by John Norris
The situation between Mary and Bobby came to a head at the end of January 1968. At a routine breakfast with reporters, Bobby declared that he would not run against LBJ “under any foreseeable circumstances.” Yet at almost that exact moment, nine thousand miles away, the Vietcong launched a massive, coordinated attack coinciding with the lunar new year: the Tet Offensive. In Saigon, Vietcong assaulted the airport and the presidential palace and occupied the U.S. embassy grounds for eight hours before being repulsed.
The scale and ambition of the Tet Offensive shocked the American public. Just two months before, American commander General William Westmoreland had declared that the North Vietnamese were “unable to mount a major offensive” and that the end of the war was in view.
Although the U.S. military soon turned back the attack, Bobby’s pronouncement could not have been more ill-timed. Because he hadn’t seen the news of the Tet Offensive come across the wires, the stories that came out after his press briefing made it sound as though Bobby was making his declaration to stay out of the race despite the Tet Offensive.
Mary was enraged when she saw Bobby’s statement, seeing it as a profound betrayal of the antiwar cause. She sent Bobby a devastatingly blunt telegram: “St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland.” Few male reporters in America had the nerve to challenge Bobby so directly. “She was just furious,” recalled Bobby’s confidant Peter Edelman, “and what a way to say it.”
Journalist Rowland Evans remembered speaking with Bobby after he received the telegram, and he marveled at how harshly Mary seemed to have turned on Bobby. Bobby patiently explained to Evans that this was an Irish feud; the two would work it out; an outsider could not understand.
With the situation increasingly unsettled, Mary headed to her favorite presidential proving ground: New Hampshire.
On February 2, Richard Nixon officially announced his candidacy at the Manchester Holiday Inn, joking, “Gentlemen, this is not my last press conference.” Nixon never liked reporters, but he did understand the media. He ran a shrewd, if cynical, press operation in 1968 and after by increasingly cutting the national press out of events and directing his message through the relative safety of scripted question-and-answer sessions filmed in studios. He was able to project an aura of openness with none of its perils. Little more than two weeks later, George Romney officially bowed out of the Republican race, leaving Nixon with only token resistance in the primary from Reagan and Rockefeller. Nixon made his position on Vietnam gauzy enough to keep both hawks and doves convinced he was on their side.
While Mary never relented in her suspicion of Nixon, she credited him with mounting a remarkable comeback and described his campaign operation in New Hampshire as “a model of organizational smoothness and cordiality.”
If Nixon’s campaign was orderly and buttoned down, Gene McCarthy’s was anything but. Richard Goodwin, who had been a speechwriter for both JFK and LBJ, described the scene when he joined the McCarthy campaign: “There wasn’t a single reporter, no speechwriter, no secretaries, not even a typewriter.” Yet in the wake of the Tet Offensive, the McCarthy campaign began to snowball.
Mary remembered first arriving at McCarthy headquarters, in Concord, a short time later: “It was in the back of the building. I went in and it was total, one thousand percent activity. I hadn’t seen so many people in a political headquarters since I could remember. It was just so immense you figured it had to make a difference.”
Young people from all over the country poured into New Hampshire to get behind the McCarthy campaign, attracting a remarkable array of talented young organizers and activists. As Mary said, it was as if McCarthy had “pressed the button on an alarm bell and the entire college population of the United States rose up to help him.” Mary helped the “kids” out with spending money and kidded that McCarthy’s was the first campaign in history where haircuts were a legitimate campaign expense.
Blair Clark argued that it was Mary “who put these young campaigners on the front pages of the nation.” She wrote charming columns about Ph.D.s from Harvard and MIT translating news releases into French for the French Canadians, respectfully debating the complexities of the war with puzzled housewives, and subsisting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as they slept on the floors of church basements.
