News of the death last week of Mark Shields was received with universal sorrow and regret in political Washington and outside the Beltway.
In print, the New York Times published a lengthy obituary recounting “a life immersed in politics,” describing him as “a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings … with bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit.” On television, his PBS colleagues praised his life and life’s work: “There was nobody like him,” declared Judy Woodruff, the anchor and managing editor of PBS NewsHour, adding that “he loved politics. He loved politicians.” David Brooks, his longtime PBS NewsHour co-commentator and sometime sparring partner, told viewers that “God gave him a golden heart. He just believed in America, believed in unpretentious America … in regular Americans, and all of us.”
To be sure, as Samuel Johnson once said, “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.” Still, in the case of the 85-year-old Shields, who came to Washington in the late 1960s and only stepped down from his pundit’s perch 1 1/2 years ago, the praise was hardly misplaced. It is probably not true, as Brooks suggested, that he was “part of a generation that … we’re not going to see the likes of again.” But with his view of politics as sport as well as serious business and his cheerful conviction that his adversaries were not his enemies, and might even be right on occasion, Shields was a lively political partisan whose sense and sensibilities are conspicuously rare in the nation’s capital.
Born into an Irish Catholic family on the outskirts of Boston, Shields soaked up the local civic convictions and tribal habits and lore, and he never let go. He was an ardent and lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, and he followed his 1959 graduation from the University of Notre Dame with two years in the Marines. “The first time I ever saw my mother cry,” he said, “was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost” the 1952 presidential election. As a young consultant to Democratic candidates in New England, he got a taste of national politics as a staffer on the ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, who, he once insisted, “would have been the best president of my lifetime.”
The balance of Shields’s career as a campaign strategist was spent in regional contests — he helped elect a Democratic governor of Ohio and a Democratic mayor in Boston — and searching, in vain, for a successful inheritor of the Kennedy mantle. But in the late 1970s, after working on the failed presidential campaigns of Edmund Muskie, Sargent Shriver, and Morris Udall, he gave up the chase and switched to journalism.
In the culture of his adopted home, it was a seamless and successful transition, and Shields began at the top: first as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, and then, chafing at anonymity, as a weekly columnist. But television beckoned in the late 1980s. CNN invited him to join the cast of Capital Gang, a pioneering political gabfest featuring weekly liberal vs. conservative matches, and he joined Inside Washington, another showcase for pundits and insiders on PBS and, later, ABC.
His most enduring mark, however, was left on PBS NewsHour, which he joined in 1987. During the next three decades, Shields was paired with an ostensible partisan adversary, such as William Safire, David Gergen, Paul Gigot, and, from 2003, Brooks, for brief exchanges toward the end of the broadcast. It was his longest-running engagement and, in the fullness of time, granted him considerably more influence and personal renown than toiling in the vineyards of retail politics.
Then again, part of his appeal was a paradox: With his rumpled blazers, Boston inflections, and quivering jowls, Shields was no one’s idea of a TV idol. The camera, however, captured something more valuable: impassioned beliefs grounded in wide experience, a sense of the absurd extending to himself, and faith in the raucous American brand of self-government.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
