Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Many reporters, including Mary, softened their judgment of President Johnson in the wake of his decision not to run for reelection. The ever media-sensitive LBJ was quick to notice, and he joked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that the president of the Correspondents’ Association should consider retiring to promote greater unity in the press corps. “And you’ll find out that once you step aside,” he said, “things start happening: Mary McGrory may even call you a statesman.”

  Johnson’s withdrawal made McCarthy’s April 2 primary victory in Wisconsin anticlimactic. Bobby had entered the race too late to be on the ballot, and Johnson was no longer a candidate. But the shock waves continued.

  On April 4, Mary was at a Democratic Party function in Washington when word arrived that Reverend Martin Luther King had been gunned down on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee. Mary was appalled by some of the reactions. “Of course, I’m from the South and I’m glad,” one lobbyist told her.

  Riots erupted in Washington and other major cities. Scores of homes and businesses were torched in Washington’s traditionally middle-class black neighborhoods as gray smoke choked the U Street corridor. The National Guard was deployed to halt the advance of the furious crowds.

  “I can remember riding down Connecticut Avenue the morning after the riots,” said Mary, “and seeing a jeep and two young soldiers with machine guns. Connecticut Avenue early in the morning! What has happened?” It seemed as if the country was slipping toward madness.

  Mary attended King’s funeral at a packed church in Atlanta, where she squeezed into a pew next to Richard Nixon. As the service began, the two shared a hymnal—the only time the two ever sang from the same page in their long careers. “In the church, he was his mother’s genteel son, making sure I was ready when he turned the pages,” Mary recalled. “He sang the old hymns—‘Softly and Tenderly,’ ‘In the Garden’—in his pleasant baritone.”

  The King assassination provided an uncomfortable window into Gene McCarthy’s psyche and underscored why his campaign stumbled soon after its giddy turn in New Hampshire. Clark and McCarthy were in San Francisco when they learned that King had been shot. Walking down the hall with Clark afterwards, McCarthy remarked, “You know, he kind of brought it on himself. He shouldn’t have gone to Memphis.” Many of those who knew McCarthy best came to sour on him because of such moments. As reporter Jack Germond observed of Mary, “She had the notion that Gene McCarthy was going to be another Adlai Stevenson, and he wasn’t. He was the most cynical man I ever met.” McCarthy’s behavior after the assassination stood in sharp contrast with Kennedy’s, given that Bobby calmed an angry black crowd in Indianapolis with a heartfelt speech the night of the shooting.

  McCarthy was increasingly counterproductive on the campaign trail. Asked on The Tonight Show if he would make a good president, the senator replied, “Yes, I think I would be adequate.” As Blair Clark complained, “He was contemptuous about most other politicians . . . even Caesar could kiss the ass of somebody who would be useful to his cause, but not Gene.” Bobby Kennedy was simply a stronger politician. McCarthy’s chances of winning the nomination plummeted when Bobby entered the race, leaving McCarthy deeply embittered in a year when rancor was an overabundant commodity.

  The Democratic contest took another sharp turn when Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his presidential bid in late April. Humphrey chose not to compete directly with Kennedy and McCarthy in the primaries, instead relying heavily on delegates from states that were not holding primaries. Humphrey was in a difficult position and was initially unwilling to challenge Johnson’s position on the war in order to maintain his support. As Mary lamented, “When people are voting for the president, good or bad, they at least want to believe that he is his own man.”

  For Mary, the great drama of 1968 had become “Robert Kennedy against himself.” She was struck by the fact that even as Bobby tried to appear more presentable—trimming his hair, speaking in more modulated tones, and acknowledging some of the faults of his late brother’s administration—the public response to him was increasingly manic. Bobby’s preferred mode of communication was no longer speeches, but a visceral connection with crowds. Mary wrote, “Kennedy has spent most of his time on the back of an open car surrounded by people who come to touch him. He is not content with pulling them onto the streets. He wants them, it seems, to come at him. They respond with a kind of mass hysteria that is both frightening and dangerous.” To Mary, Bobby launching into a crowd looked like a swimmer cleaving a heavy surf.

