Mark instinctively identifies with the underdog. You pass bills and win campaigns by bending to accommodate those whose votes can be gotten. …To this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics. “Would not our country be a more just and human place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that ‘officers eat last’?Ī couple years ago, his friend and television counterpart, David Brooks, wrote this appreciation: He learned a lot in those two years, he said, including concepts of leadership encapsulated in a Marine tradition of officers not being fed until their subordinates were. With military conscription looming, he chose in 1960 to enlist in the Marines, emerging in 1962 as a lance corporal. He attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.” “In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. He started as a legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”Ī life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m.

His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.

Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit, died on Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md.

David brooks article about mark shields