Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Mary pushed the debate into the public eye with a January 1989 column that exposed the behind-the-scenes debate at the Gridiron, calling it another reminder that many reporters “think they are part of the government establishment and feel called upon to protect and defend anyone who reaches high office no matter what.” Reporters were publicly split about Nixon’s potential attendance.

  O’Rourke, who was furious with Mary for exposing the controversial decision, invited Nixon as a personal guest, but Nixon declined.

  “We started bringing women into the Gridiron Club, and she was one of the first ones elected,” Jack Germond observed. “But she would not participate, and she would not go to the meetings—let alone take part in the program.” Eventually the board passed a rule that if members did not attend at least three meetings each year, they would not receive a ticket to the dinner. It was quickly dubbed the McGrory Rule.

  Mary liked President Bush better than she liked candidate Bush, saying, “After eight years of a reclusive, programmed and scripted presidency, he seems wonderfully spontaneous.” She also noted with relief that, unlike Reagan, Bush did not rely on index cards when he met with congressional leaders.

  In February 1989, Mary decided to give up smoking for Lent. As someone who had smoked a pack a day for years, it was not easy. Mary succeeded in quitting, although her friends and colleagues walked on eggshells, given her irritability. “I feel fine, thank you, except that I gained 22 pounds,” Mary wrote to a friend. “Everyone told me I was going to feel marvelous. They lied.”

  Mary closely chronicled the rise of an ambitious Republican House member, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, during this period. Gingrich approached politics as war, and his hyperbolic style was crudely effective.

  Gingrich scored his most important early victory in 1989 by leading the charge to bring down Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright when Wright became embroiled in a petty scandal related to bulk purchases of his autobiography. Wright had brought the scandal upon himself, but Gingrich’s tactics ushered in an era that viewed bipartisanship as treachery. The old habit of Democrats and Republicans disagreeing during the day, drinking together at night, and ultimately getting deals done was over. It was a new age of party-driven implacability.

  “In the little private dining room where members of both parties used to eat cafeteria-style, sitting wherever there was room, there is now a Democratic table and a Republican table and not much friendly banter between them,” Mary observed. Democrats continued to make Gingrich’s work easy, as several congressmen faced ethics charges resulting from sex scandals. The Democratic-run House felt broken.

  While Congress was mired in pettiness and muck, global events moved with a far grander sweep. In July 1989, Mary traveled with President Bush across Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia as pro-democracy protests bubbled up all across the Eastern Bloc. Bush received a rapturous welcome.

  The momentous change that was sweeping Europe was greeted with suspicion by many in Washington, and Bush administration officials scoffed at the audacity of Poland’s Lech Walesa when he asked for $10 billion in assistance over three years. But as Mary pointed out, the administration had no qualms about requesting $10 billion a year for construction of the B-2 bomber. “Poland is a much better investment,” she insisted.

  Many of the pundits in Washington refused to believe that change in the Communist world was genuine. On November 9, 1989, conservative columnist George Will predicted that “the Wall will stay.” The Berlin Wall fell later that day.

  Mary was not impressed with Bush’s initial reaction: “Why did the leader of the western world look as though he had lost his last friend the day they brought him the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall?” Mary’s criticism stung. When President Bush and Ben Bradlee had lunch a short time later, Bush plaintively inquired, “How can I get through to Mary McGrory?” Bradlee suggested that not much could be done. When he related the conversation to Mary, she was pleased. “So they do read me. That is all I want.”

  Whatever his hesitancy meant, President Bush benefited politically from the enormous tide of change, and he handled his international role well after the early uncertainty. His approval rating moved above the 80 percent mark.

  • • •

  The late 1980s and early ’90s were particularly hard times at Mary’s beloved orphanage. The crack cocaine epidemic, coupled with the rise of HIV/AIDS, decimated American inner cities, and few more so than Washington. More and more children fled deeply dysfunctional home lives, sparking a vituperative national debate about how best to protect them. Most courts still preferred to return children to their natural parents—no matter how derelict those parents might have been. Mary and the sisters at St. Ann’s fumed about arbitrary court decisions that sent children back into dangerous environments where further abuse seemed inevitable.

