Enrique Cerna Interviews Former TV host Phil Donahue

This is a transcript of an interview with Phil Donahue on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on July 25, 2008.

EC: Phil Donahue, welcome, good to have you here.

PD: Thank you, Enrique.

EC: So it has been 12 years now since you left daytime daily talk show television, May 1996. Do you miss it?

PD: I don’t miss the daily of it. We did over 6000 shows; I think I’m Cal Ripken. And it was a wonderful ride, it should happen to everybody. So much happened during those 29 years, and we were talking about it and my name was on the show, it was fabulous. But you know, after a while, the little voice says, ok now, they’ve heard you speak, sit down. I don’t think we lingered, I think we got out at the right time.

EC: 3 years in Dayton, Ohio.

PD: Yes, we were born in Dayton Ohio in 1967. And moved to Chicago in ’74. We weren’t sure we were going to make it as a local show. We were dull, visually dull. And we were competing with a woman on the other channel, dressed like a chicken salad sandwich, on Let’s Make a Deal and the spinning wheel, c’mon down! And I’m there talking to two talking heads, the industry just didn’t understand us. What made the show work was issues; we knew what issues were cared about, certainly our mostly female audience in 1967. And we came along and gave them a show that they wanted for a long time and no one else did it. We got very lucky.

EC: When you figured out that it was issues that was going to drive the show and make it work, did you do anything in particular yourself to go find a guest, particularly on that local level, to bring the audience in?

PD: We inherited an audience from the previous seated show. The show we replaced had an audience, it was like an entertainment show, be on it and you could wave. And when the host of that show left to move to go to Hollywood, I had been doing a radio show on the other station, a call-in afternoon radio show and it was doing very well. I mean, I had Malcolm X on that show. We could have them on from long distance; you didn’t have to come to Dayton to come on. We had a budget where we could fly in a guest 2-3 times a week, something like that. And so here we are with this audience, and I began the first show by interviewing. We had Madeline Marie O’Hare as our first guest.

EC: The atheist.

PD: The most hated woman in America, and boy when that was over, they knew there was a show; a new guy on television in the morning. And about the third show, I noticed the audience was asking better questions that I was. I jumped out of the chair and that’s what really made the Donahue Show. There would be no Donahue Show without the studio audience.

EC: That really was something that kind of brought this new way of doing television talk shows.

PD: Enrique, it was a very radical idea called democracy. Let the people use the airwaves that belong to them in the first place. We put--I don’t know if you remember--if you ever went to a television show in those days, the audience would be way back there, and the cameras would be right here, and the audience would have to look. We put the cameras behind the audience and moved it up. Our guests would almost sit knees-y with the first row; we wanted that. We wanted the guests to feel them breathing. It kept them awake, alive, and I think provoked more energy that helped the show a lot.

EC: So having an audience, having that voice…

PD: Was the whole thing, it was amazing. We had a young woman who was fasting, in protest of the Vietnam War. She had been arrested and she was in the Green County Jail, not far from Dayton. And I had her mother on, and the women went crazy, “What if she dies, what kind of mother are you?” And the mother said, “Why aren’t you concerned about the 200 young men coming home every week this war?” And of course that blew everybody back and I just couldn’t get to them fast enough. We did shows like “my husband doesn’t kiss me anymore”. Wow the phones just went POOF. “Wait till I tell you about my husband,” you know. One woman calls, she says every night before I go to sleep, I tell my husband, “I love you, honey,” and from the other side of the bed I hear, “Ditto.” You know that nobody was doing that in 1967.  And, we were able to attract a pretty decent crowd. Big enough for us to move to Chicago where you could get a guest. In Dayton, I’d say, yeah we want you to come to Dayton, and they’d say, “Yeah, the soapbox derby” and I’d say, “No, that’s Akron. Don’t go to Akron.” And then move to Chicago, O’Hare; easier to get to, not as inconvenient--you’re going to get more people. There were already people in Chicago that were glamorous and would help us. But we didn’t lose our interest in issues. If we did, you know “my husband doesn’t kiss me anymore”, we might have Bob Dole the next day; Gephardt, people you wouldn’t normally see for an hour.

