by John Norris
Time was convinced that, with some editorial changes, the Star would soon be profitable. Murray Gart was appointed as the Star’s editor and Shepley as chairman of the board. Neither had run a major newspaper before. Workmen installed a large marble-topped desk and a huge map of the world in Gart’s office, a striking change from the austere environment favored by Bellows.
A Bostonian, Gart was a graduate of Boys’ Latin School, and had served as Time’s chief of correspondents. He traveled around town in a limousine, and he and Shepley became active on the Washington social scene, lunching with Henry Kissinger and other power players.
Gart was a driven corporate man, usually waking at five in the morning, with a penchant for micromanaging reporters and editors. At his first editorial meeting, he declared, “We have to decide whether we’re going to be a daily magazine or a daily newspaper. I can tell you right now we’re going to be a daily newspaper.” He rejected Bellows’s editorial approach, despite the fact that it had invigorated the Star’s copy. Gart did not want long features or pieces of analysis. He did not want color and personality. He wanted hard news and straight reporting. “Murray wanted to put his imprint on the paper,” Jack Germond observed, “but he threw out everything, the baby with the bathwater, and some things Bellows had done were brilliant.”
He also developed a morning edition designed to compete with the Post, and he wanted to abandon the afternoon entirely but was overruled by the rest of the management team, despite the widespread evidence that afternoon newspapers were dying, being squeezed by the evening news and by rush-hour traffic that made distribution increasingly difficult. The Star remained awkwardly in between, neither fully an afternoon nor a morning paper, unable to dent the Post’s commanding position.
Gart insisted that the paper prominently cover the doings of Time Inc. executives and board members. He called the desk every night to approve the stories that would appear on the front page the next day. “People here became aware that regardless of how many meetings they had during the day, there was only one meeting that mattered,” Mary said, “and that was the meeting when Murray called the news desk at 11 at night and made up page one by phone.”
Mary, widely viewed as one of the paper’s important assets by rivals like the Post, thought Gart was too loyal to Time, too secretive, and prone to behaving like a “roman general in a province.” Nothing did more to sour the relationship between Gart and Mary than his effort to push her column to the op-ed page. Gart, acknowledging in advance that Mary would “be deeply displeased,” wrote to her: “I feel quite strongly that some columns must move, and, perhaps, be replaced by others. Yours is one I believe should move to the op-ed page. I completely suspect how deeply you feel about the matter, but I also trust that your readers will follow you wherever your column may appear.” Mary was incensed. Her columns had always appeared inside the news pages, either on the front page or on page three. She viewed her column’s placement as sacrosanct. There was certainly a case to be made that Mary’s column belonged on the opinion pages, but with circulation and finances a mess, starting a turf war with one of the paper’s most venerable staff members was a poor choice.
Mary, in a huff, announced that she would take a brief vacation, and she decided that she would go from writing four columns a week to three (still a prodigious output by today’s standards). Mary was in her early sixties, and the demands of her work were considerable. However, Gart’s unctuous response only irritated her further: he claimed that he had long worried about the pace being too much for Mary and suggested that she write a day in advance of publication, “so that some of those late nights can be eliminated.” Mary’s columns would appear on the op-ed page Tuesdays and Thursdays and on the first page of the opinion section on Sundays.
Mary seethed as her column not only was moved to the opinion pages but often appeared on different parts of the page. She was given varying word lengths with which to work, leading her to complain that she was being treated as if she were “just putty to fill up holes.” She insisted that she could not work under such conditions. “The only thing that interests me is a return to the news section,” a distraught Mary wrote to Gart. “You know how difficult it is to contemplate leaving this paper. Now I find it more difficult to contemplate staying on.”
Gart eventually agreed to fix Mary’s column in a regular position on the op-ed page, addressing at least part of her complaint, and he preemptively declared, “It is clear to me that we have at long last found the right location in the paper. Unless I hear otherwise from you, I will assume we are in agreement.” Gart quickly heard from Mary. They were not in agreement. “I belong in the company of my peers in the news section.”
Gart eventually acceded, and Mary’s column was placed on page four of the first section of the paper. Mary’s relationship with Gart and Time Inc., however, never recovered from the battle.
• • •
In early August 1978, Pope Paul VI died, and Mary was dispatched to Rome to cover the funeral and the selection of a new pontiff. Mary thought Paul VI’s unwillingness to support the use of birth control had needlessly pushed millions away from the Church, and she quoted an Italian woman to make her case: “To be a Catholic doesn’t mean to be an imbecile.”
Mary’s views on contraception and abortion said a great deal about the centrality of faith in her life. While she disagreed strongly with the pope’s positions on contraception and, later in her life and to a lesser degree, homosexuality, Mary was in strong agreement with many of the teachings of the Church, including those on abortion. But she carefully steered clear of writing about abortion in her columns, and it was one of the only areas of political belief where Mary pulled her punches. She was a member of the increasingly endangered minority of adamantly pro-life Democrats.
Mary did not like the fact that most pro-life groups had little interest in encouraging adoption or implementing child-friendly public policies, and she objected to the view within Democratic ranks “that every single intelligent person is pro-abortion.” Her own belief was that abortion extinguished a life: “You can phrase it a lot of different ways, but that’s what I think it comes down to.”
