Hello, this is Yawande Kamalefa from New York Times cooking, and I'm sitting on a blanket with Melissa Clarke.

And we're having a picnic using recipes that feature some of our favorite summer produce.

So what'd you bring Melissa?

Well, strawberries are extra delicious this time of year, so I brought my little strawberry almond cakes. I actually made these last night. You get little pockets of concentrated strawberry flavor. That tastes amazing. New York Times cooking has so many easy recipes to fit your summer plans. Find them all at nytecooking. Com.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a tribute to Phil Donahue, the king of daytime talk from me. It's Friday, August 30th.

On the inside. Foreclosed that Tristan lost. At Bold 3 Detergent Plus Fabric Sofa. From NBC News. This is Today.

When I was growing up, there were four television shows that I watched religiously. The Today Show. I love that Wayne Gretzky.

He's a good guy. And his wife, the doll, too.

And their children are really cute. Because Matt and Katie were pure magic together on that set. Sixty Minutes.

How cigarettes can destroy people's lives.

Because nobody has ever told stories like that on network TV. You think that I don't trust my husband? General Hospital.

I do trust my husband. He loves me, and we're married, and we're happy, and there's nothing that you or Miranda or anyone is ever going to do to change that.

Because all of us have a guilty pleasure. Finally, the The Phil Donahoe Show. Now, why Donahoe?

Your parents do not know that you leave this double life. You leave the apartment after they've gone to sleep. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. Good. That's a good answer. They have no idea. Or I sleep at other people's- Why was I?

Why were millions of other Americans drawn to this middle-aged host of a daytime talk show?

You dress up like this because first of all, it's fun and hey. Certainly.

This guy with a helmet of gray hair, and what always seemed to me anyway to be the world's longest, slimmest microphone.

As far as songs go, every song is a message.

Who sprinted around his studio in a beige three-piece suit.

The message of Good night, Irene. The lyrics were, Irene, good night, Irene. She's talking about my story.

It never really occurred to me to try and answer that question. Donahieu has been off the air now for more than 20 years. He's no longer a household name. The culture has forgotten him. But then a few days ago, he died at the age of 88. And suddenly, I wanted to know, What had it been about Donahieu? I logged on YouTube and I started to watch a show again. Why?

Why should I love the Lord? Why should anybody else love the Lord?

What does the Lord I've never done for any of us? I don't know. I was right back in my childhood basement with the gray commercial carpet and the exposed pipes. And so on.

If you're married, you can't have the job because you might have children. If you have children, you can't have the job because they might get sick and you'd have to take care of them. If you didn't, you'd be a bad mother. I mean, any condition of being a female still may be used against you no matter what state.

What I remembered right away was Donna Hughes' extraordinary intellectual range.

One hundred thirty-five thousand citizens were displaced because of the explosion in Trinnoble, and some of them lived here.

One day, he'd interview a presidential candidate.

Throughout this imperfect part of your marriage, did you ever separate you and Hillary?

No.

That's none of your business if we did.

The next, an activist.

If we don't put a halt to this new nuclear war fighting, which we're moving into, we are going to guarantee that we have a nuclear war.

The day after that, a celebrity.

Please welcome the divine Ms. M. Here's Beth Midler.

An illiterate adult.

You came out of the closet, so to speak, two years ago. October 16th, and no one knew except my wife.

Who somehow somehow had outwitted his college professors and his bosses and still couldn't read at the age of 45 despite having a big corporate job.

I might add that I am healing, as we all are healing from the trauma of being an illiterate in this dominant, illiterate society. It must be terrifying.

Now, remember, this is daytime talk, at a time when daytime talk didn't really exist. Donahieu is competing with soap operas and game shows, and his show was the act opposite of all of that escapism. It was the AIDS crisis.

To what? That we don't have to worry about catching AIDS in the air. Aids is not transmitted by casual contact. It never has, and it probably never will be.

It was the hard core scene in New York. He devoted an entire episode to that.

Yeah, well, share with us some of the feelings that make you feel comfortable in this group. Well, people are always seeming to try to tell us what to do, where to go, how to talk, how to walk, what to wear. We're just trying to say that maybe there's an alternative to what is set before us and dictated to us.

We're saying maybe there's- It was this incessant curiosity about ideas and motivations, why people did what did, why they believed what they believed, what made people who they are. But that doesn't quite explain why I think so many of us were watching a hue. It was this thing he did on top of all of that. It was how he treated his audience. Now, remember, until this point, a studio audience was basically an inanimate object. Mike, you know about the evil presence in my office, right? Of course I do, Paul.

