Information Outlook, Vol. 5, no. 5, May 2001

An Interview with Molly Ivins

by Douglas Newcomb

Douglas Newcomb is Managing Director, Communications for the Special Libraries Association. He may be reached at: doug@sla.org.

Molly Ivins is not easy to catch up with. She's a busy woman. And she has good reason to be busier than normal with her newest book, Shrub­the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, currently a national best seller. Molly is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she writes about Texas, national politics, and just about anything else that might take her fancy.

At her roots, Molly is a political junkie. She makes her living by the written word, but her sense of humor, rich voice, and complete candor reveal a woman who full of life and wonderful experiences and insights. I was honored to be able to catch up with her for a conversation on a Sunday afternoon, after the political talk shows were finished, naturally.

Douglas Newcomb: You have received a number of awards and honors over the years. I read with interest, however, that there are two wonderful and equally great honors in your lifetime of which you are particularly proud. One of these was having the Minneapolis Tribune police force's mascot pig named after you, and the other being banned from the Texas A&M campus.

Molly Ivins: Oh, and you want to know why I was banned from the Texas A&M campus?

DN: Well, actually, no. I would have to say, Molly, that most people, I would imagine, with a little creativity, could be banned from a campus. I would like to hear both stories. But how in the world did you get a pig named after you?

MI: Oh, I was a police reporter. I was a police reporter in Minneapolis, and the police force had this mascot pig. They marched it for years in the St. Patrick's Day Parade and named it Molly Pig in my honor. I am not sure it was intended as a compliment, but that's all right. I was still kind of pleased about it.

DN: Do you believe there is a mascot that perhaps would be more deserving of having been named after you? If so, what and why?

MI: I'm not too sure about another mascot, but I have had a cow and a poodle named after me, and arguably some children by friends.

DN: And the Texas A&M campus... Why were you banned?

MI: Well, the punch line is much better than the story. I was trying to help out some kids at A&M who were testing a campus rule that you couldn't have political speakers on the campus. That is how that came about. I wound up speaking across the street at the student center. I did my dead-level best to create a riot, but had no luck.

DN: And you were banned for that?

MI: Actually, I was banned just because they didn't want me on campus.

DN: Well, isn't that interesting. I didn't know universities actually banned people who were unsuccessful in starting a riot. I was under the impression one would be banned post-riot after all of the damage had been done.

MI: No political speakers on campus. Poor old A&M always fighting the battles of the '50s.

DN: Well, let's move on to your newest book, Shrub - The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush that you wrote with Lou Dubose.

MI: Oh, I have to tell you something that I'm sure librarians and information professionals will appreciate.

A friend of mine recently told me, 'Gee, Molly, I knew I was going to see you this week, so I went out to get your book "Shrub," at the Barnes & Noble in Boston. I looked in all the likely places and couldn't find it. I thought, well, that's strange; I know it's on the Best Seller List. Then, when I asked for help, the clerk led me to the gardening section! Isn't that wonderful?'

DN: That is so funny! Well, at least they had it. I went to my local bookstore and it was sold out, but obtained a copy with a bit of persistence.

"Shrub," is a national Best Seller covering your perspectives and thoughts on George W. Bush, or "Dubya," as you called him. But what I would like to know is your thoughts and impressions the first time you met Dubya in person?

MI: Well, actually, I have known him since we were in high school although not well. He spent a couple of years in a private prep school in Houston while I went to the better private prep school in Houston. But when he came back from prep school, he hung out with a kind of the St. Johns' crowd. And he dated girls I knew and hung out with people I knew. So I always sort of knew who he was, although I don't recall ever having had a conversation with him.

I have always said he's very affable and hard to dislike. You don't have to work at it to dislike his policies, but you have to work at it to dislike George W. the person. I don't find him either stupid or mean. I think he is pretty limited, but that is about the worst I can say about him.

DN: When was the first time you actually ever had a conversation with him, or have your conversations been limited to an interview-type situation?

MI: I just covered him. I have never interviewed him, and I was not even granted an interview for the book. We had a fairly friendly relationship, at least until this book came out. You know, we used to "gosh" one another; I would go to the press party every year and was in the Governor's Mansion for a couple of events. We would rib each other because, I think, the column was never friendly.

DN: Do you think it would be safe to assume that you won't be invited to any more parties?

MI: I seriously doubt it.

DN: Well, "Shrub" contains a lot of insider knowledge and insights. What are your tricks of the trade in mining these nuggets out of your interviews and research? What I am asking is, do you believe that serendipity plays a huge role, or is it based more on slogging through the records? If you have any interview tricks to share, I would be happy to listen to them right now!

