before the war – in Paris, where I was raised, 1931-1937, where I picked up the language easily and totally – and in an outfit much heralded and, like all intelligence agencies, almost wholly worthless, called the Office of Strategic Services, which was actually more Red than Moscow was in the thirties! Then back to State for a genteel gentleman’s career. Thank you, Colonel Colt, for underwriting it all.
Here I should insert a footnote about the language that I learned “easily and totally.” It was not French, though I speak French. It was Russian. My nanny, Natasha, was an exiled White, a duchess, no less. An exquisite and cultured lady, she moved in high White circles, and Paris before the war was the White Russian Moscow, with the largest population of exiles anywhere on Earth. They were brilliant if deluded people: immensely cultured, extravagantly cosmopolitan, charming and witty and bold to a fault, of extremely high native IQ, generously seeded with genius, indefatigable in battle and literature. After all, they produced not only the great Nabokov but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well. I may have even, as a small child, attended a soiree where N. himself was present, though I have no memory of it. So Russian was my first language, with a bit of aristocratic frost to it; meanwhile, my parents were busy doing the Paris scene, all but ignoring me, for which I thank them. Natasha’s lessons were far more meaningful and lasting than anything they could have taught me. This will explain much of what is to come in the tale ahead.
My second mentor was a man named Cleanth Brooks, of Yale, where I majored in American literature with a view toward going to Paris and working with some Harvard boys on an enterprise they had started up that seemed damn keen to me, called the
Enough of those old ghosts. My most powerful mentor was a famous man, a glamorous man, a brave man, a man who sent me on my way. I must address him at some length for you to have any grasp of what happened and why in 1963.
His name was Cord Meyer. He recruited me on my father’s recommendation, spook-to-spook as it were, from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student in lit and alone insisted on the seriousness of a pornographer named V. Nabokov, to the Plans Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, where I was to toil and happily murder by proxy for forty years, every second of every day spent in the idea – or possibly delusion? – that I was helping my country against its enemies, that I was living up to the standards of dead Meachums the world’s battlefields over, that I was ensuring all those big words that made Hemingway cringe in the rain, such as “freedom” and “democracy.”
Cord was a toot and a half, believe me. I still have dreams and nightmares about him; I’ll never escape him. Perhaps you know the story: he was one of the most famous men the Agency ever produced, and, I would say, having known most of them, the best. He was thrice touched by fire when I went to work for him in 1961. He had first of all lost an eye as a marine officer in the Pacific. Cord never discussed it, but we are given to understand that he saw the hardest of hard combat, even the gory squalor of hand-to-hand with bayonet and entrenching tool against a desperate enemy. Cord was too diffident to wear an eye patch, knowing that it would make him too famous too young. He simply slipped a glass orb in the vacant socket, and only a man studying him would notice. It was the idea of the eye gone on Iwo or Entiwok or one of those god-awful, never-heard-of-again places that was far more powerful than a showy patch would have been.
His background after the war is probably pertinent. He emerged a pacifist, having seen too many bayonets crammed into the bellies of teenage boys who’d never gotten around to getting laid. He was attracted to the idea of one-world government, so that nations wouldn’t send fleets of boys with bayonets after one another on flyspecks in far oceans. He was active in the United Nations movement and labored sweatily in service to that dream. Somehow, around 1948, after three years of hard work, it dawned on him that the whole outfit had been infiltrated and taken over by Commies and that it would henceforth work exactly the opposite of its intended mission – that is, it had come to exist to enforce the hegemony of the red over the blue. Disillusioned, he made contact with Mr. Dulles, who, duly impressed, offered him a position.
