by John Norris
Not long after the inauguration, Mary was at the White House after hours interviewing Kennedy’s appointments secretary, Kenny O’Donnell, whose office was just outside the president’s. Mary and O’Donnell had just begun talking when a restless President Kennedy burst into the room.
Spotting Mary, he enthusiastically invited her into the Oval Office. She stammered in agreement, although she would describe the next twenty minutes as the most miserable of her life. “I was never so unhappy. I called him Mr. President every other word so he’d be sure to understand that I was not going to presume old acquaintances in any possible shape or way.” After all, not many people have their old dates become president, and she acted respectfully as if JFK, the same man she had happily given grief on innumerable occasions, had been transformed into a new person.
There was an awkward silence. Kennedy finally solicited, “How’s everything going?”
Mary was suddenly hit with what she called a “terrible impulse” to unburden her troubles on the new president. She thought about telling Kennedy that her apartment was too noisy and that she had been arguing with her landlord. Given that Mary was increasingly consumed by her unresolved relationship with Blair Clark, one suspects that she also wanted to ask Kennedy about Clark, who had been his close friend and classmate at Harvard. Clark had just been promoted to general manager at CBS News, in no small part because of his close ties to Kennedy. Although he had finally left his wife, Mary’s relationship with him had stalled.
But now she was sitting with the leader of the free world—how could she talk to him about her frustrating love life and paper-thin apartment walls? Mary was uncharacteristically dumbstruck. She started to get up at least four times, and Kennedy eyed her back down to her chair. “I was just absolutely quivering. Nothing would come,” she recalled.
The two discussed Kennedy’s young children. The president asked her what she thought of Caroline, and Mary said that she thought she was doing wonderfully. Kennedy expressed concern that his son was “not very good looking,” which was ironic, given that JFK Jr. would one day be dubbed the sexiest man in America. Mary reassured the president. “Oh, in a year, he’ll be running around. He’ll be putting on funny hats,” Mary said, remembering the Denver airport, “and you’ll be laughing at him.”
So ended Mary’s first meeting with Kennedy as sitting president.
JFK nurtured close but carefully circumscribed relationships with reporters around his age, like Mary, Ben Bradlee, Russell Baker, Hugh Sidey, and Blair Clark. All of these reporters were well educated and were attracted to Kennedy’s charm and easy intelligence. For reporters in the inner circle, their closeness with the new president was heady. Kennedy made them confidants and drinking buddies. He invited them to state dinners, and male reporters, like fraternity brothers, joined him for nude late-night swims off the back of the presidential yacht. Although Kennedy once famously said of the press, after he’d become president, “Well, I’m reading more and enjoying it less,” he liked reporters, and he once speculated that he would have been a journalist if it weren’t for politics.
Mary was taken with JFK. As John Seigenthaler, a journalist and an assistant to Robert Kennedy when he served as attorney general, observed, “If she could have painted a picture and brought it to life of the Irish Catholic President she wanted to see, that would be Jack.” He added, “There was something of the Irish mother in the way she looked at him; something of the Irish sister. She loved him, and he knew he had her.”
This was dangerous stuff for any reporter, and even more so for Mary, given her penchant for blending commentary and hard reporting.
Kennedy used his personal relationships with reporters to avert hard questions about his misbehavior. His extramarital exploits were brazen, and he knew full well that they could cost him dearly. “I was aware of a good deal of snickering and winking about Jack Kennedy’s interest in, and prowess with, women,” Mary observed. “It was understandable. He was the most charming man of his generation, and the most attractive. He had hazel eyes and hair to match, superlative cheekbones, and a smile that reduced women to pulp. But that was while he was a senator, and a bachelor, which made it of less political consequence. When he was in the White House, I heard tales, but had no way of verifying them.”
When, years after Kennedy’s death, Seymour Hersh wrote the controversial book The Dark Side of Camelot, which cataloged many of JFK’s private misdeeds, Mary confided to a friend, “I found it painful to write about President Kennedy’s private life. It was not admirable. We knew that before Sy Hersh told us.” But Mary also understood Boston and the Kennedy family. “As his father before him,” Mary commented, JFK felt “that rules were for other people.”
The bright optimism that Kennedy brought to his first term soon collided with the harsh realities of the Cold War. In April 1961, the administration botched the Bay of Pigs invasion when a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles met with embarrassing defeat on the shores of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Shortly after the debacle, Mary spoke with Adlai Stevenson, who had been appointed by Kennedy as ambassador to the United Nations. As a frustrated Stevenson emerged from the White House, he vented to Mary, “That young man, he never says please and he never says I’m sorry.”
Although Mary only periodically covered international affairs, she described the impact of the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy. “He seemed preoccupied to the point of melancholy,” she wrote. “He constantly rearranged the papers on the lectern before him. It was as if, discouraged about the untidy world, he wanted at least to make order in his immediate vicinity.”
But Kennedy would only gain further proof of how hard it would be to bend the world to his will in late May and early June of 1961, when Mary and fifty other reporters accompanied Kennedy on his first overseas trip as president, journeying to France, Austria, and the United Kingdom.