  Kennedy prevailed in the Indiana primary in early May, but the margin was close. With Humphrey in the race and McCarthy proving to be more difficult to dispatch than planned, Bobby threw himself into campaigning with renewed fervor.

  Bobby was a man on fire, and Mary, who knew him so well, could still discern his inner shadows despite the spotlight’s glare: “Seen from afar, Kennedy is a compelling, summoning figure. Lean as a whip, dark blond hair falling over sunburned face, he is literally bent double by the clutching hands reaching up to touch him as if he were magic. Seen up close, Kennedy is a different man. Gray flints at his temples. His face is lined and gaunt. His blue eyes are blank and hunted.”

  McCarthy and Kennedy continued to jockey to see who would challenge Humphrey at the convention. Kennedy won Nebraska convincingly, while McCarthy carried Oregon—the first time a member of the Kennedy family had ever met defeat at the polls. The stage was set for a showdown in California, a must-win for both men. Bobby was infuriated that McCarthy remained in the race. “He just didn’t think McCarthy was on the same plane as him politically,” Peter Edelman explained. “He could not stand the idea of treating McCarthy as an equal.”

  After much taunting from McCarthy, Bobby agreed to a debate just days before the California primary. Blair Clark, Mary, and Robert Lowell gathered as McCarthy prepared for the debate. An aide with a lengthy set of issue papers hovered nervously outside the room. Clark tried to get McCarthy to break off the friendly chat with Mary and Lowell to prepare. The senator said he did not need to.

  Most commentators scored the debate a draw. But some important measure of healing had occurred between Mary and Bobby by this point. She was steadily becoming more enthusiastic about a Kennedy nomination, and her relations with the Kennedy inner circle had never truly ruptured. Gene McCarthy had been so disappointing to Mary on so many levels and she might have decided that Bobby was simply the better man all along.

  The California primary was held on June 4, 1968. After a busy day of campaigning, both Kennedy and McCarthy watched the returns in their hotels in Los Angeles. Bobby squeaked out a narrow 46–42 percent win. The sun-kissed Bobby took the stage at the Ambassador Hotel at around midnight and addressed a delirious crowd of eighteen hundred supporters. His wife, Ethel, pregnant with their eleventh child, stood by his side. Bobby yelled to be heard above the din, “Now it’s on to Chicago,” the site of the Democratic convention, “and let’s win there.” As Kennedy exited through the hotel’s kitchen, a crazed gunman shot him repeatedly. Robert Francis Kennedy died twenty-six hours later.

  Mary was in McCarthy’s suite at the Beverly Hilton hotel. During the day, there had been a great deal of discussion among McCarthy’s team about whether he should throw his support to Bobby if he lost California. McCarthy loyalists knew this was the best way to prevent Humphrey from securing the nomination, but they also doubted that McCarthy would be so selfless. In the suite, McCarthy, Clark, and two staffers worked on a congratulatory telegram to Bobby.

  “I think that we could say ‘fine’ instead of ‘splendid,’” McCarthy told the pair, “because I don’t think the percentage will go that high.”

  There was a knock on the door. David Schumacher, a CBS reporter, came into the room. “Senator Kennedy has been shot.” Everyone was stunned. Mary remembered someone exclaiming, “You’re kidding.” Schumacher assured them he was n
ot and disappeared to get more information. Abigail McCarthy and Gene’s two daughters emerged from an adjoining room. Schumacher returned to say that Kennedy had been shot in the head.

  McCarthy slumped in a chair and put his hands over his eyes. “Maybe we should do it in a different way,” he said. “Maybe we should have the English system of having the cabinet choose the president.”

  A group of police appeared at the hotel room door to guard McCarthy. “It was the ghastly finale to a campaign that had brought two men into increasingly bitter conflict for a prize that neither could attain without the other’s help,” wrote Mary.

