WHERE IS MAUREEN DOWD?

By: Allan Wolper NY Times Columnist To Return This Week


Maureen Dowd was missing. No one had seen her in print since her Feb. 25 New York Times column where she described Hillary Rodham Clinton's explanation for all "those sulphurous pardons" granted by her husband shortly before he departed the White House.

Dowd's readers swamped The New York Times' offices in the Big Apple and Washington with worried inquiries about her health, both mental and physical, and her job status. After all, her Pulitzer Prize is now fading, two years in the past. Radio shock jock Don Imus' wailing on the airwaves about the missing Maureen obviously contributed to the general hysteria.

"I told them she was fine, that she was on vacation," Marc Santora, her beleaguered assistant, said of Dowd's frantic followers. "A lot of them left messages, and we called a lot of them back."

But what was the real story? What was she hiding? Where was she hiding? Was she hiding with anyone we should know about? Had Bill and Hillary gotten someone to whack her?

Santora's comments sounded contrived. Dowd hadn't taken a vacation since the last century. There had to be a better reason. "She had a lot of vacation days," said Jill Abramson, the paper's Washington bureau chief. "You either use it or lose it."

What a story: The New York Times is not a factory. They say "use it or lose it" at places like the New York Post or the New York Daily News, the working people's papers, not at The New York Times.

The official word now is that Dowd's column will be back this Wednesday. We shall see.



Allan Wolper (alfyjournal@msn.com) is a contributing editor to E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.