Some 100 authors, among them residents of the South Fork, will descend on Herrick Park in East Hampton Village on Saturday for the 21st annual Authors Night fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library. Among them will be one of America’s pre-eminent writers, who recently became a part-time resident of East Hampton Town.
Maureen Dowd, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, is the author, most recently, of “Notorious: Portraits of Stars From Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech,” drawn from her numerous profiles of titans of Tinseltown (Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty) and fashion (Diane von Furstenberg, André Leon Talley), as well as moguls and visionaries including Bob Iger, Jann Wenner, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. She has also penned “The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics,” “Bushworld,” and “Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.”
Over a 50-year career, Ms. Dowd has demonstrated an incisive eye, the myriad observations and commentary in her weekly column both devastatingly blunt and laugh-out-loud funny. Her fascination with Shakespeare infuses her work, the Bard’s plays illustrating the shortcomings of contemporary leaders and the constancy of human weakness and imperfection.
“I’ve always done celebrity profiles on the side,” Ms. Dowd told The Star. “I’ve always been a news reporter, but in my spare time, I would do celebrity profiles,” seeing much in common between Hollywood and Washington. “They both specialize in illusion, and winning and losing,” she observed. “In Hollywood, it’s box office. In Washington, it’s approval numbers.”
Starting in 2017, she began to similarly scrutinize Silicon Valley, “the third capital of illusion,” she said. “It’s interesting to see how, in these three mega-cities that are their own universes, the narcissism plays out differently, how they use or abuse power differently.”
Speaking of narcissism and abuse of power, “he’s permanently changed our politics,” Ms. Dowd said of a certain president. “I think we didn’t realize that you could do a lot of the things he’s done, because it never occurred to the founding fathers that anyone who is president would sink that low. I didn’t realize he could sell Bibles, sneakers, and cologne when in the Oval Office.”
When she covered President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, “I wanted to say, ‘Cheney was lying about the rush to invade Iraq,’ but we weren’t allowed to use the word ‘lie’ about people in the White House. It just wasn’t done. Now, of course, we can say that about Trump. He’s changed things at The Times, but he’s also just changed politics forever because we see what is possible, in a bad way, for a president. Also, I think he has created a kind of hunger for the P.T. Barnum aspect of politics.”
Ms. Dowd earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 2023. “People always say, ‘What Shakespeare character does he remind you of?’ When I ask scholars, they say he’s more in the line of P.T. Barnum. He’s not complex enough” to be a Shakespearean figure, she said dryly.
When the adage “politics is show business for ugly people” was raised, she again pointed to current events. “I don’t know if that applies in Trump’s case,” she says. “He hires if they look good enough, and doesn’t if they don’t.” In a recent column, “Trump’s Cabinet of Incompetents,” she explored this theme: “If you choose your cabinet based on looks, you are likely to end up with a cabinet that makes you look bad,” she wrote. “Running government is harder than bloviating on Fox News and assorted podcasts.” “A lot of these people,” she told The Star, “are ninnies like Hegseth” — Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense — “or people who shot their dog, like Kristi Noem,” the secretary of homeland security.
Included in “Notorious” is “Elon Musk’s Future Shock,” from April 2017, when “Silicon Valley seemed to barely know Washington existed,” Ms. Dowd said, “because they were doing, to them, the most amazing thing that could be done: creating a new species with [artificial intelligence]. They weren’t paying attention to these little politicians in the East. Then, I think, at some point with Trump they realized, we can just buy the government, which they did with Musk and [the Department of Government Efficiency], where the DOGE guys were given access to taxpayers’ most secret information. They could close down agencies, show up and look at people’s private information, and force their way in. That’s another shocking thing that no one could visualize until it happened.”
In 1987, Ms. Dowd’s reporting about a plagiarized speech given by Neil Kinnock, then the British Labor Party’s leader, put an end to then-Senator Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign. How quaint that seems today.
“When I was covering Trump in 2015 and ’16, every time some scandalous thing came out, I’d been conditioned to think that a certain level of scandal, that person’s campaign would be over,” she recalled. “Trump turned that inside out. When the ‘Access Hollywood’ scandal broke, I said to my researcher, ‘He’s done,’ and then he wasn’t. The one I thought would bring him down was pretending to be his own P.R. guy, John Barron. [It is an open secret that as a businessman Mr. Trump sometimes pretended to be his own spokesman, variously named John Barron, John Miller, or David Dennison.] I know somebody who was a People reporter who talked to ‘John Barron.’ He was like, ‘It sounded like Trump.’ I thought that too weird . . . but it barely made a ripple. I do think he is sui generis in that way. He’s unique in his ability to absorb and move past things that would destroy another politician.”
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump mocked Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter with a physical disability. “That was shocking. Shocking. His cruelty,” Ms. Dowd said, riffing on Mr. Trump’s apparent obsession, like that of his father, with eugenics. For a moment, even this insightful journalist seemed at a loss for words. “You’d think that anything like that . . . in the past, it would have been over,” she mused. “But Trump has a unique relationship with his fans. In a way, that is the one thing that reminds me of Shakespeare — very Richard III, where he’s a villain but an appealing one. Richard would go to the edge of the stage and include the audience in his malevolent plan. Trump would ask rallygoers, ‘Who should I appoint for my cabinet?’ The average politician never had that kind of intimacy with their fans.”
She recently read from “Notorious” at BookHampton in East Hampton, “a really cool bookstore,” she told The Star. The art dealer Larry Gagosian, the shop’s new owner, “invited us for dinner after,” she said. “His house is like Disneyland for art lovers.”
Among her prized possessions are library cards for the Georgetown University Library and the American Library in Paris (“I carry it everywhere!” she said), along with the Andréw Geller-designed house in Springs that she bought last year.
“I’m thrilled to be able to help the East Hampton Library,” she said of Authors Night. “In fact, I would like to get a library card there. Since I did the master’s degree, and then with the election, I haven’t been able to read for pleasure in quite a while. I’m hoping that eventually I will be able to do that in the Hamptons.”
