by Peter Janney
Upon getting wind of their exposure in Ramparts, the CIA immediately went to work to undermine and destroy the magazine. CIA operative Edgar Applewhite was ordered to organize a campaign to smear the publication and then render it financially bankrupt.
“I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing,” Applewhite told author Evan Thomas. “The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.” In violation of the CIA charter, as well as the U.S. Constitution, Applewhite and his colleagues, including Cord, nevertheless acted with unabashed impunity. “We were not the least inhibited,” Applewhite continued, “by the fact that the CIA had no internal security role in the United States.”67
By then, Cord’s unique brand of narcissistic pomposity had already become legend in Washington—so much so that he was brilliantly caricatured by Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan’s 2 1967 Washington Post column, “NEWS to Me….” In a parody entitled “Are You Playing the Games by the Rules in Washington?,” Scottie, always imbued with an effervescent, even hilarious perspective, brought to life the very quintessence of Cord’s personality:
The most artistic practitioner of this game is Cord Meyer, the walking library who was recently revealed to have been running student activities all these years for the CIA.
Let us suppose that some innocent creature, coming upon Cord on a Georgetown terrace at the cocktail hour, remarks that the Manchester Guardian has been somewhat unflattering about the handling of the Flamingo Republic crisis by the CIA.
“My dear fellow,” Cord will say with a significant puff on his pipe, “I assume you have seen Yevtuchenko’s masterwork on this subject in the Trans-crimean Review. ‘Phenomenism versus Pantheism.’ Otherwise, there is no use addressing yourself to this topic, don’t you agree?”
One stroke, and he’s won. The victim admits defeat by inquiring how his children are, and whether he’s played any tennis lately.68
In January 1968, the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive revealed just how tenuous (and misguided) America’s incursion into Southeast Asia had become; the Vietnam War raged on amid increasing controversy. Throughout the world, student uprisings flared on university campuses as well as in the streets, from the United States to Mexico and France. Back home, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, Robert F. Kennedy in June. Antiwar protestors picketed the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August; television would broadcast the brutal police response for nearly twenty minutes. Meanwhile, the Black Power salutes of American Olympic medal winners were a provocative nod to the ongoing fight for civil rights. Apollo 8’s successful orbit of the moon struck the only uplifting chord in an otherwise deeply polarized, traumatic year.
Amid the tumult of 1968, Mark Meyer, Cord and Mary’s youngest son, entered Yale as a member of the class of 1972. That summer, Mark received a form letter from William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain at Yale. Coffin had served in World War II and gone to work for the CIA for three years in the early 1950s because, he said, he felt that “Stalin made Hitler look like a boy scout.” Later, he reexamined that outlook and choice, abandoned the CIA, and entered Yale Divinity School. By 1967, Coffin was an established antiwar icon and a prominent civil rights “freedom fighter.” The U.S. government had indicted him during the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial for his role in counseling students to resist the military draft.
Coffin’s letter to incoming Yale freshmen introduced the many options of religious faith available at the university, but it also made a political case for ending the war in Vietnam. “College students more than any other group have perceived the war in Vietnam to be politically inept and morally a catastrophe,” Coffin wrote. “More than any other group they have resisted the tribalistic chauvinism that passes for patriotism and have recognized that the hopes so long and cruelly deferred of the poor and colored must be realized in our time and the world around.” The good chaplain was opening the door for students “to resist the temptation to ‘cop out,’” as he wrote, “by failing to connect thoughtful inquiry with effective action; by matching courageous deeds with only shallow ideas; or by believing you can drug yourself to self and to God.”
Coffin’s letter further enraged an already apoplectic Cord Meyer. Once a world-renowned peace advocate, the man who had declared all war to be “international anarchy” now likened Coffin’s letter to brainwashing. Indignant, Cord wrote letters to former Yale classmates, including Bishop Paul Moore, Cyrus Vance, Dean Acheson, and William Bundy. He urged Coffin’s reprimand. While Bishop Moore found Coffin’s letter somewhat “inappropriate,” he did not think it was grounds for dismissal. Dean Acheson, however, did. Telling Cord that his language was far too moderate, Acheson thought Coffin’s letter lacked “taste, judgment, knowledge, and maturity. He shows himself to be far less mature than the incoming freshmen, of whom my grandson is one.” Acheson’s letter to Cord concluded: “Bill is a gay and charming fool; but he is a fool.”69
But William Sloane Coffin had done what Cord Meyer had never dared to do, and perhaps that was the true source of Cord’s outrage—the reminder of all that he had once stood for, but that he had not had the courage to uphold. Three years into his career at the CIA, Coffin had left the Agency, disillusioned by many of the unsuccessful covert activities in which he had taken part. “It didn’t work,” Coffin later recalled. “Soviet intelligence detected nearly all of our efforts. Our operations ended in disaster. It was fundamentally a bad idea. We were quite naive about the use of American power.”70
Instead, Coffin had forged a calling in the ministry, becoming a passionate advocate for human and civil rights. He won international recognition as a peace activist. He was a prolific writer and public speaker, and he published six highly acclaimed books and many articles. He became a champion for sanity in an insane world. Had Cord Meyer for one moment caught a glimpse of someone he once knew—a sight no doubt too painful to bear—he would have seen the apparition of his former self, walking hand in hand with Mary Pinchot Meyer at his side.
