintained an eclectic repertory that mixed full-length classics with the works of innovative choreographers, including Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille and Antony Tudor. Chase nurtured great dancers like the Americans Nora Kaye and Cynthia Gregory, as well as the Soviet defectors Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov.