Mo Knows   

Maureen Dowd's hip, detail-laden coverage has given New York Times readers a vivid portrait of President Bush and other political figures, and inspired similar reporting. But is it serious?

Ted Koppel has Maureen Dowd on the spot.

Dowd, the White House correspondent for the New York Times, has been invited by ABC's "Nightline" to provide commentary on President Bush's State of the Union address. Who better to discuss the man behind the speech than the reporter who has done so much to create Bush's public portrait: the obsessed sportsman, the family-man politician, the out-of-touch patrician at the helm of a drifting ship of state? Koppel, Dowd has been told, wants to talk about Bush's personality and how it affects his governing. But 10 minutes into the broadcast, Koppel abruptly changes his mind and gets down to the details of military planning.

KOPPEL: "Maureen..we keep hearing about the peace dividend. If you bring back 65,000 or 75,000 troops from Central Europe, what does that translate to in terms of big bucks?"

Dowd shifts uncomfortably under the hot studio lights. She looks tense enough to snap in two, but responds coolly.

DOWD: "In the beginning of his presidency, it was very much felt that Gorbachev had the upper hand, in terms of, you know, sort of the world stage... Bush kept this [deal] a secret, and then he sprung it, as he likes to do. And I think he's very much feeling good that he, you know, has the lead now in this sort of competition with Gorbachev..."

KOPPEL: "Isn't that a little silly?.."

Dowd calls that telecast almost three years ago her "worst nightmare." Verbal give-and-take is not her forte. Troop movements interest Koppel, but she naturally zeros in on what a new troop reduction proposal reveals about the president behind it: upstaging Gorbachev, showing who's got the upper hand – vintage Bush, as far as Dowd's concerned.

Dowd's unique spin on politics and the presidency represents the best in the "new journalism" approach to reporting. For traditional journalists, Dowd's forays into the politics of personality reflect a lack of seriousness, but her byline virtually guarantees an entertaining piece. Often funny, always readable – her colleagues like to say she has "perfect pitch in words," – Dowd has a novelist's eye for quirky detail and a laser wit that she uses to dissect the nation's most powerful. It is an irresistible combination, and not just for readers. This year, at age 40, Dowd got some long-awaited recognition from the journalistic establishment as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. As even her detractors admit, Maureen Dowd and her imitators are transforming daily political reporting.

With circulation declining, advertising revenues down, and a generation of young people who don't read as much, the question of what comprises news is taking on increasing urgency. Faced on the one hand with engaging a generation raised on MTV, and on the other with stiff competition from faxed newsletters, on-line news services and CNN, newspapers are being forced to reinvent themselves.

One line of defense for newspapers such as the Times has been to build a stable of talented writers and to give them unprecedented creative leeway. The new editorial standard places astute commentary, wit and literary style on a par with fact-gathering and on-the-scene reporting. Like magazine writing, the dominant characteristic is not objectivity, but the individual reporter's analysis.

Today, Dowd's is the most distinctive signature among those charting this new course for daily news. Her dispatches from the White House – equal parts mocking wit, literary flourish and class criticism – have shaken up the data-fed White House press corps. Dowd has been so relentless in setting a new standard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that other reporters on the beat feel the heat. "My editors really like her and unfortunately bring up her name a few too many times," says Clara Bingham, Newsweek's number two at the White House. "She's just a hard act to follow."

The Times doesn't limit Dowd to the White House. A year ago, Washington Editor Howell Raines (who becomes editorial page editor next year) freed her from the daily grind of covering the president, allowing her to pursue other subjects. Her favorites are profiles of pop culture figures, some of which have caused as many tongues to wag as her political pieces. In a profile Movieline magazine called one of "Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood," Dowd let over-petted superstar Kevin Costner hang himself with his own egotistical noose. "At one point," Dowd reports, "with a self-conscious cockiness, [Costner] points at the reporter's tape recorder and asks, 'So who hears this tape, your girlfriends?' "

Dowd has paved the way for other writers with her colorful bent. Today, thanks in part to Dowd, the Times has more divas than the Metropolitan Opera House. In an effort to clone her success, the paper has brought in magazine-trained writers such as award-winning freelancer Michael Kelly, and Jason DeParle, who made his name at the Washington Monthly. And attempts to recreate Dowd's virtuosity don't end with the Times. At every major newspaper there is a proliferation of what one friend calls "mock Dowd." Without naming names, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater concurs. "It is very unfortunate when they try and copy her writing style without her talent," he says.

