By: E&P Staff The Poynter Institute's Web site has posted a feature (
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=113714) about Mary McGrory drawn from this year's collection of her columns from Andrews McMeel Publishing.
It's by Philip Gailey, editorial page editor of Poynter's St. Petersburg Times, who edited "The Best of Mary McGrory: A Half-Century of Washington Commentary" (E&P Online, June 14).
Gailey writes, in part: "More than one publishing house pleaded with Mary during her long newspaper career to collect some of her columns between hard covers. Her answer was always the same: She was too busy; a promotion tour would be out of the question -- 'I faint at the sight of a camera.'....
"Mary was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in 1975 for her columns on Watergate, although she considered her highest honor to be seeing her name on Richard Nixon's 'enemies' list. In my opinion, she should have won two other Pulitzers earlier in her career -- one for her sidebars on the Army-McCarthy hearings and another for her commentaries on President John F. Kennedy's assassination and funeral....
"This collection, which I think reflects the wit, poetry, and passion she brought to her work, starts with one of Mary's commentaries on the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, which brought her to prominence at a time when women did not have an easy path in journalism, and ends with the last column she wrote, 'Blossoms and Bombs,' which ran in The Washington Post on March 16, 2003. Mary hated war as much as she loved springtime in Washington, and in that column, written just before President Bush launched a U.S. military invasion of Iraq, she juxtaposed the drumbeat for war with the budding signs of spring....
"Unlike most Washington columnists, Mary practiced shoe-leather reporting. She was constantly on the move, from congressional hearings and White House briefings to the campaign trail, from courtrooms to news conferences...."
McGrory, who died in 2004, was syndicated by Universal Press. Gailey was a colleague of hers at the now-defunct Washington Star.
His book contains about 100 of the 7,000 or so columns (including some of the ones on personal topics) that McGrory wrote during her career.
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