Early in President George H. W. Bush’s first term, Mary once again locked horns with the Gridiron Club. Gridiron president Larry O’Rourke announced to members that the executive board had decided to invite all of the living former presidents, including Richard Nixon, to the spring dinner. Mary, who never sang or danced at the festivities and usually had little to say at the few organizing meetings she attended, objected.
“I felt I had standing in this issue because I was on Nixon’s enemies list,” Mary said. She asked O’Rourke, in tones dripping with contempt, why Nixon was invited. O’Rourke noted that the board had discussed the issue, including Nixon’s use of wiretaps and IRS audits against the press, but still wanted him there.
Mary, along with journalists Cheryl Arvidson and Joan McKinney, forwarded a motion to disinvite Nixon. The men in the room objected, insisting that since Ronald Reagan wanted to attend, they needed to be fair and invite all of the former presidents. Mary pointed out that Nixon had waged an all-out assault on both the media and the Constitution while in office. “But he has received the blessing of celebrity,” she complained. “If you are famous, you are forgiven.”
Mary pushed the debate into the public eye with a January 1989 column that exposed the behind-the-scenes debate at the Gridiron, calling it another reminder that many reporters “think they are part of the government establishment and feel called upon to protect and defend anyone who reaches high office no matter what.” Reporters were publicly split about Nixon’s potential attendance.
O’Rourke, who was furious with Mary for exposing the controversial decision, invited Nixon as a personal guest, but Nixon declined.
“We started bringing women into the Gridiron Club, and she was one of the first ones elected,” Jack Germond observed. “But she would not participate, and she would not go to the meetings—let alone take part in the program.” Eventually the board passed a rule that if members did not attend at least three meetings each year, they would not receive a ticket to the dinner. It was quickly dubbed the McGrory Rule.
Mary liked President Bush better than she liked candidate Bush, saying, “After eight years of a reclusive, programmed and scripted presidency, he seems wonderfully spontaneous.” She also noted with relief that, unlike Reagan, Bush did not rely on index cards when he met with congressional leaders.
In February 1989, Mary decided to give up smoking for Lent. As someone who had smoked a pack a day for years, it was not easy. Mary succeeded in quitting, although her friends and colleagues walked on eggshells, given her irritability. “I feel fine, thank you, except that I gained 22 pounds,” Mary wrote to a friend. “Everyone told me I was going to feel marvelous. They lied.”
Mary closely chronicled the rise of an ambitious Republican House member, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, during this period. Gingrich approached politics as war, and his hyperbolic style was crudely effective.
Gingrich scored his most important early victory in 1989 by leading the charge to bring down Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright when Wright became embroiled in a petty scandal related to bulk purchases of his autobiography. Wright had brought the scandal upon himself, but Gingrich’s tactics ushered in an era that viewed bipartisanship as treachery. The old habit of Democrats and Republicans disagreeing during the day, drinking together at night, and ultimately getting deals done was over. It was a new age of party-driven implacability.
“In the little private dining room where members of both parties used to eat cafeteria-style, sitting wherever there was room, there is now a Democratic table and a Republican table and not much friendly banter between them,” Mary observed. Democrats continued to make Gingrich’s work easy, as several congressmen faced ethics charges resulting from sex scandals. The Democratic-run House felt broken.
While Congress was mired in pettiness and muck, global events moved with a far grander sweep. In July 1989, Mary traveled with President Bush across Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia as pro-democracy protests bubbled up all across the Eastern Bloc. Bush received a rapturous welcome.
The momentous change that was sweeping Europe was greeted with suspicion by many in Washington, and Bush administration officials scoffed at the audacity of Poland’s Lech Walesa when he asked for $10 billion in assistance over three years. But as Mary pointed out, the administration had no qualms about requesting $10 billion a year for construction of the B-2 bomber. “Poland is a much better investment,” she insisted.
Many of the pundits in Washington refused to believe that change in the Communist world was genuine. On November 9, 1989, conservative columnist George Will predicted that “the Wall will stay.” The Berlin Wall fell later that day.
