by John Norris
It quickly became evident that with relentless budget cuts targeted at the poor and the ongoing obsession with Whitewater, Gingrich and the Republicans were overreaching. Mary wrote, “The Republican attitude is exemplified by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who, faced with a choice of heartlessness or tastelessness, often chooses both.” Mary told one of her friends that it was a wonderful time to be a columnist. “I am kicking subjects away. Some days you think when Republicans try to pollute the air and water that parody can go no further, and then Clinton ups and delivers a knockout blow to himself.”
When Newt Gingrich threw a tantrum about President Clinton allegedly snubbing him on the Air Force One flight back from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel, and subsequently forced a temporary government shutdown, the White House released a photo of Clinton and Gingrich chatting amiably on the plane. The New York Daily News then featured a front-page cartoon depicting Gingrich as a bawling baby in diapers.
Mary described Gingrich’s almost Shakespearean fall in a speech at Georgetown University. “The Republicans are, as far as I know, not being paid by the Democrats, but they should be. Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, a House speaker, Republican, who closes down the government because he was asked to leave a plane by the back door? No mortal hand could have devised that succession of events. It is beyond belief to me that he could have gotten off the plane by the back door, the servants’ entrance, and that he should, within two days, close down the government.”
Mary was also able to goad both Bill and Hillary Clinton into helping out at St. Ann’s, and she arranged for Hillary to visit St. Ann’s at Christmas in 1995. She held her breath as she watched the interaction between Sister Josephine and the first lady. Yet, as Mary observed, “The meeting between the ultra-contemporary first lady and the sisters of the ancient order of the Sisters of Charity, who have run the home for homeless children for over 100 years, was unexpectedly cordial.” The two found common ground in talking about the shortcomings of the Family Reunification Act, and Hillary noted that she had been roundly criticized in the press for saying that “it takes a village” to raise a child. It was a position with which the sisters instantly sympathized.
The kids had diligently learned a new Christmas song and were singing it for the first lady when Tim Russert appeared, dressed as Santa. (Mary had told Russert that playing Santa for the kids was much like his role as host of Meet the Press: “They know they are going to get questions on which they would love to take the fifth. They will deny that they ever fight or hit each other while in the act of doing so.”) The kids abandoned Clinton and flocked to Santa. One child stayed behind, hugging Hillary’s leg and reassuring her, “It’s okay, I’ll stay here with you.” Not surprisingly, given his day job, Russert was a more interrogatory Father Christmas than his predecessors. He quizzed the children in some detail about their lapses—“Did you bite? Did you fight?”—and delivered a lecture on the importance of responsibility. One of the children leaned over and asked Mary, “Is he ever going to give us presents?”
Several years later, Mary would manage to have the kids invited to the White House for Christmas. The children were enthralled by the Marine helicopter on the lawn and by the president’s dog, Buddy. A young boy, Sherman, dashed over and thrust out his hand to President Clinton in greeting. “How do you do, Mr. President? I’m glad to see you.” Clinton smiled broadly at the effusive welcome and smiled infectiously as he had his picture taken with the four nuns who accompanied Mary and the kids.
One day in 1995, Sister Josephine vented that most teachers did not bother to take a little extra time with the kids from St. Ann’s. Mary agreed. She recalled the case of a boy named Dale, who was pleasant and social at St. Ann’s but had been sent home several times for hitting other kids at school. “This was completely out of character and the reason was not hard to find,” Mary observed. “He was striking out at those who were humiliating him.” When Dale started getting tutoring, his problems at school vanished.
Mary had a plan in mind and offered to make an initial donation of $25,000, in addition to her already considerable regular support, to establish the “Mary Gloria Room,” a space at St. Ann’s where the kids could receive regular tutoring. She would pay to refurbish and furnish the room and help underwrite a tutor in residence. “Many fail not because they lack intelligence or willingness to learn,” she explained, but because they “have never in their short, troubled lives been talked to, read to, sung to or had anything explained to them by an affectionate adult.” Mary’s charitable giving remained prodigious. During much of the late 1990s, she averaged well over $50,000 a year in charitable donations—more than a quarter of her annual salary, spread across some seventy organizations.
