by Peter Janney
In the end, Cord’s heroic effort to bring world government to the national political stage would be stymied by international events, as well as by his organization’s inability to connect with the average American. Soviet Russia entered the nuclear world stage, testing its first successful atomic bomb in 1949. Relations with the Russians were already rapidly deteriorating in the aftermath of the Czechoslovakian coup, the Berlin crisis, a Communist victory in China, and, most dramatically, the Korean War. Such fear-laden World Federalist slogans as “one world or none” lost their appeal as the Federalist cause became enmeshed in its own complexity, internal politics, and inability to be more easily understood by the general public.
A new kind of fear was emerging. The growing paranoia over “Communism,” coupled with Russia’s elevation to superpower status, engendered a new mind-set, the era known as the Cold War. No longer persuasive concerning the darkening storms from every direction, the World Federalist movement receded. “Our attempts to transform the United Nations had been overtaken by events that could no longer be ignored or explained away,” Cord wrote years later in his memoir Facing Reality.35
That was only one aspect of Cord’s own downfall, however. During the years he tirelessly devoted himself to finding a solution for world peace, Cord had a companion other than Mary. A dark melancholy had descended upon the World Federalist hero, intermingled with bouts of nervous exhaustion. Whether driven by his “absolute fury,” or his unresolved grief over the loss of his brother Quentin, Cord turned inward, despairing that the new world order was headed for nuclear Armageddon. Increasingly despondent, Cord took refuge in alcohol and nonstop chain-smoking, often finishing the first of several daily packs by midmorning. The World Federalist movement had, for Cord, run its course and failed in its mission; he returned to Harvard to resume his Lowell Fellowship, and to reflect on his defeat: “Two years spent in exhorting, pleading, warning, until my own reserves of confidence and hope had been so heavily overdrawn that it is hard for me to urge others on to action, when I now doubt the efficacy of any kind of action. Who am I to put myself against the dark and titanic forces that now mass themselves on the horizon of this new half-century? “Slowly, sadly, irreversibly, the tall world turns toward death like a flower for the Sun.”36
Rudderless and morose, unable to envision his next move, the strain was taking a huge toll, and not just on Cord. Mary was now eight months pregnant with their third child. Having traveled constantly for more than two years, Cord barely knew his first two sons: Quentin, born in 1946, and Michael, born in 1947. Not only had Mary been the stalwart figure behind Cord’s career—bearing his children, keeping house, editing his speeches and articles, and most important, aligning herself in complete support of the mission he had undertaken—she had exhausted her own reserves in the process. Incessantly preoccupied, Cord wanted only to know what the future might hold for him as his fellowship came to an end. The marriage began to show signs of trouble. Mary’s impatience became even more apparent. Saddled with mothering two young boys, and a third son born in February 1950, she carried all the family burdens and daily chores.
Taking refuge in his journal, Cord wrote of how tired he was of his own career dilemma, “wrestling with terms of personal decision and action” as to where he should focus. Unable to reach him directly, Mary pursued Cord in his journal, leaving comments for him to ponder. “You are a romantic!” She scribbled next to one entry. “We’re all in the same bed, Honey—pooped!”37 As Cord brooded over the Korean War (“This is in all probability the rehearsal for larger and more decisive battles”), he ultimately reflected: “I am without hope. And yet I live from day to day as before.” Here, Mary wrote in the margin: “When you say you are without hope, you imply that you thought humans were not what they are—humans.”38
Their banter soon reached a bitter crescendo. In June 1951, Cord wrote a four-stanza poem entitled “Proper Tribute.” The verse appeared as a thinly disguised expression of his feelings about Mary, and he surely meant her to take it as such when she discovered it.
Proper Tribute
Beauty, she wears carelessly like a bright gown,
Lent for a night by some indulgent guest
And is dismissed to find that no man loves
Only herself in that brief garment dressed.
She lacks the arrogance that lovely women
Habitually show. In genuine surprise
She smiles at praise that would-be lovers bring
As proper tribute to her transient eyes.
And in a way she’s right. She never earned
With work or special talent her tall grace,
Her full breasts or her abundant hair.
By luck with genes she won her dreaming face.
But now that beauty’s hers by nature’s gift,
She must its burden bear and growing learn
What damage in poor hearts her passing wrecks.
And how for her desire sleepless burns.
Mary took the bait. She added a closing stanza of mocking self-criticism that was also a warning to her husband: If he considered her passive or dormant, she would prove him wrong.
She bites her fingernails,
Fails to shave under her arms,
Has no sense of humor,
And is a totally mundane soul.
But silence fires the imagination of the spiritually timid.39
Cord’s decision in 1951 to work for the CIA was not about following a calling or answering destiny. He had wanted to continue writing, and he had hoped that his tenure as a Lowell Fellow at Harvard might lead to an academic post. But postwar economics being what they were, academia was not recruiting. Not even his contacts at Yale or Columbia panned out. He consulted Secretary of State Dean Acheson for a job in the State Department, but there was none for him.