In Paris, JFK was greeted by French president Charles de Gaulle at the airport as the Marine Band played “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Making his way across the field, he spotted the familiar faces of the White House press corps,” Mary remembered. “He waved to us, a low surreptitious, under-handed wave which somehow conveyed his whole situation.”
The glamorous American president and equally glamorous first lady were a sensation in France. Parisian women bowed and giggled in front of photographs of JFK in shop windows. Parisians gathered in knots around Mary and other reporters just so they could register their approval of their American guest. Mary was assigned to the press pool covering Kennedy’s evening visit to the palace at Versailles. The Kennedys and the de Gaulles were joined by 150 guests in the opulent Hall of Mirrors, with its gilded statuary and vaulted ceilings, for a six-course meal. Following the dinner, de Gaulle led Kennedy through the lengthy corridors to the Royal Opera hall for a special performance by the Paris Opera Ballet.
At intermission, Mary, who had stood for the first half of the performance in the small but exquisitely proportioned theater, cast about for a new perch. She noticed that the two presidents had disappeared into a small room behind the king’s box. Taking a deep breath, Mary pushed through the mirrored door and was startled to find herself in a small chamber with Kennedy, de Gaulle, and a handful of the most privileged guests, sipping champagne. Mary had no business being there, but she realized that a sudden exit would have been as embarrassing as her uninvited entrance.
Kennedy glanced quizzically at Mary, bemused by her trespass. He approached, and they could not suppress their laughter.
“Well, it makes you think, doesn’t it?” said the president, shaking his head. “Pretty impressive.” He added, “This is a little different than Fred Waring and Lawrence Welk at the White House. We’ve got to start doing something different. I don’t know just what, but we’ve got to do something.”
Mary was surprised—and relieved—by Kennedy’s attention. “The president did seem very happy to see me, and imme
diately clued into a conversation. He couldn’t have been more friendly and approachable and casual and gay—the way he always was.”
Mary asked Kennedy how he was getting along with de Gaulle. Kennedy raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Have you met him?” he asked.
Mary said that she had not.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
Kennedy, not even bothering to try his French, introduced Mary to de Gaulle.
“General, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, one of our journalists. This is Mary McGrory from the Washington Star.”
De Gaulle reacted with studied indifference, looking over Mary’s shoulder. Kennedy chatted on amiably in English. Mary was struck by the fact that in a room full of French speakers, Kennedy gravitated toward her because she was safe and familiar. Behind all of Kennedy’s manners and grace was a lasting shyness. “He preferred people to come to him,” Mary said, because it gave him a sense of control.
Things took a far more serious turn as Kennedy headed to Vienna for his first meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Many of Kennedy’s key foreign policy advisers had argued against holding a summit with the Soviets so early in the term. Khrushchev was eager to intimidate Kennedy, and the discussions between the two were grim. Khrushchev berated and bullied the president to an embarrassing degree. He was particularly bellicose about Berlin, and an exasperated Kennedy finally made clear that Soviet adventurism could push the two nations into war. Recognizing that the talks had been a disaster, Kennedy told journalist Scotty Reston after the meetings, “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.”
Not long after the Europe trip, Mary’s relationship with Blair Clark came to a head. Irritated by Clark’s continued indecision and upset that he had not been in contact with her when they had both been in Vienna, Mary wrote to Clark demanding that they sever all ties. If they were not going to be a couple, Mary wanted to stop tormenting herself. Maintaining a casual facade was simply too painful.
Clark responded at some length in a letter. “Dearest Mary bird, I have thought, hesitated, turned this way and that and—yes—suffered over how to respond to your letter of dismissal.” Calling himself her “grand-ambivalent friend,” he ruminated on what it would have been like if they’d sat down and truly discussed their mutual feelings.
How fierce I think we would have been, how merciless—especially you, sparing me (a little), but not yourself. I think we would have laughed, though, and found it hard to be solemn. (Indeed, I’ve never seen you that way.) All you want you say, is not to see me, and that is the simplest favor to grant, in my current obsessive state when I really see no one. If I tell you there is no way we can avoid each other given all the real and accidental links, I seem to be taking you too seriously in the farewell, or not enough. I see us meeting on the red carpet to the stairs of the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom at some Hibernian B’nai Brith dinner and being unable to carry off the estrangement, or laughing at the same thing—perhaps each other. Mary bird, it won’t work. . . . I’m asking for a retraction, for another lease on a life we’ve never lived, for more charity. I love you Mary, and you know it. It’s just that I won’t do (much of anything.) Please spare me and forgive me.
The letter perfectly encapsulated all that Mary found equally maddening and appealing about Clark: the charm, irreverence, elusiveness, and unwillingness to commit. But his letter carried the day, and Mary was not strong enough to cut off contact.
Why did Mary continue to carry a torch for him? She always had a soft spot for lost causes—perhaps because it felt very Irish. Perhaps a relationship doomed to failure was purer and more romantic. The witty and pointed letters back and forth felt like the diary of a great love affair waiting to be saved by some miracle—Mary’s own Jane Austen moment. Clark was a first-class flirt, and he offered Mary a sense of real intimacy, with the safety of distance. Because it was more a romantic than a sexual entanglement, her career wasn’t at risk. Mary had achieved a love befitting a classic novel, but in many ways it was just as remote.