Mary was not impressed with Bush’s initial reaction: “Why did the leader of the western world look as though he had lost his last friend the day they brought him the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall?” Mary’s criticism stung. When President Bush and Ben Bradlee had lunch a short time later, Bush plaintively inquired, “How can I get through to Mary McGrory?” Bradlee suggested that not much could be done. When he related the conversation to Mary, she was pleased. “So they do read me. That is all I want.”
Whatever his hesitancy meant, President Bush benefited politically from the enormous tide of change, and he handled his international role well after the early uncertainty. His approval rating moved above the 80 percent mark.
• • •
The late 1980s and early ’90s were particularly hard times at Mary’s beloved orphanage. The crack cocaine epidemic, coupled with the rise of HIV/AIDS, decimated American inner cities, and few more so than Washington. More and more children fled deeply dysfunctional home lives, sparking a vituperative national debate about how best to protect them. Most courts still preferred to return children to their natural parents—no matter how derelict those parents might have been. Mary and the sisters at St. Ann’s fumed about arbitrary court decisions that sent children back into dangerous environments where further abuse seemed inevitable.
Mary continued to volunteer at St. Ann’s during the 1980s and ’90s. Tom Noyes, the longtime Santa for the Christmas parties, suffered a heart attack and relinquished his role. Even Mary was willing to accept, albeit reluctantly, a quadruple bypass as a legitimate alibi. Mary’s fellow columnist Mark Shields stepped in as his able successor. Mary had also helped engineer a visit from Nancy Reagan to St. Ann’s when she was first lady, further proof that politics stopped at the orphanage door for Mary.
The focus of much of her ire was the Family Reunification Act, a federal proposal to expedite the return of children caught up in the social welfare system to their birth families, which made the continued existence of institutions like St. Ann’s difficult. Sister Josephine Murphy spoke with Mary about the act. “Mary, you need to take a stand, and you have to write an article,” she urged. “If you don’t, nobody is going to do anything about it.”
Mary said that she needed to ask some questions on the Hill and see if it made sense.
“But, Mary, you know you love kids. It is the only way to go.” The two went back and forth. A short time later, Mary called Josephine back: “I am going to do it.”
Mary knew that taking on the idea of family reunification was controversial. Almost everyone instinctively believes that children should be reunited with their families as quickly as possible. Reality was more complex. With drugs, AIDS, and the city’s foster care program in disarray, it was clear that putting a child’s interest first sometimes meant not speeding them back into home life. “The Family Reunification Act,” argued Mary in her column, “is predicated on the gooey notion that every woman who gives birth is by definition a mother.”
Mary described the travails of one boy at St. Ann’s as he was buffeted by the local court system:
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.
Mary argued that places like St. Ann’s were a reasonable alternative until parents could get their act together or a foster family could be found. She called Sister Josephine shortly after her column ran. There was no preamble. “Sister Josephine, I want to tell you one thing. In all my years of writing for newspapers, I have never gotten as much hate mail as I have for that article on the Family Reunification Act.”
“That’s good,” Josephine argued. “That means people are reading it.”
The issue of parents’ rights versus those of their children continued to roil Washington for much of the 1990s after a series of spectacular abuses and shocking judicial decisions, including the return of two children to a mother who had suffocated her six-week-old, stuffed the body in a dumpster, and then attended a barbecue with her boyfriend.
Mary’s time at St. Ann’s pushed her to get personally involved in a number of cases involving kids and the D.C. courts, including intervening to get one young boy whom she had helped for years released from Washington’s St. Elizabeths psychiatric facility.
The boy’s mother so resented Mary’s continuing involvement that she got a court order to prevent Mary from visiting the boy at school and the boy from going on St. Ann’s outings. A second judge lifted the ban after Mary wrote to the court explaining her activities. Mary’s work with St. Ann’s was not an abstraction. It was the grindingly hard work of trying to make a difference in an indifferent system with families teetering on the edge. It meant working with families who sometimes viewed her efforts to move a child to foster care or an orphanage as hostile, destructive, or racist. “She was probably these kids’ greatest defender,” Sister Josephine maintained. “Who but Mary could have done the things that Mary got done?”
