by John Norris
Johnson was pleased: “Kay Graham told me that it is the greatest speech she’s ever heard in her life. Mary McGrory told me about the same thing.”
“It was, sir,” said Reedy.
“Is Mary McGrory there?” asked Johnson.
Reedy was unsure. “I don’t know that she went back or not last night.”
President Johnson had something in mind. “If it doesn’t get me in trouble, I wouldn’t mind flirting with her out here [at the ranch]. . . . If she didn’t mind having a date with me, I wouldn’t mind her coming out here and resting with me. It wouldn’t make her mad with Mrs. Johnson out here, would it?”
“I don’t think so,” said Reedy, “just as long as she doesn’t get anything on the record.”
“See if she’s there,” the president urged, “and tell her that . . . Lady Bird and I are out here and Liz is going to be out here.” (Liz Carpenter was Mrs. Johnson’s press secretary and staff director.) “I would just like to philosophize with her a bit. Just visit with her. If she doesn’t have anything else to do, I’ll have her come out in a helicopter.”
Mary did not make the trip out to the ranch that week, but she took President Johnson up on the offer several weeks later when Johnson renewed the invitation. It was not out of the ordinary for Johnson to entertain a reporter, even a female one, at his ranch, and the fact that the original invitation was proffered when Lady Bird was also there with him suggests that licentiousness was not foremost upon his mind. But Johnson also had a fascination with Mary that stretched beyond her role as a columnist.
One afternoon in 1964, LBJ gave Mary a two-and-a-half-hour tour of the White House living quarters. When Johnson had to answer a phone call during the tour, he said he was “flirtin with Mareh McGrorah, she’s right here beside me.” Not long after, LBJ plucked Mary out of a White House reception for a private chat. One White House staffer called it “the most widely observed abduction in history.” Mary said that the experience left her feeling like a “French peasant girl who wandered into the court of Louis XIV.” But Mary saw clear limits to LBJ’s charm. As she confided to Blair Clark, “He’s an extraordinary man, the only one I ever met who thought that poll charts (he’s at 79 percent in Massachusetts) are seductive.”
But LBJ’s courtship of Mary was not confined to the grounds of the White House. Mary’s friend Elizabeth Shannon finally shared the story for the record. (“I was vowed to secrecy,” she said, “but I suppose that now everybody is gone, it is not a secret anymore.”) One quiet evening around this period, Mary’s phone rang. The caller identified himself as a Secret Service agent and said that President Johnson wanted to stop by her apartment in fifteen minutes. “Oh, really,” McGrory replied drolly, sure that the caller was a fellow reporter pulling her leg, but the man on the line insisted he was serious.
She went out into the hallway of her apartment building and found several Secret Service agents standing near the elevator. Realizing that the leader of the free world was indeed on his way, she ran back inside and frantically tidied up. Several minutes later, the president appeared at her door.
Mary was no stranger to power, but the impromptu nature of Johnson’s visit was unnerving.
She invited the president in and offered him a drink. They engaged in some friendly small talk until Johnson, tumbler of Scotch in his large hand, finally put his cards on the table. “Mary, I am crazy about you,” he confessed. He wanted to sleep with her.
Then, in what has to be one of the most awkward and unromantic propositions in presidential history, Johnson tried to make the case that since Mary had always admired Kennedy, she should now transfer her affections to him. Maureen Dowd, who heard about the encounter from Mary and attributed it to LBJ’s perpetual rivalry with the Kennedys, said, “He wanted to have a reporter who had been their favorite reporter.” She added, “It wasn’t so much him pouncing on her as him competing with JFK.” In LBJ’s mind, sleeping with Mary, like raising the height of the toilets in the White House, was just another way to one-up the late president.
As Mary’s friend Phil Gailey put it, “He assumed, I guess, that the only reason she loved the Kennedys was because they had power. What a klutz. He had about as big a chance of scoring with Mary as Richard Nixon did.” Listening to Johnson’s declaration, Mary later told her friends, she felt flattered, startled, and mortified at the same time. She took a deep breath and said, “I admire you, Mr. President, and I always will. And I think you are doing a terrific job, and that is where it stops—right there.”
