Maureen Dowd: Fighting Irish girl

By

Niall O'Dowd,

Irish America Magazine

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

4 Comments

A 2-year-old Maureen Dowd dressed up in her shamrock dress for St. Patrick's Day

Tweet

Michael eventually came to Washington, D.C., and despite a rudimentary education made it into the police force where he quickly climbed the ladder. Soon after he made detective, he met Peggy Meenehan, whose father managed the family bar.

The cop and the barkeep’s daughter were both champion Irish step dancers. In 1934 they married; the age difference was 18 years. They raised five kids together – Maureen, the youngest, Michael, Martin, Kevin and Peggy.

Maureen’s father was 61 when she was born, but he wrote his age as 50 on the birth certificate.

“It was hilarious that he lied,” Maureen says now, “and as a policeman, he was lying on an official document.”

The Dowds had it rough. Years later when Maureen would sometimes romanticize the 1930s, her mother would wag her finger. “Those were tough and mean times,” mother would tell daughter.

Now Maureen says she knows what she was talking about. “We’re back there,” she says referring to the current economic crisis. “We’re back in a soup can economy.”

The sisters describe Michael as the cool, clean hero, devout and chivalrous to a fault, a man adept at sizing up people and situations like no other. Peggy says Maureen had the same gift from an early age and that she got it from her father.

He loved to read, especially newspapers. “He’d grab a morning, an afternoon and evening paper every day,” says Peggy.

Their strongest memories are of Michael engrossed in the newspaper sitting under a portrait of JFK, one of his heroes. So it is not surprising that Maureen felt the pull to write from an early age.

There were already other powerful role models in the family pantheon.  Tommy Corcoran, married to a Dowd relative, was FDR’s closest confidant, known to the president as “Tommy the Cork.”  He drafted much of the New Deal legislation and reputedly coined the phrases “nothing to fear but fear itself” and “rendezvous with destiny.” Roosevelt’s son Elliott wrote, “Apart from my father, Tom (Corcoran) was the single most influential individual in the country.”

So being around power was also an early experience for the Dowd clan. And Ireland permeated the family’s early years.

Maureen is pictured in the Washington Post at age 2 in 1954, plump and pretty in a shamrock-bedecked dress, posing on St. Patrick’s Day. Typically she critiques her first media appearance – “Look, they had to give me potato chips to make me smile.”

Like Maureen, her dad had political favorites – Truman was one.

“Dad tended to judge politicians by whether he thought they were phonies or not,” says Maureen. “I think that’s one thing I inherited, besides wearing sunglasses indoors.”

Print

E-mail

Tweet