On a quiet summer evening in 1964, Mary McGrory’s phone rang. The caller identified himself as a Secret Service agent and said that President Lyndon Johnson wanted to stop by her apartment in 15 minutes. “Oh, really,” McGrory replied drolly, sure that the caller was a fellow reporter pulling her leg, but the man on the line insisted he was serious.

She went out into the hallway of her apartment building, a drab modern brick affair a few miles up Connecticut Avenue from the White House, and found several Secret Service agents standing near the elevator. Realizing that the leader of the free world was, indeed, on his way, she ran back inside and frantically tidied up. Several minutes later, the president appeared at her door.

At age 45, Mary McGrory was already one of the most influential political columnists in the country, a veteran of three presidential campaigns whose four-times-a-week musings in the Washington Evening Star were an absolute must-read for everyone from political pros to the most casual observers. A Bostonian ever proud of her Irish roots, McGrory had adored President John F. Kennedy, and she had been a constant behind-the-scenes presence during the Camelot years. So she was no stranger to power, but the impromptu nature of Johnson’s visit was unnerving.

McGrory invited the president in and offered him a drink. They engaged in some friendly small talk until Johnson, tumbler of Scotch in his large hand, finally put his cards on the table. “Mary, I am crazy about you,” he confessed. He wanted to sleep with her.

Then, in what has to be one of the most awkward and unromantic propositions in presidential history, Johnson tried to make the case that since McGrory had always admired Kennedy, she should now transfer her affections to him. “He wanted to have a reporter who had been their favorite reporter,” says Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist and McGrory protégée who heard about the encounter from McGrory and attributed it to LBJ’s perpetual rivalry with the Kennedys. “It wasn’t so much him pouncing on her as him competing with JFK.” In LBJ’s mind, sleeping with McGrory, like raising the height of the toilets in the White House, was just another way to one-up the late president. As McGrory’s friend Phil Gailey put it to me: “He assumed, I guess, that the only reason she loved the Kennedys was because they had power. What a klutz.”

Listening to Johnson’s declaration, McGrory later told her friends, she felt flattered, startled and mortified at the same time. She took a deep breath and said, “I admire you, Mr. President, and I always will. And I think you are doing a terrific job, and that is where it stops—right there.”

President Johnson finished his drink and said, “I just wanted you to know.”

“Now I know,” she replied. “Thank you.”

And with that, the president and his Secret Service detail left.

***

Lyndon Johnson was hardly the first politician—or the last—to fall for Mary McGrory. A colorful, cheeky anthropologist of American political life, she was a trailblazer who, 10 years after her death at age 85, has not been forgotten but hasn’t been fully appreciated, either. Over five decades and more than 8,000 newspaper columns, she fundamentally altered how we talk about politics and how we think about politicians—all while fending off presidential propositions and other indignities her male colleagues never endured.

Johnson, tumbler of Scotch in his large hand, finally put his cards on the table. “Mary, I am crazy about you,” he confessed.

An elegantly florid Washington institution in a town that has always been a sea of glad-handing gray suits, McGrory glided behind the scenes of 50 years of American history—drinking, flirting, cajoling and jousting with the most important figures in American life, her own story intertwined with those of the Kennedys and Richard Nixon in ways that are hard to fathom in today’s sanitized media environment. She broke too many rules in the journalism textbook to count, but had she followed those rules, she never would have gotten a place in the virtually all-male newsroom to begin with.

As a provocative woman prowling the halls of power in the 1950s and ’60s, McGrory was almost uniquely bewitching to the day’s alpha males. She was slim and attractive and yet could drink and smoke with the old bulls. She was funny and sharp, able to talk politics like a ward captain, and there was a twinkle in her eyes that suggested a certain mischief. Perhaps more than any other journalist in American history, she pushed her editors (and they were invariably men) to come to terms with the fact that women—or at least this particular woman—had something worthwhile to say. And she always seemed to embrace the advice that she had once laughingly given an intimidated relative when he walked up to the buffet at a Washington gala: “Always approach the shrimp bowl like you own it.”

