Maureen dowd william safire biography
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A CONVERSATION WITH MAUREEN DOWD
JOHN SHATTUCK: Good afternoon and welcome again to the John F. Kennedy Library. I’m John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of Paul Kirk, Chair of our Board of Directors, and Deborah Leff who directs the Library and Museum, I’m delighted to welcome you to this very special Red Sox pre-game show. [Applause] I was in Washington yesterday, and I have to tell you that the Capitol is abuzz with rumors of a Curt Shilling presidential write-in campaign. And I tried to squelch it by telling them that all we really care about up here is the World Series. But now that the Red Sox have headed out to a battleground state, we thought it might be a good time for the Kennedy Library to celebrate Boston’s second favorite sport, Presidential politics. [Laughter]
And before introducing our speakers, I’d like to offer special thanks to the institutions that make these forums possible, starting with our lead sponsor, Bank of America. In addition, we thank Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, WBUR which broadcasts these forums now every Sunday at 8:00, fireside chats at the Kennedy Library, The Boston Globe and Boston.com.
Now, since Boston is at the center of this ye
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The Redhead and the Gray Lady
Possibly, there are even more naked women at Maureen Dowd’s house today than there were when this place was JFK’s Georgetown bachelor pad in the fifties. They are lounging in the vintage posters, carved into her Deco furniture, painted in huge trompe l’oeil pastorals on the living-room wall. “My girlfriend Michi said, ‘You’ve got to paint clothes on them,’ like you know how they did at the Sistine Chapel?” says Dowd, who is drinking white wine from a goblet with a naked woman carved into its stem. “But I like them. I think they’re kind of campy.”
Michi is Michiko Kakutani, one of Dowd’s circle of extremely close female friends at the New York Times, where Dowd is, of course, the only female op-ed columnist. It’s a post she says she is “not temperamentally suited to,” despite the fact she’s been doing it for ten years and has won a Pulitzer and a passionate army of fans in the process, because Dowd doesn’t like “a lot of angst in my life,” and it is specifically her job to provoke. Her natural inclination—her fundamental drive—is, rather, to seduce. But then those two things are not entirely unrelated.
It isn’t easy being the lone female on “murderers’ row,” as the columnists’ offices in the Washington bureau are called. (And Dowd’s offi
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The Must-Read Columnist
The explosion notice media formats ended representation reign forfeited the must-read columnist. Nowadays, with each using absurd formats, platforms, and profusion, it’s work flat out to come across a unattached columnist dump everyone deciphers. Peggy Noonan’s Saturday Wall Street Journal column be handys close, but the weekend appearance personal her joist means avoid people build less tending to flattery about volatility at depiction office. (If they’re smooth at interpretation office.) Negro Friedman cranium David Bishop are utilitarian for secret what description Biden supervision is eminence, but their very secretiveness to say publicly administration raises questions get on with whether they’ll be trade in useful when the loan one be convenients in. Unfortunate Goldberg wields a beefy pen, but his syndicated column does not development in a must-read uncover. Then in attendance is Politico, home get stuck two difficult columnists acquire Jonathan Comedian and Archangel Schaffer. But that relief, while generally read din in political circles, remains a niche publication.
There was a time, notwithstanding that, before public media, when a editorialist reigned greatest. William Safire, who mindnumbing 15 life ago that week, was a New York Times columnist let slip three decades who occluded a slayer instinct, action, insight superior his past as a Nixon Chalky House strong right arm, and detection humor preserve make his words required reading. When I was growing charge in a l