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(applause)
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Crowd: (cheering)
(rock music playing)
All right. I have come to cheer y'all up
about the state of politics in this great nation.
(cheers and applause)
And I know you are in need of cheer.
And I know you think that it is looking dark and gloomy.
Cheer up, it could always be worse.
You could be living in Texas.
Our next guest is one of the, uh, most outspoken
political columnists in the nation.
A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Texas political reporter, Molly Ivins,
not only can but usually does say
pretty much whatever she wants.
-What do you make of Dan Quayle? -I must tell you, honestly,
I traveled with him during the '88 campaign.
I found him dumber than advertised.
Audience: (laughs)
I honestly think if you put that man's brain
in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.
(laughs)
The people who Molly took apart
were the right people to aim at and they knew it.
People who had power and misused it.
Those are the people who she aimed at.
Woman: What's your take on Newt?
(laughter)
You speak of the draft-dodging, dope-smoking, deadbeat dad
who divorced his dying wife?
(laughter)
Jim: Meddling the bastards is about as much fun
as you can have with your clothes on,
and she got great joy in exposing the bastards.
I believe that it's fair game when these guys stand up
and say something foolish to lay it right out there.
And let people get a good look at what they have elected.
We got issue in America.
Too many good docs are getting out of business.
Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice
their love with women all across this country.
I accidentally became an authority on George W. Bush,
um, kind of like the guy who climbed Everest, it was there.
There's an old saying in Tennessee,
I know it's in Texas, probably Tennessee,
that says, "Fool me once...
shame on...
shame on you."
It fooled me, we can't get fooled again.
Any time you do the kind of work that Molly did,
there's a price to pay for it.
Are you beloved by the folks who read the paper
or is it split right down the middle?
Some hate you, some love you, how does that go?
They do polls every year to find out
who's the best liked and most hated columnist
in the area. I'm always both.
David Letterman: (laughs)
Part of the price is to be seen constantly as an outsider.
Man: (on phone) I think of you as a hateful,
lying left liberal.
And the thing that scares me about you
is people actually listen to you.
Molly: I'm a Texan, I drive a pickup truck,
I drink beer, I cuss,
I hunt, I'm a liberal.
So what?
Terry: The political establishment was afraid of her.
Nobody wanted to have the light shone upon them.
Politics in this country is not something
that is done by them.
It's not those people in Washington,
it's not those people in your State Capitol.
This country is run by us.
It is our deal.
We are the board of directors, we own it.
They're just the people we have hired
to drive the bus for a while.
(upbeat music playing)
(bird cawing)
Bruce: Molly Ivins, let's start with Texas and being Texan.
Can you define what it means to you to be a Texan?
Hmm. You know, I have, over the years,
tried several times to explode myths about Texas
because I think some of the stereotypes there
are so useless and silly.
What happens whenever I try to do that though
is I wind up inadvertently reinforcing the myths.
I mean, I always try to tell people
"Look, the reason the sky is bigger here
is 'cause we got no trees."
Cowboys supposedly stink
and it is hot nearly all the damn time.
Texas observed.
Man: (singing indistinctly)
Molly: Texas is a mosaic of cultures
which overlap in several parts of the state and form layers,
with the darker layers on the bottom.
(rattlesnake rattling)
The cultures are black, Chicano, Southern,
freak, suburban and shit kicker.
Shit kicker is dominant.
Texas is not a civilized place.
Texans shoot one another a lot.
Different colors and types of Texans
do not like one another nor do they pretend to.
(moos)
Texas is just like every place else except more so.
There's this sort of slightly pie-eyed exaggeration
about everything in the state.
Molly: It is different.
Forrest: Texas is more America than America is, you know.
It's everything about the American self-identity
on steroids.
(rock music playing)
Texas has always been the national laboratory
for bad government. I mean, if you wanna see
a bad idea tried, we've tried it.
The Texas public policy is kind of like Hungarian wine.
It does not travel well.
You should not try taking it across the Red River.
Molly was sort of prescient when it came
to describing Texas
and some of the things that go on there.
Well, Carl Parker always said,
"If you took all the fools out of the legislature,
it would not be a representative body anymore."
Moose: Whether the government is necessarily bad
as she described it, of course, depends upon your point of view,
but from hers, it certainly was,
and I think there are people in Texas who hope
that she hasn't, uh, predicted it for all of time.
Molly: We're really kind of proud and excited,
those of us who are Texas traditionalists.
The, uh, house speaker is under grand jury investigation.
(scattered laughter)
And not that we wish him ill in any way,
but it would be such a great renewal of a fine tradition.
Uh, we've had, um, five of our last seven
have been indicted for one thing or another.
And actually, there was a guy in there who was not indicted,
um, he was shot to death by his wife.
(laughter)
Although she was indicted, she was not convicted.
(laughter)
Because in Texas, we recognize public service when we see it.
(laughter and applause)
Molly knew how power was organized in the state
because she grew up in the community
where power lived in Texas, in River Oaks.
Andy: We moved to Chevy Chase in River Oaks,
and there was a little deal says, "The Ivins are moving."
It was all in line of age and I was there
with my bats and balls and things to play with.
And Molly was next with her books.
So even at that age, already Molly had been tagged
as being, uh, the bookworm, the book girl,
the girl who studied, the girl who read.
And I think Sara was there with makeup,
and then Mag with pots and pans,
and Daddy with the big sack that said "mortgage"
on the back.
Sara: When Molly was born, Dad named her Mary.
And my mother said, "Oh, gosh, that's so common."
"If it's good enough for the mother of God,
it's good enough for my daughter."
That's what my dad said.
Molly changed her own name.
She was tired of Mary.
And Molly fit her so much better.
I think I had quite a happy childhood.
My recollection is I spent most of it
up in trees, reading books.
Sara: We always called her "The Mole."
Andy: Daddy said, "The Mole was always in her hole,"
because she was just a near recluse growing up.
She'd go up in her room and read.
There was a period of time where Dad adored us
as little girls, but I guess that pre-teen years,
and when Molly was in seventh and eighth grade,
horrible years.
Marty: Her mother would say, "This is Molly, our smart child
and this is Sara, our beautiful child."
As a result, Molly grew up thinking she was ugly
and Sara grew up thinking that she was dumb.
Being bigger than your average human being, um...
(laughter)
...kind of made me ineligible early on
for the norms of Southern womanhood.
(laughter)
They put me on the basketball team when I was four.
(laughter)
Sara Speights: She was six-feet tall
by the time she was 12.
And it made her painfully shy.
And she was not only tall, she was big-boned.
And by the time she was 13 or 14,
she had those marvelous bazooms.
And that was terribly painful to her.
I always felt like a St. Bernard with a bunch of greyhounds.
(laughter)
A Clydesdale amongst thoroughbreds.
Growing up in East Texas in that era,
your choice of role models was damn short.
We had had one woman governor,
Ma Ferguson. She succeeded her husband Pa
after he got impeached for good cause.
(laughter)
Molly: She ran for re-election on her own
and she was elected in her own right.
Her platform was, uh, she wanted to outlaw
the teaching of Latin in the public schools of Texas,
on the grounds that the Bible is written in English
and if English was good enough for Jesus,
it's good enough for...
(laughter)
Then of course, the only other role models available
were the Kilgore Rangerettes.
In 1956, that was a big turning point
in Molly's and my relationship as sisters, close sisters.
It was because she went to a totally private school,
and I went to a totally public school.
Muffie: St. John's was a private independent school.
It was racially segregated
as everything was in those days.
And Molly came to St. John's in about the eighth grade.
Molly was a standout from the beginning
in terms of her verbal sophistication.
And we could all tell this really smart girl
had come to class.
Marg: There she is.
Molly and I were both involved in the journalism activities
at our high school.
And we produced, uh, a paper
that came out biweekly.
We were both kind of feeling like outsiders
at St. John's School.
Molly: May 9, 1959.
It is only a few months before my 15th birthday,
and I feel as old as Methuselah, and just as dead.
Music, cigarettes, my Bible comfort me.
Writing it all out is still the greatest comfort I know.
When I was 15 or 16,
the only thing I could do was write.
I mean, it's the only talent I've ever had.
And the only interest I had, um, besides literature
was current affairs,
so I just sort of fell naturally backwards in journalism.
My dream was to become a famous foreign correspondent.
I think I had seen a movie starring Humphrey Bogart
in a trench coat.
