Remembering Molly Ivins

by John Nichols

February 02, 2007

 Molly Ivins always said she wanted to write a book about the lonely experience of East Texas civil rights campaigners to be titled No One Famous Ever Came. While the television screens and newspapers told the stories of the marches, the legal battles and the victories of campaigns against segregation in Alabama and Mississippi, Ivins recalled, the foes of Jim Crow laws in the region where she came of age in the 1950s and '60s often labored in obscurity without any hope that they would be joined on the picket lines by Nobel Peace Prize winners, folk singers, Hollywood stars or senators.  And Ivins loved those righteous strugglers all the more for their willingness to carry on.  The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came only when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out. The nation's mostly widely syndicated progressive columnist, who died January 31 at age 62 after a long battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer," adored the activists she celebrated from the time in the late 1960s when she created her own "Movements for Social Change" beat at the old Minneapolis Tribune and started making heroes of "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."  "Troublemaker" might be a term of derision in the lexicon of some journalists - particularly the on-bended-knee White House press pack that Ivins studiously refused to run with - but to Molly it was a term of endearment. If anyone anywhere was picking a fight with the powerful, she was writing them up with the same passionate language she employed when her friend the great Texas liberal Billie Carr passed on in 2002. Ivins recalled Carr "was there for the workers and the unions, she was there for the African-Americans, she was there for the Hispanics, she was there for the women, she was there for the gays. And this wasn't all high-minded, oh, we-should-all-be-kinder-to-one-another. This was tough, down, gritty, political trench warfare; money against people. She bullied her way to the table of power, and then she used that place to get everybody else there, too. If you ain't ready to sweat, and you ain't smart enough to deal, you can't play in her league."  Molly Ivins could have played in the league of the big boys. They invited her in, giving her a bureau chief job with the New York Times - which she wrote her way out of when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck." Leaving the Times in 1982 was the best thing that ever happened to Molly. She settled back in her home state of Texas, where her friend Jim Hightower was about to get elected as agricultural commissioner and another friend named Ann Richards was striding toward the governorship. As a newspaper columnist for the old Dallas Times Herald - and, after that paper's demise, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Molly began writing a political column drenched in the good humor and fighting spirit of that populist moment. It appealed beyond Texas, and within a decade she was writing for 400 papers nationwide.  As it happened, the populist fires faded in Texas, and the state started spewing out the byproducts of an uglier political tradition - the oil-money plutocracy - in the form of George Bush and Dick Cheney.  It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential expos of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins's columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.  When Washington pundits started counseling bipartisanship after voters routed the Republicans in the 2006 elections, Molly wrote, "The sheer pleasure of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone after Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife - accused of everything from selling drugs to murder - all orchestrated by that paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.... So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners.  "Given Bush's record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a bad idea on its face," Ivins continued, in a column that warned any Democrat who might think to make nice with President and his team that "These people are not only dishonest - they're not even smart."  Her readers cheered that November 9, 2006, column, as they did everything Molly wrote. And the cheers came loudest from those distant corners of Kansas and Mississippi where, often, her words were the only dissents that appeared in the local papers during the long period of diminished discourse following 9/11. For the liberal faithful in Boise and Biloxi and Beaumont, she was a lifeline - telling them that, yes, Henry Kissinger was "an old war criminal," that Bush had created a "an honest to goodness constitutional crisis" when it embarked on a program of warrantless wiretapping and that Bill Moyers should seek the presidency because "I want to vote for somebody who's good and brave and who should win." (The Moyers boomlet was our last co-conspiracy, and in Molly's honor, I'm thinking of writing in his name on my Democratic primary ballot next year.)  For the people in the places where no one famous ever came, Molly Ivins arrived a couple of times a week in the form of columns that told the local rabble-rousers that they were the true patriots, that they damn well better keep pitching fits about the war and the Patriot Act and economic inequality, and that they should never apologize for defending "those highest and best American ideas" contained in the Bill of Rights.  Often, Molly actually did come - in all of her wisecracking, pot-stirring populist glory.  Keeping a promise she'd made when her old friend and fellow Texan John Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could have commanded five figures, she took no speaker's fee. She just came and told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. "I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years," she told them. "The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's."  She also told them, even when she was battling cancer and Karl Rove, that they should relish the lucky break of their consciences and their conflicts. Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."    -------------------------------------------------------------------   Enough is Enough By Molly Ivins The Texas Observer  Friday 26 January 2007  Stop it. Now.  The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.  It is not a matter of whether we are losing or will lose. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geostrategically," he says.  His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recommend sending more forces only if there is a clear definition of their goals.  Bush's call for a "surge" also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation based on much broader strategic implications.  About the only politician out there besides Bush calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: "The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own-impose its rule throughout the country ... By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed." With all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.  A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country - we have voted overwhelmingly against this war at the polls and in the polls. (About 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent.) We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.  Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Sen. Ted Kennedy's proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. If Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration's idiotic "plans" and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recently departed colleagues.  Anyone who wants to talk knowledgeably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. It's like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?  As The Washington Post's review notes, Chandrasekaran's book "methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis."  We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!" 


