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. Then she suffered a recurrence. On October 23 she died. 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.
I was introduced to her in the usual fashion: over the phone, and unforgettably. In early 1991 I was about to resign my post in a marginal office of the Bush White House. 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. Now, a week later, she was calling to say that my successor had just been selected. She knew more about my office than I did. I was suitably amazed.
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. This development was the best anecdote Devroy had for a piece she was writing about White House hiring practices. She wanted my reaction, on the record. I whimpered for mercy and quickly excused myself.
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. So each of the next few mornings, the Post was a timebomb on my doorstep. And then, finally, some version of Devroy’s piece appeared, textured and thick with information. But my name was not in it.
I recount this minor incident because it is only partially consistent with the Devroy legend. It is consistent with the part about how good she was at her work. No detail of White House life — not even me — was small enough to elude 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 nearly always reported it — the hows and whys of politics — with matchless sophistication. And she did so at superhuman volume, year after year. “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. “I mean, there was nobody who could touch her.”
Derroy’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. 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.
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. Devroy cultivated this image. She used the photo on this page as the screensaver on her computer in the Post newsroom. It depicts a Secret Service officer in the foolish act of attempting to prevent Devroy from interviewing someone in the White House driveway. Moments after this picture was snapped, Devroy won the argument.
She won most of her arguments, I expect. But the memory of those arguments does not do her justice. I got to know Ann Devroy quite well these past few years. She was very smart, very funny, very generous with her time and advice, the finest gossip I have ever known. And she was something else. 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. I wondered why. ” You were so distressed about it,” she said. “I try to be nice, you know.”
Ann Devroy was very nice, indeed. The world will miss her.
DAVID TELL