"There is a trend in daily journalism allowing writers with more of a voice to put their spin on a piece," says Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, who worked with Dowd at the Washington Star. "Maureen didn't invent the trend, but she is certainly the shining example of it."

Dowd-Speak

"People expect me to be older, taller and a blonde," Dowd explains during our first meeting. Her brown hair falls loosely around her shoulders and her bangs cover her eyes. A sharp nose and mouth punctuate an otherwise round face. She wears a short-sleeved black linen suit, which, contrary to reports about her fashion preferences, is neither very stylish nor very short. The only provocative aspect of her dress is a pair of pin-point heels on which she balances awkwardly.

There are two Maureen Dowds. There is the Dowd of journalistic lore. Tales of her lateness, her disorganization, and of her purse – which, like Mary Poppins' satchel, is home to an infinite number of items – have reached almost mythic proportions. Then there is the quiet Dowd: a voracious reader, a hard worker, and a member of a close-knit, tight-lipped Washington, D.C., Irish clan. Dowd is, friends say, a very private person. More than one long-time associate say they have trusted Dowd with their deepest secrets but know none of hers. To get Dowd to agree to be interviewed takes months of persuasion. She finally consents to a meeting at her office and chooses a room where the lights don't work. Dowd also adamantly refused to be photographed for this story.

Getting her to talk, especially about herself, isn't easy. When she does, Dowd's intonation is like comedienne Rita Rudner's: sarcastic, slightly depressed Valley girl. Her nervousness is disarming. Push Dowd too hard and she spews out a catalogue of her own inadequacies. When pressed to clarify a point, she pleads, "Oh my God, I'm trying as hard as I can, I'm just so inarticulate." At another point she asks, "You'll take all the 'likes' out of my speech, right?"

Is this the woman who posed for Esquire's annual "Women We Love" photo feature? Dowd, single and at the top of a profession that is still dominated by men, appears to expect an attack. Self-deprecating banter is one technique she uses to keep strangers off balance. One suspects that like William Makepeace Thackeray's heroine Rebecca Sharp – the pen name that Dowd chose for a career advice column she wrote for Mademoiselle – Dowd has found that cultivated vulnerability has its rewards. When I test this hypothesis with her friends, they squirm. "She has a soft, I'm-a-woman-you're-a-man manner, and men can't take it," fellow Times White House reporter Andrew Rosenthal says protectively.

Jane Mayer, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, prefers to characterize Dowd as a woman who has a certain '40s glamour. "What can you say about a woman whose favorite meal is popcorn and champagne?" she asks.

"The stereotype about her is that she does this dumb-girl routine," says Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas. "She can be flirtatious, but the big-time Washington writers all have different styles and they're all using personal devices to extract information. That's what it's all about. And if she's flirtatious, well, she ain't alone."

By now, though, it is no secret that the delicate creature on the other side of the tape recorder is no pushover. She earned her beat the hard way. Dowd began her career as an editorial assistant at the now-defunct Washington Star, where, as she puts it, "I was almost fired every day because I couldn't take a decent phone message." After two years, Dowd became a reporter. For five years she worked the county beat, the metro beat and the sports beat. "I covered so many malls in Virginia that I thought I would die," she says. Nevertheless, she persisted and began to be recognized. "[Editor Jim] Bellows reserved a space on the front page for the article with the most verve. It gave you something to aim for," she recalls.

Dowd followed in the footsteps of many others groomed under Bellows who became pioneers of the "new journalism," including Tom Wolfe and Gail Sheehy, and was considered a rising star when the paper went under in 1981. "She was really just getting her sea legs then, but she was wonderful," says Bellows. "She had a special touch to her writing and that's what you hope from your writers, that they will be sorcerers with the little details."

