Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Haynes Johnson observed that Mary had “no qualms at all” crossing the lines that other reporters were reluctant to breach. “Her role was to influence events and to influence the world through her writings. If she could do it by personal importuning and pressure, she would do that.”

  By September and October of 1963, Mary was happily previewing the likely Republican presidential contenders. Although both Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney hoped to win the nomination, Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage had badly damaged him in the eyes of Republican voters, and Romney simply never caught fire. Former senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, also hinted that he might run. But Barry Goldwater was the darling of the right, and his impolitic rhetoric thrilled conservatives. Kennedy relished the idea of running against Goldwater. Mary wrote that when Goldwater’s name came up in press conferences, the president looked “like a child who wants to save his candy so he can savor it better later.”

  In mid-November, Mary received an invitation to a White House lunch scheduled for December 6, 1963. She noted with satisfaction that the invitation had arrived well in advance.

  On November 14, Mary covered the president’s press conference at the State Department Auditorium. At one point, a reporter invited Kennedy to criticize Congress for its failure to pass several key spending bills. But as Mary observed, “This most rational man refused. It was not his style. Instead, he quoted from the poet Arthur Hugh Clough: ‘But westward, look, the land is bright.’”

  It was the last time Mary would see John Fitzgerald Kennedy alive.

  Just after 1:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on November 22, 1963, dazed reporters rushed into the Star. A weeping Mary was among them. JFK had been assassinated in Dallas.

  At the center of the maelstrom was one of the Star’s editors, John Cassady. Cassady was well liked among the staff, and known for his unusually even temperament. Calm and deliberate, he was what one former colleague described as “an old style gentleman.” Cassady was particularly influential on Mary, always able to coax columns out of her as deadlines approached.

  Mary was dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One as President Lyndon Johnson and Jackie Kennedy arrived from Dallas with JFK’s body. Several hundred people had gathered by the fence in the harsh artificial light of the landing strip. Bobby Kennedy waited restlessly, as did other members of the cabinet. Mary described the scene: “Secretary of Defense McNamara was by himself, looking off into the distance. McGeorge Bundy, the President’s foreign policy adviser, was carrying a dispatch case under his arm. Theodore Sorensen, the President’s young special counsel, looking white-faced and stricken, was unseeing and unhearing in the nightmarish light and noise.”

  A U.S. Navy hearse waited for the late president’s body. “And a few minutes after six, United States Air Force One, all white and blue, landed amid a deafening roar,” Mary penned. “The back door was flung open. But this time there was no familiar graceful figure, fingering a button of his jacket, waiting to smile, wanting to wave. Instead the light fell on the gleam of a bronze casket.”

  Kennedy’s aides, who had loved him like a brother, were all there: Dave Powers, Larry O’Brien, and Kenny O’Donnell, among others. “The men picked up their inexpressible burden and placed it on top of the platform, and it was lowered into the hearse. Then in the frame stood his wife, Jacqueline, in a rose-colored suit with black facings. By her side was his favorite brother, Robert, the Attorney General, who had somehow gotten onto the plane although he had never left Washington. He was holding Mrs. Kennedy by the hand. She was lifted from the platform and opened the door of the gray hearse and climbed in the back. Bobby followed her. Several minutes later, the new President walked slowly down the ramp with his wife. With tears on their faces, the leaderless men of the New Frontier went up to greet him.”

  After leaving Andrews Air Force Base, Mary had a cup of coffee in Bethesda and then went to the White House. In the lobby, she found Bob Healy, a reporter for the Boston Globe, looking like a wounded animal. The two retreated to the historic Hay-Adams Hotel for several Scotches. It was tempting to drink more, but both had work to do. They headed back to their respective offices.

  Mary was asked to write both a news story about the scene at Andrews and an editorial. Mary went to her desk in the back of the Star newsroom and perched before her typewriter. Her heart felt like it was breaking.

  Burt Hoffman, the editor on the national desk, came by her desk. “Newby’s looking for you.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Hoffman.

  “I’m going to write for the news side first,” Mary said, “and then I’ll do his editorial.”

  Newby emerged from his office not long after. He started circling Mary’s desk, edging closer as he consulted his watch.

  “I’m going to finish the news story,” Mary told Newby, “and then take care of you.”

  Newby never forgot the scene. As he stood over her shoulder waiting for the copy, Mary typed away, tears streaming down her face.

  The news story came quickly, and she churned out the editorial in about forty-five minutes.

  There are no better examples of Mary’s work than what she produced in the days following Dallas. Consider this excerpt from her editorial: “He brought gaiety, glamour, and grace to the American political scene in a measure never known before. That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement—these are what we shall remember.”

  “She wrote that column off the top of her head,” recalled her colleague Lance Gay. “She said that was one of her easier columns to write. She came in and wrote. It was something she believed.”

  “That evening a group of us who lived on Macomb Street, out Connecticut Avenue, drifted over to Mary McGrory’s,” Patrick Moynihan recalled. Moynihan told the others, among them Mary, how he had been in the White House that afternoon, just down the hall from the Oval Office, when he heard the news. The staff was replacing the rug in the president’s office, and the furniture had been out in the hall, with JFK’s rocking chair sitting atop his desk, “as if new people were moving in.”

