by John Norris
Mary befriended a number of his staffers during the campaign, a mix of Boston Irish pols and young intellectuals who had connected with Kennedy at Harvard and in the military. Mary recalled that Kennedy’s aides were always trying to get him to wear a hat, hoping that it would make him look older. “At the last minute going out the door, he’d reach in the closet for any hat that was there,” Mary remembered. “He’d put it on, and sometimes it wouldn’t go down over his hair, sometimes it fell down over his ears.” There was a great deal of excitement around Kennedy. He was young, good-looking, and a war hero. Kennedy’s refined charm and intelligence were a striking change from the rough-hewn ways of most Boston Irish politicians. Kennedy won the congressional seat comfortably.
After they both moved to Washington, Kennedy, then single and a freshman member of Congress, asked McGrory out on a date—but he did so through an intermediary, as was sometimes his style. Mary was offended. She made clear that it was not how she expected to be approached. JFK then asked her out in person, and they had dinner together in February 1948.
Mary was always tight-lipped about the encounter, but she told a friend that Kennedy simply had to do something about his unkempt hair. Seeing how animated Mary became when she discussed current affairs, Kennedy told her that she should write about politics. She agreed, sharing her frustrations that the editors at the Star had not yet let her do so. Some of Mary’s relatives speculate that Mary had a love affair with JFK, but it was clear that if there was romance, it did not go very far. Mary was well enough attuned to Boston’s ingrained class distinctions to know that Kennedys were happy to consort with commoners but did not marry them, and she was not one for empty assignations.
Mary and Kennedy did become friends. Several years later, she bumped into him near his office. JFK said that he was contemplating a 1952 run for the Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate against incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. Mary discouraged him, pointing out that Lodge was popular and came from the state’s most important Republican family, and that 1952 was shaping up as a good year for Republicans as President Truman’s poll numbers sagged. Kennedy made his position clearer: he was going to enter the race. Mary kept at Kennedy. “But why?” she asked. “What’s the choice between you and Henry Cabot Lodge?” As Mary later recounted with a smile, “I have no reason to think he enjoyed the conversation, and he certainly didn’t take the advice.”
During the campaign, Mary went to Boston to watch a debate between Kennedy and Lodge at Waltham High School. Mary was impressed by Kennedy. She noted with satisfaction that his chestnut-colored hair was carefully brushed. “Always a man for direct confrontation, he was delighted to have a debate with the incumbent,” Mary wrote. “He came on, composed as a prince of the blood.” During the debate, a local sitting next to Mary leaned over and whispered, “He’s a thoroughbred.” Although some graded the debate a draw, Mary knew a winning style when she saw one. “Here was this handsome, graceful, articulate creature, and I think everybody was inclined to give him exactly what he wanted, which was a seat in the senate.” Couple this with his rich father’s willingness to spend amply on his behalf and the Kennedy campaign machine was in full swing.
JFK was the kind of Boston Irish politician for which Mary’s late father had always yearned: serious, well-read, and eminently presentable. It is no wonder Massachusetts governor Paul Dever dubbed JFK “the first Irish Brahmin.” Although Dwight D. Eisenhower swept Massachusetts by more than 200,000 votes in winning the presidency in 1952, Kennedy snuck past Lodge in the Senate race as his political career continued its meteoric and carefully engineered rise. But Mary was still skeptical about JFK’s ultimate potential. Kennedy seemed too young and untested, and Mary wondered how the family’s enormous wealth and sometimes lawless sense of privilege would play on the national stage. Asked later if she thought she was dealing with the future president of the United States during their early encounters, Mary replied, “I certainly didn’t.”
As Mary chatted amiably with JFK at the Denver airport that day in 1956, Kennedy noticed that she was carrying a small stack of funny hats that she had collected on the campaign trail. JFK began trying the hats on one by one as they talked, goofing around and striking exaggerated poses. As the two parted, Mary could not help but marvel at how much things had changed since her days in the book review department.