Mary’s faith was absent from her columns, but it shaped her far more than most of her readers, and even many of her friends, appreciated. Her faith was her moral center. “Mary was so wonderfully caustic and funny about life that it probably didn’t occur to most of us that she was deeply religious,” observed fellow columnist Anthony Lewis. “It was an anomaly among that group of people.”
Even the nuns at St. Ann’s were surprised by the depth of Mary’s devotion. Sister Josephine Murphy remembered visiting Mary’s apartment and seeing the centuries-old The Following of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, on her nightstand. When Josephine pointed out the book, Mary said simply, “That is kind of what I try to live by.”
Mary was reluctant to impose her view of religion on others. She blended very traditional Catholicism with distinct strains of liberation theology, the idea that social and polical change in support of the working class was a natural extension of her faith. She prayed on her knees every night before bed. She almost never missed a Sunday Mass. She felt that the entire point of religion was to assist the oppressed and less fortunate—something in which she thought the Church often fell criminally short. Mary saw social justice as the cornerstone of responsible Catholicism and believed in a God of love and compassion.
Her initially stern disapproval of homosexuality drove a wedge between her and several others in her circle. “When I came out of the closet in 1977, Mary was one of those who had a great deal of difficulty with it,” her old friend David Mixner related. “Her working-class background and her devout Catholicism made it very difficult for her to understand or accept my sexuality.”
Mary’s view of homosexuality softened with time, and when Mixner wrote a memoir, she passed it on to a relative who was struggling with his own sexual iden
tity, along with a simple inscription inside the front cover: “Here my darling, I think this will help you, from a person who I really love.”
In Rome, Mary was very pleased with the rapid selection of Pope John Paul I as Paul VI’s successor, but his reign was short, and John Paul died just thirty-three days after being selected. Mary was shocked when the cardinals selected someone who wasn’t Italian, the first in centuries, to be the new pope: John Paul II.
During the funeral ceremonies for Pope Paul VI, Mary spent a good deal of time with Senator Ted Kennedy, whom President Carter had dispatched as his envoy to the ceremonies. Mary was eager for Kennedy to challenge Carter, whose approval ratings were in the mid-forties, in the 1980 Democratic primary. Kennedy made a September 1978 visit to New Hampshire to dip his toe in the presidential waters. However, Carter enjoyed a surge of popularity when he brokered a peace agreement between Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, complete with a White House signing ceremony. Carter had no plans to go quietly, even if pushed by a Kennedy.
Mary knew from experience that Teddy was very different from his late brothers. He lacked Jack’s regal cool and Bobby’s raw intensity. He was more like everyone’s favorite boisterous uncle, and Mary wondered whether Teddy had the fire for a competitive run.
Christmas 1978 was a gloomy one at the Star as the financial outlook turned bleak. The paper had lost $10 million in 1978 and was set to bleed even more red ink in 1979. Citing its troubled bottom line, Time threatened to walk away from the paper unless the Star’s unions renegotiated their contracts by midnight on New Year’s Eve. Negotiations went to the deadline, leaving a nervous Murray Gart pacing the newsroom as the year drew near an end. The unions agreed to a new contract just before midnight. Gart was relieved, and he broke out a bottle of Scotch. The mood quickly dampened when James Shepley called, declaring that the paper would not publish the next day—Shepley wanted to see the agreement in writing. No true newspaperman would have ever made the decision not to publish with an agreement reached.
For one day, on January 1, 1979, there was no Washington Star.
Management tried to boost staff morale by holding a lavish, belated New Year’s party at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel. With bartenders wearing tuxedos and a giant ice sculpture gracing the center of the ballroom, Star staffers groused that such money would have been better spent on benefits. Still, in its lead editorial on January 2, the Time Inc. leadership declared, “We are here to stay,” promising to pump an additional $60 million into the paper over the next five years.
There were hopeful signs. Circulation rose during 1979, and a number of offices were renovated within the Star building. Still, the staff greeted the layer of new editors imported from Time Inc. with a wariness that bordered on hostility, objecting to the idea of remaking the Star as a carbon copy of Time.
On March 29, 1979, a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown, and the entire nation was gripped with nuclear anxiety. Mary was not about to remain on the sidelines, and she headed to Pennsylvania with her friend and colleague Phil Gailey.
As Mary arrived for breakfast with Gailey and several other reporters at a Harrisburg hotel, she clutched a newspaper in her hand. She thrust it toward the group. There was a vivid picture on the front page of a terrified mother fleeing with her child, who was wrapped tightly in a blanket. The cooling towers of the power plant loomed in the background.
“I have to find that mother,” Mary said.
One reporter suggested that she should find a different story—surely the woman had already left town. Mary responded with annoyance, “This is the story.”
Gailey quickly realized how his day would be spent, and he agreed to assist Mary in the search. They showed the photo to clerks, gas station attendants, and local reporters. They drove around neighborhoods near Three Mile Island, trying to re-create the photo’s camera angle. After hours of fruitless searching, the landscape finally appeared to match the picture. They found the house.