An even darker disclosure of CIA skulduggery came in 1972 when it was revealed that Cord Meyer had prevailed upon New York publisher Harper & Row to give the Agency the right to examine the galleys of a forthcoming book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. The author was a Yale graduate student named Alfred McCoy. The book relied on McCoy’s harrowing tours through the war zones of Vietnam and Laos, as well as visits to Europe’s wellarmed drug lords, documenting astonishing accounts of CIA dealings within the drug trade. The book’s findings were as dangerous as McCoy’s travels: Key figures in the heroin trade told McCoy on the record that American intelligence had collaborated with the drug trade dating back as far as World War II, and that CIA advisers were financing weapons to support the Hmong Highlanders by using CIA helicopters to transport Laotian opium to Vietnam markets. McCoy also revealed that, beginning in Guatemala in 1954, the CIA had been involved in widespread terrorism throughout Central America, including the training of death squads. The Agency had needed untraceable money to finance its clandestine operations. They had found what they desired with narco-traffickers such as Panamanian resident Manuel Noriega, who would eventually be outed as having long been on the CIA payroll.
Cass Canfield, the head of Harper & Row, found himself caving in to CIA pressure. He forced the young author McCoy to acquiesce to the Agency’s demand for prior review, but the book was published largely intact, in part because the major news media had exposed the CIA’s attempt to influence its content. But the fact remained that McCoy’s research was particularly unwelcome in Washington in 1972. President Nixon was leading his “war on drugs” crusade. The U.S. military was still trying to recover from publicity around the massacre at My Lai and other atrocities in Vietnam. Revelations about the CIA-led assassination campaign throughout Southeast Asia, Operation Phoenix, made matters even worse.
Most astounding of all had been the news that the “golden boy” of th
e post–World War II peace movement—Cord Meyer himself—was leading an assault on the First Amendment at the New York office of publishing giant Harper & Row. The man whose debut short story “Waves of Darkness” had decried the futility and horror of war was now a complicit architect of secret wars and violations of democracy the world over, as well as within the United States. As one observer told journalist Merle Miller in 1972, “the man who wrote ‘Waves of Darkness’ must have died a little the day he walked into Harper & Row, assuming there was any of that man still left in Cord.”71
There wasn’t. He had been gone for more than twenty years. Mary had left just in time.
2 In April 1967, Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was still married to Samuel J. (“Jack”) Lanahan.
8
Personal Evolution
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
—Marcel Proust
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the definer of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny.
How can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
—Emma Goldman
BEFORE THE END of her life, Mary Pinchot Meyer would be the muse and lover of two of the most influential and important men of her generation: Cord Meyer and Jack Kennedy—ironically, the top two postwar public figures highlighted in Glamour’s 1947 feature “Young Men Who Care.” The two would cross paths in their career orbits repeatedly. At the center was Mary. At first, Cord had seemed the more promising. Poised for a meteoric rise with a stellar political future, he had access to those who would further stimulate his vision and position him for national recognition. His ascent and fall, however, would become Faustian, despite Mary’s steadfast love and support,
As their marriage unraveled in 1955, so did that of their next-door neighbors at Hickory Hill. Jack and Jackie Kennedy had moved into the six-acre compound that had once been the headquarters of Civil War Army general George McClellan. The view from the Meyer terrace drew the eye straight across two small ridges to the new Kennedy compound where “Lord and Lady” Kennedy reigned, but their life together was becoming strained. Early miscarriages and a stillborn birth, further complicated by Jack’s compulsive philandering, would have been overwhelming to any young marriage. Author Truman Capote, a frequent guest at the Kennedys’ New York dinner parties early on, recalled of Jackie, “She was sweet, eager, intelligent, not quite sure of herself, and hurt—hurt because she knew Jack was banging all those other broads.”1 In fact, Jackie would eventually follow her husband’s lead where infidelity was concerned. During a trip to California in January 1956, where Jack was working on a short film about the history of the Democratic Party for the August opening of the national convention in Chicago later that year, Jackie and actor William Holden had a tryst. According to Jackie’s stepbrother and sometime confidante Gore Vidal, “She had had her share of affairs with the famous, among them the actor William Holden. But I always suspected that some of these couplings were motivated by revenge on Jack, not to mention just plain stamp collecting.”2
Or was Jackie trying to be the woman she thought her husband would find more exciting? She told Jack about the fling with Holden, claimed author Peter Evans, just a few days after it happened. Her hope was to stimulate his affection, because women who slept with powerful men were a turn-on for Jack. The plan backfired. When Jackie discovered not long after that she was pregnant, Jack became resentful, allegedly not believing the child was his. Eight months into the pregnancy in August 1956, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, where he vied, unsuccessfully, for the vice presidential nomination.3