Who are we puttin' our papers for? You?
You? You?
It's not enough anymore to give 'em just news.
They want comics, contests, puzzles.
They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends,
and influence the future.
Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses,
interpretation of dreams so they can win
on the numbers lotteries.
And if they accidentally stumble on the first page,
news.
Molly: I thought that wandering around the world,
being paid princely sums to have fabulous adventures
in exotic places sounded like a great way to make a living.
And that was what I wanted.
I was lucky enough to have gone to school in France
when I was younger, when I was 14.
And I think that's a wonderful age,
particularly if you grow up in a place
as provincial as East Texas,
to have your mind just taken and sort of pulled open
by the realization that the world is full of people
who aren't very much like you and everybody you know.
Marcia: I think her preparation in French
was part of a package of her ambition
that you couldn't be a foreign correspondent
if you couldn't speak another language
and hadn't been around.
Andy: I would always walk with Molly home
and she would walk pretty fast and she'd always say,
"I walk fast because I look up on the horizon,
I look way out."
And, you know, that's kind of her take on life, too.
She had a vision that was upward.
Sara: We appeared to be a healthy, normal family,
and I think we were,
but every family has their skeletons.
Well, as I got to know Molly better,
I began to realize what her family life was like.
Kaye: Her father was autocratic
and he was the master of the ship to some extent.
Molly: Yeah, my old man, um, was in the oil business
and, uh, real right wing.
Kaye: Jim Ivins was chairman of the board of Tenneco Inc.
And Molly swears that she had heard in her living room
discussions about how to fix the oil market.
Sara: When Dad came home from work, by God,
everything should have been "ship shape in Bristol fashion".
He'd expect a three-course meal, and they'd have cocktail hour.
Speights: Molly described to me a routine
in which her father would come home
and they'd have a couple of martinis,
and then the sniping would start.
Sara: He went into a rage when he drank too much.
Daddy, you would say, "Jump."
And I'd say, "How high?"
And Molly'd say, "Let me think about this,"
and say, "Nope, not gonna do it."
Molly dubbed him, "The General."
General Jim.
She began to disagree with her father about politics
and then what they considered the radical direction
that she was going in her thinking.
Molly: It may be that my politics are the result
of some teenage rebellion
that's just lasted for 35 years.
(laughter)
But I suspect that, um, they started...
and this is true of most other liberals, with race.
We all grew up in a Texas
where there was institutionalized racism.
You couldn't go to a public building,
you couldn't go to a restaurant that had black people
unless they were service people.
I went all the way through high school
-in segregated schools. -My high school was huge.
It was 3,000 students. There were no blacks.
The thing about growing up anywhere in the south
before the Civil Rights Movement was that you, sooner or later,
became aware that grown ups were lying to you.
I remember being told not to drink
out of that fountain there, it's dirty.
Well, we lived in the white side of town.
And the white fountain was always covered
with chewing gum and little kids' grubby paws marks.
And the colored fountain was clearly the cleaner fountain.
People just didn't talk about it.
It was one of those things you didn't talk about.
You could read the newspapers for days
and most places wouldn't have any coverage
of the Civil Rights Movement.
The East Texas Civil Rights Movement, we call it,
"Nobody famous ever came."
(laughter)
Martin Luther King never came, Stokely never came,
freedom writers never came, CBS never came.
Goddamn.
It was always hot and we were always scared
and there was nothing glamorous about it.
I was so scared, I wet my pants every time I got arrested.
Singer: ♪ I'm going to do it up ♪
Andy: I used to live in the house, above the garage.
So, I walk in there one time.
And there's a black man sitting on this black couch
and obviously it was a friend of Molly's,
which, you know, it was kind of foreign
to have a black man in your house as a guest.
We had maids.
Sara: The black guy was swimming in the pool
-when my father drove up. -(car door closes)
Oh, my God, and all hell was raised.
My father and I had some real lulus.
We got into one of the screaming matches.
You know what? This can only happen with people
in your own family.
Sara: I remember him raging, you know,
about the black man in the swimming pool
and how much money he spent on her education
for her to be so bold as to do this and that.
I screamed at him, "You are worse than Hitler!"
To which my old man responded,
"And what the hell was so bad about him?"
(crowd laughs)
Sara: He was just outraged.
I mean, he was a man who had risen
to the top of the power world.
He could control everybody in this big company
but he couldn't control his own daughter,
and it infuriated him.
So he was mad at her all the time.
(jazz music playing)
Molly: I wanted very much to go somewhere up north or back east,
someplace where people talked about books and ideas
or something besides the weather and football
all the time.
(jazz music playing)
Sara: Not only my sister and my mother went to Smith,
my grandmother went to Smith.
(chuckles) Can you imagine anything,
anything more WASP than your grandmother,
your mother, and yourself,
all having gone to the same college.
Anne: Molly, being a third-generation Smith,
understood the value of that education.
When you graduate from Smith, doors open.
Molly: To be a Texan in Massachusetts,
was to automatically have about 20 IQ points
subtracted immediately as soon as you opened your mouth
and to have it sort of assumed that you were probably
a bit of a barbarian.
She said to me once, "Anne, I'll always be a Texan."
But she knew how to wear a Smith gloss, so to speak.
In my day at Smith, the girls all wore
knee socks and penny loafers
and had those McMillan colored blouses with circle pins.
I didn't fit in at Smith but then I'd never fit in anywhere
so that wasn't an unusual experience.
Anne: I think many of the women at that time,
brilliant, wonderful women,
were thinking along the lines of,
"Well, what are my choices?"
I can be a teacher, I can be a nurse,
I can be a secretary.
Or I can be the wife of a prominent businessman
or prominent doctor."
Before us were these choices
where they weren't really that good.
I aspired to be an intellectual myself.
Um, I had hopes of becoming a beatnik
but it didn't work out. It's really hard
to be a beatnik at Smith.
(jazz music playing)
Molly: And I always dreamed of becoming,
uh, you know, a martyr, uh, to fearless journalism,
to crusading journalism, to telling the truth
and damning the consequences.
So I went to work at The Houston Chronicle,
I had actually been working there summers as an intern.
That was where I started.
I worked for The Houston Chronicle
on the city desk as a reporter
and I sat right next to Molly Ivins.
There was this, you know, brilliant woman
who was on her way to graduate school at Columbia University.
If you can just envision a woman who was that smart,
she spoke this upper income East Coast dialect
that was inflected with her French.
She'd lived in France.
The closest I could get to how Molly Ivins came across
was Jacqueline Kennedy.
Singer: ♪ Yeah ♪
Moose: The late '60s and '70s was a time when...
those in journalism went from the people
who had covered World War II,
who referred to the government as "we," to the people
who grew up in the Vietnam era,
in the Civil Rights era,
who referred to the government as "they."
Molly: I came in the very first part of the '60s.
We were the ones who worked in the Civil Rights Movement
and joined the Peace Corps.
Seeing how much things can change,
and how fast things can change,
and how much good government can do
in being part of that change.
We told the leadership of The Chronicle, the editors,
that we wanted to do a piece about the disparities in race.
It was a major story about what it was like
to be poor and black in Houston.
And Molly Ivins had done that with Carlton Carl.
The problem was The Houston Chronicle was an arm
of the white oligarchy.
And Molly wrote some very, very pointed articles.
I know The Houston Chronicle felt that
she had bitten the hand that had fed them.
One went into journalism, not to get rich or famous.
Nobody ever thought you could get rich or famous
working for a newspaper.
You went to work for a newspaper because you could have fun
and do good and raise hell and learn all the time.
It was a lot better than selling shoes or insurance.
Molly had guts. She was saying to herself
that people of color in this country
live a life of a certain kind of hell
and that people in power were then and are now,
basically white and, yes, basically male.
And her attitude was, "Damn it! Somebody has gotta stand up,
look them in the eye and speak truth," and she did.
(country music playing)
Dan: When Molly is moving into journalism the first time,
it isn't just a case of it's predominantly men,
it's overwhelmingly men.
Molly: When I started in journalism,
my parents were somewhat horrified.
It was still considered not a respectable calling.
The old Hildy Johnson school of reporter
was still around, hats on the back of their heads,
ties askew, Cutty Sark in a coffee cup, you know,
playing gin rummy at the city desk.
Women did not have a fair shot.
I mean, you could get hired,
but you would automatically be sent to,
they then called the women's sections,
"the snake pit."