  After learning the news, McCarthy half-turned to Clark and said, “You know, he kind of brought it on himself”—exactly the same words he had used after Martin Luther King’s assassination. David Mixner, who remained active on the McCarthy campaign, summed up Gene’s lasting animus toward the Kennedy family as “sad and tragic.” He called McCarthy a man who enjoyed a phenomenal moment in the sun only to become “bitter that it was a cloudy day again.”

  • • •

  On June 7, Mary received a Western Union telegram: “You are invited to attend a requiem Mass in memory of Robert Francis Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on Saturday, June 8, 1968, at 10:00 a.m.”

  Less than five years after burying Jack, the Kennedy clan gathered in New York to memorialize Bobby. Mary wondered if the country had entered “an era when the lunatics, not the leaders, are writing the history,” and her remembrances of Bobby were shaded in bittersweet hues:

  Bobby was a Celt—“unassimilated,” Robert Lowell once called him—warm-hearted, vindictive, humorous, moody, intuitive. He loved and hated, and was, in turn, loved and hated. He could never be unkind to anyone who had been kind to his brother, or kind to anyone who had been unkind. He was a natural organizer. He tried pathetically to be like his brother, to read the same books, cultivate the same people, and consult the same advisers. He was torn between what he felt and what he thought. . . . At the end, he was a forlorn figure, caught between the past and the future, motorcading between miles of people who rushed to touch him and reassure him. His tragedy was not only that he had not achieved his full potential, but that uncertainties and pressures had prevented him from seeing what it was.

  Leonard Bernstein played a Mahler symphony at the Mass, and Andy Williams sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy for his older brother: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” A line of mourners more than twenty-five blocks long waited to pass by the body.

  Mary was torn with grief, writing of Bobby that “he attracted the adulation and the rage which his clan, with their splendid, doomed lives, aroused in a nation that had never seen such a compelling collection of human beings, so beautiful, so armored, and so vulnerable.” Her parting words for Bobby sounded like those of a proud, wounded sibling: “He was, at the very least, a magnificent boy, who always did his best.” Time magazine declared that Mary had delivered one of Bobby’s most elegant remembrances despite having been one of his severest critics.

  A special twenty-one-car funeral train carried Bobby’s body from New York to Washington, where he would be laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery, by his brother’s side. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the tracks as the train worked its way south toward Union Station: young people, old people, weeping housewives, poor black men wearing dark funeral suits, veterans holding Americans flags, policemen, Boy Scouts, and firemen all standing stiff at attention as the train rumbled by. A country stood vigil for a fallen son.

  John Seigenthaler remembered seeing Mary on the train: “She just exploded in tears, not a word, just an explosion of tears. And she had cried fifteen times before that.” The two embraced. On the train, there was discussion of whether thirty-six-year-old Teddy Kennedy should jump into the presidential race or join the Humphrey ticket as vice president.

  Mary was riven by a sense of guilt after Bobby’s death, and Bobby’s press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, tried to put the situation in perspective. “Maybe Bobby had gone too far with some things,” he said. “Mary may have worried that she was not in a state of grace with Bobby when he died.” Mary naturally reflected on how tough she had been on Bobby. Yet her remorse did not push her toward revisionism or hero worship. “You would have been hard put the day after Bobby had been killed to find a person on the McCarthy campaign who hadn’t wished they had supported him,” David Mixner said. “That was the climate. I don’t think Mary regretted her words, but we all examined our relationship at that moment.”

  A year that began with bright promise had spiraled out of control. The very idea of politics, and the very idea of America, seemed threatened.

  By early July Gene McCarthy felt revived, even though Hubert Humphrey had a significant delegate lead heading into the Chicago convention. Mary’s notes from a private July 2 discussion with McCarthy paint the picture of a bold but badly out-of-touch candidate: “Thinks he will now get it. It seems ordained.” McCarthy likened himself to a toreador poised to skewer the unsuspecting Humphrey. Mary’s faith in him had waned, and she scrawled in her notebook that McCarthy had “lost his constituency with the kids.” The Minnesota senator remained stubbornly unwilling to speak kindly about Bobby even after his death.

