by John Norris
With the burglars taking the fall for the break-in, Watergate might have died there, but one of the defendants wrote to Judge Sirica in March 1973 alleging that he had been pressured into perjury. It also came to light that White House counsel John Dean had been allowed to monitor FBI questioning of White House staff members. The scandal spread.
Mary had a field day. “The president knows that Watergate is the one confrontation that an inept and despised Congress might win,” she wrote. “Yet he has chosen to fight it out the way he has fought all his other battles: with secrecy and defiance, with no quarter, no compromises, and no concessions.” Mary scoffed at Nixon’s claims that he had been too trusting of his underlings, saying that it was implausible for a man “whose whole career has been based on an unlimited suspicion of his fellow man.”
As Watergate gained steam, so did the volume of Mary’s hate mail. She was threatened by an anonymous caller to the Star: “If Nixon goes down, Mary McGrory goes too.” One of the security guards at the Star, Clarence, took the threat as a personal affront and subsequently insisted on escorting Mary to her car nightly.
With a Senate Watergate Committee slated to begin hearings in May 1973, Nixon was forced to fire four trusted members of his team in an effort to cauterize the bleeding. Those let go included counselor John Ehrlichman, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, White House Counsel John Dean, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.
With Dean’s lengthy testimony before the Watergate Committee casting stark light on the Machiavellian dealings in the White House, Mary described the scheming as a curious mix of evil and ineptitude, a Marx Brothers movie as retold by the German General Staff. Mary called Nixon “a demented monarch, totally removed from reality, calling down vengeance upon his enemies, surrounded by imaginary foes, threatening to ‘get’ the press for publishing Watergate stories, complaining that the IRS was not sufficiently tormenting his tormentors.”
Dean announced that he would release Nixon’s enemies list, a compilation of key administration opponents who the president’s aides felt should be targeted with dirty tricks. With word that the list was going to be released on June 27, Bernard Kalb, who was covering the hearings for the Star, contacted Dean’s lawyer.
“I will never tell anybody where I got it,” Kalb promised. “Have we got anybody on the list?”
The response: “Mary McGrory.”
Mary’s was the final name on the list of the president’s twenty key enemies, her entry highlighted with two stars and an asterisk. The list singled her out for writing “daily hate Nixon articles.” Other notables on the list included CBS reporter Daniel Schorr, actor Paul Newman, Congressman John Conyers, and the president of the United Auto Workers, Leonard Woodcock.
The enemies list was a remarkably formal plan by a sitting president to neutralize his opponents. Its language was a chilling mix of officiousness and macho bluster. “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The memo detailed the tools at hand: IRS audits, litigation, denial of federal contracts, and even selective prosecutions.
Mary was delighted to discover that her name was on the enemies list, proclaiming it to be the nicest thing that had ever happened to her. When the news broke, her friend Art Buchwald insisted on taking Mary to celebrate with a meal at Sans Souci. As Mary walked into the restaurant, the patrons spontaneously rose and gave her a standing ovation under the restaurant’s crystal chandelier.
Fan mail quickly overwhelmed Mary’s hate mail. A policeman from New Jersey volunteered his services as a bodyguard. At a cocktail party in Denver, a woman shouldered up to Mary and insisted that she autograph her bus pass, saying, “We never get to shake hands with an enemy in Denver.”
A friend expressed concern that Mary was not treating the situation with more gravity: “You know, you should be very indignant about this. This is a terrible reflection on democracy and freedom of expression.”
“Yes, it is all that,” Mary replied, “but we found out about it.”
Privately, Mary was not so glib, writing to a reader, “I wondered why my tax returns were audited three years in a row; I often thought my phone was tapped. I never allowed myself to think about how far they were prepared to go. Had the Nixon staff plans been enforced—if there had been no Watergate disclosure—I am certain great efforts would have been made to silence me and other critics.”
When Mary learned that former White House counselor Chuck Colson was writing notes of apology to those on the enemies list, Mary penned an open letter to him, saying that she had been “fooled completely” into thinking that the break-ins at her house had been the work of “honest thieves” and that the IRS had audited her out of conscientiousness. Mary insisted that Colson not apologize; the experience had been grand.
John McKelway, who wrote the Rambler column for the Star, penned an ode to Mary, “It Helps to Know Thine Enemy.” It was one of Mary’s favorite things ever written about her:
The Mary McGrory named on the White House list as an enemy is, as far as I can tell at this point in Watergate time, the same Mary McGrory who struggles a few feet away in this office.
One nice thought about the list, in her case at least, is that it does show someone at the White House could read . . .
Since those at the White House were deep in the business of listing people, what they should have done with this particular name was to have included a single sheet within that black collection under the heading: “And then there is Mary McGrory.” That would have been the only way to handle the dark deed properly.
She comes into the office late in the afternoon.
She has spent long hours watching those in charge, feeling things, listening to her colleagues, probing here and there into the play of thought. She works very hard.
She is capable of a number of moods. One must wait to be on the safe side to see which way the wind is blowing.