Mary carried a lingering sadness with her as she left the Kefauver campaign. During the late nights and while bouncing across the countryside in the campaign bus, something most unexpected had happened. Mary had fallen in love. Her heart was drawn not to the dashing Kennedy but to her fellow reporter Blair Clark.
Mary never talked about her romantic life; she was concerned that any whiff of impropriety could derail her career. Love was still a firing offense for a woman in the newspaper business, and this romance had a great deal going against it. Blair was not only a fellow journalist, but a married man. Mary was overcome with intertwined feelings of attraction and despair. Debonair and witty, Blair was everything that Mary dreamed of in a man.
Although they often worked together in close quarters, Mary and Clark were remarkably discreet about their feelings. Even their closest friends had no inkling of their romance or the steady stream of correspondence between them. Both went out of their way to avoid being seen together after hours or in social settings, for fear of arousing suspicion.
About the only person Mary confided in was Sister Editha, the head of St. Ann’s orphanage at the time. Sitting on the floor at St. Ann’s one afternoon, Mary told Sister Editha of her love for Clark, with immense sadness etched on her face. Mary had written Blair telling him that she was afraid to see him because it felt like playing with fire.
Sister Editha tried to assure Mary that she was doing the right thing. Mary was not so sure. Clark had told Mary that his marriage was in considerable trouble, but Mary was uncomfortable with an affair. She craved Blair in a way that she had never craved anyone before. Unsettled, Mary reluctantly left Blair and joined the Stevenson campaign.
Adlai Stevenson’s press corps was much larger than Kefauver’s, with some ninety reporters in total, two of them women. Mary described the sharp contrast between the Kefauver and Stevenson operations: “One has the atmosphere of a schoolyard at recess time; the other, of a classroom just before midyears.” Where Kefauver delivered a standard stump speech at every stop, reporters covering Stevenson were bombarded with rewrites and new speeches almost by the hour.
Stevenson was a gifted speaker but an obtuse politician, the kind of man to be irritated by applause during his speeches. After reading a sympathetic Mary column about him, Stevenson signaled for her to approach the stage at a Democratic Party event. Several reporters gave Mary a boost so she could get within earshot. “My dear,” Stevenson said, “I read your stories and found them absolutely bewitching.” It was the first and last time that Mary would ever recall a politician describing her work as such, and she did seem to be falling under his spell.
Reporter Al Spivak, who also covered Stevenson around this time, noted of Mary, “It was fascinating to watch her. She was totally absorbed with Stevenson. For want of a better term, I would say that she was in love with Stevenson, but I do not mean that in a romantic way; idyllically.”
Mary was not shy in expressing her support. Herb Klein, Richard Nixon’s longtime press aide, recalled first seeing Mary on Vice President Nixon’s press bus in 1956. “We were in a motorcade where the crowds were enthusiastic, waving Eisenhower-Nixon signs at the press. Mary couldn’t hold herself in. She periodically shouted back at them cries of ‘Yea, Stevenson.’” She was not exactly a model of journalistic impartiality. Mary saw Nixon as a white-collar version of Joe McCarthy, his career largely propelled by impugning opponents as Communist sympathizers.
Stevenson lost the election badly, with Eisenhower sweeping forty-one of the forty-eight states. America liked Ike. It was a disheartening and lopsided loss, an
d Mary wept on Election Night.
• • •
While presidents and presidential campaigns were a lifelong mainstay of Mary’s work, covering Congress was an equally important beat, onto which she slipped naturally in the 1950s. Congress—what Mary often referred to as the federal entertainment center—was a far more florid institution then than it is today. Congressmen slurped down bourbon, conducted tawdry affairs, and exchanged cash for votes with startling brazenness.
Mary could pierce even the mundane nonsense of everyday life in Washington with her tart prose. A pair of members debated on the floor of Congress “like two elderly polar bears negotiating the pas de deux from ‘Swan Lake.’” Efforts by a politician to restrain a freelancing underling were akin to “a small man trying to take a large dog for a walk.” “Did you see Mary’s story this morning?” became a common refrain among the press corps.
