Mark Shields, an American political virtue and failure analyst, first as a democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator, with his candid liberal views and sharply sharpened wit 40. We have pleased and ranked our viewers for the year. In Chevy Chase, Maryland he was 85 years old.
His daughter, Amy Shiels Doyle, said the cause was a complication of renal failure.
Even when Mr. Shield was a boy, politics was very close. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents woke him up at 5 am to get a glimpse of President Harry S. Truman passing by Weymouth, the town of Massachusetts south of Boston where they lived. I did. He recalled, “I first saw his mother’s cry on the night of Adlai Stevenson’s loss in 1952.”
His political life began in earnest in the 1960s shortly after he spent two years in the Marine Corps. He started as a legislative aide to Wisconsin Senator William Proxmeir.
He then attacked on his own as a political consultant for a Democratic candidate. His first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s unlucky presidential election in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I go to the grave, believing that Robert Kennedy was the best president of my life,” he told The New York Times in 1993.
He was successful, helping John J. Gilligan become Governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White re-elected as Mayor of Boston in 1975. He worked for a man who wasted a pursuit of national office in the 1970s. Among them are Edmund S. Muskellunge and R. Includes Sargent Shriver, Morris K. Udal.
“At some point, I held the NCAA’s indoor record and recorded the written and delivered concession speeches,” said Shields.
At the end of the 1970s, he decided another path. This is how his long career, which made him a staple of American political journalism and critics, began.
He started as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, but the intrinsic anonymity of his work made him uncomfortable. He asked for a weekly column and got it.
Eventually he became independent. It was television that left his hardest mark while he continued to write columns that became distributed weekly by Creators Syndicate.
From 1988 to 2005, he was a moderator and panelist for the “Capital Gang”. This is a weekly CNN talk show that brings together liberals like Mr. Shield and conservative liberals. He was also a panelist for another weekly public relations program, Inside Washington, seen on PBS and ABC until the end of 2013.
In 1985, he wrote “About the Campaign Trail”. This is a somewhat irreverent view of the 1984 presidential election. For many years he also taught politics and press courses at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.
His longest stretch, as a commentator on PBS NewsHour from 1987 to 2020, decided to finish his regular gig at the age of 83. The self-proclaimed New Deal liberal Shield has been the counterpoint of a series of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Zigo, David Gargen, and David Brooks for the past 19 years.
In a Panegyric to a colleague, Brooks wrote in a December 2020 New York Times column, “To this day, Mark argues that politics isn’t punishing heretics, but looking for converts.” Is written.
Mr Shields’ attitude was crumpled, his face was increasingly awkward, and his accent was undoubtedly New England. He came across the Times in 1993 as “a man who just likes to discuss what’s happening at the barber shop next door.”
His calling card was a nonsense political sensibility that pierced pomposity, the dominant personality trait of many office owners, and infused humor to please the audience. Not surprisingly, his targets, the arch conservatives that stand out among them, did not kindly respond to his arrows. And he hasn’t always adhered to modern standards of correctness.
“The most difficult thing he’s ever done was asking the Republicans to vote for tax cuts,” Shields said negatively about President Donald J. Trump. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was an “invertebrate.” Senator Lindsey Graham has made The Lone Ranger’s loyal companion, Tonto, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many people are suffering from the “Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.
In a 2013 C-SPAN interview he praised, he quoted Republican Gerald R. Ford, who took office in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. Ford was “most emotionally healthy,” he said.
“The others weren’t basketball cases,” he said, but “they have that bug. The late and very great Mo Udal, who was looking for the office, once did it. Putting it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is preservatives. “
He argued that politics was “contact sports, the problem of accepting one or two elbows,” and losing was “the original American sin.”
“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing,” he said. “Like my nephew has graduated from a driving school” and “I want to be with you, but we made a family promise to the taxi driver.”
Still, for all their fools, he simply entered the arena and had constant praise to politicians, whether Democrats or Republicans.
“Everyone who dares to run for office, sits next to a high school teacher, double-dates, or pools in a car knows if you won or probably lost,” he says. I did. “Political candidates have the courage to risk the public’s refusal that most of us will go any length to avoid.”
Mark Stephen Shields was born on May 25, 1937 in Weymouth. He is one of four children, William Shields, a paper salesman in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until he got married.
“In my Irish-American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized Catholics,” Shields wrote in 2009.
He attended a school in Weymouth, then majored in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and graduated in 1959. Due to the impending military draft, he chose to join the Marine Corps in 1960 and appeared as Corporal Spear in 1962. He has learned a lot in the last two years and said it includes the concept of leadership encapsulated in the Marine Corps tradition of not being fed until his subordinates are fed.
“Isn’t our country a more just and human place?” He wrote in 2010, “What if Wall Street and Washington brass and executive suites believed that” executives eat last “? “
When he embarked on his political career, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They got married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he survives by his wife and two grandchildren.
There were bumps along the road, including periods of heavy drinking. “If I wasn’t alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of alcoholism,” he told C-SPAN, adding: God made whiskey so that the Irish and Indians wouldn’t move the world. “
Some of his happiest moments were when he engaged in a political campaign. It’s your name and you never know your name. Boy, it’s probably as good as it gets. “