For the week of December 4 - 10, 2002

A ‘liberal’ even conservatives can thank

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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In today’s toxic U.S. politics, Florence Mahoney qualified as one of those detested Democratic "liberals" that Republicans bash with relish as softheaded social do-gooders.

You bet. Florence wore her liberal politics with honor and pride.

And millions upon millions of Americans for generations and generations to come will be better off because of her liberal good works that are well known in Washington and the world of public health, but not much beyond.

Florence Mahoney is acknowledged as the driving force behind the modern day $16 billion-a-year National Institutes of Health that one observer calls "the greatest biomedical research aggregation in the world," and its Institute on Aging, which she badgered Congress into creating over the protests of then-President Richard Nixon.

To those of us who knew the inexhaustible Florence and watched her awesome pursuit of projects with unflagging energy, she seemed indestructible, even as she passed the 100-year mark in age.

However, at 103, life for Florence ran its course: She died last Friday at her spacious home overlooking the Potomac in Washington, her last breath in the arms of her inseparable housekeeper, Rose.

I was a relative newcomer to Florence’s circle of friends 30 years ago, and decidedly insignificant: We met in Phoenix in the early 1970s at a press club candidates’ debate when I first joined The Arizona Republic as editorial page editor.

Befriending journalists was one of Florence’s proven strategies for promoting her projects. But using journalists was not disingenuous. She was married to the late Daniel J. Mahoney Sr. who was president of the Cox Newspapers chain that eventually burgeoned into the huge Cox Communications multi-media newspaper and broadcast empire. He also was the son-in-law of Ohio Gov. James Cox, who ran unsuccessfully for president. Her late son, Daniel Jr., who owned the M Bar M ranch just outside Stanley, was a Cox newspapers publisher.

Over three decades we exchanged letters and calls, and occasionally lunched in Washington and Phoenix. Florence never was without an issue to raise with politicians throughout the country by phone or letter. Her modest hilltop home in Phoenix’s suburban Paradise Valley was cluttered with magazines and books she relentlessly mined for material to support her arguments, virtually all of them related to medicine and health.

I’m told that parties in her elegant colonial-style Washington home teemed with the capital’s most influential political, business and media figures. She also was known for getting through to the powerful on the phone, including presidents. Harry Truman said Florence and philanthropist Mary Lasker, who was a cohort in her projects, were "the most tireless, consistent and effective crusaders" he’d known.

One personal memory of Florence’s energy, when she was well into her 80s and relying on a cane, involves a day she asked me to lunch at her Washington place when I was in town for meetings. But we then decided on the long walk into Georgetown to a restaurant and back to her place, and she chatted all the way about a current passion, how to make American couples better parents.

Florence was a sparse, slightly stooped figure with her gray hair piled on her head. But her aged appearance was deceiving: she spoke and moved rapidly for her years, as if time would run out before she could convey an idea, as her thoughts nimbly hopped from one fact to the next during conversations.

Small wonder the most powerful men in U.S. politics couldn’t resist her pleas to fund and expand today’s NIH and provide medical hope for whole generations of Americans, especially the aging.

Last year, a final tribute to Florence’s lifelong work arrived in time for her to enjoy it: a book about her remarkable legacies, "Noble Conspirator: Florence S. Mahoney and the Rise of the National Institutes of Health," by Judith Robinson.

Even today’s Republicans might admit, perhaps grudgingly, that the nation is far better off that Richard Nixon, the conservative, didn’t get his way by blocking Mahoney, the liberal, from her lifelong goal of NIH and its research into health of the aging.

 

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