Tom Oliphant is alive and well...

For commenter Laurie and for anyone else who has the excellent taste to be missing Tom Oliphant's Boston Globe columns, here's the latest news:

First off, he's just fine, healthwise; he appears pretty much every Thursday on Al Franken's Air America Radio show (usually during the last half hour), except when Al's on tour. His Globe column about the brain aneurysm that put him out of commission from March till June of 2005 is a riveting and typically self-deprecating read.

The Boston Globe offered a number of its writers a very generous retirement package at the end of last year, and Tom accepted it. He's working on a political book to follow up last year's, Praying for Gil Hodges : A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Online interview on that book here.

Here's a list of some links for the Oliphant-deprived:

A streamable video from a December 2005 NewsHour appearance. (warning: also features the insufferable David Brooks)

A Kennedy Library forum: A Conversation with Senator John Kerry on his receiving the Distinguished American Award, moderated by Thomas Oliphant (a really good one!)

Then I found this tantalizing link from the Randi Rhodes forum.

On Franken's show today Al suggested to estimable guest Tom Oliphant that "if" Al runs for senate, the bow-tied wearing Mr. O. should take over Al's slot. Tom seemed amenable to this idea. I'm liking it the more I think about it.

What do others think?

I love Oliphant myself, and think he has a great voice and manner for radio. So maybe?

And finally, Oliphant's own words on John Kerry, published in The American Prospect in August of 2004,

In his remarkably thorough book on Kerry’s formative youth, Douglas Brinkley tells a story about the two of us in the moments just before Kerry began his [famous] statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. . . . When we entered the Dirksen Senate Office Building and raced up the stairs a few minutes before he was due to speak, we were struck by the absence of people in the stairwell and in the long corridor approaching the hearing room. It felt like a Sunday.

But when we reached the door and opened it a crack, Kerry drew back suddenly, stunned at the sight of a completely packed room. I nudged him forward again and attempted to cut the tension by saying, “Go ahead. Be famous. See if I care.”

It never occurred to me or to him where that moment might one day lead. I think it’s important that the presidency looms on his horizon not as a codicil in some trust fund, a virtual entitlement by virtue of lucky birth. Instead, it looms at the end of a long climb up the ladder from assistant county prosecutor.

John Kerry is a good, tough man. He is curious, grounded after a public and personal life that has not always been pleasant, a fan of ideas whose practical side has usually kept him from policy wonkery, a natural progressive with the added fixation on what works that made FDR and JFK so interesting. I know it is chic to be disdainful, but the modern Democratic neurosis gets in the way of a solid case for affection. Without embarrassment, and after a very long journey, I really like this guy. . . .

The Boston Globe is not the same paper since he left. Every evening I open the editorial page looking for a column that is well-written, incisive and moving, and more times than not, there's nothing there.