April 27, 2004
Mary McGrory laid to rest
I grew up reading Mary McGrory's columns in the wonderful Washington Star and eventually worked near her office at the Washington Post. Yesterday she was laid to rest in a funeral attended by Kennedys and their staff.
Toward the end of my three years at the Washington Post, in 1995, the paper got a new computer system and the National section was moved to new quarters that rearranged everyone's desks and placed us graphics specialists, myself and Barbara Saffir, outside Mary's office.
McGrory was thoroughly confused at how to operate the new terminals, and came to rely on Barbara and me to help her. I felt a great deal of empathy for her. The entire idea of a graphical interface and using menus and a computer mouse was just plain confusing to someone of her generation. I tried to put my hand over hers on the mouse in teaching her how to create, save and send stories on to editors so that muscle memory might take over and relieve her anxiety. Eventually she got the hang of it.
Mary took us out to a wonderful lunch as a thank you for helping her. The more I read about her orientation toward friendships with men rather than women, what Joel Achenbach called her masculine bias, the more I realize that it was rather special of her to take two women out to lunch.
David Von Drehle quoted a former Star colleague of hers as saying:
She never identified with other woman writers nor did she take up the cause of feminism. Her approach was to say, "I made it in a man's world and you must make it, too, without depending on any philosophical principle like feminism."
Mary reminds me of my Aunt Anna, also Boston Irish and born a few years after Mary, who once worked for Sen. John Kennedy when he first came to Washington, D.C. Both got far in their careers but never married, and it seems that "having it all" eluded many female pioneers.
My life experiences traveling the world and living later in Baltimore led to new viewpoints that put me at an ever-greater remove from McGrory's staunch liberalism; for examples of McGrory's writing, see here.
It might be said that time passed Mary by; not only in the guise of new computers, but realities that mugged many a 1960s liberal. Fresh winds guided more creative thinkers on ways to tackle issues ranging from welfare to terrorism to feminism. As a woman, I eventually decided that Kennedys and Clintons had an innate innobility toward females,
She continued to love Kennedys and to despite Nixon, to hate our efforts in Iraq the way liberals once hated Vietnam. While fellow liberals such as Maureen Dowd called McGrory "the most luminous writer and clearest thinker in the business," conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan berated her for ill-thought-out analogies comparing Iraq and Saudi Arabia and others noted they never agreed with a single one of her columns — so McGrory merely preached to the choir for some portion of her career.
Chappaquiddick and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and Soviet adventurism and Monica Lewinsky and Sept. 11 changed many once-liberals and Kennedy supporters into apostates. But not McGrory. I kept silent at our lunch about the fact that I had made a switch to conservatism much earlier, by voting for Reagan for president twice. Of course, that had to be kept secret from most of my Washington Post colleagues, and McGrory most of all. One was under no illusion, based on her entire ouevre, that she would view a conservative as anything but a blighted soul.
Still, one feels for her, having been felled by a stroke from writing during her last year. Godspeed, Mary McGrory.