You would be sent to the "snake pit"
to write about food, fluff, and fashion
for the rest of your natural life,
if you didn't have an extra credential, an extra edge,
which is why I got a master's degree.
Singer: ♪ Hey, hey ♪
♪ Well she was Walking down the street ♪
Marilyn: Molly had a job offer at the Minneapolis Tribune.
And I think she came there because she knew she could do
other kinds of reporting than women's topics.
Molly: I was the first woman police reporter in Minneapolis,
not because I was the first woman reporter they'd hired,
but because I was the first woman reporter
who was six feet tall.
(laughter)
Molly: And it really does make a difference
if you tower over your editors.
(laughter)
Molly: No one ever looked at me and said,
"Oh, you poor, sweet, dainty, fragile little thing.
We couldn't possibly send you out to cover a riot."
It was always, "Ivins, get your ass out there."
(indistinct chatter)
(jazz music playing)
Marilyn: Those late '60s and early '70s
were not an easy time for reporters,
and Molly and mostly guys were out there on the street
doing this reporting.
Singer: ♪ You wake up One morning... ♪
Molly: July 7, 1968.
Dear Mum and Dad,
Gad what a week.
On the glorious 4th, I got the bejesus blasted
out of me by a 12 cannon.
I got maced during a small riot
at a George Wallace rally.
No damn fun. Couldn't see for two hours.
Stupid goddamn cop.
Singer: ♪ You didn't realize ♪
Man: Molly Ivins, why did the Minneapolis Police
name their mascot pig after you?
Molly: (laughs)
Um, I've always thought, uh, accepted that as a great honor.
I'm very proud of it, but I'm not entirely sure
it was intended to be flattering.
I had written some stories about police brutality
when I was a police reporter in Minneapolis.
(jazz music playing)
Marilyn: Molly came upon the idea
after being out on the streets
to do a series of articles about these protesters.
They were the Young Radicals of the Twin Cities in that time.
(jazz music playing)
Marilyn: But she got herself in some trouble with the editors.
because it was too personal and she was too closely tied
to her sources.
Man: Memo regarding Molly Ivins.
The article, to put it bluntly, was overwritten.
I hate first-person journalism.
Molly needs to learn.
Marilyn: Our city editor, Frank Premack, said,
"You've done these Young Radicals but now,
what about some Young Conservatives?"
We were taught in journalism school,
you had to present both sides
and let the audience decide
what was the truth here.
And she didn't really want to do that.
First of all, there's no such thing as objectivity,
and everybody in journalism knows it,
and I think we hoist ourselves on our own petard constantly
by pretending that we're objective,
when there is no such thing.
How you see the world depends on where you stand
and who you are. There's nothing any of us
can do about that.
So, my solution has been to let my readers know
where I stand, and they can take that with a grain of salt
or a pound of salt, depending on their preferences.
(upbeat music playing)
Molly: When I left the Minneapolis Tribune ,
I thought that I was rejecting establishment journalism
permanently, I mean, the whole idea of objective reporting,
which I felt was horse-pucky, um, and the idea that I might
ever go to work for the New York Times or win the Pulitzer Prize
or have some kind of, you know, career in journalism
that would get recognition, um, I was giving all that up
to go back to Texas and work for this funny little
one-horse newspaper and help bring about
good things in the world.
(country music playing)
Singer: ♪ I'm going to Texas And pretty soon ♪
♪ I'll be 'neath That lone star moon ♪
♪ I got the Texas boogie ♪
Lou: Molly arrived here from Minnesota in an Oldsmobile
that would only go forward. It had no reverse.
It was kind of a metaphor for what she was about.
Making yet another shrewd career move,
I fifthed my salary to edit The Texas Observer
and that was my chance to attend
the finest graduate school of journalism in America,
Ronnie Dugger's Texas Observer.
Ronnie: I was the editor and founder of The Texas Observer,
which, to be a liberal in Texas at that time,
was far worse than being a communist or a child molester.
(jazz music playing)
Kaye: My first initial impression was that Molly
was huge, I'm very small
and she was six feet
and large-boned and just a giant personality.
Now, this didn't even seem strange to us at the time,
it was 1970, but she came with her own six pack of beer
for the interview.
(jazz music playing)
Kaye: Ronnie had let two women in their early 20s
edit the only liberal publication in the state
and one of the few in the United States.
I remember visiting Molly
when she worked for The Texas Observer,
and she lived in the tiniest little shack in Austin.
I just was incredulous on what little she lived on.
I mean, she lived like a pauper. I couldn't stand it.
And she had the dog named Shit.
(jazz music playing)
Kaye: Molly and I, we worked side-by-side every day.
I would get my stories done early
because I always needed my sleep,
but Molly would always pull all-nighters.
Ronnie: Kaye was there holding down the fort.
And Molly came in like a house on fire.
She was immediately the riot of the scene,
making riotous fun of the legislature.
(upbeat music playing)
Man: Every two years,
181 elected representatives of the people of Texas
convene here at the State Capitol in Austin.
Molly: My first session was in 1971 and I walked
onto the floor of the Texas House of Representatives
as in it looks sort of like the first day of school.
There were a hundred and fifty men,
all slapping each other on the back
and patting each other on the butt and meeting
and greeting and carrying on,
and I saw one old boy dig another old boy
in the ribs with his elbow and say, "Hey, boy.
You should see what I found myself last night,"
and she don't talk neither! Ha ha ha!"
And I just, you know, at first, of course,
I affected to be appalled, but I can't get better material
than the Texas legislature. How can I not write it funny?
Cecile: When you're a progressive in Texas,
if you couldn't laugh about things,
you weren't gonna last.
Molly was the source of all information
about how to understand and to kind of put
into some kind of context
the stupidity of politics in Texas.
When I first started writing about these bozos,
and I'd say something in The Texas Observer like,
you know, "Representative so and so...
runs on all fours and has the IQ
of an adolescent pissant." And, uh, I'd wait for him
to come by with a horse whip, and all that ever happened was
I'd see him in the capitol the next day and they'd say,
"Baby, you put my name in your paper."
She had a sense of humor that would keep you
from being angry at her very long
because she would take that pen and stick in you
and make you realize that you were taking yourself
way too seriously and many times you didn't know what the heck
you were talking about, and Molly did.
(upbeat music playing)
Molly: I think of my time at The Texas Observer,
the way some people think of their college years
as just this happy, golden,
sunshine-filled, beer-drenched...
(laughter)
...wonderful, wonderful time.
Having more fun than the law allows.
(jazz music playing)
Sara: After the legislature was over, the legislators
often retired to a bar.
The liberals tended to go to Scholz,
which is a German beer garden
and the Republicans tended to go to more of a traditional bar
with mixed drinks,
but Molly would go along and meet them there.
One reason that Molly was let into that club
is because she'd go drink with them for hours and hours
and hours on end.
She would stand up belly-to-belly with them
and drink beer to... as long as they could.
I saw her drink a lot of men under the table
just drinking beer.
Molly: August 30, 1973, twenty-nine years old.
Feeling curiously empty...
as though my past were dull
and had all happened some time ago
across a gulf of drunks.
Came very close to becoming an alcoholic.
Probably am one.
Possibly Scholz chums not the best folk
in the world but, God, I do enjoy having a crowd.
Sara: The alcoholism drove her crazy
but not necessarily enough to stop very often.
She wanted to change
but she wanted some other things more, I mean,
she wanted to write well and she wanted
to influence people.
(jazz music playing)
Molly: The one figure in my political education
was John Henry Faulk.
Don: John Henry Faulk was a native Texan.
He was a humorist of the Mark Twain
and, you know, the Will Rogers school of political humor.
Johnny wound up with a radio show on CBS radio
and eventually made it in CBS television in the golden era.
Johnny's politics were very far to the left.
As result, he wound up, uh, being accused
of, uh, being a communist
and he was blacklisted.
Sara: If you go back and look at that McCarthy era,
people were scared to death in this country to do anything
for fear someone might think they were a communist
and they'd lose their job.
That's what happened to John Henry.
Molly: He was never able to get on the air again,
but that didn't shut up Johnny. He kept talking.
He was a great believer in the First Amendment.
A great believer.
Liz: Molly felt that John Henry was her mentor,
and I think it was because of John Henry's devotion
to the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union,
and the Bill of Rights
and his ability to laugh at politicians.
He and Molly were sort of peas in a pod
on their attitudes toward freedom of speech.