She first exploded on the national political scene in April 1954, a decade before Johnson’s unannounced visit, after Newby Noyes, an editor at the Evening Star, strode into the newspaper’s sleepy book review department and approached her desk carrying two cold bottles of root beer. McGrory had been reviewing books for more than a decade, and was known as one of the finest wordsmiths and most sparkling wits on the staff. She did not yet own the shrimp bowl, but she certainly aspired to. Noyes offered McGrory a root beer as he pulled up a chair.

He began by asking a candid question in tones loud enough to be heard across the room, “Say, Mary, aren’t you ever going to get married?”

She knew he wasn’t just making small talk. This was an era when there were precious few women in journalism, and editors often demanded that women leave their positions if they wed. Some female reporters went so far as to hide their marriages to avoid being dismissed.

“Well, you know, I hope so,” McGrory said, “but I don’t know.”

“Because if you’re not going to get married,” Noyes continued, “we want you to do something different. We just always figured that you would get married and have a baby and leave us, so we haven’t tried to do a great deal. But we think you can do more.”

McGrory had agitated for years to cover politics. She asked what “doing more” might entail.

“We think you should add humor and color and charm and flair to the news pages.”

She sipped her root beer and smiled coyly. “Oh, is that all?”

“Yes,” Noyes said. “We want you to start at the Army-McCarthy hearings.”

McGrory entered the Senate hearings, she later said, “paralyzed with fear” and overwhelmed by the crush of reporters, staffers, Capitol Police officers and spectators jammed into the room. Suddenly, a friendly face materialized: Mike Dowd, the police inspector in charge of Senate security. He escorted McGrory to a front-row seat at a long press table. Dowd, an Irish immigrant whose daughter Maureen would go on to become McGrory’s close friend, later said he had just wanted to help a nice Irish girl on her first big assignment.

As Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, the vituperative anti-communist crusader, entered the hearing room amid a cascade of flash bulbs and shouted questions, McGrory felt a twinge of recognition. “I had seen his likes all my life, at wakes, at weddings, at the junior prom,” McGrory observed. “He was an Irish bully boy.”

When McGrory returned to the Star and tentatively shared a draft with Noyes, his verdict was blunt: “No. No. No. No, Mary.” The column read like a wire service story. He wanted her to write like a drama critic covering a play. He wanted her to put readers in the room. “Write it like a letter to your favorite aunt.”

After six hours of flustered rewrites, McGrory’s first column appeared on April 23, 1954. She took Noyes’ instruction to write like a theater reviewer almost literally, and the column began: “It’s too early yet to tell about the plot, but they’ve certainly got a cast there. The star, Senator McCarthy, ploughs his high-shouldered way through the crowds amid small cheers.” McGrory described Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s lawyer, as looking like a boy who had been reprimanded at school and “come back with his elders to get the thing straightened out.” Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens looked “about as dangerous as an Eagle Scout.”

She produced 36 columns over 36 days of hearings. By the time the political drama reached its height, with lawyer Joseph Welch famously demanding of McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” McGrory’s columns were the talk of the town.

“All of a sudden people wanted to adopt me, marry me, poison me, run me out of town,” McGrory recalled. Fellow reporter Doris Fleeson observed: “She’s been coiled up on her bookshelf all these years just waiting to strike.”

Opportunities suddenly unfurled before McGrory. Noyes appointed her to the paper’s national staff, directing her to write color stories on the big political happenings of the day. Her coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings reached the final round of consideration for the Pulitzer Prize. Scotty Reston, the powerhouse Washington bureau chief and columnist for the New York Times, tried to bring McGrory aboard his talented team, but the negotiations collapsed after Reston suggested that in addition to her reporting duties, she would need to handle the switchboard in the morning.

