Columnist

“Maureen Dowd has long been one of the most compelling writers in American journalism,” said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of his paper’s famous columnist. When Times op-ed columnist Anna Quindlen left her position in 1994, Dowd, dubbed one of the new establishment, was ready to take her job. 

The daughter of an Irish cop, Maureen Bridget Dowd was a reporter for the Washington Star and Time magazine before joining The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983. 

A graduate of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., she began covering national politics during Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential bid in 1984 and moved to the newspaper’s Washington bureau in 1986. Dowd was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for national reporting in 1992 and has won numerous other citations.