Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

by Peter Janney

  Still uncertain of a path for his vision, Cord entered Yale Law School in February 1945, commuting back and forth from New York. Not interested in entering his family’s well-established, highly profitable real estate business, he considered a legal career to be a sound stepping-stone to public life. But the drudgery of the law curriculum bored him; he longed to continue writing. In April 1945, Cord received word that former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, soon to be a U.S. delegate to the San Francisco Conference that would establish the United Nations, had chosen him to be one of his aides for the conference. Cord leaped at the chance and immediately went to Washington to meet with Stassen. The following day, he returned to New York where he and Mary were quietly married at her mother’s apartment. The two would attend the conference together. Mary would report the event for UPI.

  Stassen had chosen Cord on recommendations from a number of American colleges. He would not be disappointed. After the conference, asked about the quality of Cord’s work, Stassen said, “[H]e turned in the best reports of the day of the proceedings and got them to me twice as fast as anyone else.” Stassen would later say of Cord, “That young man has the best mind of any young man in America.”14

  Increasingly persuasive and articulate about his emerging vision for the prospect of a world without war, Cord was critical of the first UN conference in San Francisco. Despite the extravagant press claims that the conference had been a major step forward in ensuring a peaceful future for the world, Cord already knew differently. The proposed UN Security Council veto power, as well as certain other provisions, made it virtually impossible for the new organization to protect against armed aggression. “This is a step in the right direction,” Cord told John Crider of the New York Times, “but there will have to be amendments to make it work. I don’t see how it can prevent war unless it grows into something more than seems to be contemplated here. It seems to be the only practical solution at the moment, but it remains to be seen if it is workable.” Cord concluded, “[T]he only real solution is a genuine federation of the nations so they would not be free to make war, but would be subordinate to a higher law.”15

  Cord had just articulated twenty-three words that might open an entirely new era: “… a genuine federation of the nations so they would not be free to make war, but would be subordinate to a higher law.” It was May 2, 1945, barely a week after the UN charter conference in San Francisco had begun. The mission he and Mary would share for the next three years was coming into focus, and his presence at the conference wasn’t going unnoticed. “There was a lot of talk about Cord Meyer who was a young political hopeful at that time,” said Betty Coxe Spaulding, who attended the conference with her husband, Chuck Spaulding. “He was married to Mary Pinchot at that time, so Cord and Mary, Chuck and I, and Jack [Kennedy] and his girlfriend would spend time together.”16

  As it happened, or perhaps as fate would have it, Jack Kennedy was covering the event as a newspaper correspondent for the Hearst newspaper Chicago Herald-American. Whatever social temptations beckoned, young Kennedy did manage to file seventeen three-hundred-word stories, mainly focusing on the emerging tensions between Russia and the West. His stories always included his picture, byline, and a short bio—”PT-boat hero of the South Pacific and son of former Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy”—as well his authorship of the best-selling Why England Slept. Yet Jack’s astute grasp of the unfolding post–World War II power grab was steadily drawing attention. Like Cord, he was being courted by the Atlantic Monthly’s editor, Edward Weeks. “I haven’t changed my views that disarmament is an essential part of any lasting peace,” Jack wrote back to the editor during the conference. In one Hearst dispatch, Kennedy wrote that “diplomacy might be said to be the art of who gets what and how, as applied to international affairs.”17 And like Cord, he would leave the conference with a sense of some inevitable showdown among world powers that the UN would, in the end, be completely powerless to stop.18

  During the San Francisco UN conference, Jack and Cord had a legendary confrontation.19 Still dazzled by Mary’s allure, Jack was willing to try almost anything to stay connected with her. Sensing the intrusion, Cord would have none of it. Testosterone sparks of territorial infringement quickly flared amid whatever social discourse was taking place. Realizing Cord’s position as a principal liaison to U.S. delegate Harold Stassen, Jack wanted to interview him for one of his press filings, but Cord snubbed him, declining the invitation. Jack never forgot the dismissal; years later, when Cord wanted out of the CIA and solicited Kennedy for the ambassadorship to Guatemala, the president ignored him. Joseph W. Shimon, a close Kennedy White House aide who talked and walked with President Kennedy daily, noted in 1975 that the president never forgave anyone who crossed him. “Bobby would threaten you,” said Shimon, “he’d holler, scream, kick you, anything. Jack was a strong, deep, silent guy, really more so than people realize. Jack wouldn’t threaten you. Jack would do it to you. He’d just pull that string and you’re through.”20

  Cord and Mary left the UN charter conference discouraged. Despite the many efforts to find some unifying supranational authority against “the death agony of nationalism” that forever propelled one nation against another, the United Nations was neutered even before its inception. Recalling one of his mentors at Yale, Cord mused: “[Professor Nicholas] Spykman showed us that the existence of sovereign states had always led to wars. He didn’t think anything could be done about it; he was quite cynical about the chances of peace.”21 The press had made extravagant claims about the conference as a major step toward ensuring peace throughout the world, but Cord felt differently. The proposed United Nations Security Council veto power, for example, made it virtually impossible for the new organization to protect against armed aggression. The Soviets, keen to protect their independence, had opposed all attempts to give the UN real power. So had the U.S. Senate, which prohibited the American delegation from proposing anything that would limit America’s hegemony.

