THE DAYS OF MARY MEYER

Blonde and exquisite, feisty and fey, she was one of a group of bright, intense, and hungry people who held sway in that era — too much, perhaps, for their own good. Drinking, depression, and breakdowns were frequent. Mary’s ex-husband’s boss, CIA chief Frank Wisner, shot himself after a harrowing bout with manic depression. So did Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. So did James Truitt, a Newsweek reporter who had been Mary’s confidant (and who sold her story to tabloids). And those who escaped their own demons seemed to draw down upon themselves the demons of others. John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963; his brother Robert, five years later. And Mary herself was murdered in 1964, shot twice as she walked one October afternoon along the canal in Georgetown.

Mary Meyer’s life was entangled in secrets: the secrets of her husband’s CIA job, which rotted their marriage; a secret affair with President Kennedy (which the Bradlees learned about on the night of her murder); her secret diary that was spirited away by CIA counter-spy James Jesus Angleton. And her murder, which has never been solved, seems haunted by secrets — the secrets she may have learned in a CIA family, secrets she may have been told by Kennedy.

Ex-Time staffer Nina Burleigh does not manage to resolve these secrets in her new book, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. But Burleigh does present a sensitive study of a time, place, and woman — interspersed with political lunacy. As a tirade against war and male beastliness, A Very Private Woman proves tiresome. But as a social history, murder mystery, and character study, it evokes a by-gone era and a private woman made public by death.

As mistresses go, Mary Meyer was close to the top, a companion as well as a plaything. Described as “wildly beautiful, in the Grace Kelly sense,” she was born Mary Pinchot in 1920 to a wealthy political family. At Grey Towers, the family’s country estate in Pennsylvania, she and her siblings rode, splashed in pools, played tennis, and dined on peacock, homegrown. At twenty-four, after finishing at Vassar, she married Cord Meyer, a poet who had gone into World War II a pacifist and come out a military hero.

After the war, as head of covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, Meyer gradually changed from a poet into an overworked bureaucrat for an agency immersed in bizarre plans to kill Castro with conch shells. To escape, Mary plunged into art, and then into an affair with an Italian playboy, whom she met on the “husband-dumping” tour of Europe she took with her sister Tony in 1954. (Just as Mary dropped Meyer, so Tony dropped her own Washington-lawyer husband for Ben Bradlee, whom she wed the next year.)

Mary made plans to settle in the American West with her lover and children, but before her divorce was finalized the playboy had deserted her and her middle child had been killed in a traffic accident. Still stunned, she moved to Georgetown to begin life as an Unmarried Woman, setting up a studio in the Bradlees’ garage and starting an affair with a then-struggling artist, Kenneth Noland. (She also tried to drown her sorrows in the curious therapies of psychiatrists who specialized in orgone boxes and experiments with LSD.)

In 1959, as the affair with Noland was ending, she ran into John Kennedy and resumed their old friendship. In 1961, she began to appear at the White House — at first at Jackie’s invitation and then on evenings when Jackie was out. Logged into the White House around 7:30, usually on the arm of one of the president’s social retainers (“William Walton plus one”), she would be driven home around midnight. Kennedy was famous for quickly losing interest in his conquests, but Mary appears to have been the exception, becoming an integral part of his universe. As Burleigh writes,

So frequent was her proximity to the president, and so obvious Kennedy’s admiration for her, that [White House counsel Myer] Feldman felt Mary might make a good conduit to the president’s ear. . . . Longtime Kennedy aide Dave Powers recalled . . . , “Jack loved to talk to her and he talked to her about just about anything.”

Mary was often called to the White House at times of political and personal crisis: She was there on August 5, 1962, when Marilyn Monroe was found dead; in October, when Mississippi governor Ross Barnett challenged the federal government to a civil-rights showdown; on June 12, 1963, when civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered; in August 1963, two days after their friend Philip Graham committed suicide.

It is this extraordinary closeness to a president that led Mary’s friends to insist that there must be a reason she was shot to death on the canal towpath, eleven months after the president himself had been killed. Was it something political or personal that he told her? And what did they talk about? Did her family ask Angleton to look for her diary? Or did he break into Mary’s studio himself? Why didn’t Angleton burn the diary when Tony Bradlee asked him to? Was it copied? Does it still exist?

A suspect was arrested near Mary’s body, but no weapon was ever recovered, and at the trial in July 1965, the evidence was deemed inconclusive. Burleigh thinks this was largely thanks to incompetent prosecution and suggests that the verdict had been a politically correct one: The suspect was black, the Summer of ’65 riots had started, and this was one issue the white establishment did not wish to press. But many people thought then, and still think, that Mary’s had been a professional killing and that the murderer had slipped away into the nearby woods.

Like the scenes of her life, the scenes of her death were filled with establishment figures. The U.S. district attorney for Washington was David Acheson, son of former secretary of state Dean Acheson and brother-in-law of presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy. The judge was Howard Corcoran, brother of Washington super-lawyer Tommy Corcoran, and the judge’s law clerk was the young Robert Bennett. Sam Donaldson was present as a young reporter. Ben Bradlee was the first witness called.

