by John Norris
“About four months,” Shannon replied.
“Well, it didn’t take you long to get what you came for, did it?” Mary walked away without another word. The four trainees stared at one another, stunned by the exchange. One of them was Carl Bernstein. “We are not going to let her get away with that,” Bernstein declared.
Mary had to pass by the desk to get to her office, and Bernstein began surreptitiously flinging wads of paper in her direction whenever she appeared. Mary finally came over to the desk and said, “This has to stop.” It did.
When Elizabeth shared the story with William Shannon, he roared with laughter. The three went out to dinner not long after, and Elizabeth and Mary became close friends.
Journalist Marjorie Williams noted that while Mary certainly “had a queenly expectation of deference,” there was “something so gorgeous, in this irretrievably masculine town, about a woman who knew her due.” Williams argued that Mary had made it acceptable for women to be more genuine in the workplace. “To be a woman in a man’s town you had to be more careful, make yet a paler impression, than the Brooks Brothers suits all around you,” she said. “Mary showed that you could be not only forgiven, but rewarded, for shedding that dreary disguise. Talent, Mary taught us, was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.”
When Williams had first started working with Mary, Mary sent her a personal note telling her to largely ignore the men in the newsroom—they were all bark and no bite. Mary would send nice handwritten notes when she liked one of Williams’s pieces, something the male stars of the newsroom almost never did. Williams also received a three-word piece of advice from Mary when she began penning an op-ed column at the Post: “Subtlety is overrated.”
“Mentoring, in today’s parlance, wasn’t her thing,” reporter Gloria Borger explained. “Hard work was. It wasn’t about complaining that you were taken less seriously than the men, or that you earned less, or that you got crummy assignments. It was about diligence, about doing your work well—and getting noticed for the right reasons.” Mary was more a mother superior than a mentor.
Cokie Roberts argued that even though Mary was a notably reluctant feminist, her contributions were significant. “Mary was very much a trailblazer for the women coming after her. We could not have done what we did if she had not done what she did, and kept doing it.”
• • •
By 1971, President Nixon seemed to have emerged triumphant. His approval ratings were strong, the tumult of the late 1960s had died down to a very large degree, and the dishonors of his earlier campaign losses were an increasingly distant memory. He was in an enviable position heading into the 1972 presidential race. But in June 1971, the Nixon administration became embroiled in a high-profile showdown with the New York Times and the Washington Post after the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. When the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the papers could publish the documents, it was an important reminder that there were limits to even the most imperial presidency.
Yet within the halls of the White House, the president and his inner circle were not going to accept such a rebuke easily, and they relentlessly plotted how to bring the full weight of the government to bear against their opponents. Surprisingly prominent among these enemies: Mary McGrory. Three years after sharing a hymnal with Nixon at Martin Luther King’s funeral, Mary was in the crosshairs.
In September 1971, Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel, drew up the infamous “enemies list,” detailing twenty of Nixon’s most hated opponents and political enemies. Mary’s name was among them.
On September 18, Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, met in the Oval Office to discuss their “tax list.” Haldeman pointed out that the IRS had been instructed to go after some of Nixon’s least favorite reporters. “They’re going after a couple of media people. They are going after Dan Schorr, Mary McGrory,” said Haldeman.
“Good,” Nixon replied.
“They just want to harass them, just get them in a little trouble,” Haldeman elaborated after a further exchange, “just give them a little trouble.”
“Exactly,” Nixon declared. “Pound these people.”
“Just give them a little trouble,” Haldeman repeated.
Nixon chortled before preemptively exonerating himself: “It’s routine.”
In separate conversations with Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Nixon made clear what he expected of the next IRS commissioner: “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told, that every income tax return I want to see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.”
“It isn’t a matter of doing anything against the law,” Haldeman responded. “It’s a matter of using the law to its full—to our benefit rather than someone else’s.”
Mary’s name came up frequently in the White House tapes, and denouncing her was a sure way to curry favor with the president. During one Oval Office meeting, press secretary Ron Ziegler complained about Mary McGrory and “her sick little world,” before adding, “We shouldn’t judge anything by her. Never have, never should.” Henry Kissinger discussed possibly meeting with Gene McCarthy as part of his continued campaign to mute antiwar criticism but then complained, “If I have lunch with him, he’ll leak to Mary McGrory.”
William Safire, who was working as a White House speechwriter, remembered inviting Mary to a dinner party at his home. The next day, he was rebuked by Haldeman: “There is not a chance that you can ever persuade McGrory to ever be fair about anything to do with Nixon, and to invite ‘them’ into your homes is hopeless.”
Mary was audited by the IRS in 1971. “She was in a dither,” recalled her colleague Lance Gay. “It was a top-to-bottom audit and they wanted justification for everything.” The audit quickly focused on Mary’s charitable giving as an area of concern, particularly a “miscellaneous contribution” of cash to St. Ann’s to help Sister Editha buy Christmas presents for the kids.
