Rachel Maddow: A Biography

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For Alex

INTRODUCTION

FOR JUST ABOUT her entire life, Rachel Maddow has been hard to miss.

Whether it was the day when she was only three years old and nonchalantly picked up the newspaper and started sounding out the words, or when she was accepted as a Rhodes Scholar and dyed her buzz cut bright blue to celebrate, or as a five-foot-eleven adult who’s happiest dressed in her favorite self-described third-grade-boy attire of jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, she’s always stood out in one way or another.

But she’s become most prominent for her intelligent banter and lightning-fast wit, as well as her ability to convey information to others in an entertaining way, whether she’s defending her doctoral thesis, calling out a list of snow-day school closings on local radio in Massachusetts—complete with sound effects—or explaining on her TV show the most plausible reasons why a certain president would be using Russian talking points during a cabinet meeting.

Rachel Maddow has taken a truly unorthodox path to stardom, and she has never apologized or changed who she is to get where she is today. Indeed, in many cases—particularly concerning her sexuality—she’s openly flaunted it: This is who I am, take it or leave it.

I don’t make apologies for who I am, and I don’t hold back, she’s said.

She considers herself to be an outsider, first and foremost, and this has shaped her philosophy and career like nothing else. I never feel like I fit in, and that’s my superpower, she admitted. That forces me to struggle out of insecurity, which somehow results in success. I still feel like a criminal, like I’ve stolen some more deserving person’s television show.

Her reputation for overpreparation—a rarity in the world of fast-paced cable and broadcast news—is famous throughout the industry. Even when she was guest hosting for Keith Olbermann on Countdown, she’d arrive at MSNBC at nine in the morning to prepare for a show that wouldn’t air until eleven hours later; indeed, there are many hosts who glide into the studio an hour or two before airtime, largely leaving the sausage making to the staff. Not Rachel. I’ve been in the TV game a long time, and I’ve never seen anyone prepare like she does, said Bill Wolff, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show.

While she loves nothing more than to impart new information—or a new twist on an old topic—to millions of viewers, she is a loner at heart and works best by herself, behind a closed door where she can have time alone to indulge her curiosity, dig for obscure facts, and write an opening monologue that is both entertaining and informative and provides a new spin on a well-worn headline. She’s also been open about her personal struggles, including the fact that she suffers from depression.

I am not a model of mental health, she’s admitted.

And she openly acknowledges that what motivates her is the fear of failure. It’s very boring and sad, but I want to convince myself that my existence matters, she said, which is hard to fathom given the years she spent as an activist fighting for people with AIDS. Rachel, as I knew her, has always been about making a contribution, said Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and now the junior senator from New Jersey, who was friends with her at Stanford and Oxford. She wanted to change the world.

She’s unique, said Matt Delzell, managing director at The Marketing Arm, a branding agency. She refuses to toe the line when it comes to any party, while remaining loyal to liberal values in the true sense of the word. Her uniqueness and her underdog appeal draw people in, regardless of whether they agree with her opinions, he added. She’s not afraid to criticize liberals despite being a liberal.

Indeed, she relishes her role as an equal opportunity critic. I’m interested in making fun of bad ideas, regardless of who has them, she said, adding that she has long welcomed the staunchest of conservatives onto her show, where she has been honestly curious—and eager—to hear what they have to say. We just click, said Michael Steele, former chairperson of the Republican National Committee. She listens. It’s one of the reasons I love going on her show. And when it’s all said and done, no one is angry, no one is bloody.

I certainly don’t agree with her politics at all, but she’s a really nice person, said Tucker Carlson, who regularly invited Rachel onto his show, The Situation with Tucker Carlson (later changed to Tucker) between 2005 and 2008, to debate the topics of the day. It’s very hard to find people who can argue well, who can argue from principle. She’s a person of principle.

She is also hugely patriotic and has been known to tear up whenever she hears The Star-Spangled Banner play. I am a person who feels personally aggrieved by people who undermine our constitutional republic, she said. I think the Fourth Amendment is personally wired into my DNA.

Despite her obvious excitement when talking about certain stories on camera, Rachel maintains that she’s oddly calm, especially when working on a story that has everyone else up in arms. I don’t have an emotional reaction to the news, she said. It’s like if you’re a surgeon who’s removing brain tumors. While you’re doing the surgery, do you feel sad for the person having gotten the tumor? No, you’re working on taking care of the tumor and fixing it.

Underscoring everything is the clear fact that she respects the intelligence of her audience, which can be a hard thing to find on any network or cable show out there today. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way, she said.

Despite these contradictions—or maybe because of them—millions love her and tune in regularly for her honesty and willingness to say what few other public figures will say, and for not hiding her glee whenever crooked, incompetent, or just plain mean people—politicians and otherwise—get caught. But even in these moments, she never belittles the scoundrels.

Even though I can be harsh in my criticism and I can be strong in my beliefs, I try not to be mean, she said. And I don’t have a very high tolerance for other people who are cruel or personally insulting in a way that I think is meant to humiliate people.

