TV pundit’s piercing analysis was offered with wit, humor
Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharp wit, died Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 85.
His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.
Politics loomed large for Shields even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m. so he could glimpse President Harry Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, Massachusetts.
A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, first as a legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis.
He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates; his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
He had successes, including helping John Gilligan become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin White win reelection as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who vainly pursued national office in the 1970s, among them Edmund Muskie, Sargent Shriver and Morris Udall.
As the 1970s ended, he began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry.
He started as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the anonymity of the job discomfited him. He asked for, and got, a weekly column.
Before long, he set out on his own. He continued writing a column, which came to be distributed each week by Creators Syndicate, but television is where he left his firmest imprint.
His longest stretch was as a commentator on “PBS NewsHour” from 1987 through 2020, when he decided at age 83 to end his regular gig. A self-described New Deal liberal, Shields was the counterpoint to a succession of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the last 19 years, David Brooks.
His calling card was a no-nonsense political sensibility, infused with humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an officeholder: pomposity. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.
Of President Donald Trump, Shields said dismissively that “the toughest thing he’s ever done was to ask Republicans to vote for a tax cut.” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was “an invertebrate”; Sen. Lindsey Graham made Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many are afflicted with “the Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.
Still, for all their foibles, he had an abiding admiration for politicians, Democrat and Republican, simply for entering the arena.
“When you dare to run for public office, everyone you ever sat next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or carpooled with knows whether you won or, more likely, lost,” he said.
As he set out on his career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They were married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.