Mary’s case was reviewed by the IRS district director, and Sister Editha eventually produced a receipt. The IRS informed Mary that it was willing to accept the receipt as legitimate but insisted that other charitable contributions were not properly documented and that Mary owed an additional thousand dollars in taxes and penalties.
She scrambled to produce additional documentation. Ironically, Mary eventually received a tax credit of $194.88 after the IRS audit was completed—she had actually failed to fully take her charitable deductions. Mary was audited multiple years in a row during the Nixon era. There is probably no better indictment of Nixon’s abuse of power than his use of the IRS to hound Mary for buying Christmas gifts for orphans. Frank Mankiewicz put it in perspective: “Intellectually, Nixon saw her as sort of like him, but totally an enemy. Of all the people on the enemies list, she was probably most the enemy.”
For the Democratic Party, the 1972 presidential campaign only continued the suffering that had begun in 1968.
Ted Kennedy decided to sit on the sidelines after the fatal accident at Chappaquiddick, and the list of Democratic contenders was long, but not formidable. Continuing to describe politics as theater, Mary wrote from Manchester, “The New Hampshire primary is badly in need of a play doctor. After six months on the boards, it is dying on its feet. The cast is enormous, there is no end of jugglers and tumblers, but no plot has developed, no villain or hero has come down from the lovely hills.”
Senator Ed Muskie of Maine was the front-runner, but in one of the Nixon campaign’s dirty-tricks operations, operatives for the president spread the rumor that Muskie had derisively referred to French Canadians as “Canucks”—which would be an obvious problem, given New Hampshire’s sizable French Canadian population. Standing on the back of a flatbed truck, denouncing both the Canucks accusation and charges in the Manchester Union Leader that his wife drank heavily, Muskie broke down in tears. Mary noted in her colum
n that the conservative Union Leader had drawn blood from many a politician, “but until that moment never made one cry.” The incident only became more infamous when Muskie subsequently insisted that the tears had been “melting snowflakes.”
South Dakota senator George McGovern emerged as the alternative, bolstered by youth and antiwar voters. Yet McGovern was not the most convincing candidate to wage a general election. He came from a small state with little in the way of electoral clout, and his fiercely liberal positions were easily caricatured. Columnist Robert Novak cited an anonymous senator saying that if McGovern got the nomination, the general election would be all about his positions on “amnesty, abortion, and acid.”
McGovern claimed the nomination at the July 1972 Democratic convention, in Miami. It was far more peaceful than Chicago, but it was still a train wreck. The Democrats had substantially changed their convention rules after 1968 in an effort to prevent party bigwigs from overruling the rank and file in selecting a nominee. But the pendulum swung too far, and the convention verged on ungoverned. “The spirit of the occasion,” Mary wrote, “is aptly conveyed by a streamer that floats behind a plane that patrols the rain clouds overhead. It reads: ‘McGovern is a disaster.’”
As the convention played out like a ragged circus on television, the party pros were telling Mary that McGovern could cost the party “every office from the courthouse to the White House.” The convention was so badly stage-managed that McGovern accepted the nomination at three in the morning. Most Americans had turned off their televisions.
McGovern’s most notable blunder at the convention was his selection of Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his vice presidential candidate. It quickly leaked that Eagleton was under medication for depression and had undergone shock therapy, but he resisted being removed from the ticket. Democrats were outraged that McGovern had failed to defuse the situation by either defending Eagleton or replacing him. As Mary jested, McGovern had become the only politician in history to be labeled “a spineless brute.”
When Senator Eagleton read that Mary had described him as an eager “cocker spaniel,” he shook his head and, referring to President Nixon’s famous speech invoking his dog Checkers, said, “Instead of giving a Checkers speech, I’ve become Checkers.”
As the Democrats imploded, two enterprising and largely unknown Washington Post reporters labored over a story that would change Washington. On June 17, 1972, a break-in occurred at Democratic headquarters, in the Watergate building. The Post assigned Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the story, and the two dug relentlessly. This was the same scruffy Bernstein with whom Mary had clashed when he was a reporter trainee at the Star. Mary had later counseled him against leaving the Star for the Post.
Woodward and Bernstein soon reported that Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund linked to the break-in. When the two reporters asked Mitchell to comment on the pending story, Mitchell gave one of the more famous responses in modern journalism: “Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” The owner of the Post was not deterred.
By early October, Woodward and Bernstein had reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House.”
As the two reporters worked the story, Mary sent a note to both: “I don’t really know what you are doing, but I’m glad you are doing it.” When she bumped into Bernstein, she was self-deprecating: “What a mistake you made. You’ve just gone on to achieve fame and fortune. You could have stayed with us and got our coffee and pencils for the rest of your life. You blew it.”
Mary considered Watergate the greatest journalistic feat of modern times. “That story happened because a brilliant and bold editor, Ben Bradlee, took a chance on two guys under thirty and held them to high standards,” she argued. “They showed you what journalism was all about: shoe leather and persistence, and will and determination, and knocking on doors and going back and knocking on doors again, and not being intimidated.”
