Losing Walter Shapiro on a day he would have appreciated more than anyone

My 'work husband' and I weathered journalism ups and downs, but our friendship never wavered.

It is fitting that I began writing this personal remembrance at cocktail hour on Monday, July 22. I was drinking wine, but Walter would have been sipping Scotch or the fresh martini, complete with frosted glass, that more than one friend wanted very much to bring to the hospital as soon as he could sit up in bed.

That day did not come. In peak ironic timing that he of course would have appreciated, word of Walter’s death (I can hardly bear typing that phrase) came on a Sunday morning, when lots of political journalists were online tracking the talk shows, unaware that a few hours later, President Joe Biden would suddenly “stand down” from running for reelection. By posting a letter on X/Twitter. And then waiting a half hour to mention he was endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris.

That’s the kind of news political junkies wait lifetimes for and rarely encounter. Like so many others, I wanted to know what Walter thought. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered over the previous 10 days.

I keep tripping over emails and direct messages and jokes. On the evening of July 12, we had this exchange:

Alas I am in hospital with pneumonia. I will check back next week.

OMG. Are you ok? They caught it early?

It is just my excuse to avoid writing on the Trump convention.

You're making me laugh. So I guess if you can still do one-liners, you're not in dire shape.

I was wrong. That was our last contact.

Others have written of Walter’s immense contributions to political journalism, his kindness, his mentorship, and his self-deprecating sense of humor. I agree with all of them and urge you to read their tributes, and dip into all his work, everywhere, all the way back, at his Authory portfolio.

This is a personal appreciation and tribute to a close friendship that endured through turbulent times in journalism, politics and—mostly for good—the TV transition to streaming.

I don’t have specific recollections of the first time I met Walter, but it would have happened close to 30 years ago. He signed a contract to write political columns for USA Today in 1995, and I joined the staff the following year as a national political writer.

We quickly recognized that we were “mental twins,” as I called us in May, after he generously used the word “masterful” to promote a column I had written about journalism foibles and followed up with an email headlined “Your Piece Hit All My Sweet Spots.” Which I already knew. Because, of course.

The main difference between us was that he had a guaranteed 25 inches (about 750 words) for his columns (it was in his contract), while I was often scrambling to cram a news story into 10 or 12 inches. We ended up liking each other anyway, and worked in harmony through five or six presidential and congressional election cycles.

But eventually things fell apart, as they tend to in journalism, especially in crises like the 2008  financial collapse and ensuing recession. Money at USA Today grew tight and Walter’s contract ended. I urged him to get in touch with Melinda Henneberger, a friend who was starting a new online-only opinion site—Politics Daily—at AOL. I had a feeling they’d hit it off.

“Of course I hired him in the first 30 seconds of our lunch -- duh -- so then we just had fun for two hours. That was not much of an interview, he told me then and later. What was there to ask?” Melinda wrote this week on Facebook.

Money soon got tighter, USA Today instituted unpaid furlough weeks, and I belatedly decided to join Walter, Melinda and the rest of the merry band at Politics Daily. It was a startup, and online, and this was 2009, and suddenly we were all required to build our own brands and PD’s brand and get out there on Twitter and Facebook. Whatever they were.

Walter took some persuading. It was my great triumph to coax him onto Twitter by comparing it to the stand-up comedy he did back then at clubs in DC and New York. “It’s just like one-liners,” I told him, and that was the magic. It was his great triumph that some years later, he was considered such a social media guru that the magazine he was working for summoned him to Washington to give a talk on how to do it. I have no idea what he said, but we both loved that this happened.

I might also deserve credit, and will claim it until challenged, for this: In 2009, there were few online only, independent media outlets and even fewer that showcased political opinion writers. In that environment I managed to win an award, and I strongly encouraged Walter—a contest-phobic—to enter the same competition the next year. He did, he won, and he declared his mission accomplished. “I can now call myself an award-winning journalist,” he told me, adding that therefore, he had no need to enter any more contests. As far as I know, he was true to his word.

When Politics Daily shut down in March 2011, Walter opened doors for me as he has done for many. We worked smoothly together on a 2012 Eagleton Institute of Politics report about whether governors make good presidents and candidates, then found to our shock on our next project—a Brookings Institution report called Phoning It In and Failing to Show: The Story of the 2014 Primaries—that we could separately write alternate chapters and our writing sounded like the same person.

To be clear, we are 100% not the same person. I don’t think I ever saw Walter stoop to wearing jeans, my daily attire of choice. He wore suit pants and liked his beef rare, and it seemed completely appropriate that he ended up with the X/Twitter handle @MrWalterShapiro. My husband, who also likes beef and martinis and Scotch, compared him to a boulevardier—a Parisian man about town, his towns being New York City and Washington, D.C., but also Manchester, N.H., and Des Moines, Iowa, and all the other familiar touchpoints on the early primary map.

As the economic tides rolled in and out, Walter revealed himself as an expert not just on politics but on the journalism business. He quickly became my go-to guy for tips on how to manage a free-lance career, many of which originated with his wife, Meryl Gordon. She's an author, a professor and a wonderful friend who has a real genius for coming up with lines like “Lots going on, can’t talk about it” (when people asked what she was up to) and “Can’t you do better than that?” (when negotiating on pay).

Walter was my “work husband” and he was also my “Louise Penny husband” after my actual husband stopped reading her books for reasons I still can’t fathom. The four of us exchanged a steady stream of what-to-watch and what-to-read suggestions over the years, and discussed but never made a trip to “Longmire Days,” still going strong in Wyoming though the TV series ended long ago.

That joke Walter made about having an excuse to not write about Donald Trump at the Republican convention was misdirection. He would have reveled in covering it all. In that, he had much more discipline and tolerance than I did. On the final night of the convention, instead of watching Trump, I watched the final two episodes of Franklin on Apple TV.

It felt far more patriotic, especially when John Adams made this toast to the United States that he, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay were in Paris trying to will into being: “To virtue, honesty, education of the people, and the rule of law. We can have no country without them, nor be worthy of one.”

It made me tear up, and it wasn’t just the resonance of the words as we contemplate another Trump presidency. I knew Walter had been deteriorating through the week, but all I could think of was discussing the show with him. If he hadn’t seen it, I realized, he probably wouldn’t ever. And if he had, our conversation about that, and everything else, would never happen.

Photo credits: Walter Shapiro, family photo; Walter Shapiro and Meryl Gordon at The Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor, Oct. 31, 2010. University of Michigan Office of Student Publications