The Mary Gloria Room officially opened on Valentine’s Day 2000, and it was as well equipped as any private school. Mary made brief remarks at the ribbon cutting. She confessed that she routinely lied when filling out her taxes, since the IRS required that she must have received “nothing of value” in return for her donations for them to be deductible. “That’s not true. I have received great treasures,” Mary shared. “I have learned about the infinite resilience, courage, intelligence, and kindness of these children. Some of them have told me about the violence they have witnessed, and even endured: knifings, shootings, and other things that shouldn’t have happened. They bear their burdens with great valor. They are responsive and funny. If they just can weather the first grade, and understand that we believe in them and their potential, they’ll do just fine.”
In her later years, Mary became even more intent on using her perch as a writer to make a personal difference. She got to know a group of activists running a civil disobedience campaign against the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training facility notorious for its links to Latin American military officers with checkered human rights records. Mary learned that one of the key organizers of the protests, Father Roy Bourgeois, a Navy Vietnam vet and a Maryknoll missionary, had been arrested for picketing the school in Fort Benning, Georgia. Mary tried to contact Father Bourgeois in prison but was thwarted by prison administrators.
Mary called Congressman Joe Kennedy’s press secretary, Brian O’Connor, and he followed up with the Bureau of Prisons. Mary was finally allowed to speak to Bourgeois. He was relatively upbeat. “Look, I don’t mind this, Mary. This is all degradation and humility, but I don’t mind because I think we will stir the conscience of America.”
“You hope,” Mary said.
“What I mind,” continued Bourgeois, “is that Bill Corrigan, who is a 74-year-old World War II veteran, is being given a bad time by the guards. He has to pick up cigarette butts in the prison yard, and he is not allowed to call his wife, Lil. He can’t call her up because the guard in charge won’t approve his telephone list. He doesn’t like him. He’s military, and Bill’s war record doesn’t count. He’s not a veteran; he’s a troublemaker.” Corrigan and his wife had been married for forty years and had hardly spent a day apart.
“You know, Father,” Mary said, “I think I will put that in the paper. That does seem like petty tyranny to me.”
Mary highlighted Corrigan’s plight in a column that, most fittingly, ran on the Fourth of July, pointing out that Father Bourgeois and his fellow protestors had served more jail time than the Salvadoran military officers who had famously assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Bill Corrigan was allowed to speak with his wife the next day and was no longer forced to pick up cigarette butts. “I only have small victories,” Mary reflected on the incident. “Other people can bring down presidents and change policies; this is what I have to settle for. And it is okay.”
• • •
Mary dove into the 1996 presidential race, even as life on the campaign trail was becoming difficult. She was seventy-eight, and this would be her eleventh presidential campaign.
Although Senator Bob Dole was the presumptive Republican nomin
ee, New Hampshire could not resist mischief and awarded a primary win to fire-breathing pundit Pat Buchanan. “A disaster with a crowbar has happened to Republican politics,” Mary commented. “The know-nothings who have ever idolized Buchanan have been augmented by middle-American converts who have long suspected that their troubles are not of their own making.”
In Appleton, Wisconsin, the Dole campaign was briefly grounded after a flight attendant took ill. As they killed time on the tarmac, one of the other attendants served beverages. Mary asked for Scotch. “Sorry, no Scotch,” she was told. “Only wine and beer.” Mary was appalled. “What kind of campaign plane doesn’t have Scotch?” As one of her fellow reporters mused, “And what kind of campaign doesn’t have Mary McGrory to keep them honest?”
But as the primaries ground on, Mary experienced a sharp uptick in her cholesterol levels, leading to a strict order from her doctor to cut back on fatty foods. “I’ve decided, with the help of a doctor, to slow down. I want to go to two columns a week,” she told her agent. “I’ll finish out the campaign on my regular schedule, take two weeks’ vacation when it’s over in November, and start the new regimen.”
