Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  Mary singled out Ted Kennedy for his ineffectiveness. She pointed out that his long history of women problems—drunken carousing, the long shadow of Chappaquiddick, and the events of the previous spring, when Kennedy had been out drinking with a nephew who would later be charged with rape—all combined to silence the man best suited to challenge Thomas. Mary’s grim postmortem for the Massachusetts senator: “Kennedy, gravely wounded in the dirty war, cannot escape the limits of his usefulness.”

  The 1992 presidential campaign got off to an unusually late start, and Mary teased New York governor Mario Cuomo for his extended anguish about whether to mount a bid: “Nobody knows what Cuomo is waiting for as he issues daily bulletins from somewhere deep inside his psyche. In his latest soliloquy, divertingly recounted in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd, he blames God for his dilemma. The Almighty has not obliged him with a shaft of lightning such as was visited on Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.”

  After reading the column, Maureen Dowd dropped Mary a note, saying that she had come up in her conversation with Cuomo. “I’m not discussing anything I said to Mary,” insisted Cuomo, “because I’m not myself when I’m with McGrory. She’s crazy. She can get anything she wants from me. She is magnificent. Not only is she smart, gracious, nice. She’s also human. She’s got enough of the devil in her, you know, so that you know she’s real and beautiful. If she didn’t have a little bit of the Irish in her, and a little bit of Boston and a little bit of the old stories, she’d be too perfect.”

  Mary still tried to goad Cuomo into running. Her next column was in verse, again following a biblical theme: “How odd of God, says Mario C. Not doing for me the same as he did for Saul of T.” Minutes after reading Mary’s column, Cuomo called and left a voice-mail message on Mary’s answering machine. “How odd of Mary to do this to me, to mock my tormented musings. My frantic, fumbling efforts first to forge political fusings. Doesn’t she know I need to think, to ponder and to ruminate? Doesn’t she know that otherwise I will not be able persuasively to fulminate?” For Mary, the literate sparring must have felt like shades of her old relationship with Adlai Stevenson or Gene McCarthy.

  “I am convinced that Mario Cuomo will run,” Mary wrote to a friend in November 1991. “It better be soon, or somebody will lynch him.”

  Just before Christmas, Cuomo announced that he would not run, and Mary called it “coal in the Christmas stocking of the Democratic Party.” Mary finally had hit her breaking point, telling a friend in Antrim, “I’m sick and tired of Mario Cuomo and his peekaboo.”

  The great irony of the 1992 race was that while many Democrats stayed away from the race because of Bush’s enormous popularity, there were growing signs of his weakness as the campaign began. Most ominously for Bush, the economy was dipping just as firebrand television commentator Pat Buchanan geared up for a Republican primary challenge against him.

  Mary painted a bleak picture as President Bush courted Granite State voters: “New Hampshire, site of the first presidential primary, is afflicted with massive unemployment, foreclosures, bank failures, and plant closings, and George Bush was wary when he took its hand.” She spoke with many Republicans who planned to vote for Buchanan simply to send a message about the economy, and it seemed safe to do so, since the Democratic field looked weak. Buchanan appealed to voters as if he were leading an angry mob toward Frankenstein’s castle.

  On the Democratic side, Mary devoted a good amount of coverage to the rising Democratic contender Bill Clinton. She nicely captured the Arkansas governor, “a tall, square-shouldered, pumpkin-faced extrovert, bowls people over with his charm. Color him effervescent. . . . With little children, with old ladies, he is magic.” While Clinton exuded southern charm, he was free of Jimmy Carter’s rectitude. Carter told New Hampshire voters he loved them; Clinton told them they deserved to be the first presidential primary state because they were so demanding.