  Mary continued to volunteer at St. Ann’s during the 1980s and ’90s. Tom Noyes, the longtime Santa for the Christmas parties, suffered a heart attack and relinquished his role. Even Mary was willing to accept, albeit reluctantly, a quadruple bypass as a legitimate alibi. Mary’s fellow columnist Mark Shields stepped in as his able successor. Mary had also helped engineer a visit from Nancy Reagan to St. Ann’s when she was first lady, further proof that politics stopped at the orphanage door for Mary.

  The focus of much of her ire was the Family Reunification Act, a federal proposal to expedite the return of children caught up in the social welfare system to their birth families, which made the continued existence of institutions like St. Ann’s difficult. Sister Josephine Murphy spoke with Mary about the act. “Mary, you need to take a stand, and you have to write an article,” she urged. “If you don’t, nobody is going to do anything about it.”

  Mary said that she needed to ask some questions on the Hill and see if it made sense.

  “But, Mary, you know you love kids. It is the only way to go.” The two went back and forth. A short time later, Mary called Josephine back: “I am going to do it.”

  Mary knew that taking on the idea of family reunification was controversial. Almost everyone instinctively believes that children should be reunited with their families as quickly as possible. Reality was more complex. With drugs, AIDS, and the city’s foster care program in disarray, it was clear that putting a child’s interest first sometimes meant not speeding them back into home life. “The Family Reunification Act,” argued Mary in her column, “is predicated on the gooey notion that every woman who gives birth is by definition a mother.”

  Mary described the travails of one boy at St. Ann’s as he was buffeted by the local court system:

  When we went swimming in the summer, the boy avoided the water. He made a wide circle around the pool. One of the child-care workers said he didn’t like water. Someone remembered that he had come to St. Ann’s at the age of 18 months, with two-thirds of his body burned. The judge sent him home with his mother. She said she had forgotten the hot water was running. Standing beside the pool, the boy gradually decided to risk it and was soon splashing and shrieking with the rest of the children. Later, there had been an episode involving a haircut undertaken with a razor. The judge sent him back home again, with a fatherly lecture to his mother about going to the barber next time.

  Mary argued that places like St. Ann’s were a reasonable alternative until parents could get their act together or a foster family could be found. She called Sister Josephine shortly after her column ran. There was no preamble. “Sister Josephine, I want to tell you one thing. In all my years of writing for newspapers, I have never gotten as much hate mail as I have for that article on the Family Reunification Act.”

  “That’s good,” Josephine argued. “That means people are reading it.”

  The issue of parents’ rights versus those of their children continued to roil Washington for much of the 1990s after a series of spectacular abuses and shocking judicial decisions, including the return of
two children to a mother who had suffocated her six-week-old, stuffed the body in a dumpster, and then attended a barbecue with her boyfriend.

  Mary’s time at St. Ann’s pushed her to get personally involved in a number of cases involving kids and the D.C. courts, including intervening to get one young boy whom she had helped for years released from Washington’s St. Elizabeths psychiatric facility.

  The boy’s mother so resented Mary’s continuing involvement that she got a court order to prevent Mary from visiting the boy at school and the boy from going on St. Ann’s outings. A second judge lifted the ban after Mary wrote to the court explaining her activities. Mary’s work with St. Ann’s was not an abstraction. It was the grindingly hard work of trying to make a difference in an indifferent system with families teetering on the edge. It meant working with families who sometimes viewed her efforts to move a child to foster care or an orphanage as hostile, destructive, or racist. “She was probably these kids’ greatest defender,” Sister Josephine maintained. “Who but Mary could have done the things that Mary got done?”

