Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  A stream of supporters appeared in the hotel room, wiping tear gas from their eyes. The McCarthy campaign had set up a room on the fifteenth floor of the hotel to provide first aid to bloodied protestors, and McCarthy, Mary, and several others went there to assess the situation. They met a young medical student who had been trying to help with the wounded but had been beaten by police for his efforts. His white smock was blood-spattered, his head bandaged.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” the med student said as McCarthy and Mary entered. “Welcome to the Democratic Party of Chicago.”

  McCarthy and Mary returned to the suite on the twenty-third floor.

  Humphrey’s eventual acceptance speech was impossible. He had to acknowledge the violence raging all around without further antagonizing either the police or the demonstrators. He had to thank President Johnson for his support while simultaneously appealing to Kennedy and McCarthy loyalists. He had to pay tribute to Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy while sounding optimistic. He could neither fully defend nor denounce a war in Southeast Asia that was tearing apart the country.

  Much of Humphrey’s speech was greeted with derisive jeers at the McCarthy headquarters. Many of the young volunteers donned black armbands. The end of any losing campaign is difficult, but this was calamitous. Mary described the convention as “a total, complete, utter nightmare.”

  With the nomination settled, young McCarthy staffers played bridge on the fifteenth floor. A group of police burst into the room, shouting that the students were being evicted from the hotel for throwing debris down on the national guardsmen, which they had not done. When one of the young staffers tried to retrieve his possessions, a policeman lunged and fractured his skull with a nightstick. The frightened and bloody students were herded into the elevator. By this point McCarthy and Mary had been told what was taking place, and they appeared in the lobby.

  It was half past five in the morning. McCarthy quietly asked the policemen who was in charge. No one was willing to come forward. He instructed his volunteers to return to their rooms. The Chicago convention was over.

  Mary’s reporting from the convention touched off a firestorm at the Star. When editors reviewed Mary’s report of McCarthy’s volunteers being assaulted, they fiercely debated the prominence they should give the story. One of them, Burt Hoffman, resigned in disgust as other editors tried to bury the story. He was asked to return after tempers cooled.

  Star readers had every right to be confused by the paper’s coverage from Chicago. In one of her columns, Mary argued that a Boy Scout troop could have handled the protestors. Yet almost side by side with her accounts of police brutality was a story by Betty Beale regaling readers with accounts of rampaging yippies. A column by James J. Kilpatrick waxed poetic about the heroic patience of the Chicago police. As a Star reader complained, “One wonders if they were in the same city.”

  The focus shifted to the race between Humphrey and Nixon. Al Spivak, who had covered the Kefauver campaign with Mary and considered her a friend, turned in his press pass to become Humphrey’s public affairs director. Mary had been highly critical of Humphrey, and Spivak arranged a lunch with her at Sans Souci, one of Washington’s most fashionable restaurants at the time, in an effort to sway her opinion.

  At lunch in the airy green-and-gold dining room, Spivak argued that no matter how negligent Mary might have felt Humphrey had been in not opposing LBJ on the war, Nixon was a far worse alternative. To Spivak’s considerable frustration, Mary kept repeating the same phrase: “It is the war, dear boy. It is the war.” The two finished lunch, and Spivak did not bother trying to contact Mary again. Their relationship was one more casualty of 1968.

  Humphrey, who lagged behind Nixon in the polls, was unable to gain traction until late October, when he finally distanced himself from Johnson’s Vietnam policy. A deeply embittered Gene McCarthy finally offered what passed for an endorsement, and many Humphrey partisans blamed McCarthy for their difficulties in bringing home Democratic votes. President Johnson announced a bombing pause, and Humphrey began to rise in the polls.

  In the end, it was not enough. Nixon won the presidency, in a race that was surprisingly close, given Chicago, the war, and the vituperative Democratic infighting.

  “Many Democrats feel remorse when they look back to 1968 and realize that by their fury with Humphrey over the Vietnam War, they let Richard Nixon come to office,” Mary wrote years later, likely including herself in that group.

  Mary was deeply disappointed that young people had not turned out to vote in larger numbers. “They quit in the most meaningful way,” Mary disparaged. “I hate that word, but it is the only one that comes to mind.” Yet it was unfair to blame the youth for lacking enthusiasm about choosing between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon.

  No figure was more of a disappointment than Gene McCarthy. Mary wrote that many Americans viewed him as “a self-righteous spoiler who would not make the difference in politics, either for himself or, when the time came, for the vice president.” McCarthy subsequently ran for president in 1972, as a Democrat, and in 1976, as an independent. Neither effort was particularly serious, and Mary found the bids embarrassing.

  Mary wrote to a friend, “Someday someone will figure out why Gene dropped out so completely after the New Hampshire triumph and turned sour on the kids. I think it was his Kennedy fixation, but I’m not sure. I run into him now and again. He lives in the country and recites a lot of Yeats. He could have done so much more.” Whatever sense of romance she had shared with McCarthy was dead—although she would always cherish the days of the New Hampshire insurrection.