  In mid-January, Mary noted that reports of womanizing could prove an Achilles’ heel for Clinton in New Hampshire, saying that his rivals knew “that the hint of scandal may be the only way of stopping the radiant, ruddy stranger who seems to have captured New Hampshire’s stony heart.” When Bill and Hillary Clinton went on 60 Minutes to fend off charges of his philandering, they saved the campaign. Ever prudish, Mary found the spectacle of politicians and their wives talking so publicly about the pain of infidelity undignified. “I was extremely critical of Governor Clinton’s treatment of his wife,” Mary wrote to a friend. “I thought it so unattractive that he would never be nominated.” Yet Mary was quick to learn that Clinton had what she called “truly awesome recuperative powers.”

  But Mary kept her harshest judgments of Clinton out of print, recognizing that some of her complaints sounded old-fashioned, and her language describing Clinton was more playful than condemnatory: “He is like Tom Jones, the hero of a picaresque 18th-century novel that was made into a riotous movie—a big, good-looking, good-hearted, lusty, scrape-prone lad.”

  Even at seventy-three, Mary traveled gamely across New Hampshire as if she were herself a candidate. In mid-February, with the temperature eight degrees above zero, she trudged with a campaign volunteer through the streets of Ward 7 in Manchester, convinced it was still the best way to read the tea leaves of the electorate.

  Mary enjoyed close relationships with a number of Clinton’s key advisers, particularly George Stephanopoulos, whom she had gotten to know when he was working as an aide to Congressman Dick Gephardt. “One of my boss’s constituents was a young man named Steven McKenna, who was born deformed by thalidomide that had been given to his mom by a government doctor,” explained Stephanopoulos. “The Justice Department was stopping him from suing for damages. Exactly the kind of case Mary adopted as her own. She wrote the column, Steve got his day in court. I made a friend.”

  Stephanopoulos helped Mary in her garden, volunteered with the kids from St. Ann’s, and tended bar at Mary’s parties. In the run-up to the campaign, Mary and several other friends tried to dissuade Stephanopoulos from going to work for Clinton, insisting he was a long shot. Stephanopoulos sensibly ignored the collective wisdom and signed on as Clinton’s communications director.

  When Stephanopoulos’s career skyrocketed and he became one of President Clinton’s closest advisers at the age of thirty-four, Washington Post reporter Al Kamen and his wife saw him on television one evening. His wife turned to him and asked, “Isn’t that the guy who used to serve us at Mary’s?”

  The campaign was a stern test of friendship for Stephanopoulos and Mary. Clinton exploded at Stephanopoulos when he read critical columns from Mary. Mary would pester Stephanopoulos when he was slow to respond to her inquiries. “Dear George,” she wrote him at one point. “Ever since I began writing about the Clintons, you have stopped returning my calls. What kind of a message is that?”

  • • •

  Although Bill Clinton finished second to Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary, he sold his performance as that of the “comeback kid.” On the Republican side, President Bush turned back the effort by Buchanan, but voters were uneasy.

  This restlessness found a standard-bearer with the entry of Texas billionaire Ross Perot into the presidential race as an independent. The plainspoken Texan offered blunt assessments of the ills of government in terms that were colorful and easy to understand. The initial public response was electric.

  In early May 1992, Mary had a lengthy interview with Perot, and she liked him. He funded programs for inner-city schoolkids out of his own pocket and was animated in a way that reminded her of Joe Allbritton. Mary loved the fact that Perot was bringing new people into the political process and turning out volunteers in droves. It was significant praise that she called his campaign the most “exhilarating adventure” in American politics since Gene McCarthy’s New Hampshire insurgency. But Mary also spotted storm clouds on the horizon: “It is hard to see him keeping cool during a pres
idential debate when a rival charges him with being all wet.” For a period before the conventions, Ross Perot led in the polls in a three-way contest with Clinton and Bush.

  Len Downie noted that it was Mary who had asked Hillary Clinton the now famous question about the balance between being a professional woman and a mother. Clinton’s response to Mary was, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Clinton’s answer quickly became campaign fodder, with critics saying that she was a radical feminist demeaning stay-at-home moms. The fact that Clinton’s response came to a question from Mary, a woman who had never baked cookies or raised a child, was no small irony.