  Some of the more problematic elements of the Family Reunification Act were indeed altered over time, and there was a growing recognition in both law and practice that sending children back into a clearly abusive environment was inhumane.

  The positive national mood spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall took a sharp negative turn with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Mary was no hawk, but she acknowledged that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had crossed a line that America could not tolerate, writing, “Bombs, blockades, whatever—Saddam has asked for it.”

  Bush’s resolute performance in planning a response to the invasion of Kuwait highlighted an important dichotomy for Mary. “It is increasingly plain that in George Bush, the American people got two presidents for the price of one,” she wrote. “Each of the chief executives comes equipped with a totally different personality, so that it is easy to tell them apart. The foreign policy president is cool, measured, tough, coping. The domestic policy man is strident, petulant, self-pitying.”

  Everything seemed to break right for President Bush as the war commenced, although Mary was uneasy with the conflict’s slick packaging. “So far, President Bush has given the country the war it said it wanted in the polls: a war almost free of casualties, or at least many that we can see. Moreover, Operation Desert Storm is a telegenic combination of air show and arms bazaar, with marvelous weapons for every contingency being uncovered precisely when needed.” Small wonder, then, that potential Democratic presidential contenders stayed on the sidelines. Bush was so popular that a challenge seemed foolhardy. As Bush delivered his State of the Union address in January 1991, Mary remarked that Congress had been reduced to the status of an American Legion post, “required only to shout and cheer, and leap to its feet at every mention of our warriors.”

  Some 86 percent of the public approved of Bush and his handling of the war. In less than a month and a half, coalition forces defeated Iraq’s forces and Saddam Hussein ordered a hasty retreat from Kuwait, but Mary expressed growing queasiness with the way the administration airbrushed the conflict.

  Mary’s prickly attitude toward the Gulf War and President Bush sparked considerable backlash from readers. “My patriotism is often questioned by readers,” Mary explained. “I come down to saying that I think it is possible to love my country without loving its wars. That’s pretty defensive, but if you saw my mail, you would know why.”

  President Bush had some fun with Mary’s fierce position on the war. At the March 1991 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual dinner much like the Gridiron event, spirits were high in the wake of the Gulf War triumph. General Colin Powell was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers. The black-tie-and-gown crowd took in a lighthearted speech by President Bush.

  “Bill Dickinson of the Armed Services Committee was there,” said President Bush of the Gulf War, “and he reminded us of some events that all of you are familiar with, how several hundred Iraqis surrendered to a helicopter. We remember that one, and I think Tom briefed on it. Several more surrendered—and this is a true story—to a drone that was going by. And get this one: others surrendered to an Italian photographer—I can’t imagine surrendering to the press. To Mary McGrory, I say, ‘Never! Come and get me. I’ll never surrender!’” The crowd erupted in laughter and applause, Mary included.

  Len Downie became the Post’s chief editor in 1991, and Mary was increasingly at odds with the paper’s management. Downie was more cautious than Bradlee and never had easy relations with female staffers. Downie objected to Mary’s column appearing on the news pages instead of with the op-ed columns, and Mary was filled with sour memories of her tussles with Murray Gart at the Star on the same subject. “I didn’t have any great trouble getting him to understand that Mary was a special case,” explained Don Graham about the paper’s ultimate decision not to move the column. “She wound up on the front page of Outlook on Sunday and the inside pages the other days. She was treated as a special case, and should have been.” Mary won the battle, but she and Downie engaged in a reluctant détente.

  Mary treated most editors with a “good help is hard to get” attitude. Bill Hamilton, one of her editors at the Post, was fond of saying that when Mary introduced him as her editor, “it was clear who was working for whom.” Mary liked Hamilton and Ken Ikenberry, but she had increasingly scratchy relations with her other editors at the Post, who she thought were picky and prone to micromanagement, leaving her to tell one in exasperation, “Well, you know, my name’s on it.”

