Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  “Do you want to come in this afternoon?”

  “No, tomorrow morning will be all right.”

  So the next morning at 10:30, a grinning Kenny O’Donnell ushered Mary into the Oval Office with great flourish.

  President Kennedy strode forward, rubbing his hands together. He gently placed a hand on Mary’s arm. “There she is. I was wondering where you had been. I was just saying to Kenny the other day, ‘We never see Mary anymore.’”

  Kennedy wore a gray suit, and he looked tired, but not depressed. He noted in even tones that his first year had brought its share of disappointments. Mary was struck by his lack of swagger. She simply could not stay angry with him.

  As the two drank their coffee, Kennedy said, “I see you’re writing about Goldwater.”

  Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative firebrand from Arizona, was widely expected to be Kennedy’s Republican challenger in 1964, although the outspoken Goldwater had yet to formally announce his plans.

  Mary nodded.

  “I didn’t read it,” declared Kennedy. It came across as more of a rebuke than intended.

  “Oh, you didn’t,” Mary responded, taken aback.

  “No,” Kennedy said. “Any story that starts out that a man would rather be right than president, I never finish.” For the intensely pragmatic Kennedy, Goldwater’s emphasis on ideology over electability was baffling.

  “Except that in his case,” retorted Mary, “don’t you see that it’s literally true?”

  Kennedy pondered Goldwater’s stance almost as a curiosity. “Oh, yes. I never thought of that.”

  Mary described the session with Kennedy in her column the next day. She omitted the exchange about Goldwater and wrote that Kennedy “stood on the eve of his first anniversary in power, attempting as always to convince with facts and figures rather than a show of feeling, making no great claims, aware of his problems, conscious of his responsibilities and, on Monday anyway, hopeful.”

  As the interview drew to a close, Kennedy suddenly proffered Mary an invitation to a White House congressional dinner that was scheduled a few days later. “Why don’t you come? Why don’t you come?” Kennedy gave a halfhearted explanation for why she hadn’t gotten the peace offering of an invitation sooner.

  At the dinner, JFK and Jackie made a grand entrance as the band played “Hail to the Chief.” Mary was pleasantly surprised when Congressman Charles Halleck, the Republican House minority leader, called down the table during the meal to tell Mary how much he enjoyed her columns.

  As the evening wound down, Mary and Kennedy chatted at some length in the hall. Both were enjoying themselves. She shared her surprise that Congressman Halleck was a regular reader.

  Kennedy smiled. “He reads those stories, does he?” said the president. Then, referring back to their conversation in the Oval Office, he added, “And when he reads that you’ve said that a man would rather be right than president, he reads all the way through, does he?” Mary smiled.

  • • •

  The 1962 California governor’s race gave Mary a chance to again cover the politician she loved to loathe: Richard Nixon. (She had once written to a friend about Nixon, “If he were a horse, I should not buy him.”) Nixon hoped that a win in California would help rehabilitate his image and provide a springboard to the presidency. He regularly accused Governor Pat Brown of being soft on subversives, casting himself as the country’s fiercest anti-Communist. “Just why Californians should be so obsessed with the subject of domestic communism is puzzling,” pondered Mary. “Everyone here, including Richard M. Nixon, who brought it up, insists that communism is not a major issue in Mr. Nixon’s campaign against Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown. It is merely the one that sets audiences on fire.”

  Mary knew the race would be tight, and as the contest neared its climax, the Cuban missile crisis erupted, in October 1962. With the United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear confrontation, the world held its collective breath. Although fears of a nuclear war were not new, the entire situation was enormously unsettling. It was not long before Popular Mechanics was selling do-it-yourself home fallout-shelter kits.

