Remembering Molly Ivins (Page 3)

This is a series of tributes to Molly Ivins, a writer of passion and principle and a longtime friend of the magazine. Also, listen to Molly Ivins's last interview with Laura Flanders on RadioNation.

Ronnie Dugger

Founding editor, The Texas Observer

Molly Ivins was more than one of the stars of the progressive media in her lifetime. She was the one of these stars who reached so many people with her down-home explanations and serial horse-laughs that in exchange for the money she earned for the mainstream media, they permitted her to penetrate the soul of the nation with reverberating effects.

After her education at Smith and Columbia and in Paris, her three years' work on the Minneapolis daily marked her as one of the best reporters in the country. But she chose then to join The Texas Observer and regale its discriminating readers with the absurdities of her home state's legislature. Hired back to the responsible big time by the New York Times, she did herself in with her boss there with her story describing a local chicken-plucking contest as a "gang pluck." With her high intelligence, she had perceived that the way to the people's sense of justice detours through their sense of humor. Brave, sagacious and dedicated, she then simply set forth on her own and became the only always-funny and the most widely read liberal, progressive and populist columnist in the country. Her syndication in 350 to 400 newspapers was without a parallel for a leftist columnist in the nation's newspapers. 60 Minutes even gave her a tumble.

In her last column, calling everyone into the streets to stop the war against Iraq, she gave away one of her secrets: "Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous." She never married, maybe never even had a beau, but surely she had as large a family of loving admirers as anyone in the media.

Taking into account her six bestselling books and the sheer quantity of her publication, I told her in a letter that was read to her the day before she died that she was the most effective columnist and journalist for compassion and justice known to me near or far in my lifetime.

Lou Dubose

Author and former editor, The Texas Observer

On a Sunday in September, Molly Ivins caught an early-morning flight from Austin to Flagstaff, Arizona. She had just concluded yet another six-week regimen of chemotherapy aimed at checking the metastasizing disease that had started as breast cancer in 1999. From Flagstaff she traveled to Lee's Ferry to begin a twelve-day rafting trip on the Grand Canyon with her longtime river-running friend Dave Richards, a Texas labor and civil rights lawyer. She wasn't dying. She was living.

On January 31, the Texas journalist whose syndicated column ran in more than 360 newspapers died at her Austin home in the company of friends and family and her beloved black standard poodle, Fanny.

In the canyon, Molly had a chance encounter with a Texas politician, a tall, stately former Republican senator she might have considered a reasonable candidate for governor in this red state if he hadn't worked so hard to dismantle our civil justice system.

"I can't seem to get away from them," she said after the trip.

And so she couldn't. In a private room in the oncology wing of Austin's Seaton Medical Center a week before she died, at times in a voice so low it was inaudible, Molly quizzed a Democratic State Rep who had come to visit. She wanted the inside story of the failed attempt to topple the intellectually corrupt and autocratic Speaker of the Texas House. She had watched the process from her home in South Austin and was furious with the House Democrats she believed had been bought off by the Republican Speaker and his corporate sponsors. From her hospital bed she was shopping around for a credentialed reporter who would send a certified letter to every Democratic House member who had voted for the Speaker, demanding interviews and a public accounting of how much money they were promised for their votes.

At the time of her death, Molly was president of the nonprofit board that published The Texas Observer. She had come to the Observer in 1970 as a co-editor, after working the police beat at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In Austin in the early '70s the best political reporting was done in bars and private clubs, working the good old boys from the Lege, the lieutenant governors' and governors' office. Molly found her milieu there, gradually appropriating her subjects' voices and melding them into the distinct voice in which she would write for the next thirty years. (She also encountered an occupational hazard common to our profession, alcohol, with which she struggled for more than thirty years until checking herself in to what she called "drunk school," followed by regular AA meetings for the last eighteen months of her life.)

Molly moved from the Observer to the New York Times, where the voice she had developed in Austin--atypical of a Smith College graduate conversant in French--never quite fit. Her description of a community chicken slaughter in New Mexico as a "gang pluck" caught the attention of Times editor Abe Rosenthal, who told her he suspected she had tried to slip an off-color joke into her copy. "Abe, you're a smart man," Molly replied. Rosenthal pulled her off the Rocky Mountain desk and assigned her to metro coverage. She would move from the Times to the Dallas Times-Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and into syndication.

Her final column, dictated to her administrative assistant, Betsy Moon, was a full-throated assault on the failed and dishonest war George Bush and Dick Cheney had begun and that only the American public can now end.

She said she would write about nothing else until the war in Iraq ended. She was beginning what she described as "an old-fashioned newspaper campaign" focused on one subject--the Bush Administration's disaster in Iraq.

Her campaign ended prematurely on January 31.

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