Four short years later Time magazine dubbed McGrory the “Queen of the Washington Press Corps.” “Her technique is all her own,” the magazine wrote. “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.” (She made such an impression on Tommy Weber, the photographer Time sent to take her picture, that he wrote a colleague, “If I put down all my thoughts Boyd would make me send Time, Inc. a check for the privilege of covering the babe. This gal has everything—manners of a lad—a wonderful voice—attractive as hell to look at—and a touch of come-on that gives guys noises in the head. Why don’t we hire her?”)

On a single day shortly after the publication of the Time profile—November 7, 1958—McGrory received book offers from editors at Doubleday, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Alfred A. Knopf and McGraw-Hill—all of which she politely turned down.

So what was it about her that felt so different, so revolutionary?

It wasn’t just being a woman in a man’s town, though that might have helped. It wasn’t just that she wrote beautifully, which she did. At the time, focusing on the personal side of politics and what made politicians tick seemed almost rebellious. But McGrory realized that with the advent of television, print reporters needed to offer a more evocative take on the day’s events if they hoped to compete with the evening news.

She combined commentary and field reporting in a way that few others did, forming her opinions firsthand in hearing rooms and on the campaign trail. She viewed columnists who largely stayed in their offices as hopeless thumbsuckers. And she wrote about the foibles and hypocrisies of senators and presidents as comfortably—and as pointedly—as though she were sitting at the kitchen table gossiping about the neighbors.

Her writing was so well crafted that even the mundane nonsense of everyday life in Washington became compelling. A pair of members debated on the floor of Congress, “like two elderly polar bears negotiating the pas de deux from ‘Swan Lake.’” A senator from Wisconsin ran on a platform of “preparedness, non-intervention, and cheese.” Efforts by a politician to restrain a freelancing underling were akin to “a small man trying to take a large dog for a walk.”

McGrory would sit patiently on the leather benches below the old oil portraits of politicians in the Speaker’s Lobby off the floor of the House of Representatives, lying in wait for members of Congress. That patience was usually rewarded. “Men naturally like to explain things to women,” McGrory observed, “and I have given them exceptional opportunities in that regard.”

But while politicians never could resist talking to her, they usually opened the newspaper the next day with trepidation. Washington’s most powerful personages, Democrats and Republicans alike, came to fear McGrory’s sweetly savage prose. Her friend Bobby Kennedy commented, “She is so gentle—until she gets behind a typewriter.” Lyndon Johnson lamented, “Mary McGrory is the best writer in Washington, and she keeps getting better and better at my expense.”

***

The Queen of the Washington Press Corps, like so many Beltway legends, turns out to have been a self-made heroine. She was born in Roslindale, on the outskirts of Boston, two years before women were given the right to vote. Her father was a postal clerk, and her mother did part-time accounting work to help make ends meet. In a stroke of good fortune, McGrory was accepted to the Girls’ Latin School in Boston, the finest public school for young women in the United States at the time. It was there that she gained an education and a manner that convinced most who met her later in life that she must have come from a wealthy East Coast family.

In fact, she was the first in her family to graduate from university, Emmanuel College in Boston, and she started out in journalism with no connections and no credentials at a time when the field was dominated by men, from publishers down to the lowliest copy boy—hardly a suitable profession for a nice Catholic girl from Roslindale. As author and media historian Eric Alterman joked: “Reporting was seen as a job for winos, perverts, and those without sufficient imagination to become gangsters.”

But McGrory had been attracted to journalism as a girl by reading about the comic strip adventures of Jane Arden, a prototypical spunky female reporter, and McGrory landed a job reviewing books at the Boston Herald Traveler in 1942. She got her first big break when the New York Times commissioned a number of her reviews, which led to her making the leap to the Washington Star in 1947.

Arriving in the capital, McGrory was struck by a feeling of openness and mobility. Washington’s avenues were broad and tree-lined, unlike Boston’s cramped streets. More important, “in Boston, your name or your face froze you into place,” she said. “In Washington, nobody knew exactly who anybody else was,” allowing her to invent herself as the person she wanted to be.

