by John Norris
Mary wrote to Woodson saying that she was deeply interested and that the press—including herself—was deserving of reproach for not knowing more about the case. Mary said that she would visit Alderson Federal Prison Camp if the warden would permit it.
Woodson developed cold feet and told Mary that she would discuss her antinuclear activities but not her personal life. (Woodson had one natural son, now grown; three autistic foster children who had been reassigned to other families because of her civil disobedience; and seven adopted, developmentally challenged children at home, including one with brain damage, being cared for by friends.)
Mary’s response to Woodson was artfully manipulative. “I understand and sympathize with your desire to preserve your privacy. As you have learned, this is a difficult thing to do when you have committed a public act. My experience has been that it is the person rather than the issue which often moves people,” Mary wrote. “But activist resistance is something they turn away from. All I am saying is that when they know a little about the human being who makes a sacrifice such as yours, they have to think about the commitment and then about the cause.” She reiterated that she was willing to visit the prison to meet with Woodson but added, “If you think that something I would write from such a meeting would be intrusive, I would respect your wishes and forget about it.”
Woodson agreed to the interview. Mary’s column on Woodson reflected real admiration for her commitment to the antinuclear cause, but her unease with Woodson’s decision to essentially abandon her foster children because of her activism was palpable. Mary might also have been contemplating her own decision never to have children in service of her career.
In the fall of 1985, Mary was given the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, one of the more important laurels in journalism. Ben Bradlee could not have been kinder when he wrote to the awards committee praising Mary: “She has an angel’s eyes, all-seeing and compassionate. Hers has been a constant voice, unswayed by the moment. She has consistently shown the courage to stand against the wind.”
While pleased with the honor, Mary was anxious because she had to deliver a speech. Mary being Mary, she polled her friends and associates about fitting potential topics. Her former editor from the Star, Jim Bellows, came up with the winning entry: “Where has all the passion gone? Why are newspapers, TV, etc. so dull? Why no campus demonstrations?”
Mary’s speech, at Colby College, in Maine, was sharply critical of both journalists and the general public. She noted that the previous recipients of the award had all been elder media statesmen—what she called “forest people,” in that they shared a commanding view of public life. “I am strictly trees,” Mary demurred. “I have spent my working years examining the underbrush, the saplings, and the occasional tall pine. The long view, the big picture, are beyond me.” Grand introspection, she insisted, was not a luxury in which she indulged.
That said, she went directly to her central concern:
There has been a sharp fall-off in the kind of impassioned mail that came my way when such enormous events as the Vietnam War and Watergate were unfolding. I have begun to wonder what people care about, or if they care at all. . . . I don’t know what it is, if the public is sublimely content—that could be that Ronald Reagan has restored a sense of public happiness to the republic; if people have decided the issues are too complex and have retreated into comfortable assumptions that the poor get what they deserve, that industrial pollution is inevitable, [and] that politicians are always corrupt. . . . I tell you all this not as a way of taking the discussion from the shortcomings of the press. We can always do it better. Chaucer was right when he lamented “the lyfe so shorte, the crafte so long to lerne.” Maybe it’s our fault. Maybe we spent so many years telling people what officials were doing wrong that they hated to see us coming.
Congressman Tip O’Neill’s last year in office was 1986, a sad changing of the guard for Mary. O’Neill was rumpled and sounded like a Boston ward politician. He liked whiskey and jousting with reporters. He took constituent services seriously. He was not a modern man, and Mary loved him for it.
Mary was misty-eyed at O’Neill’s farewell, but when he decided to do several American Express commercials after he retired, Mary described her horror upon seeing O’Neill pop out of a suitcase in an ad, like “some elderly, white-thatched cobra.”
“Tip O’Neill got very, very mad at me, not-speaking mad, because I criticized him for doing that American Express ad,” Mary recalled. When the two met at a party, O’Neill refused to even acknowledge her—he “just cut me dead,” observed Mary.
But after more time passed, the two met at a dinner. O’Neill came up behind Mary and put his arm around her waist. “Hello, darling.”
Mary looked up in surprise at the bearlike former Speaker. “I thought you were mad at me?”
“I was mad,” O’Neill said in his soothing baritone, “but now I’m not mad anymore.”
President Reagan’s grip on events became an increasingly pressing issue with the emergence of the Iran-contra scandal. By August 1985, Mary and others had flagged the role of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North in orchestrating aid to the Nicaraguan contras from the White House, despite legislation banning such assistance. When Mary pointed out that North was funneling private funds to the contras, Reagan vaguely and falsely asserted that no laws had been broken. Other than a masterful handling of the space shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986—and his remembrance of its crew, who had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God”—Reagan was increasingly off-kilter, what would later be revealed as the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. His public appearances, always a strength, were becoming liabilities.
When a plane full of weapons for the contras was shot down, Mary argued, in October 1986, that the “crooked trail” led straight to the National Security Council. A new and sensational angle to the scandal soon emerged: the White House had provided weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held in Lebanon—and then used the proceeds from the arms sales to finance the contras. It was Rube Goldberg diplomacy of the highest order. “Yes, Ronald Reagan, at one remove, shook hands with the Devil,” Mary penned.