President Johnson finished his drink and said, “I just wanted you to know.”
“Now I know,” she replied. “Thank you.” And with that, the president and his Secret Service detail departed. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Mary wrote, “as the campaign unfolded, it seemed the president did not wish merely to be elected; he wished to be loved.”
But Lyndon Johnson was hardly the first powerful man to be intrigued with Mary, and she was uniquely bewitching to the day’s alpha males. She was slim and attractive and yet could drink and smoke with the old bulls. She was funny and sharp, able to talk politics like a ward captain, and there was a twinkle in her eyes that suggested a certain mischief. Perhaps more than any other journalist in American history, she pushed her editors (and they were invariably men) to come to terms with the fact that women had something worthwhile to say.
But as much as Mary was willing to flirt to her journalistic advantage, she always kept these powerful men at an arm’s length. And it was this aura of ultimate unattainability that was so intoxicating to powerful men used to getting their way.
Ultimately, Mary was never particularly at ease with sex or sexuality. (Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman would say many years later that Mary “would have been a Jesuit priest if only she’d been a boy.”) But Mary also recognized that consummating a relationship with someone like LBJ would end badly for her and could place her entire career at risk.
President Johnson crushed Goldwater in the election, taking more than 60 percent of the vote and sweeping all but six states. Mary spent Election Day in New York with Bobby Kennedy, who won his Senate seat comfortably. The day was a blur. A victory party was assembled at the Fifth Avenue apartment of Kennedy’s sister Jean Smith. Jackie Kennedy, the British ambassador, and Sammy Davis Jr. all attended. The victory celebration relocated to the famed steak-and-seafood house Delmonico’s. Then Bobby kept going, visiting the Fulton Fish Market, near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge—where he had begun his campaign eight weeks earlier—at four in the morning. The new senator laughed and said, “It smells better here than it did two months ago.” As the workers jostled Bobby, one of them barked out, “For God’s sake, don’t kill him now, we need him.”
Not long after the election, the Star’s publishers invited President Johnson for an “owners’ lunch.” As Tommy Noyes recalled, the sessions were usually built around an “ambassador, a Cabinet member, a new Redskins coach—some lion of the moment” who would participate in an off-the-record conversation attended by the paper’s directors, editors, and key reporters. President Johnson initially declined the offer, but he invited the editorial staff and key political writers at the Star, including Mary, to a discussion at the White House. Mary sat in the chair normally reserved for the secretary of state in cabinet meetings, just at the president’s elbow.
As she glanced around, looking for those small details that she could use in her column, Mary noticed four buttons directly in front of the president’s chair. As Noyes recalled, Mary thought they must be “THE buttons, those legendary objects that, with the push of a presidential finger, would send the missiles on their way.” Mary leaned in to get a closer look. Thinking that she might see DEFCON 1 and DEFCON 2, or MOSCOW and PEKING, she instead read the carefully typed labels: COCA-COLA, 7-UP, DIET PEPSI, and COFFEE.
Despite such light moments, the Star was headed in the wrong direction as it
rapidly lost ground to the rival Washington Post. In 1959, the Star relocated from offices on Pennsylvania Avenue to a new building in a blighted neighborhood near the Capitol in an effort to make it easier for Star trucks to avoid afternoon traffic jams. However, circulation remained a problem, as did management in general. At one point, there were some forty-three relatives from the Star’s owning families on the payroll, several of whom were content to sit at their desks all day drinking. The paper’s failure to compete meaningfully in the increasingly lucrative morning market was a slow suicide.
Still, the Star continued to attract good people, and many of the top names in journalism today cut their teeth working as junior staffers in the dictation bank at the paper during the 1960s. The Star remained a hothouse for eccentric talent, a freewheeling environment that bred intense loyalty.
