by John Norris
Clark had told his fiancée about Mary and about Mary’s strong feelings for him, but he insisted that the relationship had never been consummated. Joanna was unconcerned, acknowledging with some whimsy that Clark had been a ladies’ man. (Mary and Joanna would meet only once in person after Joanna permanently relocated to the United States, at a party for John Lennon. Joanna was thrilled when she got a chance to dance with the former Beatle, but she also observed that Mary was “quite upset” and left the party early.)
Mary was shattered by the news that Clark was going to remarry and turned to Sister Editha for solace. Sister Editha, who was also friends with Clark, sent him a series of angry, reproachful letters. Although Mary was stunned by his declaration of love for another woman, she did not break off communication with him. She still hoped, seemingly against all reason, for his hand. Mary blamed herself to a degree, fretting that her unwillingness to step away from her work had made her unavailable. “Don’t let your career get in the way of your personal life,” she would confide to a young woman years later. “Sometimes you might have regrets that you should have married someone, but you let your career get in your way like I did.”
Hiding her pain, Mary turned to a series of profiles of the likely 1968 Republican presidential contenders. The GOP contest lacked the Shakespearean drama of the confrontation between Bobby and LBJ, but the reports of Richard Nixon’s permanent political demise had been premature. Nixon emerged from the debacle of the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign in good shape. He spent much of 1966 stumping and fundraising for other Republican candidates, leaving any number of politicians in his debt.
Nixon faced surprisingly soft competition in the primary, including George Romney and the newly elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan. But Romney was virtually disqualified after saying he had been “brainwashed” by the generals and Johnson administration officials into buying an overly rosy vision of the war, and Reagan’s views at the time were so extreme that they only boosted Nixon’s popularity with moderate Republicans. Just five years after the debacle of the “exit snarling” speech, Nixon enjoyed a virtually unopposed path to the Republican nomination.
But for Mary, the Republicans were irrelevant to the great political question of 1967: What Democrat would demand an end to the Vietnam War? Mary entered a period in her career in which the lines between her personal and professional life were not just blurred but obliterated.
During the first half of 1967, Bobby Kennedy remained torn about how best to express his position on Vietnam, worried that a public split with LBJ on the war would only divide the party and ensure a Republican in the White House. At the same time, liberals and many of his closest advisers were clamoring for him to speak out on the issue.
If Bobby was initially reluctant to criticize LBJ on Vietnam, Gene McCarthy relished his own emerging role as a bomb thrower for the cause of peace. In August 1967, McCarthy accused President Johnson of imposing a “foreign policy dictatorship” and began seriously contemplating a White House run. No one, including Mary, gave McCarthy a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding. That October, Mary spoke with a reporter who was convinced that McCarthy was going to challenge Johnson. She insisted that it was simply “too preposterous” to consider.
Mary interviewed Bobby on November 16, 1967, in the New Senate Office Building. The intense and uncomfortable discussion was remarkable for its candor and for Mary’s willingness to push Bobby in a way that no neutral journalist ever would. The two of them agreed that the Vietnam conflict had reached one of its last, best opportunities for negotiation. Mary goaded Bobby, saying that it was heartening McCarthy was going to run for president.
Bobby was annoyed. He asked if a McCarthy campaign would have any impact beyond making Mary feel better. How did she think McCarthy would campaign? Bobby answered his own question, observing that he thought McCarthy was lazy and indicating that he had gotten negative reports about McCarthy from his political networks in Detroit, Chicago, and Boston.
Kennedy thought McCarthy would have to “work his tail off” to make any impression at all on the public. Bobby had heard McCarthy in the Senate and thought he was a talented speaker, but he warned Mary that McCarthy’s penchant for offhand remarks could prove costly. “Does he realize how different it is running for president?”
Mary said that it was plain that neither McCarthy nor anyone on his staff had a clue how to run a presidential campaign. By this point she was one of a select few serving as a kitchen cabinet for McCarthy as he developed his plans. She had told McCarthy that she thought it did not make sense for him to compete in the upcoming New Hampshire primary.
