by John Norris
“You know, I’m old and tired, and I have just been through the worst clobbering in my life,” Mary said when accepting the award. “I wrote that the commander in chief was AWOL for several hours on the worst day of our lives, September 11. The roof fell in. I was called a traitor to my country, a disgrace to my profession. The telephone rang with canceled subscriptions and calls for my head. A seven-inch stack of e-mails and letters called me names I can’t repeat.” She said that by giving her the award, the Post was in essence saying, “‘Hell no, she won’t go. She is one of us.’”
But Mary’s comments were also barbed. She noted that with regard to her move over from the Star, “Some of you thought I should have come over sooner, and thought I was spoiled and overrated, which I probably was—and am to this day. You thought I was given to gab and levity; I thought you took yourselves too seriously and found saying ‘Good morning’ an unconscionable intrusion on your thoughts.” Mary again compared the difference between the Star and the Post to that between Rome and Paris: the atmosphere at the Post, “businesslike, professional, and calm,” was only occasionally broken by “bursts of laughter from the financial section.”
“It has crossed my mind a time or two to retire,” continued Mary, but she declared that she simply could not face the idea of a retirement ceremony with only cake. She expressed her gratitude to Ben Bradlee (although she twitted him for being a slightly reluctant bearer) and Don Graham. In closing, Mary declared, “When I die, I want just one word on my tombstone: ‘newspaperwoman.’ If anyone asks for credentials, I will show them the Eugene Meyer.”
The stress following September 11 was only compounded by another blowup with Steve Luxenberg in January 2002. After a particularly intense argument on a Friday afternoon, Mary not only lost her voice, but had trouble even forming words. When the situation did not improve, she was rushed to George Washington University Hospital.
Brian McGrory remembers visiting Mary at the hospital. She described the incredible volume of hate mail she had received after September 11. The reaction was so vitriolic that she was stunned. Mary feared that she had lost her handle on the public and wondered if it was time to retire. When the Post’s executive editor, Len Downie, visited the next day, Mary offered to resign. He told her that he would not accept her resignation. “She was beyond thrilled,” Brian recalled. “It was a very important moment for her.”
Mary had suffered a small stroke. After a battery of tests, she was put on blood thinners and told to monitor her blood pressure. The incident convinced Mary that she could not work with Luxenberg as an editor, and she wrote to Fred Hiatt, “Do you have space for me on your op-ed page? The sooner the better. I have reached the end of the road with Outlook and the prosecuting attorney style of editing. I regret to say that I blew a fuse in the last dreadful encounter last Friday. It literally made me sick.”
It says a great deal about Mary’s exasperation with Luxenberg that she was willing to move her columns rather than be under his hand. “I prized my perch in the A-section,” Mary wrote to Hiatt. “But it’s time to move.”
In January 2002, her columns started appearing not on page two but on the op-ed page. Whereas Mary had been livid with the move when it had happened under Murray Gart at the Star, this time she was resigned and wounded. That sting was not lessened when one of her friends wrote to her about how galling it must be for her to be in the company of the “pygmies” on the Post’s editorial pages.
With the United States already having invaded Afghanistan, the Bush administration moved toward military action against Iraq, and by October 2002, congressional Democrats had joined Republicans in backing President Bush’s request for authority to use force against Baghdad. Mary was convinced that Democrats were more concerned about their own electoral prospects than the dangers that would accompany an ill-advised war in Iraq. “Sheepish Democrats continue to show the electorate that when it comes to the fateful business of sending young Americans into battle,” wrote Mary, “they are at one with the Republicans.” When Democrats fared poorly in the 2002 midterm elections, Mary saw it as no surprise. “They emitted a bleat, and mistook it for a message.”
Mary was unconvinced that war with Iraq made sense. The Post editorial page, far more conservative than it had been in earlier years, was distressingly uniform in its support for the Iraq War. Mary railed against the casualness with which the potential for “collateral damage” was dismissed by armchair generals, forgetting that it meant “children with big dark eyes who will die for reasons not entirely clear to everybody.”
Her position on the war veered sharply after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s dramatic February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, making the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Mary had long liked and respected Powell, and she saw him as a voice of reason within the administration.
Mary’s column the day after Powell’s presentation was titled simply, “I’m Persuaded.” “I don’t know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell’s ‘J’accuse’ speech against Saddam Hussein,” Mary wrote. “I can only say that he persuaded me.” Mary noted that she was not a pacifist, but that she truly thought that war should be a last resort. “I have resisted the push to war against Iraq because I thought George W. Bush was trying to pick a fight for all the wrong reasons—big oil, the far right—against the wrong enemy.”
But Powell had changed her mind. “He made his case without histrionics of any kind, with no verbal embellishments.” Mary did not buy the effort to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda, but she said of Powell’s speech, “I’m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.”
Mary’s conversion was news. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer cited Mary as an example of how public sentiment was shifting in favor of war. Television entertainer and outspoken liberal Phil Donahue lamented that Mary’s column amounted to a “valentine for the president and his plans.” Oliver North, the disgraced colonel of the Iran-contra scandal, who had been reborn as a conservative talk show host, said that Mary sounded as if she was ready to volunteer for the Marines. Mary was chagrined when several congressmen informed her that her column had “liberated” them to support the war.
