Dionne Shuns Partisan Politics

It was a battle of giants. The Cold War heated the classroom as the Herculean minds of professors Michael Walzer and Robert Nozick dueled over the moral worth of socialism and capitalism. It was also where E.J. Dionne '73, now a syndicated columnist, learned that fighting over politics does not have to end in a nuclear meltdown.

"They were intellectually rigorous, tough on each other, but still friends," Dionne recalls of the class that shaped his journalistic ideals.

"As someone who watches and engages in debates in Washington in 1998, it is a standard to which I still aspire," he says.

A Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in social studies, Dionne's thoughtful and non-partisan approach to politics has catapulted the national columnist into journalism's elite.

"He is now maturing into one of the most sensible, morally informed and insightful observers of our national life, a true public intellectual," says Harvey G. Cox Jr., Thomas professor of divinity, who taught Dionne while in college. "I'm glad that I had a little something to do with his early formation."

In the early '70s, when students violently protested the Vietnam War, Dionne was conservative compared to many of his leftist friends. Now, in expressing the hope that government and communities will work together for social change, Dionne falls to the left of the political spectrum and is best described as a progressive.

According to Dionne, his political outlook has remained virtually unchanged since the day he tossed his graduation cap into the air. He accounts for his changing image--from conservative to moderate liberal--by pointing to changes in the political climate.

"I don't think of myself in a radically different place, but the political conversation has moved to the right," he says.

Dionne came to Harvard the year after the famed 1969 takeover of University Hall. He recalls looking out of the window of his Expository Writing class in Holyoke Center and seeing students rioting below in Harvard Square.

Although he protested the war, Dionne says he was more at home in the classroom, where issues were debated in a more thoughtful and respectful environment.

In this way, social studies was an ideal concentration for Dionne, who still fuses together many aspects of the social sciences--from philosophy to sociology to economics--in his job as a journalist.

The concentration also provided him with a background in polling and statistics, which later made him adept at covering national elections, Dionne says.

"I suppose I'm a professional social studies graduate. That's kind of what I do for a living now," he says.

A Brookings Institution fellow, he is one of Washington's foremost political pundits, the author of two acclaimed books on politics and the writer of three national weekly columns.

He also appears regularly on television in round table discussions such as NBC's "Meet the Press" and MSNBC's "The Big Show."

Although he never planned a career in journalism, newspapers have always been an important part of Dionne's life.

As a boy, four newspapers were delivered each Sunday morning to his home in Fall River, Mass., where he got his first job delivering papers for the Fall River Herald at the age of 16. He grew up speaking French because of the town's large French-speaking population.

While at Harvard, Dionne wrote opinion columns for The Crimson, but devoted most of his efforts to covering cross-country and track.

He got his first stint at a major newspaper while at Oxford University, working summers at The New York Times' Paris bureau. With most of the other reporters covering strife in the Middle East, the young twenty-something's byline topped most of the Timesi Paris stories.

When he returned to the U.S., Dionne covered New York City politics for the Times before moving on to cover state and national government in the early '80s.

He returned from another stint in Europe in time for the 1988 presidential campaign, during which he covered Gary Hart. It was a campaign Dionne loathed because of the "side-issues" of Hartis alleged affair and then Vice President George Bush's use of escaped convict Willie Horton in campaign ads against then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.

In 1990, Dionne accepted a job at The Washington Post, where he wrote columns exclusively from 1992 until 1996, when he became syndicated.

Dionne's first book was published in 1991 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Why Americans Hate Politics bemoans the petty squabbling that has, in Dionne's opinion, gotten in the way of solving real problems.

Written while Dionne was living in the small town of Keswick, Va., in a house with "a nice family, three dogs and horse named Hank," the book describes the destructive effect of partisan party politics on political discourse.

"The central argument of this book is that liberalism and conservatism are framing political issues as a series of false choices. Wracked by contradiction and responsive mainly to the needs of their constituencies, liberalism and conservatism prevent the nation from settling the questions that most trouble it," he writes.

While Dionne laments divisiveness in politics, he is fanatically partisan in another subject--baseball.

Although Dionne worked at The New York Times for 14 years, he remains a devout Boston Red Sox fan, with one exception: he coaches his son's little league team, the Yankees.

Dionne says spending time with his three small children helps crystallize his thinking.

"I think when you talk to your kids, you have to convey more often what you really think than at any other time. You can't hedge with kids. You end up conveying what you really think and feel," he says.

Returning to Harvard for his 25th reunion, Dionne says he looks forward to reminiscing about his youth and his experiences at Harvard.

"There was an intensity to the time that I treasure," he says. "There was such an intense engagement with what was going on around us that I feel lucky I was able to live through that time."