  Clinton announced the selection of Tennessee senator Al Gore as his running mate in advance of the convention in New York. Gore was more conservative than Mary would have liked, but she knew that Gore’s service in Vietnam, environmental credentials, and solid family life provided Clinton with what she called a “character graft.”

  The gathering in New York took on new import as Ross Perot made the dramatic announcement that he was dropping out of the race. Mary had been unsparing toward Perot even before the announcement, given his increasingly strange behavior on the campaign trail. “This is the scary Perot,” she said, “the raging paranoid who far from being the Trumanesque figure of earlier impressions, combines the worst features of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.” Perot’s announcement meant that millions of votes were suddenly up for grabs. Mary saw his withdrawal as a particularly grave sin, because he had gotten so many Americans excited about the political process for the first time and then abandoned them out of pique.

  When Mary was in New York, she learned that Gore was holding a fundraiser at a local law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. When Mary arrived, she was told it was a private event. “Closed to the public?” stormed Mary. “What are you talking about? Is this man running to be a partner in Cravath, Swain and Moore, or is he running for the vice presidency of the United States?” Mary, the only reporter present, was given a front-row seat. “You have to keep a sense of outrage and indignation, and you get very cross with people who are trying to keep you from doing what you are supposed to,” Mary explained.

  On the convention floor, both Clinton and Gore delivered intensely personal acceptance speeches. “These were probably the most intimate acceptance speeches in the history of the art, and real weepers,” observed Mary. “They had to be, say the handlers, because people don’t know Gore and don’t trust Clinton. By the time the delegates departed with their Clinton pennants, they were sure their Dixie duo would do just fine.”

  From New York, Mary headed to the Republican convention, in Houston. Although a speech by former president Ronald Reagan was received blissfully, the convention became most famous for a fiery oration by Pat Buchanan that called America to a “cultural war” against radical feminists, homosexuals, environmentalists, and other “malcontents.” When he spoke of a “block-by-block” effort to retake America’s cities, using force if necessary, the crowd in the hall gushed. The audience at home winced.

  Mary wrote, “The Republican assembly was not a joyous gathering of like-minded people. It was more of a putative expedition against people the Christian Right considers reprehensible, a fairly sizable number, which includes gays, reporters, the “gridlocked Democratic Congress,” single mothers, women who have abortions, and above all, Hillary Clinton. . . . The pillars of faith, hope, and charity came in for little attention.”

  In October, Ross Perot jumped back into the presidential race, despite his deeply wounded image. The race was down to Bush and Clinton, and Bush was gaining steady ground on Clinton through a drumbeat of attacks on his character and lack of experience.

  But then came an October surprise: special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had been investigating the Iran-contra scandal for years, dropped a bombshell: Vice President Bush had lied about his role in the arms-for-hostages saga. Walsh not only indicted former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger for lying to Congress, but released key information just four days before the election that made clear that Bush had also lied about his part in the scandal.

  Mary’s earlier open questions to Bush about Iran-contra were central to Walsh’s findings. The day after Bush’s open letter to Mary had appeared in the Post in 1987, Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz had spoken on the phone. Weinberger complained angrily to Shultz about Bush’s assertion to Mary that he would have taken a different view of arms sales to Iran if he had known there was opposition in the cabinet. Unfortunately for Bush, an aide to Shultz took detailed notes of the conversation between Weinberger and the secretary of state. Weinberger told Shultz that Bush’s answers were “terrible” and that the vice president had clearly known that both Weinberger and Shultz vehemently objected to the arms deal. Weinberger wondered, “Why did he say that?”

  Once again a politician had hung himself on what he thought were relatively softball questions from Mary. Walsh had effectively destroyed Bush’s campaign in the eleventh hour with a very rough form of justice.

