'New York Times' columnist Maureen Dowd - loved by liberals, loathed by Bushes - comes to Ireland, her parents' birthplace, this week. Sean O'Driscoll met her in Manhattan
It's Friday afternoon at the New York Times's offices in Manhattan. Maureen Dowd is flicking a pen against her desk and looking around the room. She has a column due later that evening and she is looking remarkably relaxed, recounting a story about how her family obtained a miraculous medal believed to have been worn by Michael Collins on the day he was assassinated.
Her researcher, Julie, and I are in the room, when media critic Alessandra Stanley comes in, holding a large cup of coffee. There is an immediate buzz between them, as sentences fly across each other. The night before, President Bush had a serious dig at the New York Times in a speech, and the topic has Dowd animated. She is afraid that a response from the newspaper might sound self-referential, but she believes Bush has got his facts mixed up. (He claimed the New York Times ridiculed the US occupation of Germany after the second World War.)
She bites her lip and looks around. She rings Andy, a New York Times journalist who dug up the original 1946 article that Bush referred to in his speech. He recounts that Bush has it all wrong. It turns out the story was by Anne O'Hare McCormick, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, who actually praised the US zone in Germany and denounced the Soviet occupation.
There is more chatter. Dowd is nodding her head and staring in front of her. It is a freeze-frame moment, when another Maureen Dowd swipe at the President is taking shape. The response to Bush's attack is published the following Sunday, read by Dowd lovers and haters from Alaska to Johannesburg. There are already dozens of references to the article on both liberal and conservative Internet blogs.
This month, the columnist known as "The Cobra" by President Bush is all over the news with her collection of columns entitled Bushworld, which is a number-one bestseller in Los Angeles and Boston, and number four in New York.
Her cutting analysis of policymakers in newsprint, and recently, on television, has left little room for ambivalence about Maureen Dowd. She is a favourite hate figure for right-wing columnists, and the White House has taken her press pass away.
On the other side, she is adored by liberals, who see her as a torch bearer because of her acerbic analysis of Bush's psychology, even though she won a Pulitzer Prize for writings that levelled both Bill Clinton and the politicians who sought his impeachment. In her personal relationships with politicians, she is trying to stay neutral, wincing in an Irish bar when I suggest that she has a love-hate relationship with George Bush Senior. "He calls it that. I would never use words like 'love' and 'hate' about politicians," she says. "My emotions are not engaged by politicians."
As she recounts listening to a personal rendition of John Kerry's poetry, or sitting in the back of a car giving George Bush Junior a culture quiz, or her trip to Reykjavik to cover the Reagan/Gorbachev arms summit, you can't help but wonder what her fortune would have been had feminism not arrived in the 1960s. She might have found a suitable job as a typist in Congress through her Clare-born father, a police detective who worked as head of security in the Senate for 20 years. But fortune and history dictated that she would, instead, almost bring George Bush to a fury as his unwanted psychoanalyst-in-print.
Maureen Brigid Dowd was born into a first-generation Irish family in Washington, with whom she spends much of her spare time. Her late father, Michael, was a former IRA member ("back then it was little more than rabble rousing," she claims) who emigrated from Fanore, Co Clare before joining the DC police. Her mother's family emigrated from Ballinrobe, Co Sligo, and Maureen's parents met at Irish dances in Washington.
They were both very involved in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, her father went on to become national president, her mother national historian. She comes from a divided political background - her father was a Fianna Fáil supporter, mostly because Eamonn de Valera represented Clare in national politics. Her mother, Peggy, now 96, remains a strong supporter of Michael Collins. On a trip back to Ireland, her parents ended up having an argument over whether they should visit de Valera's or Collins's graveside. "I thought that was hilarious," she says. "It really did run that deep."
Back at home with her mother and sister the day after her column is finished, she lists off the titles of all the family's Collins biographies. One of her brothers is named Kevin Barry.
Much of her interest in Irish history comes from her closeness to her parents, and she still misses her father. "He had these incredible eyes. He used to say the colour came up from the sea at Fanore and into his eyes."
Asked by the Hibernians to find a suitable "Little Miss Ireland" for a photograph in the first edition of the Washington Post, Michael chose his redheaded two-year-old daughter, Maureen. "It was in the old Tammany Hall style of nepotism. It was a St Patrick's Day and it was my first mention in a newspaper."
Michael Dowd's job in the Congress building immersed the family in politics. Her brothers worked as Senate pagers and her family backed politicians based on their personalities, not their parties. "My mom and dad stayed up all night the night Truman was elected, they were so excited. And then one of the two people that my father and my brothers liked the most was Richard Nixon. They said he was much nicer than JFK. Barry Goldwater, the former right-wing Senator, said that if he was elected president, he would make my father head of White House security, so my father immediately declared that we were all Goldwater Republicans."
With a family immersed in the daily lives of politicians, Dowd's interest in the personalities and personal psychology of Capitol Hill emerged. While other journalists wanted the big picture and the latest news, she stood back and questioned what made the politicians tick. By the time she moved to the Washington office of the New York Times, she knew she wanted to write about the small details that offered clues to the true nature of national politicians and advisers. In a typical column last February, reprinted in Bushworld, she offers a description of how Condoleezza Rice failed to assess Saddam Hussein's plans: "A conservative, ice-skating Brahms aficionada from Birmingham had assumed that a homicidal, grenade-fishing Sinatra aficionado from Tikrit reasoned just like her."
"I constantly saw colleagues fighting for the lead for the newspaper," she says of her time as a New York Times reporter. "I never wanted to do that. I love the offbeat thing that nobody knew, even just a tiny piece of detail, something that would make the reader think, make the reader laugh." The White House staff was soon to learn that the "colour" writer actually had a serious agenda. Some staff were patronising, she says, hoping she would move on from the New York Times, to be replaced by the usual affluent male White House correspondent.
"I went out for dinner with Bob Teeter, who was Bush Senior's pollster and later campaign manager. He said: 'Frankly, we didn't see you as the New York Times White House reporter.' I was devastated because it wasn't long after I got the job. As a woman, it was an extra burden. I said: 'Do you see me as an ethnic, working class person who should be working for the New York Post?'"
The pressure of fighting off criticism eventually proved too much. "The first couple of years of the column I spent at lot of time curled up on the floor of my house crying. Finally, I started going to the gym a lot and went to a nutritionist. I asked [former editor] Hal Raines to quit the column, but I came through it alright."
Dating, she says, has been a problem in the past, as some men are afraid to date a political columnist. "I do remember a couple of times years ago, guys would say: 'I don't want to have to keep up with you.' But I'm not Dorothy Parker or anything. I'm not Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. I'm sort of ditzy. I'm not clever. My mom says I'm not funny in person, just in print.When you're writing a column, you develop an alternative voice, that's the Maureen Dowd that people know. But there's no big mystery to me."
She will be glad, she says, to get off the television publicity circuit and back into her own private world of friends and family. "When people have never met me, they expect [right wing columnist] Anne Coulter or some big blonde with a whip or something. I just want to hide away and get back to doing what I do."
Public recognition, as when a waitress in the Irish bar tells her how much she loves her work, has been a recurring event since she began publicising the book. "I read this letter that JD Salinger wrote to Joyce Maynard, who used to work at the [New York] Times," she says, as the waitress leaves the table. "He said, 'you can't take the applause and not the criticism, because it will warp your writing as much as the criticism.' I love that. If I keep that close to me, I can take whatever people say about Maureen Dowd, whoever people think that happens to be."
Bushworld is published by Penguin, €16.99. Maureen Dowd visits Dublin on the 27th and 28th of September