Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  “Ah, the young people,” Kissinger sighed.

  “He gave me a big song and dance about how he missed young people,” Mary said, “and how his relationship with the students had been so wonderful.” Kissinger told her that he would love to meet the young leaders of the peace movement. Could Mary arrange it? Despite the earlier disaster with Ehrlichman, Mary was amenable. Kissinger made clear that the meeting would have to be small and secret. Mary agreed.

  The group met at Mary’s apartment around Christmas 1969.

  Mary had invited David Hawk, David Mixner, and Sam Brown to the discussion. Hawk was facing an indictment for dodging the draft, but he was far from the stereotypical hippie. A swimming champion at Cornell, he was handsome and clean-cut. Mary believed, with something approaching certitude, that if anyone met and seriously talked to young men like Hawk, Mixner, and Brown, they would see the light on the war.

  Kissinger appeared at Mary’s apartment right on time. “He was charming,” said Mary.

  The five of them sat down for drinks. All three young men described their passionate, resolute opposition to Vietnam. “He listened with genuine interest, total attention,” Mary said. “He heard them out, never interrupting, contradicting, arguing, or scolding.”

  “There is only one answer to this madness, and that is to bring the troops home now,” Brown urged. “Not next year, but now.”

  “Sam, you know that is not possible,” Kissinger replied. He argued that the protestors needed to demonstrate restraint: “This administration will not tolerate domestic violence or disruption because of the war. I warn you that there are elements in the White House who would welcome the opportunity to take reprisals against any of you if you were to provide them the excuse.”

  Kissinger “seemed struck by Hawk,” Mary recalled, “a dark, direct, smiling young man, whose mind was wonderfully focused by the notion of going to jail for his convictions.” After dinner, Kissinger continued to make the case that Vietnamization—the process of training South Vietnamese soldiers to take on greater and greater responsibilities—was working.

  “Dr. Kissinger,” Hawk asked, “what if Vietnamization fails?”

  Kissinger insisted that the process was going well and that despite the tenacity of the Vietcong, the South Vietnamese were pulling together. “Well, we think we have a hope of success.”

  Hawk was not so easily dissuaded. “Dr. Kissinger, what if it doesn’t work?”

  Kissinger said that it would be obvious if they failed. He added that he was sending General Alexander Haig, “my best man,” to the field so he could give him “the frankest of reports.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” queried Hawk for a third time.

  “Then we will have another strategy,” the national security adviser replied.

  “And what is that?” Hawk asked.

  Mary recalled the moment. Kissinger, “with the wise look that had disarmed so many,” said simply, “That I cannot tell you.” David Hawk left the meeting convinced that the administration would never end the war without outside pressure. After the meeting, Kissinger jettisoned his vow of secrecy as soon as it was convenient to do so, puffing himself up in the process by telling others that he was in “constant contact” with the peace movement.

  “It was a mistake and I shouldn’t have done it,” Mary said in retrospect. She knew that many of her peers viewed her friendship with the peace movement leaders as a curiosity, but, as she maintained, “Had it been left to the World War II generation, we would have been in Vietnam forever.”

  By 1970 it had become clear to Mary that Nixon’s plan to end the war in Vietnam was a cruel illusion. Nixon and his team increasingly made the case that the real problem wasn’t the war, but the people protesting the war. In April 1970, President Nixon expanded and escalated the conflict by launching a major bombing campaign in Cambodia. Mary was outraged. Kissinger’s Plan B was massive air attacks.

  About a year after the meeting at her apartment, Mary sat next to Kissinger at a party hosted by the president of the Washington, D.C., city council. Kissinger had arrived late and joined the head table for dessert. In his deep, rumbling voice, he tried to charm Mary, asking when she might invite him to dinner. Mary, who had downed a number of cocktails by this point, snapped, “When you have the last American out of Vietnam.”

  She was deeply at odds with the Star’s editorial line on Vietnam during this period. “Mary was very upset that the paper wouldn’t support her views,” Newby Noyes said. “Sometimes she wouldn’t even talk to me.” Mary helped galvanize a staff protest in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, offering to resign. Newby replied to her in writing: “I don’t care what you write; just keep writing it for us.”

  Mary insisted that her inability to shift the Star’s editorial position on Vietnam was a sign of her limited influence as a columnist. “If those people on the Star, who are paid to read me are so totally unmoved, I can’t imagine how the public is,” she vented. “I have written anti-war articles practically four times a week and yet our paper has endorsed every step of the war, and I constantly get hate mail calling me a communist.”

  While Vietnam mightily frustrated Mary, she did not truly believe she lacked influence. Her columns were carefully dissected at the White House and in Congress. When she wrote columns complaining about surly treatment at her local post office, no less than the postmaster general attempted to mollify her. (“How can I call you Mary if you call me General?” wrote America’s chief postal official in response.) Her humility was tactical. It allowed her to maintain the useful fiction that she was a helpless naïf.

  Mary was a challenge for her editors to manage. “I think it was always understood that if they changed anything, I would go out the door, never to return again,” Mary said. “Total freedom of expression is what I require.” Reporter Edward Morgan recalled a lunch with Noyes during which Mary’s name came up. Newby shook his head and clapped his hand to his brow. “I love her but she is constantly causing me headaches.”

  Mary repeatedly complained to Newby that the paper ran too many letters critical of her work. “Many of the letters I get about you are answered by a firm statement from me that the Star is proud to have you in the paper,” he reassured her. “But when we get a flood of protest over something we do—whether it is an editorial, a news story, or a Miss McGrory comment—I think we should give the dissenters a chance to blow off steam.”

  It was around this time that Liz Acosta was officially assigned as Mary’s full-time assistant. Mary was the only columnist at the Star to be given both an office and a secretary. When Maureen Dowd first started at the Star, she noticed that Mary’s small office was always the center of activity. “All the cute guy reporters at the paper—Phil Gailey, Fred Barnes, Walter Taylor, Lance Gay—were always clustered around her tiny little office, dancing attendance, fetching, serving, doting, like Las Vegas chorus boys,” Dowd observed. “Naturally, I immediately decided I wanted to be a columnist.” Acosta and another friend, Gertrude Cleary, were a constant presence at Mary’s parties and social gatherings.

  Mary lost two important women in her life in 1970 with the death of Doris Fleeson, in August, and her mother, in October. Gene McCarthy delivered the eulogy for Fleeson at the Navy Chapel, in Washington, celebrating her toughness by saying that she considered it her calling “to tell this world what was wrong with it, and who was wrong, and to suggest in terms that no one could misunderstand what she thought ought to be done.” On October 3, Mary’s mother died, at age eighty-one, after suffering a heart attack at Deaconess Hospital, in Boston. After a service at the Holy Name Church, in West Roxbury, she was buried in Roslindale’s Old Calvary Cemetery.

  Mary developed an even stronger bond with her aunt Kate after her mother’s death. Kate would often stay with Mary in Washington for months at a time, and they were always together with other family members in Boston and Antrim dur
ing the holidays. Mary’s friends were taken with Kate’s decidedly no-nonsense worldview. “You know all they talk about is politics down there,” Kate complained of Washington. “They never talk about the weather.” When Aunt Kate sold her cabin in New Hampshire, Mary continued to travel up to Antrim every year at the end of the summer and often for Thanksgiving, with the Maplehurst Inn becoming her new home away from home in New Hampshire.

  Mary’s relationship with her surviving family, primarily her nieces and nephew, was enduring but sometimes—like all her relationships—complicated. Her nephew Ted McGrory and niece Anne Beatty and husband Tom effectively served as Mary’s immediate family, welcoming her into their homes for holidays and family gatherings. Mary was generous and well loved by her surviving family, and she often brought unexpected delights into their lives: Ted Kennedy dropping her off at their front door; a chance to meet the president on visits to Washington; the thrill of mingling with Walter Cronkite at a party in Mary’s apartment; a round of golf with Ethel Kennedy as Mary trailed behind in a cart; and playing touch football at the family compound in Hyannis Port.

  But Mary was not always easy on those close to her. She could be demanding and critical. Her niece Polly, with whom she had a very close, but later strained, relationship, remembers feeling as if she couldn’t do anything right when, before one of Mary’s parties, Mary criticized her makeup and clothes. “That looks cheap,” she said. Yet once the gathering began, Mary introduced Polly as her darling, talented niece. But it wasn’t just family members who were judged. Maureen Dowd remembers Mary lecturing her at a restaurant in Rome because her bra strap was showing. Another friend was scolded because her skirt was too short. Mary approved and she disapproved, and there was no in-between—a trait that served her well as a columnist but was challenging on a personal level.

  Family and friends sometimes struggled to escape their pigeonholed identities. Mary’s niece Anne was designated as a campfire wood gatherer on the beach in Antrim when she was five. Mary, satisfied with her performance, assigned her the same role every year in perpetuity. “It was really hard to change categories,” said Mary’s nephew, Ted. “There was a no-trade clause.”

  “She did have a temper,” Phil Gailey commented. “She did lash out sometimes, and usually the people who got the worst end of her tongue lashings were the people she cared about the most.” By and large, people around Mary accepted that sudden storms came with her personality.

  For someone with such a nimble mind, Mary viewed the world in largely binary terms: moral or immoral; good guy versus bad guy. Because she loved Antrim, everything about Antrim was brilliant. The locals were descendants of Revolutionary War heroes. The local production of Oliver! was “Broadway caliber,” and Wayno’s Grocery was “the finest in the country.”

  If everything about Antrim was good, everything about Richard Nixon was bad, and the two clashed in a most unexpected way in a July 1970 incident that only underscored how entrenched sexism still was in the newsroom.

  Newby Noyes had invited Nixon to an owners’ lunch. The president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called to say that Nixon would accept upon one condition: the lunch had to be stag; no women were to be included. Noyes suggested, half-joking, that the White House wanted to make the event stag because of Mary. Ziegler laughed off the question.

  Word of Mary’s exclusion quickly spread. Thirteen female Star employees complained to Newby and John Kauffmann, president of the Star. They also sent a telegram to Nixon, calling the move “an affront to all women staffers.” The local Newspaper Guild telegrammed protests to Nixon, Ziegler, communications director Herb Klein, and the Star’s management, arguing that it was already hard enough for women in journalism without having sexism promoted at the “highest level.” Several women staffers at the Star asked what the reaction would have been if the White House had asked for a “whites only” lunch. Kauffmann replied, “Of course, we would have immediately reacted and said no. But somehow when someone suggests you have something stag, you just don’t react.”

  Mary did not lend her name to the protests, and she remained mum, as did most of the men on the staff of the Star.

  On July 23, 1970, President Nixon was served shrimp cocktail and filet mignon in the Star’s boardroom. Mary, still the only woman on the Star’s national staff, ate an egg salad sandwich at her desk.

  After his lunch, President Nixon toured the newsroom. Newby Noyes pointed out Mary’s office, and Nixon stepped in to say hello. The small gray office wasn’t much. The window was chipped, two telephones sat on the desk, and a large Italian traffic poster that warned FACILITATE PASSING . . . IF YOU WISH TO ARRIVE adorned one wall, surely leaving Nixon to ponder how so much torment could flow from such undistinguished quarters.

  Nixon and Mary made awkward small talk.

  Nixon observed that Mary had an orderly desk, “the neatest in the newsroom.”

  “Is that where you keep the cheesecake?” the president asked Mary, a reference to her column on crime.

  She asked Nixon if he’d enjoyed lunch. The president noted that he didn’t like to eat while talking. There was not much else to say, and Nixon departed.

  Women were increasingly willing to challenge having the playing field of journalism tilted against them. One of the great symbols of sexism in journalism during the 1970s remained the annual Gridiron Club dinner. The event was a nearly century-old tradition featuring skits and musical numbers, and every president since Grover Cleveland had appeared at the ceremonies at least once. The dinners were a chance for Washington’s senior journalists to mingle with politicians in an atmosphere of slightly drunken, and sometimes feigned, informality.

