by Peter Janney
During a transcontinental train trip to California, where Bob and Mary both had journalism assignments, they stopped in Salem, Ohio, to visit Bob’s mother. At one point during the visit, Bob asked his mother what she thought about Mary. Her reply was unabashed. She made it clear to her favorite son that it was obvious Mary wanted to marry him.
“Are you sure?” Bob remembered asking at the time.
“A mother knows,” she said, reassuring him.
Bob looked at his mother and smiled. “You’ve made me the happiest man in the world.”
But Bob Schwartz would never ask Mary to marry him. In fact, it was he who ended the relationship. “I was only an enlisted man in the Navy,” said Schwartz in 2008, considering a decision he had made so many years earlier. “Everything pointed to the fact that I was not socially, or in any way, equal to Mary. I didn’t feel comfortable with everyone always looking at her on the street, but not really noticing me. Mary was a complete head turner. I had credentials of my own, but they weren’t Mary credentials.”41
There was also the formidable shadow of Mary’s mother. Schwartz didn’t believe that he would ever really get Ruth’s “benediction” to marry her daughter. “I began to hear her mother’s voice, not Mary’s voice,” Schwartz recalled. “Ruth Pinchot never said anything affronting about me, but made it clear in other ways that ‘a Cord Meyer would be a better choice,’ though no Cord Meyer had shown up yet.” All the while, however, Mary had been making it clear to Bob how much he meant to her. So had her sister, Tony.
Late one evening at Bob’s Seventy-Ninth Street apartment in New York, Tony Pinchot showed up unannounced at his door. Obviously aware of the impending breakup, Tony had maintained a friendship with Bob throughout the time he had a relationship with her sister. Tony confided to Bob that for years she and the rest of the family had “wearily” watched the endless parade of men that Mary kept dragging home for her parents and family to meet. Tony then emphatically, and in no uncertain terms, told Bob that it was he who was the true standout—the only one she and her mother ever wanted in their family. Even with that benediction, whether Schwartz believed he “needed to be out of his sailor’s suit and a full-fledged adult before he could get married,” something kept telling him his time with Mary had run its course, in spite of the fact that Mary had been so clear about wanting to be with him.
Many years later, Schwartz found himself conferring with a psychoanalyst with regard to his relationship with one of his children. His relationship with Mary, and the memory he had forged of her leaving him, kept coming up. After a bit of work, the analyst confronted him, not believing that it was Mary who ended it, but him. “For some reason you didn’t think it was going to work,” Bob recalled the analyst telling him. Pointing out he had repeatedly “pulled the rug out from under his relationship with Mary,” it became clear the only way to deal with the pain and grief of a breakup was for Bob himself to orchestrate the termination, in a sense saying “you’re not going to hurt me, I’m going to hurt you first.” The breakup was difficult, Schwartz said. “I mean, three years night and day and nobody else, and never being bored for a moment. It was astonishing, and very hard to let go of. It ended with a series of trial separations.”
Yet that was only one part of it. Somewhere within, Schwartz was adamant about the nature of fate and the destiny that accompanied it: “For whatever reason, a Cord Meyer was due to appear. When he did, we both accepted it, but not before we shaped each other’s future. She never could be with anyone who didn’t have some of the things I had, and I could never be with another woman after Mary who couldn’t understand what Mary had been for me. Mary set the standard. She raised the bar for all of my future relationships. It ended with many tears on both our parts.”
Regarding Mary’s murder, Schwartz was shocked by the event. Even in 2008, he remained unsure what to make of it, though he didn’t want to entertain any conspiracy theories. He was adamant about one thing, however: “Her wrestling with her assailant was quintessential Mary. It would have outraged her sensibilities to go down without a fight.”42
Now in his eighties, a connoisseur and lover of ballet, Bob Schwartz ultimately compared Mary Meyer to what he called a prima ballerina assoluta. The term was originally inspired by the Italian masters of the early Romantic ballet and was only bestowed on a ballerina who was considered exceptional, and above all others. The first recorded use of the title was by the renowned French ballet master Marius Petipa when he bestowed it on the Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani in 1894. In the Soviet Union, Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya were eventually honored as such. Others awarded the distinction included Alicia Alonso from Cuba, and Margot Fonteyn from England. To date, no American ballerina has ever held the rank, though Rudolf Nureyev considered Cynthia Gregory to be deserving of such a title.
“Mary was a prima female assoluta,” lamented Schwartz as he contemplated her murder, a tear rolling down his cheek. “She was what women were meant to be.”43
7
Cyclops
This young man has only one eye, but he sees more with one eye than most people see with two.
—President Rufus Jones
Haverford College
(introducing Cord Meyer in 1947)
Fathers, go back to your children, who are in need of you. Husbands, go back to your young wives, who cry in the night and count the anxious days. Farmers, return to your fields, where the grain rots and the house slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this insanity will be the rotting bodies upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw down these guns that we hate. With the morning we shall go together and in charity and hope build a new life and a new world.
—Cord Meyer Jr.
“Waves of Darkness” (1946)
There is a huge difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports—one planet indivisible, with clean air, soil and water; with liberty, justice and peace for all.
