Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  On August 6, the eve of closing day, the editorial staff debated the final headline. The first attempt, “Goodbye,” seemed too informal. Gart suggested “Farewell.” The editors eventually agreed on “The Final Edition.” Mary worked on her last column, fondly remembering the characters who had filled the newsroom during her three and a half decades at the paper: Newby Noyes, Jim Bellows, Joe Allbritton, and others.

  Mary saw Tom Kenworthy, a young reporter who had arrived at the Star just three months before, looking forlorn. She sat next to him as they wrote their final stories. Many of the staffers wore small black buttons bearing the dates 1852–1981 as they cleaned the last detritus from their desks. Ed Yoder finished his column, packed the books from his shelf, and proofed the final editorial page. He walked down to Mary’s small office. They hugged, not exchanging a word. There was nothing left to say.

  She walked out with Phil Gailey. The lobby was jammed with people buying the final edition. Gailey scolded in their general direction, “Where were you when we needed you?” Mary held his hand. The two sang several verses of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as they departed.

  Mary and Gailey headed to the Jenkins Hill pub, on Capitol Hill, with the other members of the staff. The reporters sang and drank, and a few wore black armbands. Mary did not stay long. This was one wake at which she could not bear to linger.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Life at the Post

  The day after the Star closed, Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post took Mary to lunch.

  Over their meal, Bradlee, somewhat gingerly, inquired, “Now?”

  “Yes,” said Mary.

  “How much?” Bradlee asked. Mary named a salary. It was more modest than Bradlee had imagined. The two shook hands. “And that was that,” said Bradlee. Mary McGrory was a columnist for the Post.

  Bradlee was gracious, telling Mary that during all the years she had been at the Star, he felt like he had not been doing his job. Bradlee was smart enough not to replicate Murray Gart’s mistakes.

  He knew that Mary was an institution, and sometimes difficult. The Post wanted Mary because she was a premier talent with a well-established readership. But at the same time, some at the Post worried that she might not fit in at a paper that she had always viewed as the enemy—despite being more in tune with the paper’s political slant. Mary was in her sixties but had lost little of her drive. As Cokie Roberts recalled, “There was all sorts of sturm und drang about ‘Oh God, what do we do with her?’”

  Mary was given a nice outside office, next to Bob Woodward. She brought her assistant, Liz Acosta, with her, a luxury no other Post columnist enjoyed. Don Graham, who had become the Post’s publisher as his mother assumed the role of chairwoman of the board, noted that having an assistant created some tensions, “but not with anybody who understood the importance of having a Mary McGrory on the paper.” Mary would write three columns a week, appearing on page two and on the front page of the Sunday Outlook section. Kay Graham informed Mary that her late husband, Phil, wherever he was, was pleased.

  After a much deserved August holiday, Mary’s first Post column appeared on September 8, 1981. There was no reference to switching papers, and Mary picked up where she had left off, skewering Republicans for worrying that Reagan appointees were working in insufficiently opulent offices.

  The Washington Post had Mary’s pen, but her heart remained at the Star. Mary highlighted the differences between the Star and the Post by comparing two European cities: “The Star, disheveled, disorganized, welcoming, mellow, and forgiving, was Rome. The Post, structured, disdainful, elegant, and demanding, was Paris.”

  The Post was bigger, better funded, and more impersonal than the Star. Because it was a morning newspaper, Mary’s deadlines were earlier, and she was no longer able to labor on her columns deep into the night. The rest of her daily routine remained largely unchanged. She started her days in her bright apartment by turning on National Public Radio, preferring it to the labored enthusiasm of morning television. She read the Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, looking for the big story of the day.

  After breakfast, she would lay out her outfit for the day. Invariably, her clothes were well tailored and impeccable. She usually arrived at the office at around ten with a column in mind. After another cup of coffee, Mary slowly picked up speed, leafing through her letters and the inevitable stack of pitches from press secretaries hoping that she would write about their pet issues.

