The Press: Queen of the Corps

Her technique is all her own. Pert and comely, she sits quietly in meetings and hearing rooms, watching gestures, listening to sounds, painting mental pictures. She writes swiftly and well, turns out some of the most perceptive, pungent copy in Washington, D.C. Says U.P.I. Bureau Chief Lyle Wilson of the Washington Star’s Mary McGrory: “Mary is the tops—the best I’ve ever seen. Her stuff stands up next day; it has survival value.”

This week, in a neat black suit and chic red velvet coat, Reporter Mary McGrory finished a survey of political races in New England and New York. As always, t her copy twinkled brightly in the Star (circ. 266,414). In her home town of Boston, she watched the pols stand “cigar-to-cigar” to cheer Mr. Truman; in New York she noted that ardent Campaigner Nelson Rockefeller “plunges into a crowd as into a warm bath,” and referred to Rockefeller and Governor Averell Harriman as “two millionaires tramping the streets begging for work.” Reading her stories. Political Reporter Carroll Kilpatrick of the rival Washington Post and Times Herald wired Mary: IN THE INTEREST OF MY FELLOW STUMBLEBUMS, I IMPLORE YOU TO STOP WRITING. SHAMEFACEDLY YOURS.

Pictures in Writing. To Washington Correspondent James (“Scotty”) Reston of the New York Times, Mary McGrory’s “poet’s gift of analogy” is a thing that puts her in a special class, and is one reason that he has tried to hire her. Mary’s copy stands out against her rivals’ because she has what one colleague calls the ability to “write pictures” of what she sees and hears. “I have very few opinions, but powerful impressions,” she says. “I’m poor at summary, significance, relating—all I can do is respond.”

Politics has attracted Mary since her girlhood in Boston (“You heard politics from the time you were five”). She graduated from Boston’s Roman Catholic Emmanuel College in 1939 with a B.A. in English (“no honors”), got a job cropping pictures for Houghton Mifflin Co. at $16.50 a week. In 1942 she went to work for the Boston Herald as a secretary, wrote an occasional book review so well that she was hired for the book page of the Star in 1947. Mary liked books (she still does some reviewing), but the city room fascinated her. In 1954 the Star’s Executive Editor Newbold Noyes Jr. bustled her off to help cover the Army-McCarthy hearings. Advised Noyes: “Write it like a letter to your favorite aunt.”

An Eyeful for Auntie. Auntie got an eyeful. Army Secretary Stevens looked “about as dangerous as an eagle scout leading his first patrol.” Roy Cohn “looks like a boy who has had a letter sent home from school about him, and has come back with his elders to get the thing straightened out.” As for the duel between McCarthy and Army Counsel Joseph Welch, “Mr. Welch proceeds at the measured pace of the minuet, with frequent, courtly bows. Senator McCarthy favors the tarantella, moving almost faster than the human eye can follow.”

“All of a sudden,” recalls Mary, “people wanted to adopt me, marry me, poison me, run me out of town.” Ever since, she has been covering history-in-the-making with warmth and wit. With Senator Kefauver in the 1956 presidential campaign: “Unlike Mr. Stevenson, who persists in regarding the campaign speech as an art form. Senator Kefauver still obviously believes that the road to the White House is paved with pressed palms.” At this summer’s Adams-Goldfine hearings: “Better you should ask a bear to dance than Mr. Goldfine to unravel personally this business of misbranded fabrics.”

Mary McGrory, 40, lives quietly in an apartment on her $160-a-week salary (plus $20-$30 a week for book reviews), spends her free Sundays singing and talking to children at Washington’s St. Ann’s Orphanage, who call her “Mary Agloria.” She turns her warm wit on herself to find an explanation for the fact that she has never married: “I guess the men think the best thing about me is my writing.”

-Tammany Chief Carmine De Sapio.