by Peter Janney
I haven’t seen the ocean in a long time, and though I love it, it often brings with it for me a vague sadness. Perhaps because it’s so old and unchanging, it makes me think that I’m not young anymore and that unlike the sea, I’m changing, not necessarily for the better. I stood there with the wind blowing keenly enough for me to turn up my jacket collar and I was aware then, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, of all my faults and past mistakes.
I counted the more than ten years since the war and could think of very few acts of spontaneous generosity toward individuals, of many once bright talents rusting in disuse. And most of all, I thought of how through rude indifference and selfish carelessness I had so alienated Mary and of how all my days would be as lonely and melancholy as this one if she left me.47
Cord’s reflections in moments of solitude demonstrated the kind of awareness that could have been a precursor to change, had he the will and commitment to act on his insights. Six months later, another event soon took place that might have helped Cord right his course, had he again been willing to take the first step.
During the Senate McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s, Cold War tensions fueled the public’s fear that “Communist subversives” had infiltrated various arenas of the American government. Senator Joseph McCarthy launched a campaign of reckless and widespread character assassinations, fueled by unsubstantiated accusations against his political opponents, or anyone he considered a threat, or a “Communist sympathizer.” Over the course of three years, McCarthy’s attacks on the patriotism and the integrity of anyone he deemed suspect destroyed many reputations and lives. Two years into Cord’s work at the CIA, McCarthy came calling for him.
“At 4 pm August 31 [1953],” Cord recorded in his journal, “I was in my office discussing with a branch chief certain lines of action we planned to follow against the Communists in Japan, when the phone rang and I was requested to go to the office of Dick Helms.” Cord was told that he had become a target of the McCarthy Hearings. Accused of collaborating with Communists during his dealings with the American Veterans Committee in 1946, he learned that his loyalty had been called into question. Authors Cass Canfield, Theodore White, and James Aldridge, along with poet Richard Wilbur, were also implicated. “Well, they’ve apparently found something in your past,” Helms said to Cord. “It looks serious.” Cord was relieved of duty and sent home.
It might have been his chance to leave the CIA for good—an opportunity for redemption—but he wouldn’t seize the opportunity. Instead, he spent the next couple of months writing a 130-page defense for what he called his “political trial.”48 Mary, too, was under suspicion. The indictment against her alleged that she had registered as a member of the American Labor Party of New York in 1944.49 During his suspension, Cord used his time off to complete a play that he felt particularly proud of. He sent it to playwright Robert Anderson, who he hoped might assist him with the rewriting of certain scenes. The time away from the Agency rekindled Cord’s literary fire. It also proved beneficial—however fleetingly—to his marriage.
Nearly three months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Allen Dulles personally let Cord know that the charges had been dropped, that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing. But the time off had already whetted Cord’s appetite for something else. In early January 1954, he and Mary went to New York on a brief trip, during which Cord talked to a number of people about a job in publishing. “But I quickly learned that my friends in the established firms are going to find it very difficult to give me the kind of job and responsibility I’d like,” he noted in his journal several days later.50 Again, ambition and a need for fame and notoriety would squelch his recent renewed stirring of inspiration and interest in writing.
Clearly, Cord wanted out of the CIA and all government service, but was too insecure to cut his ties and strike out on his own. While McCarthy’s witchhunt had offended him, it seems that it hadn’t been enough to cause him to walk away. When Cord returned to work, Allen Dulles sensed his discontent and, to assuage him, promoted him to chief of the International Organizations Division. As one of the major operating divisions within the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, the division would merge with the Covert Action Staff in 1962. By November 1954, Cord noted in his journal that his resolve “to leave the government has been delayed by a promotion that keeps me so busy that I am so weary at night, I fall into bed after a quick glance at the newspaper.” Then, in a reference to Kenneth Fearing’s poem “Dirge,” Cord wrote, “Bam he lived as wow he died [as wow he lived].” His next sentence read: “It’s no good really.”51
For Mary, too, it was “no good really.” Cord’s brush with McCarthyism had distressed them both. It had also opened a door to the possibility—and to Mary’s hope—that Cord might choose another path, but he hadn’t. His unwillingness or inability to disentangle himself from the CIA, which Mary openly despised, caused her to move further away toward independence. Increasingly, the stakes became higher—not only the stability of her family, but the integrity of her soul. Beyond her roles as mother, CIA wife, and homemaker, Mary still identified with something deeper within and longed to experience a fulfillment more profound. A tragedy would yank her out of her reverie: the accidental death of the beloved family dog, a rambunctious golden retriever. Struck and killed by a car on busy Route 123, which ran adjacent to their house, the dog had been the special favorite of Mary and Cord’s middle son, Michael. His death veiled a Cassandra-like warning. Two years later, an even bigger horror would occur at almost the exact spot.
