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with Clarence Page Chicago Tribune

John McLaughlin's final 'Bye-bye'

John McLaughlin, host of "The McLaughlin Group," arrives at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington in 2012. (Kevin Wolf / AP)

Back in the early 1990s, when our son was 4 years old and accustomed to seeing his dad on a certain Washington-based public television talk show, he'd annoy us by skipping through the house singing, "Bye-bye! Bye-bye!"

John McLaughlin, creator and host of "The McLaughlin Group," was delighted to hear that news. "Watch out, Clarence," he said in his professorial bellow. "I'm subverting a new generation."

"Father John," as a few of us regulars on his news panel sometimes called him backstage, has uttered his last "bye-bye." The former Roman Catholic priest who became an aide to President Richard Nixon and later pioneered a pugilistic style of political punditry, died Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 89.

I was fortunate enough to be part of the "Group" for 28 of its 34 years on the air.

McLaughlin invited me to join the panel, he told me later, on the recommendation of another visionary broadcaster, William McCarter, the Chicago public TV and radio chief who brought the show to PBS in 1982. McCarter died in 2011.

My biggest regret when I heard of McLaughlin's death was my own failure to thank him for the changes his program has brought to my life, let alone his influence on the way politics are discussed on television.

Before the Group came along, political talk shows tended to be polite interrogations of politicians, authors and other newsmakers. McLaughlin changed that. He bypassed the newsmakers to let us commentators argue about the newsmakers.

He further enlivened the conversation by giving his panelists too many topics and too little time to make our points without raising our voices and talking over one another.

And there were his unique McLaughlin-isms. He opened the show by plunging directly into "Issue one!"

He headlined topics with festive labels like "Political Potpourri!" and halted responses in midsentence with a resounding "Wrong!"

He forced us to compress complexities into a tidy scale of zero-to-10, "zero being absolute impossibility and 10 being metaphysical certitude."

And he branded his distinguished panel with such nicknames as Freddy "the Beadle" Barnes, now at The Weekly Standard; Jack "Germondo" Germond, the late Baltimore Sun columnist; and Eleanor "You're Swell-a-nor" Clift, now with The Daily Beast.

We knew we had entered pop culture when the show was lampooned on "Saturday Night Live," once with Dana Carvey playing a spot-on McLaughlin and another with McLaughlin playing himself — "almost as well as Carvey did," I later joked.

I missed out on the "SNL" spoof, but I was included in one of Mad magazine's cartoon depictions of the Group in a late-1990s edition, enabling me to score some rare cool points with my son's fifth-grade classmates. Priceless.

The show did have its critics. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, another master of nicknames, called it "the McGoofy Group." Germond called it "TV at its worst" and insisted he was only sticking around to pay for his daughter's medical school tuition. My grandmother simply called it "the shouting show." Sounds about right.

A more scholarly critic is best-selling author Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor. In her 1998 book "The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words," she includes "The McLaughlin Group" among media that have promoted "agonism," forms of ritualized fighting that use words instead of fists or weapons.

When the belief that "watching fights can be fun" enters our public discourse, she said in an email exchange, there is a "degradation of information." Landing "a good — and entertaining — blow" becomes more important than getting the facts right, she said, or getting useful information across.

Donald Trump used that aesthetic in his TV show, "The Apprentice," with his "belligerent, entertaining, 'You're fired!'" Tannen said, and in his Republican presidential candidacy that represents "the inevitable result — of the merging and confusing of information and entertainment."

Could the Group have played a role in the rise of Trump? That should give all of us pause.Yet the worst sin in our business, besides plagiarism and inaccuracies, is to be boring. If McLaughlin's Group helped to make today's complicated news and issues a little easier for the public to digest, I hear it encouraged quite a few to read newspapers, too.

For all that and more, I'll miss you, John. Bye-bye!

John McLaughlin, TV Host Who Made Combat of Punditry, Dies at 89

By ELIZABETH JENSEN NY Times

John McLaughlin began his television show, “The McLaughlin Group,” in 1982.

John McLaughlin, a former Roman Catholic priest who became an aide to Richard M. Nixon in the White House and parlayed his fierce defense of the president into a television career as host of “The McLaughlin Group,” the long-running Sunday morning program of combative political punditry, died on Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 89.

His death was announced on the program’s Facebook page. The columnist Eleanor Clift, a longtime panelist on the show, wrote in The Daily Beast that he had been treated for prostate cancer for some time and that it had spread.

Mr. McLaughlin had been absent from the show this last weekend for the first time in more than 34 years. “I am under the weather,” he wrote to viewers in a note that began the broadcast, adding that his voice was “weaker than usual” but that his “spirit is strong.”

As creator, executive producer and host of “The McLaughlin Group,” which began in 1982, Mr. McLaughlin helped reinvent the political talk-show format by injecting unabashed partisanship and a dash of entertainment.

His program, broadcast on select CBS and PBS stations, inspired a generation of pundits, although few quite adopted his self-exaggerated, blustery persona. His penchant for giving nicknames to his panelists, his riffling through the week’s topics and his prosecutorial questioning became fodder for comedians, notably Dana Carvey on “Saturday Night Live,” even while policy makers tuned in for the political observations.

The show always ended with a prediction by each of the panelists, with Mr. McLaughlin getting the final word, even if seemingly with tongue in cheek. In 1989, for example, he predicted, “Within weeks, Delaware will authorize public flogging for drug trafficking.’’ (It did not.) His trademark signoff was a robust “Bye-bye!”