That year Dowd went to Time magazine, where she was a Washington and New York correspondent and a writer for the magazine's "Nation" section. She doesn't complain about her stint there, but her Time articles lack the characteristic Dowd gusto, perhaps because the magazine's rigid editing structure squelched her creative voice.

Fortunately for Dowd, then-New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal wanted to experiment with more style-conscious writers. With prompting from then-Deputy Metropolitan Editor Anna Quindlen, Rosenthal hired Dowd for the metro desk. Dowd began producing the unorthodox. During the 1984 Democratic convention, when other reporters were scrambling to get background on vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, Dowd mused on the front page about the etiquette of Mondale's kissing his running mate. It was her opening to explore changing gender roles in politics.

In 1986 she moved back to Washington where, during a House debate on a trade bill, she investigated the congressional garage to find out which representatives owned foreign cars. Covering the 1988 presidential campaign, Dowd wrote two articles showing that the two candidates' cultural tastes were dated (Dukakis carried a torch for Janet Leigh; Bush's favorite actress was Greer Garson). The articles, and her consistently insightful coverage of the campaign, cemented her place in the upper echelon of the Times reporting staff.

Politics As Prose

What makes a Dowd story stand out? First, she is funny. Her specialty is capturing the compromised politician. She takes devilish delight in finding the most image-conscious of men in undignified situations: Jerry Brown ambushed by earnest questioners at the end of a long day as he arrives at the modest quarters provided by supporters; President Bush's motorcade stalled in traffic during the stalled budget talks of 1990. Noting that "insinuating your way into a photograph with the President..is one of Washington's highest art forms," Dowd devoted one front page story to White House "Velcroids," the "officials who form a Velcroid-like attachment to President Bush at an event in Washington or on the road, sticking with him everywhere he goes in the hope of turning up next to him in newspapers or on television."

Dowd is the first to admit that she wants to entertain, but that is not her primary goal. Humor, she believes, is a byproduct of political coverage: style follows substance. "A lot of male reporters look at politics as a baseball game. The statistics change, the players change," Dowd told Washingtonian magazine in 1985. "I see it more as Shakespearean drama. It's one of the few arenas where you can watch character development."

White House reporters of the old school dutifully catalogue a president's every activity, hoping that a personal profile might emerge. Dowd has turned that practice on its head. She tries to show who Bush is so that her readers might better understand what he does. "With Bush," she says, "if you track his character and style of operating you know a lot more about him and what he will do than if you track his positions, like on abortion, which have changed."

Dowd pursues her odd angle in an equally odd way. She hates asking questions; she thinks they are "intrusive." Instead she relies on her uncanny ability to stand in the pack and see what others do not. Covering Bush on the campaign trail, she notes that the president, fumbling for the common touch, somehow turned the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band into "the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird." She sifts through information available to everyone else, culls the odd phrase or moment missed by others, and builds her story from there. "Reading a Dowd story," says Associated Press's Rita Beamish, a friend and colleague on the White House beat, "you say, 'Oh, that's exactly the way it was, why didn't I see it?' "

Her powers of perception have earned her respect from wary White House officials. One high-placed White House source warns, "You have to be careful. If you are in the same room with her, she will know what you're thinking."

Dowd's combination of humor and insight can be devastating. Late in November 1991, for example, USA Today ran an article quoting then-Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher on the Bush reelection effort: "We've got to find more people who have a more direct sync or tie or feel for the average-income person." Dowd gave the quote a sarcastic spin, writing a stinging piece about the inability of Bush's elite circle to empathize with the electorate. Her lead was an imaginary help wanted ad: "Immediate opening for a consultant who understands the common fellow. Good career opportunity for someone familiar with bowling alleys, pro wrestling and K mart who can explain 'average' thinking to a group of old-line public servants planning America's future overseas and seeking to expand into domestic portfolio."

Is She Tough Enough?

"I prefer to do stories that tweak and amuse," Dowd says. She winces as she recalls the only big scandal she's broken, the revelation during the 1988 presidential campaign that Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had plagiarized significant parts of his stump speech. "It was hard to watch Biden have to drop out of the race within a week... That didn't give me any pleasure as a journalist," she says. "I am not afraid to say something really tough, but my favorite stories are the ones that will make people laugh, a slice of human nature."