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Editorial: Molly Ivins can say that

Molly Ivins thought newspapers should guarantee readers one good laugh a day. The syndicated columnist brought laughter — and often heartburn, especially among conservatives — to readers of about 350 papers, including this one, at least once a week. Ms. Ivins died Wednesday at her home in Texas, leaving opinion pages across the country a little less raucous and witty.

In pointed language, Ms. Ivins routinely skewered politicians whom she viewed as inept or pompous. She referred to President Bush, whom she first knew in high school, as "shrub."

The president said Wednesday night that he "respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.

"Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed," he added.

Ms. Ivins’ columns appeared in the Bangor Daily News for more than a decade. Her absences during her long battle with breast cancer elicited numerous phone calls from readers wanting to make sure the paper had not dropped their favorite columnist.

After graduating from Smith College and earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, she studied for a year in Paris at the Institute for Political Science. She began her journalism career in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. After a stint at the Minneapolis Tribune and a run as the co-editor of the liberal Texas Observer, she joined The New York Times staff in 1976. There her vivid descriptions were often toned down. One character "with a beer gut that belonged in the Smithsonian" became "a man with a protuberant abdomen."

"Newspapers have this problem," Ms. Ivins told the Bangor Daily News in 2003. "They try to hire good writers and then they try to beat it out of you. I firmly believe that newspapers would sell more papers if they said, ‘We guarantee you one good laugh a day.’"

No one was able to "beat it out of" Molly Ivins, who used some of her many awards as trivets. Her final column, about President Bush’s troop surge, combined her signature zing with a populist appeal: "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there."

That was the essence of Molly Ivins.
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"Molly Ivins' clever and colorful perspectives on people and politics gained her national acclaim and admiration that crossed party lines," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who Ivins playfully dubbed "Governor Goodhair."

Colleagues at the liberal Austin-based biweekly The Texas Observer remembered her as a mentor and hero, a patriot and a friend.

"With Molly's death we have lost someone we hold dear. What she has left behind we will hold dearer still," the Observer said in a statement. The Observer's Web site Wednesday night featured photos and tributes to Ivins, once a co-editor of the publication.

Readers from around the world e-mailed remembrances of Ivins, telling how she had touched their lives. Some fans dropped off flowers at the Observer's office in downtown Austin.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column. Ivins' illness did not seem to hinder her populist-toned humor or her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person," she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September 2006, the same month cancer claimed her friend, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

In a Jan. 11 column, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!"'

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Dubose, who had been working on a third book with Ivins, said even last week in the hospital, Ivins wanted to talk about the book.

"She was married to her profession, she lived for the story," he said.

Ivins was an equal-opportunity critic, taking jabs at and making fun of politicians of both major parties.

"Molly Ivins' work made us all laugh -- liberal, conservative and in-between," said Democratic state Sen. Rodney Ellis of Houston. "She had an incredible gift to cut to the chase and make us not take ourselves too seriously. She was one of a kind."

In an Austin speech last year, former President Bill Clinton described Ivins as someone who was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me."

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature, which she referred to as "The Lege," the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's School of Journalism. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the city's first woman police reporter.

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer. She was the featured attraction in October at a huge Texas Observer fundraising "barbecue," at which politicians, journalists and entertainers honored her.

She joined The New York Times in 1976, where she worked first as a political reporter in New York and later as the Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine mountain states.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate.

Ivins received several awards for her writing, including the Pringle Prize for Washington Journalism from Columbia University in 2003 and the Eugene V. Debs Award in the field of journalism.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and she had a recurrence in 2003. Her latest diagnosis came around Thanksgiving 2005. After her most recent recurrence, Ivins said she wasn't giving in to the illness.

