News > March 6, 2008

By Molly Nevola | Staff writer

Political commentator and veteran columnist for the Washington Post E.J. Dionne, Jr. was no stranger to the world of journalism even during his childhood in Fall River, Ma. Dionne, former New York Times reporter and current twice-weekly editorialist for the Post, was fascinated by politics and news at an early age, landing jobs at local presses and writing for his college newspaper. He has worked in political journalism ever since.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne will speak at the university’s commencement ceremony this coming May.

In a phone interview Feb. 29, the university’s 2008 commencement speaker recounted his experiences, political and religious values and connections to the university while offering guidance to graduates, a generation that he praises for its political engagement and commitment to service.

Dr. Dionne, what sparked your interest in the world of journalism, and how did you break into this field?

I grew up in a household where my dad would get four Sunday newspapers. I read news all my life and was always fascinated by politics and journalism. My first paid job, I helped pull papers off the press at my local paper, wrote for my college paper and the Standard Times in New Bedford, but I didn’t know at the time that this is what I was going to do for a living.

When I was an undergraduate, I got to know folks at the Times and even tried to sell an article to the New York Times Magazine. When I was a senior, I had written my senior thesis on Italians in East Harlem and racial and ethnic change in the neighborhood. He didn’t want to buy that, but I was going to Oxford for a couple years for grad school and mentioned that I was going to be kicking around Europe. I took the night boat train over to Paris one time and ended up getting offered a job in the Paris Bureau.

I worked that summer and then was hired by the Times, they helped set up what became the NYT CBS poll, and so I got into journalism partly just from a love of journalism and also through my interest in polling. I did a lot of polling and public opinion work in Britain. I worked on the 1976 campaign, started covering state and local politics, covered presidential campaign, went back to Albany, NY, then was bureau chief and was sent back to Europe. I had a job where if there was a disaster somewhere, I covered it. So I joke, I got to cover the French Open, the Cannes Film Festival and then the war in Lebanon. Then I was sent to Rome, which was fantastic because I got to cover Italy and the Vatican with a focus on religion and politics, two topics that are of great interest to me.

Tell me about your new book, Souled Out.

So far I’ve been very lucky on all the reviews I’ve received so far, including the New York Times’. Religion and politics are subjects that have engaged me pretty much my whole life — I joke that I grew up in a household that violated the rules that you’re never supposed to talk about them at the dinner table, but we always did at our house.

I was raised and still am Catholic. I wrote all sorts of papers on this subject; I took a course on Soviet history – wrote a paper on Stalin, Spanish mystics and anarchists, McCarthyism. I once hitchhiked to the Brooklyn public library from Boston to do research. So this is something that’s always engaged me, and then I did cover the Vatican, and that plays a role in the book.

I’m editor of a series on religion and public life — this is a subject that I’ve been engaged in forever and had written about it a fair amount in my column, and I decided I wanted to write a book that pulled together what, in some ways, I’ve done over the last 25 years.

Broadly speaking, I’m on the liberal or center-left side of politics, and it bothered me when the liberals showed prejudice against people who weren’t. We’re supposed to be against prejudice. We’re very proud of that as progressive, so we should also be against prejudice against religious believers that we disagree with. At the same time, I was troubled that there were people on the right who were implying that the only fair reading of the Gospel is a conservative reading. And some of this is comes out of the book — I think there is an exhaustion with religion used in a narrow political way … so that’s what Souled Out is.

You have a regular discussion on National Public Radio with David Brooks. As you know, Brooks spoke to the graduating class of 2007 at last year’s commencement. What do you and Brooks have in common, and how do you see things differently than him?

I’m going to call David, and I’m going to have to study up on what he said. I really like and admire him very much — one of the reasons we like to debate and discuss politics so much is because he is a conservative who grew up in a liberal family, and I am vice versa. We have a certain affection for the other side. My household in general was more conservative.

We have a respect for the other side. We both have baseball playing sons; his son is a great baseball player. We both have a fascination with the suburbs; we’ve spent a lot of time out there in the suburbs.

You know, we like a style and admire the spirit of William F. Buckley, whom David once worked for, and I, although my politics are different, have always admired how he did what he did. You can disagree with someone without hating them, which I think is a good thing in life. I also think both of them like to step out and be analytical and candid about what’s going on. And even when David and I have a political disagreement, we often overlap analytically.

He’s just a very warm person on top of that.

In this very important election year, what would you tell people of our generation in regards to politics? What is most interesting about this election to you?

One of the most interesting things about the year is the engagement of your generation and that you have made an enormous difference in the Democratc primaries. Without this engagement, I don’t think Barack Obama would be where he is in the Democratic race. It’s been forever since younger voters have played this kind of role, maybe unprecedented, in an election campaign. What I would say is, be in this for the long haul. Politics can be exhilarating; it can also be disappointing. The generations that have a real impact are those that stick with it. So I hope that the sense of excitement that exists now will stay with you. I mean, what it really feels like is the early ‘60s: joining the Peace Corps, staffing the civil rights division in the justice departmet, you know, really made a huge difference in our country’s life. You run into these folks now who are in or approaching retirement and they really had this deep concern that came from the earlier WWII generation.

I think that this is real — getting excited about the possibilities of government again. There’s a role for public action and private action. I think that your generation may have the balance for it.

In 1996, you wrote They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era — were you wrong or just 13 years too early?

You know, I think the underlying thesis, I would defend all along. I joke with friends who give me grief about it, saying Al Gore did win a plurality of the vote in 2000, so I don’t think the trajectory was all to the right even in this period. And I point out in the book, if you look at what was happening in politics, throughout the democratic world you had this effort to find this new kind of progressive politics – sometimes called the Third Way. But in a lot of countries in the world, you had this effort to figure out how to have social justice in a successful market economy. Now having said all that, the core argument which I thought was right then and is now being proven out more than people say it was earlier, is that in a global economy, people sort of want a new set of rules, teams to work, to make sense of the world they are in. These years very much resembled the progressive era at the turn of the century — we were going from farm to factory, from urban areas to rural areas, and now we are moving from industrial to a high tech economy, to a more service-oriented economy. In that kind of period people are looking for a new set of rules to reach economic growth on the one hand but within a framework where opportunity is shared. That’s when people turn to progressivism, when they are looking for a new set of rules to make the system work. That’s why I think there was a call for reform in the progressive years which eventually led to the New Deal, and I think there is a similar call to reform now. In a funny way we see that in both parties because McCain is the closest thing to a reform-oriented republican. I do think an era of reform is what the country is looking for.

This year’s graduating class will see a more troubled economy than previous classes. What do you think will happen next, and how should graduates prepare themselves for what’s to come economically?

You know, if I had a 100 percent answer to that, I might start a consulting business. I think the first rule to answering the world out of college is to figure out how to follow your head and heart at the same time. People tend to be most successful pursuing work they love. And there are constraints on that, you also have to pursue work that allows you to earn you a living. But I don’t think that rule of finding that medium changes with the economy. I think that this service orientation that you have may actually serve you well.

For a brief period, the private economy may be harder to find footing in, and there are a lot of younger people who start out in all sorts of service from the Peace Corps to Teach for America, and I think having some experience doing service of some kind can be immensely valuable both personally and as a matter of public contribution and in terms of experience.