EC: You enjoyed doing politics.

PD: Oh I still do, I think, you know this is the drama, especially now. Politics, the Washington press corp., you have to think of it like a sporting thing. Their Super Bowl is every four years, the presidential election. The sports press is the Super Bowl so they focus on that. And you can see their hearts start to accelerate, it’s the great drama. And all the other congressional races as well. I think this is a great country, I think we have so much to share to the rest of the world.

EC: While you were doing the show, did you try to sit on your personal views, or was that a part of it?

PD: I often said that, 6,000 show, it’s pretty hard to walk like a mechanical man down the center of every issue never revealing. No, I think people caught on to me. If you watch a couple shows, you could see that. We certainly didn’t turn our backs on other political ideas. Ronald Reagan was on the show. George Bush the 1st was on the show.

EC: Jerry Falwell.

PD: Falwell, all of them. Conservatives were good guests for us. They punched back at me, it’d get the audience aroused and the phones rang. Those were good shows, I enjoyed them.

EC: Did it bother you to be called a liberal?

PD: You know, I never thought of myself. I didn’t say, you know, I think I’ll be liberal. Liberals brought us social security, just to name one. The liberal has become the political idea that dare not speak its name. We have so marginalized the liberal voice in this country; liberals wanna sing Kum Ba Yah. Who are these people? They’re wimps.

EC: They like granola.

PD: They like granola; they don’t have any idea about this world. They have to be tough. And then the process of this marginalization, we’ve lost our respect for diplomacy. You can’t get elected until you prove you’re tough. You don’t get elected to office by saying, “I’m for diplomacy.” You have to run for office and say, “I’m for a stronger military.” $500 billion a year, (not counting the Iraq War, which is 125 billion)--a supplemental. Do the math, that’s $2 billion a day for things that go boom. We look like we’re an insecure nation here, and we have so much to share. This is a great country, what are we doing? We’re bombing Grenada for god’s sakes. And the American people are standing there and watching it, and remaining largely mute.

EC: Let’s go to 2002, you join MSNBC to do Donahue.  In essence they bring you on because they know where you stand particularly on the war, and it’s in the run up to the war. The show, although it doesn’t get great rating, it is the highest rates show they have on the air at MSNBC um, beating Chris Matthew’s Hardball show which is pretty popular, I don’t know what kind of ratings it gets now.  But uh, you didn’t have a great ride there.  You ended up getting bounced because you had low ratings.

PD: Yes (clears throat) what gave them away was, to be honest we were often the tent pole for the evening for MSNBC.  We never beat FOX.

EC: Were you up against Bill O’Reilly?

PD: Uh huh.  Not always, but often the number 1 show.  We deserved certainly to be nurtured not cancelled and a memo was leaked to the New York Times.  Which you know, thank goodness, because otherwise I’d look like a guy saying, “Hey, hey they fired me!” The memo said that Donahue’s anti-war posture is not a good thing.  

EC: In fact they said in that Donahue should be fired because he would be a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.  This was a consultant that did this.

PD: Uh huh, in a time of war, when the competition is waving the flag.  That’s what it said in the memo.  You know being against the war is not certainly in October 2002, which is the month of the Iraq war resolution--October 2002 Senate and the House voted to give the president permission. We invaded in March of ’03. We invaded Iraq.  I was gone before March of ’03.  Enrique, I just think it’s very important, I hate to preachy about this, being against the war is not good for business.  This is what you get with corporate media.  Corporate media doesn’t want to scold; disagreeing with the president, especially when the nation couldn’t wait to bomb somebody--not everybody, millions of people resisted his war were against it but their voices were never heard.  So if we don’t appreciate that there is a financial, ah, pressure here, these boardroom people don’t want to go to the country club and have somebody in the locker room saying, What are you doing with this Donahue guy criticizing our president!  Criticizing Rumsfeld! You know there are millions of people in our country today who believe if our president calls a war, you have to shut-up and sing and salute.  That is not the country my parents raised me to pledge my allegiance to.  And don’t forget this, we’ve had millions, how many thousands and thousands of young men and Americans die on foreign battlefields to protect our way of life, at the center of which is free speech. If you’re not going to use it at a time like this, stop wasting their blood.  