Mary seemed to recognize that she had strayed into dangerous territory. “Readers complained about a lack of objectivity,” she would observe. “They were probably right. It’s a little hard to keep your head with 21-year-old press aides who tell you that you’re their substitute mother figure. Mass solicitude from a generation that hasn’t been speaking to anyone over 30 can be pretty undoing.”
In an oral history, Mary acknowledged that she probably hadn’t applied the same standards to McCarthy she would have applied to anyone else. Certainly, the lines on any campaign are blurrier than either reporters or candidates would like to admit, and this sort of insider political trading is far from a hanging offense in Washington journalism. Genuine objectivity is often all but unrecognizable in the stew of Washington politics and personal relationships.
At other times, Mary was notably defensive about her behind-the-scenes role on the McCarthy campaign. Richard Stout of Newsweek, while working on a book about the campaign several years later, shared with Mary a draft chapter detailing McCarthy’s messy management style: “McGrory, as a friend of Clark and McCarthy, found herself in the unavoidable position of listener and sometimes adviser who, to many on the staff, seemed as much a campaign manager as anyone else.”
Mary took exception. “Nothing, dear Dick, could be further off the mark,” she wrote. “Like every reporter I have ever met, I have the campaign manager streak in me, but early on, I was disqualified as a strategist in the McCarthy camp. When I was first informed the senator would make the run, I was not only disbelieving, but embarrassed. Almost immediately, I distinguished myself further by expressing the absolute certainty that entrance into the New Hampshire primary would be fatal.” Mary noted that she had written critical stories about the campaign, and she closed with something of a plea: “I hope you will find some support for my contention that while personally involved to the extent of being a friend of the principals, I managed some professional objectivity.”
Stout was unconvinced, and Mary was less than candid when it came to the extent of her involvement. If there is any doubt about Mary’s influence with McCarthy, Blair Clark recalled a day when Marty Peretz, one of the campaign’s leading donors, complained about his lack of access to the candidate and Clark responded, “You’ve seen Gene a lot; you know that nobody has access to Gene. Possibly Mary McGrory as an old friend and fellow Catholic. You and I aren’t Catholics.”
The dynamism of the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire was all the more remarkable given McCarthy’s diffidence as a candidate. His speeches tended to be scholarly ruminations rather than rousing calls to action, he did not like being on the stump, hated raising money or dealing with local politicians, and, as Blair Clark soon realized, “He didn’t want a campaign.” Once, in the middle of shaking hands in a crowd, McCarthy blurted out, “This is sort of a strange ritual.”
Traveling back and forth to Washington, Mary attended cocktail parties where politicians lectured her that the young people flooding into New Hampshire were alienating good, stolid, traditional New Hampshire voters. Flying back up to New Hampshire, Mary sat down with Bill Dunfey, eager to see what he thought.
“Mary, old people like young people,” Dunfey replied, “and they like having them come to their door.”
Mary took umbrage that McCarthy’s campaign was still being treated as a lark by most Washington journalists, many of whom shared Bobby’s opinion that McCarthy lacked money, fire, and enough foreign policy expertise to be credible. She lamented to McCarthy that his challenge to Johnson had become “the biggest political joke in the country.” The candidate was unperturbed. He reassured Mary in th
e language of his early years as an amateur boxer: “You fight from a low crouch. You wait for events. You let it come to you.”
In her columns, Mary continued to draw the distinction between McCarthy and Bobby in bright lines. “McCarthy, one of the senate’s thinkers, who merely wants to legitimize dissent, is tramping through the provinces making trouble for Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy, one of the world’s doers, is sitting morosely on the sidelines,” she wrote. “Both men are suffering excoriating criticism: McCarthy for doing the right thing badly and Kennedy for doing nothing.”
Yet events continued to break against President Lyndon Johnson. In an unusually personal aside at the end of the CBS Evening News broadcast on February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite announced to America his view that “the bloody experience of Vietnam” would almost certainly end in a stalemate. At the White House, Johnson reacted: “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
On the Sunday before the primary in early March, Mary came out of the Wayfarer and grabbed a copy of the morning paper. The headline announced that General Westmoreland was requesting another 210,000 American troops for Vietnam. The news only further galvanized the McCarthy forces. On the final weekend of the race, the campaign turned away 2,500 new volunteers because it was inundated with help.
