Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd of The New York Times accepted The Denver Press Club’s Damon Runyon Award at a banquet held in her honor on April 15, at the historic Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. A sold-out audience of 350 was on hand to help celebrate the award which is given annually by The Denver Press Club to a member of the journalism community for outstanding contributions to the profession.

For each of the past six years, the Denver Press Club has made the award to a journalist who best exemplifies the spirit that Runyon biographer Tom Clark described when he wrote: “Damon Runyon was a listener and a watcher, a peripatetic student of life who possessed a diamond cutter’s powers of attention, the dispassionate curiosity of a scientist, the investigative energies of a great reporter and the local knowledge of the denizen of the streets.”

“I am so pleased to receive this award because Damon Runyon had exactly the kind of life I want,” said Dowd, recalling Runyon’s habits of frequenting places like New York City’s Stork Club and the racetrack. “He lived in a time when vice still had the virtue of being stylish.”

Damon Runyon grew up in Pueblo and worked for The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News from 1900 to 1911. He was a Denver Press Club member in the early 1900s before moving to New York to work as a sportswriter, reporter and columnist for the Hearst newspapers. His collection of short stories about the characters who frequented Broadway in the 1920s later formed the basis for the musical, Guys and Dolls.

Dowd had praise for both The Denver Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post for their coverage of the Columbine High School shooting, coverage which won Pulitzer Prizes for each paper.

“We work in a very weird business where sometimes our best professional moments are someone else’s worst personal moments,” said Dowd. “In Washington last year, we covered farce. In Denver, you had to cover tragedy. I just can’t imagine how unspeakably sad that must have been. You have all my respect and awe for that.”

In speaking of her own Pulitzer, she said, “I never expected to win the Pulitzer, especially for writing about sex in The New York Times. I think they were really surprised, too.”

Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Sue O’Brien introduced Dowd to the audience. She described how both Denver papers vie over trying to be the first to get Dowd’s column into print each week. “Before Maureen’s column was available to both papers, the editorial staffs had it easy. The Monday paper was pretty much put to bed by late Friday, so we all had our weekends to ourselves. Since the Post had an exclusive on the column, we didn’t worry too much about when it arrived,” O’Brien explained. “But now that we both run it, we haunt the wires waiting for her copy to come over to make sure that “the hated Rocky” doesn’t get it ahead of us. There go our weekends!”

When Dowd took the podium to begin her acceptance speech she quipped, “I just love to be fought over.” In response to O’Brien’s highly complimentary introduction, Dowd offered to e-mail her column to her to free up her weekends.

Maureen Dowd is a Washington, D. C. native. She received her B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University in Washington in 1973. She began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When the Star folded in 1981, Dowd went to Time magazine. She joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in October 1983. She was assigned to the paper’s Washington bureau in August, 1986. She covered two presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent, gaining a wide following of admirers and imitators for her witty, incisive and acerbic portraits of the powerful. She also wrote a column, ”On Washington,” for The New York Times’ magazine. In 1992 Dowd was a Pulitzer finalist for national reporting.

She became a columnist on the Times Op-Ed page in January 1995 after returning from the Times’ Washington bureau. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary for her analysis of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The judges praised her “unsparing columns on the hypocrisies involved in the Lewinsky affair and the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton.”

”There is no better writer today,” former President George W. Bush said when Dowd won her Pulitzer. ”She makes me laugh and cry. She makes me angry and sad. She tough as nails but she can be kinder and gentler too.”

Previous winners of The Damon Runyon Award include Jimmy Breslin of New York Newsday, the late Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune, The late Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, Molly Ivins of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Pete Hamill of the New York Daily News and Ted Turner, founder of CNN.

In addition to presenting the Damon Runyon Award, the Denver Press club honored Colorado’s top collegiate journalists with the Damon Runyon scholarship. The first prize winner is Kevin Darst, a senior at Colorado State University and a general assignment reporter for the Fort Collins Coloradoan.

– Lance Thomas

Maureen Dowd Acceptance Speech

I’m just so glad to be out west. Back east, we’re dealing with charges and counter-charges, accusations of incompetence, a whisper campaign….But look, enough about the New York Times and the Pulitzer board.

The Times was shut out of the Pulitzers for the first time in 15 years. Not that anyone was counting.

So, I want to congratulate the two Denver papers on winning Pulitzers. But our new policy at the Times is that we think the Pulitzers are sort of ostentation. It’s sad that you need that sort of outside validation.