  After a long, uncomfortable pause, Mary declared, “We’ll never laugh again.”

  “Heavens, Mary,” Moynihan replied with a start. “We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.”

  As Moynihan would say later, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time.”

  On Saturday, the day after the assassination, Mary attended the wake in the East Room of the White House. As she entered, Kenny O’Donnell approached her. Mary had observed in her column that morning that O’Donnell would have been willing to die for Jack Kennedy. Wrapping his arms around her, he said, “I will love you forever for what you wrote about me.”

  Mary was dismissive. “Well, Kenny, everybody knows that’s true.” They went in.

  A Catholic Mass was held as part of the ceremony, the first time a Mass had ever been conducted in the White House.

  Like most newspapers, the Star printed extra copies for what it expected to be heavy public demand. The staff was shocked to see many of those extra copies come back unsold. People were home, glued to their televisions, and did not go out to buy the newspaper.

  Mary was supposed to write a reminiscence of Kennedy for the next day’s paper. She brought a draft to the desk of editor Bill Hill, who had a prickly relationship with many reporters.

  Hill read the draft and said that it should be in the first person.

  Burt Hoffman, who was watching the scene, began to protest. He was worried that Mary was on the edge of a breakdown.

  Mary waved off Hoffman. “Burt, it’s okay. He’s right.”

  She
went back to her desk and labored over the rewrite. She managed to produce a remembrance that was deeply personal without being self-aggrandizing. “When he came to the White House, suddenly everyone saw what the New Frontier was going to mean,” Mary wrote. “It meant a poet at the inauguration; it meant swooping around Washington, dropping in on delighted and flustered old friends; it meant going to the airport in zero weather without an overcoat; it meant a rocking chair and having the Hickory Hill seminar at the White House when Bobby and Ethel were out of town; it meant fun at presidential press conferences.”

  On Sunday, November 24, Kennedy’s body lay in state under the Capitol Rotunda. Mary worked through the crowd of hundreds of thousands of people waiting outside in near-freezing temperatures to pay their respects.

  Back at the Star, she turned her attention to Kennedy’s widow, Jackie. “From the moment she arrived back in Washington, erect and composed, wearing the blood-stained clothes of the infamous day in Dallas, she has imparted meaning and order to the chaos around her. She would not want anything to be lost to the world. She brought her two children to the Capitol yesterday. If she wanted them to see, however imperfectly, what their father meant, she also dramatized to the world and the evil people in it that a young father had been slain as well as a president.”

  As Mary completed her column that evening, she again spoke with her editor, John Cassady. “I’ll go to the funeral,” Mary said in low tones.

  “You’re not too tired?” Cassady inquired.

  “No, I can do it.”

  On Monday, November 25, a million people turned out in the streets of Washington to watch Kennedy’s final funeral procession as it traveled from the Capitol past the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and on to Kennedy’s final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery. During the ceremony at St. Matthew’s, Mary whispered, “Goodnight, sweet prince,” as Kennedy lay in his coffin.

  After the funeral, Mary walked with William Walton, an old Kennedy family friend. The day was cold, and the two went to the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Square from the White House, for a glass of brandy. They reminisced, and for a moment, just a moment, in the overstuffed comfort of the cozy bar, it felt as though maybe Kennedy was not dead. They both knew better.

  After some time, Mary stood up. “But Bill, now I have to go and write his funeral story.”

  Walton understood. He added a parting comment: “Do one thing for him. No crap.”

  “Okay,” Mary said, “I’ll do that. I’ll try to do that.”

  Mary took a taxi back to the Star. John Cassady was on the desk. Mary settled in to write. It might have been the fatigue, the brandy, or the grief, but nothing came. “I had a total, complete block,” Mary would recall. It was not long before she was surrounded by small piles of crumpled paper with abandoned leads.

  Mary wrote long, ponderous sentences that hung like “Victorian crepe.” Her prose felt leaden. The minutes turned to hours, and three hours stretched to four, and then five. All the emotion and exhaustion welled up within her, but her feelings were unwilling to escape to the page.

  At around eleven, John Cassady approached gingerly.

  “Are you sure you can do it, Mary?”

  Mary sighed. “Yes, I know I can.”

  Cassady retreated.

  Mary stopped and took a deep breath. She thought back to Girls’ Latin School and diagramming sentence after sentence. She thought about Kennedy the man, and traveling with him on the campaign trail.

  And at that moment, Mary came to a fundamental conviction: in the presence of great grief and emotion, write short sentences.

  She started to slash the long, soggy phrases in half. The writing began to move. Mary’s column on Kennedy’s funeral remains one of her finest. Here it is in its entirety:

  Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s funeral it can be said he would have liked it.

  It had that decorum and dash that were in his special style. It was both splendid and spontaneous. It was full of children and princes, of gardeners and governors.

  Everyone measured up to New Frontier standards.

  A million people lined up every inch of his last journey. Enough heads of state filed into St. Matthew’s Cathedral to change the shape of the world.

