Michael Moore, a talented and at times boorish filmmaker, was thoroughly enjoying the sound of his own voice, condemning the major political parties as useless and corrupt before nearly 10,000 at a rousing Ralph Nader rally last week at the Pavilion of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Standing off in an arena alley, praying that Moore would finally finish a too-simplistic-by-half harangue, I turned and saw an unmistakable mop of white hair brush past me. With fatherly finesse, the fellow tapped a short, quiet and self-effacing young man on the shoulder and said, “Kid, come with me up front.”
There, alas, were two pop-culture icons: Eddie Vedder, lead vocalist with Pearl Jam, and Phil Donahue, the retired and path-breaking talk-show host.
Vedder and Donahue had completed their respective warm-up singing and speaking roles in what has been a most interesting Nader road show, filling up arenas nationwide with a mix of students, 1960s diehards and independents of all ages, united by unease with Al Gore and George Bush and inclined to throw their lot with the consumer activist-turned-Green Party candidate.
“I first interviewed him in 1965 on the occasion of `Unsafe at Any Speed,’ ” Donahue explained several days later, referring to the attack on the auto industry that made Nader a household name as a young Harvard Law School graduate. “I was impressed with this guy who brought down the biggest corporation in the world [General Motors Corp.]. He was dogged.”
Donahue, of course, also became an American staple. For 29 years, his daily talk show was one of America’s most-watched shows, and for a long stretch the most widely syndicated of all, though I had no idea that Nader had appeared more than any single guest, including Hollywood celebrities.
“People watched when we featured Ralph,” said Donahue, who moved his show to Chicago from Dayton in 1974, then to New York in 1984 and finally decided he’d had enough in 1996 after more than 6,000 shows.
The departure has given Donahue, 64, the chance to be more overtly political (“I couldn’t very well get on anybody’s campaign bus when I had the show”), in particular to support longtime friend Nader, whom he calls “the most important private citizen of the 20th Century. Nader’s a practical man who says some people can fight City Hall alone, but it’s better to have a crowd.”
“And his is a Herculean challenge,” said Donahue, “windy and narrowed and filled with all sorts of obstacles of challenging corporate greed, corporate welfare and mergers of huge corporations. Most of the people to whom he speaks work for corporations. It’s tough to coalesce people against corporations.”
As we continued our conversation over several calls after Donahue returned east, where he and wife Marlo Thomas divide time between homes in New York City and Connecticut, it was clear that, while he’s retired from the well-compensated grind of daily television, he’s been far from retiring.
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“It’s great not putting a shirt and tie on every day,” said Donahue, who then detailed activities keeping him quite busy, and an assortment of views on politics, the media, even the late Tribune columnist Mike Royko.
His late father-in-law, comedian Danny Thomas, founded the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, which has evolved into a major center of pediatric health care. “It’s quite something,” Donahue says, “and quite expensive,” meaning there is lots of fundraising to do.
He also serves on the board of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the oldest AIDS service organizations. He has watched as the epidemic has “changed its face, with it striking in significantly greater numbers in the black and Hispanic communities.”
“Powerful white people are not losing their friends much anymore,” he said. “That makes fundraising more complicated. You don’t have a Rock Hudson or a Halston or a Liberace [dying], all the people who brought the epidemic to the front page. But the dragon is still out there and this is all very ominous.”
Amid seas of fluff, Donahue’s show was ahead of its time in taking on seven serious topics. And yet, when he was beckoned to share host duties with Ted Koppel at a 1984 Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire, many eyebrows were raised in the elite press.
“There’s a conceit in the serious press community that this would be a wonderful place to work if we didn’t have all these `other people’ coming in all the time. It always shocked me that journalists felt this way. They have a sense of proprietary ownership of the presidential campaign,” said Donahue, a Notre Dame business graduate who became an aggressive radio, then television, reporter in Michigan and Ohio, along the way corralling interviews with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and Texas swindler (and Lyndon Johnson crony) Billie Sol Estes, which aired nationally on the “CBS Evening News.”
But it wasn’t long ago that “serious” topics and political candidates were the exclusive province of a small number of shows. That’s changed. Sen. Joseph Lieberman singing “My Way” on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show, and both Gore and Bush trying to out-hip one another on the David Letterman and Jay Leno talkfests, seem part of an irreversible, populist shift.
“I am fascinated by all that,” Donahue said. “But we should not be surprised. Everything else has become entertainment. There are 11 p.m. newscasts leading with box office receipts. Even the most loyal local news anchor would have to admit you may have to look like `Entertainment Tonight’ to succeed.”
“Of course, a little nonsense now and then is treasured by the best of men,” he said. What rankles him is the conceit of journalists that, because somebody once worked for a pol or hosted a game show, one cannot be taken credibly. And many of those same journalists, he suggests, are utter hypocrites for bashing the entertainment impulse in politics, then re-running the lines of Leno and Letterman, in the same way that “Newsweek put Geraldo on its cover with a broken nose and wondered, `What’s happening to TV?!!’ “
Donahue became a tad nostalgic when recalling his arrival in Chicago in 1974, when “I ran right into Royko’s work” for the first time. “I had never seen anything like this. He named the cop, the street corner, the female driver who was verbally abused by the cop, detailed what the cop said and did. I had never seen journalism like this.
“I was totally blown away by Royko and I received such a baptism. I had him on the show a few times and was fascinated. Boy, what a brain! And the nerve to go after big, powerful people. No pretense, no b.s., the forerunner of a lot of these shock jocks but without the vulgarity. He threw propriety and deference out the window.
“He was owned by nobody. He grabbed the culture and took it by the throat. Can you imagine trying to get somebody’s attention if you are in jail today? It’s not easy.”
Donahue brought up Royko, too, in the context of the increasing consolidation of media, especially vivid with a few companies owning many hundreds of radio stations and undermining the local essence of many. As with Nader, he discerned in Royko a nerve to confront power.
“How many newspaper publishers out there would today allow a Royko to write that way, to sting the guys, like the president of the local electric company, going to dinner, and playing golf with, the publisher?” said the famous interrogator, suspecting he knew the answer.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.