Toughness, however, is precisely what many journalists expect of a top-flight reporter and some say Dowd isn't tough enough. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner J. Anthony Lukas says, "She is not breaking scandalous doings in the traditional journalistic fashion. She is penetrating in a different way. She is concerned with a style of governance and political combat – but these are not impeachable offenses. She makes us want to laugh at Bush whereas a lot of us are only in the mood to weep.

"As a whole the press hasn't been particularly good at revealing why this country has been badly governed by Bush – some people blame Maureen," Lukas adds.

Her critics call her reporting "soft news," a term that drives her friends and admirers mad. When asked if Dowd is a soft-news reporter, Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee, loses her cool. "That suggests writing about people is soft news, and writing about data is hard news," says Lewis. "During the budget crisis [of 1990] she was showing us how muddled the Bush administration was instead of the 89th story about what's in the appropriations bill, which changes every half-hour anyway. It is a particularly male point of view that values data and indicators."

"I don't belive in the characterizations of 'soft' and 'hard,' " Dowd says. "I just believe that there are different ways to reveal important things to the reader and in many different subject areas." Like Lewis, she cites her articles on the stalled 1990 budget agreement as among her most trenchant. In one article, Dowd tracked a series of behind-the-scenes actions that illustrated how the personal pettiness and "haughty intellectualism" of then-Chief of Staff John Sununu and Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman alienated so many members of Congress that it resulted in the defeat of Bush's budget package and the temporary shutdown of the federal government. "Mr. Sununu put his legs up on the conference table, with his feet sticking near Senator Robert C. Byrd's face. After the incident, Senator Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, gave a speech to the 21 negotiators and their staffers inside the meeting room, saying that in four decades in the Senate, he had never been treated with such disrepect." The incident, Dowd reported, toughened Byrd's negotiating stance.

Says Dowd, "Sununu and Darman both called and said that they would never speak to me again – in essence they cut me off. But, it didn't bother me at all to lose the two top sources at the White House."

In addition, Fitzwater showed her a lengthy memo Bush had written to him about getting her "on our side." Dowd says the White House "thought I was scary because they knew that I could do pieces that would get to the heart: Sununu trying to humiliate a congressman in a room with Bush saying nothing. That's tough journalism."

Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves, for one, remains unimpressed. "I don't care about character reporting," he says. "What politicians do or say in private is irrelevant. It is what they do and say in public that's important. We need less focus on character and more on ideas and issues."

In Dowd's defense, Raines says, "Maureen is a good enough reporter that if I asked her to give me a piece on throw-weights as a component of arms control, she's got the intellectual capacity to do it. But the fact is that we have a lot of other people who can do that. We have no one else to do what she does uniquely, which is put all this stuff together in a rounded picture.

"The picture of the Bush presidency that has emerged from Maureen's reporting is the truest picture of overall reality," says Raines. "The kind of reporting she does is the hardest to do and it gives you the clearest gem-like pictures."

Up Close and Personal

Even many of those who take Dowd's reporting on its own terms wonder if she doesn't wander outside the boundaries of acceptable interpretative writing. Dowd insists that the many fleeting images of a public person point to a truer essence of that person, and the reporter's highest calling is to convey that essence to his or her readers. She expressed those priorities in a review for the New Republic of Kitty Kelley's much-criticized biography of Nancy Reagan. "Bob Woodward may have been able to document incontrovertibly every line of coke that John Belushi enjoyed," Dowd wrote, "but he was never able to capture the spirit of Belushi, or to explain the allure of drugs. Robert Caro's skills as an investigative reporter inspire awe, yet there is reason to believe..his biography of Lyndon Johnson is wrong in the fundamentals of its interpretation... Woodward and Caro produced a blizzard of particulars, but they just didn't get it."

