Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Washington was gripped by a seemingly endless series of allegations, revelations, and shocks. By March 1998 Mary was pleading for relief. “We can’t go on this way. It has to stop,” she wrote. “We’ve been on a diet of gossip that is the functional equivalent of foie gras and brandy three times a day. We can expect nothing but gout and hardening of the arteries unless we quit.”

  In April, Mary attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She wrote to a friend, that she went to the “dinner which was full of ladies wearing too much or too little and men who think they own the world. I was kissed by Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, and Warren Beatty. Had long conversations with the president’s lawyer. He says they do not worry about the report coming from Kenneth Starr. Hoping for a one day wonder.”

  Mary was vacationing in Italy, on an island near Mount Vesuvius, when the Starr Report was released. She tried to read the first excerpts in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. “It wasn’t easy. My dictionary did not have all the words, and I hesitated to ask the bar staff.” Mary was worried that other lounge patrons would think she was reading pornography.

  The Italians at her hotel were puzzled by the scandal. “Signora,” the hotel manager gravely told Mary, “I am praying your country will come to its senses and let your president continue to govern for the good of the whole world.” Over dinner, a jeweler from Nettuno could barely contain his anger with the scandal. “Why? Why? He is a good president, Wall Street likes him, the world loves him. He has reduced unemployment. People are happy.”

  Mary asked how Italians would feel if it were revealed that their prime minister was “having a disgusting affair.”

  “We would say ‘Bravo,’” he replied.

  An interesting dispute erupted when author Gay Talese accused prominent Irish Catholics in the media—including Mary, Maureen Dowd, Tim Russert, and Pat Buchanan—of “high-minded pontificating” when it came to the scandal. “The Irish media want the president to climb up the hill on bloody knees like the Stations of the Cross,” Talese wrote. Others picked up on Talese’s charge, with Irish American reporter William Powers accusing the Irish American media of behaving like a “Roman Legion.” Most of them shrugged off the complaints, but they were a close-knit group, and Mary was among those who often gathered to chat politics after they attended Mass in Georgetown. While calling the group a “mafia” was excessive, Irish American journalists and politicians in Washington often did function as a clan, one of the many powerful circles of friends and associates who operate just beneath the surface in Washington.

  In October 1998, the House of Representatives voted 258–176 to begin an impeachment inquiry, despite its public unpopularity. In the 1998 off-year elections, Democrats actually picked up five seats in the House. As Mary said of Clinton after the election, “Millstone? No, he’s Moses.”

  Angry Republicans again blamed Newt Gingrich for the strategic blunder of pursuing the Lewinsky scandal and pushed him out of his post not long after the election. Gingrich huffed that he was not willing to preside over “cannibals” and quit Congress.

  The seismic shocks continued. After Republicans elected longtime Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston to replace Gingrich as Speaker, it was revealed that Livingston had also been engaged in an extramarital affair. He resigned. For Republicans, it was exploding cigar after exploding cigar. At least four other senior Republicans admitted to extramarital affairs, and one member of the leadership confessed to fathering a child out of wedlock. “The Republicans are beyond reason,” Mary lamented. “They are like people on New Year’s Eve determined to have a wild time, no matter the cost.”

  Clinton was ultimately impeached by the House, on a largely party-line vote, in December 1998. He was then acquitted by the Senate in February 1999, having achieved one of the great escape acts in American political history.

  Amid the political upheavals, Mary was honored with the Fourth Estate Award at the National Press Club. It was one of the few times that Mary allowed a big deal to be made for her, and Walter Cronkite, Kay Graham, Gene McCarthy, and a host of other luminaries attended the televised event.

  Roger Mudd led off by praising Mary’s work and he read John McKelway’s column from when Mary had been included on the Nixon White House enemies list. Ted Kennedy was next to take the podium. The senator looked tired, and his prepared remarks were oddly stilted. But Kennedy’s praise was heartfelt when he declared Mary the “poet laureate of American journalism” and added, “Nothing compares to four extraordinary columns and the editorial she wrote for the Washington Star thirty-five years ago this month, when we lost Jack. They are some of the most beautiful words ever written about my brother, and they helped immensely to ease the pain. We love you, Mary, and always will.”

