by John Norris
I do not advocate institutions for every child in a difficult home situation. And I can’t presume to know what goes on in all orphanages. But I felt safe and very loved in mine. You had a lot to do with that. It’s hard to believe that I would have had nearly as much fun in a foster home. I’m not even sure early adoption would have been so much better. This is not to say that I don’t suffer from some institutional hangovers: I have a peculiar fondness for cafeteria food; an unbounded affection for the Daughters of Charity; about twice a week I still wake up with my thumb in my mouth. I also have a tendency to view complicated issues like poverty and illiteracy in very simple terms. There is no intellectual wavering, or posturing either. I think people don’t share enough. This is not just a political conviction but an emotional one that goes straight back to the day room at St. Ann’s. I know quite a few people who would have done well to spend some time there learning the cardinal rule. You are very much part of why my early memories are such happy ones. And why I felt so loved. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to thank you.
No one ever delivered a more eloquent encomium to Mary’s work with kids. Mary was so delighted with Rita Markley’s letter that she insisted that she join her for a visit back to Hickory Hill so she could swim in the pool one more time. Rita, upon seeing Mary for the first time in years, was struck by several things. Mary seemed younger than she imagined her to be, and she wore “amazing shoes.” Markley marveled that Mary had kept up her work with disadvantaged kids for decades without ever becoming tedious or dull—“because that wasn’t who she was.” Markley, who went on to run a nonprofit that provides shelter for the homeless, credits Mary with helping her understand the difference that “one person seeing you can make in a life.”
• • •
With President Ford having been appointed rather than elected, the 1976 presidential race promised to be an unusually open contest, and a striking contrast with Nixon’s walkover win in 1972. The action was intense not just on the Democratic side; Ronald Reagan was making a conservative challenge to upend Ford in the Republican primary. In New Hampshire, Mary quickly realized that Ronald Reagan, whom many had dismissed as a lazy and ineffective campaigner, was energetic and gifted on the stump. She did not think he was a serious man, but she took him seriously as a candidate.
The Democratic contest included a record number of candidates and no clear favorite. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter gained momentum coming off a win in the Iowa caucus, but Mary’s northern reserve and Catholicism clashed sharply with Carter’s effusive southern evangelicalism. She did not like people who wore religion on their sleeve, and she thought Carter humorless. Mary’s disdain for him was evident in her columns, although she described him as the craftiest and toughest of the Democratic candidates.
Many of Mary’s readers wondered why she remained lukewarm toward Carter, accusing her of harboring an antisouthern bias. The charge had some merit, and Mary never took well to southern evangelicals, but she also pushed back against the notion that she should be easier on Carter just because he was a Democrat: “It is not my job to elect the man, but to observe him.”
But for Mary and the Star, the 1976 race was most memorable not for Carter, Ford, or Reagan but for the first major crisis of the Joe Allbritton era, which began on the nation’s bicentennial celebration.
The nation’s two hundredth birthday started innocently enough for Mary, and she happily covered tall ships arriving to fanfare in New York Harbor and parades in Washington. After the upheaval of the Nixon years, the festivities on the National Mall—where police and young people intermingled with ease—felt like innocence restored.
Not far away, Joe Allbritton and his wife watched the Fourth of July fireworks from the Truman Balcony of the White House as special guests of President Gerald Ford. Allbritton felt like he had arrived.
Later that night, Allbritton hosted a barbecue for the Star staff and others at his house on N Street in Georgetown. He pulled aside Jim Bellows as the other guests laughed and chatted. He said that he had hatched a secret plan. Bellows blanched. “What plan?”
“I am not going to tell you,” Allbritton replied, “because you would veto it.”
Bellows mentioned the exchange to Ed Yoder, who was equally perplexed.
Later that night, Bellows got a panicked call from the paper’s night editor. Allbritton had phoned in the text of an editorial that he had written himself, endorsing President Ford in the Republican primary, and said he wanted it to run on the paper’s front page.
