John McLaughlin Dies At 89, Leaving A Legacy Of Combative Political Punditry

John McLaughlin, a widely respected political commentator who hosted The McLaughlin Group since 1982, died on Tuesday at his home in Virginia.

“Yet my spirit is strong and my dedication to the show remains absolute”, he wrote. McLaughlin’s last public message addressed his absences from the show.

The syndicated talk show paved the way for today’s panel-style political talk shows featuring pundits and journalists.

As Fox News reports, McLaughlin felt informing and entertaining the American people could happen simultaneously. He was later recruited to be a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon by Pat Buchanan, a Nixon adviser and, later, a regular McLaughlin Group panelist.

We were saddened to hear of the passing of John McLaughlin this week. Although most of the show’s almost 2,000 episodes-which aired weekly, usually on PBS-started out calmly enough, with McLaughlin firing questions at his panelists and friends in his clipped New England tone, discussions often escalated into arguments and shouting matches between the four guests. They said it celebrated nasty posturing, abhorred complexity and featured a group of mostly aging conservative white men spouting off on topics they knew little about. He also served as a host on CNBC in the early 1990s. A 1990 article in The Washington Post Magazine quoted former McLaughlin staffers Anne Rumsey, Kara Swisher and Tom Miller recalling instances of petty tyranny and McLaughlin leering at female employees.

McLaughlin was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and was ordained a priest in 1959. Dr. McLaughlin denied the allegations; the suit was settled out of court.

In 1997, McLaughlin, then 70, married 36-year-old Cristina Vidal, the vice president of his production company. He studied at a seminary in MA and earned two master’s degrees at Boston College. But they divorced in 2010.

He ran for the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island as an anti-Vietnam War Republican in 1970, losing to incumbent Democrat John Pastore.

Aside from his “McLaughlin Group” hosting and producing duties, he was an editor for the National Review, writing a column called “From Washington Straight”. In recent years, the show also introduced itself as “the American original”, a reference to the multitudes of similar, ideologically tilted political programs that proliferated in its wake, including CNN’s “Crossfire” and MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”.