Some of the more problematic elements of the Family Reunification Act were indeed altered over time, and there was a growing recognition in both law and practice that sending children back into a clearly abusive environment was inhumane.
The positive national mood spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall took a sharp negative turn with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Mary was no hawk, but she acknowledged that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had crossed a line that America could not tolerate, writing, “Bombs, blockades, whatever—Saddam has asked for it.”
Bush’s resolute performance in planning a response to the invasion of Kuwait highlighted an important dichotomy for Mary. “It is increasingly plain that in George Bush, the American people got two presidents for the price of one,” she wrote. “Each of the chief executives comes equipped with a totally different personality, so that it is easy to tell them apart. The foreign policy president is cool, measured, tough, coping. The domestic policy man is strident, petulant, self-pitying.”
Everything seemed to break right for President Bush as the war commenced, although Mary was uneasy with the conflict’s slick packaging. “So far, President Bush has given the country the war it said it wanted in the polls: a war almost free of casualties, or at least many that we can see. Moreover, Operation Desert Storm is a telegenic combination of air show and arms bazaar, with marvelous weapons for every contingency being uncovered precisely when needed.” Small wonder, then, that potential Democratic presidential contenders stayed on the sidelines. Bush was so popular that a challenge seemed foolhardy. As Bush delivered his State of the Union address in January 1991, Mary remarked that Congress had been reduced to the status of an American Legion post, “required only to shout and cheer, and leap to its feet at every mention of our warriors.”
Some 86 percent of the public approved of Bush and his handling of the war. In less than a month and a half, coalition forces defeated Iraq’s forces and Saddam Hussein ordered a hasty retreat from Kuwait, but Mary expressed growing queasiness with the way the administration airbrushed the conflict.
Mary’s prickly attitude toward the Gulf War and President Bush sparked considerable backlash from readers. “My patriotism is often questioned by readers,” Mary explained. “I come down to saying that I think it is possible to love my country without loving its wars. That’s pretty defensive, but if you saw my mail, you would know why.”
President Bush had some fun with Mary’s fierce position on the war. At the March 1991 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual dinner much like the Gridiron event, spirits were high in the wake of the Gulf War triumph. General Colin Powell was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers. The black-tie-and-gown crowd took in a lighthearted speech by President Bush.
“Bill Dickinson of the Armed Services Committee was there,” said President Bush of the Gulf War, “and he reminded us of some events that all of you are familiar with, how several hundred Iraqis surrendered to a helicopter. We remember that one, and I think Tom briefed on it. Several more surrendered—and this is a true story—to a drone that was going by. And get this one: others surrendered to an Italian photographer—I can’t imagine surrendering to the press. To Mary McGrory, I say, ‘Never! Come and get me. I’ll never surrender!’” The crowd erupted in laughter and applause, Mary included.
Len Downie became the Post’s chief editor in 1991, and Mary was increasingly at odds with the paper’s management. Downie was more cautious than Bradlee and never had easy relations with female staffers. Downie objected to Mary’s column appearing on the news pages instead of with the op-ed columns, and Mary was filled with sour memories of her tussles with Murray Gart at the Star on the same subject. “I didn’t have any great trouble getting him to understand that Mary was a special case,” explained Don Graham about the paper’s ultimate decision not to move the column. “She wound up on the front page of Outlook on Sunday and the inside pages the other days. She was treated as a special case, and should have been.” Mary won the battle, but she and Downie engaged in a reluctant détente.
Mary treated most editors with a “good help is hard to get” attitude. Bill Hamilton, one of her editors at the Post, was fond of saying that when Mary introduced him as her editor, “it was clear who was working for whom.” Mary liked Hamilton and Ken Ikenberry, but she had increasingly scratchy relations with her other editors at the Post, who she thought were picky and prone to micromanagement, leaving her to tell one in exasperation, “Well, you know, my name’s on it.”
Her relationship with her peers and editors became more challenging as she got older. “She became more imperious, more regal, I think, as the Mary McGrory persona took hold,” said her former colleague Haynes Johnson. Don Graham, the publisher of the Post, would send Mary nice handwritten notes when he particularly enjoyed a column. “We became sort of partisans of each other,” said Graham. “She would use me to score points against the editor.”