Bobby disagreed with Mary’s assessment. He thought McCarthy should compete in New Hampshire but argued that he would need to avoid running a single-issue campaign. It was not enough to be against Vietnam; McCarthy had to present an alternative to Johnson’s entire approach.
Kennedy thought LBJ was vulnerable in New Hampshire. Governor John King was weak; the state party chairman, Bill Dunfey, was not overly fond of LBJ; and the Democratic organization in the state was “next to nothing.” Bobby thought McCarthy should stay away from university towns and disgruntled youth and focus more on small towns and more traditional Democratic constituencies. He thought that a policy based on a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam would be a disaster and said that McCarthy should say that he would consult the military but “not take their words as coming from the last anointed.”
Bobby’s own opinion of the war was pointed: “The administration keeps claiming we are winning, but it is obvious we are not.” He claimed that the war was fundamentally eroding America’s international prestige, with President Johnson unable to travel to Europe or most of Latin America for fear of widespread protests. Mary echoed the sentiment, observing that when she’d come back from her summer vacation in Italy, it was apparent that the president was limiting his domestic travel to military installations. “Do you realize our president can’t go anywhere except under armed guard?” Mary complained. “It is like South America or something.”
Kennedy maintained that McCarthy should “tell the people in the small towns of New Hampshire that he is worried about the cities, about the education of our children, about immorality, about violence.” Suddenly it sounded as though Bobby was no longer offering McCarthy advice but thinking of the campaign he could wage.
Mary told Bobby point-blank that he should run for president—that he must run for president. She warned him that his followers were disillusioned with his unwillingness to challenge Johnson on Vietnam, and said that traditional Kennedy voters would gravitate toward McCarthy “because he has the guts to take on the issue.” It is hard to imagine a sterner challenge to the ever-combative Bobby. Mary felt not only comfortable, but compelled, to give Bobby campaign advice in much stronger terms than she would have ever offered to his late brother.
Bobby insisted that he could not run and again expressed his fears that it would split the Democratic Party. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”
“Well,” Mary snorted, “I never thought the Kennedys thought that much for the party. You have your own party.”
“I couldn’t beat him,” insisted Bobby.
Mary was incredulous. “Are you telling me that people would vote for Lyndon Johnson instead of you?”
Bobby did not answer directly. “If you want to know, my mother and my sisters agree with you,” he said. Mary pointed out that even Gene McCarthy still hoped that Bobby would run. The majority of his friends wanted him to get in; the campaign professionals around him thought it unwise.
Kennedy fretted that the public would think he was running for president simply because he hated Johnson. But even as he resisted Mary’s continued entreaties, she could see the agony on his face. Finally, a frustrated Mary scribbled in her notebook, “Bobby is immobilized.”
“We had a difficult conversation about it,” Mary recalle
d. “I wish he had not hesitated. I think it all would have been different if he stood up earlier.”
Mary’s column the next day spelled out Bobby’s predicament. “The sudden, startling emergence of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota as an alternative candidate to President Johnson has made life difficult for Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. . . . In the face of repeated and almost frantic pleas from his advisers, Kennedy is holding firm to his contention that any defiance of the president on his part would be laid entirely to personal ambition.” Mary quoted Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” to make her case: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / to rust unburnish’d, not shine in use.” Small wonder that Bobby once said of her, “Mary is so gentle—until she gets behind a typewriter.”
John Seigenthaler remembered coming to Washington in 1967 for the annual Gridiron Club dinner. He chatted with Mary over drinks at the Jefferson Hotel. Seigenthaler, one of Bobby’s key political confidants, was one of those counseling against a presidential run. As soon as he sat down, Mary was all over him.
“Why is that you think he shouldn’t do this?” Mary demanded.
“Mary, it is crazy for him to do it.”
Mary’s voice rose with anger. “This war is a moral disgrace.”