EC: So, we jump ahead to what, 2005.  And uh, you meet this young man who changes your life.

PD: I do, 2005, yeah.  I uh.

EC: You met Thomas Young. Tell me about Thomas Young

PD: I met Thomas Young at Walter Reed.  He was, there he was lying there, very pale cheekbones.  And I’m talking to him; he was wicked out on medication.  Morphine wall to wall.  

EC: And actually it was Ralph Nader who arranged this.

PD: It was Nader who said in a conversation with him, a mother and a son have asked to see me at Walter Reed, do you want to go?  I said, “Yeah,” I’d never been. So about a week later, off we go.  I’m standing next to his bed and his mother, who you’ll see in the film we made about this called Body of War, his mother says, gives me a briefing on the nature of his injury, “Thomas is a T4. That’s back here, as far down as you can go with your hand [touches back of neck] touch your spine there, that’s where the bullet went through Thomas’s spine.”

EC: He was actually shot in his collar bone right?

PD: Come down from the collarbone and exited T4.  He was at the back of a truck, 25 guys, no top, Sadr City--fish in a barrel.

EC: In what, 5 days?

PD: Um, he can’t cough. His stomach muscles don’t work. He can’t get the energy up to do that.  He has morning nausea.  Um, prime of life, he has sexual dysfunction.  You know the more- the closer you get to this, and I said, “I think the American people should see this.”  This is the most sanitized war of my lifetime; can’t shoot the coffins, and the whole press corp. said, “Ok.”  Uh, we have saluted here.  Norman Solomon wrote a book, “War Made Easy”.  He makes the point, if a president wants a war, he can have one.  It’s amazing, it’s just amazing…and certainly been demonstrated in my lifetime.  And especially when you don’t have a congress executing its constitutional responsibility, then certainly the door is wide open.  And by the way Enrique you don’t get a, you don’t have--you don’t get glory for fixing healthcare.  You don’t get glory for fixing global warming or even the economy.  You only get glory for going to war. You don’t get a statue in the park for fixing anything, except going to war.  That’s why we got this horses and the swords and the, you know, and, we’re killing people.  Our children are in jeopardy because they were by accident of birth, born here.  They’re, they’re more likely to go to war than anybody else, certainly in a democratic, advanced country, like ours.

EC: In meeting Thomas, you’ve- obviously been very moved by the whole thing, you said that you wanted to at first write a book about it.  And then you changed your mind and said let’s make a movie.

PD: Yeah, I thought it was absurd, me make a movie.  

EC: You’d never done that before?

PD: No, I’d never done that.  It’s just uh, boy I’ll tell you what, it’s a contact sport.  This is.  Um, and I thought let’s go.  Taking chutzpah to another level, I said let’s go.

PD Audio clips: “Thomas is a very compelling figure. He speaks and you can’t take your eyes off him.” “There is no script in this film, we follow the story.” “I want this, I want the movie to be seen, and so does he.”

EC: We have a short time left here let me ask you a few other topics. Oprah Winfrey what do you think of her?

PD: Stratospheric, hard to imagine a more successful human being in the history of our business.

EC: Did she bring the end of Donahue?

PD: Well you know we had been on, 29 years, you know.  We were ready anyway, yeah.  But she uh, I-I, I don’t think it was a, a direct result, I think we would’ve left anyway, but she certainly was on the rise back then.

EC: Ralph Nader.  You supported him for president earlier, you’re still good friends with him, he’s running again, are you gonna support him again?

PD: I won’t be on the bus.  I’ve got a wife who was upset when I was on the bus in 2000.

EC: Your wife Marlow Thomas, your wife.

