Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Not long after Mary departed, the Beatles arrived in New York to screaming crowds of fans. Two days later, their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was watched by some seventy-three million Americans. Signs of protest against the conformity of the 1950s were beginning to ripple across the country.

  Mary was discomfited by the idea of Lyndon Johnson having assumed the presidency. She thought LBJ was gargantuan in both his abilities and his shortcomings, a master political tactician defined by coarseness and insecurity. Johnson was painfully aware that many, like Mary, saw him as a step down from Kennedy. As he told a biographer, the circumstances of coming into the presidency were almost unbearable. “For millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne.” America was angry with Texas and Texans; the Dallas Cowboys football team was booed for coming from the town that killed Kennedy.

  Mary attended LBJ’s first major press conference, in March 1964. “The moment that would provide the most vivid contrast between him and his predecessor, President Kennedy, could not be put off forever. It is easy to understand why President Johnson wanted to.” Mary even commented disapprovingly on the venue, calling the International Conference Room at the State Department “a depressing chamber, with a low ceiling that looks like an enormous ice-cube tray.”

  After Mary’s comments, President Johnson grumbled to the head of the Associated Press, “When I sat down, they said I ought to stand up. When I stood up, they said I ought to sit down. When I had it in the State Department, Mary McGrory said the room was too dark. When I had it in the East Room, they said it was too light. And I don’t give a damn. Just so it is comfortable for them.” Johnson also complained to his aide Joseph Califano, “Mary McGrory is the best writer in Washington, and she keeps getting better and better at my expense.”

  Oval Office recordings made clear that Mary’s columns troubled Johnson, and tapes from March 1964 captured the president telling Larry O’Brien, “Now you’ve got to get me straightened out with Mary. She’s had three mean columns on me in the last ten days.” O’Brien assured Johnson he would talk with Mary. “Just tell her that she can be in love with me, too, that I love her,” LBJ said, “and I think she is the best writer in town.”

  When Mary started questioning the administration’s strategy to pass civil rights legislation, President Johnson personally phoned Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and insisted that he talk with Mary and “tell her that it is going very well and you’re very happy with it.” Johnson warned that Mary had “awfully good” sources in the Justice Department—Bobby Kennedy—and that she was intent on being a “troublemaker.”

  Mary met with Johnson in the Oval Office on March 24 for a full hour, as part of his effort to win her over. Johnson believed a personal approach to reporters was essential, as he described to biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin: “You learn that Stewart Alsop cares a lot about appearing to be an intellectual and a historian, so whenever you talk to him, play down the gold cufflinks which you play up with Time Magazine, and to him, emphasize your relationship with F.D.R. and your roots in Texas. You learn that Mary McGrory likes dominant personalities and Doris Fleeson cares only about issues, so with McGrory, you come on strong and with Fleeson you make yourself sound like some impractical red-hot liberal.” Johnson’s strategy of coming on strong with Mary was badly flawed. As Mary told Blair Clark, “I think he has done mighty well, but I’m afraid he lacks charm to an almost disastrous degree.”

  After the discussion at the White House, Mary’s columns were more positive for a time, largely because it was obvious that Johnson was in an exceptionally good position heading into the fall election, with high poll numbers and rapid progress on an ambitious legislative agenda.

  If Johnson was adjusting after an uneasy start, the same could not be said for Bobby Kennedy. With a bracing chill in the air, Bobby and Jackie Kennedy visited JFK’s resting place at Arlington National Cemetery on the first Saint Patrick’s Day after his death. The Irish ambassador placed a shamrock and a small clump of Irish sod on Kennedy’s grave.

  Mary and Bobby called on Jackie Kennedy at her temporary residence later that day. Mary and Bobby had talked a great deal after JFK had been killed, and he hoped that Mary could help cheer Jackie. As the three chatted, John Kennedy Jr., not yet four years old, rambled into the room. Jackie offered her son a small glass of ginger ale. The young Kennedy said that he wanted Coke instead. He kept after his mother until she relented, and Jackie finally gave her son what Mary described as a “thimbleful” of Coke. Mary told John Jr. that she lived near the zoo and asked if he might like to visit sometime, see the animals, and come by her apartment for a cup of tea. “Oh,” interjected John Jr., “I’ll have Coke.”