Seigenthaler tried to lighten the mood, joking that Mary sounded like Peter Edelman, one of Bobby’s liberal antiwar friends.
Mary seethed. “Don’t you understand?”
Seigenthaler knew that he had crossed a line. “She would not be teased about this,” he said. “She knew where she was. She knew where the country was, and she knew Vietnam was a disaster.”
Mary asked Seigenthaler why he was not telling Bobby “what he needs to hear about the war, instead of telling him what you think he needs to hear about politics.” At a time when Bobby was struggling with the moral and political implications of a presidential run, Seigenthaler described Mary as being “like a little Irish mosquito buzzing around occasionally giving him a little nip, and it itches and he feels a little pain, and he was getting a lot of that from a lot of different places.”
Mary covered Gene McCarthy’s emergence as a presidential candidate with humor, skepticism, and a sense of relief that someone—anyone—was taking up the antiwar banner. Some of her columns on the candidate sounded shamelessly promotional, including when she wrote that the “handsome rebel’s” antiwar rhetoric had “fallen like thunder on the ears of the protestors.” Her description of McCarthy as “gentle, literate, and witty” left other reporters and political hands wondering if Mary was hopelessly in the tank for him. Nevertheless, with McCarthy’s political chances almost universally deemed to lie somewhere between slim and none, most seemed willing to forgive Mary such excesses.
In the days before McCarthy made his formal announcement, Mary made the rounds with some key political players. She had a long conversation with Bill Dunfey, the New Hampshire state Democratic chairman. Dunfey felt that Johnson, although he had the state party machinery behind him, had made a key strategic error. Johnson was not on the primary ballot but was pushing for a strong write-in. Dunfey noted that JFK had gotten 43,000 write-in votes in 1960, and LBJ had managed only 29,000 in 1964—just four months after Kennedy’s assassination. Anything below that 29,000-vote level would be seen as a disappointment for LBJ. Dunfey’s bottom line for McCarthy in New Hampshire: “He hasn’t got a damned thing to lose.” Mary was encouraged but pressured Dunfey to do everything he could to get Bobby to jump in the race.
Several days later, Mary spoke with her friend Kenny O’Donnell, a longtime Kennedy loyalist. O’Donnell said that he had always been on friendly terms with McCarthy but would not serve as his campaign manager. Mary was trying to find seasoned political hands who might rally to the McCarthy cause while she was still trying to push Bobby into the race. O’Donnell said he thought McCarthy “had a lot of guts” and could potentially do well in New Hampshire, but he did not want to look like yet another former Kennedy hand attacking President Johnson. O’Donnell had a bleak view of the prospects for victory in Vietnam and said that, outside of the military, he could not think of anyone in government who supported the war. Mary’s conversations led her to conclude that Bobby was simultaneously pleased that McCarthy was willing to take on Johnson and convinced that he would be “ground to powder” by the president’s machine.
On November 30, 1967, Eugene McCarthy formally announced his presidential candidacy in the Senate Caucus Room, saying that President Johnson had set no limits on the price that he would pay for military victory in Vietnam. McCarthy admitted that his odds were sufficiently long, that it was difficult for many people to support him by light of day. When a reporter asked if he believed that the United States should stop communism, he replied tartly: “Yes, I do. And South Vietnam is the worst possible place to try.”
When a journalist asked when he’d decided to run for president, McCarthy replied, “Well, it was nothing like St. Paul being knocked off his horse, I can tell you that. . . . I waited a decent period of time for someone else to do it.” Mary’s column the next day noted that most Democratic politicians were “breaking all track records in their flight” from McCarthy. “His skilled and spirited debut may not cause any tremors at the White House, where Robert Kennedy is viewed as the real enemy,” Mary wrote. “But if the country is susceptible to wit and style reminiscent of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, McCarthy may have to be taken more seriously than anyone—including McCarthy himself—takes him now.”
