Bob Beckel, who turned a long career as a Democratic politician into an even longer career as a television pundit, mostly for Fox News, where he took on the role of a good-natured full-time liberal with a penchant for saying whatever’s on his mind, died Sunday at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was 73 years old.
His daughter Mackenzie Beckel confirmed the death but said the cause was not known.
As an expert, Mr. Beckel often traded blows with the likes of Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld. But some of his positions – although he defended Barack Obama and called for visa freezes for Muslim and Chinese students – meant that he often had more friends on the right than on the left.
“We got on very well with him. He had the key to my house,” Mr. Hannity said on his show on Monday. Appearing alongside Mr. Hannity, Laura Ingram, another Fox host, called him “an old liberal to fight with.”
But Mr. Beckel has often crossed the line of cultural insensitivity. On the Fox News show The Five, where he hosted, he used racial slurs against the Chinese and repeatedly questioned the loyalty of Muslim Americans. “I am an Islamophobe. That’s right – you can call me whatever you want, ”he said in 2015, after attack in the editorial office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Fox News fired him in 2015, ostensibly over a dispute over extended sick leave that began with spinal surgery but turned into a stay in rehab after he became addicted to painkillers. The network rehired him in early 2017 with great fanfare — only to fire him again a few months later after a black employee accused him of make a racist remark .
Mr. Beckel denied the allegations, saying he was set up because of his constant criticism of President Donald Trump.
Mr. Beckel rose to national prominence as the outspoken campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign. By all accounts, he ran a savvy race to help his candidate overcome an ignominious defeat in the New Hampshire primary to Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, in part convincing Mr. Mondale to question the substance of Mr. Hart’s agenda during the debate by uttering the popular catchphrase “Where beef?”
Mr. Mondale announced his candidacy, but Ronald Reagan defeated him in November of that year in one of the most lopsided elections in recent history.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Beckel announced that he was done with campaigns, but not with politics. The following year, he founded a consulting firm advising politicians and corporate clients, and throughout the 1990s served as an expert on cable, network, and local news.
In 2000, he signed with Fox News as a commentator, and in 2011 he joined four other network personalities to launch The Five, an afternoon party loosely modeled after The Look.
The show became popular, dominating its 5:00 pm timeslot and second only to Mr. Hannity among Fox viewers. Many of the show’s fans, including a surprising number of liberals, said they tuned in mainly to see what the always unpredictable Mr. Beckel would do next.
Broad-shouldered and slightly round-shouldered, adorned with bright suspenders and shirt sleeves, Mr. Beckel was as inclined to defend liberal piety as he was to pierce it. He could make a rude gesture to one of his conservative sparring partners or show up just before Christmas dressed as Santa Claus.
“It’s like a Thanksgiving family coming home and arguing about politics, but you know everyone loves each other.” he told The New York Times in 2011.
Robert Gilliland Beckel was born November 15, 1948 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. His father, Cambridge Graham Beckel, taught at Queens College and later at a high school in Lyme, Connecticut, where the family moved when Robert was in high school. His mother, Ellen (Gilliland) Beckel, was a housewife.
Both of his parents were alcoholics, a fact that Mr. Beckel greatly disgraced but which he freely discussed, especially in light of his own later struggle with substance abuse.
But his father, who moonlighted as a labor organizer and civil rights activist, also passed on a fierce commitment to progressive ideas, a complex legacy that Mr. Beckel explored in his memoir I Should Be Dead: My Life, Surviving Politics. , TV and drug addiction” (2015).
He graduated from Wagner College on Staten Island in 1970 with a degree in political science, where he also played football. From 1971 to 1972 he served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines and in 1977 joined the State Department.
There, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, he worked on the Panama Canal Treaty, SALT II arms control negotiations, and US policy in the Middle East. He left to run ground operations in Texas for Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign, a losing effort that nonetheless allowed him to lead Mr. Mondale’s campaign.
Mr. Beckel has worked extensively as an expert. He did everything the producers asked him to do, whether it was replacing vacationing hosts or participating in election night coverage.
“It’s a way for me to keep my finger on the pulse,” he told The Washington Post in 1991. — I can still gain strength before the campaigns, but I do not need to participate in them. I can go to Iowa and New Hampshire, stand up, and then go to bed.”
He married Leland Ingham, a professional golfer, in 1991; they divorced in 2002. Together with his daughter, he had a son, Alex; his brother Graham; and his sister Peggy Proto.
In November 2000, Mr. Beckel made an attempt to see if voters in Florida could be persuaded to switch their votes from George W. Bush to Al Gore. When The Wall Street Journal reported on his project, Mr. Gore distanced himself from him, and when Mr. Beckel insisted, two partners from his firm left, forcing him to dissolve it.
Mr. Beckel’s demons caused him controversy from time to time. In early 2001, he got drunk in a Maryland bar and flirted with a married woman. Her husband, who was sitting nearby, drew a pistol and aimed it at Mr. Beckel’s head; he pulled the trigger and it misfired.
A year later, he hired a prostitute who then tried to extort money from him; after he refused and it went public, he was fired from the campaign of Alan Blinken, a Democrat (and uncle of Anthony Blinken, secretary of state) who was running for the Senate from Idaho.
Mr. Beckel continued to ride. Along with conservative writer Cal Thomas, he wrote a regular column for USA Today discussing issues such as immigration, the Iraq War, and holiday shopping; They later co-wrote Common Ground: How to Stop the Guerrilla War That’s Destroying America (2008).
But his real love was television.
“I can write a good solid LA Times presidential campaign op-ed and no one will pay a hell of a lot of attention to me,” he said. said Washington Post. “I turn on Crossfire and people seem to think it’s more important.”