No one was home. Mary stalked around the property, taking notes in shorthand. She assayed the flower boxes and toys scattered around the yard. She got the name MAYBERRY off the mailbox. After she chatted with a neighbor who thought the family had fled to an evacuation center, Mary and Gailey went to all of the evacuation centers, passing the increasingly dog-eared photo from hand to hand. No luck. They tried calling every person with the same last name in the telephone book. Finally they had luck: the woman in the picture was staying with relatives living seventy-five miles away.
Catherine Mayberry shared how she had escaped with her one-year-old daughter cradled in her arms, and her husband said that she was still so frightened that she sometimes trembled when holding their daughter. “I’m totally against nuclear power,” Catherine declared. “I’d go back to candles rather than go through another week like this.” For Gailey, the entire episode was a perfect example of Mary’s dedication to following her gut instincts on a story and putting in the time to deliver a colorful story illuminated by real reporting.
Back in Washington, Mary continued to hammer away at Jimmy Carter. Disaffection with the president was widespread amid a growing energy crunch and a sharp spike in gas prices. Mary wrote to a reader, “I’m sorry to hear you think the press is crucifying the president. To be honest, I thought he was doing a pretty good job of it himself.”
Mary was skeptical that Ted Kennedy would challenge Carter, knowing that his personal life was messy and that a presidential race would reopen all the old questions about his disturbing behavior during the accident at Chappaquiddick.
By the fall of 1979, it was clear that Kennedy was going to run. However, he stumbled from the start, including during an awkward interview with Roger Mudd of CBS News, when he struggled to explain why he was running. Mary shredded Kennedy’s performance in the Mudd interview as “epic haplessness” and declared that he was “patently wretched” in trying to explain away Chappaquiddick. Like her columns on Bobby in 1968, Mary’s take on Teddy felt brutal because of their friendship.
Although friends with Kennedy, Mary never approved of his lifestyle. She thought Chappaquiddick was a moral stain and frowned on his heavy drinking and well-known womanizing. Elizabeth Shannon, a close friend of Mary’s, later dated Kennedy after her own husband had passed away and Kennedy was divorced. At one point Mary sniffed to Shannon about her relationship with Kennedy, “I thought you had better taste than that.” Although she was disappointed by his personal failings, Kennedy remained an important source for Mary, and she was a regular attendee at after-hours, off-the-record discussions with Kennedy in his office over a bottle of Scotch.
The seizure of American hostages by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran complicated the Democratic race, and the slow-moving drama became a defining episode for the already beleaguered President Carter. The public initially rallied around the president, and Kennedy’s aura of inevitability evaporated.
Mary covered one of the signature moments in the Republican primary and one of the signature moments in the career of Ronald Reagan at a New Hampshire debate hosted by the Nashua Telegraph. During the contentious back-and-forth over who would actually participate in the debate, the Telegraph editor asked that Reagan’s microphone be turned off. A visibly angry Reagan snapped, “I am paying for this microphone.” Mary wrote that “Reagan was transformed into a party leader,” while George Bush “looked like a studious patron of the public library who is determined not to be disturbed by the noisy boys at the magazine rack.”
Mary might have objected to Reagan’s worldview, which she called “making life more comfortable for the comfortable,” but Carter left her cold. She described the likely clash between Carter and Reagan as “a choice between a Democrat who can’t govern and a Republican who won’t.”
Ted Kennedy lost to Carter by double digits in New Hampshire. Although Kennedy managed to win a number of states, his campaign was
ultimately embarrassing, and the race with Carter was bitter.
At the Republican convention, in Detroit, what should have been a relatively uneventful coronation for Ronald Reagan was made dramatic by an eleventh-hour suggestion from former president Gerald Ford that he would consider serving as Ronald Reagan’s running mate. Speculation about the potential dream ticket swept the Joe Louis Arena as envoys from the Ford and Reagan camps engaged in frantic negotiations.
The talks eventually collapsed, and Reagan chose George Bush as his running mate. Mary likened the scene of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and George and Barbara Bush standing on the convention stage to “the parents of the bride and bridegroom who are determined to put a good face on a marriage of convenience.”
The Democratic convention, in New York, became most famous for Kennedy’s swan song, a rousing, nostalgic speech that left many delegates wondering where the real Ted Kennedy had been during the primaries. Kennedy finished his speech with his most famous words: “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” It was an unprecedented moment of defeat for a Kennedy, and, as Mary said, Teddy was desperate to show that Carter had not destroyed the Kennedy magic. It was a great speech, but Teddy had served his party’s nominee poorly, and he said next to nothing about supporting Carter. The speech had given Kennedy his measure of revenge, and Mary said that Carter left the convention looking like an airline pilot “whose passengers have defected to the hijacker.”
Mary recognized the enormity of the moment. The last of the Kennedy brothers had acknowledged on the grand national stage that his dreams of the presidency were finished. “Everything is a big deal for the Kennedys,” she said, “and they have a very powerful sense of entitlement. And they are treated like royalty. . . . No matter what the tabloids say, no matter what happens, they are there, because the Kennedys are different from you and me.”