In a sign of exactly how lightly McCarthy was taking his campaign, he declared to Mary and several other friends over drinks that if he won the nomination, he would choose Tommy Noyes from the Star as his running mate. Both McCarthy and Noyes agreed the essential role for a vice president was to do absolutely nothing.
• • •
In December 1967, Richard Nixon came to an owners’ lunch at the Star. It was a small gathering, and Haynes Johnson attended, along with Mary. Nixon had not formally announced that he was running, but it was obvious that he was. Nixon picked at his food and then pushed it away. “I’m in training,” he said with a tight smile. “Mary would ask these little, barbed questions, but they were reporters’ questions,” remembered Johnson, as Mary and Nixon continued to build a reservoir of mutual animosity. Johnson said the lunch meeting was “memorable beyond belief” in illuminating Nixon’s personality: “He was going to do anything he could to get Mary if he had the power to do it, because Mary, and the Marys of the world, were a threat.”
Mary tried as much as anyone to make Gene McCarthy’s campaign credible. She was particularly eager to enlist Blair Clark to the cause, and Clark later acknowledged that Mary was “instrumental” in bringing him aboard the McCarthy campaign. Clark had gotten to know McCarthy casually in 1967, because they were mutual friends with the poet Robert Lowell, and McCarthy had long been a slightly frustrated poet himself. Shortly before McCarthy announced his bid, and after prodding by Mary, Clark wrote to McCarthy from London, saying that he hoped he would run and offering his services if he did.
Clark heard back from McCarthy shortly before he returned to the States in early December. Upon arriving in New York, he got hold of Teddy White, another old friend, who informed him that McCarthy was headed to Chicago for a press conference and speech. Clark decided to accompany White to Chicago. He and Mary met up almost immediately upon his arrival. Despite his still pending remarriage, it felt a bit like old times for the two.
Clark again offered his services to McCarthy, who asked him to travel to Massachusetts to get a handle on the primary in that state. Clark did, and reported back, unsurprisingly, that most of the party leadership remained beholden to the Kennedys.
McCarthy asked Blair Clark to become his campaign chairman.
Clark said he was not much of a chairman type.
“Fine,” McCarthy responded. “Call yourself whatever you want.”
C
lark suggested that McCarthy might be better served by having someone who had actually run a national campaign in such a role, but he offered to fill in until McCarthy could find a more seasoned hand. With that, McCarthy made Clark his presidential campaign manager—the first of many signs that McCarthy didn’t care much about titles, experience, or conventional wisdom when it came to running for president.
Clark quickly learned that McCarthy cared little for veteran political operatives, saying he “never even looked for one; didn’t want one.”
Blair Clark would lead Eugene McCarthy’s charge against President Johnson and the Vietnam War. Mary was delighted. She would be by their side.
CHAPTER FIVE
Splendid, Doomed Lives
Much has rightly been made of the role of young people in 1968 as they took to the streets. This was the beginning of campus sit-ins, the protest anthems of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and the rising militancy of groups like the Black Panthers. But what is more easily overlooked is the revolution that took place within the establishment against Vietnam. People like Mary McGrory, Blair Clark, and Gene McCarthy, were not wild-eyed radicals. They were card-carrying members of the East Coast elite. All rejected the imperial folly of Vietnam, and all were willing to challenge the traditional political order in doing so.
By any measure of journalistic objectivity, Mary should have recused herself from covering the 1968 campaign. She had lobbied Bobby Kennedy to get into the race. She and Gene McCarthy were close friends and drinking buddies. She’d recruited a man she was in love with, Blair Clark, to sign on as McCarthy’s campaign manager. These were not garden-variety conflicts of interest.
By early January 1968, Gene McCarthy had announced that he intended to compete in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, and Mary had tough words in her column for Bobby Kennedy as he remained on the sidelines: “The stormer of rapids and mountains, the bold invader of hostile states and continents, has been cast in the role of Hamlet, not daring to do what he most wants to do.”