When the president expressed concern that the Post was running stories “based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association, and character assassination,” Mary noted that this was a rather remarkable assertion for a politician who had built an entire career on exactly the same methods. Thanks in no small part to the general ineptitude of the McGovern campaign, Watergate was not a major issue in the 1972 campaign. A bloody Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, in Munich, seemed to only reinforce the public’s sense that they needed Nixon’s steady internationalist hand at the helm.
In late October, Mary wrote a column reflecting a small burst of optimism for McGovern as she traveled with the candidate in Michigan. “If the same coalescence of grassroots organization, labor muscle, and heavy registration occur in other big industrial states, the mandate could be something less than the size of Mt. Rushmore on November 7.” It was not a prediction of a McGovern upset and, as prognostication goes, it was very guarded.
Timothy Crouse’s bestseller, The Boys on the Bus, gave on insider account of reporters covering the 1972 campaign and singled out Mary in highlighting the danger of reporters getting caught inside the bubble of campaigns. Crouse had seen Mary repeatedly express her admiration for McGovern and her acute distaste for Nixon on the trail.
He recalled an incident from one of the final nights of the campaign as reporters and staff disembarked from the McGovern campaign plane at the Little Rock airport. Mary was the only person to notice a small crowd of McGovern supporters gathered at the fence.
“Frank. Frank,” Mary shouted as she ran after McGovern’s campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz. “Make him go over there! Christ, it’s one-to-one and it won’t take a moment,” she said.
“So McGovern went to the fence and drank in the adoration of the blacks and college kids who had been waiting for hours to see him,” Crouse wrote. “She watched them reaching for his hands and glowed with happiness.”
While Crouse thought Mary was too biased, he also viewed her as a first-rate reporter, with her columns “full of facts and incidents that appeared nowhere else, the fruits of her hard digging.” He also noted, “The men on the plane, who were not necessarily friends of the feminist movement, automatically treated her as an equal.” Which brought Crouse to Mary’s column about McGovern’s improving chances in Michigan. “Privately, she went beyond this prediction; she was convinced that McGovern was going to win the election,” he wrote. During a drive with the Nixon motorcade, Mary gleefully counted the McGovern signs they passed along the way. When they passed an auto dealership adorned with a large NIXON IN ’72 sign, Mary’s riposte was quick: “Used car place, figures.”
Over the next two weeks, Mary became increasingly anxious about the Michigan column, even though her words had been artfully hedged. “I’ve taken more grief for that article than for almost anything I’ve ever written,” Mary said. Crouse wrote that she “began to talk about it obsessively with her friends on the McGovern plane. During the last week, she phoned the Star from an airport press room in Corpus Christi, making monster faces throughout the conversation.”
Mary’s editors had said they had spoken with sources in Michigan who thought she had gotten it wrong. “If McGovern loses, I’m moving to Ottawa,” Mary said. “I mean, I really went out on a limb and it could be very bad.” Yet Mary survived McGovern’s landslide loss to Nixon—who carried Michigan by fourteen percentage points—with little ill effect.
Crouse was damning in his assessment: “But the fact that these people thought McGovern had a chance to win showed the folly of trying to call an election from 30,000 feet in the air.” One only had to look back on Mary’s columns from the Eagleton affair to know that in her heart of hearts, she did not really think McGovern was going to win—but she wanted him to. The 19
68 McCarthy insurgency in New Hampshire might have given her undue faith in electoral upsets and the hope that anything could happen.
Mary was chagrined by her treatment in the Crouse book. “I hit the pits in 1972,” she wrote later. “A week before the election, I wrote that McGovern canvassing figures showed that he could take Hamtramck, a blue-collar suburb of Detroit. From that I skated off to a conclusion that he could win the election. I will never live it down.” She was also frank about the pressure of producing four columns a week: “One day you make a complete idiot of yourself, get it all wrong, write something clumsy, inaccurate, stupid. The next day, maybe you get it right.”
Certainly, Mary made more than her share of mistakes through the years. She confused the president of Cambodia with its prime minister. She mixed up a B-1 bomber with a B-2. She had Louis XIV’s head chopped off rather than Louis XVI’s. She put boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter on death row rather than giving him life without parole. One of her editors even noted that Mary had a less than salutary habit of simply making up people’s middle initials when she was in doubt.
And like many writers, Mary had a tendency to make people and events more grandiose, not less. She told her version of the truth, and sometimes it was larger than life. But if the 1972 presidential race highlighted Mary’s tendency to write with her heart rather than her head, Nixon’s second term would illuminate her many gifts.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Enemy
Richard Nixon had reopened relations with China, he’d won the 1972 reelection in a landslide, and his Democratic opponents were in complete disarray. But in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge John Sirica presided over the 1973 trial of the Watergate burglars, and it became clear that federal prosecutors were eager to avoid any discussion of who had directed the men to break into the Democratic headquarters. Mary described the scene in the courtroom as a “curious spectacle of defense and prosecution in friendly competition to limit the scope of the inquiry.”