The secret life of Maureen Dowd

The New York Times columnist reveals her first great love, her family's Irish ties and her real take on Obama, Bush, Biden and Geffen

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, 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.

“He 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.”

As part of his job Michael Dowd guarded FDR and Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare, loved Truman but didn't like Bobby Kennedy, who let the side down by not bothering to hire some Irish who needed work on the Hill.

He won a medal for bravery and befriended high people, and saw places a young Irish emigrant had no right to dream of. Michael rose through the ranks to become head of the AOH, the largest Irish organization in America.

Her mother was an Irish rebel.  In the 1970s Peggy Dowd led a demonstration at the British Embassy after Bloody Sunday when 14 were shot by British forces in Derry.  To her eternal satisfaction the then British ambassador had to sneak in through the underground garage.

Maureen and Peggy agree she would have been “delighted” that President Barack Obama recently got rid of the Churchill bust that George W. Bush kept in the Oval Office.

Their parent’ biggest fight occurred on a trip to Ireland.  Being a Clare man, Michael Dowd wanted to go to Eamon de Valera's grave. His wife wanted to pay homage to Michael Collins. The Irish Civil War almost got reenacted.

On another occasion Mike Dowd arrived back in Ireland with an American car, a roadster. The locals were gobsmacked at the likes of this prosperity.

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Nster.com