No. 21566 Lawrence O’Donnell and two of his books
Lawrence O’Donnell’s works include:
Deadly Force. (1983)
Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics. (2017)
Lawrence O’Donnell is a television anchor, political commentator and host of The Lawt Word With Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. He was a writer and producer for the television series The West Wing. He created and produced the NBC series Mister Sterling. He has appeared in the HBO series Big Love. Born in Dorchester in 1951, he was the son of Lawrence Francis O’Donnell, Sr., an attorney and Frances Marie (Buckley), an office manager. He graduated from Harvard in 1976 with a degree in economics.
For his part, Lawrence O’Donnell, himself a victim of police brutality, saw that there was historically important story to be told based on the Bowden case. He began documenting cases in which cops had killed mainly black men with impunity in cities around the country. He first wrote about the subject in a 1979 New York Times op-ed piece.
Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr.’s book, Deadly Force, was adapted into a movie. It was a pivotal moment in O’Donnell’s life: he found his calling in screenwriting, even though he would defer launching that career for several more years.
Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., and his four siblings came of age in the 1950s and 60s in St. Brendan’s Parish. The O’Donnell clan bounced around from a three-decker on Gallivan to a two-family on Hilltop before finally landing in a single-family house on Grayson Street, two blocks from St. Brendan’s church and the grammar school that the kids all attended.
After graduating from Harvard, O’Donnell tried his hand at teaching and became a substitute in the Boston public schools in the run-up to the busing crisis of 1974-75. He taught at a wide array of schools, including Girls Latin Academy in Codman Square. The experience not only inspired his first magazine article, published in Boston Magazine in 1980, but it forged his thinking on public education for life.
Despite his utter lack of interest in politics — “I never did anything more than vote for the lesser of two evils,” he says — O’Donnell caught on as an aide and a speechwriter for New York’s US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the mid-1980s. He spent eight years working for the liberal workhorse, eventually topping off the experience as the staff director for the Senate’s Finance Committee.