  Mary was at the Beverly Hilton hotel with the Nixon campaign on Election Night. At one in the morning, Governor Brown, with a lead of 100,000 votes, claimed victory. Mary described the scene at the Nixon camp. “At 1:50, the atmosphere on the seventh floor was snappish. An aide stood on the barricades and threatened to call the fire marshal if the television cameras did not go back. A heated exchange followed and the cameras retreated a foot. Post-mortems were quietly being conducted between lesser staff aides and reporters.” Campaign aide Caspar Weinberger, then the Republican state chairman, went down to the ballroom to tell bedraggled partisans that there would be no statement from Nixon.

  The next morning when Herb Klein, Nixon’s press secretary, told Nixon that the press was waiting for a traditional concession speech, he replied simply, “Screw them.” Klein went down to address the press in the Hilton’s Cadoro Room, announcing that Nixon had conceded but would not appear. Klein was surprised as everyone else when Nixon, against his better judgment, decided to come down from his suite and take the podium. He was exhausted, unshaven, and surrounded by red-eyed assistants. The results made for one of Mary’s most famous columns. It began, “For Richard M. Nixon, it was exit snarling. He bowed off the political stage, turning on friends and enemies alike, protesting all the while he had ‘no hard feelings against anybody.’”

  Mary could not have imagined better material, and she took Nixon apart in magisterial fashion.

  Mr. Nixon carried on for 17 minutes in a finale of intemperance and incoherence unmatched in American political annals. He pulled the havoc down around his ears, while his staff looked on aghast. His principal target was the press. But he was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack. Every time he scorched the Fourth Estate, his voice curling with rage and scorn, he insisted that he had no complaint. Throughout, he was obviously having a furious inner argument with himself. The schooled politician who came within an ace of the White House kept telling him not to do it. But the sore loser told him to keep going. Three times he said, “one last thing.” But the rancor that had propelled him to confront his persecutors, whom he said at one point he has always respected, would not let him quit.

  Nixon then uttered some of his most famous words: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference, and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.”

  Mary’s column concluded, “No questions had been asked except by Mr. Nixon of himself. None actually remained, the former vice president having disposed of everything, including possibly his reputation, in his epic tirade.”

  Her column provoked intense reactions. One Star reader telegrammed the editors: “McGrory’s column concerning Vice President Richard M. Nixon meanest, lowest, dirtiest diatribe yet written, your rag has reached a new low. Cancel my subscription and remove your yellow box from my property no later than today.” Another wrote, “I know it’s typical of the Irish to kick a man when he’s down, but even the Irish are human beings who must have somewhere in their hearts a faint shred of compassion.”

  The vitriol was such that the Washington Post’s White House correspondent, Edward Folliard, felt compelled to write to the Star in Mary’s defense: “I have been a reader of the Evening Star since I was in short pants. Never in all that time—and it has been an awfully long time—have I seen such meanness of spirit and such uncontrolled and unjustified rage as was poured into your letter to the editor department by those who wrote in to denounce Mary McGrory’s story.”

  The response from other quarters was kinder. Ben Bradlee and humorist Art Buchwald cabled Mary: “Now that you don’t have Nixon to kick around, you’ll never write a better story.” Mary also received a gracious note from W.
P. Hobby of the Houston Post, a juror for the Pulitzer Prize that year: “Four of us read 78 entries in two days—some of them pretty grim. There was no question as to which of the 78 entries made the most enjoyable reading. . . . The Pulitzer group on national affairs seemed to be afflicted with the idea that everything has to be cosmic, so your entry didn’t get recommended for the award, but it did make the day considerably brighter.” Mary’s style remained too unconventional for the Pulitzer’s arbiters of taste.

  When Eleanor Roosevelt passed away, on November 7, 1962, Mary flew to the funeral on Air Force One with JFK and a number of other senior officials and reporters. The president came to the front of the plane and saw Mary. His mood was light. The Cuban missile crisis had been successfully resolved through adroit backroom diplomacy that left Kennedy looking like he had stared down the Soviets.

  “Say Mary, that was a nice story you wrote about Nixon.” Grinning, he added, “I must remember to smile when I get defeated.”

  Kennedy sat down next to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had earlier served as California’s governor and who also disliked Nixon. Recently appointed justice Arthur Goldberg appeared, and Kennedy asked Warren, “Is Arthur being any help to you up there, Chief?”