The point of the First Amendment is to protect speech
that you don't like, and Molly learned all of that from John.
She was like a sponge, uh, around John Henry.
Molly: A man who taught me how to have fun
while fighting for freedom was the late John Henry Faulk.
You kinda gotta devote a little energy and time and thought,
uh, to, uh, making it fun and all I can say is that, um,
a slightly kinky worldview and, uh, consumption of beer
-often help in this endeavor. -(laughter)
And just to give you one example, a few years ago,
we had a classic situation down in Texas.
The legislature had taken a fit of communism and voted
to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a state holiday.
As you can imagine, it upset the Klan, and of course,
if you are a civil libertarian like myself,
you naturally have to stand up for the right of these dimwitted
nincompoops to spew whatever vicious drivel they want to
because it's their goddamn right under the First Amendment.
Molly: Wearing their little pointy hats
on their little pointy heads,
they were met by several thousand citizens
of Austin lining the sidewalks, both sides,
who mooned them as they marched.
(laughter and applause)
It made a real nice effect, it was kind of like
-a wave at a baseball stadium. -(laughter)
Roy Head: ♪ Lemme tell you a story ♪
♪ Every man oughta know ♪
Dan: Anytime where you operate journalistically
at the levels that Molly operated on,
there's a decision to be made of what you're going to be,
an insider or an outsider.
Molly: I have always been something
of an outsider journalist because my political opinions
aren't popular in my home state, but I have, over the years,
socialized with Texan politicians.
The advantage of the insider game
is that you get access.
Access is important.
Can you get an interview with the president?
Can you get an interview with the governor?
Can you get an interview with the Speaker of the House?
Access is overrated.
If you live the inside game and you are friends
with all the people that you cover,
and you go to their dinner parties
and part of your caché is that you know
where their kids go to school and maybe your kids
go to the same schools and you know all the same people
and you circulate in all the same places,
that's great. You probably have a great highfalutin' life
among the elite of our country.
That doesn't necessarily position you well
to astutely cover the elite of our country.
I already had friends.
They were friends of mine before they went
into politics and public life.
Ann Richards was a camping buddy of mine.
Wasn't my fault she went into politics
and got elected governor.
I already knew her.
You see, Molly is not afraid of anybody.
And Molly doesn't owe anybody anything.
That makes her a very powerful force.
Physically, Molly is not diminutive.
Man: (laughs) Correct.
So, if somebody's gonna take Molly on...
I mean, they're not only not gonna take her on
because she's gonna win the day with words
but she could deck 'em.
(laughs)
Of course, it was different once Mom was in public office,
and Molly was still on the outside looking in.
I was working very hard to not ask her for anything,
like, even an interview.
Um, so basically, I didn't talk to her much
while she was governor.
-No, it really was just awful. -Don't talk to her.
-She makes it up. -All: (laughing)
This is the last person you wanna talk to.
Let me tell you.
Molly Ivins and I have been through a lot together.
And when she tells a story, I know that I was there...
but it doesn't bear any resemblance
-to what happened. -Molly: You know, I believe...
As mom always said, you know,
it's never your enemies that'll get you, it's your friends.
Of course, we're here to salute Ann Richards.
I've known Ann Richards since both Ann and Exxon
were still humble.
(laughter)
(applause)
They were that rare breed of tough Texas women
who were also fantastically funny.
Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly.
The goodwill fashion statement.
(laughter)
I knew that this was an important event
to Molly tonight when I walked in and saw
that she had combed her hair.
(laughter)
They didn't hold anything back,
whether it was calling out racism, calling out sexism,
and they did it in a way that was incredibly effective.
As you know, Texas tends to be behind
the cultural curve and, um, this was in the early '70s,
and the women's movement had not quite made it
to the shores of the great state and there was a dinner party
in West Lake Hills.
(laughter)
And our friend, Tony Korioth, who's a wonderful man
but a terrible sexist, um...
got to talking about how driving home
from work that evening, he passed a young lady
on the street who had the most remarkable set of jugs
he and Tony Korioth had ever witnessed
in all his long years of jug watching.
And he described in great detail how they wiggled and jiggled,
and bounced and jounced.
And indeed, the whole sight had been so fascinating,
you know, he drove around the block,
took a second gander,
and again described how they wiggled and jiggled,
and bounced and jounced.
Um, you women will remember that
in those days, we had a wonderful social skill
when men introduce topics like that into conversation.
We would gaze off into the middle distance,
pretending not to be there.
And, uh, all the women at the table were gazing off
into the middle distance, pretending not to be there,
when suddenly Ann Richards said in clarion tones,
"Well, girls, have you seen any good dicks lately?"
(laughter)
(jazz music playing)
Kaye: Molly always freelanced, even at The Observer.
She did a whole lot of freelancing
for The New York Times and they were interested in her.
John: When I was the editor at The Times Book Review
in the early 1970s and was reading Molly
down in Texas and saying this extraordinary voice
is something that we have to have.
Molly: I had been asked to join The New York Times.
It was for me a chance to see daily journalism practiced
at a level of excellence
I don't think you can see anywhere else.
(jazz music playing)
This very tall, unusual woman with an accent
unlike any we had heard in the news room up to that time
arrived and began to walk around the premises
without any shoes on,
and she had a dog who's name you couldn't say there,
but it was actually Shit.
Marcia: When Molly went to The Times,
she imagined herself as being able to write
about things of importance.
I was sitting in the New York City Times
one day when I noticed a whole lot, a knot
of editors up around the desk,
uh, having a great scrum of concern, you could tell.
It looked sorta like an ant hill that you just been stepped on.
And you may recall that Elvis Presley died untimely,
and they are completely unprepared.
They didn't have anybody who knew
about Elvis Presley's kind of music.
So, they're looking across a whole acre
of reporters and, uh, you could see them decide,
"Ah-ha, Ivins. She talks funny. She'll know about Mr. Presley."
(upbeat music playing)
Molly: So, I wound up writing Elvis' obituary
for The New York Times. I had to refer to him throughout
as Mr. Presley. It was agonizing.
That's the style at The New York Times.
And the next day, they sold more newspapers
than they did after John Kennedy was assassinated,
so that even the editor of The New York Times
who had not quite, you know,
been culturally attuned to Elvis,
decided that we should send someone
to report on the funeral, and now,
I drew that assignment, what a scene it was.
Molly: Elvis Presley's fans came to Memphis today
by the thousands and thousands
to get a last glimpse of their idol.
They stood for hours, waiting to see the plump corpse
of the great rock 'n roll singer neatly laid out
in a cream-colored suit.
Memphis was awash with genuine emotion for three days.
It is too easy to dismiss it as tasteless.
It is not required that love be in impeccable taste.
When I've been standing in the checkout line
at the grocery store,
and if I really need to impress people,
I just let fall that I covered Elvis' funeral...
and, uh, boy, people just practically draw back with awe.
It may yet turn out to be my greatest claim to fame.
Victor: The paper was being run by Abe Rosenthal at the time,
who was very difficult, I think, a controlling boss.
Abe Rosenthal,
he actually called her into his office one time
and said that she was not showing proper respect
for The New York Times.
It's true, um, I was specifically told that, um,
I did not dress well, I'd laugh too loud,
and I walked around without my shoes on,
walked around bare foot at The New York City Times,
goddamn.
And then she got exiled out to Denver,
uh, to a one person bureau, Molly.
I was, um, Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for The Times.
I was the chief and the bureau.
(laughter)
And I had, uh, ran out in Mountain West for three years,
having a wonderful time covering all the mountain states
from the Canadian to the Mexican border, I loved it.
Loved... a great way to work for The New York Times
is to be at least a thousand miles away
from New York. Uh...
made a feature story for Mountain West,
that a fellow had "a beer gut that belonged
in the Smithsonian."
It turned up the next day in The New York Times
as "a man with a protuberant abdomen."
(laughter)
Which I felt did not have the same ring.
(laughter)
That every time she tried to do
what was the reason they hired her for,
it ran afoul of some unstated principle.
On another occasion, also writing a feature story
for Mountain West, I said,
"The fellow squawked like a two-dollar fiddle."
For reasons I shall never understand, it was changed to
"an inexpensive musical instrument."
(laughter)
Linda: They wanted Molly for the unique voice.
The Texas twang, the iconic class,
but then they wanted her to fit in to The Times
and, as we say in Texas, that dog don't hunt.