MI: Bless your heart. That book was actually a combination of two things. First is we really did want to write about George Dubya's record so we spent a lot of time with the paper, as it were. Second, Lou Dubose and I have about 50 years worth of Texas political reporting between us. So it was not hard for either of us to cover Bush because we have been around Texas politics a lot longer than Bush has, and we knew everybody better than he did. So it was really pretty easy.

DN: Based on your knowledge of George W. Bush, do you think he will enhance our progress to an information- and knowledge-based society? Do you see him being surrounded by the next generation of advisors?

MI: Well, I think he knows what's going on. Bush works in a very corporate way. It is the corporate interests, I think, that move him, and he does have close ties to many in the high-tech sector. So I think he will be listening to them and he is certainly open in that sense. But if you want my opinion of whether or not he has ever thought about, you know, the range of communication in the future, I would guess not. Policy really doesn't interest him very much.

DN: What do you think are his greatest interests?

MI: Baseball and politics.

DN: Well, the Special Libraries Association happens to have a baseball caucus. Perhaps we can get Laura Bush to join, and bring her husband with her.

You have written for newspapers, magazines, and now you have just completed your fourth book. Are there distinct differences in the research paths and your experiences in these different genres?

MI: Hmmm, let me think. Several of the books have been collections of journalism and others like "Shrub" are written from scratch, as it were. The way we got through the "Shrub" book was by saying to ourselves each chapter was just like a magazine article. We have done magazine. Articles of 5,000, and 10,000 words. We can do this. And that is sort of the way Lou and I got through it.

But yes, because the whole project is so much more massive. Anyhow, George Dubya's political career is relatively short for being elected President of the United States. I mean only 6 years. It wasn't that we had to look at 30 years of Lyndon Johnson's public life before the White House or something like that. In fact, it was simply absorbing the volume of information and keeping it organized which are, of course, precisely the skills that information professionals deal with all the time.

DN: Molly, you just touched on something. You said that George W. had a very short political career before he was elected President. What are your thoughts about the news that George W. Bush was not elected but rather appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court?

MI: Well, I spent the last part of the 36-day war in Tallahassee and I am convinced that Al Gore carried Florida I have been from the beginning.

I actually watched it happen. It was just astonishing, and I have covered a lot of very close elections before that involved recounts, and I know that they give rise to political elections that are legends. You know, like landslide Lyndon and 36 people who voted in alphabetical order and that kind of thing, but I am absolutely persuaded that Gore got more votes than Bush in Florida.

In fact, probably by a considerable number, and I am not just talking about people who set out for the polls intending to vote for him and then didn't quite manage to. I mean, I am really talking about countable votes.

DN: Well, thank you for your honest and forthright comments on that.

Stepping away from George W. Bush, what can you tell me about Laura Bush? How do you think her librarian credentials will aid her as First Lady?

MI: Well, I am a big Laura Bush fan. I think she is a genuine and real person. There is a curious story that Bush tells over and over again. Every time I heard it, it stops me.

He will tell an audience how he was wooing Laura and when he proposed to her, she said, "Well, I will marry you on one condition. You have to promise me I will never make a political speech," and that for him is the punch line of the joke. And then the crowd all laughs because this poor woman has made hundreds of speeches. Then he says, "I sure am glad that she broke that promise."

DN: What is it that stops you about this story?

MI: Well, Laura Bush has learned how to make political speeches. From the beginning you could see how painfully uncomfortable she was. But now she is really quite good at it especially if it has anything to do with libraries and books. She deserves real credit for the Texas Book Festival, where she is much more than like an honorary chairwoman. I mean she has really worked at that.

DN: Have you had much interaction with special librarians and information professionals in general?

MI: Oh, yes. I know about special librarians. You know, my very, very first job was in a newspaper library. I worked with Marian Orgain of the Houston Chronicle. I believe that she was very active with the Special Libraries Association, because I remember writing some letters for her about it. I have a long history with special libraries, newspaper libraries especially, in the days when they were called "morgues."

DN: And do you have many fond memories of the morgue?

MI: Oh, absolutely. I am a morgue fan. The greatest stuff I have ever done has been with the help of the newspaper librarians.

DN: Your two main interests are identified as "writing" and "politics." Can you tell me something more about how the two combine in what is sometimes referred to as "the information-gathering arena"?

For example, have there been any situations in which you have started to research an individual or topic, and then when you got into the writing, you discover the information you have is shaping your message?

MI: That is an interesting question, really an interesting question. Has the information shaped the way you write? To some extent, it does particularly in the newspaper industry. I think the largest single factor in newspaper writing is deadlines, and the only thing on newspapers is you got to go with what you got. And if you have a hole in your story, you write around it. You know, you make as many calls as you can. You learn as much as you can, but if you haven't got it by deadline, you go with what you have.