Pretty and always well dressed, the disturber of the thoughts of men, she scowls at her mail box. She is on other lists not so public. She gets hate mail of the worst kind, complimentary notes written with care.
Mary McGrory hears the telephone ringing as one frequently does in a newspaper office. Mary McGrory says, “Is that my telephone?” It is a demanding question, and it is best for all concerned to get the matter settled before the next sounding of the bells.
Mary McGrory goes into her cubicle and begins to telephone, or answer calls, or nibble graham crackers. She doodles—many firm squares connected. As the evening closes in she tries to begin writing. The polishing will come later, later at night. The writing does not come easy, but she takes great pride in it. She has to do it.
Sometimes you will have an amusing anecdote to tell Mary McGrory. She may hear it; she may not. The eyes fall on what she is reading. She is elsewhere, quite far away.
But other times, she listens. The laughter comes rollicking out; she is doubled up by, say, the absurdity of it all. Her mind sparkles. She embellishes. She is funny. Her wit can demolish. . . .
Mary McGrory can be infuriating. She can be right, she can be wrong, but always she writes it so well. That is why she was listed. They could not take it.
Haynes Johnson reflected on Mary’s inclusion on the enemies list. “That was typical of Nixon,” he said. “He would talk about enemies, and she would be an enemy. That we have to destroy her, we have to mitigate her influence, crush her if possible, defame her. That would be Nixon. Absolutely Nixon.”
Mary was a self-admitted Watergate junkie long before being named. Not only was Nixon, her least favorite politician, being slowly roasted alive, but the hearings offered a wonderful parade of personalities. Mary put Senator Sam Ervin, who chaired the hearings, front and center,
calling him the rock that all the waves dashed against: “His bright eyes and quivering wattles suggest the rooster greeting the day, joyful and alert. At 76, he is doing what he was born to do—trying to find out if the Constitution, which is graven on his heart, is alive and well in high places.” It was the best material from a hearing Mary had enjoyed since Joe McCarthy terrorized the U.S. Army.
But as spring faded into summer, it looked as though Nixon might actually survive. That is, until Alexander Butterfield testified before the committee on July 16, 1973, acknowledging under oath that Nixon recorded his own conversations with an Oval Office taping system. Suddenly a definitive answer could be found to the question “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Nixon insisted that he would not make any tapes available, touching off a legal battle in which the presidency hung in the balance.
• • •
Watergate was changing journalism in ways too numerous to count. Not only had the Washington Post gotten the scoop of the century; it had established itself as the second most important paper in America, behind only the New York Times. The Star lagged badly behind. Watergate also produced a new zeal for investigative journalism, pushing reporters and politicians into ever more wary and antagonistic relationships.
In the fall of 1973, a television crew filming a documentary on the media and Watergate caught up with Mary as she sat in the hearing room. The young interviewer asked why the reporters covering the hearings were not out scouring for new evidence and allegations.
“Yes, except that some of us can’t do it,” Mary explained. “It’s a gift, investigative reporting, and a lot of people don’t have it. They don’t have the stomach for it; they don’t have the brass that it takes to go up to a total stranger and take him by the lapels and say, ‘Now you tell me.’ I can’t for instance.”
The interviewer pressed on, hoping to embarrass Mary: “You’re more comfortable in this situation?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “It’s all handed to me on a platter. I just have to sit here and take it all in. It’s much easier than going around knocking on doors at midnight and meeting people in underground parking spaces in the dead of night, which is what, as you know, Woodward and Bernstein did.”
“But you’re going to say there’s something of value in your being here, I hope,” suggested the interviewer.
“It keeps me off the streets,” observed a bemused Mary. She was far from an armchair pundit and sourced all of her material firsthand, unlike many of today’s commentators. But at the same time, she never had any taste for relying on anonymously sourced quotes or tips. She did not engage in intrigue when it came to reporting.
Mary covered every single day of the hearings, and her work underscored her unique ability as a reporter and a writer to take events that we could see with our own eyes and layer in observations, emotion, and detail that provoked us to think again—and think differently—about what we had seen.
It is no coincidence that Mary’s most famous columns—on the Army-McCarthy hearings, Nixon’s “exit snarling” press conference, JFK’s funeral, and the Watergate hearings—were all written about public events. She helped people make sense of public life. She humanized the players on the stage. She took what people knew and used it to help them understand how they felt. She looked at the world with eager, discerning eyes, even after decades in the business.
Mary did not sprinkle her column with anonymous background quotes from politicians and press secretaries. As much as she admired Woodward and Bernstein’s approach, her style was simply different. The Post reporters had built Watergate on double-sourced anonymous tips, mainly from law enforcement officials and key contacts in the administration. The identity of their main source, “Deep Throat,” was a matter of speculation for more than a quarter of a century. By contrast, Mary’s work was transparent. She was not looking for book deals or speaker’s fees, her quotes were on the record, and she thought what the man in the street had to say mattered.