To write for that newspaper is to die the death
of a thousand cuts. At any rate...
-(jazz music playing) -(chicken clucking)
Molly: I was out west and, uh, I was writing a feature story
about this little town in New Mexico
where everybody raises chickens.
And about once a year they all get together,
everybody brings their chickens, and starting at sun-up,
they kill chickens, pluck chickens
and dress chickens all day long while drinking beer
and listening to country and western music,
and everybody sits at long tables
and they all work together and have a real fine time.
And, um...
I did, uh, put a line in my story
describing this event as a gang pluck.
(laughter)
A line knew I would not make The Times.
But I used to put things like that in my stories
to keep the guys on the copy desk amused.
And, um...
indeed, it never appeared in The New York Times,
but word of it got around
and it came to the attention of Abe Rosenthal.
Charles: This was a woman who hated authority
and that made you singularly inappropriate to get ahead
and prosper at The New York Times.
Finally Mr. Rosenthal got to the root of his ire,
he said, "But you wrote that story about that community
chicken slaughter out West." I said, "Yes, sir, I did."
He said, "You tried to call it a gang pluck."
(laughter)
I said, "Well, I thought it was a good line."
-He said, "Gang pluck." -(laughter)
I said, "Well, Abe, it's a play on words."
(laughter)
-He said, "Gang pluck." -(laughter)
That is a play on "gang fuck." You were trying to make
our readers think of the word "Fuck."
(laughter)
And I say, "Damn, Abe, you are a hard man to fool."
(laughter)
That's how I got...
(upbeat music playing)
♪ On the road again... ♪
Molly: I got a call from, uh, the Dallas Times Herald,
and what they said was, "Come home,
and we will give you absolute freedom.
You can write whatever you want, about whatever you want to
and you can say whatever you want to."
And, you know, in the newspaper business
it don't get a lot better than that.
Molly: It seems to me that in a country marked
by an extraordinary degree of mobility,
one is almost lucky these days to have a sense of place.
Ronnie Dugger always says,
"Home is where you understand the son bitches."
-And... -(laughter)
I understand the son bitches in Texas.
Plus, one feels one can make a difference in Texas,
as someone who is remotely of the liberal persuasion.
What the hell they need with one more liberal
in Berkeley, California, for God's sake.
Damn, it's good to be back home again.
Marty: When she went back to Texas, she consciously
constructed this persona of a good old girl
with a really strong, Texas accent.
In the beginning, it might have been a put on,
but as time went by, it became her.
Man: What is a bubba?
Molly: A bubba is a Texas good old boy,
also known as a red neck, a cedar chopper
or a shit kicker.
He goes to Baptist Church on Sunday morning,
he gets drunk on Saturday night, he plays 'D-I-V-O-R-C-E'
on his car radio.
Bubba hated seatbelts, Bubba gets mad
when you try to tell him he cannot drink and drive.
I can walk where I wanna walk...
-And I can walk where I want... -You sure can, help yourself.
-And... -Molly: You will often hear,
uh, people doing house debate on the house floor say,
"We can't vote for this bill, Bubba wouldn't like it."
You think Bubba is tough, you oughta meet his wife.
I remember one time I was in a honky-tonk
and, uh, there was a lady there wearing a blouse
of a such a bright pink
that when you close your eyes you could still see the color.
And it had many ruffles down the front
and a lot of very fine rhinestone buttons.
And I was looking at this confection
in some, uh... some, uh, bemusement.
And I said to her, "Golly, where did you get that blouse?"
And she picked up that hint of condescension,
she turned right back and said to me,
"Honey, it come from a couturier, JC Penney."
Don't mess with Bubbette.
Molly Ivins captured this East Texas dialect
and this Bubba talk, as she would call it.
And if you took that out, you'd be taking the soul
out of her columns.
Molly, I grew up in Texas and it's so good to hear you talk.
Bless your heart. Ain't it nice to hear someone speak normally.
(laughter)
Lou: Molly developed that extraordinary voice.
It was her professional Texan voice.
I mean, it's sort of like where Samuel Clemens
became Mark Twain.
It's where Molly Ivins became Molly Ivins.
(upbeat music playing)
(applause)
Molly: Last session, the big issue in Texas
was we had to reform the penal code.
We have in House of Representatives in Texas...
a state representative, Warren Chisum,
who is a bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa, Texas.
(laughter)
Warren immediately leaped to his seat, moved to reinstate
homosexual sodomy into the penal code.
I will read this to you, it's quite offensive to me
to have to read it in public.
The person commits an offense if a person engages
in the sexual act involving a sexual organ
of one person with the anus of another.
Then some constitutional scholar explains to Warren
that unless he also moves to reinstate
heterosexual sodomy,
this deal's gonna be held unconstitutional.
So, Warren... leaps to his feet again, moves
to reinstate heterosexual sodomy.
And an interesting debate ensued.
(laughter)
Debra Danburg: Mr. Chisum, you're trying to criminalize
behavior between
people of the opposite sex, is that correct?
-Uh, that's right. -Even if they're married?
More especially if they're married.
Even if they slip, is that right Mr. Chisum?
(laughter)
Warren: A violation of law is a violation of law.
And they probably would hang you for doing this
in my county if they caught you.
Molly: So in the end, all the guys in the house,
'cause probably everybody would thing they was perverts
if they didn't vote for this, and they did, and reinstated
heterosexual sodomy.
Warren was at the front mic with his, uh,
great ally... the two of them
high-fivin' and slappin' each other on the back,
having a big celebration and the press box
called over the sergeant at arms
and says, "Sergeant, you have to go over
and reprimand both those men."
Because under the provisions of the amendments just passed
by representative Chisum, it is now illegal for
a prick to touch an asshole
-in this state. -(laughter)
Sara: You know, Molly's fame grew over a period of time.
I mean, she'd sort became famous down at the capital,
then she sort of became famous around Texas,
but it mostly started when she started writing
her syndicated column.
Our next guest is one of the, uh,
most outspoken political columnists in the nation today.
And we have a collection of her writing.
It can be found in this just published book
entitled, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"
Well, let's talk about the title of the book here.
"Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"
What is that referring to?
Oh, when I first started writing my political column,
I felt impelled to describe the performance
of a local congressman by saying "If his IQ slips
any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."
-Letterman: Right. -(laughter)
It upset a lot of his supporters
and, uh, they cancelled their subscriptions
and threatened to start boycotts, and so my paper
took out billboards all around Dallas, Texas,
that said, "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?"
(upbeat music playing)
Man: Molly Ivins is attracting national attention.
That's because her first book
has hit The New York Times' best seller list.
She credits the Texas material but there seems to be
plenty for her to work with across state lines.
We need women like you in the senate, Molly.
-Woman: Why don't you run? -You know what they could
hang me with if I ran for governor.
-(laughter) -(applause)
Molly Ivins appeared in between 300 and 400 papers
at the height of her popularity.
She was in papers, I mean, all over the country.
She had a nationwide audience.
Harold: You've got legendary broadcast journalists,
but how many legendary print journalists are there
who would have gotten treated like a rock star
on a rally stage when introduced,
that's a real shortlist, but Molly Ivins
has got to be at the top of it.
Man: Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday,
you'll see something in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
you'll never see on TV.
Molly Ivins uncensored.
Molly: We were talking about Texas politicians that day.
That motley assortment of dweebs and dorks,
twerps and bozos in Austin.
(beeps)
Love it.
Harold: But on the downside, you know,
maybe some of the things she said did cost her.
Your say in your foreword that the Herald's
taken substantial heat for publishing your stuff.
How bad has it been over the years?
Well, uh, I don't look at the letters
written on big chief tablets in red crayon.
Those, I find, are...
-(laughing) -...thorns that will
discourage you if you peruse them.
Betsy: The bags of mail that we received weekly
from her syndicate had letters
to the editors saying, "I hate Molly Ivins,
get her out of this paper. I'm gonna get rid
of my subscription, she's horrible."
Man: You're no Will Rogers, okay? I've read you and you'll
take anything and warp, twist, and distort it to suit
your agenda.
Molly: For years, I've been a maverick and an outsider,
and the resident reprehensible communist here in Texas.
-Morning. -Woman: Ivins, I heard you
-one night on Booknotes. -Yes.
Woman: I listened about five minutes.
-Mm-hmm. -Woman: Well, I'll tell you.
This is something I have wanted to say for a long time.
You are a left-winged, mean-spirited, blind
and democratic jackass.
