An inspiration named Mary
Those of us who grew into journalism at the Washington Star in the 1970s wore our underdog status as a badge of honor. We were the struggling afternoon paper competing against the behemoth Washington Post. We prided ourselves on doing more with less. They had a huge staff, a bigger circulation, more ads, more clout. We were in financial trouble and had less of everything.
But we had Mary.
There, in the very back of the messy newsroom, Mary McGrory spent hours tapping out her columns on the same inky, five-ply ditto paper we all used--only her copy was, literally and figuratively, far cleaner than anyone else's. Clear writing. Clear thinking. And always as honest as it was fair. Mary's Washington columns were not off-the-cuff, ego-filled ruminations. They were reported, informed opinions and observations, always dead-on. Mary was must-read.
When I first got to the Star, in 1973, as a summer intern, my city editor gave me some advice: Go read Mary in today's paper. And then go back and read her on the Army-McCarthy hearings. I did. It was petrifying. I knew I could never write like that. And I was right.
Hard work. It wasn't as if Mary took us young girls in the newsroom under her wing. Mentoring, in today's parlance, wasn't her thing. Hard work was. It wasn't about complaining that you were taken less seriously than the men, or that you earned less, or that you got crummy assignments. It was about diligence, about doing your work well--and getting noticed for the right reasons. That's what Mary had done. She expected no less of us.
When I finally became a real reporter for the star , then moved to covering Capitol Hill and politics for Newsweek and this magazine, it occurred to me that Mary was everywhere. Like the rest of us beat reporters, Mary, the vaunted columnist, stood outside the senators' lunch meetings on Tuesdays, pad in hand. She stood with the rest of us on the hard marble floor, waiting--then recording the senators in shorthand while we shoved our tiny tape recorders in their faces. Mary trusted her own pen more.
At these generally unsatisfying stake-outs, Mary allowed us all to shout out our weedy questions about the day's headlines. "Do you think the highway bill will pass?" or "What's the final defense spending number in the budget?" Then she would catch us all up short by asking, "Senator, don't you think so-and-so behaved badly today?" or "Can you tell us why the White House is asking you to do this?" It was usually a tough question but always posed politely. Mary had a way: sounding as sweet as your grandmother while being as tough as Tony Soprano. Inevitably, she asked the questions everyone wanted answered. And more often than not, the politician actually had to stop and think about a response.
Mary believed that to understand the story, you had to be there. No shortcuts. No C-SPAN reporting. Maybe it came from her daily attendance at the McCarthy hearings or her constant presence at the Watergate hearings. Her coverage there earned her a Pulitzer. But Mary didn't stop there. She had her own seat at the Iran-contra hearings, too--when she was 68 years old and could have comfortably watched the proceedings from the office. Not Mary. She had to see the body language, understand the emotion, and report the byplay. She needed to listen, in person.
So, too, on the campaign trail. Mary had to be there out on the hustings, and when she was, we were all Mary's helpers. We carried her bags, made sure she had a seat on the bus or knew the schedule. She knew she'd get where she needed to go. It's just that the story was so much more interesting than the logistics.
The last time I saw Mary, most of her beautiful words had been taken from her because of a stroke. My husband and I sat and chatted with her about politics, gossiping about who was misbehaving. She nodded, sometimes commented, and chuckled with us. When it was time to leave, her caretaker asked us if we might drop them at a 5 o'clock mass. No problem, we said. Mary determinedly walked up a rather steep hill to the car and got in the front seat. We asked the caretaker which church. "I don't know," she said. "Mary always picks different ones."
Then, without missing a beat, Mary proceeded to direct us to the church, like a traffic cop giving directions. She always knew where she was going.
This story appears in the May 3, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.