Mary's Mosaic (34 page)

“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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

D
uring 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 were “like rabbits staring with fascination at the oncoming headlights of the car that will crush them.”
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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.”
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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.”

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.