by John Norris
It was natural that Mary was drawn to the nuclear freeze. It was a grassroots movement made up of scientists, church people, and housewives. After the shaggy rebellion of the Vietnam protests, the nuclear freeze felt distinctly highbrow. Mary was delighted when she heard Mozart playing in the background at one of the meetings. There were no flag burnings, and no one seized the dean’s office.
Mary was smitten when a discussion of a nuclear freeze dominated a town hall meeting in her beloved Antrim, long a Republican stronghold. She brought a photographer from Newsweek to the debate, and the freeze was discussed just after a motion from an Antrim restaurant to build an entrance ramp.
By a two-to-one margin, the citizens of Antrim joined forty other towns in New Hampshire and voted for a bilateral nuclear freeze with the Soviets. Somewhat oddly, they also passed a motion at the same meeting in favor of establishing an official partnership with the USS Antrim, a nuclear missile cruiser. Mary called it the finest political gathering she had ever attended. Pictures of the debate appeared in Newsweek and were featured in a textbook discussing democracy in action. (Mary was, of course, already something of a local legend in Antrim, and townspeople still discussed the time she had asked the town clerk to join her for a baked bean dinner with Walter Cronkite.)
Mary, in full cheerleading mode, urged on the activists: “The public, after a 35-year sleep on the question, has suddenly sprung awake and demanded a halt to the arms race.”
The Reagan administration and its allies pushed back hard against the freeze movement. The head of the National College Republicans, Jack Abramoff, told Mary that while not everyone involved in the freeze movement was a Communist, all were guilty of “supporting the Kremlin line.”
Mary repeatedly circled back to Reagan’s personality and easy political touch in explaining his enduring popularity. A September 25, 1983, column summed up her take on Reagan:
What he has going for him more than anything else, though, is his seemingly indestructible nice guy image. As president, Reagan has instituted policies that are hard on people, that are even mean. He shamelessly chooses guns over butter. While ever striving to permit the rich to keep more of their money, he has tried to make sure that the poor don’t get too much. . . . At Reagan’s press conferences, he routinely makes gaffes and misstatements. He says things that are inconsistent or just plain wrong. His staff stoically cleans up after him. He doesn’t seem bothered. He knows what happens to compulsively well-informed chief executives—like Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson. He may know, from a source hidden from the rest of us, that the public is more at ease with a non-perfectionist, no-sweat, average-guy kind of presidency.
As Mary scanned the Democratic horizon for an alternative to Reagan, one politician in particular caught her attention: Governor Mario Cuomo of New York. There was much for Mary to like. Cuomo was religious, outspokenly compassionate, and a skilled orator. Mary loved it when Cuomo declared in his inaugural speech that government could both “pay the bills and still help people in wheelchairs.”
When Cuomo sat down with Mary and the Post editorial board, the governor was asked his thoughts on the likely 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, former vice president Walter Mondale. “My mother thinks Mondale is polenta,” Cuomo said. Most of those in the room did not understand the reference. Cuomo elaborated: “You know polenta, it’s quite bland.” Mary went further, describing polenta to the gathered editors and writers as the Italian version of cream of wheat—“terribly good for one, but not much fun.” After Mary ran a column that prominently mentioned the remark, Governor Cuomo sent Mary a note insisting, unconvincingly, that polenta was an underappreciated gem.
One of Mary’s favorite encounters took place at a January 1984 going-away party for David Gergen, one of President Reagan’s key political advisers. Richard Darman, another Reagan aide, was chatting with Mary, along with Ed Rollins, the White House political director. Darman was preening, eager to demonstrate to Rollins that he could handle Mary.
“You have no influence, you know,” Darman asserted to Mary. “I read you. You write well, and it’s logical. Aesthetically, it might be the best column of all. I read it. But it has no effect whatever because you are so predictable.” Darman insisted that with conservatives in control of Washington, Mary’s columns amounted to little more than left-wing entertainment.