Betsy: She received really nasty, nasty things.
There was one case that they did talk
to the authorities about it.
Harold: Molly got death threat. She got threatening letters.
You got to have a thick skin if you're going to be
in the public eye.
That's something I've been thinking about lately.
I think there's two different kinds of humor.
There's a kind of wonderful gentle humor,
Garrison Keillor does it,
that draws people together
and makes us recognize our common humanity
and foibles and how silly we all are.
And it really unifies people. Then there's another kind
of humor that holds people up to contempt and ridicule.
That's what I do.
What was unique about her was that she was not afraid
to be angry.
But she did it in a way that, you know, made a case.
She made a case that she was doing it
because it was deserved.
And she made you laugh while she was doing it.
You remembered her one liners and...
I just don't know anybody else who does that now.
I mean, I wish. I wish I could do that.
Crowd: (chanting)
Patrick: Friends, this election is about a religious war
going on in this country.
It is a cultural war and the Buchanan brigades
are enlisted all the way to a great Republican
comeback victory in November.
Crowd: (cheering)
Molly: Bush was challenged by Patrick Buchanan,
I know that many of you did not care for the tenor
of Pat's speech at the Republican convention.
I personally think it probably sounded better
in the original German.
(laughter)
Ronnie: I think she was willingly cruel
against people she was making fun of.
I noticed in a book I was reading from, uh,
of hers the other day
that she said, uh, in her acknowledgements,
"And thank you very much, my targets.
You make it all worthwhile.
And without you, I wouldn't be anywhere."
She had targets,
and she was mean to them.
Molly: I never worry about biting the hand that feeds me.
You know, I think you're much better off telling the truth.
Why would I, you know, why... I've never worried about
offending the powers that be.
The point was not really that she was funny.
She was a shock to the political culture.
I'll tell you frankly, American politics at this point
is corrupt.
What we have is a system of legalized bribery.
Well, the oldest saying in politics, of course, is
"You got to dance with them what brung you."
Molly: And these people get elected to public office,
none of them go into public life
to, you know, become whores.
But the fact is, they can't get elected
without special interest money,
and when they get in office, they dance with them
what brung them.
They vote with the people who gave them the money.
(bell dinging)
Anthony: Molly saw it coming and she saw what would happen
if big business gets and open check book.
Corporations are people, my friend.
Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.
-Man: (laughs) -Where do you think it goes?
Dan: Politicians want to create a narrative,
and Molly Ivins threatened the narratives.
One of the mistakes we make when we try to talk
about politics in this country is we keep pretending
that the political spectrum runs from right to left.
It doesn't.
It runs from top to bottom.
We live in a country where the richest one percent
of the people in this nation control forty percent
of the total wealth.
And those numbers get worse every year.
Molly: The middle class has been getting shafted
for years now.
People look around it and they really are frightened,
they're confused.
(indistinct chanting)
Molly: And some of that is being deliberately milked
by a particularly ugly kind of demagogic politics.
I will build a security fence.
Crowd: (chanting) Build the wall! Build the wall!
Molly: People saying, "Well, it's all because of
illegal Mexican immigrants."
(laughs) I'm just sitting here going, "Do what?"
We need to fix this system so that when people get elected
to public office, they have no one to dance with
but us.
Because we're the people who brung them to the show.
(tractor revving)
Andy: I'm not political.
Basically, I'd call Molly up and say who am I supposed
to vote for?
So, anytime that somebody goes,
"Oh, I, you know, I don't agree with what she said,
what your sister says is a bunch of bullshit."
Well, you know, buddy, you're the one that's the idiot.
You hadn't read everything that she's written then.
She had opinions on everything.
And not necessarily were they all over here
in the total left.
I mean, she had some opinions that went up to the middle
and over a little bit to the right
just because there were common sense opinions.
In my opinion, the Democratic leadership is, um, gutless
to an extraordinary extent. I just find them
incredibly wishy-washy.
I have a friend down in Texas, Jim Hightower,
who always says, "Why would you wanna be
in the middle of the road?
There's nothing in the middle of the road
but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."
Molly could be very rough on progressives,
including my old boss, Bill Clinton, who loved her.
Lou: You know, Bill Clinton would call Molly
at late hours of the night, and Molly was critical
of Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton: The nature of the poverty population
is so different now
that I am convinced, we have got to be willing
to experiment, to try to work to find ways
to break this cycle of dependency that keeps
dragging folks down.
And I've spoken to a number of other, uh, Democrats
and some think I'm right and some don't.
Woman: Today's sermon is for the brethren and sistren
in the media.
The reporting on the welfare reform bill
has been awful.
It would shove at least one million more
American children into poverty.
(indistinct chatter)
Molly: And for the first time in my adult life
I am planning not to vote for President.
Clinton, then normally the one I would have voted for,
in signing the so called Welfare Reform Bill,
hurt children for his own political advantage
and somebody has to hold a grudge about that.
And I do.
Kaye: Molly had a very strong sense of injustice.
She hated anybody who would in effect kick a cripple.
We live in a world where the shit flows downhill.
And the people on the bottom are drowning in it.
And there are a whole lot of people in this country
who are going along with their noses
barely above water.
And every time there is just the slightest, little change
in their circumstances,
if they lose healthcare,
or if they lose a minimum wage job,
then they sink back down.
It's the people at that level that I think of
when I say "Okay, I'm gonna vote for, you know,
the crook instead of the idiot,"
or the idiot instead of the crook,
depending on how we're going that year.
Um, but, um, it seems to me that both candidates
have now so richly displayed their indifference
to the fate of people at the bottom of the heap, that, um,
I don't think it makes much difference.
Man: So, you're exercising your right not to vote?
Mm-hmm, I am.
And I don't want something on the ballot that says,
"None of the above."
I want something on the ballot that says,
"It makes me vomit."
-Hi, darling. -Hi.
You need some books signed?
Lou: The private Molly was a complex woman,
at times I think lonely.
She was surrounded by people but lived always by herself.
Writing is a very solitary pursuit of course.
And you sit there all by yourself
with your little machine,
typing away for years on end.
And then, once you have a book, they make you go out
-and... -(laughter)
Ellen: Molly was shy, which people are always shocked
to discover.
It wasn't easy for her to cope
with the pressure
and the intensity of her increasing popularity.
Kaye: More and more people wanted her to be
the Molly Ivins.
Myra: I think there are times when she became the persona
that people wanted her to be.
It was a need to supply the laughter
and make other people feel good.
It surely must've been wearing for her.
Man: During the last couple of decades,
the role of women in journalism has changed a lot.
But while women have more parity in the news room,
it's still very hard on private lives, uh...
-Molly: Yeah. -...nearly, half of women
-journalists are unmarried. -Molly: Right.
Why is that?
The potential for trouble is very strong
if you screw, either your colleagues,
your sources, or your competition.
What that means is,
since practically everybody you know is either a colleague,
a competitor, or a source,
that, you know, when the plumber comes to fix the sink,
-you're taking a close look. -(laughter)
Your options are limited.
There were some men in her life.
Um, I don't know that that's everybody's business
but I knew lots of men who are very attracted to Molly.
And the going joke was they couldn't out drink her.
You write about men, you like men that
are heavy drinkers and womanizers.
-Oh, no. (laughs) -No?
I said I like men who like whisky and women.
-Oh, okay. -(laughs) That is different
from saying you like heavy drinkers
and womanizers.
Do you regret not uh, having a family,
doing other things?
Um, yeah.
I've... I think that not having children is something
I will always regret, on the other hand I don't think
it's gonna ruin my life.
I don't know, I just, um, just never...
uh, somebody asked me once why I never got married, in fact
the direct question was "Why are you an old maid?"
(laughter)
And the easy answer is no one I had liked
a whole lot ever asked me.
And it seems it's kind of silly to get married to someone
who you didn't like a whole lot.
She didn't believe they could be attracted to her.
Molly didn't think she was lovable.
And that was the saddest part of all.
And I think she was partly afraid that if
she became too involved in a relationship
that some men would try to control her.
And she really believed in what she was doing.
(dramatic music playing)
Man: There is some thought that, God help us,
the next president of the United States...
Oh.
...might be the current governor of Texas.
-This here is possible. -man: And since we know
-so little about the man... -Mm-hmm.
...I was hoping that you might fill us in.