She's standing right next to you. Booyah.

They laughed, sometimes literally on a laugh track. They clapped in unison. They were basically a prop.

Let me go out in the audience and get some observations. Now, what do you think of all this business of student protests? For example, Columbia, Berkeley, and other- But in Donahue's hands, the The audience became just as important as the guest on the stage.

Yes, ma'am.

I think there's racism everywhere, and you cannot pinpoint it on a particular race, but it depends on the individual. I think that as long as we keep calling people Black and White, that's when the racism is going to continue. I know you want to- But as soon as that happens, you let me know. We're not making this- This wasn't an accident.

This was quite deliberate. Donahieu made the audience central to the show from the very beginning, and he talked about how it happened and why it happened in interviews.

Welcome to Speaking Freely. I'm Ken Paulson. It's a pleasure to welcome Phil Donahue. Thank you.

And he liked to tell the story of how the show's origins in Dayton, Ohio, forced him to do it.

We tried to get movie stars. Everybody but us had movie stars. We would call them movie stars, and they'd say, Dayton, that's the soapbox derby. I said, No, that's Akron. Dayton is...

He could never persuade big-name guests to come to Dayton, so he gravitated to issues.

We discovered that issues would keep us on the air. Issues.

And when it came to issues, it turned out that the most interesting perspectives were not his.

And suddenly, the audience is starting to ask better questions than I was during the commercials. And I got up one day and walked out. And we realized now that if it hadn't been for that, we probably would not have survived. I just don't think you can sell two talking heads in front of a curtain for very long. Now you tell me.

And so slowly but surely, he started to turn his microphone and his show over to his audience.

And people's hands were going up all and I couldn't get to them fast enough.

And since this was the 1960s and the 1970s, and it was in the middle of men's workday, turning his microphone over to the audience really meant turning his microphone and eventually his show over to women.

Sexism was rampant at the time. The mantra in the television game was the only thing women care about is covered dishes, needlepoint, and children, and mothering. It's all. We came along, and it was clear that Behind this stereotype, we're thinking live human beings who wanted to get in the act, who had something to say, who wanted to kick tires, who wanted to get mad, who were mad at doctors for patronizing them. We exploited all this to our own advantage.

In the relative obscurity of Dayton, Ohio, Donahieu was undertaking a pretty radical experiment in the history of television. He was asking women what they thought, and he was taking their lives and their needs very seriously.

We are inside an abortion clinic in Chicago. The patient with her back to the camera is in the first trimester of an unwanted pregnancy.

He televised an abortion.

Our patient, having been told what to expect, walks to the treatment room where she meets the doctor for the first time. The medical term for this abortion is vacuum aspiration curatej.

He televised a tubular ligation surgery.

A baby in his birth. Okay.

He televised a child's birth. She is dead. Of course, not all his gestures towards women were super high-minded.

For those of you that prefer Italian men, one of Houston's top models, Mr. Gq himself, the Italian stallion.

There were the episodes about male strippers where these guys came out on the set, took off all their clothes, and the women went wild. You will wake up. And Donahieu made very clear that those pitches came from the women on his staff, not him. Then there's this moment in an episode in 1979.

Here's a woman who's read by millions around the world. She may be our most debated philosopher.

Where all of these puzzle pieces of what made Donahue Donahue come together. His curiosity, his female audience, and these feminist ideas that his show so often probed.

A warm human being who has a lot to say and comes straight at everything she says. I am pleased to present Ayn Rand. Ms. Rand.

It was an interview with the writer Ayn Rand.

So your view is if we all became more comfortable with our natural tendencies, that is to say, selfishness, there would be less horror, less war, less Hitler? There wouldn't be any.

And just think about that for a moment. Ayn Rand, one of the great public intellectuals of her era, or really any era, this champion of rational, selfishness, and capitalism unbound on daytime television.

The more selfish we are, the more tranquil and peaceful the world in which we live. And more benevolent toward other people if we're rationally selfish.

And this moment starts, as so many great Donahum moments do, with a question from the audience.

Ms. Rand, in your novels, you portray very strong women. I was wondering why you think in the world, we don't have strong women leaders. Because if you're speaking about women's liberation, that whole movement, it's a very false and phony issue.

Rand responds by basically casting doubt on the whole movement for women's rights.

Women are human beings, so they need leaders just like men. They need leaders who are men or women as the leaders have earned.

Then, Donahieu jumps in.