It was an almost unheard-of move, and all hell broke loose.
Bellows ordered the night editor to spike the piece, but when Allbritton learned he had been countermanded, he fired the night editor over the phone. The editorial in question was, if nothing else, colorful. It led with a classic story about a Texas railroad that had decided to get rid of two old trains by colliding them together on the same track as a publicity stunt. The event had generated so much attention, with some forty thousand people turning out to watch, that a small town sprung up on the site of the planned collision: Crush, Texas.
However, things ended badly when the trains’ boilers exploded on impact, killing three. Allbritton used the story as a parable to argue against the continued infighting between Ford and Reagan in the Republican primary, and urged Reagan to quit the race.
Bellows called Yoder at 5:30 in the morning: “What do you know about this Ford editorial?”
Yoder replied, “This is news to me.”
The two men went to Allbritton’s townhouse in Georgetown at dawn, Yoder still wearing his pajamas beneath his pants. Bellows tried to keep his temper in check, but he was exasperated by the idea of a publisher ignoring his editors and using the front page for a political endorsement.
Allbritton bristled. He owned the Star and felt he had the right to say what he wanted. Bellows called a front-page endorsement “the nuclear weapon of editorial journalism” and insisted that editors had to be consulted before taking such a bold step. Allbritton was puzzled, saying that he hadn’t wanted to bother Bellows or Yoder, since his endorsement would not be on the editorial page.
Yoder tried a different tack: “Joe, it would be as if you loaned all the money in your bank to one borrower.”
“Ed, now you are speaking my language,” Allbritton declared. The tension eased.
It was agreed that the endorsement would be rewritten and appear on the editorial page several days later.
Allbritton was pleased that the endorsement got a warm reception at the White House, and he showed Yoder a handwritten note of thanks from President Ford, but he also harbored lingering resentment toward his editors. One of Allbritton’s aides told Yoder that even a small additional incident might push the publisher to close the paper. With the Star in seemingly perpetual financial difficulties, most of the staffers had gotten used to feeling as if the rug might be pulled out from underneath them at any moment. Allbritton, in particular, felt like an unstable molecule.
As a result of the dust-up over the editorial, staffers came to rely on Mary as a liaison to Allbritton. “The one who could deal with him was McGrory,” explained Lance Gay. “She would go up and hold his hand and tell him, ‘Joe, this is not really the way we do things at the newspaper.’” Mary told Bellows that she believed in humoring Allbritton. “I’m an old maid, and we have to humor people,” she said. “We’re in a very precarious situation.”
Mary traveled to New York to cover the Democratic convention. Democrats and the city of New York were in an unusually good mood. The spirits of the city had been buoyed by the bicentennial, a visit from Queen Elizabeth, and the convention itself. Democrats were enthusiastic about the Carter nomination, and even Mary was warming toward the Georgian. She was pleased that his acceptance speech emphasized Democrats like FDR and John Kennedy more than saving souls.
The 1976 Republican convention, in Kansas City, was a throwback to the
era when conventions actually mattered, with the nomination poised between Ford and Reagan. Conservatives tried to shout down the Ford supporters, saying that the president was soft on the Soviets and abortion (which had been legalized by the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973). Ford supporters insisted that Reagan was hopelessly hard-line and would prove an electoral debacle. Ultimately, Ford prevailed, but Reagan’s electrifying concession speech left many wondering if they had picked the wrong man.
For Mary, the Republican convention and its passionate arguments were politics and journalism as they were supposed to be. And for the Star, it was a renaissance. The editorial changes that Jim Bellows had put in place made the paper feel like a guerrilla operation taking on the stodgy Washington Post.
“Our party after the close of the Republican convention in Kansas City was strictly a world-class blast that lasted till dawn and attracted fellow degenerates from nearly every other news organization there,” recalled Mary’s colleague James Dickenson. “The major attractions were the tangos and rumbas (or so we fancied them) that several of us danced, with long-stemmed roses in our teeth at the approach of dawn, with Mary McGrory, who epitomized the heart and soul and spirit of the Star. Once again, for a glorious, fleeting glimmer, we all were young and drunk and 21 and thought we were going to live forever.” But such moments were short-lived, and the Star was headed for trouble.
