Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Mary viewed most columnists (with the exception of Walter Lippmann) as thumb-suckers rather than reporters. She did not believe her writing befitted the traditional “wise man” approach of most opinion writers of the day. She didn’t want to pontificate about grand national ideas, demurring to Noyes that traditional columnists were different from “people like me who only know what they see and a little poetry.” Mary wanted to cover politics from the front lines, and she was worried that syndication would force her to become something she was not.

  But she was about to become more popular than she had ever imagined, and it would only lend momentum to the notion that Mary was indeed the new face of opinion writing. In November 1958, Time ran a major profile of Mary. She made such an impression on Tommy Weber, the photographer sent to take her picture, that he wrote a colleague, “If I put down all my thoughts, Boyd would make me send Time Inc. a check for the privilege of covering the babe. This gal has everything—manners of a lad—a wonderful voice—attractive as hell to look at—and a touch of come-on that gives guys noises in the head. Why don’t we hire her?”

  Dubbing Mary the “Queen of the Corps,” Time observed, “Her technique is all her own. Pert and comely, she sits quietly in meetings and hearing rooms, watching gestures, listening to sounds, painting mental pictures. She writes swiftly and well, turns out some of the most perceptive, pungent copy in Washington, D.C.” Not only did United Press’s Washington bureau chief call Mary’s writing the best he had ever seen, but Time also quoted Scotty Reston of the New York Times as saying that she had the “poet’s gift of analogy.”

  The article noted that Mary lived simply on her $160-a-week salary and was a regular volunteer at St. Ann’s. When the Time reporter asked Mary why she was still single, she responded with both humor and rue: “I guess the men think the best thing about me is my writing.”

  The Time article led to a rush of letters and calls to Mary from friends, family, and former colleagues. Joseph Welch wrote to Mary of his joy in reading the piece and how it had triggered fond memories of getting to know her during the Army-McCarthy hearings, recalling her as “eager, inquiring, and damned pretty.” Welch continued, “I have not forgotten what you did for me. I never will.” Welch seemed to have a crush on Mary, and a short time later he sent her a note playfully cut and pasted from the letters of magazine headlines, as in a ransom note. “Joseph N. Welch Hopelessly Confused by Mary McGrory,” it read. “What to do about the torrid but tender American Woman. She must be exotic. The world is yours.”

  In the wake of the Time article, new opportunities appeared in bunches. On a single day—November 7, 1958—Mary received letters from editors at Doubleday, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Alfred A. Knopf, and McGraw-Hill asking if she was interested in writing a book. Columnist Stewart Alsop wrote to Mary: “When are you going to write a piece for the Saturday Evening Post? I’ve always said you’re the best feature writer in the business, and now I see Time is saying the same thing.”

  The level of interest was striking, and testament to an important fact: Publishers weren’t reaching out to Mary simply because they thought it would be good to hear a woman’s view on politics. Instead, the acclaim surrounding her column spoke to an obvious commercial appeal. Mary wrote beautifully, she was attractive, and a woman in the halls of power felt sexy and modern.

  Perhaps the only thing more striking than the torrent of book offers was Mary’s response: a polite “No, thank you” to almost all. Mary joked to one of the publishers that her work looked good in the newspaper only because she was competing with reporters “dictating from gas stations during riots on deadline.” Mary could have had her pick of book or magazine deals, but she just wanted to be a reporter. The closest she ever came to writing a book was contributing single chapters to three different political volumes, in 1959, 1961, and 1966.

  The attention kept coming. In January 1959, Editor & Publisher ran another profile of Mary, with some of her colleagues calling her the finest reporter since legendary World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle. Newsweek ran its own story on Mary in 1960, dubbing her a “round-faced, leprechaun-turned-reporter” with “the brightest eyes in the Washington press corps.”

  In February 1960, Mary surrendered, and her column went into syndication. She was given a flexible writing schedule, and she guaranteed other newspapers at least two columns a week—which was not difficult, since she averaged a column every other day for the Star. The Globe was one of the first papers to pick up her column, calling her “Boston’s gift to the national press.”

