Newspaper columnists usually reveal more about the times they lived than about their own lives, which leaves plenty of room for the biographer.
John Norris has written a lively and affectionate biography of Mary McGrory, perhaps the most consequential liberal voice of the late 20th century. She spent the vast majority of her long career at The Washington Star and then at The Washington Post, crusading against Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam War, and covering presidential candidates going back to Adlai Stevenson.
The best of these biographies, such as Ronald Steel’s “Walter Lippman and the American Century,” tell the reader as much about the country and its history as they do about important journalists. McGrory’s collected dispatches could rightly be called “The Unmaking of the American Century,” since her most important columns were about the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, the protests against the Vietnam War, and Watergate, coverage which earned her a place on Nixon’s enemies list and a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
But overall Norris has chosen a more conventional template, hewing closely to McGrory’s colorful life. His biography contains only a little on McGrory’s Boston upbringing, focusing instead on her long career. He manages to capture, however, both the personal and professional aspects of those decades, not a hard task considering how closely entwined the two were. Many of her sources became friends; she threw famous parties filled with other journalists and politicians, and the few romances Norris documents (McGrory talked to almost no one about her love life) drew from this somewhat incestuous band of insiders.
It was Time magazine who first anointed her queen in an early profile, and Norris captures her regal bearing but doesn’t dwell on what others sometimes saw as downright bossiness. We both attended the birthday dinner of a mutual friend, and McGrory directed the table conversation like a drill sergeant, calling on each speaker, “Now, you talk.” If someone spoke out of turn, she muttered “Not you” and cut them off.
Norris prefers the moniker “The first queen of journalism,” to underscore her status as one of the few important women’s voices in Washington. McGrory was an important path breaker for other female journalists, and when she joined the Post’s op-ed page, she had tips for some of her new female colleagues. Marjorie Williams, another astute Washington watcher who, like McGrory, mined the characters of her subjects, got a note from her: “Subtlety is overrated.”
She was one of the few women pundits during her early career although hardly a crusading feminist. When women journalists were finally let out of the balcony of The National Press Club to sit on the main floor with the men, she pronounced the food in the balcony tastier. She picketed for the admission of women to Washington’s Gridiron Club, because news was sometimes made at its annual dinner, but after gaining admission, she rarely participated in events. She was for decades the only woman on the Star’s national staff. Norris aptly labels her “a reluctant warrior on the front lines of feminism.”
She covered 11 presidential campaigns into her 80s. A favorite spot was the bar at New Hampshire’s Sheraton Wayfarer Hotel, where in the early days she was the only woman to occupy a barstool next to the Boys on the Bus and did so quite ably. At the New Hampshire primary in 2000, she was downing her fifth Campari when her much younger cousin, Brian (now editor of the Globe), had to go to bed. She famously used her gender to her advantage, getting colleagues to be her porters.
But the overt sexism might have defeated someone less determined. She was the first in her family to graduate from college — Emmanuel after Radcliffe turned down her scholarship application — then learned typing and shorthand at secretarial school. After working briefly in publishing, she was tucked away in the books section of the Star. (One of her first reviews was of a book called “Reluctant Hussy.’’)
The Star’s editor walked over to her desk one day and asked her whether she planned to marry, on the presumption, revealing of the times, that she would quit the paper if she did. When she said she was uncertain, he offered McGrory her dream job of covering national affairs. He instructed her to pretend she was writing to a favorite aunt, as she had demonstrated in her reviews a very lively style and a keen ear for the interesting. The editor wanted to preserve these virtues in her work and avoid the ponderous, Olympian style of some of her male colleagues.
From the start, McGrory’s practice was to write a heavily reported column, no matter how tedious the hearings she attended became. She blurred news and opinion, however, and some readers questioned whether her writing belonged on the news pages. She focused on the human foibles of political figures, often in lyrical prose filled with the classical references she learned growing up in Irish Catholic Boston and attending the prestigious Girls Latin School.
The Star was her lifelong love, and she was heartbroken when it folded in 1981. Other papers tried to poach her, including The New York Times, where Scotty Reston told her she’d be expected to “handle the switchboard in the morning,” which outraged her. Ben Bradlee hired her at lunch the day after the Star ceased publication, and although she spent the next 20 years there, she never considered it her real home, according to Norris.
She said the nicest thing that ever happened to her was landing on the enemies list, and she covered every day of the Watergate hearings. When the IRS audited her, part of Nixon’s harassment campaign, she ended up with a refund.
About some of her unusually close relationships with the people she covered, Norris says, “she [wrote] her own rules.” Her ties to Eugene McCarthy and long romance with his campaign manager, Blair Clark, probably should have disqualified her from covering his campaign. She helped a group of civil-rights workers draft a speech on the plane back from Selma. Ardently anti-war during Vietnam, she pushed Robert Kennedy to enter the presidential race in 1968. But when he demurred, and McCarthy gained momentum, she lambasted RFK, who had by then thrown his hat in the ring, as a spoiler. Nonetheless, she formed a strong friendship with his widow, Ethel, and delighted in bringing kids from St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, where McGrory volunteered and which she generously supported for decades, to swim at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate in suburban Washington, D.C.
She never married, though Norris reports several juicy incidents about McGrory and men, including when LBJ showed up at her apartment and unsuccessfully tried to seduce her. “She felt flattered . . . and mortified at the same time,” Norris says. Clark was probably the love of her life but he, like the Star, ended up breaking her heart.
It’s too bad that Norris does not quote more liberally from McGrory’s columns because her own words are really the best way to enjoy and understand her. Norris wisely reprints in its entirety her famous column on JFK’s funeral, which she described as a day with “so much grief nobly born that it may extinguish that unseemly hour in Dallas, where all that was alien to him — savagery, violence, irrationality — struck down the 35th President of the United States.”
But we get practically nary a word from her Pulitzer-winning Watergate columns. She was at her acerbic best on Nixon, describing his 1962 concession speech in the California gubernatorial campaign as a 17-minute “finale of intemperance and incoherence unmatched in American political annals.”
About Whitewater during the Clinton administration, she wrote, “If the Whitewater hearings were a series, it would have been canceled, if a show, closed, and if a horse, shot.” McGrory was also the columnist whose question provoked Hillary Clinton’s now infamous retort: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” But one yearns for more of her actual words.
Like Lippman and Reston, McGrory may have overstayed her perch. She offended some readers with a critical column about President George W. Bush on 9/11, and then did something she had resisted throughout her career. She let her column be moved from the news pages to the editorial section. Then, she made her liberal base furious with a column about Iraq headlined “I’m Persuaded” for which she later apologized.
In 2003, she collapsed from a stroke at the Post and was left unable to write and mostly speaking in gibberish, a tragedy for someone so eloquent. She died in 2004 and left a simple inscription for her grave: “Mary McGrory: Newspaper Woman and Volunteer.’’