Other Notable Deaths

REINHARD MOHN , 88

Chairman and CEO of Bertelsmann AG

Reinhard Mohn, who helped transform media group Bertelsmann AG from a German book publisher to an international media company, has died, the company said Sunday.

Mr. Mohn, together with his wife, helped steer the company into a wide array of publishing - including the acquisition of U.S.-based Random House - music and other ventures.

He spent some 45 years with the company and most recently served as honorary chairman of the company's supervisory board.

Born in Guetersloh in 1921, Mr. Mohn took over his family's printing and publishing business, C. Bertelsmann Verlag, in 1947. He expanded the operation by embracing sales representatives and catalogs, and the company grew to incorporate magazine publishing, television broadcasting and other avenues.

In 1971, he helped oversee the family-owned company's transformation into a stock corporation and become chairman and chief executive. In 1977, he established the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation.

He retired from the company in 1981 but remained on Bertelsmann's supervisory board - the German equivalent to a U.S. board of directors - for another decade.

Bertelsmann's assets include book publisher Random House, TV broadcaster RTL, a majority stake in magazine publisher Gruner + Jahr, and the Direct Group book and media clubs.

Bertelsmann at one point held a 50 percent stake in the music company Sony BMG. It sold the U.S. portion of the Direct Group book club in 2008.

PEG MULLEN, 92

Wrote about son's death in Vietnam

Peg Mullen, an author and former Iowa farm wife who hounded the U.S. military to find the truth about her son's death in Vietnam, died Friday. Family members said Mrs. Mullen died at a nursing home in La Porte City, Iowa.

Peg Mullen wrote the 1995 book "Unfriendly Fire: A Mother's Memoir" after her son Michael died at age 25 when a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him Feb. 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh.

Almost from the day Mrs. Mullen and her husband, Gene, who died in 1986, learned that Michael had been killed, she tried to get more information about their son's death from the U.S. military. Her full-page ad in The Des Moines Register protesting the war and marches in anti-war demonstrations put her on par with the more notable protesters of the day.

Her book includes 40 letters from Michael, along with an account of her conversation one night in 1989 with the man who told her he had fired the fatal shell.

It also lambasts Norman Schwarzkopf, the Persian Gulf War general who was Michael's battalion commander in Vietnam.

The autobiography was a follow-up to "Friendly Fire," a book by C.D.B. Bryan and a television movie of the same name that starred Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty.

According to the University of Iowa library's Iowa Women's Archives, Mrs. Mullen was born in 1917 in Pocahontas, about 140 miles northwest of Des Moines. She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.