  The weather was superb, as crisp and clear as one of his own instructions.

  His wife’s gallantry became a legend. His two children behaved like Kennedys. His 3-year-old son saluted his coffin. His 6-year-old daughter comforted her mother. Looking up and seeing tears, she reached over and gave her mother’s hand a consoling squeeze.

  The procession from the White House would have delighted him. It was a marvelous eye-filling jumble of the mighty and obscure, all walking behind his wife and his two brothers.

  There was no cadence or order, but the presence of Gen. de Gaulle alone in the ragged line of march was enough to give it grandeur. He stalked splendidly up Connecticut Avenue, more or less beside Queen Frederika of Greece and King Baudouin of Belgium.

  The sounds of the day were smashingly appropriate. The tolling of the bells gave way to the skirling of the Black Watch Pipers whose lament blended with the organ music inside the cathedral.

  At the graveside, there was the thunder of jets overhead, a 21-gun salute, taps, and finally the strains of the Navy hymn, “Eternal Father Strong to Save.”

  He would have seen every politician he ever knew, two ex-Presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, and a foe or two. Gov. Wallace of Alabama had trouble finding a place to sit in the Cathedral.

  His old friend, Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who married him, baptized his children and prayed over him in the icy air of his inaugural, said a Low Mass. At the final prayers, after the last blessing, he suddenly added, “Dear Jack.”

  There was no eulogy. Instead, Bishop Philip M. Hannan mounted the pulpit and read passages from the President’s speeches and evoked him so vividly that tears splashed on the red carpets and the benches of the Cathedral. Nobody cried out, nobody broke down.

  And the Bishop read a passage the President had often noted in the Scriptures: “There is a time to be born and a time to die.” He made no reference to the fact that no one had thought last Friday was a time for John Fitzgerald Kennedy to die—a martyr’s death—in Dallas. The President himself had spent no time in trying to express the inexpressible. Excess was alien to his nature.

  The funeral cortege stretched for miles. An old campaigner would have loved the crowd. Children sat on the curbstones. Old ladies wrapped their furs around them.

  The site of the grave, at the top of one slope, commands all of Washington. Prince Philip used his sword as a walking stick to navigate the incline.

  His brother, Robert, his face a study in desolation, stood beside the President’s widow. The children of the fabulous family were all around.

  Jacqueline Kennedy received the flag from his coffin, bent over and with a torch lit a flame that is to burn forever on his grave—against the day that anyone might forget that her husband had been a President and a martyr.

  It was a day of such endless fitness, with so much pathos and panoply, so much grief nobly born that it may extinguish that unseemly hour in Dallas, where all that was alien to him—savagery, violence, irrationality—struck down the 35th President of the United States.

  Under the weight of tragedy, Mary produced a remarkable series of pitch-perfect columns—moving but not maudlin, graceful and understated. Haynes Johnson called them “the best thing I have ever seen in American journalism.” Many of Mary’s fellow journalists described it as criminal that she did not win a Pulitzer Prize for her work in 1963.

  Jackie Kennedy wrote to Mary that her column on the funeral “will always be the best of all. It makes him so alive that I can’t bear to read it too often.”

  But Mary was not entirely a stargazer when it came to Kennedy. She acknowledged his person
al shortcomings and the problems during his term. “He invaded Cuba—and never relented in his hostility to Fidel Castro. He was slow on civil rights. He sent 17,000 Americans to Vietnam. . . . Those who did not know him or live through his death may find it difficult to understand the continuing bereavement of those who did. What was lost on that black day in Dallas was the irreplaceable sense of ‘glad confident morning’ that John Kennedy brought to the whole world.”

  On Thanksgiving Day, less than a week after the president’s murder, Mary was invited, along with about twenty other guests, to Hickory Hill to have brunch with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. The Kennedys struggled to put on a brave face as they served Bloody Marys to their guests. Mary entered, weeping, and threw her arms around Bobby. He did his best to brighten the mood, but the terrible strain was apparent on Bobby’s face.

  Mary coaxed Bobby into attending the annual Christmas party for the St. Ann’s orphans. She let the children know that Bobby Kennedy would be coming and told them to be on their best behavior. She was particularly fond of one of the boys from St. Ann’s, Michael Doyle, describing him as “the kind of child who melts you.”

  Author Peter Maas recalled the moment when Bobby entered the room: “All these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence.” Michael Doyle ran up to Bobby, stopped in front of him, and exclaimed, “Your brother’s dead. Your brother’s dead.”

  The adults were stunned into silence, and Bobby winced as if he had been struck. Michael Doyle burst into tears.

  Bobby stepped forward and scooped up the boy, holding him close.

  “That’s all right,” Bobby whispered to Michael. “I have another brother.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Picking Up the Pieces

  Drained, Mary took a short holiday in January 1964. Jackie, Bobby, and Ethel Kennedy telegrammed her as she departed from New York: “Miss Mary McGrory, passenger Oslofjord, care Norwegian American Lines, West Tenth Street, Sailing 8pm, New York. All the Kennedys send their love. Come back quickly.”