"Maybe this is false bravado," she told the Austin American-Statesman in early 2006. "In some ways for me, this is like having a manageable disease. It's like diabetes. It doesn't mean it's not going to come get me in the end."
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A tribute to Molly Ivins By ANTHONY ZURCHER 2/2/2007
	Molly Ivins, who died Wednesday of breast cancer, began writing her syndicated column for Creators Syndicate in 1992. Anthony Zurcher, based in Austin, Texas, has been Molly's editor and friend for many years. Goodbye, Molly I. Molly Ivins is gone, and her words will never grace these pages again - for this, we will mourn. But Molly wasn't the type of woman who would want us to grieve. More likely, she'd say something like, "Hang in there, keep fightin' for freedom, raise more hell, and don't forget to laugh, too." If there was one thing Molly wanted us to understand, it's that the world of politics is absurd. Since we can't cry, we might as well laugh. And in case we ever forgot, Molly would remind us, several times a week, in her own unique style. Shortly after becoming editor of Molly Ivins' syndicated column, I learned one of my most important jobs was to tell her newspaper clients that, yes, Molly meant to write it that way. We called her linguistic peculiarities "Molly-isms." Administration officials were "Bushies," government was in fact spelled "guvment," business was "bidness." And if someone was "madder than a peach orchard boar," well, he was quite mad indeed. Of course, having grown up in Texas, all of this made sense to me. But to newspaper editors in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and beyond - Yankee land, as Molly would say - her folksy language could be a mystery. "That's just Molly being Molly," I would explain and leave it at that. But there was more to Molly Ivins than insightful political commentary packaged in an aw-shucks Southern charm. In the coming days, much will be made of Molly's contributions to the liberal cause, how important she was as an authentic female voice on opinion pages across the country, her passionate and eloquent defense of the poorest and the weakest among us against the corruption of the most powerful, and the joy she took in celebrating the uniqueness of American culture - and all of this is true. But more than that, Molly Ivins was a woman who loved and cared deeply for the world around her. And her warm and generous spirit was apparent in all her words and deeds. Molly's work was truly her passion. She would regularly turn down lucrative speaking engagements to give rally-the-troops speeches at liberalism's loneliest outposts. And when she did rub elbows with the highfalutin' well-to-do, the encounter would invariably end up as comedic grist in future columns. For a woman who made a profession of offering her opinion to others, Molly was remarkably humble. She was known for hosting unforgettable parties at her Austin home, which would feature rollicking political discussions, and impromptu poetry recitals and satirical songs. At one such event, I noticed her dining table was littered with various awards and distinguished speaker plaques, put to use as trivets for steaming plates of tamales, chili and fajita meat. When I called this to her attention, Molly matter-of-factly replied, "Well, what else am I going to do with 'em?" Perhaps the most astounding aspect of Molly's life is the love she engendered from her legions of fans. If Molly missed a column for any reason, her newspapers would hear about it the next day. As word of Molly's illness spread, the letters, cards, e-mails and gifts poured in. Even as Molly fought her last battle with cancer, she continued to make public appearances. When she was too weak to write, she dictated her final two columns. Although her body was failing, she still had so much to say. Last fall, before an audience at the University of Texas, her voice began as barely a whisper. But as she went on, she drew strength from the standing-room-only crowd until, at the end of the hour, she was forcefully imploring the students to get involved and make a difference. As Molly once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." For me, Molly's greatest words of wisdom came with three children's books she gave my son when he was born. In her inimitable way, she captured the spirit of each in one-sentence inscriptions. In "Alice in Wonderland," she offered, "Here's to six impossible things before breakfast." For "The Wind in the Willows," it was, "May you have Toad's zest for life." And in "The Little Prince," she wrote, "May your heart always see clearly." Like the Little Prince, Molly Ivins has left us for a journey of her own. But while she was here, her heart never failed to see clear and true - and for that, we can all be grateful. Creators Syndicate

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

(MCT)

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Thursday, Feb. 1:

X X X

For six years, the trenchant columns of Molly Ivins have raised Cain on the Commentary page of the Chicago Tribune. In that too-brief span of time, not one of the many fine writers who share that real estate infuriated so many Tribune readers - or won the adoration of so many others.

When her column didn't appear, the former group had a good blood-pressure day, and the latter group suspected that, yep, it finally had happened: A newspaper that had twice endorsed the American president she most loathed had squelched her column. The great right-wing conspiracy had caught up with Molly.

If only. That would have been the better fate.

Those quieter days when her column didn't appear in the Tribune had been growing more frequent. Molly Ivins was dying, and Wednesday was her deadline. Breast cancer, damnable breast cancer, took another of the many women whose futures it cuts short.

Her first Tribune column appeared March 1, 2001, and ripped the tax cut proposal of her fellow Texan, President George W. Bush. "Even the dimmest of us have got the point that it's a tax cut for the very rich with a little sop thrown in for some of the rest of us," she fumed.

Her final column appeared less than four weeks ago, on Jan. 5. Not a lot of mellowing: "The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck - so it's up to us. You and me." She promised that in every future column, she would write about the bane of her existence, the war in Iraq.

But there was no future column. Never will be. Instead there'll be anthologies, and remembrances, and much e-mailing among her disciples of favorite bombast from her columns.

You can bet, too, that there'll be quite a party in Austin, because Molly would want that and probably left instructions.

So we're all left with the late Molly Ivins, oracle of truth or worthy opponent.

Take your pick.

You can remember her fondly from the bond of your kinship, you can remember her angrily from the well of your fury.

Either way, you'll miss Molly. So will we.
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