She was used to this criticism from the Reagan White House. Republican operatives insisted that she was too liberal, out of touch, and over the hill. Mary had known Darman for some time, and she did not dislike him. As she weighed how best to respond, ABC correspondent Ann Compton joined the conversation.
Compton offered Mary effusive thanks: “I had the lead story on the evening news last night because of you.”
“How interesting,” Mary cooed, glancing at Darman.
Compton cited a column that Mary had written earlier in the week breaking the news that President Reagan was about to make a conciliatory speech on the Soviet Union and was trying to reach an arms agreement with Moscow.
“How did you approach the story?” Mary asked.
“I just took it right from your column and put it on the air,” Compton said.
Mary turned to Darman. “No influence?” She smiled.
“Only with eighty million people,” Darman said good-humoredly, and blushed. Mary was fond of recounting the incident, calling it a “very satisfactory moment.” She might have been out of step with the conservative revolution, but the Reagan era cemented her role as one of the most important liberal voices in the country. She was still able to break news despite being at odds with the party in power, because she worked her sources so hard.
The exchange underscores some of Mary’s more obvious contradictions. She expounded at great length about her lack of influence but delighted in stories that spoke to her clout. She described herself as an outsider but hosted parties attended by Supreme Court justices, senators, and the most powerful reporters in the country. Mary depicted herself as well-intentioned and a bit hapless, but most politicians and fellow reporters quickly learned that she was incredibly shrewd and purposeful in the ways of Washington.
Gloria Borger recalled covering politics with Mary on the Hill. “Mary allowed us all to shout out our weedy questions about the day’s headlines. ‘Do you think the highway bill will pass?’ or ‘What’s the final defense spending number in the budget?’ Then she would catch us all up short by asking, ‘Senator, don’t you think so-and-so behaved badly today?’ or ‘Can you tell us why the White House is asking you to do this?’ It was usually a tough question, but always posed politely. Mary had a way: sounding as sweet as your grandmother while being as tough as Tony Soprano.”
Mary could sit patiently for hours, covering the most mundane of hearings, but dismiss someone she considered a windbag with a wave of her hand. Shortly after John Kerry first won his seat as a junior senator from Massachusetts, he attended a party at a local hotel with Mary. She grabbed Kerry by the arm, eager to introduce him to someone at a different function taking place in another part of the hotel.
As Mary pulled Kerry through the crowd, they were stopped by John Volpe, who had served in Nixon’s cabinet. Volpe droned on, missing the obvious body language saying that Mary wished to be elsewhere. “Hey,” Mary finally interjected, “you were the secretary of transportation: where are the elevators?” Mary and the senator were off without another word.
The September 1984 Vanity Fair profiled what it considered to be the most influential and powerful opinion writers in the country. Mary was the only woman of the bunch, her column being carried in 187 papers around the country, which put her fifth highest on the list, behind James Kilpatrick, George Will, David Broder, and William F. Buckley Jr.—all conservatives. Mary’s ability to crack this group as a woman and a liberal spoke volumes about the quality of her work, and success also said a great deal about the importance, particularly for a woman, of not
watering down opinion with “he said, she said” constructions. It is no coincidence that the most successful female columnists to follow Mary—Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins—all relied on a formula somewhat similar to Mary’s, with their knockout punches usually wrapped in humor.
The Reagan years saw conservative pundits rise to new levels of importance. President Reagan carefully cultivated relationships with writers like George Will and conservative talking head John McLaughlin. Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who had turned news commentator after Nixon’s resignation, returned to the White House as Reagan’s communications director. Coming from Hollywood, Ronald Reagan implicitly understood the power of pundits in helping to set the national narrative. This, in turn, spurred more and more political hands to quickly recast themselves as commentators once they left their posts—despite having no real grounding in journalism.
