Simply the best

Mary McGrory is my cousin. Merely typing those words fills me with pride. For the unknowing, she's a Washington Post columnist long syndicated in the Globe, a lion of the left, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Born in Roslindale and educated in Boston, she has written about the world's most significant events for nearly 50 years. People still quote her words from the Kennedy assassinations. She landed prominently on Nixon's Enemies List. The elder George Bush once lamented in his private journal, "She has destroyed me over and over again."

I raise these points because in the amazing journey that is Mary McGrory's life, this is a bittersweet week. Tomorrow night, in New York, she will be given the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, but amid the laudatory words and the applause a sad reality will come clear.

Mary fell ill in March, and eight months later she's yet to fully recover. Barring a breakthrough, she's probably written the last of her syndicated columns, ending one of the most important, colorful, and enduring newspaper careers that the American public has had the pleasure to read.

While most Washington pundits closet themselves with their own profound thoughts, interrupted only by lunch at the Palm with the Secretary of Something, Mary employs old-fashioned tools: a sensible pair of shoes, a Bic, and a notebook. She haunts congressional hearings. She sits with the unwashed in the back of the White House briefing room.

And after finding her perpetually lost keys and remembering where in creation she parked, she rushes back to the Post to create elegantly understated prose, on-point and on deadline.

Times have changed in the news business, but Mary never has. Technology baffles her, and I'm not talking about Palm Pilots and Blackberries. I mean the answering machine and the computer. I've received countless voicemails from her that proceed: "Hello?" Pause. "Cousin?" Pause. "Click." In a rant against Toshiba, she once wrote, "I came along in an era when the transmission of one's copy did not require an advance degree from MIT," adding of the old days, "All I had to carry was my portable typewriter, and I never really carried that."

Indeed, from the very beginning, she mastered the role of the helpless naif. On her many campaign trips, if her colleagues aren't carrying her jumble of bags, then the candidate probably is. No one is exempt; to her, I'm more porter than reporter.

But that's just part of the deal. The reward is an invitation to Sunday supper. Congressmen from both parties, diplomats, news hounds, and activists gather regularly to dine on her lasagna and sing Irish songs. Newcomers are first sent to work in her garden; George Stephanopoulos might still be fertilizing her impatiens but for Bill Clinton's victory in 1992.

Her one true love: the Washington Star -- "Just a wonderful, kind, welcoming, funny place, full of eccentrics and desperate people," she once told an interviewer. Star editor Newby Noyes plucked her from the anonymity of the book section in 1954 to cover the Army-McCarthy hearings with the advice, "Write it like a letter to your favorite aunt."

When the Star closed in 1981, she went to the more formal newsroom of the Post, where she liked to remind people of the fun they didn't have. Still, its staff and owners have poured out their hearts to her since she fell ill, with a generosity like a throwback to another time.

Hers is a world of soft irony. She checks into elaborate spas in Italy every year, but while there always gains a few pounds. She was audited during the Nixon administration and got a refund. At a stiff Washington party, she once whispered to me, "Always approach the shrimp bowl like you own it."

Blood aside, in my chosen field, she's the best I'll ever know, and that's the joy and the sadness of it all.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.