WASHINGTON — Political analyst John McLaughlin, host of the long-running weekly television series The McLaughlin Group, died early Tuesday at the age of 89.
McLaughlin’s death was announced on The McLaughlin Group Facebook page. No cause of death was mentioned, but an ailing McLaughlin had missed the taping for this past weekend’s show for the first time in the series’ 34 years.
“Earlier this morning, a beloved friend and mentor, Dr. John McLaughlin, passed away peacefully at the age of 89,” the Facebook post said. “As a former jesuit priest, teacher, pundit and news host, John touched many lives. For 34 years, The McLaughlin Group informed millions of Americans. Now he has said bye bye for the last time, to rejoin his beloved dog, Oliver, in heaven. He will always be remembered.”
McLaughlin’s ascerbic style was both loved and hated by many political watchers across the nation. His show, which aired on PBS stations across the nation and was produced at WUSA-TV, differed from the Sunday morning "talking head" political shows, in that McLaughlin would sharply question a panel of commentators, usually rotating among Pat Buchanan, Clarence Page, Eleanor Clift, Mort Zuckerman and other notable writers and columnists from newspapers and news organizations.
“My feeling is talk shows have not kept pace with the breakthroughs and changes in format in television generally,” McLaughlin told The Associated Press in 1986. “I began the group as a talk show of the ‘90s.”
He said informing an audience could be entertaining: “The acquisition of knowledge need not be like listening to the Gregorian chant.”
Critics said the show was more about show business and entertainment than journalism and politics. They said it celebrated nasty posturing, abhorred complexity and featured a group of mostly aging conservative white men spouting off on topics they knew little about.
But the format was hugely successful. As McLaughlin himself might have said, on a probability scale from zero to 10 — zero meaning zero probability, 10 meaning metaphysical certitude — in the show’s heyday, the chances that the Washington establishment were faithfully tuning in each week was definitely a 10.
McLaughlin's style was often parodied, notably by comedian Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live.
McLaughlin could be a hard boss to work for. A 1990 article in The Washington Post Magazine quoted former McLaughlin staffers Anne Rumsey, Kara Swisher and Tom Miller recalling instances of petty tyranny and McLaughlin leering at female employees.
His former office manager, Linda Dean, filed a $4 million lawsuit against McLaughlin in 1988, claiming she was fired after protesting his unwanted sexual advances. McLaughlin denied the allegations; the suit was settled out of court in December 1989.
McLaughlin and his wife of 16 years, former Labor Secretary Ann Dore McLaughlin, divorced three years later.
In 1997, McLaughlin, then 70, married 36-year-old Cristina Vidal, the vice president of his production company. They divorced in 2010.
Born March 29, 1927, McLaughlin grew up in a middle class neighborhood of Providence, R.I., where his father was a furniture salesman. He trained for the priesthood at Shadowbrook, a small Jesuit seminary in western Massachusetts, and earned master’s degrees in philosophy and English at Boston College and a doctorate in communications at Columbia University.
He worked as an editor at a Jesuit weekly and gave lectures on sex before shocking his friends in 1970 by switching parties to run unsuccessfully as a dovish, anti-war Republican against Rhode Island’s hawkish incumbent Democratic U.S. senator.
He opened a consulting firm and gave up his Roman collar in 1975 to marry longtime friend Dore, who served as secretary of labor from December 1987 to January 1989. McLaughlin became a talk radio show host on a Washington station in 1980, but only lasted a year.
In 1982, he persuaded wealthy friend Robert Moore, a former aide in the Nixon White House, to underwrite a new form of public affairs television — and a juggernaut was born.
