Fittingly perhaps, she died amid the splendour of a Washington spring, the season she loved the best.Rupert Cornwell. For more than 30 years he was responsible for some of the most important art books of the late 20th century. For years the Post had been trying to prise her away, but McGrory’s loyalty to the Star was unshakeable. Though she graced the op-ed pages of the Post with unchanging brilliance, the Star was her first and enduring love.Along with her luminous writing, she possessed a rare honesty. There was no greater measure of the persuasiveness of Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in February 2003 on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction than the hard-nosed McGrory’s admission in one of her last columns that she too had been convinced. “She [McGrory] has destroyed me over and over again,” the first President George Bush lamented in his private journal.

McGrory was an unabashed liberal, but never a feminist in the modern sense. She saw herself as a woman who had made it in a man’s world – as simple as that.When the Star folded in 1981, she moved to the Washington Post, which under the Katharine Graham/Ben Bradlee regime had taken over as the capital’s leading paper. The mightiest senators and her most illustrious male professional rivals would eat out of her hand. She had an unparalleled knack of getting into meetings from which she was supposedly barred, and persuading people to talk.The thoroughness of her research made her columns all the more powerful. Inevitably, the columnist who adored Kennedy could not abide Richard Nixon. But in her coverage of the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s fall in 1974 she rose – if anything – to even greater heights, earning a long overdue Pulitzer Prize.MrGrory’s modus operandi was a mix of flirtation and bullying, that usually ensured she got her way.

(Her editor told her to write as though she were writing a letter to her aunt.)There followed a host of major stories, none greater than the murder of her hero and fellow Boston Irishman John Fitzgerald Kennedy, of whom she mourned “that lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement”. Amid her battles with Latin grammar, there somehow emerged a lifelong passion for newspapers.By 1947 McGrory was on her way south, to join the Washington Star, as a back-up book reviewer. Quickly her writing caught the eye of her editors, and in 1954 she began the columnist’s trade she would play for almost 50 years, with the Joseph McCarthy hearings her first assignment. Her father was a postal worker who loved learning and literature, and sent his daughter to the Girls’ Latin School near Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play baseball. Washington was where McGrory flourished, but her origins were unmistakably in the Irish community of Boston where she was born. Mary McGrory, journalist: born Boston, Massachusetts 22 August 1918; died Washington DC 21 April 2004. For half a century Mary McGrory was the gold standard of Washington journalism.