I never expected to win a Pulitzer. Especially not for writing about sex in the New York Times. I think they were really surprised too.

I realized that Bill Clinton was going to drag the Grey Lady into unexpected realms the first time I tried to write about the Paula Jones lawsuit.

I handed in 800 words to Howell Raines, the head of the editorial page, at eight o’clock. At 8:15 p.m., he returned it to me, edited. There were 200 words.

“The New York Times,” he told me, “does not make penis jokes.”

I knew we were in for a very bumpy year.

But I really knew we were in trouble the day I passed by Bill Safire’s office and saw him sitting in his big red leather easy chair, reading the Starr report in his lap.

He waved me in and told me, “There’s something here I don’t understand.”

I braced myself.

“What,” he inquired politely, “is thong underwear?”

Our language maven wasn’t being salacious. He was just flummoxed by the unfamiliar usage of a familiar word. He had not experienced a thong before as an adjective.

I had a flashback to the time Barbara Bush told me that President Bush had turned to her one night while he was flipping through a women’s magazine and asked, “Barb, what is a bikini wax?”

I tried to explain to Safire that it was like the thong that you wear on your foot at the beach but this one was wrapped around the….I hesitated.

“Posterior?” he asked helpfully. “So it’s like a g-string?”

He looked happy.

“That reminds me of my wild youth in Union City, N.J.”

It’s bad enough when the children of America are learning racy new images. But when the veteran columnists of America are exposed to it, that’s really scary.

I often feel vaguely that I’m trapped in (the movie) Groundhog Day….I’m once more covering a presidential candidate named George Bush who can’t talk….a self made “bidness” man from Midland with monogrammed cowboy boots who, when I ask him if he’s read any novels lately, tells me to stop psychoanalyzing him.

Isn’t there some sort of double jeopardy provision for this, that you can’t kill the same man twice?

I will admit…I do miss Monica, in the same way I used to miss Nancy Reagan and her astrologer, the same way I’m sure you all miss Patsy Ramsey.

I wonder if Monica has any new thoughts on education reform? Or if she still prefers Sweet N Low to Equal?

People once told me that winning the Pulitzer would change my life. I envisioned a cascade of men, money, exclusive interviews, respect. But it hasn’t happened. Leonardo DiCaprio is getting all the exclusive interviews.

I am so pleased to get this award because Damon Runyon had exactly the kind of life I want: hanging out at the Stork Club and a supper club in Times Square called the Silver Slipper. Going to the track.

He lived in a time when vice still had the virtue of being stylish.

We work in a very weird business where sometimes our best professional moments are someone else’s worst personal moments.

When I first became a reporter at the Washington Star, I was a police reporter. My editors would send me out to terrible situations.

I remember a mother whose kids had died in a fire. I remember a father whose daughter died in a crash on prom night. I could never work up my nerve to interview them.

I would drive around in the car, around and around the block. Usually, I would just put my head on the steering wheel and wish I had a different personality. It took me years to actually do those kinds of interviews.

In Washington last year, we covered farce. In Denver, you had to cover tragedy. I just can’t imagine how unspeakably sad that must have been.

I’d really like to say, you have all my respect and awe for that.

So thank you for this (award) tonight. I really do feel like Damon Runyon’s Lucky Lady. Don’t let anyone squirt cider in your ear.

O’Brien tells of competition, Dowd’s contributions

In introducing 1999-2000 Damon Runyon Award winner Maureen Dowd, Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Sue O’Brien told of the competition between Denver’s two major dailies to scoop one another by being first to run Dowd’s popular column. She also praised Dowd as a writer who has avoided the stereotypical female journalist’s role as an advocate, choosing instead to rely on “her gift of observation and her gift of _expression to create a distinctive, mocking style that has spawned not just imitation but outright envy and resentment.”

The complete text of O’Brien’s remarks follows:

Maureen — you’ve probably heard until you’re tired of hearing it that one of the great signs of the popularity of your column is that it is featured in both daily newspapers in this most competitive of newspaper markets.

What you may not know is just how competitive our use of your column has come to be.

Once upon a time, in the good old days, The Denver Post (WE capitalize our THE, just like you guys) enjoyed the exclusive use of THE New York Times’ columnists.

But then, the Times news service decided to see if it could get DOUBLE profits out of competitive markets.

And, of course, it could. And the then-Rocky Mountain News was permitted — at what I hope was a substantial price — to horn in on our exclusive franchise.