  Notably, Mary’s columns in the Star were printed on the first or third page, not on the opinion-and-editorial pages. Mary felt strongly about her placement. As Newby Noyes observed, “The amusing thing about her attitude was that even if all she did was comment, she still didn’t want to be regarded as a commentator or a columnist.”

  The commingling of reporting and commentary on the news pages occasioned complaints from some readers. Wrote one, “You probably have some good reasons for violating the basic concept of journalism which states that opinion should be confined to the editorial pages and not passed off as ‘reporting.’ May we know what it is?” In response, the Star ran a note from Noyes: “We use Miss McGrory’s articles in the news columns because the news of what she reports is made more newsworthy by her own perceptive style of reporting it.” It wasn’t a very satisfying answer.

  Mary, for good and bad, was one of the important forerunners in the trend of newspapers blurring the line between hard reporting and commentary. It would become increasingly difficult for editors and readers all across the industry to discern when a reporter’s thumb was on the scale.

  Russell Baker was impressed that Mary maintained her blue-collar approach to legwork after being syndicated. “Mary did something remarkable: She went to work. Once I got a column I took it as a license to never go back to the Hill again.” Within a year of syndication, she had appeared in some forty newspapers across the country and, as Haynes Johnson argued, “Mary became the premium political columnist in the country.”

  • • •

  As Mary’s syndication negotiations played out during 1958 and 1959, she had become quite close to Allen Drury, a fellow journalist who covered Capitol Hill and an aspiring novelist. “It seemed to me once that Mary was fond of Allen Drury, who was a colleague on the Star,” Baker recalled. “Allen switched to the Times about the same time I did.” Baker, his wife, Drury, and Mary ate out occasionally. “My wife and I thought of them as—what?—not lovers, certainly, but a couple who dated,” Baker said. “People still dated back then. They just seemed comfortable well together.”

  It was around this time that Drury published his first novel, Advise and Consent, about a contentious political battle between a fictional president and Congress. Both Mary and Baker provided nice blurbs for the back cover of the book, and Mary’s review in the Star was gushing.

  The book was a sensation, and it leapt onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 102 weeks. Baker described the sudden success. “Allen had a million dollars right away, and quit the Times. A million was real money in those days.” With his newfound wealth, Drury booked passage on a transatlantic liner for a luxury cruise, and he decided to take a very special female guest: his mother.

  This was not the news for which Mary had hoped. “Mary was flabbergasted,” Baker explained. “I can still hear the incredulity with which she spoke the words ‘With his mother!’” Mary’s dreams of a romantic getaway were dashed. However, there was more to the story. “I’ve since thought that she suspected, or even realized for the first time,” said Baker, “that Allen was gay—which he was, of course, though he was deeply closeted, in the 1950s style. I have often speculated on what his trip to Europe with his mother did to Mary’s thinking about her own life.”

  While Mary was attracted to Drury, she still carried a torch for Blair Clark, and her heart r
aced when she learned that Clark and his wife, Holly, were divorcing at around this time.

  Mary made sure she had frequent reasons to visit Blair in New York City, and the two remained in regular contact despite her concerns about the intensity of her own feelings. But Mary always remained so discreet in her interactions with Blair that not a whisper of gossip about the two circulated in the newsroom.

  The biggest political story of 1959 was the wide-open 1960 presidential race. Vice President Nixon was the presumptive favorite on the Republican side, and a host of Democratic contenders actively explored their chances. The country was still in a glow from the Eisenhower years, with Look magazine describing Americans at the time as “relaxed, unadventurous, comfortably satisfied with their life, and blandly optimistic about the future.” Cars, television sets, and all the consumerism made possible during the 1950s were a powerful tonic.

  In April 1959, Mary joined JFK as he made an early West Coast swing to consult party leaders in California and build support for entering the presidential race. Party bosses were unconvinced, and they remained wary of Kennedy’s Catholicism, Ivy League education, and youth. Senators Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson were safer alternatives, and there was still talk of Adlai Stevenson being drafted at the convention.