You’d have to be a really miserable specimen of a human being to not like her, said Keith Olbermann, who encouraged MSNBC to give Rachel her own show.

I have always felt like my job is to chart the waters, she said. And we are at sea.

At the same time, she has never tried to conceal her ambition; after all, she dreamed of having her own TV show for many years before it actually happened. You reach people in television in a way that allows you to make more of an impact, she said. If that’s the game you’ve decided to play, you might as well try to win.

CHAPTER 1

Who Is That Kid and Where Did She Come From?

RACHEL ANNE MADDOW was born on April Fools’ Day 1973, and almost from the very beginning, she was showing signs of the wonky but entertaining public persona she’d grow into several decades in the future.

Rachel arrived with a real quizzical look on her face, wanting to check everything out, said her mother, Elaine Maddow, adding that her daughter was a pretty lively kid to boot.

She was born grown-up, and she never talked baby talk, said Elaine, noting that Rachel had taught herself to read around the age of three by reading the newspaper each morning. We [kept] saying to ourselves, Who is that kid and where did she come from?

Which was a reasonable question, given her parents’ heritage.

Elaine Gosse was born on June 16, 1941, in Newfoundland, Canada, into a conservative Catholic family where she was one of eight brothers and sisters; her father was a fisherman. All I ever saw my mother do with eight children was work hard, so I thought, well, maybe I would just not do that, Elaine remembered. I’d be a career lady or sail the seas or do something really different. She moved to California in 1963 to become a portfolio analyst for the financial company Dean Witter.

Robert—Rachel’s father—had grown up in Arizona and Southern California and graduated from Stanford University in 1964. He was in his second year at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco when he met Elaine at a party. He served in Vietnam as a captain in the Air Force between 1967 and 1972, working as an attorney and liaison between the military and various gun and weapons manufacturers. He and Elaine married in 1968, and their first child, David, was born in July 1969. When Rachel was born, he changed careers and began working for the local water authority, the East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Rachel’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Russia, and though he was Jewish, he raised Rachel’s father as a Protestant. Robert and Elaine—who came from a devoted Catholic family—decided to raise their future children as Catholic, and Robert actually converted to Catholicism in 1981.

Elaine became an American citizen—when she was eight months pregnant with Rachel—because she wanted to vote in local and national elections, though it could also have been because she spent the afternoons during her pregnancy with Rachel watching the Watergate hearings on TV. In fact, Elaine marveled at her young daughter’s sense of compassion. She always seemed to be concerned about causes and people that were overlooked, said Elaine, a trait that was sparked in young Rachel when she entered kindergarten, the same year that California’s Proposition 13—an amendment that reduced property values and tax rates—became law.

I can actually remember the library hours changing because they couldn’t afford to staff it anymore, said Rachel years later. That, coupled with the state’s worst (to date) drought in 1977 due to record-low levels of snowpack across the state, also fostered her lifelong environmental activism, not to mention her father’s work on water issues. Growing up in a time of drought made a lasting impression on the wet cement of my very young mind, she said. It gave me a lifelong appreciation that water is rare, fragile, and also that water is power.

There was a lot of discussion of fairness in our house, said Elaine. Every night in the Maddow household the family would gather for dinner and grill the kids about how their days went, asking, ‘What went right and what went wrong in your day?’

We discouraged whining, she added. If they whined, we’d say, ‘Whining is not going to do a thing. Now, how are you going to take care of it?’

When Rachel and David were young, respectively only three and seven years old, they begged their parents for a pet, but Elaine always refused; after all, she had been raised to believe animals were there to work—such as dogs who herd sheep or help with hunting trips—or to be eaten. But they kept badgering, and their parents finally gave in and brought a golden retriever home. My brother and I were really excited for about a half an hour, then we lost interest and it became my mom’s responsibility, said Rachel. The golden retriever ate her plants and then went straight back home.

Like many kids growing up in the 1970s, young Rachel also watched her fair share of Saturday morning cartoons, but what really caught her eye—and incidentally also influenced her path—were the educational segments known as Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of three-minute animated shorts that aired on ABC, designed to convert dry educational topics such as science and grammar into fun learning experiences.

One of the best-known segments was I’m Just a Bill, which explained how the legislative process works. In fact, Rachel points to Schoolhouse Rock! as serving as a major influence on the segments of her show where she explains complex stories in plain language but with an entertaining and often humorous twist. She still has a soft spot for them. When I see those, I get misty, she said.

She also took careful note of how her father watched sports on TV—with the sound off while he listened to the radio—which would play an important role later on when she launched her radio career. "I thought, right, radio is harder. He’s getting a higher-level audio experience from people who know you can’t see the picture," she said.

Another equally important formative moment arrived in 1980 when she watched Ronald Reagan on the family’s black-and-white television after the presidential election and couldn’t stand the sight of the future president. All I remember is the feeling of dislike, she said, which wasn’t a surprise, because even at an early age she was becoming aware of the huge disconnect between her burgeoning social values and those that surrounded her in her hometown of Castro Valley, which she would later describe as a very conservative, nasty little town.

