The daughter of an Irish cop, Maureen Dowd graduated from Catholic University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English literature. She began her career in journalism in 1974 as a clerk for The Washington Star. She started writing obituaries and the weather and worked her way up to become a sports columnist and city reporter for the newspaper. When The Star folded in 1981, she went to Time magazine. She joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983.

Dowd began covering national politics during Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential bid in 1984 and moved to the newspaper’s Washington Bureau in 1986. She covered the White House beat since 1988 and wrote a column in the Sunday Times Magazine entitled “On Washington.”

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1992, Dowd was a 1991 recipient of the Breakthrough Award from “Women, Men and Media” at Columbia University and a 1994 Matrix award from New York Women in Communications.

In January 1995, Dowd was appointed columnist of The New York Times Op-Ed page. Regarding the appointment, publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said, “Maureen Dowd has long been one of the most compelling writers in American journalism….I know she will be an important, fresh voice on our Op-Ed page.”