  Marjorie Williams, who worked with Mary at the Post, described her at work. “While harried reporters bustled past her, Mary drifted from desk to desk in what seemed to be aimless, sociable circles,” and yet Mary “always made you feel as if you were the one person she had been pining to discuss the topic with. But in the midst of this breeze-shooting you found yourself telling her about a lunch you’d had with a member of the relevant committee staff two weeks ago, or something you’d heard secondhand from someone you trusted in the White House, or the best idea you’d had in three weeks. She was completely competitive and extraordinarily kind.”

  Mary would then make a series of phone calls, or venture up to the Hill, still determined to do her own legwork. Back in the office by 3:30, she would start trying to put words on paper, perusing her notebooks full of shorthand. She would pester Liz Acosta for relevant articles from her voluminous subject files and pace the newsroom.

  Back at her computer, Mary revised and revised again. Her colleagues knew to give a wide berth when she was concentrating. She had Acosta print out draft copies of her column, and she still tore off pieces of paper and rolled them into small balls as she smoked. She would fidget and tug at her hair as she read.

  Eventually, Mary would relinquish her column to an editor, never fully pleased. She would then retire to her apartment, cooking a late dinner and unwinding with a drink and a good book or while watching one of her favorite television shows. She always had a soft spot for both M*A*S*H and Cheers.

  Mary quickly discovered that the Post was “strictly temperance.” No liquor was served at major celebrations. “Everything is celebrated with a cake: farewells, promotions, prizes. And they stick to it,” lamented Mary. “Great emotion is celebrated in thick frosting.” Mary was horrified that even when the paper won a trio of Pulitzers, no champagne was in sight.

  She felt that the Post was terribly self-important. Since the paper attracted accomplished reporters and had found itself at the top of the industry after Watergate, it was less interested in nurturing young talent or taking chances than it had once been. Ben Bradlee was increasingly the paper’s last bastion against stodginess.

  Mary put the best face on her new circumstance. She lined the walls of her office with books of poetry and history, and she told an interviewer, “They have given me a lovely office and a kind editor and the freedom to write anything I want. I really could not ask for more.” She said that she was “totally, happily, uninvolved” in the Post’s management and added that she was pleased to have more time to focus on her writing.

  None of it was the least bit convincing.

  Mary wrote to a friend, complaining of the Post, “We take ourselves very seriously, and are much too busy to say good morning even ten hours before deadline.” Mary often felt slighted: “They never say whether they particularly like what I write,” Mary said of the editors. “I don’t appreciate power, and they certainly do.”

  “She quite frankly hated the Post,” Lance Gay remembered, describing the paper as a “great aircraft carrier sort of a place. You look out there and there are all these desks, a sea of reporters, and she could not find anyone to have lunch with.” Mary told Gay that she did not fit in well. “She had an office and a secretary and they treated her very well,” he explained, “but she had no friends there, she was lonely. She was affected by the fact that she had no life beyond the column.” Ben Bradlee fully acknowledged that the Post never replaced the Star in Ma
ry’s heart. “I understood it. Loyalty was written all over that big Irish face.”

  Mary was writing for one of the most important newspapers in the nation, and her column was widely syndicated. Yet for all of the acclaim, it felt to Mary as though the bad guys had won by 1981. Ronald Reagan was president, the country was tilting dramatically to the right, funding for schools and homeless shelters was being slashed, the Star was bankrupt, and Mary hung her hat in the newsroom of her once dreaded rival.

  Mary found a measure of solace when she entered a romantic relationship with Bob Abernethy, an NBC reporter. She had gotten to know Abernethy and his wife, Jean, when Jean worked as a copy girl at the Star in the mid-1940s. Bob and Jean were married in 1955, but she had died in 1980.

  Bob and Mary had known each other casually when Jean was alive and occasionally bumped into each other at events or on the campaign trail. Both Mary and Abernethy had been at Andrews Air Force Base when Kennedy’s body arrived from Dallas in 1963. He was the first person to call Mary when the news of the Star’s closure was announced.

