by John Norris
She had not given up on the president, and the Clinton White House had not given up on trying to bring Mary around. In June 1993, she attended a small White House dinner. Mary and first lady Hillary Clinton discussed clothes and innovative ways to assist families needing drug treatment as a pleasant evening breeze wafted through the room.
The president shepherded Mary and others through several rooms, sharing his newfound knowledge of the White House. He pointed out that Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Harry Truman had all renovated, whereas FDR had done little because of the war.
As they sat down for a dinner of Atlantic salmon and pan-seared lamb, Mary was surprised to be seated between President Clinton and Ted Kennedy. Clinton waxed on at length about his sports heroes: Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer, and Ted Williams. Mary was never much for sports, although she did coin a classic quote about America and sports: “Baseball is what we were; football is what we have become.”
Clinton talked about the many people who had given him advice upon taking office, saying that some of the best insights had come from author and historian David McCullough. As they were talking about McCullough, Kennedy noted how sad it was that Mrs. Truman had always left her husband alone every summer at the White House. “I would be a basket case,” Clinton insisted at the idea of spending the summer without Hillary. Mary noticed that Clinton ate everything on his plate.
The Marine Band played softly in the background. Toward the end of the dinner, Kennedy scooped up the cardboard name placards in front of their settings, telling Mary that he was going to ask the president to autograph them. Mary said that it seemed “terminally tacky” to do so, and then promptly did the same.
After dinner, Mary watched as Bill and Hillary danced. “It was a stupendous evening, and I have never been more pleasantly shocked than to be seated next to the president,” Mary observed. Even after decades covering presidents, the White House still held magic for Mary.
The White House charm offensive made some inroads, and Mary gave Hillary Clinton high marks for her appearance before Congress advocating for health care reform. “The first First Lady to lead the charge for a major program that she herself crafted showed such skill and strength that she set a new standard for presidential and other political wives, for White House witnesses, and perhaps for women in general,” she wrote. “It’s a long way to Tipperary on getting health care through Congress. But Mrs. Clinton has made a brilliant beginning.” But Mary also recognized that Hillary’s star turn had sparked considerable resentment in Congress.
When Mary attended a 1993 Christmas party for reporters at the White House, she painted a portrait of a president growing in his role. “He ostentatiously waved away a luscious torte with ginger sauce, displaying a self-discipline not seen on yesterday’s romps through McDonald’s. He showed off an enormous amount of information without seeming to show off.”
The new year began on a down note for Mary with the death of Tip O’Neill early in 1994. For her it was both the loss of a friend and the passing of an era. Mary recalled the last time she had seen O’Neill alive—at a reception for his successor as Speaker, Jim Wright. “He was walking with a cane, his great white-thatched head was bent, and his voice, soft as rain in his prime, was almost inaudible.” After a warm hug, Tip confided to Mary, “‘I’m fallin’ apart, darlin’—arthritis, diabetes.”
Mary said of O’Neill’s very Irish funeral, “I don’t think I have ever been at a funeral where there was more love.” O’Neill’s son Thomas drew wicked grins when he reminded the crowd that whenever his father had spoken of Ronald Reagan’s ancestral birthplace in Ireland, Ballyporeen, he always noted that it meant “valley of small potatoes.”
“Every single politician in that church had the same thought running through their head during that funeral,” Congressmen Ed Markey confided to Mary over drinks afterwards: “‘My funeral won’t be this good.’”
One of President Clinton’s signature achievements was his assistance to the Northern Ireland peace process. Mary was initially skeptical, and many Irish American politicians, not to mention the British government, were alarmed when Clinton granted a visa to Sinn Féin spokesman Gerry Adams in February 1994. But Ted Kennedy gave Clinton important political cover when he said that Adams, although controversial, had a role in the peace process.
Mary sat next to Adams at a private dinner during his first trip to Washington. After politely listening to him speak, she leaned in and asked Adams about the Irish Republican Army. “Was it really necessary to shoot all those fathers in front of their children?”
Adams was taken aback. This was not the question he had been expecting from the genteel gray-haired reporter. After a moment he replied, “No, it wasn’t, and I regret that.” Mary was unimpressed when Adams claimed that nonviolence had failed to produce results.
Mary panned the visit. “Adams came for 48 hours, was given star treatment and puffball questions from the U.S. press, smiled his tight and ominous smile, failed to renounce terrorism, encouraged all the wrong people in the United States and Ireland. . . . The cause of peace in Northern Ireland was not advanced by a centimeter.”
But even if it did not bear immediate fruit, Clinton’s attention to the Irish American community got noticed. At a 1994 White House Saint Patrick’s Day celebration, a crowd of four hundred Irish and Irish Americans gave Clinton a thunderous standing ovation. While it had been a long time since Irish Americans had been a marginalized political class, Clinton made them feel more loved than ever before.
Many viewed Mary as the embodiment of pure Irish Americanism. If she had avoided talking about her half-German heritage as a youth because of unease with her identity, she did so as an adult because it would have deconstructed a carefully cultivated image.