Well, but the point is that women feel because of the cultural inhibitors that have been placed on women, some woman leadership is needed.

And he asks Ayn Rand how she thinks that women can get ahead. For him, this avowed feminist, the answer seems pretty obvious. What's needed is a formal sustained effort to advocate for women's equality.

You can do it only by education. You do it by spreading the right idea that women intellectually are not the inferior of men. Of course not. Physically, they certainly are. That's what feminists are doing. They're standing up and educating. No.

But Rand totally rejects that.

They're asking for government power and government handouts. They go around depriving men of jobs because you have to have quota of so many women. But their point is that they have been denied jobs all these years.

Donahieu wants to talk about systemic barriers. Rand wants to talk about hard work.

What should they do? Be nice little girls not say anything and stay home and break bread? No. Well, what should they do? Should they- Go into any career of their choice, except longshoreman or professional football player as they're crying today, and fight for their career as every man has to fight.

In her mind, women simply have to prove themselves one by one. In Ran's telling, in any reasonable, logical free market economy, talented women will eventually just rise. It will happen.

All you have to do is show your ability. If someone is prejudiced and doesn't hire you, the intelligent employer will.

But then as the conversation keeps going, this heady, fascinating back and forth about feminism and capitalism, something really interesting happens when another woman in the audience asks Rand a question.

Fifteen years ago, I was impressed with your books, and I felt that your philosophy was proper. Today, however, I'm more educated, and I find that a company- This is what I don't answer. Wait a minute. You haven't heard the question yet.

When Rand responds- She has already estimated her position and my work, incidentally, displaying the quality of her brain.

If she says today, she is more educated. I am more educated now than I was 15 years ago when I was in high school, before I went to college, before I read the newspaper. I'm not interested in your biography.

She is exceptionally dismissive of this woman.

Let her make her point. It's very basic. If a company is permitted to do what it wants to do, like IT- Donna, who tries to create some space for this audience member to speak. Can we encourage you to make a contribution to that observation? I will not answer anyone who is impolite, but to show you- She wasn't impolite. I do not sanction impoliteness, and I am not the victim of hippies.

Rans disdain completely overpower everything.

If anyone else wants to ask the same question politely, I'll be delighted to answer. There was nothing impolite. You are punishing this woman for the vigor and energy that she brought to the dialog. And that's not fair to her. This is the woman we spend a long time trying to attract to our television audience.

And what I realized was that This was a moment that could only happen on Donahieu. It was a moment that I don't think ever would have happened if it were just Donahieu and Ayn Rand sitting on stage talking to one another. I don't think Rand would have been that rude to this powerful TV host. She would only act that way toward an ordinary person. What you get because of this complicated ecosystem that Donna Hugh has created is this totally unfiltered version of this intellectual titan. It's pretty ugly. While you're watching this happen, you start to wonder what truly animates Ayn Rand. Is it this ruthless, uncompromising philosophy at the center of her best-selling books? Or is it maybe that she just doesn't like other people? Whatever was really going on here, it is revealing, it is messy, it is unexpected, and it is fantastic television. And all of it was orchestrated by this guy, Philip John Donoghue, whose biography in no way prepares you for this kaleidoscopic, boundary-pushing national conversation that he invited the country to have day after day for 30 years.

We'll be back in just a moment. This is A. O. Scott. I'm a critic at the New York Times. These days, there are so many movies and books and television shows and songs that it's hard to make sense of it all. At the New York Times, what the critics do is sort through as much of that as we can to come up with advice, with recommendations, to guide you toward the stuff that's worth your time and attention. But we don't only offer guidance. Critics are here to help you make sense of things, to get you thinking about the way a movie connects with history or politics, the way a song opens up emotion, how a piece of art illuminates the world in the magical way that only art can do. Really, what I do and what the other critics here do is part of the same project that all of the journalists at the New York Times work on every day to give you clarity and perspective, and above all, a deeper understanding of the world. When you subscribe to the New York Times, it's not just, Here are the headlines, but, Here's the way everything fits together.

If you'd like to subscribe, please go to nytimes. Com/subscribe.

So who was Phil Donahieu?

My father always had a job. I was born in 1935. So his unemployment preceded my birth. He felt the depression. Oh, yes, my parents did. Absolutely.

He was born six years after the Great Depression into an Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. His dad sold furniture, his mom sold shoes.

I worked for the nuns for 50 cents an hour when I was 10, 12 years old, switching the- He went to a Catholic day school and later a Catholic college.

In his telling, Catholicism was the scaffolding for his entire way of thinking. The guy I had 16 years of Catholic education.

