Mary McGrory, 85; Washington Post Columnist Covered Scandal and War

Mary McGrory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist who covered the Army-McCarthy hearings, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and two U.S.-led invasions of Iraq with an eloquent style she often compared to writing letters home, has died. She was 85.

McGrory died Wednesday night at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. The cause of death was not announced, but McGrory was known to have suffered a stroke just over a year ago. Her final column ran in the Washington Post, her longtime employer, on March 16, 2003. She retired at the end of the year.

“Mary was simply one of the best opinion columnists of her time,” Leonard Downie Jr., the Post’s executive editor, said in the Post’s obituary of McGrory on Thursday. “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.”

Her columns appeared in the Washington Star from 1954 until the paper folded in 1981. She joined the Post that same year and was eventually syndicated in 150 newspapers.

In one of her last columns, the lifelong liberal 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.” In that same column, she wrote that while “his performance as frontier sheriff fighting terrorism still goes down well in the country, it has bombed in the world.”

Sturdily built, with short, wash-and-wear hair and the energy of a spinning top, everything about McGrory seemed tailored to the demands of her profession. Everything except her manners. Friends and critics alike were struck by her courtesy and her perfect decorum, qualities not always associated with reporters.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy once remarked, “She is so gentle until she gets to the typewriter.” McGrory agreed with him. “I can only be mean in writing,” she told Ms. magazine in 1975.

That same year, McGrory was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her work during the Watergate scandal. She described the scene in vivid if not gentle prose. Of the testimony of President Nixon’s aides before congressional panels investigating the affair, she wrote that they “came on like Chinese wrestlers, bellowing and making hideous faces as if to frighten the prosecutors to death.”

She had nothing to lose: She was already on Nixon’s “enemies list.”

When Nixon resigned in 1974 in the face of sure impeachment, McGrory stepped back to consider an aspect of his style that always disturbed her -- his abuse of the English language.

She blasted him for specific offenses: “When our former first citizen said, ‘I am not a crook,’ what he meant was, ‘You can’t prove it.’ ”

Her faithful readers would not be surprised by McGrory’s essay on language.

She was born and raised in a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, the daughter of a postman. Her father taught her and her brother to treasure words, she once recalled. She attended Girls Latin School, now Boston Latin School, where she studied the ancient language in daily classes. She later said it helped her to learn English vocabulary.

She could cite the first definition of any term with a Latin root and occasionally did so in her columns.

“Unlike Michael Dukakis, I don’t mind if you call me a liberal,” she wrote of the then Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts governor in 1988. “Its root is ‘liber,’ the Latin word for ‘free,’ and isn’t that what we are all about?”

She attended Emmanuel College, a Catholic women’s school in Boston, and from there went to the Hickock Secretarial School. She landed her first job as a secretary at Houghton Mifflin publishers in Boston. In 1942, she was hired by the Boston Herald-Traveler as secretary to the book review editor.

Modest Beginnings

She wrote occasional reviews and features, and she parlayed them into a job as a member of the book review staff at the Washington Star in 1947.

Years later, when reporters tried to question her about her personal life, she usually put them off. “I want to be read, but I don’t want to be a personality,” she told Newsweek magazine years ago.

“I’m a very private person,” she later told Ms. magazine. “If people want to know about me, I write in the paper every week.”

She did suggest, however, that her work was the most important thing in her life. “I need to spend a lot of time alone, to regroup,” she said. “I think about it [work] constantly, because there’s never a moment when you can rest.”

She never married or had children.

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 a number of 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.”

At the Star, she spent seven years squeezing features in around her book reviews. In 1954, Star Editor Newbold Noyes opened the door to her future. He sent her to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings the summer Sen. Joseph McCarthy was looking for communists in the ranks of the U.S. Army.

McCarthy had already investigated members of the State Department and had earned a reputation as a brutal questioner who rarely could prove his damning accusations.

Noyes asked McGrory to bring “color, flavor and charm” to the news pages, and he told her how to do it. “Go every day, watch everything and take lots of notes.”

Irreverence, intelligence and wit colored her reports. She referred to McCarthy as “an Irish bully” and alluded to her own Boston Irish roots: “I’d seen that kind walk into rooms all my life.”

Her column of June 10, 1954, showed McCarthy at a particularly low point in the hearings that turned out to be the beginning of his decline. The senator accused the Army’s defense lawyer, Joseph Welch, of hiring a communist sympathizer at his firm. When McCarthy failed to offer proof, Welch rejected the accusations.

In sentences loaded with facts and observations, McGrory revealed her characters and suggested her own opinions.

“He [Welch] asked in tones of shock and outrage, twice. ‘Have you no sense of decency, Senator?’

“Sen. McCarthy did not answer Mr. Welch. He went rumbling along in his allegations against a member of Mr. Welch’s Boston law firm.”

At times in her five decades as a Washington journalist, she strayed from politics to write about gardening or charities that were special to her. But her real home was Capitol Hill. She wore a path through the halls of the Senate and House of Representatives, foraging for tips. She described her routine to the Christian Science Monitor in 1991.

“Tuesdays, the Senate has its caucus lunch and you stand outside and they come out and tell you what they were talking about. Maybe you don’t get a story, but you get an idea.”

“Then you go over to the House side. People come pouring out of that chamber and they can’t wait to talk to you. They’re tremendous gossips ... and they just love the attention.”

After some years of experience, McGrory compared being a columnist to being a psychiatric nurse. “You make people feel better because they agree with you,” she told the Monitor. She first realized it during the Vietnam War, which she opposed, and recalled her readers’ response on that issue.

“The first weeks of the war, the mail was coming in here [saying]: ‘I thought I was crazy until I read you and realized that somebody agreed with me,’ ” she told the Monitor. “That’s what happened all through Vietnam.”

She wrote more than 3,000 words a week for years. But when anyone asked which columns she was most proud of, she usually mentioned her coverage of President Kennedy’s funeral in 1963.

She had been writing about Kennedy from their days in Boston, when she worked for the Boston Herald-Traveler and he campaigned for a U.S. House seat in 1946.

“The hard-eyed pros didn’t like him much. ‘Harvard Irish,’ they scoffed. But his followers, who from the first regarded him as one of themselves -- and yet above them -- said, ‘He’s class,’ or, because the word can be either a noun or an adjective in Boston, ‘He’s got class.’ ”

A Personal Loss

Kennedy’s assassination struck her as a personal loss. His funeral was an unexpected source of consolation:

“Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s funeral, it can be said, he would have liked it,” she wrote on Nov. 26, 1963. “It had that decorum and dash that were his special style. It was both splendid and spontaneous. It was full of children and princes, of gardeners and governors.”

The column marked a change in her writing style, she told the International Women’s Media Foundation years later.

“The only thing I know for sure about writing -- other than that it’s difficult -- is that in dealing with subjects heavy with emotion, the only way is to write short sentences,” she said.

“I learned the hardest way, during six hours that I spent trying to write the story of John Kennedy’s funeral. Once I chopped my long, soggy sentences in half, it moved.”