  Cord’s frustration with bureaucratic roadblocks, however, paled next to the wrenching horror he experienced upon receiving an early morning phone call from his mother on May 31. His fraternal twin brother, Quentin, had been killed in action during an entrenched battle with the Japanese on Okinawa. One of his wiremen had been hit by sniper fire. Quentin had rushed to help him and was killed by fragments from a Japanese grenade. The war between nations had just become even more personal, taking from Cord someone whom he had loved deeply

  Though comforted by Mary, Cord was shattered by the death of his brother, yet there was little show of grief. Without expression, “absolute fury” and the emotional pain that drove it would eventually extract the kind of toll that forever torments a soul. Those closest to Cord would repeatedly remark how big a blow the death of his twin brother had been. “Cord was always very closed off emotionally and protective of his private life,” recalled his former Yale classmate, newspaperman Charlie Bartlett. “I don’t think he ever got over the loss of his brother.”22

  The letter Cord wrote to his parents after brother Quentin’s death was disciplined, stoic, and philosophical. He spoke of his brother’s bravery, of his lack of guile, and his belief that Quentin would go on living in the hearts and minds of those who loved him. Later attempting to make sense of the loss, he recalled a memory of Quentin where he “saw him in the moonlight with his head raised in a gesture of farewell, and though we were twins still young in his unconquerable grace, that I should have to answer how I spent my days since we parted, and that it was necessary that I should be able to give a simple, honest answer.” A month later, he recorded in his journal that he had “opened the front page of a book to meet an introductory quote that read: Thy brother’s blood cries from the ground. If I could only understand clearly what it said, then it should be done no matter what the obstacles or the dangers. We who survive are the debtors until we also die.”23

  Jack Kennedy’s close friend Chuck Spaulding had known Cord well enough to be “fascinated by t
he difference between Meyer and Jack,” perhaps sensing that either one of them might rise to the greatest of political heights. “Cord Meyer did come back from the war with the loss of an eye and the loss of a brother in a similar respect to Jack and was so affected by it,” Spaulding reflected. “But Kennedy was never affected like that [regarding the war death of his older brother, Joe]. He was never pushed off this hard, sensible center of his being.”24 Such became the hardened character of these men, both of whom had looked up “the asshole of death” and survived war’s slaughter. But though he was imbued with the sensibility of a poet, the province of genuine human intimacy often challenged and eluded Cord. His deepest emotional expression seemed confined to his journal writing, in which he demonstrated an unusually complex understanding and vulnerability that he was rarely able to express in life. Jack Kennedy appeared content to avoid any intimacy in human relationships entirely. Emotionally crippled in his relations with women, he detested being embraced, and then compulsively showered, sometimes as often as five times a day, only then to crave the most intimate merging of all, sexual union.25

  The impact of World War II on the men who returned was poignantly expressed by Mary Meyer’s dear friend Anne Truitt in 1982: “Confronted by the probability of their own deaths, it seems to me that many of the most percipient men of my generation killed off those parts of themselves that were most vulnerable to pain, and thus lost forever a delicacy of feeling on which intimacy depends. To a less tragic extent we women also had to harden ourselves and stood to lose with them the vulnerability that is one of the guardians of the human spirit.”26 Cord’s anesthetization to grief would eventually maim his capacity for sustaining intimacy in relationship, and not just with Mary.

  After leaving the UN San Francisco Conference, Cord and Mary traveled by train to Montana to take a month-long honeymoon. Cord already had his next writing assignment for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “A Serviceman Looks at the Peace.” The cross-country train trip provided many hours for the essential discussion and reflection between the husband-and-wife team. Cord found it difficult to write about the illusion that the proposed structure of the United Nations was going “to be all love and kisses among the nations of the world.”27 Mary’s editing attempts only provoked his ire, eventually exasperating her to tears. The finished article, nonetheless, was blunt. Pulling no punches, Cord sternly warned that “for those of us who have fought not for power but because we believe in the possibility of peace, the Charter is nothing more than a series of harmless platitudes. Weak and inadequate as it stands today, it is all that we shall have won from the war.”28

  The article was due for publication in September 1945, and Cord submitted it at the very beginning of August. But a few days later, on August 6, and again on August 9, the entire world witnessed a global event of unprecedented magnitude: the detonation of the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Atomic Age had begun. For Cord, the path was now illuminated ever more profoundly. “I knew then that the question of world government was no longer a matter to be talked about for the future,” he told journalist Croswell Bowen. “I knew then it must come about immediately or we will all be finished.”29

  Edward Weeks, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was so impressed with Cord’s latest essay that he advised his acolyte to give up law and go to graduate school at Harvard, a door that Weeks would help open. Weeks considered Cord to be the brightest intellectual star, and he wanted him to be surrounded by the best minds. He facilitated Cord and Mary’s transition to Cambridge that September by giving Mary a job on the Atlantic’s editorial staff. Cord began taking courses at Harvard. In less than one month, Harvard would prove to be his launching pad to the world stage.