The day of the primary, Mary spoke again with Bill Dunfey. “I have seen something I never saw before,” he shared. “I drove across the state, and at every crossroads, I saw young people standing with literature outside polling places, holding the flag.” Most pollsters thought McCarthy wouldn’t capture more than 10 percent of the vote, but Dunfey thought he would do better than expected, potentially pulling up to a third of Democrats.
Mary watched the returns come in at McCarthy’s cottage at the Wayfarer Inn, along with Abigail McCarthy, Blair Clark, and several others. McCarthy did not win the primary, but he shocked the world by capturing 42 percent of the vote, to Johnson’s 49 percent. At campaign headquarters, college students chanted, “On to Wisconsin,” the next primary. “I think I can get the nomination,” declared McCarthy. For Mary, New Hampshire was his finest hour, a moment when the senator “knocked the establishment right out of the saddle.”
When a reporter asked McCarthy if he had spoken with Bobby Kennedy after the results, he said no but added that he had enjoyed a fine discussion with the poet Robert Lowell.
The morning after the primary, McCarthy called the Washington Star offices. He demanded to speak with Tommy Noyes, having him pulled out of an editorial meeting. McCarthy then reiterated his strict instructions to Noyes that when he occupied the White House, with Noyes as his vice president, Noyes was “to put his feet on the desk and never be heard from again.”
Mary’s column on the New Hampshire fallout cited Yeats: “All is changed; changed utterly.” McCarthy was a sudden, unexpected political star. For Mary, New Hampshire in 1968 always stood as a brief, exemplary moment when youth, energy, and faith had changed American politics. She could never have imagined the horrors to follow.
Less than ten hours after McCarthy’s breakthrough in New Hampshire, Bobby indicated to reporters that he was going to jump into the race, and an official announcement came several days later. McCarthy loyalists were livid, particularly after Kennedy’s Shermanesque statement that he wouldn’t run. Mary seethed, feeling that McCarthy had taken all the risks to soften the race for Kennedy’s entry, and her resulting column was scalding. “Kennedy thinks that American youth belongs to him, perhaps as the bequest of his brother. Seeing the romance flower between them and McCarthy, he moved with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman to break it up.” She described the Kennedy family as believing it possessed the right of eminent domain in American politics.
John Seigenthaler put it in plain terms: “She was pissed off at Bob,” and she lashed into Bobby in ways that she never would have with JFK. But like all good Irish feuds, the anger flowed in both directions, and the Kennedy clan was angered that Mary was so full-throated in her support for McCarthy, given his obvious flaws. Mary’s relationship with the Kennedys was often rockier than it was perceived by the outside world, where she was often viewed as reflexively pro-Kennedy. Interestingly, Ethel Kennedy, who was known to lash out at her husband’s critics, maintained a good relationship with Mary despite the trying circumstances.
Ted Sorensen, Jack Kennedy’s speechwriter, nicely framed Mary’s dilemma with Bobby now in the race: “Poor Mary. Two Irish Catholics seeking the Democratic nomination.”
Mary understood that the unconventional McCarthy campaign was largely unintelligible to the highly organized Kennedy camp. And as close as Mary was to McCarthy, she was honest about his deficiencies as a politician: “Detail bores him. He has a minute staff, and his tactics, apart from the issue, seem based largely on the lapses of the other side, which have been numerous.” Mary described McCarthy as possessing only two advantages: “He has been smarter and braver.”