He had a talent, a nose for it. Within five years he became head of Clandestine Services, in the Directorate of Plans, and if you don’t yet know, Clandestine was where it all happened, a hatchery for mayhem. Other outfits would call such a unit “Operations,” and it would acquire flashy nicknames like “The Ranch” or “The OK Corral,” and its operatives would be called “cowboys” or “gunslingers” or some such. It never looked as deadly as it was: a bayful of mild-looking Yalies (a few Princetonians and Brownies thrown in, the odd nonpedigreed genius with special skills) with narrow ties (never loosened), horn-rims or black-framed heavy plastics, Brooks Brothers dark gray or summer-tan suits, Barrie Ltd. pebbled brogues or loafers, as dull as the Episcopal ministry. On weekends, a lot of madras, rather lurid Bermudas (red was popular, I recall), old Jack Purcell tennis shoes, usually battered orange by clay courts, khakis, old blue button-downs, maybe an old tennis shirt. Little would one know that behind those bland eyes and smooth faces lurked minds that plotted the downfalls and upswings of tyrants, the murders of secret- police colonels, an invasion or two, and a coup or three.
Back to Cord, wizard of Clandestine. His second immersion in flame was not cool or enviable. It was awful. In 1958 he lost his second child, a nine-year-old son, who was fatally hit by a car in, of all places, the spiritual home of all us Yalies waging the Cold War, Georgetown. The loss of a child is something I cannot fathom. As emotion embarrasses me, I will not linger on it, nor try to conjure its effects on him. It cannot have inclined him to a merry view of the universe.
It was his third tragedy that made him famous, pitied, beloved, scorned, doubted, mistrusted, suspected, and yet somehow vivid. He was, in his way, a pre-George Smiley Smiley, in that his public cuckolding served allegorically for the earnestness with which he loved his country and the disdain with which it repaid him. The name of his disaster was Mary Pinchot Meyer.
I suppose she could be termed a transitional woman. She came too late to be called a beatnik and too early to be called a hippie. “Well-bred bohemian,” though it has no public cachet, is probably the most accurate term. It goes without saying that she was beautiful, that she had the social ease being well bred confers upon its progeny (why do I insist on “progeny” instead of “children”? fancy again!), that she had beautiful flashing legs, that most everybody fell in love with her, that she was witty, effervescent, charismatic, that she had a great mane of hair, tawny and thick, and that lipstick looked redder on her than on any woman in Washington. She must have been sexually precocious, she must have loved danger, she must have had in her the seedlings of feminism and a need to be a person outside the illustrious reign of her husband as warrior-king of the Cold War and smartest of the very smart people who coagulated in then-seedy, dumpy, but somehow glamorous-amid-the-rot Georgetown.
She left him in 1961, citing the usual suspect of that age, the catch-all “mental cruelty,” whatever that meant, and I suppose it means anything its attorneys want it to mean. Did she begin her famous affair before or after the divorce? Was Cord officially cuckolded, or did the two lovebirds have the courtesy to keep it legal until the papers were served? No one will ever know, and it’s doubtful that Cord ever told anyone. He never told me.
The two were Georgetowners before 1960. It is known that she was friendly with and passed time with his gorgeous if slightly vague wife. Moreover, they must have seen each other in the streets, perhaps at the grocery, perhaps at the various drunken lawn parties to which their set, our set, “the” set seemed to gravitate, all the bold young shapers of the future, all the technocrats of the fashionable agencies (and our agency was very fashionable, while the poor boobs of the FBI were not), and all the young, ambitious journos who would write books about us and end up richer and more powerful than any of us.
It is not known when Mary Pinchot Meyer began to sleep with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before the November 1960 election or after; nor if they waited till the divorce was final. But have at it they did, and she is credited with at least thirty visits to the White House during his three years, at many odd times of day or night. It was such a terribly kept secret in the Washington of the era that it could hardly be called a secret at all, although perhaps she was most in the dark, for she may never have quite caught on to the fact that if he was sleeping with her, he was in the meantime trying to bed every vagina between Baltimore and Richmond, with the odd movie-star bang thrown in for good measure. Other rumors swelled in the wake of the two. She had some mysterious connection to the least