Of course, running a column is really different. Well, I still write on deadline. I mean, there is no question about that. I always have. With a magazine article I think having more time does, in fact, affect the way you tell a story. This friend of mine was saying to me the other day, it is also affected by the medium. I mean, a story told on television has a different narrative arc than a story told in the newspaper.

And I assume this must be true for books, although, again, because my first few books were merely collections of journalism although we have managed to sort of organize them thematically, yeah, I think that is probably true, and based on my limited experience with books, but, yes, I think that is true.

The forum you use does affect how you tell a story.

DN: Have there been any major bloopers? For example, someone speaking on an issue with absolute certainty, but then you find out later the fact was totally incorrect or backward, et cetera?

MI: Oh, I have done so many of those that I can't even name them. Time without numbers, and without number! We have argued with editors that what we really needed to do when we put "bullshit" in the newspaper in between quotation marks was to also put in brackets afterwards stating: "so-and-so is a well-known full." Like let's tell the readers what is happening here.

DN: Do you have any particularly fantastic stories about this or any that caught you really off guard that maybe now they are funny, but at the time, they weren't, or vice versa?

MI: Well, every now and again, people in public life open their mouths and something comes out that is so amazing, you just sort of slap your forehead and bring your head down. I am sort of fine on George with his bloopers. I liked his daddy's bloopers, too. It is always funny when they get tangled up in their tongue.

But people who say things that are just dead wrong are a little scary because, when you put misinformation into the public arena, it is like poisoning the well of public debate, and as you know, there are a lot of people in this country who believe things that aren't true. The other half kind of have a spiritual outlook on life. I don't know. They believe in astrology or UFOs or something quite improbable.

DN: Are you telling me that you don't believe in UFOs!?

MI: I am telling you I don't believe in UFOs. And it is really kind of disturbing with political information because we all tend to latch on to the information that supports our point of view, and we have this wonderful ability to sort of reject or not hear information that doesn't support our point of view.

So, when you are trying to make political arguments, I think it is important to read what the other side has to say, and to almost sort of train yourself to look for information that you may not want to find.

DN: Molly, you've actually touched there on misinformation.

What have you done with information you have received that perhaps you didn't know was incorrect until you got into writing about the subject?

MI: Well, I would never, knowingly, put anything untrue in the newspaper. But, I have to admit, every year in my 4th of July column, I make up some ridiculous poll. Something like 98.2 percent of us believe that Alexis never should have divorced Blake Carrington in the old T.V. series Dynasty. I think it is pretty obvious that those are jokes.

Nonetheless, I would never knowingly put anything untrue in the newspaper, but I must tell you that I do make errors. I don't make them often, but enough to concern me and my editors. I just think it is being human. What can you do if you screw up except run a correction I have a regular section at the bottom of my column saying Crow Eaten Here. So I always want to let people know.

DN: Who or what are your information-gathering methodologies of choice? What I am asking here is how do you dig up what you need?

MI: I actually have two avenues. My favorite source, personally, is the telephone. I also have a research guy, Mike Smith, who can find anything on the Internet. So I pull off the Internet. Then we work together on the column.

DN: So how does Mike validate the sources he uses on the Internet?

MI: That is a very good question because, as you know, I think that is the great danger of the Internet there is no way to tell whether what you are finding is true or not. I got to teach for the first time a couple of years ago out at Berkeley, and I think most of my students thought they would be practicing journalism on the Internet, which took me back for about two seconds. I mean, you know, California, is so advanced.

But I don't think it makes any difference. You still have the same problems. First, you have to establish what the facts are, and what the truth of the situation is as close as you can do it under the rules of journalism. And then you have to put it in a package that is useful to people.

The Internet is a remarkable way to relay misinformation because there are no editors and no standards. On the other hand, I can't tell you that print is perfect either. The National Enquirer is not necessarily well, actually, the National Enquirer may be somewhat reliable. Let's just say the Star

DN: You said your researcher, Mike Smith, uses the Internet to do research. Do you rely a lot on the what-you-know-and who-you-know-type information? What non-traditional methods do you use?

MI: Well, I think in some ways, a good journalist is like a good research librarian. And I think of reporters as people who may not know anything, but they know how to find out about everything. Knowing how to find out is really all the skill there is to being a reporter.

Where do you look for information when you need it? It covers everything, everything from learning land records in the courthouse to knowing how to look up a police report to knowing how to talk to a politician about what really happened in the back room.

DN: What about the adage "I don't believe in gossip, but if you are going to gossip, sit next to me," that sort of thing, do you rely on that?