McGrory first laid eyes on JFK, “thin as a match and still yellow from malaria,” when he returned to a hero’s welcome in Boston after World War II. After they both moved to Washington, Kennedy, then a single freshman member of Congress, asked McGrory out on a date. But he did so through an intermediary, as was sometimes his style. McGrory was offended. She made clear that it was not how she expected to be approached. JFK then asked her out in person, and they had dinner together in February 1948; McGrory was tight-lipped about the encounter, but she told a friend that Kennedy simply had to do something about his unkempt hair. Seeing how animated McGrory became when she discussed current affairs, Kennedy told her that she should write about politics. McGrory agreed, telling Kennedy that she was frustrated that the editors at the Star wouldn’t let her do so.

The romance never went anywhere. McGrory was well enough attuned to Boston’s ingrained class distinctions to know that Kennedys were happy to consort with commoners but did not marry them, and she was not one for empty assignations. But the two became good friends, and McGrory was a constant presence on the Kennedy campaign plane during the 1960 presidential race, from the snows of Wisconsin to the coal mines of West Virginia.

Once JFK entered the White House, McGrory had special access to Camelot. She traveled to Rome with Bobby Kennedy for a private audience with the pope, and JFK personally introduced her to French President Charles de Gaulle at Versailles. She took part in the salons with leading intellectuals and members of the Kennedy Cabinet held at Bobby’s sprawling 13-bedroom home in McLean, Va.

On the night after JFK’s assassination, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time the assistant secretary of labor, and a small group of friends gathered in McGrory’s apartment. Moynihan told the others how he had been in the White House that afternoon, just down the hall from the Oval Office, when he heard the news. The staff was replacing the rug in the president’s office, and the furniture had been out in the hall, with JFK’s rocking chair sitting atop his desk, “as if new people were moving in.”

After a long pause, McGrory declared, “We’ll never laugh again.”

“Heavens, Mary,” Moynihan replied with a start. “We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.”

Her columns after the assassination are journalistic legend. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Haynes Johnson called McGrory’s column on Kennedy—with its lede, “Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s funeral it can be said he would have liked it”—“the best thing I have ever seen in American journalism.”

Jackie Kennedy wrote to McGrory that her column on the funeral “makes him so alive that I can’t bear to read it too often.”

Four years later, on November 16, 1967, McGrory sat down to interview Bobby Kennedy in the New Senate Office Building. The conversation was intense and uncomfortable: McGrory wanted Kennedy to come out strongly against the Vietnam War and challenge President Johnson in the Democratic primary.

McGrory had become one of the leading voices protesting the war, alienating many readers, and her editors, in the process. She was an unusually presentable voice of dissent: She wore Chanel suits, not tie-dye, and she wrote for a paper that was a pillar of the Washington establishment. Her opposition to the war in Vietnam made objecting to the war respectable.

McGrory saw Bobby Kennedy's statement as a betrayal of the anti-war cause. She sent him a telegram: “St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland.” 

She goaded Kennedy, saying that he must run for president to stop the war. She warned him that his followers were disillusioned with his unwillingness to challenge Johnson and said that traditional Kennedy voters would gravitate toward Sen. Eugene McCarthy, soon to emerge as the leading antiwar candidate, “because he has the guts to take on the issue.”

Kennedy, according to her account, insisted he could not run, expressing his fears that it would split the Democratic Party: “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

“Well,” McGrory snorted, “I never thought the Kennedys thought that much for the party. You have your own party.”

“I couldn’t beat him,” Kennedy insisted.

McGrory was incredulous. “Are you telling me that people would vote for Lyndon Johnson instead of you?”

Kennedy fretted that the public would think he was running simply because he disliked Johnson. But even as he resisted McGrory’s entreaties, she could see the agony on his face. “Bobby is immobilized,” she scribbled in her notebook.

The situation came to a head at the end of January 1968. At what seemed like a fairly routine breakfast with reporters in Washington, Kennedy declared that he would not run against LBJ “under any foreseeable circumstances.” At almost that exact moment 9,000 miles away, the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive in Saigon, attacking the airport and the presidential palace and occupying the U.S. Embassy grounds for several hours before being repulsed.

