Three times a week for the past dozen years, Maxine Cheshire has spun out a column of capital chatter—Spiro Agnew's literary adventures, Elizabeth Taylor's offstage antics at the Kennedy Center, Muhammad Ali's hasty exit from a White House party—that the Washington Post and some 300 subscribing newspapers generally inter among the family pages. In recent months, however, Cheshire's byline has been strutting on the front page above scoops on the hottest continuing scandal of the year: alleged efforts by South Korean agents to bribe U.S. Congressmen.
Actually, the Woodstein of Koreagate is no stranger to Page One. Last year Cheshire won a wall full of journalism awards for her disclosures that Pat Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and lesser public figures had kept millions of dollars' worth of gifts from foreign governments, in violation of a 1966 statute. A few years earlier, Cheshire investigated the $1 million worth of antiques donated by wealthy Americans to help Jacqueline Kennedy refurbish the White House: to Jackie's embarrassment, a seven-article series listed the age, origin, donor and occasionally dubious value of each piece. That prying brought a call from Jackie's husband to then Post Publisher Philip Graham. "Maxine Cheshire has reduced my wife to tears," said the President. "Listen to her." Sure enough, there in the background was the First Lady, sobbing audibly.
Cheshire's sleuthing has brought her anguish of her own. After some less than flattering observations in print about Frank Sinatra's cronies and his budding friendship with Spiro Agnew, Cheshire bumped into Ol' Blue Eyes on Inauguration Night 1973. Sinatra loudly insulted her and stuffed a couple of one-dollar bills into her empty glass—a display that drove Cheshire to tears.
Maxine does not weep easily. Her soft auburn curls and sparkling blue eyes mask the mind of a prosecutor. She grew up in bloody Harlan County, Ky., the daughter of a union lawyer twice marked for assassination. Maxine's mother shot three men she thought were after him. One afternoon Maxine walked into her home-town Harlan Enterprise and, as she recalls, "told them I knew everything that went on in the county, and they ought to hire me." They did not. She was five years old.
When her father died in 1951, Cheshire dropped out of Union College in Barbourville, Ky., and became a reporter for the Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel. Assigned to the police beat, she promptly solved a two-year-old murder. Her husband Herb Cheshire, Knoxville U.P.I, bureau manager, was transferred to Washington in 1954, and Maxine landed a society-page job with the Post. Says she: "They wanted a polite person with elbow-length white gloves who was socially presentable."
Cheshire long ago hung up her white gloves and now attends parties only reluctantly. She does most of her reporting over the phone—often from the 18th century bed in the seven-bedroom house she shares with her four children and Herb, now deputy bureau chief for McGraw-Hill. Most daylight hours, however, she can be found on the phone in her cluttered Post office where, except for a full-length sable coat occasionally flung over her shoulders ("I'm not eccentric, I'm cold."), she looks like any other harried, cynical cityside reporter.