by John Norris
At one point, Mary canvassed some of her Post colleagues about how print media could even justify its existence in the television age. An assistant national editor, Phil Bennett, chipped in, “We begin where they leave off. They show you the bombs falling. We tell you what happened after the bombs fell, why they were loosed, and what the future may hold.” Mary’s favorite answer came from Bob Barnes, the Post’s assistant metro editor: “People like to read. They like to read about what they have seen. They like to read about a game they have been to. They like to read about an opera or a play. They like to share the experience. It is a kind of validation.” Mary added her own two cents: “I hope they like to read. It is going to be awkward for me if they don’t.”
A short time later, Mary and Jack Germond appeared on CNN together to discuss the changing nature of campaigns. “Oh, it’s a lot less fun,” complained Germond.
“Technology is eating up our business the way it is everyone else’s,” said Mary. “People used to talk about horses and jockeys and strategy and victories and losses, and they used to write songs. No more. It is all about floppy disks and modems and the near-death experience with a pay phone that stopped mid-transmission. I find it very boring.”
And by God, Mary did love politics. For all the nonsense, she loved elections and the idea that we could better govern ourselves. In 2000, Anne and Tom Beatty took Mary to New Hampshire to watch one of the primary debates, shortly after a blizzard had swept across the state. “We drove her up. There was so much snow,” recalled Tom. To get in the hall, Tom and Anne had to help catapult Mary over a snowbank. Mary was thrilled. New Hampshire. Snow. Presidential politics. Even in the era of television, citizens of the state still demanded that politicians woo them in coffee shops, high school gyms, and living rooms.
Brian McGrory remembered traveling to New Hampshire to cover the primary in 2000 for the Boston Globe. After a long day on the trail, he and Mary retired to the Wayfarer Inn. It was well after midnight. “Someone had just sent over a bowl of raspberries, and she was drinking her fifth Campari and was ready to go,” said Brian. Finally, he surrendered: “Mary, I can’t do it anymore. I have to go to bed.”
When George W. Bush’s parents, the former president and first lady, rushed to New Hampshire to bolster their son’s chances against John McCain in the Republican primary, Mary compared George W. Bush to a distressed boy writing a letter home from summer camp: “The water is very cold and nobody here likes me.” When asked about Mary’s column, former first lady Barbara Bush sarcastically sniffed, “She’s always loved us.” McCain beat Bush in New Hampshire by double digits.
The freewheeling McCain campaign ground to a halt after he lost the South Carolina primary amid a flurry of negative attacks from the Bush campaign. Al Gore and George W. Bush would face each other in the general election. Mary did not love the choices. She recoiled at Bush’s antipathy for intellectualism and education, referring to him in private correspondence as a “dim-witted frat boy.” She thought Al Gore was undercut by a tendency to “lecture audiences as if they were enrolled in an English-as-a-second-language class.”
Mary took a brief break from the presidential campaign trail to cover Hillary Clinton’s Senate bid in New York. Author Beth Harpaz marveled that, although Mary was old enough to be her grandmother, her writing and reporting were still sharp. It was hard for Mary to get in and out of the campaign vans, and other reporters had to assist her. “This would be utterly humiliating for anyone else, but for McGrory, it’s just another reason to respect her,” Harpaz wrote.
Harpaz was not the only one to notice Mary’s increasing infirmity on the campaign trail. After a presidential debate in Boston, reporter David Corn encountered Mary walking away from the John F. Kennedy Library alone in the dark. She was trying to find the bus that would take her back to the hotel. “But the scene was a bit chaotic,” remembered Corn, “and she appeared unsure where to head.” Corn offered to help Mary find a taxi or accompany her. Mary politely pushed Corn aside. “Need I remind you that we’re in Boston?” With that, Mary turned and walked off into the night.
In early August, she traveled to Philadelphia for the Republican convention. When Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate, Mary was convinced that Bush thought he had won the race. “He’s already in the Oval Office,” she wrote, “and has his camp counselor by his side whispering sagely in his ear.”
Mary viewed the Republican convention, with its emphasis on “compassionate conservatism,” as preposterous but effective. “There were more gospel choirs than you would expect to hear at a gathering of the NAACP,” she wrote. She shared the opinion of a delegate who said he preferred the old conventions, “where people got up and argued about stuff.”
Mary’s views on Al Gore briefly improved with his solid performance at the Democratic convention, in Los Angeles. She thought the selection of Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish candidate ever selected for a national ticket, suggested that Gore might be emerging from his long-running identity crisis. Although she noted that some Democratic pros thought Lieberman was a “sanctimonious backstabber,” she was pleased by Gore’s boldness.
Yet it did not take long for the candidates to again wear on Mary. As Election Day approached, she described the race as a “battle between the unlikable and the unprepared.” America was just as torn about its choices, and Mary was soon reporting on an election for the ages, a virtual tie. On Election Night, Gore was declared the winner by the networks, then Bush was declared the winner; Gore made a concession call to Bush; Gore retracted his concession; and then the whole process descended into acrimony and endless debates about the returns in Florida.