Mary’s friend Bob Healy of the Boston Globe suggested that Mary had become even more influential after moving to the Post. “She has a facility for drawing people out like I’ve never seen in our business. She gives someone that little-old-lady, I-can’t-quite-hear-you routine, and then she’s got the guy’s balls on the floor.” Her columns felt more personal than they had at the Star, and the Post was a more prominent perch. Columnist James Kilpatrick, who almost never agreed with Mary on substance, praised Mary’s style for keeping his “adrenals pumping” and saluted her ability to throw in “off-beat pieces about her birds or her garden or whatever the hell she wants to write about.”
On background, other columnists offered a mix of praise and exasperation. One observer, most likely Jack Germond, complimented Mary for making the rounds every day on her “skinny little legs” but added, “She’ll drive you goddamn bananas because she’s become such a queen.” Germond was not alone in thinking that Mary could be a pain in the ass, but it is equally true that few wallflowers make it to the top rung of opinion writing.
• • •
It was widely recognized that any Democrat faced a tough campaign against President Reagan as he ran for reelection. With Walter Mondale the front-runner in a weak Democratic field, Mary feared the “inevitable encounter between him and Reagan will be as predictable as the contest between Christians and lions.”
Mondale’s fortunes appeared even rockier after an upset loss to Senator Gary Hart in the New Hampshire primary. The former vice president simply did not generate much passion, and many Democrats hedged their support with qualifiers—“Mondale, I guess.” Mary liked Mondale, but he was too much of a committee thinker for her taste, someone who would not say that the sky was blue without a focus group. Mondale ultimately prevailed in the primaries and, although it was an unconvincing performance, his selection of Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate electrified the convention, in San Francisco. “The excitement in that hall was indescribable,” Mary wrote. “I remember an older black woman standing on her chair with tears pouring down her cheeks just outside of herself with joy and happiness and hope.”
Not only was Ferraro the first woman on a major-party ticket, but the bold choice helped challenge the notion that Mondale was hopelessly cautious. Mary, sounding more like her male colleagues than she might have liked, approved of Ferraro, and compared her to “the president of a good department store.” But she also had her concerns: “Her voice is flat, she talks too fast, and she swallows the ends of her best lines.”
Mary was elated by Mario Cuomo’s keynote speech at the convention, and she wished he, rather than Mondale, had been delivering the acceptance speech. “The Republicans have nobody like Cuomo, an intellectual with street smarts, a first-generation American who is crazy about words and ideas.” Cuomo talked about his immigrant father’s calloused hands and his personal belief that Democrats would rather have laws written by Saint Francis of Assisi than Charles Darwin. It was Mary’s kind of speech.
As exuberant Democrats departed San Francisco, Mary talked with her aunt Kate to see what she thought of the Ferraro selection. Never particularly interested in politics, Kate was a lifelong Republican and wary of feminism. Kate had watched, and loved, most of the convention and was convinced that Ferraro could run the country. Mary pointed out that Mondale was the head of the ticket, not Ferraro. “Oh,” Kate replied with some impatience, “he wouldn’t dare do anything without consulting her.”
It did not take long for the bloom to go off the rose as questions cropped up about the Ferraro family tax returns and the failure of Ferraro’s husband, John Zaccaro, to disclose his wealth. Democrats remained seemingly incapable of vetting vice presidential candidates. “It may be the paramount irony of 1984,” Mary observed, “that the first female candidate was judged not for herself but for her husband.”
With Reagan enjoying a large and growing lead in the polls, the Republican convention, in Dallas, felt to Mary like a gaudy bout of triumphalism. Not even a classic Reagan gaffe just a week before the convention—when he joked into an open microphone about bombing Russia—could slow his momentum. America’s conservative fringe had become its center. In private correspondence, Mary’s frustration with Reagan bubbled over as she despaired of “that mean, dumb man.”
Mary was torn from the campaign trail when Aunt Kate suffered a heart attack and died on September 2, 1984, at the age of ninety. Mary delivered Kate’s eulogy, and it was heartfelt. Without Kate’s willingness to look after Mary’s mother, Mary would never have left Boston and probably would never have been a national columnist.