  Disenchanted with McCarthy, Mary’s heart bent back toward Blair Clark, as futile as that may have been. Clark spent a great deal of time with Mary, perhaps in part because he knew how McCarthy had wounded her. Sister Editha sharply disapproved of Mary’s lingering feelings for Blair, writing to her, “I cannot understand Blair, he is indeed aggravating—I think he is spoiled, and I think you have done a lot of it.” Every time Mary and Clark pulled closer, Clark again retreated.

  Sister Editha wrote to Clark on Christmas Eve 1968: “You are not helping Mary and Mary cannot help you—so I wish you would not phone her, write her, or see her. God put you here to do a certain work for him—find out what it is and do it.” Editha sent Mary a copy of the letter, along with a short note: “I will always remember him in my prayers, but that is all—he needs them. I tell you, I had no idea he was so selfish, conceited, unkind, so insincere, and ungrateful. He is no martyr. How he could treat you as he has is beyond me.”

  Mary and Clark settled into an uneasy détente. He married his second wife, and he and Mary saw each other from time to time.

  Mary retreated substantially from romance. Chagrined and hurt, she buried herself in her work, helping at St. Ann’s, and entertaining. More than ever before, the Star served as Mary’s substitute family and lover. As she said of the Star, “I breathe better there. I like the air, and the gossip, and the irreverence.” She added, “I would have loved to be a housewife, but it just never happened that way. I want to drop dead in the newsroom.”

  When Mary was asked by interviewers, always in very delicate terms, about her romantic life, she insisted that she had not made a conscious decision to avoid marriage, saying, “The right man never asked.” For Mary, that man was Blair Clark. Her friend Phil Gailey put it all in perspective. “She had a great life. She had interesting friends, and she did interesting things. She had fun every day. Hell, I don’t think she missed anything. I don’t think she would have traded it for marriage and a cottage and a white picket fence. What she had was incredible, and she knew it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nixon

  On an overcast Monday in January 1969, Richard Milhous Nixon was sworn in as the 37th president of the United States. His speech was deliberately subdued and largely free of soaring rhetoric as he talked of “small, splendid eff
orts” that improved neighborhoods.

  Shortly after the inauguration, Mary used her column to plead with the new president to do something about the wave of crime that had descended on Washington and other major cities. She urged him to walk around the city after dark and even proffered a personal invitation: “Please come by my place any time. I think you will find the men of Precinct Eight speak well of my cheesecake, having sampled it in the course of investigations following four break-ins.”

  Mary’s cheesecake recipe made an unexpected star turn during Nixon’s first press conference. He explained that the Secret Service had warned him about crime when he had suggested going for a walk just the day before. “I had read Mary McGrory’s column and wanted to try her cheesecake,” Nixon added. “But I find, of course, that taking a walk here in the District of Columbia, and particularly in the evening hours, is now a very serious problem, as it is in some other major cities.”

  The Star made the most of Nixon’s cheesecake mention, suggesting that “Mary McGrory’s cheesecake has taken over the title as ‘World’s Most Famous’” and reprinting her recipe. Mary bemoaned the sudden attention, writing to a friend, “After a blameless life, I have become a straight man for Richard Nixon. What a fate!”

  Mary hoped that the press and Nixon might achieve a lasting cease-fire, but it was not to be. Nixon quickly embraced a strategy calculated to paint the media as part of the problem. Vice President Spiro Agnew enthusiastically took to the offensive in 1969, lambasting “the effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” as he argued that reporters were inherently biased.

  Nixon’s emphasis on law and order, coupled with his attacks on the press, fit nicely with his broader narrative that a “silent majority” of Americans supported him on Vietnam and other issues. It was also an easy way for Nixon to implicitly make the case that someone like Mary, a reporter who was vehemently opposed to Vietnam, was somehow un-American. For the first time since the Joe McCarthy era, Mary began receiving heavy-breathing phone calls at two in the morning and anonymous messages that she was “mentally sick and should leave the country.” With her column appearing in more than fifty papers around the country, Mary’s national exposure translated into volumes of hate mail.

  It’s no surprise that her columns took on a sharper edge after 1968. She was incredibly frustrated with Vietnam, still mourning the losses of the previous year, and saddened by her personal life. Nixon, 1968, Vietnam, student unrest, failed romances with Blair Clark and Eugene McCarthy—all were corrosive. The poetry was not lost from Mary’s style, but a certain gentleness was.

  In March 1969, Mary waded into the Vietnam debate in an unusually direct way, brokering a parley between a handful of young war protestors and Nixon’s chief of staff, John Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman later complained that Mary was a reporter who believed it was her karmic duty to “change the course of events by becoming personally involved.”

  Ehrlichman and Mary had discussed the antiwar demonstrations, and she’d suggested that he might benefit from meeting some of the young antiwar organizers she had gotten to know from the McCarthy campaign. To her surprise, Ehrlichman agreed, and Mary arranged a lunch for him at her apartment along with prominent young activists Sam Brown, David Mixner, and John O’Sullivan.

  When Mixner, Brown, and O’Sullivan walked through Mary’s door that Saturday afternoon, dressed in their best suits, there was an immediate problem. Mary took a look at Brown’s long, shaggy hair and declared, “No, no, no, this won’t do.”