Bob Woodward argued that Powell’s speech and Mary’s column represented something of a turning point: “When Mary McGrory, who—a relentless Bush critic—said she believed Powell on this, that probably turned many minds. She had the ability to do that.” Powell’s speech was persuasive by almost any measure, and in a poll after the speech, some 66 percent of viewers said they found his case convincing.
Mary quickly had second thoughts about her column, and her second thoughts were spurred in no small part by a flood of reaction from upset liberals. One writer asked, “How could you? Truly, how could you?”
If Mary found any comfort in the stream of letters, it was that liberals were considerably more polite in their reproaches than were the conservatives who wrote after September 11.
“If there was one column that I know of that she might have regretted, it was the Colin Powell speech at the UN,” said her colleague Al Kamen. The lacerating criticism from the right on her September 11 column, and from the left on her Powell column, introduced an element that had always been absent in Mary’s work: uncertainty.
On March 6, 2003, she penned an open letter to her readers: “We have been through a great deal together—the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, El Salvador, Grenada, Lebanon, and Florida. For the first time I can remember, we are estranged. That is, you have been since I wrote a column Feb. 6 about Colin Powell’s U.N. indictment of Saddam Hussein. You have declared yourselves to be shocked, appalled, startled, puzzled, and above all disappointed by what you thought was a defection to the hawk side.”
Mary insisted that her words had been poorly written (a rare and painful admission for her). She main
tained that while she believed what Colin Powell had said at the UN, she was still “not convinced that war was the answer.” She cited the deluge of comments from her longtime supporters, claiming that she had done something that President Bush never did: “I offended my base.” Mary closed her column with a heartfelt plea: “You see how sorry I am. I hope now that all is forgiven and that I can come home again. Yours, The Unintentional Wanderer.”
Most of Mary’s readers and friends were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, feeling that her long career had earned her that privilege. However, one reader argued that he could not “imagine a more invalidating moment for a columnist than the admission that she must follow her base.” But Mary was genuinely wary of the Iraq invasion. As she wrote to one of her readers, “So mighty, so rich, so strong and we can’t think of anything else but to go to war. The Founders would weep.”
On Friday, March 14, 2003, Mary bustled about. She was hosting her Saint Patrick’s Day party the next day and had to make sure all of the preparations were in place. She also had a column to finish that drew a contrast between spring’s arrival in Washington and the coming Iraq invasion:
The slopes off Rock Creek Parkway will soon be carpeted with daffodils. The crocuses and hyacinths will perfume the air. Wait until the stand of azaleas starts blazing along Klingle Road. Spring really is inevitable. Mother Nature has her calendar. Rainy season, dry, it’s all the same to her. She has everything lined up, ready to go in sequence. Forsythias first, showering gold on every street corner, dandelions fiercely pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk, violets shyly venturing forward. Mother Nature is like the Pentagon in one respect. She likes everything in profusion. We have about 210,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait, for the invasion offensive; she’s got an abundance of beauty in reserve.
Mary’s assistant, Tina Toll, heard a sudden disturbance and rushed into Mary’s office. She was at her desk and could not speak properly; her only words came out in a frustrated jumble. “I called 911, and I knew something was very, very wrong,” Toll said. “And then we waited and waited and waited for what seemed like forever for help to come.” It was clear that she was seriously ill. After Mary was taken away by ambulance, editor Ken Ikenberry put the finishing touches on her column. He knew that Mary would not want to miss a deadline.
Mary was rushed to George Washington University Hospital. The prognosis was grim. She had suffered a major stroke and had a severe case of aphasia. The consequence could not have been crueler: Mary had been robbed her of her ability to communicate. Although she understood what people were saying, she could no longer speak or write coherently, and she could no longer read.
On Saturday, her friends and family rushed to deal with the situation. Toll had let everyone know that Mary’s party was canceled. But one guest did not get the message, and one of Mary’s friends was surprised to find Gene McCarthy sitting on the stoop of Mary’s apartment building, waiting for the festivities to begin.
“I flew down there on a Saturday morning,” Brian McGrory remembered. “It was awful; just terrible. The vicious irony of a person who made their living with words being unable to express themselves was just beyond painful.”
Mary’s nephew, Ted McGrory, and her niece Anne Beatty, who had always seen it as their duty to look after Mary, flew down from Boston to help take care of her. After just a few days, Mary was desperate to get out of the hospital. She had been unable to sleep at all and was distraught. Family members arranged for home care at Mary’s apartment, and she was eventually released from the hospital.
After the short car ride home, Mary walked into her apartment and headed straight down the hallway into her living room. She made an unsteady beeline for her window seat, where she curled up in a fetal position and immediately fell into a sound sleep. Mary was home.
She soon received stacks of correspondence and cards wishing her a speedy recovery. Many fans apologized for taking the liberty of addressing her with the more familiar “Mary,” rather than “Ms. McGrory,” and almost always cited the same justification for doing so: They had read her for so long that she felt like an old friend. Said one, “Get well damn it. The world needs you.”