When Adams returned to Washington, Mary pressed him at a private dinner about why the IRA was unwilling to accept a permanent cease-fire. Adams tried to deflect the question. Mary asked again. Adams detailed the intricacies of the outstanding issues. Mary repeated her question. Finally, Adams laughed aloud and said, “Permanent, permanent, permanent.”
Later, when a breakthrough in peace talks led to a cease-fire, and President Clinton made a triumphal visit to Ireland, Mary ate her crow as graciously as possible. “If President Clinton had listened to the likes of me, he never would have had his Irish triumph. I was one of those who thought he was mad to let in Gerry Adams, the IRA propagandist. But he paid no attention to us, Adams was the key, and last week, Clinton brought genuine joy to Belfast.” For Mary, Clinton’s Irish success was a powerful reminder of how much a president could achieve with political courage, helping end a war and reaping tremendous domestic political benefit as a result. When Clinton was feted and named “Irish-American of the Year,” the master of ceremonies spoke of Clinton’s daring, steadfastness, and resolve. Mary dryly noted that those were virtues that had “sometimes gone unremarked elsewhere.”
The president’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day party became the event on the Irish American social calendar. Clinton, a collection of Kennedys, the president of Ireland, senior members of the cabinet, Mary, and Hollywood heavyweights like Liam Neeson and Paul Newman delighted in the wearing of the green at the White House.
In 1998, a referendum was to be held on the historic Good Friday peace agreement. Mary called her old friend and fellow columnist Maureen Dowd and suggested that they travel to Ireland for the event: “It will be fun, a girl’s bonding trip.”
“There was no chance to bond, of course,” Dowd explained. “On the train from Dublin to Belfast, after staying up all night on the plane, Mary interviewed everyone at the station, everyone on the train, including the lame woman whom she got to carry her bags, the cabdriver on the way to the hotel, the waitress at the hotel coffee shop, the room-service waiter carrying our tea, and the priest at Sunday Mass.” (Mary insisted that, although she always relied on bearers, this time she had turned d
own the offer from the lame woman to help with her bag.)
A broad array of American journalists were on hand for the referendum. Mary dined with Dowd, Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Chris Matthews, and Richard Berke of the New York Times. When Christiane Amanpour, a very accomplished journalist, approached the table, Dowd introduced her. Mary blurted out, “I know you, you are Jamie’s girl”—a reference to Amanpour’s fiancé, State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin. Mary’s ability to strategically deflate others remain unrivaled. The Good Friday peace plan passed by an enormous margin.
But for all of his success with Northern Ireland, President Bill Clinton remained dogged by problems at home, primarily the Whitewater scandal. Although Whitewater began as an investigation of the president and first lady’s links to a failed land deal in Arkansas, his Republican opponents had broadened the investigation to include everything, including extramarital affairs.
Mary believed that the original events at the heart of Whitewater were relatively inconsequential but that the Republican obsession with bringing down the president, coupled with Clinton’s tendency to behave as if he were “generically guilty,” made the scandal self-perpetuating. In Mary’s theatrical terms: “a strong cast of wayward Arkansans, but a weak plot.” Mary reasoned that the Republicans’ ferocious focus on Whitewater would eventually backfire, saying that the public “knew they were not electing a role model when they elected Bill Clinton.”
As the Clinton administration tried to push through universal health care, the president came under daily assault from right-wing radio—a growing force in the country. Mary had little but contempt for talk show gasbags like Rush Limbaugh, but she worried that Clinton was inclined to wallow in self-pity when under fire. She made her case directly to the president in an August 1994 White House press conference: “Mr. President, would you tell us why you hold so few solo press conferences? This is only your third, and you have been heard to complain that the lords of the right-wing radio have uninterrupted communication with the American people, and you have the same chance but don’t take it. Could you tell us why?” Clinton smiled in response, saying, “I think it’s a mistake, and I intend to do more on a more regular basis.” Reporters laughed in disbelief.
Mary had particularly tough words for the congressional Whitewater hearings that summer. “If the Whitewater hearings were a series, it would have been canceled, if a show, closed, and if a horse, shot.” Mary—and most of America—were appalled as congressional Republicans repeatedly insinuated that the suicide of White House counsel Vince Foster had been the result of foul play, charges she called “scummy and out of bounds.”
Clinton’s halting performance during his first two years in office led to miserable results for Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections, and they lost control of both the House and the Senate. Mary described the president after the election: “He was pretty much in the Ancient Mariner mode, haunted and babbling. He couldn’t stop talking about the shipwreck that had just occurred, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, either.”
Power in Washington had shifted dramatically, and the new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was determined to stand the Capitol on its head. Mary’s columns on Gingrich moved with easy verve. “The newly designated House speaker, with his gray thatch and X-ray eyes, is tearing around town these days, spewing directives, reading lists, edicts, advice and predictions,” she wrote. “He swims in a sea of approval. To young House members, he is a legend, a combination of Robert Bruce and Knute Rockne.”
Gingrich was a consummate showman. He arranged for circus elephants to march around the Capitol as his colleagues voted on a Republican tax plan. His every move was followed by scores of reporters as he took aim at everything from the school lunch program to foreign aid.