Kennedy’s pronouncement could not have been more ill-timed. Because he wasn’t handed a bulletin about the Tet offensive until after the statement about his campaign plans, the news stories made it sound as though Kennedy was making his declaration to stay out of the race specifically despite the Tet offensive.

McGrory was enraged; she saw his statement as a betrayal of the antiwar cause. She sent him a telegram: “St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes out of Ireland.”

Journalist Rowland Evans remembered speaking with Kennedy after he received the telegram, and he marveled at how harshly McGrory seemed to have turned on Kennedy. This was an Irish feud, Kennedy explained. The two would work it out; an outsider could not easily understand.

***

McGrory had by then already become the center of her own little Washington world, sweeping into her ambit Democratic politicians, local wits, displaced Boston Irish living in D.C., young antiwar activists, and a legion of friends and colleagues. She didn’t believe in a caste system, and she brought people to her table because they were interesting or doing important work. Senators, Supreme Court justices and journalistic heavyweights commingled with interns, copy boys, relatives and church volunteers.

At the parties she threw in her corner apartment on Macomb Street, perched above Rock Creek Park, everyone was expected to pitch in. The most senior of senators would tend bar, and the most important of journalists had to bring a dish to share. You could not only meet the great and the good at McGrory’s soirees, you could also see them humbly pass hors d’oeuvres and take drink orders. The drinks flowed freely, and almost every party eventually turned to slightly drunken song.

Eugene McCarthy had scrawled a poem for her: “I saw you, green-gold willow arched and graced among spines and angled limbs, captive, queen, all lost light out of the smothering swamps.”

McCarthy would recite verses of Yeats and sing Irish ballads. McGrory would dance in stocking feet and deliver renditions of ditties from My Fair Lady. Bobby Kennedy insisted on singing his old camp song at one of McGrory’s parties. He left soon after, only to burst into the room again 15 minutes later because he had remembered the second verse of “Camp Wianagoni,” McGrory later recalled, and felt the need to share it. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and his wife wrote to McGrory after another party apologizing that they were not better prepared with a song list. One congressman performed a Russian dance.

McGrory took to calling her regular guests the Lower Macomb Street Choral Society. It was no wonder that Adlai Stevenson cheerily told her as he departed from one of her parties, “Let me know when the club meets again. I would like to be a member.”

Hosting allowed McGrory to avoid the awkward scenes that often greeted her at stodgy Washington gatherings in the ’50s, when her hosts didn’t know whether to treat her as a reporter or a woman—and those were definitely different categories. The men would retire to one room after dinner to talk politics, smoke cigars and drink Scotch, while women went to another to discuss more refined topics. Where would Mary go?

She had always felt that she had to choose between her career and love. When she was asked by interviewers, in very delicate terms, about her romantic life, she responded with both humor and rue: “I guess the men think the best thing about me is my writing.”

Most of her friends didn’t know who, or even if, she dated. In fact, she fell hard for Blair Clark, a fellow journalist who would later become vice president of CBS News, when they crisscrossed the Midwest together aboard buses and single-engine planes covering Estes Kefauver’s ill-fated vice-presidential campaign in 1956. McGrory confided in a friend shortly after the campaign, saying that she was afraid to see Clark, who was married at the time, “because it was dangerous, like playing with fire.”

But years of flirtation with Clark and an elegant correspondence worthy of an old English romance never produced a ring, even after he divorced. And in a sense, Clark, who was notoriously indecisive, was the perfect man for McGrory: The relationship gave her romance without much fear of a lasting commitment, although she was bitterly disappointed when he remarried in the early 1970s. Later in life she would express regret that she had never married or had children. “Don’t let your career get in the way of your personal life,” she once told a young friend. “Sometimes you might have regrets that you should have married someone, but you let your career get in your way like I did.”