Mr. McLaughlin, who left the priesthood in 1975, “proved that you could be provocative and an advocate and entertaining, and bring a larger audience to public affairs programming,” said Tammy Haddad, a former vice president of political coverage for MSNBC. Ms. Haddad was also an executive producer of “Hardball With Chris Matthews,” whose host got ample exposure on Mr. McLaughlin’s weekly round table earlier in his career.

“The early success of CNN,” Ms. Haddad noted, was based on its “political food fights” by the likes of Robert Novak and Patrick J. Buchanan, both of whom were founding “McLaughlin Group” panelists.

While in the White House, Mr. McLaughlin, well-informed but prone to tirades, would “sometimes almost become a cartoon of himself” when reporters called, said Bob Schieffer, the CBS News Washington reporter who became host of the CBS Sunday show “Face the Nation.” But as a talk-show host, Mr. Schieffer said, Mr. McLaughlin changed the industry with his shouting.

Combativeness was part of Mr. McLaughlin’s style from the beginning. As a Jesuit priest, he had been in frequent conflict with his superiors, who disapproved of his 1970 run for the United States Senate in Rhode Island as a Republican calling for a rapid end to the Vietnam War. Father McLaughlin, who had resigned as an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and switched his party affiliation, was believed to be the first active Roman Catholic priest to run for the Senate.

He stood in sharp contrast to his fellow Jesuit Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, who was given permission to run for the House that same year as an antiwar Democrat. Father McLaughlin, who was chastised by the bishop of Providence, R.I., for his Senate run, lost by a wide margin to the incumbent Democrat, John O. Pastore.

Father McLaughlin went to Washington anyway, joining President Nixon’s speechwriting team in 1971. Nicknamed Nixon’s Priest, he gave frequent speeches in defense of the president’s conduct of the Vietnam War, including bombing missions into Cambodia.

As the Watergate crisis deepened, Father McLaughlin became one of the president’s most visible supporters. At one news conference, he dismissed Nixon’s use of profanity as “emotional drainage.” Less than two weeks before the president resigned, Father McLaughlin warned in a speech at the National Press Club that the nation would face a “parade of horrors” should Nixon be impeached. (On July 31, 1973, Father Drinan became the first congressman to call for impeachment in a House resolution.)

After Vice President Gerald R. Ford succeeded Nixon in August 1974, Father McLaughlin’s speechwriting position was abolished.

Father McLaughlin had maintained a high profile in Washington, living at the tony Watergate complex rather than in the austere Jesuit residence at Georgetown University where Father Drinan lived. This led his church superiors to rebuke him in May 1974, summoning him to a period of “reflection.”

Instead, in 1975, Mr. McLaughlin successfully petitioned Pope Paul VI and was released from his vows.

That same year he married Ann Dore, his former Senate campaign manager. She later served as secretary of labor under President Ronald Reagan. The couple divorced in 1992. In 1997 he married Cristina Vidal, the vice president for operations of Oliver Productions, the company that produces “The McLaughlin Report.” That marriage also ended in divorce. There was no immediate word on survivors.

John Joseph McLaughlin was born in Providence on March 29, 1927, to the former Eva Turcotte and Augustus H. McLaughlin, a regional salesman for a furniture company. After graduating from LaSalle Academy in Providence and studying for the priesthood in Massachusetts, he was ordained a priest in 1959.

He earned master’s degrees in philosophy and English literature from Boston College, and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. He then taught at the Jesuit-run Fairfield College Preparatory School in Connecticut.

After leaving the White House, he and his wife at the time, Ms. Dore, founded a media relations and public affairs consulting company. In the early 1980s, Mr. McLaughlin hosted a weekend talk program on the Washington radio station WRC. After joining the magazine National Review as the Washington editor and a columnist, he founded a television production concern with the backing of former Nixon allies and persuaded NBC’s Washington television affiliate, WRC-TV, to broadcast a new type of weekend political talk show and to let him host it.

At the time, TV round tables of journalists like “Agronsky & Company” and “Washington Week in Review” dissected the week’s developments in a sober, nonpartisan style. Mr. McLaughlin envisioned a more animated, argumentative format including a panel reflecting conservative, moderate and liberal views, with him as moderator.

From its debut in 1982 “The McLaughlin Group” took on the flavor of a barroom debate, pitting a largely white, male cadre of columnists and political insiders against one another as they gave vent to views from the hard right (Mr. Novak and Mr. Buchanan) to the center-left (Morton Kondracke of The New Republic and Jack Germond of The Baltimore Sun). Ms. Clift, a Newsweek correspondent at the time, and the Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who is black, later joined the group as more liberal regulars.

Regardless of the panelists’ political persuasions, Mr. McLaughlin, whose own politics leaned decidedly right, would often fire off questions and cut them off, shouting “Wronnnng!”

When the cameras were off, the panelists often feuded. Mr. Novak left after a falling out in 1988 and founded a similar program on CNN, “Capital Gang.” In an interview on PBS in June 2007, Mr. Novak said of Mr. McLaughlin, “He may not be pure evil, but he’s close to it.” Mr. Germond, another of the original panelists, called the show “really bad TV,” and said he had stayed on only because he needed the money to pay his daughter’s medical school tuition.

Mr. McLaughlin was also the executive producer and host of “John McLaughlin’s One on One,” a weekly interview program that was broadcast on NBC and PBS stations. From 1989 to 1994 he hosted a daily interview show on CNBC.

In a 1992 profile in The Times, Mr. McLaughlin defended his style. “Does this depreciate journalism?” he asked. “Not one damned bit. Journalists can get very pompous, especially in the formalized days of ‘Meet the Press,’ when they took themselves so damned seriously. This show de-mythologizes the press, and I think people like that.”