Mary McGroryColumnist Mary McGrory, a major figure in 20th-century American journalism, a writer of lasting influence, exquisite technique, passionate liberal convictions, a contempt for phonies and a love of orphans and delphiniums, has died at 85.
Longtime Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship called her "the undisputed best handler of the English language in the news business".
Her career stretched from the army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, when the unknown McGrory jolted the capital with her charming but rapier daily reports, to the Iraq war of 2003, on which she wavered with characteristic candour, before coming down squarely opposed in some of her last columns, and before a stroke silenced her voice.
In one of them she took President Bush to task for his infrequent news conferences and noted that he "has a profound aversion to being called on to explain himself". While "his performance as frontier sheriff fighting terrorism still goes down well in the country, it has bombed in the world".
Her resumé included the Pulitzer Prize and membership on the Nixon administration's notorious "enemies list".
For lifelong Washingtonians, McGrory's death is a sort of last winking of the once-bright light that was the Washington Star. Although her column appeared for more than two decades in the Washington Post after the Star's demise, McGrory never shifted her loyalties.
"Mary was the Star," said one of the many journalists she nurtured there, Jeffrey Frank, now a senior editor at the New Yorker. With champagne in times of joy and a sardonic laugh in times of sorrow, McGrory was "the grand Earth Mother" of the city's roisterous afternoon paper, Frank said, and she sang Nearer My God to Thee outside her office as the ship went down in 1981.
McGrory was Boston Irish to the core. She preferred scamps, underdogs and Yeats to prigs, Brahmins and Dickens. Of politicians, she could tolerate almost anything but dullness.
Her mother was Mary Catherine McGrory, her father a postal clerk named Edward Patrick McGrory, her hero, who taught her by example "how people ought to act". As she remembered him, Edward McGrory was a brilliant Latin student, bound for Dartmouth on scholarship, when his own father died and he was obliged to go to work to support his mother and seven siblings.
"He never complained, and he never took it out on anybody," she said. "He taught my brother and me to recite poetry and to treasure words - and to enjoy the small things of life, like walking and talking and nice dogs and fresh raspberries and blueberries and things like that."
McGrory discovered her calling on the comics page of the Boston Herald-Traveler, in a strip called Jane Arden about an intrepid "girl reporter". But there was no clear path for women into the newspaper business. McGrory's route ran from Boston's Emmanuel College to the Hickock Secretarial School to the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin as an editorial assistant.
In 1942 she was hired by the Boston Herald-Traveler as secretary to the book-review editor. She gritted her teeth and seized every chance to write - book reviews, author appearances, dog stories.
She begged for a shot in the newsroom, but the answer was always No. However, her book reviews caught the eye of John K. Hutchens, book editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who took pieces from her and gave her a letter of introduction to a friend at the Star, which was looking for a second book reviewer.
In 1947 she began life with her two great loves: the nation's capital and the Star.
"It was heaven," she said wistfully of the paper, "wonderful, kind, welcoming, fun . . . full of eccentrics and desperate people trying to meet five deadlines a day. . ."
The Star was then a reflection of Newbold Noyes, national editor at the time, who could shape the paper to his own tastes because his family owned it.
"She came into the business when reporters didn't come from Harvard or Yale," said Star veteran Duncan Spencer.
Early in 1954 Noyes approached McGrory and asked: "Say, Mary, aren't you ever going to get married?" In those days there seemed to be little point for an editor to advance the career of a woman destined for motherhood. But with McGrory past 35 and still single,"We think you should add humour and colour and charm and flair to the news pages," said Noyes, as McGrory often recounted the story.
To which she answered: "Oh, is that all?"
The army-McCarthy hearings were her first assignment. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, had toured the country for several years with his sensational allegations of communists in high places. Now he had fatefully set his sights on the US army, a dramatic miscalculation that again and again brought shades of Shakespeare to McGrory's mind.
"The star, Senator McCarthy, ploughs his high-shouldered way through the crowds amid small cheers. He is tanned and grinning," she wrote in her first dispatch (April 23rd, 1954). "Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, by contrast with the senator, looks about as dangerous as an Eagle Scout leading his first patrol."