  Thinking Mary was kidding, Brown laughed. Then, shooting his friends a panicked look as he realized she was not, he insisted that his hair was fine.

  “Sam, this meeting is about the war, not your hair,” Mary insisted. “I won’t have it become an issue.”

  Mary led Brown into her bedroom, removed his jacket, draped a towel over his shoulders, and started cutting his hair. “Sam looked stricken,” Mixner recalled. “The only reason he was saved from a crew cut was the ringing doorbell.”

  Impressions of the meeting differed sharply. Although the conversation over meatloaf and cheesecake began politely, the mood soured when the discussion of Vietnam began in earnest. Ehrlichman thought Mary behaved as if she were a teacher and the activists were her star pupils. He bridled at the young men’s insistence that the administration’s stubbornness on Vietnam left them no alternative but to “make foreign policy in the streets.” He was also struck by how little respect the young men and Mary had for Gene McCarthy, despite having championed his campaign.

  Sam Brown argued that campus unrest would continue until Nixon shifted his position on the war. Ehrlichman countered that the administration would not be intimidated by long-haired troublemakers and would take all necessary measures to prevent civil disturbances.

  “Sir,” David Mixner interjected, “there are thousands of us ready to be arrested because we will not serve in this war.”

  Leaning forward, Ehrlichman pronounced, “You will go!”

  John O’Sullivan responded, “Never!”

  Anger rising, Ehrlichman replied, “Then we will put you all in jail for a long time.”

  “There aren’t enough jails to hold us all,” Brown shouted back.

  Then, in a moment that bordered on the surreal, Ehrlichman pointed his finger at each of the three young men in turn and feigned a German accent: “Then we will build the walls of our stockades higher and higher.”

  Mary was alarmed. “John, you can’t mean that,” she said to Ehrlichman. “That is uncalled for in this home. These are substantive people who believe deeply in peace. I will not have my guests threatened with prison.”

  The lunch discussion broke up not long after. After Mary closed the door behind Ehrlichman, Brown looked at her and raised his palms. “And for that I cut my hair?”

  While the nation marveled at Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk on the moon in July 1969 and was slightly stunned by the enormous Woodstock music festival just a month later, Mary continued to focus her columns on the growing Vietnam protests. She treated the massive Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam march on Washington, in mid-November 1969—organized by Brown, Mixner, and others—as a cause célèbre. More than half a million people clogged the streets of D.C. on a brisk, clear day. The scruffy rebels whom Mary had welcomed into her living room had pulled off the largest antiwar protest in American history.

  Mary appeared at the organizers’ headquarters on the day of the moratorium carrying a picnic basket. She had brought David Mixner’s favorite meatloaf. “I just brought food for my boys,” she purred as she tried to work her way past a staffer barring journalists from entering. The other reporters shouted, “Don’t let her in,” but Mary was granted entrée. As she chatted with Mixner and others, the moratorium’s press officer, Marylouise Oates, interrupted. “David, may I see you for a minute?”

  Oates lit into Mixner as soon as they were in the hall: “Just what in the hell am I supposed to tell the other reporters now that you’ve let Mary inside? They’re furious and I have to deal with them.”

  “But she brought us lunch,” Mixner said in halfhearted defense.

  “Lunch, hell!” Oates said. “She just got an exclusive. Now I have to go in there and get her and I’ll be the bad apple in her eyes.”

  Oates asked Mary to leave, and Mary never forgave her for the transgression.

  Mary always made it hard for people to draw clear lines. “She was the Irish mother,” Mixner explained. “She would come show up with baskets of food. Sometimes they were baskets of food taking care of ‘her kids,’ as she called them, and other times it was a great way to get by other reporters and get good stories. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.”

  In any case, the young people loved Mary because of her vocal opposition to the war, and her affection for youth was genuine. She always believed that youthful idealism could cha
nge the world—even after the sharp disappointments of the previous year. For Mary, the success of the moratorium was restorative. “They had no idea what they had wrought,” she wrote of the moratorium participants. “What they carried home from the bone-chilling day was a memory of community, of a single purpose, not spoken, but sung, from the platform.”

  In late 1969, Mary attended a party in Boston whose guests included a number of Harvard professors. Much of her cocktail chatter focused on National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who had previously taught at Harvard. The faculty she spoke with were still supportive of Kissinger, although skeptical of his private assurances that Nixon knew he had to end the war. The next day, Mary wrote a column that was probably tougher on Kissinger than her discussions at the party warranted: “Back in Cambridge, Henry Kissinger’s performance gets low marks. His old colleagues at Harvard and MIT, whom he values and visits whenever he can, feel he has done little to change the course of the war and that he defends it with increasing offensiveness.”

  Mary had requested interviews with Kissinger in the past, but he had always declined. Yet by the time she arrived at the Star offices the day the column ran, one of Kissinger’s military aides had already arranged a time for Kissinger to meet with Mary.

  She interviewed Kissinger in his basement office at the White House. Mary argued that Vice President Agnew’s harsh condemnation of the press and the administration’s tough language toward protestors were making people feel unwelcome in their own country. She pointed out that she was close friends with many young people who opposed the war.