PD: Marlow did not want me on the bus in ’04 and I wasn’t.  Um, I’m very, I just believe that we should have more than 2 parties.  I mean, the independent candidacies are almost impossible because of the roadblocks that are set up by the 2 parties. And these two parties are pretty much owned by corporations.  I mean, corporations can shower money on both, and they’re in a win-win situation, and you don’t really get, uh, you know what you get. With 2 parties, you get a debate. For example, not long ago the presidential debate on the democratic side, the debate was over an hour before we heard anything about Iraq. Over an hour long!  They wanted to know whether or not you’re wearing a flag pin.  Eh, you know, this is not the journalism envisioned by the framers, who- who gave us the first amendment, free press. Come on, stand up and bite back; stop handing- taking these hand outs.

EC: We’re at an age of 24-7 cable.  And uh, radio, talk radio, where everybody seems to have an opinion about something.  Uh, good for the democracy, not so good for the democracy?

PD: Well, uh- if it really was a diverse kind of thing that was happening, it would be fabulous.  The problem is, at the center of this large crowd of news gatherers are 5 large companies, mega-companies more interested in the price of their stock than they are in sticking their nose under the tent to see what-the, our leaders, our righteous leaders have in store for us.
I have the DISH Enrique.  I have 600 channels in my house, but 400 of them are selling the Bow Flex machine and the rest are jewelry and Jesus.  This is not diversity, this is corporate mania.  Using these public assets to sell things. It’d be like selling the Mississippi River, you know. These, these airwaves don’t belong to them.  And the FCC is just like, you know how many stations you want, you can have, uh, it’s the reason, it’s the reason that uh, media was so compliant when the president invaded Iraq. It’s the reason you have so many commercials on the hour and half hour.  It’s the reason that the media has turned your children into consumer targets.  Um, you know, it’s the reason you don’t see people who are members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War on Television.  You don’t see United for Peace and Justice people in television. You don’t see Peace Now Jews on television.  There’s so many wonderful and patriotic Americans out there, but you’re not hearing their voice.  And you’re sure not seeing the pain that has been inflicted in thousands of families in this war, which is what we are, you know, kind of, I don’t know, maybe we’re, maybe we have too much chutzpah. But, we’re trying to cut into that.  We’re trying to say, see this.  If you’re gonna send a nation to war, you have a responsibility to see the sacrifices that other people are making and stop with all this pretense.  The troops, the troops, oh the brave troops, the brave troops, oh you can’t say troops without saying brave--they come home, and the VA doesn’t call ‘em back.

EC: Now, you have this film, obviously it’s a big part of your life, what else is ahead for you?

PD: You know after 3 and a half years uh, I want people to see this film.  I mean I don‘t know a filmmaker who doesn’t want that.  You know I don’t know after that, um, maybe Marlow will just dust around me, um. I you know, I-I’ll sit home and, I’ll watch the Ciao shows, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.  Um, and you know, I pop off, you know I’m not - I spoke to the California State Democratic Party. I was very flattered to be asked.  Um.

EC: If you’re gonna run?

PD: Oh no, I think it’s a little late for that.  72 year old people have already been cared for on that, by John McCain.   He’s my age.  So no.  I don‘t know if I could, do I want to get on the phone and call my friends for money?  Do I want to get into this?  2 parties that’s what happens. You can’t- you know- we should have universal health- healthcare.  The only thing separating us from Canada is an imaginary line.  What is it about us that we can’t – Communism oh you don’t want- you know- these, the argument is big government is terrible big government is terrible – tax and spend. tax and spend--that’s all they say to us. And look what they’re paying for--this war.  And by the way they’re taxing our children for it while they reduce our taxes.  This is more than kissing a baby. This is pandering, this is dishonest, this is irresponsible, come on!  We’re never gonna feel free in this country until we have, until we have the courage to elect leaders who will reach out rather than lash out.

EC: Phil Donahue, thank you very much for spending the time.  I appreciate it.

PD: Thank you Enrique.