  Chief Justice Warren chuckled.

  The president and Warren then huddled over a series of press clippings from Nixon’s defeat in California. “It would have been hard to say, watching their faces,” Mary commented, “who had enjoyed the downfall more, the Chief Justice or the President of the United States. They had their heads together over the clippings and were laughing like schoolboys.”

  Perhaps Mary’s only regret from her “exit snarling” column was her absolute conviction that Nixon was finished as a politician, a view that she later called a huge mistake.

  • • •

  Despite her often grueling schedule, Mary remained committed to helping out with the orphans from St. Ann’s. Instead of using the many demands on her time as an excuse to bow out of volunteering, Mary used her success to pull in high-profile supporters to her cause. Mary enlisted the Kennedys to help out at St. Ann’s, and in 1961 she arranged for the kids’ annual Christmas party to be held at the White House. Enthusiastic three- and four-year-olds ate ice cream and admired the largest Christmas tree they had ever seen. Carefully wrapped presents greeted the children, and a number of the Kennedy children joined the almost sixty kids from St. Ann’s in the East Room. Sister Frances led the kids in “Joy to the World,” and Bobby Kennedy sternly directed his own kids to wait their turn on Santa’s lap. At the end of the party, a White House butler dutifully held a balloon for one of the orphans as he wrestled on his coat.

  The event made a lasting impression on Bobby. He decreed that Mary must bring the children to swim at his house. Every Wednesday afternoon during the summer, Justice Department vans picked up Mary and the kids and trundled them out to Hickory Hill. Bobby attended a number of times, happily embracing soggy kids as they emerged from the pool, soaking his white dress shirt.

  In 1962, Bobby again joined in the orphans’ annual Christmas party, held at the home of one of Mary’s coworkers. He had been asked to attend by one of the orphans, Rita, at a pool party. Although the festivities got off to a shaky start when one of the kids saw Santa emerging from a taxi, Saint Nick, thinking fast, explained that a minor sled accident had forced him into alternative transport.

  The attorney general sat happily with the small, dark-eyed Rita in his lap. Mary had gotten Rita and several other girls small patent leather purses. They beamed. Unfortunately, as the kids dug into their ice cream and cake, Rita misplaced her bag. She accused one of the other girls of stealing it. As Rita fought back tears, Mary explained that some of the bags looked alike.

  Bobby took charge. Mary laughingly wondered if he would bring in the police, or perhaps the FBI. “I’ll handle the investigation myself,” Bobby insisted. After finding Rita’s bag under the coffee table, he held it aloft and exclaimed, “I broke the case. I broke the case.”

  “It was total immersion,” Mary observed of Bobby’s interactions with the kids. “Kennedy needed children as much as they needed him.”

  The year 1963 began sleepily. JFK had survived and thrived after his early foreign policy missteps. His successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis was widely viewed as a triumph. At the Star, Newby Noyes was promoted to executive editor, even as circulation slipped behind the Washington Post’s. Mary’s mother and her aunt Kate moved out of their house on Kittredge Street in Roslindale, taking up residence in a nearby apartment. Mary continued her regular pilgrimages home and to Aunt Kate’s place in Antrim, New Hampshire. As a girl, she had regularly traveled up to Antrim, where her Aunt Kate owned a small cottage on Gregg Lake. The entire family soon fell in love with Antrim and the lake—none more so than Mary. The log cottage, down a rough dirt road lined by a lush carpet of ferns, had a large fieldstone fireplace and white birch railings. Mary swam in the bracing lake water and took day hikes up nearby Holt Hill. Antrim was one of a handful of places that had a special hold on Mary.

  In the spring of 1963, with Pope John XXIII lying critically ill, the Star’s editors dispatched Mary to Rome, and she was in St. Peter’s Square when the fateful news arrived that the pope had died. “Death came to Pope John XXIII at the twilight of a glorious spring day,” she wrote. “The last golden light of Rome filled the sky and a three-quarter moon was rising over the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square when word came that he had finally begun that journey for which he had so often said he was ready.”