Mary also got into a spat with the editors at the Boston Globe because they were not running her pieces as frequently as she liked, primarily because of space considerations. Her cousin Brian McGrory, who worked at the Globe, was pulled into the matter, and he drafted a long e-mail to the Globe editors about why they should continue to run her column. Brian called Mary and read her the e-mail over the phone. When he finished reading, there was a long pause. “You save that,” she finally said to Brian, “and you read it at my funeral.”
Mary explored moving her column to the Globe’s rival, the Boston Herald. The Herald editors jumped at the chance and quickly prepared a contract for Mary’s signature.
Ben Taylor, the Globe’s publisher, intervened to keep Mary from leaving, guaranteeing that at least one of her columns would appear in the paper every week. He wrote to Mary, “The last thing I wanted in my first months as publisher was to wake up one morning and read your column in the Herald.” Mary stressed how important it was to reach people in her former hometown, “who love to think I’ve retired or died.”
Mary tagged along as the Clinton-Gore campaign began a multistate train trip that would bring both men from West Virginia to the Democratic convention, in Chicago. The trip brought back fond memories of barnstorming around the country with Estes Kefauver and Blair Clark.
Mary had unexpected company for the journey: her cousin Brian, who had risen from covering local Boston crime stories to becoming a national reporter. He had moved to Washington in 1996 to cover the White House and the campaign for the Globe, and he often joined Mary for dinner on weekends. “I would go up to her house for Saturday afternoons, supposedly to garden, but she knew I hated it,” Brian explained. “I would bring my dog, Harry, up, and he would lay in the flowers.” Mary, never one to pass up a good dog story, featured Harry in several columns.
Brian had not realized that Mary was making the train trip with Clinton. “I remember being on the train in West Virginia and looking out the window and seeing Mary fumbling with her bags like John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The thought just struck me at that moment: for the next week I am going to be her porter.” He was.
As Mary and Brian worked their way through the Upper Midwest, Mary was touched by the public’s reaction to Clinton. She later recalled to Tim Russert:
I hear about the cynicism and apathy and indifference. I didn’t see it. I saw people standing along the road there the whole way, everywhere. I saw people outside Bowling Green, Ohio, five miles from the speech site. There were ten thousand people holding little lights, cheering the train as it went by. I saw people holding huge flags that they’d obviously got down from their attics, all yellow and frayed. And I saw people standing at attention as the train went by. And I saw a man standing up in a rowboat with his hand over his heart. That’s not cynicism. They love presidents. I think they love their country, and I think they realize we have a perfectly wonderful system.
After all the years and all the campaigns, Mary still believed.
Mary was less thrilled with the convention. “They were trying to pretend they weren’t politicians, which makes you think that they don’t think it’s a very high calling,” she complained. When Clinton rattled off a long list of small-bore policy goals in his acceptance speech, Mary harrumphed that it sounded like he was running for “concierge rather than president.”
• • •
“I cannot believe that you have now been at the Washington Post for fifteen years,” Don Graham wrote Mary shortly after the convention. “Your unique method of covering political campaigns consistently teaches me things about the candidates I learn from no one else. You go out with them consistently. You listen and watch. You write about what they say, how people react, and how it all feels. How simple; but how uniquely powerful when it is so well done.”
The 1996 race was largely drama-free. Clinton ran a calculated campaign, and Republicans were weighted down with the baggage of Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown. The president was reelected by a comfortable margin.
At the end of 1996, Mary’s friend George Stephanopoulos left the White House. Her recollections as he left his post were fond, but thorny: “George tried to be funny about the hazards of being friends with certain people. He told about those mornings when the unhappy Washington Post reader in the Oval Office would haul him in and demand to know ‘what’s wrong with her today?’ ‘Her’ was me. George began to fade from the Sunday night scene.”
