Mary McGrory, a great writer, an abundant soul and a hell of a gal, died late Wednesday, five days after surgery for a burst appendix and 13 months after a merciless stroke robbed her of her monumental gifts for prose writing and gab. Judging from the outpouring of calls and e-mail responding to that news, a lot of people are going to miss her.
Anyone who cares about newspaper writing could produce a dissertation on Mary's work, first at the Washington Star and, since that paper's demise in 1981, at The Washington Post. The chapters would be titled "The Perfect Word," "Show, Don't Tell," "Short Is Beautiful," "The Scalpel" and so on. All she ever wanted to be was a newspaper columnist -- a voluntary choice to pinion her craft in an 800-word straitjacket. It was astonishing how many gestures, blows and dance steps she could manage within that prison, in the service of variety, voice and impact.
Mary McGrory at her desk in 1959.
(The Washington Post)
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But no one spoke better for Mary McGrory than she spoke for herself.
I want the government to take over baseball. I realize it is a time when citizens hate government more than the umpire, but stay with me for a while. Washington, which is despised in the country, would be the source of something good and intentionally diverting for a change. We could have a team for each government department, all 18 cabinet posts. Think of the headlines: "State Tromps Defense." "Treasury Kills Justice."
Washington would arrange for farm teams, tryouts, playoffs, the World Series. Surely, they won't do worse than the owners. . . .
I can hear you saying, "Where will the money come from?" That's easy. We'll have something like $30 billion -- we're not allowed to know the exact amount -- if we shut down the CIA. And isn't it about time? The abject failure of the agency's in-house mole hunt while Aldrich Ames was spewing secrets to the Soviets was bad enough. It's the way Director James Woolsey has dealt with the culprits that tears it for taxpayers. He handed out 11 reprimands, six to retired spooks, but nobody got fired, and the man in charge of operations is being kept in his job, because -- hang on tight -- Woolsey chose him to "change the culture" of the CIA.
This game should be called. The CIA has been in extra innings since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It keeps striking out.
-- Oct. 2, 1994
McGrory captivated Washington as a 35-year-old book reviewer sent to capture the spectacle of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Buried on the inside pages of the Star, her pieces reached off the page and rattled the breakfast dishes. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's counsel Roy Cohn sparred with Army counsel Joseph Welch as McGrory watched.
At 27, Mr. Cohn has something of the air of the Quiz Kid. He has a powerful memory, he gives ready, rapid-fire answers. He has many decided opinions. . . .
As things progressed [Welch] seemed to adopt toward Mr. Cohn the kindly attitude one might take to a frisky puppy. "Down, boy, down," sums it up.
-- April 28, 1954
Her coverage of the Kennedy assassination was a stunning display of mastered emotion and taught her a lesson she often repeated: "Write short sentences in the presence of great grief."
The only time I ever heard him brag was about the White House garden.
I saw him last at his last press conference. He was invited to castigate Congress. But this most rational man refused. It was not his style. Instead, he quoted from a poet:
"But westward, look, the land is bright." To the end, he was hoping that reason would prevail.
-- Nov. 22, 1963
McGrory won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1974, after her appearance on Richard Nixon's notorious "enemies list" and an IRS audit that may have been meant as intimidation. She couldn't be sure, she liked to say, because she wound up with a small refund. One of the winning columns observed Nixon's last State of the Union address.
He called for an end to investigations of what he always refers to as "the so-called Watergate affair" -- the Republicans again interrupted him with possibly heartfelt applause. He recognized patronizingly that the House Judiciary Committee has a "special responsibility," and he declared that he would cooperate in "any way I consider consistent with my responsibilities" -- by which it was generally understood they can go fish.
The sound of hissing was heard in the chamber, a historic first, and it came from people who by this time had wearied of the travesty.
The Republicans gave him a standing ovation. If it wasn't his swan song, it was theirs. If he survives to give another January Fantasy, they don't expect to be around to hear it. That was the reality carefully blotted out in the chamber. So the Republicans chatted, smiled and clapped for what every last one of them hopes will be Richard Nixon's last State of the Union.
-- Feb. 3, 1974
She was proud of her politics.
Unlike Michael Dukakis, I don't mind if you call me a liberal.
I know George Bush has succeeded in making the word so vile that I wouldn't be surprised to see some urchin with the "L-word" branded on the sheet show up along with the Halloween hobgoblins, witches and Draculas. . . .
