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Molly Ivins was the most popular liberal commentator of the last 25 years. Bill Minutaglio, author of a new biography of the tangy Texan, on why her voice is needed now more than ever.
There was Morley Safer, in a scrum of old hardball Texas liberals and graying hippies, and hanging out at his late friend Molly Ivins's favorite bar in Austin. With pitchers of Shiner everywhere, Safer was engulfed by dozens of folks wondering what the hell the woman who once had millions of faithful readers would say about health care, Afghanistan, and, yes, Rush Limbaugh’s attempt to own a piece of the Texas Blood Sport, otherwise known as professional football.
Safer, in town to donate his papers to the University of Texas, decided to drop by the book launch for my new biography of the ferociously mercurial and troubled Ivins.
Amid the weathered longhairs, musicians, underground cartoonists and civil liberties lawyers who once formed Austin's counterculture—the people Ivins called “freedom fighters”—Safer seemed merrily caught up in the nostalgia.
“Every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war,” wrote Ivins. “Raise hell.”
"She was one of the funniest and (most) thoughtful women I've ever met," Safer told a reporter from The Daily Texan. "She was a great reporter, and we were good friends."
Close to three years after her death, he's not alone in missing Ivins.
Nose around the Internet and you'll find plenty of other people still wishing she was writing—and wondering what Ivins, if she hadn't succumbed almost three years ago to cancer and a lifetime of wild personal rides, would have to say about the discourse in the twilight of 2009.
Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. By Bill Minutaglio. 360 pages. PublicAffairs. $26.95.
They miss the Texas cornpone flavored with a Tabasco sting, the unabashed defrocking she subjected the potentates to when they stole the stage. Maybe we need Molly—frequently described as “the only woman in the room”—more than ever before.
Her domineering father was the president of Tenneco and pals with men like Sen. John Tower, she grew up with George W. Bush, she was engaged to the son of a diplomat who did the CIA’s bidding. But after years of going to war with her controlling old man, devouring seditious issues of the muckraking Texas Observer, and furtively meeting the bravest Texas progressives, she eventually decided to raise a middle finger to all of her gilded upbringing.
It took a few years and some intense trip wires—the violent death of that fiance, her love affair with a ballsy activist, her knocking Bush's gun-toting political godfather to his knees one night in a Texas bar, her telling her bosses at The New York Times to shove it—but she finally found her calling as the most popular liberal political commentator in the last 25 years.
The fact that she did it in the Lone Star State, amid the misogynistic and Jack Daniels-fueled kingmakers, was rather startling to say the least. She fought sexual gropings by famous drunk politicos, three bouts of cancer, her own rampaging alcoholism—and plenty of death threats.
Through it all, Ivins kept the home fires burning for wandering progressives, liberal Israelites, who felt marginalized since the dawn of The Age of Reagan.
Her archives are filled with thousands of letters from readers in small towns in decidedly “red” states–saying they viewed her as a lifeline. They write to Ivins as if they were “fellow travelers” sharing some secret lifestyle. The letters often begin with a confessional tone in this vein: “Dear Molly, I am writing to you because you are the only one who can understand me . . . I am a liberal in a corner of the American heartland . . . in a place where I am afraid to be myself. When I read you . . . I feel at peace with my beliefs.”
So, what would Molly Ivins say to those millions of readers today, including the ones beginning to think there has been some bait-and-switch at work with Obama?
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
I miss Molly.
Me too.
I once wrote to her, and she answered me back. Three moves and many purgings later, I can't tell you if I still have her letter...but I know she wrote to me once.
mee too
like all of you, i too miss her humor and pointed truths on all things texas; about health care or afghanistan - i would love to read what she would be saying about rick perry and all his secessionist talk!
Miss both Molly and Tim Russert.
Molly was a likable Liberal, replaced by the likes of the very nasally Maureen Dowd.
NYT's Gail Collins is likable and funny.
Banging pots and raising hell whenever I can Molly!
What makes it all worse is there's no one who "fills the whole." Not that Molly can be replaced, only that she represented the hopes, thoughts and wants of millions and there should be someone out there who can pick up the torch.
But this is true of much in American life these days. There's no one standing by to accept the torch, no one willing to step into the kitchen, take the heat, and figure out a way to quell the fire.
I fear we'll never see her like again.
My mother loved her and I know misses her too. She would alway tell me you need to read what Molly Ivins is writing about. Brave lady to fight the right here in the state of Texas. I am not surprised she got death threats.
For those of us who cut our political teeth reading Molly Ivins work, it doesn't seem possible even now that a star that bright could die. So, in her memory, many of us just rock on, trying to do our bit to make the comfortable as uncomfortable as possible.
Molly was a treasure. She was funny, smart, irreverent and hated injustice. Naturally the right-winged Republican Party was her favorite target, since it was and remains the greatest perpetrator and defender of injustices, especially to the poor and vulnerable.
Molly always cut to the chase.......with wit and grace. She is irreplaceable.
I worked in the Texas Senate for ten years. You should have seen how business abruptly paused when Molly came onto the floor.
I propose a toast to Molly, and a swift kick in the...shins...for The Lege.
If you happen to come across Eugene Page's eulogy of Molly Ivans it is a great read.
I'm sorry, I meant Clearenece Pare and Molly Ivins.
Dear Mr. Minutaglio, You have fallen in the same trap, I have seen perpetrated by some, in a vain attempt to be fair. Any mention of the extreme right, is immediately followed up by some futile attempt to paint the left with the same brush. "raging acidity of O'Reilly and Beck and their counter parts on the left". If you can't name these imaginary people ,why bring them up. Factual accuracy is more important then some misguided false sense of fairness. Are you running for office?
Clarence Pages eulogy of Molly Ivins.
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2007/feb/04/news/chi-0702040490feb04
Nobody can match Molly, or ever replace her.
Molly's commentary on the family feud between secessionist right winger, Rick Perry, and plain old right winger, Kay Baileys Hutchinson, is sorely missed.
She was our Mark Twain.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*sniff*
She would have said it better, wittier. But like that.
Thank you.
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