—William Sloane Coffin
Former Yale University chaplain
(Riverside Church, New York City, 2003)
IN AN ATTACK on a Japanese stronghold on the island of Guam during the morning of July 21, 1944, Lieutenant Cord Meyer Jr. climbed up the steep beaches leading a machine-gun platoon of forty-four men in the 22nd Marine Regiment. That evening, the thirty surviving Marines dug in for the night in their foxholes. For hours, bullets had been flying everywhere. One had sideswiped Cord and literally cut the tip off a cigar that had been in the breast pocket of his jacket. He lit the cigar later that day and “pretended a courage” he didn’t feel. That night, a heavy barrage of American firepower from ships offshore answered repeated Japanese assaults.1
Cord Meyer lay alongside his sergeant in a foxhole that was barely a foot deep. The two had agreed that one should keep guard while the other rested. Every two hours, they switched roles. To combat his fear as the night sky darkened with rain clouds, Cord tried to conjure lust by summoning pornographic images in his mind. “It proved a poor substitute,” he would write two years later. The power of terror was as overwhelming as it was debilitating. With each attack, the lieutenant and his sergeant fought back and then endured the deafening silences between rounds.
Cord wondered how he had arrived at the place he now found himself: every moment facing down his fear of death. In a state of mental detachment, he was able to see the entire spectacle of war that confronted him. On one side were his countrymen, “lying in their scooped out holes with their backs to the sea, each one shivering with fright yet determined to die bravely.” On the other side, “the poor peasantry from which the enemy recruited his soldiers were being herded into a position like cattle, to be driven in a headlong charge against the guns.” How could it be possible, Cord h
ad wondered that night, that such a human tragedy as war was now taking place? After all, “adult human beings of the civilized world did not slaughter one another. There must be some mistake which could be corrected before it was too late.” Two years later, in 1946, Cord was awarded the O. Henry Prize for his short story “Waves of Darkness,” in which he articulated a passionate appeal for world peace that would, at least for a period of time, inform every aspect of his life and work:
What if he should get out of his [fox] hole and explain the matter reasonably to both sides? “Fellow human beings,” he would begin. “There are very few of us here who in private life would kill a man for any reason whatever. The fact that guns have been placed in our hands and some of us wear one uniform and some another is no excuse for the mass murder we are about to commit. There are differences between us, I know, but none of them worth the death of one man. Most of us are not here by our own choice. We were taken from our peaceful lives and told to fight for reasons we cannot understand. Surely we have more in common than that which temporarily separates us. Fathers, go back to your children, who are in need of you. Husbands, go back to your young wives, who cry in the night and count the anxious days. Farmers, return to your fields, where the grain rots and the house slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this insanity will be the rotting bodies upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw down these guns that we hate. With the morning we shall go together and in charity and hope build a new life and a new world.”2
But during early the morning of July 22, Cord experienced anything but “charity and hope.” At 0300 hours, a Japanese grenade rolled into his foxhole, exploding in his face and killing his sergeant. Cord lay mortally wounded, contemplating death, bleeding everywhere, pieces of his teeth like half-eaten peanuts awash in his mouth of blood. The blast had shattered one eye completely and left the other so badly damaged it was swollen shut. With horror, Cord realized he was blind. Still conscious, he searched with one hand for his.45-caliber pistol to end his misery. Reviewing his short life, he realized that he had “no hatred in his heart against anyone, but rather pity.”3 Why had he not followed his conscience and refused military service, he bemoaned as he lay there dying, cursing nation-state savagery and war.
Cord’s father had feared the worst for his sensitive, artistic son. Meyer senior had reportedly looked his four boys over, having had his own combat experience in World War I. “Of all his sons, he decided Cord Jr. would be able to take it least of all,” wrote journalist Croswell Bowen in 1948. “If any of them crack up under it,” he told Bowen, “it will be Cord.” Cord’s mother was also convinced he would be killed.4
Found the next morning, Cord was immediately transported to a nearby hospital ship, where the doctor told those around him, “He’s got about 20 minutes to live,” and listed him as dead on the battalion roster, causing his parents terrible distress. Cord would, in fact, live—and thrive; but his mistaken death notice foreshadowed his twin brother Quentin’s loss a year later.
Cord Meyer Jr. was born in Washington D.C. on November 10, 1920. His twin brother Quentin was named for his father’s best friend, Quentin Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt. The twin brothers grew up in Bayside, Long Island, as well as New York City. Wealthy and socially prominent with strong political ties, the Meyer family was an influential one.
Like their father, the twins Cord and Quentin were educated at the elite St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. The school was a breeding ground for those who would one day assume positions of power in business and politics. While Quentin often stood out athletically, Cord was the academic star who also had intense feelings of social responsibility. Gerald Chittenden, a former teacher at St. Paul’s, recalled in 1948 that “Cord was fundamentally a poet,” yet he was imbued with a kind of temperament “that had a fixed habit of going off the deep end; he blew like a half gale. He may sometimes have been a little absurd in those days, but when he cooled down as he sometimes did, he amused himself as much as he did the rest of us. There was no vanity in him.”5
Yet, as Chittenden further observed, “the cold and faded oyster of cynicism drove him [Cord] to absolute fury.” In point of fact, Cord’s emotional intensity was a double-edged sword, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Channeled constructively, it might have compelled an entire country to seek out something yet unimagined. For as Chittenden astutely observed: “On questions of morals and morale, he [Cord] was always right.”6 But unfocused and without discipline, that same “absolute fury” could turn destructive and, like a cyclone, destroy everything in its path.
