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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Missing Mary
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- The Honorable Trent Lott of Mississippi, Senate Republican leader-emeritus -- a confirmed anti-communist who, despite his strong teeth and good posture, somehow missed the military draft and the chance to personally stop the Red menace in the rice paddies of Vietnam -- was asked recently by Geoff Earle of the Hill newspaper for his take on the political-military situation in Iraq and what the United States now ought to do.
Here is what Trent Lott said: "Honestly, it's a little tougher than I thought it was going to be." Then he added, "If we have to, we just mow the whole place down and see what happens."
Just imagine what Mary McGrory, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, could have done with -- and, yes, to -- a man who made that obtuse pronouncement. But because she suffered a stroke last March and has been recovering since, sadly, this season is without the tireless reporting and the graceful writing of Mary McGrory. The late Tom Winship, the peerless editor of the Boston Globe, put it well: "Mary McGrory is the best handler of the English language in the American journalism business."
But Mary McGrory has never been a pundit. She has always done her own work. She has pounded the pavement. She has haunted congressional committee rooms. Her interviews were not with the Positions or Titles of official Washington, but with real people. She once admitted that she thought of herself "as a companion to the distraught, sort of a psychiatric nurse, just saying: 'You're OK. They're wrong.'"
An interviewer asked her, "Have you ever had trouble maintaining objectivity on a story?" McGrory's answer: "Yes, about 85 percent of the time. ... I was very much against the Vietnam War, and, "I don't like the way we treat children."
Her mission was not to use her time, energy and enormous talent to persuade readers that the capital gains tax was an onerous burden upon the most productive among us, the wealth-makers. Justice for poor children and for families struggling on the margin and in the shadows, those have been Mary's passions.
Let me be clear. Mary McGrory is no plaster saint. True, she has always spent long hours with the sick and the lonely. Yes, she has spent countless days, make that years, in the company of the residents of Saint Ann's Infant and Maternity Home.
These are children who have been abused, abandoned and neglected. Mary McGrory knows each child's name and personal history -- and she helps them. She harasses and shames friends and colleagues into personally helping the St. Ann's kids. A check simply won't do. We are talking here about coerced community service.
Fifty years ago next spring, Newbold Noyes, her beloved editor at the Washington Star, sent Mary McGrory to write about the drama of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, the anti-communist crusader, had implicated the State Department, the White House and many of his congressional colleagues.
McGrory was McCarthy's worst nightmare. She saw him for what he was -- a schoolyard bully identical to the ones she had exposed and dispatched in her Boston childhood. Worse for McCarthy and better for the nation, Mary McGrory laughed at him and rallied her readers to dare to laugh at the fearsome Joe McCarthy.
She has lived professionally and personally by the words of St. Thomas a Kempis (whom she had not only read but could quote): "Fawn not upon the great." After defrocking the pompous, the pretentious and the prideful, Mary mocked self-importance and self-absorption -- targets never out of season in Washington.
Mary would host a lasagna supper where the newsroom copy aide could sit next to a senator and a Salvation Army officer next to an ambassador. One of the happiest memories was the scene in Mary's living room when Ronald Reagan's loyal assistant and confidant, Michael Deaver, played the piano while the late House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill sang, "If you're Irish come into the parlor."
I think of the table when I think of Mary McGrory -- the table to which people come together for food, for companionship. The table around which people make decisions. Mary always understood that too many people have no place at the table. Their voices are not heard. Their needs are too often ignored.
By the most well-chosen of words and by the example of her own life, Mary McGrory has taught us that all of God's children deserve their place at the table.