Mary’s coverage of Florida and its aftermath was notable for its sense of calm. At a time when the media was hyperventilating, Mary brought a welcome sense of perspective. “Life goes on,” she wrote. “There are no tanks in the streets and the telephones are working while the country learns the hard way that every vote counts.” Mary took her colleague and fellow columnist David Broder to task for his melodramatic claim that having an election still unsettled at Thanksgiving made for the saddest day for the nation since the Kennedy assassination. “He is all wet,” Mary declared.
That said, Mary did not think much of the Supreme Court verdict that finally awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. “The best that can be said about it is that it might be marginally better for them to have the last word than for the panting Florida Legislature or the possessed House of Representatives.”
Mary was at a Christmas party hosted by former Nevada senator Paul Laxalt when Gore delivered his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. Laxalt was a conservative Republican, but he and Mary had long been friends. A who’s who of senior Republicans and luminaries were at the party, including Vice President–elect Dick Cheney and Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Mary noticed that many of the Republicans at the party were preemptively prepared to take umbrage with Gore. Yet Gore was gracious and to the point: “Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the forty-third president of the United States, and I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time.” Laxalt’s Christmas party erupted in cheers. Mary wished that Gore had acted so naturally on the campaign trail.
Not long after, Mary sent a note to President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, expressing appreciation for her treatment on the campaign trail with Gore: “Thanks for the ride—the last of my lifetime.” It was an unusually blunt admission by Mary that she was getting too old to do the work she loved.
Mary’s enthusiasm for writing was increasingly dimmed by a long-running battle with one of her editors, Steve Luxenberg, who managed Mary’s copy for the Sunday Outlook section. The situation came to a head in the summer of 2001. As fellow Post editor Ken Ikenberry observed of Luxenberg, “He is a good guy, but he is a very fussy editor.” Mary and Luxenberg argued about everything from
style to word choice, and she lacerated him in a private note for what she called his “leaden touch” and “predilection for the cliché in thought and expression.”
When Luxenberg made a number of changes to one of Mary’s columns, she hit the roof. “When I looked at the Sunday paper, I found more maddening evidence of your gratuitous meddling with my copy,” Mary complained, “once again displaying your strongest suit as an editor, which is to make copy as lumpy and stuffy as possible.” Mary’s bottom line: “Unless I receive assurances that the manhandling and bullying will stop, I will not write for Outlook again.” Luxenberg’s reply: “It would be a shame if you stopped writing for Outlook. Please don’t.”
When Mary’s old friend Kay Graham died in July 2001, it was another sharp reminder of mortality. Graham’s funeral, held at the National Cathedral, would have befitted a head of state. Former president Bill Clinton and Vice President Cheney shared a pew. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma played Bach. Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger offered eulogies.
Shortly after the service, Mary wrote a seven-page letter dictating her own funeral arrangements in meticulous detail. “The letter actually referenced Kay’s funeral,” Brian McGrory recalled, “and she thought it was too grand for her. She wanted a plain gray casket.” Mary’s letter to her lawyer indicated not only the church where her funeral should take place (the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament), the type of ceremony (“a low Mass please”), and who should officiate, but also the time of day, the number of speakers, the number of minutes they were allowed to speak (not a second over seven minutes), and the lettering to be used in the program (Celtic). Front-row seats were to be reserved for old colleagues from the Star, and all the eulogists were men, as were the pallbearers. Both of her hymn choices referenced her life in the newspaper business: “O Zion, Haste,” with its refrain of “Publish Glad Tidings,” and “I’ll Meet You in the Morning.” After the funeral, a reception for close friends was to be held in her apartment, the last gathering of the Lower Macomb Street Choral Society.
Mark Gearan remembered getting a call from Mary. He asked her what she had done with her weekend. “It was gloomy and rainy and I wrote my funeral,” she responded. “Ernie Miller is singing and you are playing.” Gearan had not played the organ since high school, but he was not about to say no. “We just had to do what we were told—which I’ve been doing for twenty years,” Gearan said.
Phil Gailey remembered a similar conversation. After several brandies, Mary informed him that he would be one of her eulogists, along with Brian McGrory and Bill Hamilton of the Post. Although uncomfortable with the topic, Gailey agreed. “Good,” said Mary. “Now here are your instructions—be brief, talk about why the Washington Star was such a special place for us, and don’t go blubbery on me the way you do when you read a dog story with a sad ending.”
The turn of the century had brought monumental news stories: the impeachment of a president, the downfall of a series of House Speakers, and a presidential election decided by a mere 537 votes in Florida. But if Mary was thinking about the end of her career and the end of her life, there was more wrenching drama to come.
• • •
After her usual Italian vacation in August, Mary returned to work in early September 2001. On the morning of September 11, a beautiful blue-sky day in Washington, she attended an unremarkable press breakfast hosted by several Democratic strategists. A flurry of cell phone calls disrupted the meeting. Sara Fritz of the St. Petersburg Times told Mary that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Mary rushed back to her office. She and her colleagues watched the slow-motion footage of the collapsing towers again and again. They heard the reports of the dead and wounded at the Pentagon, which had also been struck by a hijacked plane, and they responded with alarm to rumors that a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. They watched in amazement as every single airport in the country was closed.
Mary’s column on September 13 stands out as one of the most important of her career, not necessarily for what she wrote, but for the public’s reaction. Mary led with the shock of the day, the “blank misery” and “an ocean of tears to be shed.”
She praised New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for his heroic and reassuring performance from Ground Zero on September 11 as the nation came to grips with the loss of three thousand people. “The mayor spoke forcefully, as New Yorkers are wont to do,” Mary wrote. “He promised that the city would regroup and go on. No one watching those around him could doubt it.”
She had less kind words for President George W. Bush, who had been visiting an elementary school in Florida and was then flown to secure air bases in Louisiana and Nebraska after the attacks. “George W. Bush could not find the beat,” wrote Mary. She disliked the way the president had jarringly referred to the terrorists as “folks” in his initial comments, and thought his stops at the air bases before returning to Washington late in the day made him look like a fugitive, “more apprehensive than resolute.” She declared that Bush had failed the first great test of his leadership.
With the distance of time, Mary’s column does not seem controversial. President Bush was hesitant and disjointed in the hours following the attacks. Mayor Giuliani did a far better job mastering the details of the situation in real time and laying a soothing hand on a frightened city and a grieving nation. Bush was not a great leader, and his presidency subsequently offered ample examples of that fact.
Mary received hundreds and hundreds of scathing letters and e-mails written in the coarsest and most vulgar terms imaginable. It was a torrent unlike anything she had ever seen, including during the Watergate and McCarthy eras.
“You are a shameful and disgusting journalist.”
“People such as yourself are even worse than the terrorists who attacked our country.”
“You are a disease upon the body of this last great free society.”
Compounding matters, right-wing radios hosts singled Mary out for criticism, and even more letters cascaded into her office. Mary, ever conscientious, composed a form response letter of what she called “laborious civility,” pointing out that she and the letter writers still lived in America and that the right to have different opinions was as American as apple pie. After receiving her letter, one reader sent her a brief note: “You may have lost your marbles, but you have kept your manners.”
The day after her column ran, the Post’s ombudsman, Mike Getler, sent an e-mail to the paper’s staff:
There was a large, and angry, response to me, and others, concerning Mary McGrory’s Thursday column. In times of real, national tension such as this one, that can be expected and, of course, Mary can say whatever she likes and undoubtedly many others agree with her views. But it does raise an issue for the paper because Mary’s opinion column, during the week, appears uniquely at the start of the main news section. . . . But the paper probably pays something of a price for this in terms of coloring the views of some readers about whether the Post shares her views at times such as these. Maybe everybody understands that this is the place the column has always been. But maybe it could also go on a list of things that somehow can be explained to readers.
Getler’s e-mail was hardly a ringing defense of the importance of informed dissent in a time of crisis. It felt as though the paper were distancing itself from Mary. Her placement in the paper was an issue that had been revisited periodically throughout the years, and rightfully so, but to bring it up in response to a flood of hate mail looked weak. Mary had been at the Post for twenty years, and she was disappointed in the lack of resolve from a paper that had achieved fame by taking on Nixon.
Jim Lehrer of PBS put the situation in perspective: “An emotional event triggers emotional responses. My guess is that it had less to do with Mary than the event itself. People were just very upset. It was understandable that anything that walked on the upsetness, which Mary was doing, would get a vehement response.”
Mary recognized the surge of public support for President Bush in the wake of September 11, but she had been around long enough to understand that it also brought perils. She noted that many Democrats had come to regret granting President Lyndon Johnson sweeping powers in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Vietnam War, but that few Democrats (and no Republicans) were of a mind to even politely question President Bush as he pushed through the Patriot Act, which granted law enforcement broad, and largely unchecked, new authority. Mary also objected to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s willingness to jettison attorney-client privilege for terror suspects as the nation established emergency military courts. “And don’t think you need to put out more flags,” wrote Mary in her column. “Patriotism can be quiet, too. And you might point out that there are several ideas behind the flag, like, for instance, the Constitution.” She argued that it was not treason to suggest that the president was less than perfect, and she worried about the early signs that the administration was preparing for war not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq as well.
In November 2001, the Washington Post presented Mary with the Eugene Meyer Award, its highest honor. It was a bittersweet moment for Mary. She appreciated the recognition, but she still simmered about what she saw as a lack of support after September 11. Inevitably, it was also a moment for her to contrast life at the Post with the Star.