  Despite the light moment with John Jr., the conversation with Jackie and Bobby was excruciating. Jackie had been a pillar of strength and poise during the funeral. But with the television lights off and the motorcades gone, she had sunk into depression. Bobby, too, was smothered in grief, spending long hours staring out the window of his office at the Justice Department, unsure of where to turn. “He deserved pity because he had a broken heart,” Mary recalled of Bobby. “He had found his greatest fulfillment in being his brother’s keeper. Little mattered after that.” As Mary prepared to leave, she tried to console Bobby, assuring him that brighter days were ahead. He sobbed in response.

  That night, Bobby delivered a powerful Saint Patrick’s Day speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on the legacy of being Irish and fighting for freedom. It was his first major address since his brother’s death. He made a compelling case to the white, largely Irish American audience that they needed to care about issues like civil rights. Bobby closed his remarks with a poem his brother had read at a Saint Patrick’s Day event several years earlier, an ode to the Irish patriot Owen O’Neill. He choked back tears as he read the poem’s final lines: “Why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die?” Mary knew that many angry, grieving Irish Americans were pushing for LBJ to nominate Bobby as vice president, although they knew it was unlikely.

  The bad blood between President Johnson and Bobby was shaping the political landscape in important ways. For Democrats, a unified LBJ-RFK ticket in 1964 would have been an act of healing, but the rift between the two men was too profound for either to offer, or accept, an olive branch. It grated on Bobby that in order to keep his brother’s agenda alive as a potential vice president, he needed to curry favor with Johnson. For his part, LBJ remained obsessed with Bobby, viewing him as an existential threat to his presidency.

  Mary headed out on the presidential campaign trail, covering Barry Goldwater in New Hampshire. Goldwater was challenged in the Republican primary by Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge, who, as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, sent rather murky signals about the seriousness of his bid.

  It was the first year that Mary had stayed at the Wayfarer Inn, just outside Manchester, New Hampshire. The inn soon became famous as the journalistic epicenter of New Hampshire presidential politics. Nothing in life made Mary happier than sitting at the Wayfarer’s bar swapping rumors and stories with her fellow political junkies. The Wayfarer also offered her a seemingly endless pool of potential bearers, and as columnist Jules Witcover described it, the Wayfarer was where Mary “made her own wishes yours.”

  Mary liked the gentlemanly Goldwater on a personal level, and her affection came through in her columns. “The Senator, handsome and square-jawed, photographs beautifully. His voice is pleasant. He never shouts or pounds the podium.” Mary sounded almost apologetic when she described his hawkishness, which she did frequently: “The Senator is not a bloodthirsty man. But he is a major general in the air force reserve and he cannot resist military shop-talk. . . . Thus when the Senator remarks off-handedly on coast-to-coast television on the possibility of blasting the leaves off the trees in the jungles of South Vietnam with nuclear devices, and people fairly jump out of their
skins, he is genuinely puzzled.” With Goldwater stumbling, President Johnson was content to mount a Rose Garden strategy, using the White House and its trappings to appear above the political fray.

  Goldwater’s most effective tactic in his somewhat hapless campaign was to capitalize on the growing wave of discontent among southern whites with the civil rights bill now nearing final passage. The South had long been the strongest of Democratic strongholds, but the civil rights bill, coupled with naked appeals from Republicans to disaffected whites, was realigning the American electoral map. Although Richard Nixon is usually described as the father of the Republican Party’s racially divisive “southern strategy,” the roots of this approach were very much evident in the 1964 presidential campaign.

