John McLaughlin, host of “The McLaughlin Group”, died Tuesday at his home in Washington. The show’s Facebook page announced the death of McLaughlin at 89.
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“The McLaughlin Group” announced the death on Facebook but gave no details about the cause or where McLaughlin died.
John McLaughlin was missed by his talk show, The McLaughlin Group, for the first time last Sunday in more than 34 years. He favored journalism as entertainment, telling the Associated Press in 1986, “I began the group as the talk show of the ’90’s”. In a confrontational situation, you’ll get their gut.
Pat Buchanan, one of John McLaughlin’s long-serving panelists, began the show in the absence of the moderator with an opening statement straight from his pen, which is also posted on the show’s official website. He also served as a host on CNBC in the early 1990s. This he did after failing to win the support of his Jesuit superiors in his bid to become a senator in early 1970s, which he “lost by a wide margin to the incumbent Democrat, John O. Pastore”, as Elizabeth Jensen of The New York Times noted. 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.
“This is our first time in 34 years that our distinguished leader Dr. McLaughlin is not in his chair”, Buchanan said, “and we miss him”. McLaughlin denied the allegations; the suit was settled out of court in December 1989. In 1975, he retired his Roman Catholic collar to marry longtime friend and former Labor Secretary Ann Dore.
McLaughlin was born in Providence, R.I., in 1927 and joined the Jesuit order as a young man, earning two master’s degrees from Boston College and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University.
In 1997, the 70-year-old McLaughlin married Cristina Vidal, 36, but the pair divorced in 2010.
The show was born in 1982 when he sold his wealthy friend Robert Moore, a former aide in the Nixon White House, on the idea to fund a new form of public affairs television.
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When it debuted, “The McLaughlin Group” stood in sharp contrast with “Firing Line”, “Washington Week in Review” and other political programming of its day, with a contentious atmosphere in which politicians were set aside in favor of giving voice to opinion journalists.