After graduating second in his class at St. Paul’s, Cord entered Yale in 1939, just after war had been declared in Europe. Despite the distant thunder of marching German armies, Cord immersed himself in the academic cornucopia that lay before him. He was dazzled by the brilliance of Yale’s legendary faculty. “I had great respect for Cord,” recalled his classmate and former journalist Charlie Bartlett. “He was always a dedicated student of anything he took on. He got the best marks in our class because he worked so damn hard.”7
During late-night dormitory arguments at Yale’s Davenport College, the war in Europe inevitably took center stage. For Cord, there were no merits to debate. His was the heart of a conscientious objector when it came to all things war. “Of one thing, he was certain: War was a violation of all the things, all the accumulated learning, all the teachings of the poets and philosophers who were increasingly commanding his respect.”8 Cord’s fundamental dilemma was this: If murder was against the law within a sovereign state, why, then, was it “a glorious achievement to be rewarded with appropriate honors and acclaim when committed on a member of a neighboring state?” The contradiction caused Cord to view war as nothing less than internationally sanctioned anarchy, and it would later become the chief organizing principle of his work for world peace.
Yet however “fundamentally a poet,” or philosophically a conscientious objector, Cord became bound by the conventions of his time. Circumstances being what they were, he ultimately took refuge in Plato: “A citizen could not accept the protection of the laws and the education provided by the state and then refuse to obey those laws when they required him to bear arms in the state’s justifiable defense.” With Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, “the only question left for debate was which branch of the service to join,” Cord recalled in 1980.9 Like almost everyone who went to war, Cord’s life would be permanently altered by it.
Enlisting in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia, Cord completed his Yale graduation requirements early. By the time he graduated in December 1942, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, played goalie for the Yale hockey team, and had been a publishing editor of the Yale Literary Magazine. His crowning achievement was receiving Yale’s highest honor at graduation, the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize for being “the senior adjudged by the faculty to have done most for Yale by inspiring his classmates.” Yale president Charles Seymour bestowed the honor on Cord, his voice quivering with emotion. Years later, journalist Merle Miller would recall that moment when Cord, in full Marine regalia, received the honor. “Tall and fair and handsome in his dress blues,” Miller wrote, Cord received “no doubt what was his first standing ovation,” and the applause and cheering seemed never to end. President Seymour told the departing graduates that it was up to them to “save our nation, indeed the whole world.” One acquaintance who was there that day recalled, “We all knew whom Seymour had in mind to lead that battle; the rest of us would willingly, you might say worshipfully, be Cord’s lieutenants in the fight.”10
The reality of war came soon enough. Like many soldiers in combat, Cord wrote letters home, chronicling his experiences and their effect on him. So eloquent and forthright were Cord’s letters that Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, when shown the letters by Cord’s uncle, decided to publish them even before Cord returned from the Pacific. “His writing, I felt,
had a timeless style,” Weeks told author Croswell Bowen in 1947. “Like Conrad, his prose gets you—so much so that you can’t read it aloud. There is a maturity and vividness about his phrasing. He seems to reach out and grab the exact word he needs.” Readers responded to Cord’s collection of missives, “On the Beaches,” with enormous enthusiasm, and the Atlantic received an unusually high number of requests for reprints.11 So began the opening of doors upon Cord’s return.
Cord spent the rest of the summer and fall of 1944 in convalescence. Returning to his family in New York in September, he made frequent trips to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital for the delicate removal of coral sand out of his one remaining eye. One piece of shrapnel was considered too dangerous to move. He also had to be fitted for a glass eye. He emerged as a hero from his convalescence, having earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Cord’s journal entry in September 1944 revealed a new sense of calling as he contemplated his future: “The general notion of what I have to do is clear. I owe it to those who fell beside me, and to those many others who will die before it’s done, the assurance that I will do all that is in my small power to make the future for which they died an improvement upon the past. The question is how? In what field or endeavor? Where to begin? Education? Politics? Writing? Continue my education or not?”12
That fall, Cord began “seeing a lot of Mary Pinchot.” He described her as “intensely concerned about the catastrophe of war which had beset their generation.”13 The two had met before Cord went to war, but no sparks had ignited. Their connection this time, however, fueled a passion that was as intellectual and spiritual as it was physical. For Cord, Mary was a “roman candle” who not only demanded and supported his vision of a world without war, but also shared an emerging focus on how to convince the masses of its rightness. It was to be a partnership of equals as their crusade began to take place on the world stage. Throughout the fall and into the winter of 1945, Mary and Cord deepened their union while forging and exploring the possibilities for action.