After the news broke that Oliver North had directly engineered both the arms sales and the diversion of profits to the contras, it looked for a time as though the scandal might bring down the president. Mary pounced: “It is the wedding of policies that were made for each other: two slimy, misbegotten ventures that Reagan carried on in contempt of the law and the Congress.” Reagan was forced to fire North and National Security Adviser John Poindexter.
The president reluctantly agreed to the appointment of an independent counsel, and Oliver North took the Fifth Amendment forty times in an initial appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Mary had high hopes for the congressional Iran-contra hearings. It was a good cast of characters, skullduggery had taken place at the highest levels of government, and the scandal pitted Congress against the executive branch. But covering the hearings was difficult, since a foot operation had left Mary tottering across the unforgiving marble floors of Congress on crutches. David Corn observed, “She had trouble walking, but she managed to maneuver herself through narrow rows and find a place at the front of the press table. When the hearing was over, she hobbled up to the dais to ask senators why their questions had not been more penetrating.”
One of Mary’s fellow reporters noticed that all of the best seats in the press section were reserved with large placards noting names of papers, like WASHINGTON POST and NEW YORK TIMES. Only one seat was different; it bore a placard that simply read, MARY MCGRORY.
In her many years covering hearings, Mary had never seen a single witness shift events as profoundly as Oliver North did during his star turn as a patriotic “vulnerable scamp” before the committee. North’s testimony transformed him from the shadowy figure in the center of a ter
rible scandal to someone many viewed as a national hero. Mary was not buying what the colonel was selling, but she knew North was winning the public relations battle in a rout. North proudly displayed stacks of telegrams from admirers all around the country. Mary described the Senate Caucus Room as “a smoking ruin” as members were reduced to giving inane speeches defending their own patriotism.
President Reagan had dodged the most serious threat to his presidency, but it was a story that Mary would later return to with devastating effect.
• • •
Mary’s longtime assistant and close friend Liz Acosta suffered a stroke in 1987. Mary hired a replacement only reluctantly, bringing Tina Toll onto the staff when it became clear that Acosta could not return to work. It was a job that took some getting used to. One minute Tina was expected to get the Senate majority leader on the phone, the next she was calling nuns to ensure that they would be at Sunday dinner.
With the Reagan era petering to a conclusion, all eyes turned to the 1988 presidential contest. Mary yearned for a Mario Cuomo candidacy, but after having watched him perform for several years, her opinion was less adulatory: “His recent campaign for re-election fortified some doubts about his ability to stand the gaff of a national race. He takes things personally, lets nothing go by, and does not hesitate to engage in noisy public quarrels with archbishops and reporters who say or do things that are displeasing to him.” Cuomo stated publicly that he was not inclined to run but also suggested that he might be persuaded otherwise.
One of the other likely Democratic contenders, Michael Dukakis, hailed from Massachusetts. Dukakis had a solid reputation as a skilled technocrat in the Bay State, but Mary thought he lacked both charisma and a sense of humor to a disqualifying degree.
As the primaries heated up, Democrats suffered a series of embarrassments. Senator Joe Biden’s campaign collapsed under plagiarism charges. Senator Gary Hart flamed out after being caught red-handed in an extramarital affair. As Mary complained, “Dumbness has been the element that binds the Democratic disasters together.”
On the Republican side, Vice President George Bush, Senator Bob Dole, and televangelist Pat Robertson all hoped to succeed Reagan, and Mary argued that they were “somehow more authentic human beings, more grown up than their Democratic counterparts, and with much stronger conviction.”
However, Mary was incensed that Bush had avoided any culpability for the Iran-contra mess. While campaigning in Iowa in January 1988, Bush had challenged reporters to collectively submit their questions about Iran-contra so that he could respond to them. Reporters largely balked, but Mary accepted the challenge in her own way, dedicating an entire column to questions she hoped Bush would answer.
In fairly short order, the vice president’s office hand-delivered a four-page letter to Mary answering all seventeen questions she had posed in her column, and Mary duly printed the responses in her follow-up.
Bush denied being at a key National Security Council meeting when serious objections to the plan were raised and insisted that he had not asked Secretary of State George Shultz or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, both of whom were against the arms-for-hostages plan, their views. He said that he did not recall anyone expressing major problems with the deal. George Bush, the consummate insider, argued that he was out of the loop. A number of the vice president’s claims were untrue, but it would take time for those chickens to come home to roost, and for the time being no one had concrete evidence to the contrary.
After finishing third in the Iowa caucus, behind both Dole and Robertson, Bush limped into New Hampshire. The vice president quickly retooled his image. Although Mary found Bush’s effort to portray himself as a “truck-driving, burger-chomping, back-slapping New Englander” implausible, it was enough for him to carry the Granite State. Mary was less than enchanted with the choices on the Democratic side. Dukakis’s earnestness and rectitude reminded her of Jimmy Carter—no compliment—and she quoted party insiders as saying the governor had “a tin ear and a leaden touch.”