Mary’s writing was unusually erudite. She often sprinkled classical references into her stories—even at the risk of losing a few readers along the way. One editor joked that only Mary could get Pericles on the front page of the Star. When editors complained about sophisticated word choices, Mary handed them a dictionary. Her writing on politics bore little resemblance to her earlier book reviews. There was a nimbleness and an easy, spiky humor, which breathed life into her political coverage that had been largely absent from her reviews. It was as if the rough-and-tumble of the newsroom had finally allowed Mary to be at ease.
Journalist and author Russell Baker recalled that when he started out as a reporter, in the mid-fifties, Mary was already a legend of sorts at the Capitol. A number of congressional graybeards pointed Mary out to Baker as “the very model of what I, as a congressional correspondent, should never be if I wanted to succeed covering the Hill.” Mary’s mortal sin: she had printed, verbatim, the harshly anti-immigrant views of a Pennsylvania congressman. “No reporter had ever before done him that discourtesy,” Baker recalled, explaining that most reporters in those days thought it unfair to accurately quote congressmen.
The great key to Mary’s success on the Hill was her dedication to spending long hours roaming the halls, talking to members and their staffs, and sitting through lengthy press conferences and hearings. “She was absolutely loyal to that proposition that if you didn’t see it yourself and ask questions about it yourself, you had no right to sit down and write about it,” Roger Mudd observed.
Mary would sit patiently on the leather benches below the old oil portraits of politicians in the Speaker’s Lobby, off the floor of the House of Representatives, lying in wait for members of Congress. That patience was usually rewarded. “Men naturally like to explain things to women,” Mary observed, “and I have given them exceptional opportunities in that regard.” Mary was flirtatious and persistent, and her soothing voice reeled politicians in. She beguiled.
Mary complained halfheartedly that she often played the role of therapist to politicians looking to unburden themselves about wayward children and unhappy wives. But Mary’s were crocodile tears; she enjoyed the socializing as much as the politics. Many Republicans in Congress, accustomed to reading Mary’s sharp words, were pleasantly surprised to find Mary gracious in person. “The fact that I don’t raise my voice,” Mary remarked dryly, “seems to impress them favorably.”
Increasingly, Mary carved out her own world in Washington, regularly hosting parties that became local legend as senators, Supreme Court justices, and journalistic heavyweights commingled with interns, copyboys, relatives, and church volunteers. At the parties she threw in her corner apartment on Macomb Street, perched above Rock Creek Park, everyone was expected to pitch in. According to Mary’s spirit of militant volunteerism, the most senior of senators had to tend bar, and the most important of journalists had to bring a dish to share. You could not only meet the great and the good at Mary’s soirees; you could also see them humbly pass hors d’oeuvres and take drink orders. (One accomplished professional woman in Washington remembered being reduced to tears when Mary told her she was “not a good helper” when she was taking a break from her duties.) Mary frowned upon guests arriving late or leaving early, and the lions of Washington’s establishment quailed at the thought of telling Mary that they would be unable to attend one of her parties.
The cocktails flowed freely, and almost every party eventually turned to slightly drunken song. Congressman Eugene McCarthy would recite verses of Yeats and sing Irish ballads. Mary would dance in stocking feet and deliver renditions of ditties from My Fair Lady. Bobby Kennedy insisted on singing his old camp song at one of Mary’s parties. He left soon after, only to burst into the room again fifteen minutes later because he had remembered the second verse of what Mary called “Camp Wianagoni” and felt the need to share it. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and his wife wrote to Mary after another party, apologizing that they were not better prepared with a song list. One congressman performed a Russian dance. Reporter Tom Winship remembered a colleague turning to him in wonderment during the middle of one of Mary’s raucous gatherings and asking in bewilderment, “What in heaven’s name is this all about? Is the Star really like this all the time?”
McGrory took to calling her regular guests the Lower Macomb Street Choral Society. It was no wonder that Adlai Stevenson cheerily told her, as he departed from one of her parties, “Let me know when the club meets again. I would like to be a member.”
