Ann Devroy, 1948-1997
Ann Devroy, 1948-1997 Ann Devroy, White House correspondent of the Washington Post, fought a heroic battle with cancer for more than a year. She beat it back and returned to the paper this June....
...David Tell...
...It depicts a Secret Service officer in the foolish act of attempting to prevent Devroy from interviewing someone in the White House driveway...
...Devroy cultivated this image...
...There may be people who are not mortified at the prospect of having their salaries published in the hometown paper, but I am not one of them...
...The world will miss her...
...And then, finally, some version of Devroy's piece appeared, textured and thick with information...
...So each of the next few mornings, the Post was a time-bomb on my doorstep...
...Devroy's superiority was so beyond dispute, in fact, that when she fell ill last year and left the beat, White House coverage in every other major American newspaper grew noticeably more relaxed—and therefore worse...
...She used the photo on this page as the screensaver on her computer in the Post newsroom...
...She nearly always reported it—the hows and whys of politics—with matchless sophistication...
...No detail of White House life—not even me—was small enough to elude her...
...She was very smart, very funny, very generous with her time and advice, the finest gossip I have ever known...
...But my name was not in it...
...You were so distressed about it," she said...
...And she was something else...
...She wanted my reaction, on the record...
...She won most of her arguments, I expect...
...I was suitably amazed...
...I try to be nice, you know...
...Now, a week later, she was calling to say that my successor had just been selected...
...I whimpered for mercy and quickly excused myself...
...I wondered why...
...I mean, there was nobody who could touch her...
...She was nearly always first to report it: Dan Quayle's anatomically correct doll, John Sununu's plane trips, Bill Clinton's Camp David encounter- group sessions, and more conventionally "important" things, too...
...She knew more about my office than I did...
...She was so much better than all the rest of us that it was almost embarrassing," remembers Brit Hume, who covered the White House for ABC during the Devroy era...
...Then she suffered a recurrence...
...But the memory of those arguments does not do her justice...
...I recount this minor incident because it is only partially consistent with the Devroy legend...
...Simply because competing reporters no longer had to wake up each day in justified fear that the Washington Post was about to kick their butts...
...And she did so at superhuman volume, year after year...
...Ann Devroy was very nice, indeed...
...I got to know Ann Devroy quite well these past few years...
...It is consistent with the part about how good she was at her work...
...Late this summer, walking her back to the Post after a lunch date, I reminded Devroy how she'd once left my salary out of the newspaper...
...Which is the other major part of the Devroy legend, the part she played as hellhound of the White House briefing room, someone willing to cut your legs off if a scoop or breaking story demanded it...
...This development was the best anecdote Devroy had for a piece she was writing about White House hiring practices...
...Moments after this picture was snapped, Devroy won the argument...
...On October 23 she died...
...I was further amazed to learn that Devroy had all the relevant personnel forms arrayed across her desk, that the new person's chief qualification for my job was a family connection to some prominent Bush-world personality, and that my job would pay this person vastly more money than it had ever paid me...
...Devroy had already found reason to squeeze my impending departure into the newspaper—with mysterious accuracy, less than 24 hours after I had accepted another job, and before I'd had a chance to give notice...
...To all who knew her, which means most of political Washington, the fact that she is gone seems scarcely believable, so ubiquitous and vivid was Devroy's presence...
...In early 1991 I was about to resign my post in a marginal office of the Bush White House...
...I was introduced to her in the usual fashion: over the phone, and unforgettably...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 10