It is not known exactly when Cord’s first contact with Allen Dulles took place. Possibly contacted by Cord’s father, Dulles had already been apprised of Cord’s “splendid qualifications” as early as February 1951. By March of that year, the two had met in Washington, and Cord obviously went away intrigued by what Dulles had offered him, which remained top secret and classified. On March 31 that year, Cord acknowledged in his journal that he was busy filling out the required paperwork to work for the CIA.40
Following his interview with Dulles, he met with another Dulles protégé already at the CIA, Gerald E. Miller. Writing to Miller and Dulles in late May, Cord made it clear that he was “very much interested in the job we discussed,” but asked if he could “accept on the condition that I might be free to consider one other possibility that might materialize during the first two weeks of July.” He added, “In the remote event that this other thing developed, you would then still have more than two months to find someone else.” It isn’t clear from Cord’s personal papers and letters what the “other possibility” was, though it may have been an academic appointment. Clearly, Cord’s sights at the time included something more appealing than the CIA, and he wasn’t hesitant about stalling Allen Dulles until July before committing to an Agency job that would begin the following September (1951).41
“If I had more faith in my creative talent,” he recorded in his journal in December 1945, “I should write.” The O. Henry Prize winner and best-selling author was so brilliant and talented, he could have excelled at anything he attempted. But his real passion was writing. With a leap of faith, he might have become a major literary figure during his lifetime. Free of the financial obligation to work, what then held him back from taking a chance to pursue a literary life? The same journal entry revealed perhaps a deeper reason that the literary life alone might not satisfy him—his ambition: “My peculiar temptation is not money, but notoriety and fame. This must be put aside. If it comes in the end, well and good. But it cannot be sought directly, for it corrupts all that we do and takes the mind from the object.”42
And so Cord Meyer allowed himself to be seduced by Allen Dulles, a man bent on filling
the Agency’s ranks with East Coast, patrician Ivy Leaguers, whose arrogance would become evident in their disdain for anything in their way, including the rule of law. In making this decision, Cord turned away from his soul call, and also from Mary, abandoning the prospect of world peace for the waging of a new kind of war. He joined what would later be called the Directorate of Plans, the CIA’s most secretive division dedicated to the manipulation of world order. Cord easily established himself as a rising star whose acuity often surpassed that of his peers, his well-born brethren—people like Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald, Richard Helms, even Jim Angleton—many of whom had come out of the Office of Strategic Services (OS) after the war. It was a cozy arrangement of socially connected men from prominent families.
Yet for Cord, putting his talents to work for the CIA must have been bittersweet. There would be no more “quiet work—the labor of the mind and the heart, pure in the sense that it is done for its own sake and not for some ulterior end of wealth or power,” as he once wrote.43 And whether he acknowledged it or not, the dream that he and Mary had shared for world peace gave way to the realities of Cold War manipulation and the fearsome prospect of mutually assured destruction. The Cold War was, in fact, not cold, but hot, and it promised anything but world peace.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Washington E Street offices of the newly formed CIA, Cord Meyer transformed all his poetic, insightful visionary wisdom into perfecting schemes and strategies for America’s greater power and control, the often subtle but effective attempts at world domination—no matter what the cost. Cold Warrior by day, increasingly frustrated and intoxicated at night, like many of his colleagues, the man who one journalist had once believed was destined to be “the first president of the parliament of man” was now weathering in corrosion. Yet still brilliant and talented, he achieved success quickly and often. Nicknamed “Cyclops” by his colleagues, his ubiquitous cigarette dangling from the right side of his mouth, its smoke forever wafting up through the corridor of his glass eye, Cord became known for arrogantly chiding anyone who had overlooked some important detail that only he himself could have grasped. Easily, he outflanked his colleagues and bosses.
“Cord Meyer always pissed off Dick Helms,” recalled Victor Marchetti, the disaffected former CIA insider and noted author who had worked for Cord’s boss, Richard Helms. “Helms was a traditionalist. He believed we should be spying, not the crazy things Cord had concocted. While the FI [Foreign Intelligence] section—the spies—couldn’t do diddly squat against prime targets like the Soviets and Communist China, Cord was running all these crazy things like Radio Free Europe and Operation Mockingbird and having great success. He was very, very good at it, and his operations lasted a long time. He became the Agency’s glamour boy.”44 In fact, during the course of his CIA career, Cord would be awarded the Agency’s highest distinction, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, on three different occasions, a feat only achieved by one other person: Robert Gates.