A commonly raised question about her reporting on the president is whether Dowd's personal prejudices run so thick that she paints a caricature instead of a portrait. The "class thing," as Dowd self-mockingly calls it, is a repeated theme in her Bush coverage. She grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to Catholic University. Her dad was a cop. Bush's Protestant born-to-lead attitude clearly sticks in her craw. She disparagingly throws the word "patrician" about to describe Bush and his cabinet. Though Dowd insists that her background doesn't color her view of Bush, she is sometimes guilty of what can only be described as class editorializing: "It was a characteristic reaction for a patrician politician who was bred to believe in the Establishment way of operating, that important decisions are best made behind closed doors with a group of men who share the same goals and assumptions."

Some of Dowd's critics see a personal agenda in her reporting – in particular, her coverage of the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. Dowd filed eight front page stories in nine days, and they are among the most controversial articles she has written. Dowd captured the drama of the tension-filled event with a startling realism: the passionate debate on Capitol Hill and the painful exploration of national consciousness that ensued. Written under strenuous time pressure, the articles have an angry edge that might have been softened under different circumstances. They are raw Dowd.

Her lead on October 8 was typical: "The bitter 'he-said, she-said' case of Anita F. Hill and Clarence Thomas has offered a rare look into the mechanics of power and decision-making in Washington, a city where men have always made the rules and the Senate remains an overwhelmingly male club."

Feminist Betty Friedan told Times Executive Editor Max Frankel that Dowd deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the hearings. "She made visible those things that the men didn't get," Friedan says. "She understood the outrage when allegations by Anita Hill, a respected black female professor, were swept under the rug." In fact, Women, Men and the Media, a watchdog group founded by Friedan, gave Dowd its "Breakthrough Award" for "breaking through previous male stereotypes and blind spots in news analysis."

But for conservatives, the articles proved that Dowd's personal voice was decidedly partisan. In an October 17 editorial, "Politically Correct Newsrooms," the Wall Street Journal took the extraordinary step of singling Dowd out for reprimand. "The Times has now turned its front page over to editorials by Maureen Dowd, daintily labeling her jeremiads 'Washington Memo,' " the Journal editors wrote.

Tim Graham, associate editor of the conservative newsletter Media-Watch, says Dowd belongs to a breed of reporters "more interested in their impact on politicians than their impact on their audience; more interested in getting a Supreme Court nominee knocked off than in telling people what's going on."

While many women activists like Friedan sense an ally in Dowd, the reporter becomes defensive at the notion that there is a feminist bent to her stories. Of her critics on the Thomas hearings, specifically the Journal and the McLaughlin Group's Fred Barnes, Dowd says that they have their own ideological axes to grind. As evidence of her neutrality, she offers up that women editors on the Times have chided her because her descriptions of women too often mention clothing, which they argue is patronizing and demeaning.

To Be A Star

The senior editors at the Times seem unfazed by the criticism of their star reporter. She is said to be among the best-paid, if not the best-paid, reporter in the bureau. She sometimes goes weeks without filing a story. Her copy is lightly edited. She is allowed to freelance extensively.

Nothing testifies to her star power better than the kid glove treatment she is accorded by the Times hierarchy. Take, for example, her very flattering front page story about Kitty Kelley's autobiography of Nancy Reagan, which was widely derided as free, uncritical public relations for the controversial author. Some weeks later, during a Times teleconference between the New York and Washington offices to discuss possible bias in its coverage of the William Kennedy Smith trial, the Kelley piece was mentioned. In what many people characterize as an off-hand remark, Frankel suggested it was beneath the Times' standards.

Dowd got up and walked out. Accounts conflict as to what happened next. Many say she threatened to quit, Dowd says she only considered it. She left the bureau and headed to Albany for the weekend, where she was scheduled to speak at a conference on humor writing. The next day, flowers arrived with an apology for the embarrassing public chastisement from Managing Editor Joseph Lelyveld.

In retrospect, Dowd herself says she wishes she had written the article differently. She says the paper was supposed to run a profile of Kelley that would have added balance to the total package, but the profile was pulled without her knowledge.

Unlike other reporters who have achieved her stature, she says she has no plans to leave journalism to write a book or screenplays. She continues to bounce from one section of the paper to another, as needed and as she desires. In the last six months, she's written on the battle between Bush and Ross Perot to be more Texan, interviewed Eddie Murphy and wondered if Hillary Clinton is "a hall-monitor type." She is the first to admit, "It's a great job." l