With Cord’s return and new promotion within the Agency, the year of 1954 would become a defining moment in the Meyer family. Mary’s mother, Ruth Pinchot, worried that both her daughters were being stifled in their married lives. She gave them each a round-trip ticket to Europe and a thousand dollars spending money. That summer, Mary and Tony went on what the two later referred to as “a husband dumping trip” to Europe. The trip proved the sisters’ emancipation. Tony Pittman met her second-husband-to-be, Ben Bradlee, in Paris. The two ended up “exploring hungers that weren’t there just days ago and satisfying them with gentle passion, new to me,” Bradlee would recall years later.52 Upon her return, Tony separated from Steuart Pittman. She would marry Bradlee in Paris the following summer in 1955.
For her part, Mary met “an Italian noble,” as Jim Truitt described him in 1979, when she and Tony were in Positano. “I recall the name Jean Pierre (hardly Italian), and that Mary saw him on a yacht and swam out to meet him,” Truitt noted.53 Mary and Jean Pierre reportedly sailed the Mediterranean for a few days, before she rejoined Tony in Paris. On returning home, Mary didn’t mention a word of it to Cord. But during the following summer of 1955, after attending Tony and Ben’s Paris wedding, she and Cord traveled, of all places, to Positano. Again, she spotted Jean Pierre on his sailboat, in the company of a young American woman college student. Mary introduced Cord to Jean Pierre and suggested that the four of them go cruising on Jean Pierre’s boat. The foursome sailed the Tyrrhenian Sea to Capri and then to Naples. If Cord suspected, he didn’t let on. He returned to work in Washington, while Mary stayed on in Paris, allegedly to assist Tony in her new life. Both Tony and Ben Bradlee knew, however, exactly what Mary was really up to. She secretly returned to Italy and to Jean Pierre, where the pair went on an extended cruise and made plans for a life together.
Upon her return from Europe the second time around, Mary told Cord the truth. An entry in Cord’s journal from the fall of 1955 reads: “About Mary—I have heard just two nights ago much more of that Truth I was trying to understand. Am still trying to digest it, but it makes me sick. Will put it down later.” In another journal entry from that period, Cord wrote, “Mary has finally explained the motive that was so obviously lacking in all that she had said before, since her return from Europe.”54
The motive, as Mary finally explained, was love. While she told Cord that her first encounter with Jean Pierre had been “sexually satisfying, but involving no deep emotion,” she ma
de it clear that she was now “in love with him and he with her,” and that Jean Pierre intended to “emigrate to Canada to be able to obtain a divorce, and that he and Mary were to be married and live on a ranch in the West.” Cord recalled the nagging suspicion he felt when Mary returned from Europe the first time, in 1954: “I remember half suspecting this when she first came back, but put it out of my conscious mind. I remember also her showing me a short story she had written about a brief affair. It was sophomoric in emotion and badly written. I remember criticizing its undeniable faults, and the reason I did so with so little respect for her feelings was undoubtedly because I again suspected that it was autobiographical.”55
The revelation of Mary’s affair only compounded Cord’s alcoholism. At dinner parties, Cord’s strident, argumentative disposition tended to dominate, even disrupt, all discourse. Sadly for Cord, his poetic sensibility had given way to bullying when alcohol took over. (In fact, alcoholism claimed many in the top echelon at the CIA throughout the 1950s and 1960s.) Once, years after he and Mary had divorced, he became so irked by something Ben Bradlee said that he reportedly lunged across the dinner table for Bradlee’s throat.56 Former U.S. Attorney David Acheson, Cord’s Yale classmate, recalled in 2008 that “Cord had threatened to [physically] fight somebody at a dinner party at my house. We had to tell him to calm down. Cord could be downright mean.”57
His son Michael sometimes feared him. As a father, Cord had little patience for three exuberant boys and their attendant noise, commotion, and disobedience. Michael had once confided his terror of his father’s temper. It was something we shared—I of my own father, and he of his. We both had witnessed the reckless and explosive alcohol-fueled wrath of our fathers; the shared fear had been one of the things that had cemented our boyhood friendship.