I had most of the answers. Who made me? God made me. Why did God make me? I knew the answers to the toughest questions. Then in the '60s, everything started to fall apart.

Then he starts to rethink everything, especially his relationship with the church.

We began to realize that we really did have two Americas, a black one and a white one. The liberal guilt, my conscience began to manifest itself, and I began to question the answers that had been given, and suddenly my mind was racing, I guess I'd have to say.

He gets really mad at his local diocese, which is building a fancy new cathedral where he thinks it's least needed.

Who else would spend a million dollars on a building that is used about four and a half hours a week?

He begs the church instead to put that money into inner-city Catholic schools.

And suddenly we were saying, Hold it, hold it. Now we've been listening to you. Now you listen to us.

But the church leaders ignore him.

The church was built at a cost of a million dollars, including a bell tower. It is centrally air-conditioned. It stands today in San Rafael, Ohio, I think, as a very hard, cold monument to what churches are everywhere, almost always dark and empty.

And when he loses that battle to the church, the church loses him. So by the time he enters broadcasting, Donahue strongly identifies with the power less.

Don't talk about subsidizing the farmer. The man that printed the box made more than the man that grew the corn. Farmers. In our lifetime, we've traveled in a corridor of fear.

Gay men.

Fear of employers finding out, fear of the fellow employees, fear of landlords, fear of the family. But we finally have decided at our respective ages to to put that aside and to tell the world about our relationship and that we're very proud of it.

Black women.

You're not surprised that there's not a greater participation of women of color in the women's movement.

There are huge numbers of women of color involved in the women's movement.

It's just that we don't get the media.

This is a real treat for us. And sees his job as challenging the rich and the powerful.

Why couldn't the millions of men, women, and who are Arab and who find themselves in this desperate conflict and look around wondering where peace will be, why can't they be angry with you for your characterization of them, your groundhouse criticism of them?

That sensibility is a through line across every episode of his show, and you really see it in an interview that he did in 1987.

Are you Are you 40? I'm 41. Forty-one.

With a young Donald Trump.

You're a star, Mr. Trump, and you're a businessman, and you do not run away from publicity.

Trump is flying high. His first book, The Art of the Deal, has just come out. But Donahieu keeps bringing the conversation back to the little guy.

Well, this is interesting because as you know, you're the fat cat developer, and the book on you is that you throw little old ladies who can't afford to rent out of the apartment. I I don't think that's the book on me, if you want to know that. He wants to point it down to the street, not up at Trump's penthouse in Trump Tower. Was there a lawsuit that you didn't have enough Blacks or he didn't have enough Blacks in his project, and that upset you? I didn't like it because it was in fact, and I decided to fight it.

At one point, Donahieu reads from a passage in Trump's book.

The fact was that we did rent to Blacks in our buildings. What we didn't do was rent to welfare cases, White or Black.

In which Trump says that he would never rent a unit in one of his buildings to anybody on welfare.

I watched what happened when the government came after Samuel Lephrack, another builder, and he caved in and started taking welfare cases. They virtually ruined his building.

Donahieu, at this moment, dramatically rubs his hands together as if preparing to go into battle.

Isn't you pretty close here to looking like an insensitive guy from atop your Trump Tower, looking down on the Wallman Rink over the vast holdings of your own empire? Shouldn't we have just a little more understanding from a man of your influence and wealth on the issue of making New York livable for all of us? Safety on the subway. Then we can't continue to Give you guys these big tax breaks. That would go for- Trump does what we all now know to be his go-to move when somebody tries to hold him accountable. When everybody else in the city gets it but Donald Trump, when Kosh and the administration tries to stop Donald Trump, and I don't say, Give me the tax breaks. I say, Don't give everyone else the tax breaks.

He makes himself the victim.

I'm honest. Hey, I'm not running for anything, Phil. I'm not running for office. I don't have to lie in a book. I want to tell the facts, okay?

And toward the end of the episode, as as always.

You keep saying you're not running for office, but why don't you run for mayor of New York?

The most prescient questions come from the women in the audience.

No, I wouldn't want to run for mayor of New York. I'd like to see somebody talented do that, but I really have no intention of running for mayor. Thank you. But you definitely are a political person, whether you run for office by what everything that you say and do points in that direction. You know what it is? I don't like being taken advantage of.

Okay? They saw Trump's future even before Trump did. By the late 1980s, the Phil Donahieu show was a bonafide hit. It's syndicated across the country, and the wait time for tickets to be in his studio audience is an astonishing 18 months. And this success opens up an entirely new genre of TV. Copycats are popping up across the daytime schedule.