  Her relationship with her peers and editors became more challenging as she got older. “She became more imperious, more regal, I think, as the Mary McGrory persona took hold,” said her former colleague Haynes Johnson. Don Graham, the publisher of the Post, would send Mary nice handwritten notes when he particularly enjoyed a column. “We became sort of partisans of each other,” said Graham. “She would use me to score points against the editor.”

  Mary’s assistant, Tina Toll, was blunter about the level of respect Mary was accorded by the paper’s management and staff. “Everybody deferred to Mary McGrory; it was a little bit of a fear,” said Toll. “They would stand there like puppy dogs.”

  After Bush’s wartime triumphs, the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court brought domestic issues back to the forefront in the fall of 1991. By nominating an extremely conservative African American nominee with a rags-to-riches backstory and a short paper trail, President Bush knew he was putting Democrats in a bind.

  Mary wanted to ensure that she had a good seat for the hearings and was, unsurprisingly, irritated when one of the Post’s editors told her that he did not have an extra pass for her to attend. Yet when the editor turned on his television to watch the hearings, he saw Mary being escorted to her front-row seat by the Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden.

  The already high-profile Thomas hearings turned into a national sensation when Anita Hill, a former colleague of the judge, accused him of sexual harassment. She was hastily scheduled to speak before the committee and a riveted national audience. Mary remembered the scene:

  I went to the Senate Caucus Room, where so many years before, I had seen Joseph R. McCarthy—who was to be much invoked again—for the first time. In those days the press tables were drawn right up beside the witnesses, and we could see the whites of their eyes and almost their tonsils. Through the years, we of what is called redundantly the “writing press” have been gradually moved back so that we only see the backs of their heads. It was all the way it had been when someone is about to lose or gain a reputation, and some tale of betrayal, chicanery, larceny or dirty pool was about to be revealed.

  For Mary, conservative in all things sexual, Hill’s allegations were as damning as they were shocking. “It was as if a river of raw sewage had suddenly been unleashed in the marble chamber.” Mary thought Hill could not have be
en more credible: “Hill defended herself with poise and dignity. She walked proudly through the mire.”

  In the middle of the hearings, Mary was scheduled to fly to Maine to spend the weekend with Newby Noyes to mark the tenth anniversary of the closing of the Washington Star. The clashing schedule was ironic given that it was Newby who had dispatched Mary to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings forty years before.

  Mary decided that she would still leave. Surely President Bush would withdraw Thomas’s name as a result of Hill’s devastating testimony. Mary worked and reworked her Sunday column on the flight to Maine. Newby greeted Mary at the Bangor airport, saying, “I didn’t think you’d come.” If it had been anyone other than Newby, Mary probably wouldn’t have. Newby, his wife, Beppie, and Mary took a long walk by Frenchman’s Bay, reveling in the late-autumn colors and crisp air. As they stopped at a store, Mary noticed that virtually every car in the parking lot was listening to the hearings.

  When the White House decided to forge ahead with Thomas’s nomination, Mary found herself watching his testimony on television. Thomas was aggressive, declaring that God, not the Senate, was his judge. Mary and Newby agreed that the swipe would play well with a public that never thought much of Congress. Thomas claimed that Hill was lying and that the Senate was conducting “a high-tech lynching.” It was clear that Democrats had little stomach for the fight, although the evidence suggested that Thomas had indeed harassed a number of women and not just Hill.

  Mary, panicked that the hearings would drag on for days, booked an emergency flight back to Washington. She need not have bothered. Thomas had won the showdown. Mary graded the Democrats dismally: “a collection of damaged souls and swollen egos, who have found no cause larger than their next election.” She argued that it was also a powerful demonstration of why Republicans won elections: “The old CIA motto, ‘whatever is necessary,’ guides them. The Republican members of the Judiciary Committee got their marching orders and their script from the White House for the ferocious counterattack. . . . The Democrats never even caucused.”