Jimmy Carter went on to win the election, but Mary was not upbeat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Death of a Star
In February 1977, crisis again erupted at the Star. At 5:30 on a Monday morning, Joe Allbritton, who was traveling, phoned the night desk. He ordered the night editor to immediately remove his name as publisher from the paper’s masthead.
The move sparked a frenzy of speculation as Allbritton remained out of sight. Was the owner angry with Bellows? Was the move a negotiating tactic aimed at the unions? Was Allbritton selling the newspaper? The development was all the more perplexing because no one at the paper knew what had precipitated it.
Jim Bellows visited Mary in her office, asking, “Do you know where he is?” Mary had no idea, but she concurred that Allbritton’s move was a “serious explosion.” Having the owner remove his name as publisher of the paper clearly indicated that something was seriously amiss.
Several hours later, Bellows returned. “Heard from Joe?” he asked. Mary had not.
Bellows came to Mary’s office a third time. She still had not heard from Allbritton. “Listen, Jim,” Mary said, “I think the relationship between the editor and the publisher is the most sacred relationship on a paper, and I would not dream of intervening for one split second, unless you tell me to. Would you like me to try to find him?”
“Yeah, why don’t you,” Bellows responded unenthusiastically. Mary phoned Allbritton’s wife. After some gentle cajoling, she acknowledged that her husband was in Houston.
Mary knew that Allbritton’s return was the only way to save the Star. She eventually located him, and the two engaged in a series of lengthy telephone conversations. “His lament,” Mary shared, “was that nobody listened to him, which was quite true, and they didn’t take his advice, which was quite true.” It also turned out that Allbritton was offended that he had not been featured more prominently at the annual Gridiron dinner. After considerable persuading, Allbritton agreed to fly back to Washington to come to Mary’s apartment for a meal and to further engage the Star’s unions. The future of the Washington Star appeared to hinge upon Mary’s ability to talk Allbritton down over veal ragout and Székely cabbage.
The mealtime conversation between Allbritton, Yoder, and Mary was congenial. She let Allbritton vent at great length about Bellows, the Star, and Washington, which improved his mood. Allbritton saw himself as the Star’s savior but was frustrated by what he called “obtuse, ungrateful, nit-picking editors.”
The trio had drinks and sang Baptist hymns after lunch. Mary seemed to have everything back on track.
It was four o’clock, so Mary had to finish her column for the next day. When she got to the paper, a reporter from the Washington Post called, knowing that Mary was close with Allbritton. Without thinking, she told the reporter, on the record, that she thought everything was going to be all right.
The Post printed Mary’s comments. Allbritton hit the roof and quickly canceled his planned meetings with ten unions and a federal mediator. He was furious with Mary: “If I can’t trust you, Mary, who can I trust?” The two spoke on the phone three or four times a day, and Mary described the back-and-forth: “Terrible reproaches and telephone calls, and how bad I had been, and what a disappointment, and how I had let him down, how I had betrayed him.”
The Star had never gotten a handle on its unions and trucking fleet the way the Washington Post had, and it was bedeviled by snarled afternoon traffic, raw mismanagement, a bloated workforce, and changing tastes. All across America, afternoon newspapers were in trouble as people were turning to the evening news rather than the paper. The Star was losing seventy thousand dissatisfied customers a year, primarily because papers were being delivered late or not at all. The paper had always been successful in getting new subscribers, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with the torrent of people fed up with not seeing their paper in the delivery box when it was supposed to be. One senior editor was so frustrated that the paper was not reaching his own house on time that he finally told his delivery boy he would “shoot him in the kneecap” if it did not start appearing more promptly.