Mary was more than just a high-profile columnist at the paper. She vacationed with the Star’s owners on a yacht in the Greek Islands, and served as a key bridge in employee-management relations. “Many of the younger reporters would take their cue from Mary,” Newby Noyes explained. “She was in a position of leadership, and not always the easiest person to work with.” Indeed, Mary once bragged that when it came to the internal machinations at the Star, “there wasn’t a leaf that fell that I wasn’t informed about.”
As the Star lost market share, the Post and other rivals were able to lure away some of the paper’s best reporters, and Ben Bradlee, who became the Post’s managing editor around this time and would become executive editor in 1968, was aggressive in trying to steal talent from the Star.
Haynes Johnson went to the Washington Post in the late sixties. After his departure, he attended a small dinner party hosted by Pat Moynihan and his wife. Mary, who could be quite caustic when she had been drinking, lit into him. “How could you have left the Star?” Johnson and the others were embarrassed, and a hush fell over the room. Johnson remained a close friend, but it was never quite the same. “She held grudges,” he said. “That was just who Mary was.”
• • •
The mid-1960s marked a series of sad passages for Mary—Kennedy’s assassination, the death of the pope, and the stroke of her friend and fellow reporter Doris Fleeson. The period also marked the beginning of one of her great struggles: a very public campaign against the Vietnam War.
Vietnam struck a nerve, and Mary took it personally when several young men from her old neighborhood died in the conflict. In 1965 she was writing about the increasingly hostile reception administration officials were receiving on college campuses all across the country. By 1966 she embraced early Vietnam protests and noted that the administration’s sunny version of events could not mask the fact that the conflict was “a running sore.”
For years, Mary’s columns had focused more on people than on issues as she wrote about the political scene. Yet once she started writing about Vietnam, it became a fixation, converting her from an observer into an activist. Some readers resented Mary’s steady drumbeat of columns against the war. “I used to like to read you, you used to be funny, but now you’re just so bitter and nagging,” wrote one.
Mary was uniquely well positioned to launch an extended campaign against the war. While there was no shortage of Americans willing to question authority during the mid-1960s, Mary was a most presentable rebel. There was no mistaking her for a hippie. She didn’t think much of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry or Mick Jagger’s on-stage antics. It wasn’t like boxer Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali and refusing to fight in Vietnam. Mary was impeccably mannered and attired. She wrote for a paper that was a pillar of the Washington establishment. She helped make objecting to the war respectable.
Both Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy edged toward stronger positions against the war in 1966, and McCarthy in particular, who was still raw with anger because of his treatment during the vice presidential selection process, came to harden implacably against Vietnam. For his part, President Johnson was frustrated that his successful domestic reforms were increasingly being overshadowed by a conflict half a world away. Mary dubbed Vietnam “the specter at the feast of the Great Society.”
By mid-1966 Mary was advocating for Bobby Kennedy to run for president in 1968 or 1972, describing him as the bright spark on an otherwise dreary political landscape. In October 1966, she traveled with Bobby on an eight-state western tour, keenly watching for any sign that he intended to run in 1968. Although RFK’s public opposition to Vietnam had been deliberately vague, the hope that he might take a more adamant position led to an almost delirious welcome on college campuses as restless youth looked for someone to champion their cause. BOBBY IN ’68 signs started appearing in the crowds.
Kennedy talked passionately about civil rights, the white backlash, and poverty. Mary felt as though the shroud that had enveloped Bobby since his brother’s death was finally parting as he plunged into the enthusiastic crowds. As the entourage arrived at the Portland, Oregon, airport, Mary noticed that the BOBBY IN ’68 signs had been supplanted by a starker directive on placards: BOBBY NOW! For Mary, the intense public reaction made the question of a presidential run by Bobby a matter of when, not if.
At Berkeley, always a hotbed of liberal politics, a one-hundred-piece band and a roaring crowd greeted Bobby. The American left, which had long viewed Bobby with suspicion, was eager to embrace him if he was willing to come out against the war. “In the end, though,” Mary observed, “what was most significant about the trip was Kennedy’s assessment of it. He concluded, despite the hysterical reception, that he could not take on Lyndon Johnson.”
