McGrory: Newspaper Woman and volunteer.

Burnett, Chris

John Norris, "Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism," Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 342 pages, 2015, $28.95.

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More than one decade after her death at 85 in 2004, John Norris has written in this first published biography of noted Washington columnist Mary McGrory, a remarkable account of a woman who broke the gender barrier in Washington reporting and opinion writing in the second half of the 20th century. Norris, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy organization that promotes informed, progressive debate in the media and advocates a strong role for government, would seem an appropriate biographer for McGrory. Norris has a lively and engaging journalistic writing style and he is in his element, having published articles in magazines such as Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post. The book is richly referenced with comments from friends and quotes from her more than 8,000 columns between 1954 and 1981 for the Washington Star and from 1981 to 2003 for the Washington Post.

The book tells of a shy girl who grew up in in the Boston suburb of Roslindale of Irish and German parents and, defying the conventions of mid 20th century America, escaped the life of married wife and mother to become one of the most heralded columnists and Washington reporters of the second half of the 20th century. If there is a theme to this biography, however, it is that Mary, as she became known to millions of admirers as well as critics, helped break apart the male-dominated world of Washington journalism of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet she was no feminist. She worked feverishly to write her three- to four-times-a-week column and felt women should not depend on affirmative action to compete with men. A liberal who wore with pride her place in the early 1970s on Richard Nixon's enemies list and whose columns on Watergate earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1975, she was a devout Roman Catholic who strongly opposed abortion and who had moral reservations toward homosexuality.

... What makes the book such an entertaining read is that it points out these contradictions by citing numerous examples from Mary's life, both in her writing and in the relationships she established with her sources. Mary was never a nonpartisan journalist, and she got shockingly close to many politicians in pursuing stories. She had a fondness for strong men of political conviction and charm, such as John F. Kennedy, who she knew as a confidante both when he was a senator and president. Mary also admired his brother, Bobby. She was a frequent guest, along with the orphan children of Washington's St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home, where she volunteered throughout her Washington career, at the Kennedy's estate, Hickory Hill, in suburban McLean, Virginia. Bobby Kennedy would play Santa Claus at St. Ann's Christmas Party in the 1960s and the children would go in the summer to Hickory Hill to swim in the Kennedy's pool. Other favorites of Mary included Minnesota Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, whose insurgency against Lyndon Johnson helped topple the sitting president in 1968 over the Vietnam issue, and Illinois Democratic Governor Adlai Stevenson, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1952 and 1956.

One of the most entertaining stories from the book is how Johnson, who was jealous of McGrory's closeness to the Kennedys, showed up at Mary's apartment one night early in his presidency with Secret Service in tow, with one goal--to charm her and get her to go to bed with him. McGrory politely turned the president down. "I admire you, Mr. President, and I always will," Norris quotes her as saying (p. 92). "And I think you are doing a terrific job and that is where it stops--right there."

What sets the book apart, however, is not just the entertaining narrative. Many well-written biographies have that. What makes this book especially valuable is that these stories show how Washington reporting, as well as journalism in general, changed during her lifetime. And they illustrate how Mary never fit the model of a typical reporter.

In 1954, as a young book reviewer for the Star, she was able to escape the book review desk after seven years after assuring her editor that she had no plans to ever marry. The result was her first assignment as a journalist--to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings featuring anti-Communist Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was about to self destruct his career by claiming the Army was filled with Communists and their sympathizers. Mary's picture of the senator, not written in the wire service style of the day but as a richly descriptive piece that made the chief characters of the hearing come alive on the page, helped bring McCarthy down. Today, most journalists remember the role that television, in particular CBS announcer Edward R. Murrow, played in showing courage that ended McCarthy's witch hunt. However, Mary, and her paper, were trailblazers in recognizing that lifeless wire service style prose would no longer do in an age of television. Newspapers, if they were to survive, had to pick up the story where television left off.

In setting aside objectivity and by allowing Mary's column to appear on the news pages rather than the editorial or op-ed page for most of her career, both the Star and later the Post contributed to the end of an era of public trust that a paper's news pages were places where readers could turn to get the news without political slant. McGrory, who covered every presidential political campaign from 1956 through 2000, never was part of today's journalistic world of Internet journalism where many sites cater to readers with a political agenda. If she were alive today, she would undoubtedly be appalled at the lack of real reporting that goes into much Web journalism. She shied away from making television appearances, except for a few times toward the end of her life when she went on NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by her friend Tim Russert.

What makes this biography of McGrory most compelling, though, is that it describes a woman, and a political culture in Washington, D.C., where politicians felt free to disagree during the day and get along at night. Mary didn't share Ronald Reagan's conservative politics, but she thought he was a nice man with a keen political style. And she admired the relationship Reagan developed with one of her favorite politicians, liberal House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. The informal parties at Mary's apartment, where Supreme Court justices as well as top Washington politicians from both parties tended bar and conversations over drinks extended into the wee hours of the night, became an integral part of the Washington scene. Yet even journalism icons die, and political cultures change. While McGrory was read by millions, and was as the book calls a "queen" of journalism, her burial headstone reads as if she knew her real legacy. "Newspaper woman and volunteer," is inscribed on her headstone at her burial site in her summer vacation town, Antrim, New Hampshire. After all, it wasn't the awards she received nor the important people she knew and befriended that mattered most. She was first and foremost someone who kept readers informed, and who took time out to be a mother and later grandmother figure to the children of St. Ann's.