A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer - Hardcover

Burleigh, Nina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553106295 ISBN 13: 9780553106299

Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

A painstakingly researched, intriguing biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer details her unhappy marriage to a high-level CIA agent, her romance with President John F. Kennedy, and the mystery surrounding her still-unsolved murder. 30,000 first printing.

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Nina Burleigh's articles have appeared in Time, The Washington Post,The Chicago Tribune, and New York Magazine. She lives in New York.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

nduring mysteries of recent decades was the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the well-born, beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a CIA official, who was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath in 1964. Mary Meyer was a mistress of JFK, and after her death, news that she had kept a diary set off a tense search for the document by CIA spymaster James Jesus Angelton as well as Mary's brother-in-law, journalist Ben Bradlee. But the crime was never solved, and today her life and death are still a source of fascination, as Nina Burleigh will reveal in a book that looks at a heady, sometimes glamorous period in the nation's capitol, and at a woman who embodied the grace and turbulence of her times.

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Introduction


Anyone wanting to write about a member of the silent generation of women that mothered the baby boom and married the cold warriors confronts a peculiar obstacle: Many of these women believe their lives were utterly unremarkable. The cold war wives review years spent raising children and keeping house, arranging dinner parties for dignitaries, making art, or getting jobs. They find their personal histories bland compared to their husbands', men with war wounds on their bodies and secrets of state in their brains, men whose turf ranged from Havana to Moscow and Paris to Bucharest, and whose work altered world history.

When the woman in question had an affair with a married president of the United States and then died violently, the obstacle of humility is compounded by embarrassment and sorrow. Mary Pinchot Meyer's sister and closest friend say they burned her diary, and a CIA official destroyed her other papers, obliterating her voice from history. Her closest surviving friends made an informal pact not to discuss her. Many people who will talk are persuaded—for reasons that have more to do with Mary's access to powerful men and with the tenor of the times than with available facts about the woman herself—that Mary Meyer "knew things" she wasn't supposed to know, and that her death is somehow related to that knowledge. Still others are quite happy to talk, but thirty years and advancing age have dimmed their memories. The protectiveness of her friends, the shame and sorrow of her family, and the political intrigue during her years in Washington have combined to make her life and death mythic, a part of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy legend.

Most of Mary Meyer's female peers outlived their husbands, men who drank hard and were often addicted to nicotine. These women devoted their later years to creative endeavor. In their seventies, avian and fine as porcelain, they take themselves and their work very seriously. They lived the earlier part of their lives unnoticed in a half-lit world of great refinement and delicate sensibility, eclipsed by the cold warriors and their nihilistic contest of rocket fuel and warheads and plutonium. These women painted or sculpted or wrote poetry or studied and suffered the husbands who strayed or ignored them or drank too much, or whose secret deeds were only revealed by congressional inquiries years later. Their children rebelled and got lost in drugs and the turmoil of the 1960s before coming home. They survived much.

Mary Meyer's death was a tragedy for her two surviving sons and for her sister and close friends. It was a tragedy from which the affected have tried to recover in different ways. One of those ways has been a protective silence. Like high priestesses guarding the Eleusinian mysteries, those ancient Greek fertility rites of blood and sex, her friends have protected the mystery of their lost friend's life, and with it the secret history of their group, once so important and now fading into old age, death, and history. They want Mary's story and the reasons behind a mad scramble for her diary after her death interred with her. In so doing, they protect the living as much as the dead. The image of their once-powerful set shall not be damaged while they live. Their very silence has perpetuated the mystery of their late friend more effectively than anything they might have said. Mary Meyer became a silhouette in her own story.

As the years passed and the secrets of the CIA dribbled out, Americans came to believe the cold warriors were capable of supreme acts of oversight and evil. To some minds the intelligence agency assumed the role of the invisible hand and became a controlling entity behind ever more complicated, interconnected webs of events inside America. This impression was amplified by the excessive secrecy of those times and by the official and unofficial guarding of those secrets over the years. Mary Meyer's name appears in classified documents that are still being released. Among documents relating to Mary Meyer that have been released by the CIA is a completely redacted ten-page document on CIA stationery, probably related to her husband's job. Another is not dated and is titled merely "Background Information." It is "a review of the appropriate Office of Security files" and contains her vital statistics and an explanation of the circumstances of her death. There may be other material on her at the CIA. A Freedom of Information Act request made to the CIA by the author could elicit more results in coming years.

But among the great secrets of the cold war in Washington—and there were many, not the least being the CIA's "family jewels" of assassinations and coups—there was another buried secret: sex. As hard as it might be to imagine it today, Washington was a sexier town in the years of the cold war. Flirtation was an art. Marriage was respected and divorce rates were still low, but the late 1950s and the early 1960s were the dawn of a new era in male-female relations, and traditional relationships were being tested. Experiments were undertaken, hearts were broken. The women of Mary Meyer's generation and class always operated with propriety, though. If their husbands and friends and even they were conducting themselves like characters from a John Updike novel, that was certainly nothing for the historians to note.

Sex is one reason why they feared Mary Meyer's diary. But Mary Meyer's whole life was no more about sex than anyone else's.

In my research and writing, I have tried to give Mary Meyer's life as much respect and dignity as historians automatically grant to important men. The life stories of women throughout recorded history are often the domestic histories of men, and this is no less true of the women of Mary's generation and class. Women figure in the private lives of famous men, in their beds and in the raising of those men's children and the keeping of their homes. More rarely they are compatriots or collaborators in the public sphere. Historians are interested in mistresses for what they reveal about the lives of the important men with whom they consorted. I have attempted to describe a woman, her men, and her times—and the effect of those times and men on her.

Mary Meyer's style was questing. She was an experimental, doubting woman, a woman with a will of her own, and those qualities made her unusual, especially in the convention-worshiping 1950s and especially among her female peers in Washington. Although she was not ordinary in terms of looks and means, her story is one that ordinary women will be able to recognize. It is an arc that many women in her generation experienced: A confident, athletic girl grew up to marry and bear children, became dissatisfied with her life, and embarked on a path toward the beginnings of personal authority and independence. It is an arc that Kate Chopin named in the title of her book The Awakening, and this name is entirely applicable to Mary Meyer's life. But Mary Meyer's own awakening was cut short by murder.

This book is roughly divided into four sections that examine Mary Meyer's life and world through the men with whom she was associated: her father, her husband, her lovers, and finally, the man acquitted of her murder. I did not plan this approach when I envisioned the book. But because her papers were destroyed, parts of her life story must be deduced from clues in the more public lives of the men in her life.

Researching this book, I had some breakthroughs in interviews and other primary research that cut through the fog of mystery and allowed me to glimpse the real woman. Whenever someone remembered a particularly telling anecdote, whenever I spotted a piece of her handwriting, whenever I saw a new photograph of her or one of her paintings, I felt like an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553106295
• ISBN 13: 9780553106299
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 356
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar