Pundit Boxscore for Friday 23 April 2004

GOODBYE MARY MCGRORY: Yesterday brought the sad news of the passing of Mary McGrory, a beloved columnist for the Washington Star and Washington Post.

"The most luminous writer and clearest thinker in the business," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared of McGrory at a tribute to her career several years ago. This opinion was widely held. Longtime Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship called her "the undisputed best handler of the English language in the news business." One of her rivals for that title, former Times columnist Russell Baker, noted her influence on later generations: McGrory was, he said, "a pioneering force in today's tell-it-like-it-is, show-them-no-mercy journalism."

Her career stretched from the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, when the unknown McGrory jolted the capital with her charming but rapier daily reports, to the Iraq war of 2003, on which she wavered with characteristic candor before coming down squarely in opposition in some of her last columns before a stroke silenced her voice. Her last column was published in The Washington Post on March 16, 2003, and she retired at the end of that year.

Her resume included the Pulitzer Prize and membership on the Nixon administration's notorious "enemies list."

"Mary was simply one of the best opinion columnists of her time," said Leonard Downie Jr. , The Washington Post's executive editor. "She wrote lyrically, and she never had difficulty expressing an opinion. But perhaps most impressive was Mary's reporting. She seemed to know everyone in politics, and in many other fields, besides. And her columns always revealed something to readers that they never would have otherwise known."

The Washington Post followed up this morning with an editorial, a collection of quotes, and a selected column from Ms. McGrory. The New York Times also remembers her with an editorial.