  Kennedy then broke into song: “Every word’s a perfect pearl, and all of us are here to tell you, dear, you’re a grand old girl.” The crowd ate up the performance.

  Maureen Dowd gently lampooned Mary:

  I have modeled my career on hers. Not the writing, of course, because no one writes like Mary McGrory. I have emulated her other talents. Her uncanny ability, even in remote parts of New Hampshire or Ireland, to find some sucker to carry her bags or to drive her car. The way she nobly resists this passing fad called technology. The way she uses the imperative tense in the style that Old West gunslingers used to shoot at people’s feet to make them dance. The way she acts helpless like a barracuda. From Joe McCarthy to Henry Kissinger to Robert McNamara to Murray Gart to Gerry Adams, every public figure she has elegantly sautéed has learned to beware when Mary sounds confused and begins asking seemingly innocent questions—you are about to enter the McGrory House of Pain.

  Calling Mary “the most luminous writer and clearest thinker in the business,” Dowd, to much laughter, praised Mary for her rebellious streak. “She insists on continuing to act like a beat reporter and continuing to leave her office and grill politicians and see events in person—which is, like, way unnecessary if you ask me.” Dowd closed by saying, “She is, as her beloved Italians put it, our bella figura. But never, ever eat her Jello Surprise.” Mary was pleased.

  Russell Baker followed, saying that he had stiff competition, between Dowd’s wit and Kennedy’s turn as “the Irish Pavarotti.” Baker pointed out to the audience that when Mary had first worked as a reporter, she could be admitted to the room in which they were gathered only if she sat in the balcony. “Congratulations, Mary: you have come a long way.”

  Perhaps the evening’s most poignant remarks came from Kay Graham, who said she felt like “one legend talking to another” and slyly admitted to being jealous of Mary. “I work very hard,” she said, “to collect the right people, seat them carefully, make the table pretty, and ensure the food is delicious. Mary collects as good, or better, guests, but she gets them to do the work.”

  Graham shared another reason she was jealous of Mary: “She has very clear and high standards of what matters and what doesn’t and how people should behave. . . . She is a courageous and real liberal at a time when the rest of the country has retreated to the bland center.”

  The former Post publisher also bittersweetly observed that her own paper had never won Mary’s heart. She explained how her late husband had tried again and again to persuade Mary to leave the Star. “She kept saying no, even when it became clear that the Star wasn’t going to be viable,” she said. “Sadly, after all these years, Mary is still loyal to the Star. She would still pick the Star over the Post, and Newby Noyes is still her first love,” Graham said of Mary’s former editor, who had died two years before. “Mary, I understand that—Newby was wonderful. Maybe someday, after we are all gone, you will love us as much.”

  Graham and Mary hugged warmly after Graham presented her with the Fourth Estate award. Mary was delighted that Graham had paid her “the high compliment of speaking her mind.” In a telling postscript, Graham wrote Mary a long, angst-riven letter full
of apologies and worries that she had overstepped her bounds. “Self-doubt was back,” Mary observed. “It was, as ever, out of place.”

  In her acceptance speech, she noted that Maureen Dowd’s writing was so sharp-tongued that it made readers view her own work as kindhearted, lauded Kennedy for his golden pipes, and thanked Graham for putting up with her. She said that she had initially been inclined to turn down the award because she worried that afterwards she would have no choice but to either “die or retire—and neither option appeals to me.”

  Mary spoke to her place as a columnist in Washington. “No great men ever call me. You want to know who calls me? Losers. I am their mark. If you want to abolish land mines. If you want to reform campaign spending,” Mary said. “If you want to reduce nuclear weapons, if you want to eliminate them, if you want to save children from abuse, or stupid laws, or thickheaded judges, you have my telephone number.”