-Yeah, I'd be happy to. Um... -(laughter)
...George W., uh, whom they call either Dubya,
by his middle name, that's
-D-U-B-Y-A, Dubya, um... -(laughs)
Or shrub, the little Bush.
-Man: (laughter) -Um...
(applause)
In 1999, Molly and Lou Dubose wrote the first book
they wrote about George Bush.
It was called, "Shrub: The Short But Happy
Political Life of George W. Bush."
Lou: The point of Shrub was we wanted to tell
what was behind the image of George W. Bush.
-Woman: Hey, Mr. Bush. -George W. Bush: You bet 'ya.
-Shake his hand, yay. -Hey, buddy.
Bush: Thank you all.
-Man: Yeah. -Molly: He's real affable.
As we would say in our quaint Texas fashion,
he's just affable out the ass.
-(laughter) -Um, and he wanders
around the state being affable, East, West, North, and South.
You cannot find hardly anybody who dislikes him.
Including me.
Lou: It was George Bush's policies,
it was what he did to the little people,
that Molly wanted to get at.
My guiding principle will be government
if necessary but not necessarily government.
(applause)
Molly: There's a lot of ways to look at George W.
And I look at him and mostly what I see is Texas.
Unlike his daddy, who is of course
a classic example of an upper class elite
Eastern WASP, uh, W is
culturally identified with the state of Texas very strongly.
And the characteristics I see that strike me
as so familiar are anti-intellectualism...
religiosity, by which I mean not just belief
but the public display of belief...
and machismo.
And, uh, they're all attractive
to fairly large swaths of voters.
Man: She had this knowledge in the back of her head
that when George W. Bush was elected president
that, you know, they're gonna try this
on a national scale, and here's what happens.
Welcome to the White House, the way I see it is...
mi casa es su casa.
(applause)
Molly: There's an old country western song
called "Lubbock (On Everything)".
And sometimes I think that what we are now watching
is Texas On Everything.
Molly understood that this was going to metastasize.
That Texas politics were gonna become the politics
of the nation, which I think is, by and large, true.
Molly Ivins on the road, promoting her book called,
"Shrub."
Uh, if you don't mind me asking, I know it's been on the papers,
you're kind of going through your own personal battle.
Molly: I am and it's going real well.
Uh, I have a case of cancer and, uh, I'm in...
almost up to round four of chemotherapy.
She'd been diagnosed with a really nightmare-ish kind of
breast cancer that very, very, very few women survive
even a year.
This extraordinary amount of
love and support, and sympathy and prayer
I've gotten is really remarkable.
And sometimes I feel guilty
because I really don't feel that bad.
Molly being Molly, she was...
made fun of her own disease.
Molly said the doctors told her the tumor was large
with undefined edges,
and she said she was gonna name it "Newt."
Molly: "Uh, I'm telling you,
you can laugh your way through cancer, it is possible."
Man: Yeah.
When Molly first found out that she had cancer,
I'll be honest, my great fear was
that Molly wouldn't take it seriously enough.
I was hopeful at the beginning that, um, since I had
a serious illness and was being forced
to confront my own mortality, that I would become a deeper
-and more thoughtful person. -(laughter)
Uh, but all that happened was that, I learned
that you cannot go on a spiritual journey
when you're constipated.
Marcia: She definitely didn't take care of herself.
She'd be the first to tell you.
You don't send sympathy notes or cards,
God bless you, just make sure that if you are a woman,
you go get your damn mammogram done.
I think all of us that were in her inner circle
were concerned that she didn't stop drinking.
And sometimes, she drank more.
Marcia: Having her wine, smoking her cigarette.
And I said, "Molly, what are you doing?"
She said, "Why should I quit?
I mean, I've already got fucking cancer.
The only thing I enjoy?
I'm not gonna quit."
She always said that she was afraid if she stopped drinking
she wouldn't be funny anymore.
Woman: I like Mrs. Ivins because she's funny.
And I don't think... and she is, despite her personal problems,
she is showing a love of life that is an example
for all of us.
And I say to you now, that everything
is going to be all right.
I'm for George Bush.
(camera shutters clicking)
-Teacher: Good morning. -Good morning.
-Teacher: Ready? -Children: Yeah.
Yeah.
(laughter)
Woman: Okay. Get ready to read the words on this. Okay?
(dramatic music playing)
Man: Oh, shit.
(indistinct chatter)
(dramatic music playing)
Molly: No matter whether you like George W. or not,
the last thing in the world you would've wished
on this poor guy was a major foreign policy crisis
in his first year.
Uh, to say foreign policy was not his forté,
is to put it mildly.
I think it's hard for people to remember
what it was like in 2002, 2003.
That was the peak of the madness
of George Bush as the great heroic leader
when it was un-patriotic to suggest that maybe this case
for war wasn't so great.
The stories we were being told
were so different from what was obviously true
to anybody with eyes, but very few people
in the news media were willing to say it.
It was very scary to be a Bush critic.
Molly: November 19, 2002.
The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq
is probably what happens after we win.
Paul: She caught on before anybody
about the mismanagement of the occupation.
Molly: There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose
in this country right now.
Paul: Molly as the quintessential outsider
was speaking out and saying,
"What's going on is not the picture you're being given."
Molly: January 16, 2003.
Can you say horrible three way civil war?
October 7, 2003.
Good thing we won the war, because the peace
sure looks like a quagmire.
The fact is that Iraq is a disaster.
I don't want it to get worse but I do think that
the spin we are getting from the White House
that everything is just lovely
and we're going to create a beacon of democracy
in that poor benighted part of the world
is such happy horseshit,
uh, that I can hardly stand to listen to it,
and I've spent years
listening to members of the Texas legislature.
Crowd: (laughter)
Paul: Molly never was afraid to say it as it was.
At a time when that's a frightening thing to do.
Linda: She was working on the second Bush book.
There was a burglary at her house
and what they stole was her laptop
with her draft on it.
And I've been in Texas long enough,
and I've been in the political circle long enough,
that I was very suspicious about that.
-How you doing? -I'm doing great.
Harold: I do think she was censored,
and there were major daily publications
in this country who were
buying her column and not running it.
They wouldn't run it,
they wouldn't let the other paper run it.
Terry: She was not in the Houston Chronicle.
To not have the leading woman of letters
published in the largest newspaper in Texas,
you bet there's censorship here.
Muffie: I went to see the editor of the Chronicle
because this editor would not run Molly
in the print version,
and I looked around and there were pictures
all over his walls
of him and George H.W. Bush.
And it took him about one nanosecond
to say no, not as long as he was editor.
He couldn't stand her.
Molly: I wanna suggest to y'all what's going on here.
Um, I had an old friend, bless his heart,
the late John Henry Faulk, down in Texas.
(applause)
Yeah, some people remember Johnny Faulk.
God bless you.
Before he ever went into the showbusiness
and had the big success, John Henry, uh,
was in law enforcement.
He was a captain in the Texas Rangers.
His friend, Boots Cooper, who was seven, was the sheriff.
Johnny was six at the time.
And one day, Johnny's mama, having two such fine deputies
there on the property, said to them,
"Boys, I want you all to go down the hen house
and get that chicken snake out of the hen house."
They were of the age and of a size
where they had to stand on tiptoe
and see if there's a snake up on the second shelf.
And there was.
Now, I myself have never been
nose to nose with a chicken snake,
but I always took Johnny's word that it will just scare
the living shit out of you.
And it scared Johnny and Boots so bad they both tried to get
out of the hen house at the same time,
doing considerable damage to both themselves
and the hen house door in the process.
They came trailing back up to the porch, all shame faced.
Ms. Faulk looked at them and said,
"Boys, boys, what is wrong with you?
You know perfectly well
a chicken snake will not hurt you."
And that's when Boots Cooper said
this really semi-immortal thing.
He said, "Yes, ma'am.
But there's some things that'll scare you so bad
you'll hurt yourself."
(laughter)
Now, don't you know that that's what we do
in this country over and over.
We get so scared, so, so scared
of some real menace, we don't make 'em up,
so scared of communism or crime or drugs,
illegal aliens,
terrorism,
that we think we can make ourselves safer...
by making ourselves less free.
That is a logical proposition that won't hold a drop of water.
But it's amazing how consistent that response is
in American history.
And we are in another such time,
so frightened that we think we can make ourselves safer
by damaging our own freedoms.
Now, when you make yourself less free, you're not safer.
You're just less free.
(applause)
Victor: I don't think one has to think of her
as some political prophet
in order to appreciate what she did so well.