  “We dated,” Abernethy remembered. “And we went out to dinner together. She loved a place on Connecticut Avenue near where she lived: the Roma. We would go there, have something to drink, and talk. I was very fond of her; she was very fond of me.” Mary taught Abernethy her favorite Irish songs, and they made each other laugh.

  “The public Mary was the Mary I saw at her parties,” Abernethy recounted. “But to be with her in private was always fun and enlightening and warm. She was really wonderful.” He was impressed by Mary’s commitment to her friends and the way she reached out to people in times of sorrow. But he was also realistic about her as a person, saying, “She wasn’t sweet; you couldn’t describe her as sweet. She certainly liked to be the center of attention. She could be really tough.”

  Mary’s romance with Abernethy was unusual in several respects. It was the first relationship in Mary’s adult life about which she was reasonably open with her friends and family. Mary’s niece Anne Beatty recalled flying down to Washington with her husband to visit Mary. Even though Beatty had not known Mary was dating, Bob Abernethy greeted her and her husband at the airport.

  Mary did not bring many of her usual preoccupations to the table with Abernethy. She didn’t push him to volunteer at St. Ann’s and didn’t engage with him much about her columns. For the first time, Mary allowed herself to relax and not be overwhelmed with the preoccupation of wondering what others might think. One friend recalled how girlish Mary seemed around Abernethy.

  “Bob Abernethy was her last serious relationship,” Phil Gailey commented. “Mary did not want to give up what she had going, even for marriage to a man she probably loved. . . . Mary was not easy to live around or be around. She did have an imperial-highness side. She required much.”

  The relationship fell apart after several years. “It did not blossom into something more than a very happy and fond time together,” said Abernethy diplomatically. Per custom, after it ended, Mary never said a word about the relationship. “The next time we visited,” said Anne Beatty, “there was nothing. He just wasn’t there and there was no mention of it.”

  Mary’s transition to the Post was made even more difficult when she ran into legal trouble as a result of one of her columns. After a visit to Northern Ireland in the fall of 1981, Mary sang the praises of Seán Donlon, the departing Irish ambassador to the United States, who had made a strong push against Northern Irish terrorism and congratulated him for taking on the Irish National Caucus, “providers of funds for the fray.” The caucus, claiming that Mary’s column had accused them of financing terrorism, announced its intention to sue Mary and the Post for a million dollars. Mary had been on the job less than a month. Ben Bradlee, no stranger to legal threats, just smiled. “It sounds like you’re having fun,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.” The suit was eventually dropped after the Post offered a minor clarification.

  On January 19, 1982, Mary attended President Reagan’s White House press conference marking his first year in office. Though she was usually relegated to the back of the room, one of her Post colleagues was stuck in traffic, and she got a front-row seat. Mary felt obligated to ask a question, something that she didn’t do very often in large groups.

  The press conference was nearing its end, and reporter Helen Thomas, who was usually given the last question, raised her hand.

  “Helen,” said President Reagan. “I think Mary got up before you did, Helen, so I’ll take her question.”

  “Mr. President,” inquired Mary, “in New York last week you called upon the rich to help the poor in this present economic difficulty. Are you planning to increase your own contributions to private charity to set an example to the rich people of this country to do more for the poor?”

  Reagan grimaced and then, in an amiable stage whisper to Helen Thomas, declared, “Helen, I just want you to know whenever you speak from now on, I’m shutting up.” Mary said that Reagan looked as if he had “just about swallowed his epiglottis.”

  “No, Mary, I tell you,” Reagan said, “I realize that some had noticed what seemed to be a small percentage of deductions for worthwhile causes. And that is true. And I’m afraid it will be true this year, because I haven’t changed my habits. But I also happen to be someone who believes in tithing—the giving of a tenth—but I have for a number of years done some of that giving in ways that are not tax deductible, with regard to individuals that are being helped.”