Sounds scary. Well, the mothers on today's show say they are terrified of their own children.

Sally Jesse Raphael, Mori Povich.

You are not.

Heraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer.

You have a secret to tell him. Yes. And your secret is? I'm a man, Jerry.

And most important of all, Oprah, who told Donahue that if it wasn't for Phil Donahue, There would never have been an Oprah show. Her career would not have been possible if it weren't for him.

So this is a full circle for me. Well, we've watched Oprah as you soared. There is no other single human being who has done with this media what Oprah has done. My cubs cap is off to you.

Oprah aside, the shows that followed Donahue, his illegitimate children, as he called them, were nowhere near as thoughtful as his show was. But Donahue steadfastly refused to criticize them, and he was asked to criticize them all the time.

You talked about it being a naughty show, but it is a far cry from what you see today on television. Are you comfortable with where it's gone? Well, it's hard for me to be uncomfortable with what What's happening on television today because I've been preached to so much in the 29 years I was on the air. I mean, there were viewers who got messages from God to get me off the air. There were people who felt that the United States of America was going to hell, and Phil Donahee was leading it there with atheists and doing shows like the March on Skoki by Nazis. We had Nazis on our program. So when people say, What do I think of this or that program? I'm a little bit hesitant. I feel that the show is not worthy of consideration will fall of their own weight. We don't want a bunch of white men, and that's usually what it winds up being, behind closed doors, deciding what you and I should see. Because for him, TV belonged in the hands of the viewer.

Good, bad, smart, stupid, Ayn Rand, or in studio surprise paternity tests. They all had their place. Because the alternative was undemocratic.

One of the main bulwarks against somebody assuming power who knows what's good for you is a free press and unfettered speech by the Citizen Re, allowing all of us to be heard. We were looking for a cacophony of voices, not a well-trained choir.

But eventually, after three decades, that cacophony overtook Donnie Q. The viewers were voting, and they were no longer voting for him. And his show ended its run in 1996. He briefly tried to make a comeback in the early 2000s with a reboot of a Donahieu show on MSNBC.

The anti-war movement is heating up. Resist the war.

But all of his anti-establishment instincts ran up against the cruel realities of cable news after the September 11th terror attacks. At a time when almost everybody else in TV news seemed to be beating the drums of war, Donahoe very loudly questioned the coming US invasion of Iraq.

This is an email from Michael. I'm 17. I'm the person the Bush administration wants to hold a rifle and go off and kill Iraqis. I would like to know why. Is that too much to ask?

And to hear him tell it, his bosses at MSNBC were not interested in a cacophony of voices. They wanted a well-trained choir.

It really is funny, almost, when you look back on how the management was just frozen by the anti-war voice. We were scoled, we weren't patriotic. American people disagreed with us, and we weren't good for business.

His show was canceled after just seven months. As it happens, the year he went off the air for good was the year that I began my career in journalism. When I think about Phil Donahieu now, and I try to answer that question of why I was always so drawn to his work, it's all right there in his show. He respected his audience. He never talked down to them. He sought out nuance wherever he could find it. He forced us way outside our comfort zones. And he challenged us to see ourselves and our neighbors in a new and more generous light. A few months before Donahue died, back in May, President Biden invited him to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor.

And before social media and click bait news, Phil Donahue broadcast the power of personal stories and living rooms all across America. He helped change hearts and minds through honest and open dialog. Over the course of a defining career in television, through thousands of daily conversations, Phil Donnie steered the nation's discourse and spoke to our better angels. I wish you were still speaking there, pal. It made a big difference.

And for once, Phil Donogh, now seated in a wheelchair, didn't say a word. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Madam Vice President, Governor Walsh, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

In her first extended interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamal Harris, joined by her running mate, Tim Walsh, was pushed by CNN to explain positions she had taken during her first run for President in 2020, but has since backed away from, including banning fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

There was a debate you raised your hand when asked whether or not the border should be decriminalized. Do you still believe that? I believe there should be consequence. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be consequence.

Harris insisted that despite shifting stances on specific policies, her core beliefs have remained the same.

How should voters look at some of the changes that you've made in your policy? Is it because you have more experience now and you've learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for President in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you're saying now is going to be your policy moving forward? Dana, I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed. You mentioned.

Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Shannon Lynn, Stella Tan, and Asta Chhatharvedi. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Pell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See See you on Tuesday after the holiday.