In the mid-1960s she grew close to McCarthy, whom she once described as “a relaxed, handsome … intellectual.” It was not hard to understand the bond between the two: Both were tart-tongued, progressive Roman Catholics with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic literature. Their shared outrage over Vietnam only pushed them closer, and McGrory thrilled as McCarthy pulled off one of the most famous near-upsets in American political history by almost edging out LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

So many young people disaffected with Vietnam flocked to the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire that it was dubbed “the children’s crusade.” McGrory joked that it was the first time in American political history that paying for haircuts (so that the shaggy hippies who gathered under McCarthy’s banner looked more presentable) was a legitimate campaign expense. She understood that the unconventional McCarthy effort was largely unintelligible to the highly organized Kennedy camp. And as fond as McGrory was of McCarthy, she was still honest in her columns about his deficiencies as a retail politician: “Detail bores him. He has a minute staff, and his tactics, apart from the issue, seem based largely on the lapses of the other side, which have been numerous.” Early in the race, she described McCarthy as possessing only two advantages: “He has been smarter and braver.”

But she only hinted in her writing at the personal relationship also unfolding. After one campaign stop in March 1968, McGrory carefully filed away a tourist certificate they had collected. It declared that McCarthy was an “Admiral of Lake Superior” for having completed the drive around the Great Lake, “on the most scenic highway in America.” On the back, McCarthy had scrawled a poem for her: “There in the savage orange of autumn tamarack, its rusted spikes reeling the slanted last of the northern day, down into dark root waters, among the least trees in the least land, in the darkening death camp of the tribe of trees, I saw you, green-gold willow arched and graced among spines and angled limbs, captive, queen, all lost light out of the smothering swamps, you beam back, redeemed.”

McGrory’s column the next day made no mention of captive queens or green-gold willows, but she hinted at a bit of the magic, describing his campaign tour as one that made “politics seem like an innocent and beguiling business.” She also noted, without mentioning the poem, that McCarthy “spoke of the tamarack tree, his current favorite political symbol,” as he made his way through the northern forests.

There has long been speculation that McGrory and the unhappily married McCarthy were lovers. The vehemence with which several of her closest friends declined to discuss the issue with me gives further credence to the claim. Dominic Sandbrook, who wrote a well-regarded biography of McCarthy, told me: “It’s very plausible that they had a romantic relationship—I’m guessing sometime between 1967 and 1969. She was certainly smitten with him for a time.”

Ben Bradlee, later to be McGrory’s boss at the Washington Post, concurred, telling me, “I think she did love Gene McCarthy, whether it was physical love or not.” But Bradlee didn’t think much of the object of McGrory’s crush: “He was such a pain in the ass. McCarthy, he was hard to stay in love with.” The rumors of a liaison between McGrory and McCarthy floated around the campaign. Student leader David Mixner, who would become a close friend of McGrory’s, said, “I don’t know if there was ever a physical relationship, but it was a love story. She adored him, and he adored her.”

For McGrory, New Hampshire in 1968 always stood as a brief, giddy moment when youth, energy and faith changed American politics. She could never have imagined what was to follow.

Kennedy jumped into the race. LBJ dropped out. McGrory shared a hymnal in an overcrowded church pew with Richard Nixon at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta. She saw frantic crowds tear at Bobby Kennedy’s clothes as he made his bid for the Democratic nomination. And McGrory was with Gene McCarthy and his inner circle at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles when news arrived that Kennedy had been shot that awful June evening.

“First the enemies list and now the Pulitzer Prize,” joked her friend, the humorist Art Buchwald. “Have you no shame?”

She rode aboard Kennedy’s funeral train engulfed in misery as it bore his body back to rest by his brother’s side in Arlington National Cemetery, and she sounded like a wounded sibling as she eulogized him in her column: “He was fierce. He could be rude. He shared the Kennedy conviction that the Kennedys, if not born, had at least been bred to rule. And he attracted the adulation and the rage which his clan, with their splendid, doomed lives, aroused in a nation that had never seen such a compelling collection of human beings, so beautiful, so armored, and so vulnerable.”

