Slate, Jan. 22, 2004, at 10:00 PM PT Dean, Lobotomized He shouldn't take that abuse from Diane Sawyer. By Timothy Noah
You think Howard Dean is too angry? In his interview on Jan. 22 with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, he wasn't nearly angry enough. After the (unmarried) New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd sniffed that "the doctors Dean seem to be in need of some tips on togetherness and building a healthy political marriage," and the first female editor of The New Yorker compared Dean's missus to "the mad wife in Jane Eyre, screaming in the attic upstairs," the little woman relented and gave what Sawyer revealed with mild disgust was her very first TV interview.
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Seeing Dean beg for mercy over what was merely an untelegenic display of enthusiasm called to mind the last scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when Chief Bromden finds McMurphy, and he's been lobotomized, all rebellion and mischief sucked out of him, and you don't know whether to rage or weep. If only Dean had taken a swing at Nurse Ratched before they wheeled him into the operating room.
full: http://slate.msn.com/id/2094290/
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The Washington Post September 30, 1988, Friday, Final Edition
Wife Air Problems for World; Manager Says Champion's Boxing Career Might Be Over
Life with heavyweight champion Mike Tyson has been "torture . . . pure hell . . . worse than anything I could possibly imagine," his wife, actress Robin Givens, says in a television interview to be aired Friday night. She also called her husband "a manic-depressive."
Describing her husband's "extremely volatile temper," she told Barbara Walters of ABC's "20-20" that Tyson has "a side to him that's scary. Michael is intimidating, to say the least. I think that there's a time when he cannot control his temper, and that's frightening."
Although Tyson did not say so on the part of the interview set for viewing at 10 p.m. Friday, the New York Daily News reported today that he does not regularly take lithium, the medication prescribed for his manic-depression.
In a separate interview with Walters, Tyson's manager, Bill Cayton, said Tyson's boxing career could be over if he is taking lithium, although sources close to Tyson said last week he would resume training soon.
"If he is a manic-depressive and he is put on lithium, as far as I'm concerned, he'll never box again," Cayton told a surprised Walters, who earlier in the week had interviewed Tyson, Givens and his mother-in-law Ruth Roper at the Tyson estate in Bernardsville, N.J.
"It's not proper for him to box," Cayton explained, "if he's on a mind-altering drug."
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