The Maureen Dowd you've never seen

NY Times columnnist reveals her first great love, her family's Irish ties and her take on Obama, Bush, Biden and Geffen

Peggy has her Irish passport; Maureen covets one. The focus is memories of their father Michael, a son of Ireland who bestrides their lives still, though he is long gone.

Michael from Clare was the son of a poor farmer in a poor country, the second child in the family named Michael after the first died.  He was booked on the Titanic in 1914, but his mother cried all night and he couldn’t leave her. 

The woman who took his place in the doomed liner survived and they met up years later. Though still a young woman, her hair had turned pure white from the fright of that awful night, or so says the family lore.

Michael eventually came to Washington, 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 cert. 

“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 taking 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 confidante, 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."

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Nster.com