During the summer of 1951, Cord and Mary moved their family to the Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, in advance of Cord’s September start at the CIA. For Mary, the move was a relief. The boys were still very young—Quentin was five, Michael was four, and Mark was almost two. Mary looked forward to establishing a new family routine. They bought a grand old southern-style house on nearly three acres of land, just a few miles from Chain Bridge on the Potomac River. Known as Langley Commons, the house was built before the Civil War. It had a spacious, window-lined living room, a library, and a dining room with French doors that opened onto a landscaped terrace. The kitchen had been completely remodeled and updated. Upstairs, there were six well-spaced bedrooms and two renovated full bathrooms. Outside, there were large oak trees, rolling hills, and gardens, as well as a white-fenced riding stable, complete with a small barn. Mary, for her part, would be reunited with her sister, Tony, now married to Washington attorney Steuart Pittman and living nearby. Many of Mary’s former Vassar classmates were also raising families in the area. Coupled with family life, the gaiety of the Washington social scene—dinner and cocktail parties, dances at the Waltz Group, Sunday-morning touch football games at Palisades Park—now took command as the Cold Warriors and the rest of the “Greatest Generation” ascended in their careers.
But if indeed silence sometimes “fired the imagination of the spiritually timid,” Mary wasn’t content to sit still where the life and future of her children were concerned. The fact that she was no longer crusading for world peace didn’t mean that the future peace and happiness of her progeny could be neglected. She wanted something different from what she had experienced as a young girl. A new era of progressive education was unfolding in the early 1950s as Mary embarked on the search for a school in which to enroll her children. She came upon an educational experiment that embodied something she thought important.
Georgetown Day School (GDS) had first opened its doors in 1945. It was the first private, coeducational, multicultural, and racially integrated school in Washington, a city that was still mostly segregated. The school had been founded by seven families who wanted to create not only a learning environment committed to academic excellence and educational innovation, but also an overall educational experience that emphasized children of all races learning together. The school’s educational philosophy grew out of such bold educational experiments as Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Goddard College in Vermont, and the work of German philosopher Rudolf Steiner, father of Waldorf education. Many of the teachers in the first racially mixed schools of the 1950s had been educated at Goddard and Black Mountain.
Led by the adventurous headmistress Agnes (“Aggie”) O’Neill, herself a dear friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, and her assistant, Bernard Wanderman, the school was first located just off Ward Circle adjacent to American University in Northwest Washington, behind what was then the location of a television station. The racially mixed, multicultural children who attended GDS were not just from wealthy, progressive, well-educated families from the “good sections of town.” Many students took public transportation when their parents had little means of transporting them. The pupils were grouped together mostly by age, ability, and social development, not necessarily by grade level. A great emphasis was placed on each child’s unique learning style. with “slower learners” often tutored by more advanced students under supervision. With a solid emphasis on both the performing and fine arts, the school required its students to participate in artistic endeavors such as class plays, ceramics, and painting.
Mary thought the school was attempting something unique and highly necessary. Much to Cord’s dismay, she enrolled both Quentin and Michael, who would be placed in different groups. Later, their youngest son, Mark would also attend GDS for a while. Cord felt the school “too soft,” not rigorously academic enough. How, after all, would this kind of environment prepare his progeny for St. Paul’s and Yale? For Mary, however, the children’s academic journey with its emphasis on the arts paralleled her own five-year artistic turning inward. Now seriously focusing her attention on painting, having transformed a former garden shed into a studio adjacent to the bricked terrace of the McLean house, she found herself teaching part-time in the GDS art studio, as well as taking courses with emerging Washington Color School icon Kenneth Noland.
Settling into the social life of Washington, Mary had another daunting role to fill: CIA wife. In the 1950s, the wives of upper-echelon CIA men were appendages to their husbands, like virtually all wives in America during that era. CIA operatives, however, were not allowed to discuss their work with their spouses. For Mary, this meant that the days of being Cord’s partner, his chief sounding board and literary editor, were behind them—a dispiriting shift and a demoralizing change for a woman who had, in times gone by, thrived in a partnership of equals. Mortified, she witnessed the transformation taking place in the once-promising poetic visionary, as Cord became one of the men he had always disparaged and warned about—men who wer
e “like rabbits staring with fascination at the oncoming headlights of the car that will crush them.”45
Mary fought against being relegated to a role characterized by subservience, deference, and compliance. She confronted and argued with Cord over the CIA’s mission, and, in particular, his work for the Agency. She began to discern what lay ahead and wanted no part of it. Her disdain manifested itself at parties and social gatherings, where she was alone among CIA wives in her critical views. Mary was, in the recollection of one of them, “always making wisecracks” about what the Agency was really up to. Some considered Mary’s wisecracking disrespectful. Others suspected that her joking was a sign she knew more than she would admit. One insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mary was well acquainted with the CIA’s drug program, MKULTRA, and that Cord, in trying to appease his wife, had told her much more than he should have about many CIA undertakings. That source added, “Mary absolutely detested Allen Dulles and everything he stood for. She compared him to Machiavelli, only worse.”46
Cord, for his part, knew he was alienating Mary. Just a few years earlier, she had been his most steadfast, trusted partner in their mission for world peace. Now, he kept her at arm’s length. Emotionally adrift, alone, drinking too much, traveling on CIA business in Lisbon, Portugal, in February 1953, Cord found himself contemplating the city’s harbor “for a moment in the precious sunshine.”