She continued thus day by day through the tumultuous hearings, which ended with McCarthy's undoing. The pieces, which ran unobtrusively on inside pages, instantly galvanised a readership.
McGrory tore the edges from newspapers on her desk and rolled them into tight balls as she fretted over each word. Reporter Chick Yarbrough dubbed these her "anguishes" and counted them each morning. "There were 36 anguishes last night," he announced one day. "You must have had a very bad time."
In fact, she was having the time of her life. "It was what I had thought I had wanted to do all along," she said, "take huge events and get a little angle on them . . . observing closely, accurately, and picking out the right thing or the right person to begin with, to be the focal point . . . and making a pattern or some sort of sense of it."
A cousin, Brian McGrory, a columnist for the Boston Globe, noted that she had the ability to endear herself to the Washington press corps and leading politicians. "On her many campaign trips," he wrote in November 2003, "if her colleagues aren't carrying her jumble of bags, then the candidate probably is. The reward is an invitation to Sunday supper. Congressmen from both parties, diplomats, newshounds and activists gather regularly to dine on her lasagna and sing Irish songs."
McGrory displayed supreme confidence in her judgments concerning character and emotion. After witnessing Richard Nixon's furious news conference after losing a campaign for governor of California in 1962, she wrote an award-winning column that declared: "Mr Nixon carried on for 17 minutes in a finale of intemperance and incoherence perhaps unmatched in American political annals. He pulled the havoc down around his ears, while his staff looked on aghast."
A year later, in a fever of grief, she churned out scene pieces and tone poems and even an editorial for the Star when her adored John F. Kennedy was assassinated. "He brought gaiety, glamour and grace to the American political scene in a measure never known before," one piece began. "That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement . . ."
With Watergate. the nation was once again riveted by Senate hearings. Once again, McGrory's was the definitive eye. She "felt at home" at the Watergate hearings, she once said. "You know, it always comes down to the characters." And here was some cast.
McGrory followed the drama through its climax in Nixon's August 1974 resignation, and for her work that year she received journalism's highest honour, the Pulitzer. Her aversion to Nixon had not wavered. McGrory lit into him straightaway once he reached the White House and never let up, and when the list of White House "enemies" compiled by Nixon aides became public in 1973, no one was surprised to see her name on it.
Membership on the list "was great", McGrory later said. Columnist Art Buchwald took her tothe place of the moment, Sans Souci, to celebrate, and when they walked in, the diners rose in a standing ovation.
McGrory pounded the pavement and fretted her adjectives far into her 80s, and she applied the same bemused and laser eye to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that she first focused on Joe McCarthy and John F. Kennedy. She visited Belfast a number of times and devoted several columns to the Troubles, although she rarely toed the standard Irish-American line.
She was put beside Gerry Adams at a private dinner in Washington on his first visit in 1994 and was not impressed. At one point she turned to him and asked: "Was it really necessary to shoot all those fathers in front of their children?" A stunned Adams replied: "No, it wasn't, and I regret that."
She wrote afterwards: "He smiles a lot. He is silky, only turning surly when asked about fronting for an organisation that shot fathers on their doorsteps."
In March at a Washington dinner she was presented with the America Ireland Fund's humanitarian award by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. He told the guests: "Here in Washington, you may like to think of her as one of your own but we know her as Mary from the shores of Lough Swilly who is not only a great friend of many years standing, but a very dear member of our extended family as well."
"I wish I'd been more assertive," she once said, summing up her regrets. "And I wish I'd gotten married . . . I wish I'd been quicker to see things, understand things . . . I wish I'd been better organised and hadn't spent so much time trying to find things I'd lost, dropped, forgotten. I wish I could have cracked the White House somehow . . . We could be here all night talking about what I would do differently."
Her own misgivings notwithstanding, "Mary was simply one of the best opinion columnists of her time," said Leonard Downie jnr, the Post's executive editor. "She wrote lyrically, and she never had difficulty expressing an opinion. But perhaps most impressive was Mary's reporting. She seemed to know everyone in politics, and in many other fields besides. And her columns always revealed something to readers that they never would have otherwise known."
Mary McGrory: born August 22nd, 1918; died April 2004