One night over dinner, Mary complained to the Italian ambassador. “Don’t you understand?” he retorted to Mary. “He is blamed for every bad story you write.” Mary later asked Stephanopoulos if that was indeed the case. He sighed, “I carried you on my back as long as I could.” When you pen unvarnished political opinion for a living, friendships are a fragile thing.
American politics veered into a remarkable period of turbulence during President Clinton’s second term. In the summer of 1997, with shades of Julius Caesar, Republican House members plotted unsuccessfully to overthrow Newt Gingrich as Speaker, and Mary described the atmosphere within Republican ranks as “thick with charges of vile treason.”
Against that backdrop, independent counsel Kenneth Starr continued his Whitewater investigation. Mary was aghast that Starr was on an open-ended hunt for Clinton’s sexual escapades, complaining in June 1997, “They shoot mad dogs. Mad-dog prosecutors are a different story.” The Starr investigation, combined with an ongoing lawsuit by former alleged Clinton paramour Paula Jones, led to a media frenzy focused on the president’s sex life.
When rumors surfaced that the president’s genitalia had certain “distinguishing characteristics,” Mary threw up her arms at the wall-to-wall coverage. At a cocktail party, she ran into Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the New York Times. Mary noted that the Times had avoided printing a detailed discussion of the ins and outs of the president’s private parts. She asked if it was a result of a Times policy on such matters. An uncomfortable Sulzberger could only say, “We try not to be tacky.”
Any hopes of avoiding epic tawdriness were dashed with the January 1998 accusation that President Clinton had sex in the Oval Office with a twenty-four-year old intern, Monica Lewinsky. Making matters far worse for Clinton, a confidante of Lewinsky’s, Linda Tripp, had recorded her conversations with Lewinsky about the affair. Mary wondered if the president would survive lying under oath. “Morally, he is in mud. Legally, he’s in worse trouble. . . . We are talking about an impeachable offense.” Both Clinton and Lewinsky denied the relationship, but unconvincingly so.
Mary was outraged by the president’s behavior, dubbing him a “Dogpatch Don Giovanni” and adding, “If Clinton had any shame, he would have long since expired of it.” But she was also horrified by the great roar of
innuendo stoked by a whole new source: Internet blogs like the right-wing Drudge Report.
Mary had never been a fan of opinion delivered without actual reporting, and suddenly the Internet offered a Pandora’s box of insta-punditry that was uncouth, unkind, and often uninformed. Mary loved the idea of citizen journalism, but much of what she saw on the Web simply felt like shouting. For someone who slaved over every word after hours of legwork, the idea that Matt Drudge was shaping the national debate with anonymous rumors seemed like a throwback to the dingy days of McCarthyism. “We have fallen into a dim age,” Russell Baker wrote to Mary. “Not for the first time I suppose, but the press-public slobbering brought on by Monica has surely never been equaled in the squalor department.”
Certainly the Internet alone was not to blame. The creation of twenty-four-hour cable news stations like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC during the 1990s meant that there was a limitless maw of programming that needed to be met, and pontificating pundits provided a cheap way to fill airtime. If ratings were good, it didn’t matter if anyone actually did any reporting or knew what they were talking about. As author David Foster Wallace once complained, talk radio, the Internet, and cable news “enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.” Mary had harsh words for the media’s approach. “The press, terrified of being scooped, poured on poorly sourced or even dead wrong details to feed the public a story nobody wanted to read, foisting sensational disclosures on a Congress that was cowering under its desk.”
Republicans assumed that the damning revelations doomed Clinton. They were in for a rude shock—polls showed Clinton at an all-time high in approval ratings. “The country was awed,” said Republican congressman Chris Shays of Connecticut. “It was like seeing Houdini in action. They saw him put in the box, chained and padlocked, and thrown overboard. And the next minute they saw him not just out, but steering the ship.” Impeachment was starting to look more dangerous for Republicans than for Clinton.