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

“He didn't just say he disliked Hillary, he dismissed her as ‘the easiest [candidate] to beat.’

“He called Hillary overproduced and overscripted. ‘It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't.’”

Dowd admits her interview with Geffen changed the presidential race forever, and she is grateful to Geffen for standing by his comments.

“He’s a good guy to have in a foxhole with you. Because oftentimes you get that intensity on you, I’ve had sources who were kind of shying away. He was fine,” she says.

“He just said bring it on when the controversy flared.  He didn’t back away, he didn’t say it was out of context, he just said, ‘Yep that’s what I said. That’s how it is.’”

Dowd rates Geffen as one of the few wise men left in a bleak economic landscape. Recently she asked him his opinion of the current climate.

“I was on business in Los Angeles and I had lunch with David Geffen and Oprah, and he knows a lot about money. He got out before the crash.” He said it was Joe Kennedy who got out of the stock market because he started getting stock tips from the guy shining his shoes. And he decided that’s it. “He had the same  feeling that too many people who shouldn’t have been involved were.”

She also asked him why he was the only one of his DreamWorks studio partners -- Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg the others -- not to get caught up in the Madoff scandal, and Geffen said simply because the two others did not call him.

“So he called them and he said, ‘Why didn’t you give me that tip? I would have told you not to do it, but you didn’t give me that tip.’”

Geffen, she reports, believes America may be in recession for up to 10 years.

Typically, Dowd has caught the zeitgeist moment in her columns on the financial scandals. She describes her recent columns attacking the crew on the ship of fools that ran the economy aground as inspired by her sense of “Irish class rage” against those that set themselves up as superior.

For decades, she says, many like her felt they were not part of that charmed circle that lived high and made fast money or were able to crack the secret code.

Now, like in Oz, the wizards of Wall Street are revealed as frauds, and Maureen Dowd is the first to skewer them and their pretensions.

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Nster.com