Looking toward the small riding stable from the Meyer’s terrace, the next house over was the six-acre compound known as Hickory Hill. Years later it would become the legendary “Kennedy Compound,” occupied by the family of Robert F. Kennedy. But in the spring of 1955, its new inhabitants, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, became next-door neighbors of the Meyer family.
That May, Jackie suffered a miscarriage; a year later, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, while Jack was cavorting about Europe with Senator George Smathers. By the end of 1956, both marriages, the Meyer’s and the Kennedy’s, had been in turmoil for some time. It appeared that some force was still at work, keeping Mary and Jack aware of one another. Jack and Jackie left Hickory Hill for Georgetown in the fall of 1956. Mary would follow them a year later, but not before a trauma of unimaginable proportion.
During the fall of 1956, on her thirty-sixth birthday in October, Mary told Cord their marriage was over. She wanted a divorce. They had become strangers under one roof. Whatever grief she may have felt, Mary embraced the prospect of independence and all that it might promise—exploration as a painter, and the possibility of rekindling the flame with Jean Pierre. Convention would not enslave her, just as the quiet life of the CIA wife and homemaker had not satisfied her. Her children would have to adjust. Perhaps in time, she might have thought, they would come to recognize and understand the courage it had taken to save her own life, though initially they might blame her for such a cataclysmic disruption to the family. Whatever her disposition, it was about to be horrifically tested. Life’s vicissitudes would make an unscheduled appearance early one December evening, a week before Christmas.
As the winter solstice light waned fast into dusk, the two older Meyer boys, Quentin and Michael, hurried toward home across the well-trafficked Route 123, already having been chastised for previous dinnertime tardiness due to their hypnotic television attraction at a neighbor’s house. Some of the fast-moving cars already had their headlights on; some didn’t. The faster, more-agile Quenty raced to the other side without incident. Perhaps he assumed that his younger brother was right behind him. He wasn’t. Michael couldn’t keep up with his older brother, and in the dark of the busy thoroughfare, he likely relied on the headlights of oncoming cars to tell him when it was safe to dash. Just nine years old, Michael Pinchot Meyer would not see the car that would take his life. His death was nearly instantaneous, and it took place where another auto had claimed the life of his beloved golden retriever just two years earlier. If the dog’s sacrifice had forewarned the danger, it had gone unheeded.
Mary heard the screech of tires and the screams of her oldest son. She raced down the hill toward the awful scene. The driver who had struck Michael had become hysterical. An ambulance arrived, but it was too late. Mary would, for the last time, hold and accompany Michael to the hospital, but not before she paused to comfort the driver who had struck her son, her rare compassion anchored in some deeper dimension. The ever-delicate young Mikey would leave those who loved him in an interminable river of grief.
Laid to rest just before Christmas on a sloping hill near his grandfather Amos Pinchot in the Milford cemetery, Michael rested just a stone’s throw from Grey Towers, where he had loved to fish and roam. Quenty, who would be eleven in January, could not bring himself to attend the burial; it was a decision that would later haunt him. Cord recorded in his journal that his youngest son, Mark, who was just six years old at the time, couldn’t believe that “his brother lay in that narrow hole in the ground and neither could I.” 58 The loss burrowed deep into Mary’s psyche. The future seemed impossible to fathom. Within a decade, her own grave would be dug next to Michael’s. A month after their son’s death, Cord confided in his journal his hope that shared grief might yield reconciliation with Mary. His wish was that “our shared sorrow would be a bridge to a better life between us.”59 It was not to be.