Mary’s style was perfectly suited for an era when television was making it harder and harder for newspapers to keep up. Because her columns were built on the strength of her observation and wit, it did not matter that readers had to wait until the next day to read them—indeed, they were usually an even better read if you were already keeping up with the story.
As prosecutors and Congress slowly pried out the White House tapes, Mary and other reporters got their first taste of the detailed conversations that had taken place in the Oval Office when the large blue book of tape transcripts arrived at the newspaper on April 30, 1974. “It was torn apart in big chunks like loaves of bread at the zoo,” Mary recalled.
In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the nation’s constitutional form of government would be in serious jeopardy if Nixon were allowed to withhold tapes of his choosing. Sentiment was growing in Congress, including among Republicans, to impeach the president.
In early August, Mary headed to Antrim for vacation. Her editors had told her to take a break and prepare for the coming impeachment debate in the House of Representatives. On August 7, she was walking up the path from Gregg Lake, where she had been swimming, when she spied the owner of the Maplehurst Inn rushing down the trail. “Your office just called,” he panted. “They think he is going.” Nixon was going to resign. Mary’s vacation had lasted twenty-three hours. One of her cousins drove her at breakneck speed back to Boston so she could fly home. By 8:45 P.M. Mary was in her office at the Star.
On August 8, President Nixon announced in a televised address to the nation that he was quitting the highest office in the land. Mary thought the speech was unmemorable and bereft of contrition, sounding “eerily like thousands of others he has given during the almost 40 years he has been seeking, gaining and losing public office.” But, as Mary observed, “Richard Nixon’s small store of pity had always been reserved for himself.”
Nixon’s resignation marked the end of an era for Mary. She had written about him more than anyone else during her career. Mary viewed Nixon’s fall as a victory for a free press, and she felt no small measure of vindication. As she wrote to a Nixon defender shortly after he stepped down, “I realize he still has many friends, but I don’t think history will be among them.”
“He was a man who never should have been president of the United States, not even in politics as far as I was concerned, because he didn’t like people,” Mary maintained. But at the same time, she recognized that Nixon had given her endless fodder as an opinion writer. “He was really something. Divine. Really, divine. I miss him still.”
On August 22, 1974 (her birthday), the House Judiciary Committee, under Representative Peter Rodino, passed a unanimous resolution, 38–0, praising Mary: “Resolved, that in her conduct of the office of the press, in her exercise of the constitutionally protected First Amendment right of freedom of speech, Ms. Mary McGrory has, to the best of her ability, preserved, protected and defended the people’s right to have access to the truth from one who writes like the wind and speaks from the heart.”
At the White House, the beleaguered staff tried to restore some measure of normalcy and calm as Gerald Ford became president. At the daily press briefing, the White House spokesman sonorously intoned to the gathered journalists, “This is not the time for partisan recriminations.”
A slender hand rose firmly from within the overwhelmingly male sea of reporters pressing their questions. It was Mary.
“If now isn’t the time for recriminations,” Mary wondered, in her soft but direct voice, “when would be the time?”
• • •
The combination of Nixon and Vietnam had shifted Mary’s worldview. She still had enormous faith in democracy, but, like many, she increasingly doubted that people in the government would do the right thing. Her writing became more personal and reflective. She became more willing to poke fun at herself in her columns, and her observations increasingly glided between t
he drama of politics and the travails of daily life. “She understood something that most of these Washington pundits and gasbags don’t understand,” explained her friend Phil Gailey. “You can write about the serious stuff day after day, but at some point you have to step back and give yourself and the readers a break.”
There was no better example than Mary’s annual garden column, which she started writing in 1975. Mary came from a family of gardeners, and she had always enjoyed puttering around in the small flower beds behind her corner apartment. In her columns, she transformed her slightly bedraggled garden plot into a place of tragedy and triumph. She endured raids by rapacious squirrels, and the rosebushes failed to produce a single bud. Mockingbirds dug up her seeds, and mourning doves flung themselves against her kitchen window. Only the ever faithful impatiens saved Mary from despair. “For many years, the surest sign of spring in Washington was not the flowering of cherry trees, or the blooming of azaleas,” Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair wrote, “but the arrival of Mary McGrory’s first gardening column of the season.”
“I like February, because it is the month when my garden is at its peak, although—or, perhaps I should say, because—it is not yet planted,” Mary wrote in her initial gardening column. The columns were love letters to spring, and they were fantastically popular. Her frequent complaints about squirrels—“four-footed tire-slashers, avid, shameless, persistent, bird-feeder raiders”—touched some kind of national pulse. “It’s questionable advice to give to a young or aspiring journalist, but I have to tell you that if you really want to get the public going, you should write about squirrels,” Mary observed.
Readers shared elaborate squirrel-proofing diagrams with Mary, featuring wire, brackets, and plastic tubing. One woman advocated installing a miniature electrified fence. Someone suggested greasing the bird feeder, and a reader from Michigan swore by balls of human hair hung in stockings.