And there began, not just the Newspaper War, but the Maureen Dowd war.

I need to add a couple of other facts here, quickly.

First, in this market at least, Sunday opinion sections are usually prepared in advance. That means we wrap up our week’s work on Friday.

Secondly — at least out here in the middle markets — the exalted — and generally grizzled — members of editorial-page staffs have come to see a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday workweek as a necessary perk of late-career life.

At least we saw it as a necessary perk until we found ourselves “sharing” an immensely popular columnist who writes for Sundays in her home newspaper and whose column is usually transmitted out to us here in the boondocks at about 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Back in the good old days, when we valued our weekends more than competition, both The Post and the Rocky editorial page folks went home on Friday confident that a lovely, fresh Dowd column would be waiting for us on Monday mornings, as yet virgin in Denver.

And so we both ran you on Tuesday and no one was the wiser.

And then one day, I got this brainstorm. If I’d just come in on Sunday, I could sub the Dowd column into our already-prepared Monday page — and steal a march on the hated Rocky.

It worked. For two weeks.

Until my friends at the Rocky discovered that they could come in on the weekend, too. They not only saw my Monday — but at least a couple of times their somewhat later deadline has enabled them to raise the ante to Sunday.

When that shot was fired across my bow, the only thing that gave me comfort was the vision of Vince Carroll, Linda Seebach and Peter Blake taking it in turns to hover over the AP wire on Saturday, waiting to pounce and beat me to the punch.

At the moment, things have pretty much settled down. You’re a Monday staple in both newspapers, with an occasional Sunday outing in the Rocky. But the leisurely weekend of Denver editorial-page staffs is a thing of distant memory.

Thank you, Maureen.

We’re here tonight to honor a woman who has drawn more than her share of controversy in our industry because she HASN’T taken on the traditional female columnist’s burden of advocating for the downtrodden at every turn.

She has, instead, carved out a path that is largely gender-neutral — except in the terms her critics use to describe HER with — relying on her gift of observation and her gift of _expression to create a distinctive, mocking style that has spawned not just imitation but outright envy and resentment.

And immense admiration.

Maureen Dowd is a native of Washington, D.C.

She graduated from Catholic University in Washington in 1973 and began working at the Washington Star the next year as an editorial assistant — progressing to become a sports columnist, metro reporter and feature writer.

After the Star folded in 1981, Dowd worked briefly at Time magazine before joining The Times in 1983.

She went home to Washington in 1986 to join The Times’ D.C. bureau, where her distinctive, acerbic style as the paper’s White House correspondent led to her first Pulitzer nomination — for national reporting — in 1992.

It was during those years, that I first acknowledged her as a role model. Maybe it takes another Irish-American woman to fully appreciate the blessing — and burden — of being able to spot bull … blarney.

In 1995, she moved from The Times’ news pages to the op-ed page, where she began writing the column that, again, won her a Pulitzer nomination, and this time the prize in 1999.

That prize, for commentary, was awarded “for her fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.”

The Pulitzer stirred a whirlwind of commentary from a lot of people who appear to have been challenged to prove that they can be just as mean as they think she is.

She’s been accused of damaging the noble traditions of political reporting by her failure to bring to the art the appropriate seriousness and sanctimony. Her excursions into popular culture are seen as trivializing the art of pious pontification, instead — as I would contend — of bringing it forward from the Nineteenth Century into not just the 20th but the 21st.

Pious Maureen Dowd is not, but she’s a worthy recipient of the sixth annual Damon Runyon Award.

Damon Runyon brought to life the people he wrote about.

In that tradition, Dowd’s deft profiles have, yes, violated Camelot — but they’ve done so by making its inhabitants recognizable and accessible to readers who don’t know a thing about politics and — until they started reading her — probably didn’t care.

And she’s brought something else. And that’s a moral core.

Of Dowd’s Pulitzer, NewsWatch critic Trevor Butterworth wrote last fall, “Perhaps Dowd’s critics, for all their avowed seriousness, have simply missed the point of satire — the fundamental indignation at corruption and folly. ‘Satire’, as the English poet Alexander Pope pointed out, ‘heals with morals what it hurts with wit.’ ”

It’s a great honor to introduce you tonight to America’s reigning witty moralist — winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and the 2000 Damon Runyon award — Maureen Dowd of the The Denver Post and the Denver Rocky Mountain News — and The New York Times.

She writes, as one member of the Damon Runyon award committee pointed out, “what other reporters are thinking, but are afraid to say.