Taking a few days off the campaign trail, Mary sorted through Kate’s old stacks of letters and belongings, reading the letters she had written to Kate after first moving to Washington: updates about finding an apartment, worrying about the cost of a couch, and her date with a young Jack Kennedy. She leafed through pictures of her father at the cabin in Antrim. Although the Beatty family was on hand to help Mary sift through Kate’s belongings and offer their support, Mary had no husband or children to ease her grief. Holding the faded black-and-white photos in hand, Mary must have pondered the cost of her choices.
Back on the campaign trail, Democratic operatives had reverted to gloom, spending much of their time picking apart Mondale’s flaws: his lack of charisma, poor television performances, and forced smile. “The good news for Democrats is that Walter F. Mondale does, after all, have an instinct for the jugular,” Mary declared. “The bad news is that it seems to be for his own.”
Mondale got a brief bounce after Reagan struggled in their initial debate, fueling speculation that the president was starting to lose his edge mentally. However, Reagan dazzled in the debate rematch. “He looked rosy and rested; he blithely strewed errors, indiscretions, and zany ideas and liberally passed the buck for foreign-policy mishaps and disasters,” Mary observed. “But he was also dispensing quips and quotes and one-liners and crisp comebacks.” Reagan brought down the house when he joked that he would not take advantage of Mondale’s relative youth and inexperience.
Aunt Kate’s death and Mondale’s tepid performance made the 1984 campaign one of the least engaging of Mary’s career. The results at the ballot box were as one-sided as they were predictable: Reagan swept forty-nine states and set a record with 525 electoral votes. It was a complete wipeout. Some 55 percent of women voted for Reagan despite Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic ticket.
In 1985, Mary became particularly struck by the ascension of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his very public embrace of reform. When Gorbachev announced that Moscow would suspend nuclear testing for five months, and even longer if joined by the United States, Mary said the Reagan administration had responded as if Gorbachev had engaged in “something between a social error and an act of terrorism.” She took her fellow journalists to task for dismissing the offer as traditional Soviet propaganda, arguing that broader changes were afoot in Moscow.
Mary became part of the story in September 1985 when Gorbachev sat down for an inter
view with Time magazine. Gorbachev said that he was disappointed with the tone of many of Reagan’s speeches but was still looking forward to an upcoming summit meeting. “We agreed to the Geneva meeting because we thought we could do a lot by trying to meet each other halfway,” Gorbachev said. “So we see that there are some who want to generate a situation to persuade the U.S. and the American public that, as Mary McGrory put it, even if the only thing to come out of the summit was an agreement to exchange ballet troupes, then even so, people would be gleeful and happy.”
Mary joined a congressional delegation headed to Moscow several weeks later. While Gorbachev was driving reform, most of the officials the delegation met with were not. When the Americans raised the issue of human rights, Soviet officials countered with well-rehearsed examples of American injustices and repression. During a discussion of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet official burst out, “What about in your own country? A female from Woodside, California, the mother of seven, imprisoned for eighteen years for damaging a Minuteman missile concrete? Nobody speaks about it.” Mary had no idea what the man was talking about, but she passingly referred to the discussion in a subsequent column.
Not long after returning, she received a letter from Helen Woodson, the woman mentioned by the Soviets. “Yes, Mary, there is ‘a female, the mother of seven’ (actually it’s 11, with seven still at home) who was imprisoned for 18 years, after being accused of touching (attempted disarmament) of a Minuteman missile. The event took place in Kansas City, not Woodside, California, but the ‘stony-faced Soviet’ can be forgiven that slight error.”
Woodson said that Mary should visit her in prison if she wanted to learn more. Mary was intrigued. Woodson, along with two Roman Catholic priests, had tried to symbolically damage a nuclear missile site near Kansas City with a jackhammer in November 1984, and she was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