In New York, Blair Clark’s dream of buying the New York Post withered on the vine: publisher Dorothy Schiff was reluctant to sell, and Clark had made little headway in raising the outside money he needed to make a serious bid. Schiff was gauzy in discussing Clark’s reasons for leaving his job as associate publisher. Clark was more direct in his recollection. After they had dined together one night and gone back to Schiff’s apartment, a tipsy Schiff made, in Clark’s words, “what I can only call a pass, however ladylike.” He stammered an excuse about why he needed to leave. As a Schiff biographer reported of Clark, “He left the apartment knowing that his career at the Post was over.”
Although Clark managed to move from high-profile position to high-profile position with seeming ease, not all were impressed. Pollster Lou Harris argued that Clark was a “rich boy dilettante. He got himself into all kinds of enviable jobs, partly because he knew everybody, and because he was so affable and rich.”
Clark and Mary spent a great deal of time together during 1966 and ’67. Mary’s niece Polly McGrory was one of just a handful of people to whom Mary confided her strong feelings for Blair, although she, too, remained puzzled with her aunt’s reluctance to discuss matters of the heart. “If she was having an affair with Blair,” Polly argued, “why not tell us about it? I don’t understand what the secrecy was all about.”
When it came to Mary’s love life, the vast majority of friends and family never asked, and they were never told. No one dared press her on the subject. It said a lot about Mary, and her upbringing, that one of the very few people with whom she was at least partially candid about her feelings toward Blair was Sister Editha, the nun who ran St. Ann’s for many years. Mary was eager for the world to see her opinion on the printed page four days a week, but she was appalled by the thought of telling friends and family about fond glances or stolen kisses.
Mary’s intense privacy led to a spate of theories about her love life and sexuality among colleagues, friends, and family. Some thought that her admiration for politicians like President Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson made it hard for other men to achieve equal measure. Some wondered if she was gay. In many ways, both the St. Ann’s orphanage and the Star served as substitute families for Mary.
Ben Bradlee suggested that Mary’s fierce privacy led to a reputation as something of an old maid. “I didn’t think she was a
very sexual animal,” he said. “She was careful, and she was old fashioned.” Mary worried that her romantic life would adversely affect her career. “I think for a woman of her age to have a fulfilling career that was really demanding, and to want to make it to the top, which she did, it was very hard to be married,” Cokie Roberts explained. “Men are scared of women like that,” Roberts said, “and still are.”
The choice between the front page and domestic life was stark. Mary felt that she could be a successful reporter or she could be happily married—not both—even as the 1960s tumultuously shuffled the American social order, opening doors for women and minorities that had long been closed.
By 1967, if there had been a physical relationship between Mary and Clark, it was a thing of the past. Their repartee remained flirtatious, and with Clark leaving the New York Post, Mary clung, against her better judgment, to the possibility of a lasting relationship or perhaps even marriage. When several dates between Clark’s son Tim and Mary’s niece Polly sputtered, Mary wondered to Clark, in April 1967, “Are we McGrorys too exacting, or are you Clarks too cavalier?”
Mary and Clark celebrated their mutual birthday together in New York in August 1967. He dropped her a note afterwards: “Sweet Mary, we had such fun on our birthday didn’t we? And you were a darling to come up and co-celebrate it (or is that sacrilegious?) Love to you, dear. Blair.”
But then, in September 1967, Clark wrote her again with devastating news. “By now you will have guessed my secret—what I couldn’t bring myself to tell you on the phone Saturday. . . . I’m going abroad to meet a girl about whom I’m most serious; who I expect to marry.” The woman, twenty-nine-year-old Joanna Rostropowicz, was a Polish sociologist and a divorced mother. The letter closed, “The fact is that I have inhibitions about telling you this central fact of my life. What that means about me and about you, I don’t know, really. I tell it to you now, asking you to forgive my clumsiness, as you have so often. And I send you, dearest Mary, very much love. Blair.”