Mary’s assistant, Tina Toll, was blunter about the level of respect Mary was accorded by the paper’s management and staff. “Everybody deferred to Mary McGrory; it was a little bit of a fear,” said Toll. “They would stand there like puppy dogs.”
After Bush’s wartime triumphs, the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court brought domestic issues back to the forefront in the fall of 1991. By nominating an extremely conservative African American nominee with a rags-to-riches backstory and a short paper trail, President Bush knew he was putting Democrats in a bind.
Mary wanted to ensure that she had a good seat for the hearings and was, unsurprisingly, irritated when one of the Post’s editors told her that he did not have an extra pass for her to attend. Yet when the editor turned on his television to watch the hearings, he saw Mary being escorted to her front-row seat by the Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden.
The already high-profile Thomas hearings turned into a national sensation when Anita Hill, a former colleague of the judge, accused him of sexual harassment. She was hastily scheduled to speak before the committee and a riveted national audience. Mary remembered the scene:
I went to the Senate Caucus Room, where so many years before, I had seen Joseph R. McCarthy—who was to be much invoked again—for the first time. In those days the press tables were drawn right up beside the witnesses, and we could see the whites of their eyes and almost their tonsils. Through the years, we of what is called redundantly the “writing press” have been gradually moved back so that we only see the backs of their heads. It was all the way it had been when someone is about to lose or gain a reputation, and some tale of betrayal, chicanery, larceny or dirty pool was about to be revealed.
For Mary, conservative in all things sexual, Hill’s allegations were as damning as they were shocking. “It was as if a river of raw sewage had suddenly been unleashed in the marble chamber.” Mary thought Hill could not have been more credible: “Hill defended herself with poise and dignity. She walked proudly through the mire.”
In the middle of the hearings, Mary was scheduled to fly to Maine to spend the weekend with Newby Noyes to mark the tenth anniversary of the closing of the Washington Star. The clashing schedule was ironic given that it was Newby who had dispatched Mary to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings forty years before.
Mary decided that she would still leave. Surely President Bush would withdraw Thomas’s name as a result of Hill’s devastating testimony. Mary worked and reworked her Sunday column on the flight to Maine. Newby greeted Mary at the Bangor airport, saying, “I didn’t think you’d come.” If it had been anyone other than Newby, Mary probably wouldn’t have. Newby, his wife, Beppie, and Mary took a long walk by Frenchman’s Bay, reveling in the late-autumn colors and crisp air. As they stopped at a store, Mary noticed that virtually every car in the parking lot was listening to the hearings.
When the White House decided to forge ahead with Thomas’s nomination, Mary found herself watching his testimony on television. Thomas was aggressive, declaring that God, not the Senate, was his judge. Mary and Newby agreed that the swipe would play well with a public that never thought much of Congress. Thomas claimed that Hill was lying and that the Senate was conducting “a high-tech lynching.” It was clear that Democrats had little stomach for the fight, although the evidence suggested that Thomas had indeed harassed a number of women and not just Hill.
Mary, panicked that the hearings would drag on for days, booked an emergency flight back to Washington. She need not have bothered. Thomas had won the showdown. Mary graded the Democrats dismally: “a collection of damaged souls and swollen egos, who have found no cause larger than their next election.” She argued that it was also a powerful demonstration of why Republicans won elections: “The old CIA motto, ‘whatever is necessary,’ guides them. The Republican members of the Judiciary Committee got their marching orders and their script from the White House for the ferocious counterattack. . . . The Democrats never even caucused.”
Mary singled out Ted Kennedy for his ineffectiveness. She pointed out that his long history of women problems—drunken carousing, the long shadow of Chappaquiddick, and the events of the previous spring, when Kennedy had been out drinking with a nephew who would later be charged with rape—all combined to silence the man best suited to challenge Thomas. Mary’s grim postmortem for the Massachusetts senator: “Kennedy, gravely wounded in the dirty war, cannot escape the limits of his usefulness.”