  Back at the White House, members of the cabinet debated whether Kennedy should cancel a planned trip to Italy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then Kennedy’s assistant secretary of labor, wrote to Mary in Rome in late June 1963: “It is just as we feared—you won’t ever come back to us. I was about to write you last week to say how absolutely startlingly marvelous everything you have written has been.” Mary and Moynihan had become good friends, and she had deep affection for the cerebral New Yorker. In his letter, Moynihan described the debate at the White House regarding Kennedy’s trip. When someone suggested that Kennedy should cancel the visit, the president declared, “Out of the question, I have to go to Rome in order to bring Mary back.”

  Returning from Rome, Mary covered JFK’s Oval Office address on the night of July 26, 1963, when he announced his support for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

  Kennedy stopped to chat with Mary after the speech and asked how she was doing.

  “I’m happy,” said Mary. “I think this was a great moment. I think I’m even happier than you are.”

  Kennedy said, “Well, I’m happy.”

  Mary gently pushed back, “Well, you didn’t sound that way.”

  Jabbing his left arm forward, Kennedy changed the subject. “What I want to know is why didn’t the Star consider your credentials good enough to come to Ireland with us?” He was referring to a trip to Ireland the month before.

  “Oh, I think it was something to do with immigration quotas,” joked Mary, and the two laughed. But Mary also saw a message in Kennedy’s inquiry. “It was interesting that he didn’t want to waste any time discussing nuclear policy, when he did want to address a very specific inquiry indicating he knew who was where at all times.”

  But if international issues dominated the early part of Kennedy’s term, domestic problems were never far beneath the surface, and the growing civil rights struggle was increasingly becoming a focus of Mary’s writing. She pushed for a chance to do more reporting from the South, but her editors were concerned for her safety.

  Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech before a massive crowd in Washington on August 28, 1963. Mary attended the speech with Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News and Kennedy pollster Lou Harris. She met Harris and Lisagor on the Capitol steps. The days before the speech had been incredibly tense, and Washington was on high alert, ex
pecting violence. Large numbers of police and national guardsmen were positioned all over the city, and most Washingtonians stayed home from their jobs, fearing clashes in the streets. Mary’s assessment of the threat was quite different; she brought a picnic basket of hard-boiled eggs, which she, Lisagor, and Harris ate as they stood at the Lincoln Memorial. They were just twenty feet away from King as he delivered his speech.

  On September 15, 1963, in a savage rejoinder to Dr. King, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. The senseless attack wounded more than twenty and killed four young girls attending Sunday services. The attack on the church was so galling, and the March on Washington so orderly and respectful, that the national tide began to make a decisive shift in favor of civil rights.

  Mary attended the memorial service for the children, in a crowded black church in Birmingham, and her series of columns from Alabama brimmed with outrage. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anything more appalling to Mary than an attack on innocent children in a church. “Dynamite has become a principal means of political expression in this strange, sick city,” she wrote.

  Mary ardently supported the role of faith leaders in promoting civil rights, and she delighted in seeing student protestors and nuns standing side by side under a common banner. On a plane ride back from Selma, Alabama, Mary insisted on helping a group of interfaith leaders write their public statement. It was an admirable sentiment, but the moment also underscored Mary’s increasing willingness to write her own rules as a reporter.

  Mary did not consider herself bound by normal standards of journalistic impartiality. “It is not my responsibility,” she argued. “If I wanted to be fair and objective, I wouldn’t be writing.” Mary thought of herself not as a columnist but as a reporter who had been given license to deliver her opinion. If the Kennedys, as Mary argued, saw themselves as above the rules of society, Mary saw herself as outside the usual standards of journalism. As one letter to the Star’s editor during the 1960s complained, “This is not an account of events but an opinion, a loaded opinion—skillful, subtly, and dangerously loaded.”