With the Iraq invasion in full force, Mary’s friends let her know that her voice was missed. “They tell me you’ve been under the weather,” Russell Baker wrote. “I am sorry to hear it, but don’t dawdle about getting back into action. Our country is being hijacked.” Phil Gailey wrote, “With you out of commission temporarily, the president no doubt decided this was the time to strike,” and he insisted that Mary needed to be ready by autumn to serve as his translator in Rome. George McGovern shared with Mary that he, his wife, and several friends had sung “Shall We Gather at the River?” in Mary’s honor as they dined at a local restaurant—much “to the amusement of the people in nearby booths.”
Mary consulted a wide range of neurological experts and underwent intensive therapy to treat the aphasia in an attempt to rehabilitate her language skills. Her notebooks from after the stroke were filled with page after page of pinched and almost illegible writing as she tried to reteach her shaky hands to shape letters.
“It was one of the weirdest things I have encountered,” said her friend Lance Gay. “You could talk to her, and she could understand you. She would then respond, but she could not make a coherent English sentence. It was all gibberish.”
“Mary continued to call me after she had a stroke in March 2003,” Maureen Dowd shared. “You could understand a bit here or there—‘casserole’ or ‘Cheney.’ It broke my heart to hear the words coming out so jumbled from lips that never uttered a less than perfect sentence.”
Mary was galled by her lack of progress as spring stretched into summer and then fall. Awkward scene followed awkward scene as she realized that her friends and family could rarely understand her attempts at speech no matter how Herculean her effort. During one of her conversations with Phil Gailey, Mary managed to croak out the phrase “worse than death.” Gailey was sure it probably was. When one of Mary’s friends told her, “We miss your words,” Mary mustered the reply, “So do I.”
Mary was far from a model patient, and she often lashed out at the nurses attending to her in the apartment. Her friend Lee Cohn remembered visiting one day when Mary got a wine glass down from the shelf and poured herself a hefty draft of Irish whiskey. Cohn asked the nurse with some concern, “Is that all right?”
“If you find someone who can tell her what to do,” sighed the exasperated nurse, “you let me know.”
Mary’s friends and colleagues came out in force to show their support. Ted Kennedy and his wife brought covered dinners. Senator Chris Dodd called frequently. “We knew she would still want gossip,” Gloria Borger said of visiting Mary. “We went out on the back deck with her nurse, and we brought chocolates and had a glass of wine.” Mary nodded, sometimes trying to comment, and chuckled in between the silences. For Borger, Mary’s decline seemed to be the final act for the Washington Star.
When it was time to leave, Mary’s nurse asked Borger if she and Mary could be dropped at five o’clock Mass. Borger was happy to help. Mary walked up the slight hill on Macomb Street, and climbed into the front seat of Borger’s car.
“Which church are you going to?”
“I don’t know,” the nurse responded. “Mary always picks different ones.”
“Then, without missing a beat,” Borger shared, “Mary proceeded to direct us to the church, like a traffic cop giving directions.” Borger was amazed.
Al Kamen was as frustrated as anyone by his interactions with her: “She would write things, scratch things—two parallel lines—and show it to me. This was supposed to mean something. What did these lines mean? You couldn’t respond.” He hit on an idea for a better way to spend time together.
Kamen began taking Mary for rides in his convertible Mazda Miata with the top down and opera music playing. They would drive down R
ock Creek Parkway, along the river, and past the Kennedy Center. Although getting Mary into the small convertible was a bit of a process, she enjoyed the sun and the wind in her hair. It was a triumph of nonverbal communication.
Mary often arranged to be taken into the Post newsroom. “One day I went over to her apartment,” remembered Lee Cohn, “and she was sitting there with her press pass on a chain around her neck, waiting for someone from the Post to pick her up.” Len Downie had to be diplomatic as Mary asked, in barely intelligible words, when she could resume her column. The pathos was suffocating. Eventually, Mary agreed to retire from the Post, realizing that she would never author another column.
• • •
Mary received a number of tributes during her illness. One of those that touched her most deeply was a November 2003 column by Brian McGrory singing her praises in the Boston Globe. Begging forgiveness for “the boorish act of bragging about a relative,” Brian acknowledged that eight months after her stroke, it was clear that Mary was unlikely to fully recover, “ending one of the most important, colorful, and enduring newspaper careers that the American public has had the pleasure to read.”
On November 12, 2003, Mary was feted during a black-tie dinner at the Pierre Hotel, in New York, as she received the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. Mark Shields offered a wonderful piece of commentary in his remarks:
When I think of Mary McGrory I think of the table. The table is where people come together for food and companionship. For many, there is not enough food, and for some, there is no table at all. The table is where people come to make decisions in their neighborhoods, in their families and even their nations. Too many people have no place at that table. Their voices are not heard, their needs are often unaddressed. Mary McGrory’s magnificent life work has been to remind all of us that all of God’s children deserve a place at our table.