Mary’s cooking was notable, but not for the right reasons. Mary often served canned asparagus spears wrapped in white buttered bread, convinced it was both delicious and elegant. “Her Jell-O Surprise was frightening,” said Maureen Dowd, “and her meatloaf worse.” Mark Shields appeared to be only half-joking when he spoke in passing of a lasagna that sent seven people to nearby Sibley Hospital.
As Don Graham, the Washington Post’s publisher after Kay Graham retired, observed, “Obviously the center of Mary entertaining was Mary. It was a performance of sorts. She loved music and she loved poetry and she loved people, with something of an emphasis on Irish people.” As she sat in her favorite chair, the parties were a chance for Mary to bask in good company, drink, talk politics, and laugh.
Hosting also allowed Mary to avoid the awkward scenes that often greeted her at stodgy Washington gatherings in the fifties, when her hosts didn’t know whether to treat her as a reporter or as a woman—those were definitely different categories. The men would retire to one room after dinner to talk politics, smoke cigars, and drink Scotch, while women went to another to discuss more refined topics. Where would Mary go? (Most often with the men, but uncomfortably so for her hosts.) At her own parties, no one wondered if she had one drink too many or whispered about the man who had given her a ride home.
But while Mary was able to hold parties the way she liked, other Washington institutions were more resistant to change, none more so than the National Press Club, an important local venue for politicians and other prominent public figures to deliver speeches and make news. The club had a strict no-women policy.
When journalist Sarah McClendon applied for membership to the National Press Club in 1955, she was never given the courtesy of a response. A year later, a deal was negotiated whereby women reporters were allowed to sit in the balcony during lunch speeches if they would be escorted up the fire exit before the lunch and whisked from the premises immediately after the speaker had concluded. They could not ask questions or be served a meal, and they were wedged into the eaves next to the bulky, blazing-hot television lights. It was a deliberate humiliation, what author Nan Robertson called “one of the ugliest symbols of discrimination against women to be found in the world of journalism.” Reporter Haynes Johnson concurred, saying that it was an outrage that “Mary McGrory and Doris Fleeson had to sit in the goddamn balcony” while “kids like me were down on the floor.”
Mary bitterly resented it, and years later she still brimmed with anger as she described looking down on “some fat lobbyist lighting
his cigar and having his second cup of coffee.” It wasn’t until 1959 that the situation began to change, when President Eisenhower invited Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to visit Washington. The State Department wanted to hold Khrushchev’s speech at the press club, and Khrushchev insisted women be included. The leaders of the press club reluctantly and bizarrely agreed to allow 1.4 female reporters to cover the event for every 10 male reporters in attendance. It would still be more than a decade before women were allowed to become members of the press club.
When women were finally allowed on the main floor to eat lunch during special occasions, Mary was asked how she liked it. “The food was better in the balcony,” she harrumphed.
But despite the many degradations, Mary’s writing was only becoming more popular. In September 1957, George Minot, her former editor at the Boston Herald Traveler, who had insisted that she was too shy to make a good reporter, wrote Mary asking if his paper could carry several of her columns a month. Not long after, the managing editor of the Boston Globe asked if his paper could carry some of her work. This led Newby Noyes to suggest that Mary syndicate her column. But while Mary was enthusiastic about the idea of her column appearing in Boston, she was wary of syndication.
A handful of men—and they were all men—stood at the intellectual apogee of journalism and dominated the opinion and editorial pages of the major dailies at the time. It is difficult to overstate the influence of these pundits in an era before opinion was democratized and the Internet made it so that everyone could contribute to the cacophony of commentary. These self-appointed sages, like Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop at the New York Herald Tribune and Scotty Reston at the New York Times, appeared in hundreds of papers across the country. They adroitly trafficked in their roles as consummate insiders. They were journalists in name, members of the ruling elite in practice. They dined with presidents and saw it as their duty to guide their hand. These pundits told the country what to think and could sway public opinion to a degree that is almost unfathomable today.