The 1992 presidential campaign got off to an unusually late start, and Mary teased New York governor Mario Cuomo for his extended anguish about whether to mount a bid: “Nobody knows what Cuomo is waiting for as he issues daily bulletins from somewhere deep inside his psyche. In his latest soliloquy, divertingly recounted in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd, he blames God for his dilemma. The Almighty has not obliged him with a shaft of lightning such as was visited on Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.”
After reading the column, Maureen Dowd dropped Mary a note, saying that she had come up in her conversation with Cuomo. “I’m not discussing anything I said to Mary,” insisted Cuomo, “because I’m not myself when I’m with McGrory. She’s crazy. She can get anything she wants from me. She is magnificent. Not only is she smart, gracious, nice. She’s also human. She’s got enough of the devil in her, you know, so that you know she’s real and beautiful. If she didn’t have a little bit of the Irish in her, and a little bit of Boston and a little bit of the old stories, she’d be too perfect.”
Mary still tried to goad Cuomo into running. Her next column was in verse, again following a biblical theme: “How odd of God, says Mario C. Not doing for me the same as he did for Saul of T.” Minutes after reading Mary’s column, Cuomo called and left a voice-mail message on Mary’s answering machine. “How odd of Mary to do this to me, to mock my tormented musings. My frantic, fumbling efforts first to forge political fusings. Doesn’t she know I need to think, to ponder and to ruminate? Doesn’t she know that otherwise I will not be able persuasively to fulminate?” For Mary, the literate sparring must have felt like shades of her old relationship with Adlai Stevenson or Gene McCarthy.
“I am convinced that Mario Cuomo will run,” Mary wrote to a friend in November 1991. “It better be soon, or somebody will lynch him.”
Just before Christmas, Cuomo announced that he would not run, and Mary called it “coal in the Christmas stocking of the Democratic Party.” Mary finally had hit her breaking point, telling a friend in Antrim, “I’m sick and tired of Mario Cuomo and his peekaboo.”
The great irony of the 1992 race was that while many Democrats stayed away from the race because of Bush’s enormous popularity, there were growing signs of his weakness as the campaign began. Most ominously for Bush, the economy was dipping just as firebrand television commentator Pat Buchanan geared up for a Republican primary challenge against him.
Mary painted a bleak picture as President Bush courted Granite State voters: “New Hampshire, site of the first presidential primary, is afflicted with massive unemployment, foreclosures, bank failures, and plant closings, and George Bush was wary when he took its hand.” She spoke with many Republicans who planned to vote for Buchanan simply to send a message about the economy, and it seemed safe to do so, since the Democratic field looked weak. Buchanan appealed to voters as if he were leading an angry mob toward Frankenstein’s castle.
On the Democratic side, Mary devoted a good amount of coverage to the rising Democratic contender Bill Clinton. She nicely captured the Arkansas governor, “a tall, square-shouldered, pumpkin-faced extrovert, bowls people over with his charm. Color him effervescent. . . . With little children, with old ladies, he is magic.” While Clinton exuded southern charm, he was free of Jimmy Carter’s rectitude. Carter told New Hampshire voters he loved them; Clinton told them they deserved to be the first presidential primary state because they were so demanding.
In mid-January, Mary noted that reports of womanizing could prove an Achilles’ heel for Clinton in New Hampshire, saying that his rivals knew “that the hint of scandal may be the only way of stopping the radiant, ruddy stranger who seems to have captured New Hampshire’s stony heart.” When Bill and Hillary Clinton went on 60 Minutes to fend off charges of his philandering, they saved the campaign. Ever prudish, Mary found the spectacle of politicians and their wives talking so publicly about the pain of infidelity undignified. “I was extremely critical of Governor Clinton’s treatment of his wife,” Mary wrote to a friend. “I thought it so unattractive that he would never be nominated.” Yet Mary was quick to learn that Clinton had what she called “truly awesome recuperative powers.”
But Mary kept her harshest judgments of Clinton out of print, recognizing that some of her complaints sounded old-fashioned, and her language describing Clinton was more playful than condemnatory: “He is like Tom Jones, the hero of a picaresque 18th-century novel that was made into a riotous movie—a big, good-looking, good-hearted, lusty, scrape-prone lad.”