She also got to know the president’s brother Bobby better during this period. Their relationship was complex. The attorney general was more confrontational, less literary, and more devout than the president. His reputation as the ill-tempered political enforcer of the Kennedy clan was well earned, and his appointment to the cabinet had been one of family loyalty over qualification.
Mary was uneasy about Bobby’s sharp edges, and she described him like a British weather report: “Cloudy, with bright intervals.” But despite some differences, Mary and Bobby forged a close bond. (As she also did with Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was a deeply observant Catholic and a great fan of Mary’s work.)
Bobby’s former press secretary, John Seigenthaler, noted that Bobby was wary of Mary as a reporter, and the younger Kennedy also knew that in Mary’s eyes, he was always wanting in comparison with his brother. Haynes Johnson, a close friend of Bobby’s, observed: “Jack was like a Boston Brahmin or an English lord and Bobby was a parish priest—tough as nails and would fight like hell.”
Mary traveled to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port as a guest. “Bobby tried to teach me to water ski,” she remembered. “It was one of his few failures as a coach.” As Mary confided to a fellow visitor, Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, the only way to get along with the Kennedys was to preemptively admit that you were an underachiever so that you could get enough space to sit and read a book rather than joining a touch football game.
Mary was invited to a number of the salons hosted by Bobby and Ethel at Hickory Hill, their sprawling Civil War–era white-brick home in McLean, Virginia. The gatherings became emblematic of the new administration, with artists, politicians, intellectuals, and others gathering to discuss great ideas of the day.
Mary also recalled a winter day when she emerged from the Justice Department after an interview. A black limousine pulled up next to her. It was Bobby and Ethel. Bobby rolled down the window and called out to her, “Are you coming to my party? We’re having a reception for foreign students.”
Mary replied that she had to get back to her office, and she started walking down 10th Street. A few seconds later, she heard pounding footsteps. Bobby was running after her. Reaching Mary, he leaned over, scooped her up, and threw her over his shoulder.
“You are coming to my party,” said Bobby, roaring with laughter. Racing back down the street, he carried Mary up the stairs to the entrance of the Justice Department.
Not long after her trip to Europe with JFK, Mary traveled with Bobby, Ethel, and a small congressional delegation to Rome for a private audience with Pope John XXIII at Castel Gandolfo. The pope, smiling, entered the high-ceilinged chamber wearing red shoes and a white cassock. The Americans dropped to their knees. The pope easily shifted from a gesture of benediction to motioning his visitors to rise. He invited all of the Catholics to receive his personal blessing while pointing out that “it wouldn’t hurt” the non-Catholics to do so as well. Mary was particularly enthusiastic about Pope John’s reforms, later codified in Vatican II, which, among other things, allowed Catholic masses to be held in local languages rather than Latin. She saw him as a much-needed breath of fresh air in the Church.
Mary had come far: she was a syndicated columnist, President Kennedy had personally introduced her to Charles de Gaulle, her niece and nephew had met JFK in the Oval Office, and now she was being invited to a private audience with the pope at the Vatican. Her life was almost inconceivable to her friends and family back in Roslindale.
• • •
In late July 1961, Kennedy announced from Washington that he was dramatically expanding the U.S. military in response to Nikita Khrushchev’s threats. Mary described the president as he addressed the nation on the Berlin crisis: “Inside his stuffy, crowded office, the president was tense. Outside it was a perfect summer night, an
almost full moon riding high, the trees black against the sky. The president looked hot and preoccupied.” It struck Mary that Kennedy was trying to reason with the American public rather than rouse them. “We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action,” he said.
As the Soviets attempted to isolate West Berlin by erecting the Berlin Wall, in August 1961, Kennedy called for the active-duty military to be expanded by more than 210,000 men. Fears of a war between the two superpowers intensified. The wall’s completion, which stopped the rush of immigration into West Berlin and trapped East Germans behind the Iron Curtain, ushered in an uneasy standoff that would endure for decades. The Cold War had its most physical embodiment: an ugly concrete scar running through the heart of Germany.
With Kennedy approaching the end of his first year in office and his tenure having been marked by the harsh realities of the Cold War, the editors at the Star assigned Mary an “anniversary” story in January 1962. She requested an interview with JFK through the White House press office at a time when numerous other reporters were working on similar pieces. Mary stewed when no response was forthcoming.
She called up Kenny O’Donnell to complain, touching his most sensitive nerve: clan loyalty.
“Kenny,” Mary sighed, “I did not see Roscoe Drummond”—the head of the Christian Science Monitor’s Washington bureau, who had been granted a presidential interview—“in Wisconsin, and I did not ride any buses with Roscoe Drummond in West Virginia. I was there. Have you forgotten all your old friends?”
Mary was miffed, and O’Donnell knew it.
“Mary, Mary,” he said, trying to calm her, “what do you want?”
“I want to see the president,” Mary said.