I still think it's a respectable word. Its root is "liber," the Latin word for "free," and isn't that what we are all about?
-- Oct. 30, 1988
She was humble about her garden.
I am hoping for a cease-fire with the squirrels. They are still sore about my anti-squirrel bird feeder, and they got even by uprooting the bulbs I put in last fall. They apparently have a school for vindictive landscaping and rearranged my daffodils in a clump on a slippery slope where they can see them and I can't. God knows what they will try next. Milosevic is their role model.
Gardeners, like most addicts, do not learn from their mistakes. They just make new ones. I have added alyssum to a bed of blue salvia and ageratum, which have proved moody in the past. Marie, my neighbor with the green thumb, approved. "You have to be careful with alyssum, you know," she said. "It spreads." Then we both burst out laughing. We know full well that it might for her, but never for me.
Is my optimism bizarre? Not when you look at a new campaign by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which had a briefing during the hardware spending orgy in the House. It has a big budget, big names like Paul Newman and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, the glossiest brochures I've seen in decades of reporting on would-be Pentagon reformers. Its members believe they can make Congress put money into school buses instead of Apaches.
If they can think that, I don't know why it's so crazy for me to look forward to a summer of never having to buy flowers.
-- May 9, 1999
She was funny about her driving.
So now I own a Mercedes-Benz. You want to make something of it? Of course you do. Everybody does. . . .
Every morning when I turn the key to unlock the door, the latch springs up and the other three clunk authoritatively in sequence. When I start the motor, I get the feeling that I have activated a company of Teutonic knights, with spears atrembling and shields at the ready.
I say, "Hey, guys, cool it. We're just going down to the paper."
-- Aug. 9, 1987
McGrory volunteered for decades at the St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Hyattsville, taking the homeless, abused and orphaned children to swim at the Hickory Hill estate of the Kennedys, on visits to the White House and for parties with Santa. The kids called her "Mary Gloria" after one had trouble pronouncing her name. She burned with outrage over their suffering in a city of wealth and power, but rendered it as a cool and therefore doubly chilling fire.
As a volunteer at St. Ann's Infant Home, I sometimes see the handiwork of the District of Columbia legal system and the operation of the Family Reunification Act. Recently, it was a 4-year-old boy. He was flung across his bed, sobbing, "I don't want to go." A judge had ordered him to go home with his maternal grandmother.
It's not easy to know just what happened to him in his short life. He was a big-eyed, wary child who looked at you in stages. It took him a while to look you in the eye. His court records are confidential. Juvenile court judges are never in the newspapers -- except, of course, when a child sent home is killed.
The St. Ann's social worker would not even tell me the boy's last name. But his story, told in asides and in fragments, told in scars and welts, was pretty well known.
When we went swimming in the summer, the boy avoided the water. He made a wide circle around the pool. One of the child-care workers said he didn't like water. Someone remembered that he had come to St. Ann's at the age of 18 months, with two-thirds of his body burned. The judge sent him home with his mother. She said she had forgotten the hot water was running. Standing beside the pool, the boy gradually decided to risk it and was soon splashing and shrieking with the rest of the children.
Later, there had been an episode involving a haircut undertaken with a razor.
The judge sent him back home again, with a fatherly lecture to his mother about going to the barber next time. The Family Reunification Act had won again.
-- Dec. 22, 1991
She was able to see virtue in anyone who would fight for kids -- no matter how strongly she opposed them otherwise.
Newt Gingrich is many people. To the Democrats, he is a demon and a demon fund-raiser for the party. To Republicans, an uncommonly accomplished albatross. . . . He can cross your eyes with his economic theories, glaze them over with his socio-cultural Information Age rap. He's at his best when he talks about the orphan city, Washington, D.C. He's clear, cogent and convincing.
When he first took office, Speaker Gingrich spoke of the possibility of making the battered, unkempt capital "an urban jewel." Democrats jeered. "All talk, typical Gingrich." They were wrong. He appointed sensible Republicans to committees to deal with the District's incoherent government and to unravel the District's tangled finances. He invited schoolchildren to his office and encouraged them to read, gave them $2 for every book they finished. He sat for hours with Marion Barry, perhaps the most difficult mayor in the country. . . .
The speaker's grip on reality is sometimes considered tenuous; when he talks about the District, he is all there. He has a clear idea about what the city should be and why.