  “The sun-tanned senator with the wind-blown haircut looks very much at home in casual California,” Mary wrote of Kennedy, “and many here are charmed, finding his lean and graceful form a welcome change from the paunchy politicos they are usually called upon to follow.” Mary added a comment from an observer in San Francisco who, upon seeing Kennedy for the first time, blurted out, “Why, he’s just a boy.”

  After spending about a week traveling together, Mary, JFK, and Kennedy’s confidant Steve Smith shared a flight back to Washington. Mary asked Kennedy bluntly, “Why do you want to be president?” Kennedy carefully ticked through the likely Democratic candidates, assessing their respective strengths and weaknesses at length. As Mary put it, Kennedy’s message was clear: “Why not me?” In May 1959, she still thought it preposterous that Kennedy could win the presidency.

  Reporter Edward Morgan attended a small dinner party with Mary at Kennedy’s elegant, narrow, three-story Federal home on N Street in Georgetown in 1959, recalling that she “had him on the griddle most of the evening about his campaign for the White House. He loved it.” Morgan thought Mary had a unique ability to needle someone like Kennedy with humor and affection. Years later, when she was asked when she’d first conceived of a Kennedy presidency, Mary laughed and said, “At his inauguration.”

  By the time Kennedy announced he was running, in early January 1960, with a brief statement from the marble confines of the Senate Caucus Room, Mary was very supportive. “The young Massachusetts Democrat not only sounded like a man who knows where he is going, but acted and was treated like a man who was already there.” She argued that JFK’s deft fielding of questions from reporters at the press conference helped Kennedy quickly achieve the “priceless intangible” of looking presidential.

  But behind the scenes, Mary still preferred Stevenson, and she said that the Kennedy clan was “incensed that I favored Adlai.” The Kennedys thought that Mary should be for them at all times, because she was Catholic and from Boston.

  As the 1960 politicking began in earnest, Mary was dispatched to cover Nixon. Up to that point in her career, she had written little about him, and her pieces did not demonstrate any particular animus toward the vice president. With a challenge from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller failing to gain traction, Mary observed, “The way it is now, all that Vice President Nixon needs to do in order to be nominated and elected is to follow the advice a Boston politician once gave an ambitious junior: just wear a clean shirt every day and show up at the office.” The more time Mary spent with Nixon, the less she liked him. She thought he was awkward and addressed crowds as if “speaking to a not very bright child.”

  The campaign also thrust Mary and Blair Clark back together again, on the heels of his divorce and at a time when Clark’s star was rapidly rising at CBS News. Mary wrote to Clark frequently, and Blair responded with equally flirtatious, if less frequent, letters. Mary and Blair were together on the Kennedy campaign plane, the Caroline, in February 1960 when staffers announced that the plane was making an impromptu visit to Las Vegas to stay overnight at the Sands Hotel. The Rat Pack—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr.—had established the Sands as the most happening spot on the Strip, a desert retreat where hot days in the sun gave way to long nights filled with gambling, showgirls, swizzle sticks, and an intoxicating atmosphere of anything goes. As Clark said of Las Vegas, “There was no goddamn reason for stopping there except fun and games.”

  JFK, some of his campaign team, and several reporters went to see Sinatra perform that night at the Copa Room, where Ol’ Blue Eyes went out of his way to introduce Kennedy as the next president of the United States. Sinatra and Dean Martin kidded with the candidate, with Martin pretending to have forgotten his last name in an alcoholic fog. The stage patter was boozy and off-color, and the audience in the smoke-filled room roared. Clark remembered “bimbos and showgirls” congregating around Kennedy’s table, and he and Mary were taken aback when they received a call from Sinatra not long after his performance inviting them to join him and Kennedy for drinks in his suite.

  When they went up to Sinatra’s suite, two women were also having drinks there along with Jack Kennedy and his younger brother Teddy. One of them was a striking, dark-haired beauty, Judith Campbell, who ultimately became Kennedy’s most notorious paramour because of her ties to mob boss Sam Giancana. Mary and Blair excused themselves after a few drinks. “We sensed that Jack and Frank and a couple of the girls were about to have a party,” Clark recalled.

