TV PUNDIT KNOWN FOR HIS SHARP WIT
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 sharply honed wit, died Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85.
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 S. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”
A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. He started 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. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993.
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.
“At one point,” Shields said, “I held the NCAA indoor record for concession speeches written and delivered.”
As the 1970s ended, he decided on a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry. He started out as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the inherent 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 nononsense political sensibility, infused with audiencepleasing humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an officeholder: pomposity. Not surprisingly, his targets, archconservatives conspicuous among them, did not take kindly to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.
Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married.
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, Amy Shields Doyle, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.