From the Left

/

Politics

John McLaughlin's Last 'Bye-Bye'

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

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-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 some 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 on Tuesday (Aug. 18) 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 Father John'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 bypassed the newsmakers to let us commentators argue about them.

 

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 our responses in mid-sentence 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."

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Gary McCoy John Branch Clay Bennett Randy Enos Andy Marlette Pedro X. Molina