But her murder, along with that of Kennedy, marked the end of the world in which the pre-Vietnam establishment lived, with its assumptions of safety, order, and personal dominance. Accustomed to money and power, they had been reared to both duty and privilege, taught to think of the world as their province — to ask much of but also to save. They were equally capable of courage and hubris, sacrifice and greed. But the deaths of the Kennedys robbed them of power, the Vietnam War broke careers and friendships. Marriages ended. Children took drugs and dropped out.

At evoking this now-vanished world, Nina Burleigh proves very successful. Unfortunately, her perceptive reporting in A Very Private Woman is matched by cultural polemics and political theories not quite consistent with facts. Does it matter that the author is the same Nina Burleigh who effused in the magazine Mirabella about the charms of Bill Clinton, and then told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post that she would be happy to gratify the president in reward for his pro-abortion views?

It turns out that the answer is yes. Burleigh’s biography of Mary Meyer is a look back at the Kennedy years through the lens of the Clinton era, where countercultural values hold sway. Mary’s complex and personal story becomes a political struggle. Nuclear war and the nuclear family are declared intertwined forms of repression and menace, summed up in Mary’s 1950s marriage to a member of the CIA. “Domestic security was exalted on every level — nationally, in the suburban streets, inside the home,” Burleigh writes. “The post-war ethic was about home and family. Beneath that placid surface . . . nuclear annihilation was the submerged threat.” And this threat, it turns out, was brought on by American militance goading a peaceful Soviet Union into taking action in its own defense.

Lacking any form of historical context, Burleigh’s narrations are filled with ghastly descriptions of bombs going off and predictions of casualties, as though these were things that American presidents were either ignorant of or indifferent toward. The cause of the Cuban missile crisis Burleigh ascribes to Kennedy’s threatening rhetoric. And it is not the Russian missiles but the American response to them that “brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been.” Meanwhile, Kennedy continued to host his glittering parties with Mary and others: “Diverting attention from terrifying displays of fire and warlike rhetoric was the parade of intimate dinners and glamorous fetes at the White House. The charred images of atomic warfare hovered over the festivities like the plague in the ‘Masque of the Red Death.'”

This martial world was also a man’s world, in which women “were ‘tomatoes,’ ‘the females,’ present for male amusement.” Now and then they showed up “with children or party plans,” only to be sent back to the kitchen again. It was this culture, in Burleigh’s account, from which Mary broke free. But even in mistressly escape, she got no respect: not from her artist-lover of the late 1950s and certainly not from Kennedy, both of whom loved her for all the wrong reasons. After calling Kennedy “a decorated World War II veteran” as though it were an insult, Burleigh quotes as proof of Kennedy’s insensitivity a comment he is said to have made to a friend about Jackie: “She’s everything that a woman should be. She’s beautiful, she paints.”

What the reader finally discovers in A Very Private Woman is a feminist view in which feminine grace is a sign of abjection and masculinity a sign of evil — unless women display it. Burleigh sees nothing amiss in Kennedy’s constant adulteries, but she is moved to fury by Kennedy’s social banter with goodlooking women. It is not the president’s bedrooms but his dinner parties that are the scene of obscene debauchery. “The women filled the role once filled by dancing girls in the courts of the sultans. They were there to amuse the president, visually, conversationally, and in some cases, in bed.” The key word here is not “bed” but “amuse the president,” as though pleasing a man were a sin.

In Burleigh’s telling, the broken arc of Mary Meyer’s life becomes a feminist fable: “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.” The reader watches Mary move from war to peace, power to art, domesticity and marriage to sexual freedom, patriarchy to autonomy, reason to emotion — in short, from the conformist, male-centered world of the 1950s to the liberated 1960s.

But, of course, even what Burleigh herself records shows it was not that simple. The hard-nosed cold warriors were people who listened to music, read widely and deeply, and appreciated art. One female friend remembers that James Angleton had “a very fascinating, romantic, Bohemian side. [He] was the most romantic man I’ve ever known.” Cord Meyer was a poet who collected art and encouraged Mary in her early painting.

Burleigh writes of housekeeping and mothering as though they were nothing but drains on the creative instinct of women, but Mary seems in fact to have liked caring for her children and her home. It wasn’t patriarchal oppressions and nascent feminist stirrings that wrecked her marriage, but the enormous strains of CIA work. “I don’t know how I got through them,” Angleton’s wife said about his years in the service. “The men were decent enough, but their nerves were shot.”

Burleigh makes Mary a sexual rebel on principle and describes her plans to elope with her Italian playboy as part of her awakening from male oppression, though it seems more likely a case of bad taste and bad judgment. Indeed, if her post-marriage life were an awakening, why did she regress to John Kennedy, a man straight out of the CIA playbook, aggressive, controlling, and male?

In fact, the cliches of the feminist movement are wholly inadequate to describe this woman, these men, and the times they lived in. And, oddly enough, it is Burleigh’s skill as a reporter that contradicts her sledgehammer attacks on the military-testosterone complex. A Very Private Woman is a wonderful read with a maddening subtext, as though Betty Friedan had strayed into a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Even in Nina Burleigh’s reporting, Mary Meyer emerges not as a feminist but as a very feminine woman with very feminine interests that she pursued with an almost masculine will. She wanted art and emotion, not position and power, but she went after them with all the aggression with which some men pursue their careers.

In the contrasts in her life — her serious side and her wildness, her desire to be a good person while still being reckless — she was very much like the CIA people and even more like John Kennedy. Not a rebel against the men in her circle, she was very much part of her age.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia.