[Dialogue] {Disarmed} Molly Ivins: NYTimes Article

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

I loved her and Ann Richards; I hate cancer.
 
 
Molly Ivins Is Dead at 62; Writer Skewered  Politicians 
By _KATHARINE Q. SEELYE_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/katharine_q_seelye/index.html?inline=nyt-per) 
 
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering  
politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in  
Austin. She was 62.  
Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in  
1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. 
 Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends. 
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins  
cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought  
acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could 
filet  her ideological opponents with droll precision. 
After _Patrick J. Buchanan_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/patrick_j_buchanan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , as a conservative 
candidate for  president, declared at the 1992 _Republican National 
Convention_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  that the United States  was engaged in 
a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in  the original 
German.” 
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind  “
that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said.  “
The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I 
 do.” 
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas  
Observer, the muckraking biweekly that would become her spiritual home for 
life.  
Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was  “
reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter  
heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every  
village is about to lose its idiot.”  
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She  
viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the 
 word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.) 
But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high  
school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose,  she 
wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy  
Political Life of _George W. Bush_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ” (2000) and “
Bushwhacked” (2003). 
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq 
 continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, 
she  urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.  
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944, in California and grew up in the  
affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Her father, James, a 
conservative  Republican, was general counsel and later president of the Tenneco 
Corporation,  an oil and gas company.  
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often  
felt out of place. “I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,”  
she said.  
She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a  
friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about 
civil  rights and the Vietnam War.  
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was  
such a martinet,” she told Texas Monthly. 
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, 
 she wrote, “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how 
to  stand up to him.” 
Like her mother, Margot, and a grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College  
in Northampton, Mass. Graduating in 1966, she also studied at the Institute of 
 Political Science in Paris and earned a master’s degree at the _Columbia 
University_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  Graduate School of Journalism. 
 
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis  
Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to move to  
Austin, where she became co-editor of The Texas Observer. 
Covering the Legislature, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus 
 her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and 
her  detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how  
quickly she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice.  
Sometimes she combined the two, as in, “The sine qua non, as we say in  
Amarillo.” 
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Texas Observer, said the political 
 circus in Texas inspired Ms. Ivins. “It was like somebody snapped the 
football  to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named 
Texas,  and it’s wide open,’ ” Mr. Dugger said.  
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive  
amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual  
figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing 
in  her dog, whose name was an expletive.  
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam  
killings and _Elvis Presley_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/elvis_presley/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s death, she sensed she 
did not fit in  and complained that Times editors drained the life from her 
prose. “Naturally, I  was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she 
later wrote. “The New York  Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.” 
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky  
Mountain States, where she continued to challenge her editors’ tolerance for  
prankish writing.  
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a  
sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article.  But 
her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who  
ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered  
routine matters with little flair. 
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her  
a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing 
it  as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.” 
But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted.  
When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have 
to  water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several 
advertisers  boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that 
read:  “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the 
first  of her six books. 
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth  
Star-Telegram, until 2001, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.  
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London,  
Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque. One of her closest friends  
was _Ann Richards_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ann_w_richards/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , the former Texas governor, who 
died last  year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the 
Texas wilds. 
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and  
she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s 
full  of good-ol’-boy stories.” 
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book  
tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote  
for Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation. 
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work  
overload might have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She  
eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused 
 Ms. Ivins of lifting passages Ms. King had written and using them in 1988 
for an  article in Mother Jones. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in 
the  article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.  
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished 
 in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison 
you;  then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than  
that.” 
But she continued to write her columns and continued to write and raise money 
 for The Texas Observer. 
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On  
the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell 
the  truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go 
after  the bad guys with all the energy you have.” 
 




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Strategics International Inc.
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