One of Gingrich’s early gaffes propelled Mary and the Speaker into an interesting conversation. When Gingrich suggested that children from poor mothers might be better off in orphanages, Democrats unloosed howls of protest about Republican hard-heartedness. Hillary Clinton called Gingrich’s plan “absurd,” and the president suggested that Gingrich was trying to uproot loving families.
Mary, shaped by her experience with St. Ann’s, was one of the few Democrats to speak out in Gingrich’s defense. “Nobody is saying that an institution is better than a home,” she wrote. “But what he and others are saying is that an institution is better than a crack house or a life on the street.”
She wrote to a friend in Antrim, “Right now Newt is a lot of fun, or good copy anyway. It’s a thrill a day, one loony idea after another. Strangely enough, I think he wants to help poor children.” Clinton, on the other hand, she found to be “at the bottom of the Slough of Despond.”
Mary and Gingrich exchanged a series of thoughtful letters on children and volunteerism. As she noted in one of the letters, “One of the things I feel most deeply is that what makes poverty and squalor even more unbearable is the feeling that no one knows about your suffering, and no one cares.” It was not the company that most fans of either McGrory or Gingrich expected them to keep, but Mary was never less partisan than when it came to kids. However, Gingrich’s penchant for slashing social programs soon brought them to loggerheads.
In April 1995, Mary was awarded the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award for freedom of speech and also presented with the first Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism. The Four Freedoms Award was a considerable honor, and President Clinton presented Mary and the other honorees their awards at a ceremony in Warm Springs, Georgia, at the same site to which FDR had regularly decamped for healing spa treatments. The award came exactly fifty years to the day after Roosevelt had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs.
For Democrats wounded by their congressional losses, the awards ceremony, on the porch of the Little White House, under a canopy of chestnut trees, was a balm. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the gathering “the most talented group of speakers probably ever assembled” in the state of Georgia.
Forty members of the Morehouse College choir sang a full-throated version of the spiritual “Ain’a That Good News” as President Clinton and the others walked up the dirt path to the podium. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves, the granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor, wowed the crowd when she argued that FDR’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” speech—which maintained that Americans had a right to education, decent wages, and health care—was not a “Contract with America, but a ringing articulation of America’s contract with ourselves.”
Mary’s speech, which she had fretted over at great length, was warm and sharp. Even as she insisted that she was not worthy of the award, she asked forgiveness from those in the audience who might think that she was “vulgar” for being proud of her place on Nixon’s enemies list.
She talked far more about FDR than about herself. “He had almost every newspaper publisher in this country grinding his teeth editorializing against ‘that man in the White House.’ But twice a week (that’s twice a week!) the reporters trooped into the Oval Office, so the publishers got nowhere with their demonizing.” She gave President Clinton a pointed glance and continued. “He understood instinctively that the way to lead was through constant communication with the people,” she said. “I regret to say that—present company, of course, excepted—that the presidents who succeeded him did not wholly share his benign and wholesome view of the press.”
In his remarks, President Clinton noted that FDR “never meant for anybody—anybody—to become totally dependent on the government when they can do things for themselves. But should we abandon the notion that everybody counts, that we’re going up or down together?” At the end of his speech, Clinton joined the crowd and chorus in clapping his hands and singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was a great moment for Mary, made all the better when she was able to hop a ride back to Washington aboard Air Force One with
the president.
Just days after the Four Freedoms ceremony, right-wing militia members bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, including 19 small children, and wounding close to 700. President Clinton was perhaps at his best in the days that followed, urging restraint, consoling families and loved ones, and calling for more tempered and reasoned debate. He singled out the rhetoric of right-wing radio as fueling anger against the government, although he did not point to any commentator by name.
Mary marched right into the debate: “People say the president should not have spoken out against intemperate talk show hosts. But if not he, who? That’s what presidents are supposed to do.” She took particular aim at Rush Limbaugh. “His offense is tastelessness. He burps on his show while his doting fans giggle at his devilishness; he suggested that the First Lady’s problem during the health care debate had been that she was menopausal. No wonder he felt threatened when Clinton appealed for more civility.”
Limbaugh took exception to Mary’s comments, even as his response validated them. On the air, Limbaugh insisted that his belch had been accidental and claimed, “Now, as for the first lady in menopause, sorry again, Ms. McGrory, but you’ve got the wrong show. It never happened. My discussion about the health care debate concerned the substance of the administration’s proposals and the credibility of those who are offering them. Menopause is not one of my many areas of expertise. I mean, I will leave menopause to others who know about it and leave them to discuss that subject. Ms. McGrory, do you have any suggestions, maybe?” On another show, Limbaugh suggested that “the men in little white coats” were soon going to take Mary from her office.
For Mary and others, Oklahoma City marked a watershed in Clinton’s presidency. He became more self-assured and presidential. “Bill Clinton has made a remarkable discovery,” Mary shared. “He has found out that he is president, and that if he tells people what’s what, they don’t mind. They even like it.”