By any measure of journalistic objectivity, McGrory should have recused herself from covering the 1968 campaign. She relentlessly lobbied Kennedy to get into the race. She and McCarthy were close beyond any permissible bounds of columnist and candidate. She even recruited another man she had been in love with, Blair Clark, to sign on as McCarthy’s campaign manager. These were extraordinary conflicts of interest. But McGrory never removed herself from the fray, and equally telling, neither did her editors.

***

After all the dust of 1968 settled, if it ever truly did, McGrory had to come to terms with the idea of a Nixon presidency. She and Nixon held each other in magnificent, mutual and long-standing contempt. Her column after his infamous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech, when he lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race, was a classic: “Mr. Nixon carried on for 17 minutes in a finale of intemperance and incoherence unmatched in American political annals. He pulled the havoc down around his ears, while his staff looked on aghast. His principal target was the press. But he was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack. Every time he scorched the Fourth Estate, his voice curling with rage and scorn, he insisted that he had no complaint.”

Nixon’s relationship with McGrory did not improve once he was elected. In July 1970, he agreed to meet with top editors and reporters at the Star on one condition: The lunch had to be stag, no women allowed. The move was clearly aimed at McGrory and triggered a protest by the local Newspaper Guild and a number of female reporters (although McGrory was not among them). President Nixon attended the all-male luncheon with shrimp cocktail and filet mignon in the Star office. McGrory, still the only woman on the Star’s national staff, ate an egg salad sandwich at her desk.

Behind the scenes at the White House, she was high on Nixon’s list of reporters to target. Her name came up frequently in the White House tapes, and denouncing her was a sure way to curry favor with Nixon. During one Oval Office meeting, press secretary Ron Ziegler complained about McGrory and “her sick little world” before adding, “We can’t judge anything by Mary McGrory. Never have, never should.”

On September 18, 1971, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, met in the Oval Office to discuss their “tax list.” Haldeman pointed out that the IRS had been instructed to go after some of Nixon’s least favorite reporters. “They’re going after a couple of media people. They are going after Dan Schorr, Mary McGrory,” said Haldeman.

“Good,” Nixon replied, “pound these people.”

But the plan to audit McGrory that year backfired: She got a larger refund because she had under-reported her considerable charitable giving. And it certainly did not soften her coverage of the Nixon White House. (She was fond of expressing her dislike for Nixon with an old quote: “If he were a horse, I should not buy him.”) McGrory’s apartment was also broken into a number of times during this period. McGrory had her theory on the unsolved crimes, saying she had been “fooled completely” into thinking that the break-ins had been the work of “honest thieves” rather than administration henchmen.

Nixon and his aides continued to curse McGrory in bitter personal terms in late-night Oval Office discussions, placing her name prominently on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list”; she was the only woman among the list’s 20 original targets, her name marked with two check marks and an asterisk for authoring what the administration called “daily hate Nixon articles.” When the list was revealed amid the Watergate scandal in June 1973, McGrory called being included one of her highest honors.

On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced in a televised address that he was quitting. McGrory thought the speech was oddly unmemorable and bereft of contrition, sounding, she wrote in her column, “eerily like thousands of others he has given during the almost 40 years he has been seeking, gaining and losing public office.” But as she observed, “Richard Nixon’s small store of pity had always been reserved for himself.”

The next spring, McGrory won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Watergate, becoming the first woman ever to win for commentary. “First the enemies list and now the Pulitzer Prize,” joked her friend, the humorist Art Buchwald. “Have you no shame?” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote a note to her: “You should win it every year.”

***

Six years later, she came to the Washington Post after her beloved Washington Star closed. For McGrory, the loss of the Star was like a death in the family; the paper’s loose, chaotic, boozy newsroom had always been home. “It was heaven,” McGrory said. “Just a wonderful, kind, welcoming, funny place, full of eccentrics and desperate people trying to meet five deadlines a day.”