MI: No. First of all, I think there is no excuse in getting your facts wrong, although, as I say, human beings make mistakes, and I, myself, have been known to err. But, generally speaking, what journalists aim for is accuracy above everything else and then fairness. The trouble is, journalists tend to assume that if you get a pro point-of-view and a con point-of-view, you then have the full story. You probably notice journalists tend to turn almost every issue into a two-sided conflict.

Football games and wars are actually the easiest of all stories to cover. Somebody once said that, but I can't remember whom. It is because there are two opposing sides, yards won and lost, and points scored. In a lot of ways, we try to do that with politics and with everything else. The classic political story, you know, is of Smith and Jones on the City Council and who gets the new road-paving contract. So if you go and you interview Smith, he is for the Acme Company, and then you interview Jones who is for the Zenith Company. And you quote them each for three paragraphs and you spell their names right, you have done an adequate piece of journalism and you can run it in the newspaper. The trouble is what you haven't done is find out that Jones is on the take from the Zenith Company and has been for years, and it is a rotten contract.

I mean, there is more to it than getting the two sides, not to mention, of course, that reality is usually a 17-sided affair to begin with.

DN: I think, that in human nature, people always want to have a very clear right or wrong, and in reality, so much of it is gray matter.

MI: Exactly, exactly. You know, tough political decisions wouldn't be tough if they were like even 60/40. It is 51/49. That is the problem, or in that range.

DN: So, who was the most interesting or intriguing person you have interviewed and why?

MI: Wow. You are always afraid you are going to forget, but I would say Barbara Jordan may have been the most memorable interview I ever had, in part, because I made her angry and she scared me to death. I asked her a really dumb question. You should never ask Barbara Jordan dumb questions. It turned out to be a bad mistake.

I had covered her in the Texas legislature when she was a Senator, and I was a great admirer of hers. I was doing a profile of her for The Washington Post right after she was first elected to Congress. And so, with great enthusiasm, before the end of the interview, I said, "God, Congresswoman, have you ever thought about running for statewide office ?" That's when she sounded exactly like God. She said (Molly Ivins' voice becomes deep and animated), "Barbara Jordan run for statewide office? A black woman run for statewide office in Texas?" As I started to pick myself up off the floor, I said, "Well, you know, Sissy Farenthold ran for governor, and she almost won and she is a woman." She turned around and said, "Sissy is a white"it was the last time I ever asked her a dumb question. I had a lot of fun with her in later years.

DN: So despite an awkward initial interaction with Barbara Jordan, the relationship later became closer. But is there one individual you would say was the most interesting person you've ever interviewed in one particular instance?

MI: Gosh, when I think of the other people I have interviewed, it almost sounds fascinating. Thor Heyerdahl, the man who wrote "Kon Tiki," was really interesting.

DN: And what did you find so interesting about him?

MI: Well, he started talking about or I somehow managed to get him started on his background. He was at least 70 when I interviewed him, which would have been, gosh, 30 years ago, I bet, maybe more. He had grown up before World War I in that civilized era when there were no borders and it was just a completely different world.

Talking to him about it was just fascinating. I mean, you didn't have to have a passport to travel. Of course, there were borders, but you didn't have to have a passport. It was before the militarization of society, and educated people felt themselves privileged and responsible, in part, I think an international family. I mean it was just extraordinary to hear him talk about it.

DN: So, in many ways, the privilege, education and money served as the passport.

MI: Yes, it did.

DN: That's very interesting. Moving on, I understand that you recently were awarded the William A. White Award. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

MI: Oh, William White was a wonderful old Prairie popular newspaper editor from back around the turn of the century. Maybe later than that. I think in the 1920s, too. I did a lot of research on him before I went to the University of Kansas. He was the editor of a newspaper in a small town in Kansas. But he was actually famous because he had such an easy tone about things, and it was just like talking to a sensible person in a small town, and everybody recognized that voice. His editorials and articles were reprinted everywhere.

DN: Wonderful. I congratulate you on this most recent award.

Well, Molly, I have just one more question for you, and it is, as a writer and researcher, what keeps you awake at night?

MI: I don't know of any reporters who don't the experience of waking up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, goddamn it. I didn't check that thing. Oh, I didn't check it. I can't believe I didn't check it!" and then you sit there and worry and worry and worry until the dawn breaks. I mean everybody you know has had that experience.

DN: And is there anything in particular that you worry about at night?

MI: No. I do think that I am a little bit concerned about the whole sort of tenor of the political discussion these days. I find it much too angry and having not enough humor.

DN: Do you think that is just in the political arena? I find that across almost everything.

MI: Well, everybody says, you know, politics got really markedly nasty, but I think you could find certain people to blame it on.

DN: Molly, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

MI: Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing everyone in San Antonio in June.