  In March 1960, Mary went to Wisconsin to cover the spirited primary battle between Kennedy and Humphrey. She described Wisconsin as “a portly, Teutonic old lady, full of beer and cheese. She is kindly and stolid and has a weakness for wild men and underdogs in politics.” Mary’s editors, delighted with her story, wired her at the Hotel Kaiser Knickerbocker: “Recommending beer and cheese for entire staff in hopes of fermenting copy superb as yours.”

  Mary trailed the candidates through beer halls, bowling alleys, factories, fish fries, shopping malls, and potluck suppers. She described the well-financed Kennedy operation as “crisp, lordly and perfectly organized,” while Senator Humphrey’s was “sketchy, frantic and largely do- it-yourself.” Like a glossy ad for the latest cigarette brand, the Kennedy campaign felt luxe. Yet despite his charisma, JFK conveyed a certain remoteness, and Mary noticed that his reaction to the adoring crowds was to extend his arm forward with the hand upraised, as if subconsciously trying to hold them at bay.

  After JFK made an appearance at a local television studio in Wisconsin, he and Mary walked back to their hotel. She would later recall:

  I had been with Hubert Humphrey, as he knew. We were walking down the corridor, and he took my arm simply because he was so tired. I think he really needed someone to lean on momentarily. He wanted to know what Humphrey was saying and what he was doing; what his crowds were like. I had a rundown of the counties that Humphrey thought he was going to take, so I ran those all by him, and he said where Humphrey was wrong, and what he would take, and what he wouldn’t take, and so forth. And then, suddenly, I think I was just supposed to disappear because I had made my little report on the Humphrey camp, and he had something else to do, and that was the end of it.

  Mary did not think Kennedy unkind, just focused. “He was terribly economical with his time, I think. Either you informed him or you amused him. Once you ceased doing either or both, you were really supposed to disappear.”

  Kennedy combined his background in Boston ward politics with the modern tools of the trade, like polling. He berated his staff with language befitting a longshoreman and inspired what Mary called an almost “feudal loyalty”
from his inner circle. A large part of Kennedy’s appeal to voters was his appearance, which Mary said suggested “to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen, or strayed, a prince in exile perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan. Whatever it is, it is pure gold.”

  As primary day approached in Wisconsin, Mary reflected on the two weary candidates:

  They have withstood gnawing winds at plant gates. They have walked up and down streets in towns with unpronounceable Indian names, approaching strangers and asking favors of them. They have dispatched their wives and sisters to far-away places to drink gallons of coffee, suffer curious stares, and answer personal questions. They have eaten villainous meals in obscure cafes, interrupted by autograph seekers and well-wishers, been expected to be kindly, virtuous, amiable, all-knowing, sincere, promising, great, and folksy. They have done things, in short, that no man but a politician seeking the power and the glow of the White House would do for love or money.

  Kennedy won Wisconsin narrowly, stoking fears that his popularity with Protestants was limited. Humphrey was reinvigorated as he headed toward the next primary battle with Kennedy, in West Virginia.

  • • •

  On the campaign trail, Mary encountered fierce anti-Catholic sentiment that fueled doubts that JFK could win the presidency. One voter complained to her that Kennedy would take his marching orders from the pope. Mary wrote back to her friend Liz Acosta, “There is a wounded rhinoceros trapped in the plumbing of this hotel, but from what I’ve seen we’re damn lucky it’s inside, so we say nothing. Jack K. is in fine form, makes a good underdog. I like this ever-better than Wisconsin, even though some of the anti-Catholic stuff is hair-raising.” The Kennedy family poured money into the West Virginia race, both aboveboard and underneath the table.

  The Kennedy forces were too much for Humphrey, and Mary reported from the “confused desolation” of the Humphrey headquarters on primary night as the results came in. Making her way past “a couple of sad secretaries, staring blankly at the blackboards,” she went up to Humphrey’s hotel suite, where the disappointed candidate and his staff were drafting a concession speech. Bobby Kennedy pushed his way into the room.