  In October 1945, Cord was invited to the Dublin Conference on World Peace in Dublin, New Hampshire. Presided over by Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts, the conference included such notables as New York lawyer Grenville Clark; former governor Thomas H. Mahony; UN conference consultant and future secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter; and Emery Reves, author of The Anatomy of Peace (1945). Reves’s book articulated the world federalist belief that the nation-state system was no longer viable. Given economic interdependence and capitalism’s need for a borderless world, the nation-state could no longer assure prosperity or stability, now that civilization had to contend with nuclear weapons. Only a supranational world government would create the possibility of protecting peace and promoting prosperity throughout the world, while hopefully promoting democracy as well.

  Cord agreed with this assessment, and he was able to articulate the vision in a way that no one else could. At the Dublin Conference that fall, his star began to rise. Norman Cousins, then editor of the Saturday Review, recalled walking into a bedroom and finding Cord sitting quietly on the edge of the bed, “… holding at bay some of the best minds in the country. Cord spoke quietly and with great intellectual force,” Cousins recalled in 1947. “He was modest but not objectionably so. You lost all consciousness of his youth and were only conscious of his reason and logic.”30

  The rising star was now shaping the policies of a number of post–World War II veterans groups, including the American Veterans Committee (AVC). Ideas for a new platform for world peace initiatives were gaining acceptance.

  He was asked by the Nation to write a series of articles that would bring into sharper focus a new policy for shaping and keeping the peace in the nascent nuclear age. Cord published “Waves of Darkness” in the January 1946 Atlantic Monthly. It would prove to be his best writing and one of the most insightful, penetrating war stories ever produced. The O. Henry Prize story gave a lightly fictionalized account of Cord’s foxhole trauma, and the force of will it took for him to go on living. That fall, Harvard bestowed yet another distinction on Cord, designating him a Lowell Fellow, one of the university’s highest honors.

  In February 1947, all of the U.S. organizations committed to the possibility of achieving world government convened in Asheville, North Carolina. Out of this conference, a new organization was formed: the United World Federalists (UWF). Cord’s presence at the conference won him further attention. His clarity of focus, entwined with his acumen for understanding, impressed the leaders of the various organizations represented at the conference. In spite of his youth—he was only twenty-six at the time—Cord was put forward as the person with the potential to lead the new movement for world government. When some in attendance protested Cord’s nomination on the grounds of his youth, New York attorney A. J. Priest stood up on Cord’s behalf.

  “Too young!” Priest said. “May I point out that Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison did their best work before they reached their 30s. I know this young man well. Despite my age, I know that I and others here would all be honored to make Cord Meyer our leader and to follow him.”31

  For the next two years, with Mary by his side, already mothering two young boys born within twenty-two months of each other, the charismatic war veteran would lead the charge for world government as the best hope to ensure world peace. Within two years, the UWF’s paid membership of seventeen thousand supporters swelled to forty thousand members. The UWF had fifteen state branches, several hundred local chapters, and a galvanized student movement. In addition, Cord’s new book, Peace or Anarchy, sold more than fifty thousand copies. Cord tirelessly traveled the country, attending conferences and giving speeches, one of which would be read into the Congressional Record on May 14, 1947, by Representative Chat Holifield of California.

  World Federalism became part of the American political landscape, attracting wide interest by such notables as atomic scientists Albert Einstein and Edward Teller, political figures Chester Bowles, General Douglas MacArthur, and finally President Truman himself. In 1949, Cord delivered an impassioned statement before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. It was inserted into the appendix of the Congressional Record by Senator Hubert Humphrey, a staunch supporter of the effort.32 As political scientist Frederick Schulman reflected in the
early 1950s, “World government had become for this generation the central symbol of Man’s will to survive, and of his moral abhorrence of collective murder and suicide.”33

  As his renown took center stage that first year, Cord appeared to be one of the young men in the Western world who would forge the post–World War II trajectory of geopolitics. Certainly he was well positioned, but what if he should falter? Who else was capable of climbing similar heights? The July 1947 issue of Glamour featured an article entitled “Wise American Leadership Is the Hope of World,” by Vera Michaels Dean. Written and published in three languages (English, French, and Russian), it outlined six basic requirements for the preservation of world peace. Immediately following the article was a portrait gallery of ten men, entitled “Young Men Who Care,” ranked in order of importance. The first two, ironically pictured side by side, were none other than Cord Meyer Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

  The caption under Cord’s picture read, “26 years old and a writer. He cares deeply about world government. Brilliantly articulate, he argues its case with lucid, patient logic. Ex-Yale and ex-Marine Corps, he gives back for the eye he lost in combat. His urgent vision of one world…. or none.”

  Under Jack’s picture, the caption read, “at 29, a Congressman. He believes good government begins at home. In a democracy which needs the best of its young men, here’s one son of an influential father who didn’t settle for a soft life. A veteran, he represents the Boston wharf district.”

  The remaining eight were positioned with four on each page.34