  In early August, Mary traveled to the Republican convention, in Miami. Seeing the continuing tumult all across the land, the lack of drama around Nixon looked like a winning formula to most Republicans. People might have viewed Nixon as square, but he did not seem sinister or unpredictable, and his earlier image as a cruel partisan had largely been papered over. Richard Nixon had obvious appeal for the large segments of the country that longed for a return to calmer days. The only discordant moment at the convention was Nixon’s rather bizarre choice of Spiro Agnew, the pugnacious governor of Maryland, as his running mate. Mary’s takeaway from the week: “The Republican convention was a dull and lifeless affair, devoid of suspense or stars, fight, or fun. The Republicans thought it was wonderful.”

  Even before the Democratic convention, there were widespread fears that it would be a disaster. Adding further to the aura of unrest and unease, Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia just days before the convention, crushing a democratic uprising. The convention was also the last one where Democratic Party bosses retained an overwhelming say in choosing the nominee. Between them, Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy had claimed nearly 70 percent of primary votes, while Humphrey took only about 2 percent, yet Humphrey was well ahead in the delegate count.

  Antiwar-protesting yippies planned large demonstrations outside the convention, in what they dubbed a “Festival of Life.” Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley vowed that no outsiders would take over his streets, his convention, or his city, and he mobilized a massive police and National Guard presence eager for confrontation.

  As Mary arrived at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which served as headquarters for the candidates and the press, the atmosphere was menacing. There were policemen posted in force by the elevator banks, and many of them were smoking, since Mayor Daley had given them special dispensation to do so during the convention.

  Mary wandered out into the streets with reporter Eric Sevareid. They saw a young protestor spread-eagled across the hood of a car as four policemen beat him with batons. The police knew that Mary and Sevareid were reporters—their press credentials were prominently displayed. “The cops wanted us to see them,” she would recall. “They were making a statement.” For Mary, the police weren’t just attacking college kids—they were launching an assault on the counterculture, on music they didn’t understand, and on young people who spoke out in ways they never had.

  The scene inside the convention was raw. Although Mayor Daley and convention organiz
ers tried to marginalize those state delegations supporting a peace plank, cameras captured them chanting and shouting in protest. Scores of delegates were arrested or expelled from the hall for opposing Vietnam. The Chicago police and National Guard antagonized unruly protestors, and the situation quickly descended into chaos.

  As delegates watched scenes of police clubbing protestors in the streets, Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut took to the podium to nominate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. Ribicoff declared, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics out on the streets of Chicago.” Mayor Daley screamed at Ribicoff in return, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”

  Mary had described the New Hampshire primary as “one of the headiest, most romantic chapters in American political history.” But just seven months later the landscape was gushing poison and rage. Even years later, she remembered the convention with anguish and clarity: “You would see friends you knew coming in from the McCarthy campaign, coming in all bloody, because they had an encounter where they were in the wrong place at the wrong time according to the Chicago police. There just wasn’t a right place for them to be. I remember getting up at 6 o’clock in the morning; nobody slept. It was an atmosphere of riot.”

  Mary joined McCarthy in his hotel suite. The two discussed whether or not he should endorse Humphrey while McCarthy casually tossed an orange around the room, fondly remembering his days as an amateur baseball player in the Great Sioux League. Poet Robert Lowell, somewhat bored, sniffed that discussions of baseball were as boring as those about politics.

  With darkness falling, the situation deteriorated further as the National Guard massed on a bridge to prevent demonstrators from moving across. “I ought to go down there,” McCarthy declared. “Those are my people. I ought to speak to them.” Musician Mary Travers, of the Peter, Paul and Mary trio, was also in the suite, and she offered to accompany McCarthy, before the Secret Service vetoed the plan.