Even at seventy-three, Mary traveled gamely across New Hampshire as if she were herself a candidate. In mid-February, with the temperature eight degrees above zero, she trudged with a campaign volunteer through the streets of Ward 7 in Manchester, convinced it was still the best way to read the tea leaves of the electorate.
Mary enjoyed close relationships with a number of Clinton’s key advisers, particularly George Stephanopoulos, whom she had gotten to know when he was working as an aide to Congressman Dick Gephardt. “One of my boss’s constituents was a young man named Steven McKenna, who was born deformed by thalidomide that had been given to his mom by a government doctor,” explained Stephanopoulos. “The Justice Department was stopping him from suing for damages. Exactly the kind of case Mary adopted as her own. She wrote the column, Steve got his day in court. I made a friend.”
Stephanopoulos helped Mary in her garden, volunteered with the kids from St. Ann’s, and tended bar at Mary’s parties. In the run-up to the campaign, Mary and several other friends tried to dissuade Stephanopoulos from going to work for Clinton, insisting he was a long shot. Stephanopoulos sensibly ignored the collective wisdom and signed on as Clinton’s communications director.
When Stephanopoulos’s career skyrocketed and he became one of President Clinton’s closest advisers at the age of thirty-four, Washington Post reporter Al Kamen and his wife saw him on television one evening. His wife turned to him and asked, “Isn’t that the guy who used to serve us at Mary’s?”
The campaign was a stern test of friendship for Stephanopoulos and Mary. Clinton exploded at Stephanopoulos when he read critical columns from Mary. Mary would pester Stephanopoulos when he was slow to respond to her inquiries. “Dear George,” she wrote him at one point. “Ever since I began writing about the Clintons, you have stopped returning my calls. What kind of a message is that?”
• • •
Although Bill Clinton finished second to Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary, he sold his performance as that of the “comeback kid.” On the Republican side, President Bush turned back the effort by Buchanan, but voters were uneasy.
This restlessness found a standard-bearer with the entry of Texas billionaire Ross Perot into the presidential race as an independent. The plainspoken Texan offered blunt assessments of the ills of government in terms that were colorful and easy to understand. The initial public response was electric.
In early May 1992, Mary had a lengthy interview with Perot, and she liked him. He funded programs for inner-city schoolkids out of his own pocket and was animated in a way that reminded her of Joe Allbritton. Mary loved the fact that Perot was bringing new people into the political process and turning out volunteers in droves. It was significant praise that she called his campaign the most “exhilarating adventure” in American politics since Gene McCarthy’s New Hampshire insurgency. But Mary also spotted storm clouds on the horizon: “It is hard to see him keeping cool during a presidential debate when a rival charges him with being all wet.” For a period before the conventions, Ross Perot led in the polls in a three-way contest with Clinton and Bush.
Len Downie noted that it was Mary who had asked Hillary Clinton the now famous question about the balance between being a professional woman and a mother. Clinton’s response to Mary was, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Clinton’s answer quickly became campaign fodder, with critics saying that she was a radical feminist demeaning stay-at-home moms. The fact that Clinton’s response came to a question from Mary, a woman who had never baked cookies or raised a child, was no small irony.
Clinton announced the selection of Tennessee senator Al Gore as his running mate in advance of the convention in New York. Gore was more conservative than Mary would have liked, but she knew that Gore’s service in Vietnam, environmental credentials, and solid family life provided Clinton with what she called a “character graft.”
The gathering in New York took on new import as Ross Perot made the dramatic announcement that he was dropping out of the race. Mary had been unsparing toward Perot even before the announcement, given his increasingly strange behavior on the campaign trail. “This is the scary Perot,” she said, “the raging paranoid who far from being the Trumanesque figure of earlier impressions, combines the worst features of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.” Perot’s announcement meant that millions of votes were suddenly up for grabs. Mary saw his withdrawal as a particularly grave sin, because he had gotten so many Americans excited about the political process for the first time and then abandoned them out of pique.