Privately, she pined for Cuomo, telling friends that she viewed him as a man among boys, a rare public figure willing to take a moral stand on hard issues. It was this kind of flattery that led many of Mary’s critics, and no small number of her friends, to suggest that throughout her career Mary fell in love with charismatic politicians—Adlai Stevenson, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, Mario Cuomo—and promoted them overenthusiastically.
But as all of those politicians could attest, Mary still had a sharp pen even with her favorite sons. In April 1988, she wrote a column asking of Cuomo, “Did he really not want to be president, or did he just not want to go through the indignities of the primaries?” Cuomo wrote to Mary after the column ran: “I didn’t miss the bus: I wasn’t going anywhere.” The governor was surprisingly thin-skinned for a New York politician. He wanted to charm Mary, but he had a hard time resisting the urge to argue with reporters over every line of their stories.
With Bush and Dukakis likely to face off in the general election, Bush wasted little time in launching blistering negative attacks on Dukakis, leading Mary to lament that “the fall campaign could bring us a new low in mindlessness.” Dukakis was oblivious to his peril, assuring reporters that voters were “smarter than that.”
Dukakis had a good convention and appeared to emerge in a strong position. His choice of the relatively conservative Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as his running mate looked like the sort of crass electoral politics that actually helps win elections. Dukakis briefly managed to shed his image as a pedestrian technocrat at the convention, and his new-found self-confidence helped push him out to a seventeen-point lead in the presidential polls. The race looked like it was his to lose.
Mary tartly observed that many of the attendees at the Republican convention, in New Orleans, looked like fish out of water in such colorful surroundings, “a little inclined to go out and look for the U.S. Embassy.” Bush misstepped early with his selection of Indiana senator Dan Quayle as his vice presidential nominee. Republicans appreciated Quayle’s hard-line stance on foreign policy and economics, but, as Mary observed, “It’s a little hard to see what J. Danforth Quayle III, blond, rich and 41, does for the Republican ticket.” One delegate complained to Mary that Quayle looked more like a mascot than a vice president.
But Bush delivered a strong acceptance speech at the convention, speaking of a “kinder, gentler nation.” It was George Bush as his own man, and Bush’s strong convention performance, along with a renewed assault of negative advertising, put Dukakis in a tailspin. “The campaign is unfolding before their eyes like some ghastly fairy tale for cynics,” Mary wrote of the Dukakis team. Making matters worse, Dukakis had reverted to his plodding preconvention self on the stump.
One of the highlights of the campaign for Mary came when Senator Bentsen deconstructed Dan Quayle in the vice presidential debate. When Quayle likened his congressional experience to that of Jack Kennedy, Bentsen was ready. “Senator,” Bentsen said, “I knew Jack Kennedy. I served with him. He was my friend. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” After a moment of stunned silence, the hall erupted in both applause and catcalls. A flushed Quayle tried to recover from the blow, but Bentsen noted later, in a delicious bit of understatement, “I did not think the comparison was well taken.”
But vice presidential debates don’t determine elections, and Dukakis fared very poorly in the second presidential debate, in Los Angeles. The very first question from moderator Bernard Shaw was a macabre hypothetical: “If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,” Shaw asked, would Governor Dukakis change his opinion on the death penalty? Dukakis should have denounced the question. Instead he gave a technocrat’s answer about the ineffectiveness of the death penalty. Mary pinpointed his emotionless answer as the exact moment when he lost the election.
George Bush was no longer in Reagan’s shadow, and he coasted to an easy electoral win. Mary reflected on the
race: “Bush’s campaign was cheap and divisive, a cynical exercise in know-nothingism and intolerance.” Yet Mary also understood that citizens would not vote for a candidate unwilling to defend himself.
As Christmas 1988 approached, Mary interviewed Dukakis under the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House. With the presidency no longer in the balance, Mary wrote of Dukakis in kinder terms: “The campaign did not change him. He is still a man who is crazy about public service and thinks that politics is about government programs and believes, although perhaps a little less surely, that everyone is as rational as he is.”
Mary asked Dukakis why his race had been unsuccessful. He answered with a succinctness and candor that would have served him well in the preceding months. “I lost,” Dukakis admitted, “because I ran a lousy campaign.”
CHAPTER TEN
Gentleman George
Early in President George H. W. Bush’s first term, Mary once again locked horns with the Gridiron Club. Gridiron president Larry O’Rourke announced to members that the executive board had decided to invite all of the living former presidents, including Richard Nixon, to the spring dinner. Mary, who never sang or danced at the festivities and usually had little to say at the few organizing meetings she attended, objected.
“I felt I had standing in this issue because I was on Nixon’s enemies list,” Mary said. She asked O’Rourke, in tones dripping with contempt, why Nixon was invited. O’Rourke noted that the board had discussed the issue, including Nixon’s use of wiretaps and IRS audits against the press, but still wanted him there.
Mary, along with journalists Cheryl Arvidson and Joan McKinney, forwarded a motion to disinvite Nixon. The men in the room objected, insisting that since Ronald Reagan wanted to attend, they needed to be fair and invite all of the former presidents. Mary pointed out that Nixon had waged an all-out assault on both the media and the Constitution while in office. “But he has received the blessing of celebrity,” she complained. “If you are famous, you are forgiven.”