Mary hatched another plan. She was scheduled to appear at the swearing-in of the new National Press Club president, and she remembered that when Carter’s vice president, Fritz Mondale, had gone to London at the beginning of the year, he had ended up singing old Welsh and Scottish songs with Prime Minister James Callaghan. Mary called the British ambassador, Sir Peter Ramsbotham, and asked if he would be willing to sing with Mondale. He was. Mondale had cold feet, but one of his staffers told Mary the best way to convince him: have the British ambassador call and act as if everything had already been agreed. The strategy worked, and Mary, the vice president, and the British ambassador ended up singing from the podium. In a fortunate twist, CBS broadcast some of the performance, and not only did Allbritton see it—he loved it. “It was just the kind of thing that he thought he was in the newspaper business for,” Mary said.
Allbritton agreed to put his name back on the paper’s masthead, as chairman. Mary’s bad cooking and enthusiastic singing had saved the Star from near calamity, but it was a brief reprieve.
Jim Bellows left the Star for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner nine months later, in November 1977.
Concurrently, although the news was not immediately public, Joe Allbritton was essentially forced to sell the Star when the Federal Communications Commission determined that he could not own both the paper and a local television station. The TV station was profitable and likely to become more so; the Star was a sinkhole. Allbritton quietly reached out to several potential suitors for the Star. Time Inc. was first on the list.
Between September and December 1977, Allbritton met repeatedly with James Shepley, the president of Time Inc. Shepley wanted to purchase the Star and felt it would give Time an important voice in the nation’s capital, parroting the symbiotic relationship between Newsweek and the Washington Post.
No one on the Star’s staff, not even Mary, knew that Allbritton had entered talks with Time. Ed Yoder observed that Allbritton’s mood brightened with the news that Bellows was leaving the paper. “It seemed for a brief stretch,” said Yoder, “as if some stability had crept into the operations.”
As the Star dealt with its internal turmoil, Mary kept about her work. She tried to like President Carter but never succeeded. She was perplexed by his clumsy, tone-deaf relations with Congress, gaining much of her ammunition on this topic from her close relationship with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill. O’Neill
adored Mary, and this only gave her more influence on the Hill. Mary was voicing O’Neill’s own frustrations when she described Carter as a “compulsive and pietistic Southerner, who understood nothing about tickets, perks, appointments and serving hard liquor at the White House.”
But on balance, Mary’s columns on Carter were not her best. They felt small. They were not illuminated by the magnificent anger she brought to Nixon or Vietnam, nor did they enjoy the pointed personal insight of her columns about Gene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, or the Kennedys.
On February 1, 1978, Joe Allbritton called James Shepley of Time. He was willing to sell the Washington Star for $20 million in cash. Shepley soon returned the call; Time’s board approved the purchase. Allbritton might not have been the world’s best newspaperman, but he was plenty savvy. The television station he’d purchased when he originally bought the Star, known as WJLA today, would end up being worth over a billion dollars. Allbritton was sad to sell the Star, with one associate saying he “was almost in grief over it,” but the ruling from the FCC and the paper’s poor financial position forced his hand.
On February 3, 1978, the deal was announced publicly—and it came on the same day that the Chicago Daily News—one of the best-known afternoon newspapers in the country—declared that it was going out of business. Shepley pronounced, “The Star has a bright future,” and insisted that Time’s vast resources and long track record of success in publishing would again push the Star to the top.
Mary was initially welcoming of Time’s ownership. She shared her view of the company’s arrival to her old friend William Shannon:
The matter was of earthquake proportions. In the dark of night, the intrepid Mr. Allbritton slipped up to New York and made common cause with Mr. James Shepley. The last time I saw Mr. Shepley was during the Nixon campaign, when, as he reminded me today, when we met in a glow of mutual congratulation, we had some differences. Last Saturday night, for the first time I can remember, I went to a party where there were representatives from the Other Paper and no one asked me solicitously, “Is the Star going to make it, Mary?” It was rather delicious.