But in the sea of red, Rachel’s parents were centrists, Reagan Democrats, which sometimes resulted in arguments and dug-in heels on both sides, and her family acknowledges that these lively debates helped shape Rachel’s debate skills later on. Anytime we would have a disagreement, she could outtalk me and give me a run for money, Elaine says. It got to the point where I’d have to say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to discuss it anymore.’

California presented a world of dichotomies to young Rachel. On the one hand, she grew up in the Bay Area, one of the most liberal parts of the United States. On the other hand, Castro Valley was an island of red Republican values surrounded by a sea of blue, and she realized that her intellect and compassion for the underdog were at odds with the sentiments of the majority of the population in her hometown. The grown-ups in her midst would talk fondly of someplace called Orange County, a conservative bastion in Southern California. I thought Orange County was a very specific thing where the people would glow a different color, she said.

Her first act of rebellion occurred at a gathering of the local chapter of the White Aryan Resistance, the modern term for the Ku Klux Klan, the skinhead racists who were common in the region. The group held rallies to attract new members at Rachel’s high school and put on concerts at local auditoriums.

Rachel gathered together a group of friends and put up anti-racist posters around town and asked a group of skinheads in nearby Oakland who were anti-racists to go to an upcoming concert organized by the racist skinheads. We were just high school kids and we were afraid of them, but we asked them to please go and beat them up, she said.

She was also a hard-core punk fan, favoring the Dead Kennedys and Hüsker Dü. My parents were horrified, she said. I was grounded when my mom found an SST records sampler LP in my room, I think it had particularly porny cover art and she was very rattled by it. As a teenager, I thought at the time that it was probably the apex of my coolness.

Despite her taste in music, she played several instruments when she was in junior high school. But I was terrible at all of them, she admitted. I was best at being the conductor.

She did better at athletics, especially when she arrived at Castro Valley High School, where she dove into playing as many sports as possible: basketball, swimming, and volleyball, which she excelled at. Rachel was more than a bit obsessive about showing up for practices and competitions; she was injured regularly but pushed through games and workouts anyway.

She’d understandably developed a reputation as a jock around school—and even dreamed of pursuing the Olympics—but she knew she was destined for more than a one-dimensional life. Sports were the thing I did in high school, but the rest of my life didn’t reflect that aspect of my personality, she said.

When it came to the movies, she favored John Hughes movies, The Breakfast Club in particular. And while she considered herself to be a mix of the jock and the rebellious character played by Ally Sheedy, she saw herself as John Bender, played by Judd Nelson: the outsider.

One outsider she particularly respected was Jessica Mitford, an Englishwoman who grew up in an aristocratic family and denounced her background. She became a muckraker of sorts and authored The American Way of Death, a book that took a critical look at the funeral industry in the United States. [The book] was uncompromising and tough, but [written] in this witty and interesting way, said Rachel. And for her to have come from that family and take such an outsider’s perspective seemed so great.

She was slowly becoming aware that she was already an outsider in another way. In the summer of 1989, between her junior and senior years of high school, Rachel volunteered at the Center for AIDS Services in nearby Oakland, pitching in where necessary by handing out food, running errands, and answering questions for clients who she inherently realized would be alive for only a short time.

As a result, she had intuited that her tribe was under siege even before she had admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. She said, Growing up in the Bay Area as a gay kid defined the world in a life-or-death sort of way. There was a sense of: Look, your life is happening now, and this may be all you get.

But coming out just to herself was still a gradual process, and while Rachel had dated guys in high school, they tended to be boys she was already friends with. In one instance, she primarily went out with one guy because she loved his car, a Mustang Fastback. "Except, I didn’t want to ride around in his car and be seen in it, I wanted that to be my car."

She actually became serious with one guy who was a marine, and they went to her senior prom together, with him in full dress uniform and Rachel resplendent in a powder-blue dress.

But something didn’t feel right. Boys weren’t as thrilling to me as they were for my girlfriends, and I definitely found myself drawn more to the charming young women in my life than to the men, she said.

When she was sixteen, Rachel finally admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. "So that’s what’s going on below my chin," she realized.

It didn’t come to me in terms of ‘I think I like that girl,’ or ‘I think I’m falling in love,’ it was, ‘It would make sense to me if I ended up being a gay person,’ she said, adding that once she began to consider the possibility, more of the pieces fell into place. It came to me as an abstraction and then very quickly became a hormonal urge. My next thought was, ‘But I hate softball! I can’t possibly be a lesbian because the only thing I know about lesbians is they play softball and I will never.’

But when it came to telling her parents—or any of her classmates—well, that wouldn’t be in the cards for a while. After all, her parents were devoted Catholics at the time and two of her maternal aunts had even become nuns. I knew it was going to be hard for them to accept me, she said.

One didn’t talk about those issues at that time, admitted Elaine.

Besides, since Castro Valley was very conservative, Rachel worried that if she came out, she’d face physical and emotional harm. I knew that it was not going to be very safe, she said.

She also had another secret that she wasn’t going to reveal anytime soon: several years before she wrestled with her sexuality, she experienced her first major struggle with depression. "I was a