The transition to the Post was difficult, even though it gave her a more prominent national perch. McGrory’s friend Lance Gay said McGrory was never truly at home at the Post, finding it to be a “great aircraft carrier sort of a place.” McGrory wrote to a friend complaining of the Post: “We take ourselves very seriously, and are much too busy to say good morning even ten hours before deadline.”

At the Post, McGrory waged an often lonely crusade against the conservative tide that swept the country under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who pleaded in vain with Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, for some relief from her barbs. (McGrory had described Dan Quayle as more mascot than vice president, and lampooned Bush for looking “as though he had lost his last friend” the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. “She has destroyed me over and over again,” Bush complained in his journal.) But McGrory was a bipartisan scourge. Her often tart treatment of President Bill Clinton, whom she was fond of comparing to a difficult adolescent who left parents unsure whether he would win a merit scholarship or total the family car, was known to send him into towering rages.

Both in the newsroom and out on the campaign trail, McGrory exercised what the late Post columnist Marjorie Williams called “a queenly expectation of deference.” She had long since transitioned from object of curiosity—and presidential leering—to Washington institution in her own right. The Post’s legendary political reporter David Broder recalled that McGrory, as one of the first female reporters out on the campaign trail, “demanded—not asked, but demanded—all of the courtesies that the 19th-century gentleman would have been expected to provide for a woman.” With perfect diction, she asked her male colleagues to carry her luggage and Royal typewriter: “Dear boy, would you be so kind to give me a hand with this?”

She was a quirky prima donna, known to lose not only car keys, but also entire rental cars. Her garden was a widely celebrated failure, as was her cooking. Technology of all forms mystified her. She liked poetry and a good stiff drink. She volunteered tirelessly at St. Ann’s, a local orphanage, for more than five decades and dragooned innumerable friends and colleagues to assist with Christmas parties and swimming lessons for the children. (Both Mark Shields and Tim Russert had good stints serving as Santa for the kids’ Christmas parties.)

She viewed the world through a lens of absolute right and wrong that made her writing burn with passion, but she was so unforgiving that it undermined some of her most important relationships. “When Mary McGrory gets pissed off,” the writer Anna Quindlen observed, “she is more pissed off than anyone. I expect [her column] to catch fire around the edges.”

Into her 70s and early 80s, even as the indignities of age mounted, she stalked the Post newsroom, testing out her next lede, trying to capture the perfect turn of phrase. She dressed down press secretaries and buttonholed senators. And when the calamity of September 11, 2001, occurred, McGrory called it as she saw it. Her column two days after the terror attacks sang the praises of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani but criticized President George W. Bush for looking “more apprehensive than resolute.”

“When Mary McGrory gets pissed off,” the writer Anna Quindlen observed, “she is more pissed off than anyone. I expect [her column] to catch fire around the edges.”

She received hundreds of scathing letters and emails. It was a torrent unlike anything she had ever seen, including during the Watergate and McCarthy eras. She had her assistant collate the mail into a 7-inch stack, and she politely responded to it all, reminding readers that having differences of opinion was as American as apple pie.

All told, over the course of her more than 8,000 columns, McGrory missed a grand total of one deadline, when she was stuck on the tarmac on a delayed flight in 1980. After observing McGrory being feted at an awards ceremony, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown proclaimed that she wanted to age like McGrory, a “sparky old broad” and unapologetic liberal with “spectacular balls.”

A proud liberal is exactly how McGrory saw herself, a writer not bound by normal standards of impartiality, and she often waded into politics with a lack of objectivity that would make a journalism professor blush. “If I wanted to be fair and objective, I wouldn’t be writing,” she once said. Yet no matter how close she may have been to the Kennedys and the other liberal lions of her age, and no matter how glittering the guests in her living room, she always knew which side of the line she was on.

“I should confess,” McGrory admitted late in her life, “although I probably shouldn’t, that I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t work for newspapers.”