-- Oct. 3, 1996
For all these reasons -- and because she did her own thinking and gathered her own facts -- McGrory held her audience fast for nearly half a century, an amazing run for an opinion columnist. And she rattled the china right up to the end. Her post-Sept. 11 criticism of President Bush provoked hundreds of calls, letters and e-mails, the tone of which persuaded her not to retire.
The firefighters and police officers were performing in a manner that the fiends who had thought of everything could hardly have imagined. The firefighters literally burned, in the brief interval between the first and second tower bombings, to enter the doomed structure, forcing their way into the burning building, squeezing by those trying to make their way down. The police were equally fearless. Two hundred and fifty of these admirable citizens were lost. Long lines formed at blood banks. People had to do something.
Mayor Giuliani held several press conferences. In one of them, he urged tolerance for people who come from countries who are suspected of plotting the carnage. It was unexpected from New York's dukes-up mayor, and it was downright statesmanlike. . . .
But George W. Bush could not find the beat. He jarringly referred to the terrorists as "folks" in his first public comments, during which he looked more apprehensive than resolute. He allowed himself to be hauled about the country like a fugitive to bunkers at air bases in Louisiana and Nebraska. Of course, the Secret Service wanted him in protective military custody but he might have reflected that if Washington was not safe for him, it wasn't safe for the rest of us. The White House and Congress were emptied out. The capital of the free world was a ghost town in a desperate hour.
Bush said the attack was a "test" for the country. It was also one for him.
He flunked.
-- Sept. 13, 2001
Recently, I almost drowned in a flood of molten reader response to what I wrote about President Bush's Sept. 11 peregrinations. A right-wing radio talk-show harpy sicked the dogs on me, and I got a great deal of abusive, sometimes unprintable communications questioning my patriotism and my sanity. I composed a form letter of laborious civility pointing out that we still lived in America the Beautiful. One reader answered:
"You may have lost your marbles, but you have kept your manners."
-- Oct. 28, 2001
Not long afterward, the outrage poured in from another quarter -- her longtime friends and supporters on the left, who had cheered McGrory's peace-preaching columns dating back to Vietnam. They could not believe it when, on the eve of the Iraq war, she saluted Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations.
I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's "J'accuse" speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince. . . .
He talked of the mobile factories concealed in trains and trucks that move along roads and rails while manufacturing biological agents. I was struck by their ingenuity and the insistence on manufacturing agents that cause diseases such as gangrene, plague, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever.
Would Saddam Hussein use them? He already has, against his own people and Iranians. . . .
I wasn't so sure about the al Qaeda connection. But I had heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought. 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.
-- Feb. 6, 2003
She explained herself a month later.
Dear 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. "I'm Persuaded," said the headline, which went a little beyond the story.
But it was my fault. I did not make it clear enough that while I believed what Colin Powell told me about Saddam Hussein's poison collection, I was not convinced that war was the answer. . . .
I failed as a writer to take time to make myself clear. And I did something that George Bush never does: I offended my base. You see how sorry I am. I hope now that all is forgiven and that I can come home again.
Yours,
The Unintentional Wanderer
-- March 6, 2003
Ten days later, Mary McGrory published her last column.
It was, like all the others, distinctly hers. A McGrory was a McGrory the way a Picasso is a Picasso. She juxtaposed the shadow of war with the promise of spring in a column both disappointed and hopeful, tragic and stalwart. She knew this is a hard, mean life sometimes, and so she squeezed every bit of joy out of it she could.
The winter made the natives a little leery of Mother Nature. She was a harridan and a shrew this year, throwing snowstorms like tantrums, one after another. She divided a city already divided between war and peace even more. We split into two subdivisions, the plowed and the unplowed.
Finally, last week, after making sure the mornings were piercingly cold, Mother Nature had a change of heart. The sun came out, a faint dusting of tender green was seen on bare branches. And George W. Bush and Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld warned us every day that time was running out.
Just when life was becoming more livable, we saw on our home screens the war's progress. We saw troops practicing desert warfare and fighting sandstorms. Administration officials tried to maintain the fiction that war or peace was still an open question. "If the president decides to use force" was the genteel phrase used before the official launched into new details about the "shock and awe" that await the Iraqi people.
Spring has a little shock and awe up her sleeve, too. Always does. 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.
-- March 16, 2003
Researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