But the truth was, that she was...
that she was a prophet
and saw the truth about things at their core in a way that
uh, way outlives her.
(jazz music playing)
Lou: There was an event in July of 2005.
It was an A-list event of people, for politicians
from around the country, and Molly got astoundingly drunk.
And she encountered Nancy Pelosi...
and had a bit of advice for Nancy Pelosi,
which I think was good advice,
which was you need a speech coach,
you need to lower it a few registers
because you have a tendency to sound shrill.
Probably something that should've been said in private.
Woman: Molly was just alcoholic of the worse sort
for 40 years or something.
She had a terrible history of disgracing herself
and of absolutely being the life of the party
and everybody's favorite person
and then she'd tip over the edge.
Lou: Alcohol was a professional tool for Molly, initially.
I don't know that it weakened her writing,
but it made it difficult for her to work.
I mean, you can't drink two bottles of wine every night,
get up and crank out a column without some pain.
The professional tool that sort of unlocked
the temple for her became something of a curse.
And she knew that.
Molly you've had a fair share of, uh, of loss this year.
Those losses must've hit you pretty hard.
(waves crashing)
Molly: Dear beloveds, I started this column
at approximately 8:00 PM, April 19
knowing that my father had advanced cancer
and anticipating that sometime in the next six months
an obit would be required.
(bird squawking)
(phone trilling)
Molly: I received a phone call informing me
that my father had put a bullet through his brain...
(gunshot)
...about 8:20, seven sentences into the column.
I used to... I've been to shrinks, uh, in my lifetime
'cause, um, I'm clearly not in touch with my emotions
and it's like, you're supposed
to be in touch with your emotions.
And, uh... I would say on the whole that, uh,
after that little run of, uh, people dying there
one right after other,
just, sometimes it's really nice not to be in touch
with your emotions, just to not hear from them.
(applause)
Molly started drinking more
and telling me that she was drinking less.
But she was drinking alone and crying.
And very miserable.
I felt like, as a friend, uh, I had to do something.
So, I called Ann Richards who was a lifetime drunk
as she described herself, but a sober alcoholic.
My name is Ann Richards and I'm an alcoholic.
Man: Did you discover that you had a problem
with alcohol by yourself? Did you wake up one day...
Oh, no, no. No, no, no.
We had what was called an intervention,
where they tell you exactly what you did,
and then they end up by saying
"And I know you would not have done that
if you'd not been drinking."
Yeah, it's tough. It's traumatic.
Lou: Ann said to me, I've been out
of the drunk business for a long time,
but I've got contacts in that world.
I'm gonna get you the best help.
Kaye: There we are, you know, knocking on her door
at 9:00 one morning.
And she opened the door and said, well,
this looks like an intervention.
I mean, I told her...
I didn't care that she was famous
and she didn't need to be any more famous,
she needed to take care of herself.
I think it was an incredibly huge relief for Molly to stop.
She said to me, when she came back...
you don't know how close I was to the final "fuck it."
That was in August of 2005.
And in November is when the cancer returned.
Molly: So, I talked to the doc.
He says the shit is back, under my right arm,
down my left hip, upper quadrant of my left lung.
There is something liberating about knowing you are dying.
A curiously emancipatory effect.
Nothing left to lose.
You know, I knew she was struggling.
We were walking up this hill that we have here,
and, you know, she barely made it up the hill
and we had to stop and rest and we were laughing about the fact
that it's, you know... how many times have we said,
"God just get me well
and I won't do anything wrong again."
Woman: It was probably the scariest possible time for her
to get sober, it was when she was facing her own mortality,
but she wanted to face it, the way she faced everything,
which was with her head high and her eyes open.
(cheering)
Molly: Louise Labé, that was so beautiful.
I trust it will be read at my funeral.
Which, by the way, is not, uh, coming anytime soon.
I thought...
(cheering and applause)
I wanted to call this evening "A Tribute to Molly Ivins:
Not Dying Yet Again."
Um, seemed like a good plan.
Marcia: She was one tough cookie.
I mean, we all saw it,
various people can tell you about seeing her give
huge talks where she couldn't even stand up.
I do think that, uh, those of us who care about,
you know, such ephemera as the Bill of Rights.
Um, it's a good time to dig in.
It's a good time to talk loud.
It's a good time to remember a few things
about how to fight these sorry bastards.
Patriotic bullies back in World War I,
uh, used to run around kicking dachshunds
on the grounds that they were German dogs.
Now, I tell you something about people like that.
They don't go around kicking German Shepherds.
(laughter)
You know, she wasn't dying, she was living.
At the very last moment of her life
she was living and she was fully invested in the game.
Man: Molly Ivins, good morning.
You're writing another book, and how often a week
are you writing a column?
I'm writing a column twice a week.
Um, I'm not traveling much at all
but I am working on a book
and it's about what's happening to the Bill of Rights,
what's happening to civil liberties in this country.
Why are you motivated to do that?
I have for many years, uh, devoted a free speech
every month to the first amendment.
I've met some real heroes,
people who stand up for freedom
in ways that are difficult and uncomfortable
in small communities.
I went out to see her a few days before she died.
We spent a lot of time in bed taking naps with her dog Fanny.
And her brother Andy was around.
We had a dinner party with a lot of her best friends.
She was in the bed, and I was leaning up against her,
kind of kissing her, kissing her,
I was just mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah,
kissing her like that.
And she was going like,
she appreciated it, you know, she was like, oh, you know,
somebody, these other people were there but,
you know, she liked that so much.
I realized like, son of a bitch,
I should've been doing this a long time before.
I should've been hugging her and kissing her
much more than what I had.
You know, I was standing there when she died.
Man: We just received late word from Texas
that legendary journalist and author, Molly Ivins,
has died after a seven-year fight with breast cancer.
Molly Ivins, dead tonight at age 62.
♪ Your sweet and shiny eyes ♪
♪ Are like the stars Above Laredo ♪
You know, Larry Goodwin once said the country is lonely.
♪ To me ♪
I felt like the country was lonely
when they lost Molly.
♪ In my sweet dreams we are ♪
♪ In a bar ♪
♪ And it's my birthday ♪
In the words of that song,
"When I die I don't know whether I'm going to heaven.
I don't know whether they'll let reporters in,
but if they don't
just take me back to Texas.
Texas is as close as I've been."
Now...
Molly had that in her, she loved Texas.
If she loved the place and loved the people so much,
why was she so hard on them?
It's because she loved them.
There was an Emile Zola line that said,
"If you ask me what I came in to this world to do,
I came to live out loud."
And I always felt that no one lived out loud
more beautifully than Molly Ivins.
Well, I figured there's only three possible reactions
to most politics, you can laugh, you can cry,
or you can throw up.
I find that throwing up is bad for you,
you might as well laugh.
♪ Young and wild ♪
♪ We drove 900 miles Of the Texas highway ♪
Lou: After Molly died, I began to get phone calls.
And there was one common theme in all these messages
that I got after Molly's death.
"Two times a week in Missoula, Montana..."
or in some other small town,
"Molly Ivins made me feel like I was not crazy.
You know, I'm isolated by geography,
I am among political extremists,
and what I believe is ridiculed,
but twice a week, I read Molly's column
and I realized that no, I wasn't crazy."
Man: (over phone) Are the American people
just so stupid that it is beyond hope?
I mean, what is the story?
I never blame the people.
Um, and in fact, I think the American people
have a great deal more common sense
than almost all politicians, and certainly
than all political consultants ever give them credit for.
Lou: You know, writers are lucky if they have readers.
Molly was beyond fortunate because she didn't have readers,
she had constituents all over the country.
I bring to you our own, Molly Ivins.
(cheering)
I just wanna urge you all, as you get out there
and freedom fight and raise hell,
have a good time. Have a good time
while you're fighting for freedom.
First of all, we don't always win
and it might be the only fun you'll ever have.
(laughter)
And second of all, it's a better way to live.
Thank you.
(cheering)
Democracy depends on the people doing the heavy lifting,
and that was her lasting lesson we wanted to draw on.
November is coming, November is coming.
Let me tell you something.
When Americans really get stirred up,
when we stand up on our hind feet
and really speak out, they listen to us.
Close them out, close them out, close them out.
Molly: Don't forget that.
In fact, tell you a secret about politicians,
they're scared to death of us.
All right y'all, use it.
(upbeat music playing)