But she only hinted in her writing at a personal relationship that was also unfolding. After one campaign stop in March 1968, Mary carefully filed away a tourist certificate she had collected with McCarthy. It declared that McCarthy was an “Admiral of Lake Superior” for having completed the drive around the Great Lake on “the most scenic highway in America.” On the back, McCarthy had scrawled a poem for Mary:
There in the savage orange of autumn tamarack,
its rusted spikes reeling the slanted last of the northern day,
down into dark root waters,
among the least trees in the least land,
In the darkening death camp of the tribe of trees,
I saw you,
green-gold willow arched and graced among spines and angled limbs,
captive,
queen,
all lost light out of the smothering swamps,
you beam back,
redeemed.
Mary’s column the next day made no mention of captive queens or green-gold willows, but she hinted at a bit of magic, describing his day of campaigning as one that made “politics seem like an innocent and beguiling business.” She also noted, without mentioning the poem, that McCarthy “spoke of the tamarack tree, his current favorite political symbol,” as he made his way through the northern forests.
There has long been speculation that Mary and the unhappily married McCarthy were romantically involved. The vehemence with which several of Mary’s closest friends decline to discuss the issue gives further credence to the claim. Dominic Sandbrook, who wrote a well-regarded biography of McCarthy, noted, “I think it’s very plausible that they had a romantic relationship—I’m guessing sometime between 1967 and 1969. She was certainly smitten with him for a time.” Gwen Gibson, a female reporter who had traveled with Mary, maintained that a McGrory-McCarthy affair “was pretty much accepted as fact around Washington in those days.”
Ben Bradlee concurred. “I think she did love Gene McCarthy, whether it was physical love or not.” But Bradlee did not think much of the object of Mary’s crush. “He was such a pain in the ass. McCarthy, he was hard to stay in love with.”
The rumors of liaisons between Mary and McCarthy floated around the campaign as well. Student leader David Mixner, who would become a close friend of Mary’s, said, “I don’t know if there was ever a physical relationship, but it was a love story. She adored him, and he adored her.” Like others, Mary’s friend Phil Gailey had heard word of a Mary-Gene romance through the grapevine. “But what the hell, they were two adults, who had clearly had one thing in common: they hated the war in Vietnam and wanted the war to stop.”
McCarthy’s affections were not reserved for Mary, and Blair Clark was forced to clean up the mess from the candidate’s increasingly brazen dalliances during the campaign. “It got to be known during the campaign that Gene had a girlfriend,” Clark said, referring to Marya McLaughlin,
who had worked for Clark at CBS and was the network’s first on-screen female reporter. In February 1968, Clark flew to Boston in the middle of the night to tell McCarthy that rumors of the affair were all over Washington, including at the Washington Post, after he’d been seen emerging from McLaughlin’s apartment at three in the morning. McCarthy’s relationship with his wife was collapsing, and the two would split by the end of the year, although they would remain married—and living apart—for the rest of their lives.
The 1968 campaign was a time of enormous emotional turmoil for Mary. She still yearned to be with Blair Clark, and one suspects that her romance with McCarthy was motivated in part by a desire to spite Clark. Mary’s niece Polly was skeptical that Mary’s romance with McCarthy ever amounted to more than a fling, because “she was still in love with Blair.”
Torn between the two men and caught up in a quixotic effort to end the agony of the Vietnam War, Mary was wound tight. Both Clark and McCarthy were dashing, charming when they wanted to be, and immensely self-absorbed. One suspects that Mary was attracted to them in part because she knew the relationships would never work—and a relationship that couldn’t work was no threat to her career or to the world she had created for herself. She seemed intent on softly sabotaging her chances for lasting love.
But if Mary’s emotional state was volatile in 1968, the political landscape was even more so.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson dropped a political bombshell when he announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Mary was in a college auditorium with the McCarthy campaign in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when the news came. In three months, McCarthy had gone from a laughingstock to essentially unseating a sitting president. Haynes Johnson remembered chatting with Mary in her hotel room later that evening as she sat with her covers pulled up to her chin, saying, “Dear boy, come let’s talk about it.” The traditional political order was unraveling before their very eyes.