  But Mary made clear that she would not have it any other way. “I never wanted to be anything but a newspaperwoman, and I still don’t want to be, and that word is going to go on my gravestone. Because I think it is a very proud and wonderful thing to do. But I should confess, although I probably shouldn’t, that I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t work for newspapers.”

  The luster of the award and the thrall of the incredible political happenings in Washington were dimmed, to a degree, by the illness of one of Mary’s closest friends, Gertrude Cleary.

  A short time later, Brian McGrory was promoted from the White House beat to his own column back in Boston with the Globe. Mary greeted the news morosely: “Everybody important in my life is either leaving or dead.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Last Hurrah

  The rhythm of the seasons was a constant for Mary.

  Spring was the budding of slender bulbs in her scraggly garden on the slopes of Rock Creek. Early summer was the riotous sounds of orphans from St. Ann’s splashing in the pool at Ethel Kennedy’s home at Hickory Hill. August was the Plaza in Rome and the splendor of people watching from a small café near the Spanish Steps. Labor Day was her beloved Antrim and the restorative waters of Gregg Lake.

  Autumn brought the rigors of the campaign trail: debates, town hall meetings, indifferent chicken suppers, and political promises proffered with abandon. Christmas was Santa Claus fast asleep on the couch waiting for the children from St. Ann’s, scrod at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, shared laughter, and a Scotch at the Parker House Hotel.

  And from all this, the lovingly crafted words came and came. Mary stalked the newsroom, testing out her next lead and trying to capture the perfect turn of phrase. She dressed down press secretaries and buttonholed senators in the long marble hallways of Congress. It was as if she might obtain grace through the patient repetition of the things she loved the most.

  Her production was staggering. During her career, Mary wrote more than eight thousand columns. Although she often waited until the last minute, she missed her deadline only once during her entire career—because she was stuck on a plane. Mary said that the constant pressure of producing columns sometimes made her feel like a hitched horse walking circles at a mill, but it was a discipline that she welcomed.

  But the years had also taken their toll, and the indignities of age mounted. Mary’s fallen arches made it difficult to stand at parties. Her blood pressure was high, and cutting back on rich food was a struggle. She missed smoking cigarettes, and still enjoyed drinking. Her penchant for losing keys, purses, and other belongings only accelerated. (She had lost an entire rental car during the 1984 primary in New Hampshire.) Her driving skills, awful to begin with, only deteriorated further. Her Mercedes was constantly in and out of the shop with minor damages, and Tina Toll was kept busy paying a small stack of parking tickets.

  One of Mary’s relatives observed, “You would see her cook a dinner or just do any daily task and you would think, ‘My God, this woman should not live alone.’ Then she would have people over and she would start talking about politics, and what was going on in the White House, and you would think, ‘My God, where did you come from?’ The light switched, and she was on.”

  At eighty-one, Mary had reached the point in life when going to the funerals of friends becomes depressingly common, and her gifts as a writer were frequently employed writing eulogies. Meg Greenfield, Newby Noyes, John McKelway, and several others close to Mary all passed away in the closing years of the century. At the memorial service for Noyes, she scrawled two notes to herself on the program: a lyric from a hymn—“Publish Glad Tidings”—and the words “inscription on gravestone.” Mary not only was pondering her own mortality; she was planning for it.

  Her great love, Blair Clark, died in 2000, at the age of eighty-two. He was survived by his widow, Joanna.

  Mary was candid about her regrets late in her life, telling more than one interviewer that she wished she had gotten married and confiding to relatives that she wished she’d had children. These reflections did not define Mary, yet it was impossible to elude a sense of lingering sadness in her twilight years. For a woman who delighted in the heroines of Jane Austen and the lovely lilt of poetry, her own story of romance did not enjoy a happy ending.

  While Mary told a fellow reporter, “We could be here all night talking about what I would do differently,” she did not wallow in sentimentality, as a wonderful exchange with Tim Russert made plain.