  In July 1964, Mary traveled to San Francisco for the Republican convention. The entire event was an enthusiastic calamity, an unchecked wave of backlash politics directed at long-haired kids, civil rights protestors, and a changing American moral landscape. Republicans seemed oblivious to the image they were projecting into America’s living rooms. The convention was made famous by Goldwater’s acceptance speech, in which he declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” The crowd loved Goldwater’s take-no-prisoners approach, but the rest of America would not.

  By contrast, the Democratic convention promised only one major piece of drama: LBJ’s selection of a running mate. Mary hoped that either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy would get the nod. She described McCarthy as a “relaxed, handsome, 47-year-old intellectual” and a Church layman “identified with the progressive elements in the church.” It was not hard to understand the bond between Mary and Gene McCarthy. Both were tart-tongued, forward-thinking Catholics who loved the letters.

  Mary and McCarthy had grown close over the years, and the two talked a number of times in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. McCarthy and JFK had never liked each other, and McCarthy had once bragged, “Any way you measure it, I’m a better man than John Kennedy.” The Kennedy family still fumed over McCarthy’s strong push for Stevenson at the 1960 convention. Bobby once grumbled, “Gene McCarthy felt he should have been the first Catholic president just because he knew more St. Thomas Aquinas than my brother.” Bobby also jeered to a reporter—Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe—that McCarthy was not pure Irish, saying, “Gene’s mother was German. That’s why he’s so mean.” This led Nolan to retort, “What’s your excuse?” Bobby’s harsh words also help put in context Mary’s decision to downplay her own German heritage.

  “Gene really felt terrible about Jack Kennedy being killed,” Mary said. “I think he was very jealous of him and resentful of him, but I can remember him calling me up and saying, ‘Nothing’s fun anymore.’” Mary urged McCarthy to visit Bobby and offer his condolences.

  “But he might misunderstand,” replied McCarthy.

  “I don’t think he would,” Mary said. “He’s heartbroken.”

  McCarthy did not go.

  McCarthy just could not bring himself to be civil to JFK when he was alive. He shunned any rapprochement with Bobby after the president’s death, even though he expressed worries to Mary that his long-running rift with the Kennedys would hurt his chances to be selected vice president. Mary took matters into her own hands and invited both Gene and Bobby to a party at her house, hoping to broker a peace. Gene arrived fifteen minutes after Bobby had departed.

  On July 30, 1964, President Johnson and his aide Bill Moyers discussed potential vice presidential choices at the White House. Mary had spoken with Moyers a short time before, relaying to him some of Bobby’s concerns. Mary said that Bobby was “very, very upset about the possibility” of Gene McCarthy being offered the vice presidential slot. Johnson asked Moyers why, and Moyers replied that Bobby had told Mary, “If he wants a Catholic, he ought to take the number one Catholic in the country.”

  “Well, who in the hell gives him the right to appoint himself number one Catholic?” the president complained. “This guy has never done anything but cause all this backlash. That’s the only thing he’s got to his credit.” Moyers said that Mary was very opposed to the idea of excluding Bobby from consideration. “She was almost in tears,” he said. This led LBJ to grumble, “I don’t know why the younger generation can’t come to me.”

  The next day, Johnson announced that he would not pick any current cabinet member as vice president—thereby eliminating Bobby, who was still attorney general, from consideration. Not long after, Bobby announced that he was leaving the administration to run for a Senate seat in New York.

  If the vice presidential hunt was agonizing for Bobby, it was only marginally less so for McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s two finalists for the job. As Democrats headed to Atlantic City for their convention, Johnson put both Humphrey and McCarthy through a humiliating ordeal. In Mary’s words, the president behaved like an “implacable Oriental potentate, demanding always one more test of strength, one more proof of loyalty before he chose.”

  Johnson ultimately settled on Humphrey, the least worst choice for Kennedy loyalists, given the repeated slights of Bobby. The choice balanced the ticket between North and South, conservative and liberal. Gene McCarthy, an assiduous nurturer of grudges even in the best of times, was infuriated by Johnson’s very public degradation, privately calling Johnson “a sadistic son of a bitch.”

