Mark Shields, a penetrating analyst of America’s political virtues and shortcomings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and irritated audiences for four decades with his frankly liberal views and sharp refinements. mind, died Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85 years old.
His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications from kidney failure.
There was a lot of politics for Mr. Shields, even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents woke him up at 5 a.m. to see President Harry S. Truman as he passed through Weymouth, a small town in Massachusetts south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I saw my mother cry was the night Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”
Life immersed in politics began seriously for him in the 1960s, not after ending two years in the Marine Corps. He began as a legislative aide to Senator William Proxmeyer of Wisconsin.
He then declared himself a political adviser to the Democratic candidates; his first national campaign was the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy presidential race in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I will go to my grave believing that Robert Kennedy was the best president of my life,” he told The New York Times in 1993.
He was successful in helping John J. Gilligan to become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White to win re-election as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who pursued national fasting in vain in the 1970s, including Edmund S. Musky, R. Sargent Shriver, and Maurice K. Udal.
“At one point,” Mr. Shields said, “I held the NCAA record indoors for concession speeches written and delivered.”
In the late 1970s, he decided to take a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a regular participant in American political journalism and connoisseurs.
He began as editor of the Washington Post, but the inherent anonymity of the work worried him. He asked for and received a weekly column.
It wasn’t long before he left alone. While he continued to write a column that was distributed weekly by Creators Syndicate, it was on television that he left his strongest mark.
From 1988 until its repeal in 2005, he moderated and participated in the Capital Gang, a weekly CNN talk show that compared liberals like Mr. Shields to their conservative counterparts. He was also a panelist in another weekly public relations program, Inside Washington, watched on PBS and ABC, until he finished in 2013.
In 1985, he wrote On the Road to Campaign, a slightly disrespectful look at the 1984 presidential race. Over the years, he has also taught courses in politics and the press at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
His longest period was as a commentator on PBS NewsHour from 1987 to 2020, when at the age of 83 he decided to end his regular concert. A self-determined Liberal New Liberal, Mr. Shields has been the counterpoint to a series of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the past 19 years, David Brooks.
In a eulogy to his colleague, Mr. Brooks wrote in his column in the New York Times in December 2020 that “to this day, Mark argues that the policy is to seek new converts, not to punish heretics.”
Mr. Shields’s manner was crumpled, his face fresher and fresher, his accent unmistakably New English. He came across, according to The Times in 1993, as “just a man who likes to argue about current events at the barber shop – the expert next door.”
His calling card was a senseless political sensibility, saturated with audience-friendly humor that broke through the dominant character trait of many officials: pomp. Not surprisingly, his targets, arch-conservatives who stood out among them, were not kind to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of fairness.
For President Donald J. Mr Shields said contemptuously that “the hardest thing he has ever done is ask Republicans to vote in favor of tax cuts.” Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was an “invertebrate”; Senator Lindsey Graham made Tonto, a loyal aide to the Lone Ranger, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, they are too affected by the Rolex gene – making them food-hungry suppliers of food to the rich.
Asked in an interview with C-SPAN in 2013 which presidents he admired, he quoted Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, is “the most emotionally healthy.”
“Not that the others were baskets,” he said, “but they get this bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udal once said when he took the job, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”
Politics, he argues, is “contact sport, a matter of taking an elbow or two,” and loss is “America’s original sin.”
“People make a lot of creative excuses for not being able to be with you when you lose,” he said. “Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school’ and ‘I’d like to be with you, but we had a family reunion with a taxidermist.'”
And yet, for all their weaknesses, he was invariably admired by politicians, whether Democrats or Republicans, simply for entering the arena.
“When you dare to run for public office, anyone you’ve sat in a high school classroom with or met twice or by car knows if you’ve won or more likely lost,” he said. “The political candidate dares to risk public rejection, which most of us will try to avoid.
Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of the four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught at the school until he married.
“In my Irish American family from Massachusetts, you were born a Democrat and a baptized Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If you’re lucky, you were also raised to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”
He attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. With the upcoming military service, he chose to enlist in the Marines in 1960, appearing in 1962 as a corporal. He has learned a lot during those two years, he said, including leadership concepts encapsulated in the Marine tradition that officers do not eat until their subordinates are up.
“Wouldn’t our country be a fairer and more humane place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and the executive apartments believed that ‘officers eat last’?”
As he embarked on a career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.
There were bumps in the road, including a period of excessive drinking. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of one,” he told C-SPAN, adding, “I haven’t drunk since May 15, 1974. It took me so long to realize that God made whiskey for not to be ruled by the Irish and the Indians.
Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you will make a change that will be better for the country, and especially for widows, orphans and people who don’t even they know your name and will never know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets. “
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