  Mary was not convinced, and she noted in her column that in 1980 Reagan had given only $3,089 in charitable contributions, out of his $227,968 in earnings. “Our millionaire president has cut the government’s allowance to the unfortunate, the old, the cold, the young, the slow. But he cheerily informs us that any big holes in the safety net will be mended by volunteers from the ranks, apparently, of the deserving rich,” she wrote. Mary also noted that Republicans had not batted an eye when Pentagon contractors absconded with tens of millions of dollars, “but the thought of a single peanut butter sandwich going down an undeserving throat gives them acute dyspepsia.”

  Mary would hound Reagan and the White House press secretary with this line of questioning for several years. In reward for her audacity, Reagan refused to call on her during White House press conferences for the next four years and five months. Mary noted that she had been placed “back with the lepers” on the White House seating chart.

  The issue of charitable giving was a personal one for Mary. Although she was never a wealthy woman, she routinely gave away 20 percent of her salary to charity. She was old-fashioned when it came to money. She did not invest in stocks and, other than her annual trip to Rome and her taste in clothes, lived frugally.

  The next year, 1982, marked the advent of one of Mary’s most popular series of columns. She had received a letter from a friend, Ned Kenworthy, who had retired from the New York Times, saying, “There’s not much to be said for retirement except that it gives you time for weeding and reading Jane Austen.” Inspired, Mary went out and bought a copy of Emma. She whisked through the book in two days.

  Mary wrote a column about Jane Austen, and—like her pieces on gardening and squirrels, which she maintained as regular staples when she moved over to the Post—it became a sensation. At a time when the city was hot and half deserted and the headlines were full of bad news, Mary championed Austen as a “great enemy of incivility and squalor.”

  Universally approving mail came in from all over the country. One day when Mary was on the Hill, Oklahoma congressman James Jones, the head of the Budget Committee, hurried down the hallway past her. The two had never spoken before. “Read all of Jane Austen,” Jones exclaimed without breaking stride.

  “The first time I wrote about Jane Austen, I was simply stunned,” Mary recalled. The following year, she was invited to speak at a meeting of the Jane Austen Society, in Philadelphia. Mary was impressed by the devotion of
the two hundred attendees. One man had read Emma fifty times. After writing a column about the experience, a clergyman in Ohio asked Mary to “examine her conscience” for not providing the society’s address in her story.

  Mary pondered why Austen was so enduring. “Maybe it is because she deals with one subject, what is called today, ‘interpersonal relationships’ and the eternal theme of young women in search of husbands,” Mary wrote. “She also describes loneliness, mostly through her delineations of old maids (she was one herself) who must be ingratiating, obliging, never revealing their own feelings in order to be tolerated.”

  Two issues dominated Mary’s columns in Reagan’s first term—Cold War tensions in Central America and the burgeoning antinuclear movement.

  She was outraged when the administration downplayed the murder of four American nuns by El Salvador’s right-wing government. “In the ugliest moment so far,” Mary observed, “former secretary of state Alexander M. Haig Jr. told a House committee that the victims probably got what they were asking for by running a roadblock and exchanging fire with Salvadoran security forces. Actually, they were shot in the back of the head, execution-style.”

  Mary also took congressional Democrats to task for failing to stand up to the president: “What congressmen want more than anything in the world is to be let off the hook when it comes to difficult choices.” Republicans remained thirsty for a broader fight with Democrats on Central America policy, and Mary quoted Representative Dick Cheney of Wyoming as saying that the real lesson of Vietnam was that “we did not do enough.”

  The early Reagan years sparked a national conversation about nuclear arms and the possibility of a nuclear freeze. The administration went to ridiculous lengths to convince the public that it should learn to live with the bomb. After presidential counselor Ed Meese described nuclear war as “something that may not be desirable,” Mary called it the ultimate in understatement.