When Mary was in New York, she learned that Gore was holding a fundraiser at a local law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. When Mary arrived, she was told it was a private event. “Closed to the public?” stormed Mary. “What are you talking about? Is this man running to be a partner in Cravath, Swain and Moore, or is he running for the vice presidency of the United States?” Mary, the only reporter present, was given a front-row seat. “You have to keep a sense of outrage and indignation, and you get very cross with people who are trying to keep you from doing what you are supposed to,” Mary explained.
On the convention floor, both Clinton and Gore delivered intensely personal acceptance speeches. “These were probably the most intimate acceptance speeches in the history of the art, and real weepers,” observed Mary. “They had to be, say the handlers, because people don’t know Gore and don’t trust Clinton. By the time the delegates departed with their Clinton pennants, they were sure their Dixie duo would do just fine.”
From New York, Mary headed to the Republican convention, in Houston. Although a speech by former president Ronald Reagan was received blissfully, the convention became most famous for a fiery oration by Pat Buchanan that called America to a “cultural war” against radical feminists, homosexuals, environmentalists, and other “malcontents.” When he spoke of a “block-by-block” effort to retake America’s cities, using force if necessary, the crowd in the hall gushed. The audience at home winced.
Mary wrote, “The Republican assembly was not a joyous gathering of like-minded people. It was more of a putative expedition against people the Christian Right considers reprehensible, a fairly sizable number, which includes gays, reporters, the “gridlocked Democratic Congress,” single mothers, women who have abortions, and above all, Hillary Clinton. . . . The pillars of faith, hope, and charity came in for little attention.”
In October, Ross Perot jumped back into the presidential race, despite his deeply wounded image. The race was down to Bush and Clinton, and Bush was gaining steady ground on Clinton through a drumbeat of attacks on his character and lack of experience.
But then came an October surprise: special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had been investigating the Iran-contra scandal for years, dropped a bombshell: Vice President Bush had lied about his role in the arms-for-hostages saga. Walsh not only indicted former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger for lying to Congress, but released key information just four days before the election that made clear that Bush had also lied about his part in the scandal.
Mary’s earlier open questions to Bush about Iran-contra were central to Walsh’s findings. The day after Bush’s open letter to Mary had appeared in the Post in 1987, Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz had spoken on the phone. Weinberger complained angrily to Shultz about Bush’s assertion to Mary that he would have taken a different view of arms sales to Iran if he had known there was opposition in the cabinet. Unfortunately for Bush, an aide to Shultz took detailed notes of the conversation between Weinberger and the secretary of state. Weinberger told Shultz that Bush’s answers were “terrible” and that the vice president had clearly known that both Weinberger and Shultz vehemently objected to the arms deal. Weinberger wondered, “Why did he say that?”
Once again a politician had hung himself on what he thought were relatively softball questions from Mary. Walsh had effectively destroyed Bush’s campaign in the eleventh hour with a very rough form of justice.
With Ross Perot managing to take close to 20 percent of the popular vote, Bill Clinton became the forty-second president of the United States.
Mary continued to weigh on President Bush’s mind even after the election. Jim Baker, who had served as Bush’s secretary of state, had become embroiled in a minor brouhaha over whether Republican political appointees had accessed Bill Clinton’s passport file in an effort to gather compromising information.
Shortly before Christmas 1992, Mary wrote of Baker, “The man who served as secretary of state for four years, who was considered the ablest man in two Republican administrations, the slick and ferocious campaign manager who made Democrats tremble, has vanished. His disappearance is the talk of the town’s Christmas parties. No Republican wishes to be quoted—Baker is much feared and respected—but the general feeling is that he has suffered grave damage to his reputation and his quest for the presidency.”
After reading Mary’s column, President Bush wrote in his diary, “An ugly editorial by Mary McGrory . . . and it will have Jim Baker climbing the wall. . . . I feel sorry for Jim Baker. Mary McGrory tries to act like Barbara and I are opposed to him in some way—the meanest, nastiest, ugliest column. She has destroyed me over and over again, and Jim is so sensitive about his own coverage that he will be really upset.”
For her part, Mary was looking forward. She sent a fax to George Stephanopoulos letting her old friend know that they had served lasagna at the Christmas party. There were leftovers available if he was interested.