Journalist Mary McGrory succeeded with "sheer stubbornness," author tells NPC audience

Mary McGrory succeeded in Washington political journalism "by dint of sheer stubbornness, John Norris, author of "Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism," told a National Press Club Book Rap Oct. 15.

"She broke into the industry at a time when women reporters were rare and women columnists were even rarer," Norris said. "She had no way that she should have succeeded."

McGrory, the 1998 winner of the NPC's Fourth Estate Award, was an outspoken liberal commentator for more than five decades, first at the Washington Star and, after the Star's demise, at The Washington Post. Norris called her story "a great window into contemporary American history and a great Horatio Alger story," given McGrory's lower-middle-class origins in Boston.

Norris, executive director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress, was interviewed by NPC member Dan Balz, chief correspondent at The Washington Post, where he was a colleague of McGrory's.

Despite McGrory’s prolific output – some 8,000 columns over her career – "it didn't come easy," Norris said. "She was an extraordinarily gifted writer, but she was never an easy writer," often going through 10, 20, 30 drafts of a column. "She worked, she reworked, she sweated over every sentence."

Seconding Balz's praise for McGrory's "skill as a writer to encapsulate events," Norris noted that "she could go to a congressional hearing which could be dry as sand, and bring it to life."

"Her ability to turn a phrase that made things in Washington much more enjoyable for the average reader than they are for the people who actually have to live through dealing with Washington,” Norris said.

McGrory once referred to the Watergate scandal's mix of incompetence and malice as a Marx Brothers movie as retold by the German General Staff, Norris said. "It was those kinds of things that made Mary's column a must-read, and made it so the politicians wanted to appear in Mary's column, and absolutely dreaded it,” Norris said.

McGrory's fierce opposition to the Vietnam War – "she objected to it early, she objected to it often," – led her to abandon the norms of objective journalism. "She blew by pretty much every journalistic boundary in the process," Norris said, becoming a de facto advisor to Eugene McCarthy's insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination.

"She was faced with seismic events at the end of her career as she was at the beginning," Norris said. From the 1954 McCarthy hearings to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Despite objections to her columns "for Mary, being critical at high moments, at critical moments, was the thing you do as a reporter,” he said.

Larry Lipman, past NPC president and a member of the Club's Book & Author Committee, introduced the event. Lippman also handled the question-and-answer portion of the event, as Balz had to leave early to pay tribute to Gwen Ifill, winner of the 2015 Fourth Estate Award, presented at a dinner the same evening.