  Women were not allowed to be Gridiron members. Mary and others decided to picket the dinner in 1970, and Mary did so because she objected to being kept away from a place where news was being made. “The question arises why any sensible woman would wish to attend such a fete,” Mary wrote. “The answer is she doesn’t. She just wishes to be asked.”

  For four years running, Mary and others picketed dinner guests. One policeman wondered at the fuss, telling the women that the attendees looked “like a bunch of old fogies anyway.” The first woman, Helen Thomas, was finally admitted in 1975, and Mary was granted membership in 1976.

  But Mary remained a reluctant warrior on the front lines of feminism. In 1971, Bella Abzug, the firebrand congresswoman from New York, contacted Mary. Abzug, along with Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and others, planned to launch a National Women’s Political Caucus to promote gender equality, and Abzug was hoping for Mary’s support. “Hundreds of women are coming, the feminist movement is on its way.”

  Mary was enthusiastic. “Oh, that’s wonderful, Bella. That’s marvelous,” she said. “Now you’re going to take a stand on the war.”

  Abzug hesitated. “Well, a lot of the women are Republicans,” she explained, “and they would find it difficult to oppose Nixon on the war.”

  “Well, then, Bella, what’s the point?” Mary asserted, “If they’re just going to be like men, why bother?”

  But despite the rhetoric and the real push of the women’s movement, women applying for jobs at papers in the 1960s were told that they would be considered only for positions as mail clerks or researchers. Writing jobs were for men.

  Mary obviously believed women to be every bit as capable as men, if not more so, but she was no knee-jerk feminist. As a self-made woman in a man’s world, she expected other women to do the same. Reporter Lesley Stahl remembered sitting next to Mary at a congressional hearing when Mary told her that she resented the young women who had gotten their jobs through affirmative action. Stahl, who had gotten her job at CBS as a direct result of affirmative action, squirmed.

  Mary did not hide her ambivalent feelings for the vocal feminism of the early 1970s. “I found its early advocates a bit strident,” she explained. “They emphasized abortion and gung-ho career
ism too much for me. I couldn’t go along with the nursing mother who insisted on being a firefighter, and I didn’t think that unisex restrooms were quite the thing. I was glad, however, to see that the ‘either-or’ syndrome which crushed so many women of my generation—marriage or a career—was being dissipated.” Doris Fleeson’s daughter wrote to Mary to complain, “Could you please stop being so ‘diligently’ anti-feminist?”

  “She definitely fit in better with the men than the women,” said her friend Phil Gailey. “She would send the women out to the kitchen to do the dishes and she would sit in the living room and talk with the men. For a woman who had broken such huge gender barriers in her day, I never understood why she cared so little about it.” As Jack Germond observed, “Mary was not of the women’s movement in any way, and she did not like being identified with it,” adding, “She always treated women with, as we say, minimum high regard.”

  Elizabeth Shannon remembers getting to know Mary when she arrived in Washington in the early sixties, after graduating from college in Texas. Shannon had landed a position with the Star’s reporter training program. The trainees, who all sat in a common bullpen in the middle of the newsroom, covered decidedly unglamorous assignments like missing animal reports and the obituaries. Not long after coming to Washington, Elizabeth met her future husband, William Shannon, a political reporter for the New York Times.

  William Shannon told Elizabeth that she should introduce herself to Mary, since Mary was an old friend.

  “Oh, God,” Elizabeth said. “She is such a star. I am a lowly reporter trainee. I am not sure I should do that.”

  A few days later, Mary stopped by the reporter trainees’ table.

  “Which one of you is Elizabeth?” she asked, somewhat menacingly.

  “That’s me,” replied Shannon.

  “I hear you are engaged to Bill Shannon,” Mary said.

  “Yes,” she said brightly, “I am.”

  “How long have you been in Washington?”