  With Ross Perot managing to take close to 20 percent of the popular vote, Bill Clinton became the forty-second president of the United States.

  Mary continued to weigh on President Bush’s mind even after the election. Jim Baker, who had served as Bush’s secretary of state, had become embroiled in a minor brouhaha over whether Republican political appointees had accessed Bill Clinton’s passport file in an effort to gather compromising information.

  Shortly before Christmas 1992, Mary wrote of Baker, “The man who served as secretary of state for four years, who was considered the ablest man in two Republican administrations, the slick and ferocious campaign manager who made Democrats tremble, has vanished. His disappearance is the talk of the town’s Christmas parties. No Republican wishes to be quoted—Baker is much feared and respected—but the general feeling is that he has suffered grave damage to his reputation and his quest for the presidency.”

  After reading Mary’s column, President Bush wrote in his diary, “An ugly editorial by Mary McGrory . . . and it will have Jim Baker climbing the wall. . . . I feel sorry for Jim Baker. Mary McGrory tries to act like Barbara and I are opposed to him in some way—the meanest, nastiest, ugliest column. She has destroyed me over and over again, and Jim is so sensitive about his own coverage that he will be really upset.”

  For her part, Mary was looking forward. She sent a fax to George Stephanopoulos letting her old friend know that they had served lasagna at the Christmas party. There were leftovers available if he was interested.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Grande Dame

  Arriving along with the Clinton administration was a great tidbit of gossip. When a staffer at the U.S. embassy in Rome was asked who he thought was in the running for the plum post of ambassador to Italy, he reeled off the names of several people he thought it would be fun to work for, and Mary’s name was high on the list.

  The day after Clinton was sworn in, Mary’s friend Al Kamen noted in his Washington Post column that the Italian press was speculating that Mary was under consideration. Not long after, Mary attended a dinner at the Italian ambassador’s residence in Washington, and the ambassador made a great fuss over her, telling his guests with a broad smile, “You see, Mary and I are not just friends anymore. We are colleagues.” Mary reveled in the attention. “It has all been great fun, and I don’t tell everyone it is just that.”

  Mary reached out to George Stephanopoulos frequently in the early days of the administration. In January 1993, she asked his help in getting on the inaugural bus to Monticello, invited him to a pesto dinner with Phil Gailey, complained that Clinton adviser Paul Begala was not returning her calls, and berated the transition team for considering a former Oliver North protégé for a job.

  Mark Gearan, who went to work in the
administration as the deputy chief of staff at the White House, knew that managing a relationship with Mary was not easy. Gearan recalled President Clinton reacting like a “hurricane” to one of Mary’s columns. Gearan, Stephanopoulos, and others were repeatedly directed by the president to deal with the “Mary problem.” But they had no more luck than the many previous denizens of the White House in getting Mary to soften her line.

  In April 1993, Bill Clinton marked his first hundred days in office. At a White House press conference, Mary put her question to the commander in chief directly: “Mr. President, would you care to make your assessment of the first hundred days before we make one for you?” Clinton and the press corps laughed, and the president defended his record, arguing with some foresight that a hard-fought win on a budget resolution would make real progress in dealing with the deficit.

  But early stumbles gave Mary plenty of material. Dubbing him “William the Procrastinator,” she painted the picture of “a president who hates to make up his mind, an eternal campaigner who can’t stand giving up on any constituency and who believes he can please all.” She compared Clinton to a difficult adolescent who left his parents unsure whether he would win a merit scholarship or total the family car.

  Mary wrote to one of her readers, “Like you, I want President Clinton to succeed. Unlike you, I have less hope now. I think he is doing badly for the same faults demonstrated in the campaign, self-indulgence, lack of focus and self-discipline.” She described his first year in office as “a blur of blunders: exploding nominations, gays in the military, a haircut on the runway, and bone-crunching confrontations with Congress.” Yet Mary also sensed real endurance in Clinton.