  Mary, who had always insisted that she hated going on television, started to appear regularly on Meet the Press, hosted by Russert. She was never the most natural guest, and her observational style was ill-suited to the staccato pace of Sunday talk shows, but Russert liked having her on, and the two became good friends. Mary, despite her feigned protestations, loved going on the show.

  During a broadcast, Russert asked her how the country and politics had changed during her long decades of writing. Mary demurred, as she often did, saying that it was her job to look at the trees, not the forest. She allowed that being one of the few women when she first started covering campaigns was not the worst thing in the world, although she knew that some saw such a view as “very retrograde.”

  “Those were the good old days?” Russert queried.

  “No, of course not,” Mary responded.

  “But were people kinder to one another then? Were they more respectful, more gentle with one another in terms of their political opinions?”

  Mary put Russert in his place. “Joe McCarthy, you’re thinking of? Chuck Colson, perhaps?” Mary was under no illusion that the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s had been easier days.

  Mary was the grande dame of Washington reporters. After observing her being feted at an awards ceremony, former New Yorker editor Tina Brown proclaimed that she wanted to age like Mary had—as a “sparky old broad,” an unapologetic liberal with “spectacular balls.” Her friend Phil Gailey observed that Mary had acquired the manner of an aging countess. Marjorie Williams of the Post remembered Mary in her later years as the Katharine Hepburn of journalism, sweeping into the newsroom in a wide-brimmed black hat and a wool cape. Mary demanded respect, and she had sharp words for those who challenged her authority. “She would arrive at a press conference called for ten o’clock,” Jack Germond recalled. “She would get there at 10:05. She would march down to the front row, and somebody would always go ahead and give her a seat. It was never me, because I thought it was insulting.”

  In many ways, Mary was as much an anomaly at the end of her career as she was at its beginning. When she broke through, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, she was the lone female reporter in the room. On the campaign trail, she was the one woman surrounded by a hundred men. By the end of her career, she was working in an environment where there were more and more women, most female reporters were married, and employers like the Post provided maternity leave and benefits. To this new generation of women, Mary was a throwback: the woman who took on McCarthy and Nixon; t
he pioneer who was forced to decide between career and love; a beloved relic from an earlier era who drank with the Kennedys and crafted handwritten thank-you notes. Mary had gone an entire career without ever being the norm.

  Mary’s family and friends cautiously broached the idea of retirement from time to time, but she was not interested. She needed the camaraderie of the newsroom and could not conceive of life without reporting. When asked publicly about it, she was categorical that she would not stop: “I am going to die in the newsroom—it’s like oxygen to me.”

  There were whispers that Mary’s finest work was in the rearview mirror. “Did Mary hold on too long? I don’t want to say it, but sure,” said Ben Bradlee. Mary was a step slower, and she no longer had the same twinkle in her eye.

  But every editor and fellow reporter marveled at one inescapable fact: Mary kept legging out stories.

  In January 2000, Mary headed to New Hampshire for the presidential primary on her twelfth presidential campaign. A birthday party for Jack Germond held at the Wayfarer Inn bar in mid-January underscored how much the business of covering campaigns had changed. The Wayfarer was still popular with old pros like Mary and Germond, but a new Holiday Inn in downtown Manchester was increasingly the preferred base, because it had a better Internet connection.

  The constant demands of reporting in the digital age had turned even the most thoughtful journalists into wire service reporters expected to constantly be on e-mail, updating blogs, and sending in revisions. Journalism had always been competitive, but now newsroom budgets were constantly shrinking, demands for content were ever growing, and the camaraderie of earlier years seemed to be fading. Tom Brokaw, who threw the party for Germond at the Wayfarer, recalled, “We were watching the Super Bowl on the one hand, talking politics on the other, and celebrating Jack. Jack threw his arm around me and said, ‘Brokaw, these kids today are going to the gym and drinking Perrier water at the end of the day. I’ve got to get out of this business.’”