After the convention, still seething over his wife’s infidelity, Jack dumped Jackie at her family’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, and flew to Europe with Senator George Smathers of Florida. The two men chartered a yacht and cruised the Mediterranean. Indulging their shared predilection for promiscuity—the yacht became a floating senatorial bordello—word reached Jack by the ship’s radio that Jackie had delivered a near-full-term stillborn girl who she had already named Arabella. Jack was said to be indifferent to the news. Newspapers had picked up the story that he was “traveling” in Europe and was unable to be reached. It reportedly took Smathers another three days—and an ultimatum—to convince the Massachusetts senator to return. “If you want to run for President, you better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside, or else every wife in the country will be against you.” In fact, Smathers flew back with Jack, but only after the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “convinced” his son to make the trip.4
It was, by that point, no secret Jackie wanted out of the marriage. After recovering from the stillbirth, she took off for London to play with her sister, Lee Radziwill, who had several affairs going at once with British royalty. When Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson got wind of all the “fun” Jackie was having sans Jack, the patriarch again took matters into his own hands. Upon Jackie’s return, the elder Kennedy took her to lunch in New York at the swank Le Pavillon. He knew the marriage was on the skids, but there were more important things on the horizon: like the presidency for his son.
Jackie and Joe Sr., had always gotten along, and so rather than intimidate his daughter-in-law, the elder Kennedy struck a deal. Jackie had laid out her demands: She wanted out of the Hickory Hill estate in McLean; she didn’t want to have dinner every night with the entire family when she came to Hyannis Port or Palm Beach; she didn’t want to play the role of political wife, campaigning endlessly for her husband. In a word, she wanted freedom. In exchange, she agreed to keep up appearances for the sake of Jack’s future political career.
That left the question of children. Without them, Jack’s political future might quickly dead-end; with them, any political height was scalable. According to author Edward Klein, Kennedy put it this way: “It’s up to a wife to keep a marriage together. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that children are the secret of any marriage. I’m going to set up a trust for your children. You will have control of it when you have children.”
“And what if I can’t have children?” Jackie asked.
“If you don’t have any children within the next ten years,” said the patriarch, “the trust fund will revert to you. The money will be yours to do with as you wish.”5
That fall, the Kennedys left Hickory Hill for Georgetown.
By 1957, Mary Meyer had also made Georgetown her home, just a few blocks away from the new Kennedy home. In spite of his failed bid for the vice presidential nomination the year before, Jack still had his sights set on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that his marriage was widely understood to be window dressing didn’t deter him. Mary, for her part, was adjusting to life without Cord, and without her son Michael. While her path and the future president’s surely crossed, her more pressing concerns took precedence. One of her priorities was finalizing her divorce as quickly as possible. She went to Nevada, a state that expedited the process, and waited out the six-week residency requirement at a no-frills “divorce ranch” run by artist and nature photographer Gus Bundy and his wife, Jeanne.6 There were many such places in Nevada, some offering luxury living with fine food and other perks. The Bundy divorce ranch, however, was far from luxurious and offered only four residential apartments. For Mary, it would serve her purpose splendidly, allowing her to come and go as she pleased.
Before Mary left on one of her trips to Nevada in 1958, her neighbor Jack had asked for a favor. Would she allow “a friend” to stay at her Georgetown house while she was away? The sylphlike, elegant dark-haired Pamela Turnure had been a receptionist in Kennedy’s Senate office. She would eventually join his presidential campaign and become Jackie’s press secretary, all while maintaining an intermittent sexual relationship with Jack. Pam h
ad been renting an apartment in the Georgetown home of Leonard and Florence Kater. One spring night, the Katers were awakened by the sound of pebbles against their tenant’s window at 1:00 A.M. They looked out their window and saw Senator Kennedy begging Pam to let him in. She did. Enraged—as “good Catholics” would be in such a situation—the Katers set out to expose Jack and destroy his chances for the presidency. They placed two tape recorders in an air vent that led to Pam’s bedroom and recorded Jack and Pam’s conversations, as well as their sexual activity. After that, they revoked Pam’s lease.
“I was so enraged,” Florence Kater told author Michael O’Brien, “that this Irish Catholic senator, who pretended to be such a good family man, might run for President that I decided to do something about it. I was very innocent and naive in those days and had no idea of the power I was up against. I knew no one would believe my story unless we had actual proof, so it addition to the tape recorders, we decided to get a photograph.”7