THE DAYS OF MARY MEYER

Back in the middle years of the Cold War, when Georgetown was the center of the universe, there was a woman named Mary Meyer who always seemed to be in the thick of things.

Daughter of a colleague of Theodore Roosevelt, ex-wife of the CIA’s Cord Meyer, and a sister-in-law of Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief Ben Bradlee, she was a neighbor to the Kennedys, a friend of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and a frequent guest of Alice’s cousin, Joseph W. Alsop. She was present at the social beginnings of Camelot, the White House dinner dance for some seventy friends of the Kennedys on March 15, 1961, where the president sat between Mary and Tony Bradlee, her sister.