Shortly thereafter, Cord wrote two pages that he titled “Notes.”60 The entry followed a sobering, truth-telling—and hope-dashing—confrontation with Mary about the state of their marriage. The first heading, “Her worries about him,” enumerated the concerns that Mary had voiced about him during this encounter: “That he [Cord] is incapable of any commitment of heart and trust, too self-reliant, disillusioned and experienced to gamble again on the hope of a shared happiness.” Cord then quoted Mary as saying, “Don’t become an old fuddy-duddy. I’ve found you out just in time—almost too late.” The woman who had once gushed to her friend Anne Truitt that Cord “rose on his toes as he walked”—a characteristic that she considered the hallmark of an interesting man61—now voiced her criticism in direct and devastating language.
The second entry in Cord’s “Notes” reads: “That he drinks too much and will drink more.” Mary had told him, “Sometimes I’ve known what you were [going] to say but you can’t because of the wine. That’s sad and shouldn’t be.” Mary had already sensed where Cord was headed. She wanted no further part of it. She feared that Cord “might prove irrelevant because of his short temper and excessive emotionalism,” and told him “they don’t take you seriously with your outbursts.” She added that she did not think that Cord was “polite enough to survive.” Finally, Cord noted that Mary had made it clear she felt that “her children might be a burden that he might come to increasingly resent. I’ve thought there was no reason why you should take care of my children.”62
Cord next noted Mary’s expectation “that he [Cord] would be cruel and thoughtless in his treatment of her,” followed by Mary’s next statement to him: “You weren’t cruel to M., were you? They say you were but I’ll make up my own mind for myself.” “M.” was clearly a reference to their deceased son, Michael, and further confirmed Michael’s own terror of his father.
Mary attacked Cord’s fidelity, calling him “incurably promiscuous,” and remarking on his good fortune not to have been a philandering husband at a time when he might have been challenged to a duel. “You’d have had to be pretty good to survive all the ones you have had to fight,” she said. On this point, at least, Mary offered a mea culpa. She admitted to Cord that she had not always “acted her age,” that she herself might be “incurably promiscuous.” After all, she a
dded, “there are so many beautiful men.”63 And she wondered whether Cord, as he grew older, “might cease to be able to satisfy her [sexually].”
Cord’s “Notes” were a kind of last will and testament of what his life and marriage had become. No longer able to hide in his journal alone, he’d been offered, in this final confrontation with Mary, a mirror, albeit her mirror, of who he had become and why she was leaving. Gone was the committed, evolving conscientious objector who, in a moment of illumination as he lay dying on the beach-battlefield of Guam, realized he had betrayed his deepest conviction—that war was just “the finished product of universal ignorance, avarice, and brutality,” and decided, if he were to live through the night, he would do something about it. In that moment, he understood that “a little out of adolescent vanity, but more because he had failed to become a conscientious objector, as he ought to have done,” he now fully grasped “the consistent series of decisions that led inevitably to where he lay [dying].” His courage in that moment—to live and accept the fate of whatever mistaken path his life had wandered—had prevailed, and won the duel over the “final ignominious act” of taking his own life in self-pity.64 Gone, too, was the man who some had thought was destined not only to become not only the president of the United States, but also “the first president of the parliament of man. And if he becomes a writer, he’s sure to win the Nobel Prize. At least.”65
In 1967, Mary’s prescience—and fear—about where Cord had been headed would be revealed. Mercifully, she would not be alive to read the article in Ramparts magazine that would expose Cord as the director of the CIA’s notorious Operation Mockingbird, as well as head of the Agency’s secret incursion into the National Student Association. Having infiltrated more than twenty-five newspapers and wire agencies, Operation Mockingbird had successfully manipulated the American media to promote the CIA viewpoint. It had been designed by Dulles protégé Frank Wisner in the late 1940s. Through it, the CIA bought influence at major media outlets by putting reporters on the CIA payroll, and vice versa. During the 1950s, an estimated three thousand salaried and contract CIA employees were engaged in propaganda efforts. One of the biggest initial supporters was Philip L. Graham, publisher and owner of the Washington Post. Under Cord’s tutelage, Mockingbird became a stunning success. Whenever the CIA wanted a news story slanted in a particular direction, it got it.66 This amounted to a subversion of democracy’s most precious cornerstone, the free press. Secretly controlling the media had proven to be one the CIA’s most powerful tools. The Agency didn’t take kindly to being found out.