  In what was a bitter irony for President Johnson, Bobby Kennedy provided the convention’s most memorable moment. Johnson had made sure that Kennedy would not speak until after the nomination, and he would be the last major speaker of the convention. LBJ’s plan only ensured that Bobby had the last word. As Kennedy came to the podium to deliver his remarks, the delegates erupted in thunderous, cathartic applause that deafened the hall for almost a quarter of an hour. Bobby quoted Shakespeare in remembering his late brother: “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

  When Mary wrote, “A convention totally dominated by Lyndon B. Johnson had been captured by a Kennedy,” President Johnson, at the White House, complained of Bobby, “You know, he’s got all these Irish Catholic girls writing for him.” It was a clear reference to Mary.

  Shortly after the convention, Mary wrote to Blair Clark. Clark was winding up what had proved to be a brief stint as general manager and vice president of CBS News. While he had a knack for identifying on-air talent, his colleagues complained about his lack of managerial skills and a level of indecisiveness that was virtually debilitating (an opinion Mary surely shared). After being passed over to become president of the news division, Clark left CBS in 1964.

  He then became the associate publisher of the New York Post, a paper owned by Dorothy Schiff, a slightly eccentric figure from a wealthy banking family. Schiff and Clark shared a passion for Democratic politics, and Schiff was drawn to Clark. Clark saw the move to the Post as a stepping-stone to ultimately buying the paper. The two worked out an informal agreement: Clark would purchase a one-quarter share of the paper over a six-month trial period.

  Mary told Blair that he had not missed much at the convention, calling it a “heavy-handed, badly arranged drag.” She thought Bobby’s speech was the only redeeming moment: “When he quoted from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Do they teach Shakespeare at Harvard at all?) it was absolutely stabbing.” Mary noted that she was disappointed for her “dear, distinguished friend” Gene McCarthy, but observed, “Now that I see how Lyndon treats Hubert like a copy-boy, I am reconciled.”

  Mary offered Clark some tongue-in-cheek career advice: “I would say how nice it would be if you went back to broadcasting. Then I would know where you were and what you are doing,” she wrote. “We might even work out a code whereby you could send messages about your health and what you call your immortal soul by which I think you mean your heart, although I am never quite sure.”

 
Mary, who was now in her forties, was still very attractive. “She always downplayed herself as a sexy woman,” columnist Anthony Lewis commented, “but she was.” Her wardrobe was simple but elegant, and many of her female friends coveted her Chanel suits. She moved easily in circles of power, and her persona was that of a successful modern woman as comfortable discussing the poetry of Yeats as she was the primary returns from New York. Men wanted to light her cigarette or refill her tumbler of Scotch, and she was happy to oblige. Mary had a good number of romantic choices, but she was still smitten with Clark and thrilled that they remained engaged in an extended, secretive, and somewhat lopsided pas de deux.

  Mary noted in her letter that Walter Cronkite and several other reporters had held a birthday party for her at the convention, and one of her fellow journalists had even given her a ton of gravel for her garden. In what was clearly commentary on their relationship, Mary declared, “In horticulture, as in love, I am clumsy and doomed, but I blunder on.”

  Covering Goldwater in the Deep South was jarring for Mary. The Goldwater crowds were fevered, and the press itself was increasingly a focus of their anger. Crowds often booed the press bus, and Mary remembered older women coming up, pounding on the press bus windows, and shouting, “Tell the truth for a change.”

  LBJ had a tricky needle to thread in the South as he delivered a major address on civil rights at the Jung Hotel, in New Orleans, on October 9, 1964. Mary called it “the most moving speech of his campaign” as he made the case for civil rights from a southern perspective: “Robert E. Lee, a great son of the South, a great leader of the South—and I assume no modern day leader would question him or challenge him . . . told us to cast off our animosities, and raise our sons to be Americans.”

  The next day, Johnson, at his ranch in Texas, spoke with his press secretary, George Reedy, about the reaction to his speech.