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

   October 12, 1964. The sky over Washington was crisp as a blue flag snapping in the breeze. Viewed from above, the city was verdant. Great swaths of parkland, tended gardens, and traffic circles gave the urban landscape an elegant southern flavor. After the steaming summer, the foliage had been slow to turn. The tall, imposing dome of the Capitol faced the Washington Monument across the Mall, two white chess pieces on a green board.
   At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the president's house was still a symbol of the tragedy of John F. Kennedy's assassination less than a year before. From the turrets and widow's walks of embassies, from the Truman Balcony of the White House, from the Capitol and the top of the Washington Monument, the city below was all trees and marble. "The City of Magnificent Distances" was what someone had called Washington in the nineteenth century. But this postcard view did not reveal everything. Obscured by the spreading treetops, dwarfed by the monuments and federal architecture, down on ground level Washington was a poor city. Whole sections of it were crumbling under decades of poverty. Many black people who were part of the city's majority lived in slum houses erected almost a hundred years earlier by black refugees from the Civil War. This Washington was one tourists rarely saw. Some black families remained without plumbing or electricity. Few had telephones. Crime, rats, and tuberculosis infested the hidden city.
   Two bridges at Q and P Streets linked old colonial Georgetown with the federal city of Washington. The spans, resting on concrete arches that soared hundreds of feet above Rock Creek, were reminiscent of ancient Rome in their scale and whiteness. On the narrow streets of Georgetown, civility ruled. Important men slept here and worked by day across the bridges. The old cobblestones and red brick sidewalks were quiet and vacant but for a maid or a woman visiting friends. Along the walls of the townhouses and mansions, light quivered against leaded glass panes and disappeared in pools of shadow behind draperies shielding Russian icons, African wood carvings, Persian carpets, and Chinese prints the occupants had collected on their global forays. Late roses bloomed; vines of ivy and bamboo stalks shared space against the old stone walls.
   It was an ideal day for walking. In a converted garage studio behind the red brick house owned by journalist Ben Bradlee, a woman was painting. She had short blond hair, full lips, and blue eyes quick to see humor. She was two days short of her forty-fourth birthday, but she usually passed for at least a decade younger. Her two teenage sons had recently moved back to their boarding schools in New Hampshire and Connecticut. Divorced and with children away at school, she was alone again in her house. Free to choose her companions, she sought out artistic, vivid people. The night before, she had entertained British theater director Peter Brook, who was in Washington to direct the hit play Marat/Sade. But inside her studio was where she felt most alive. The shelves were lined with paint and tools, her collection of music boxes and other small objects, stones and leaves and sometimes a flower from her garden. She could run her hands along the rough edges of her work table and down to the silky head of Mommacat, an alley cat who gave birth every six months. Her latest kittens mewled from a box in the corner. It was time to tack up another Free Kittens sign on the door. Looking out the window, she registered the blue of the sky and filed the color in her mind. This morning she had poured pale blues and grays onto an unsized canvas on the floor in a style that other painters were making so famous it eventually got a name: the Washington Color School.
   Around noon she propped up the painting before a fan to let it dry. She put on a gray mink-and-lambswool sweater, then a light blue angora sweater over it, donned her Kay-Bans, pulled on a pair of kid leather gloves, and in her paint-specked canvas sneakers and pedal-pusher slacks set off for her daily walk on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath. She left the little studio in the alley off N Street and strolled down the cobblestoned hill toward the Potomac River, passing rows of trim townhouses with their red and gray doors and brass knockers.
   As she crossed M Street a long black car with official plates slowed and the rear window rolled down. One of the capital's most prominent women, Polly Wisher, wife of Frank Wisner, head of the CIA's worldwide covert operations for many years, waved and called out a greeting in the refined accent of a 1930s movie star, all broad a's and dropped r's--"Good-bye, Maahry." The car passed on. Polly was on her way to London, where her husband would be stationed for a few more years with the agency. She would be the last friend to see the artist alive.
   Soon the woman was on the canal towpath. She passed below the old brownstone trolley car garage that the CIA had turned into a site for training third-world police forces. She passed a white male jogger who worked at the Pentagon. She continued walking farther away from Georgetown and civilization until she encountered someone near a small cottonwood tree. Two mechanics working on a disabled vehicle on the street high above the path heard her screams and her last words: "Someone help me." Before they could look over the stone ledge and down into the woods, two shots rang out. The first bullet to her head would eventually have killed her but didn't immediately; bleeding from the wound, she clung to the small tree and tried to fend off her attacker with her free hand. As she lost consciousness she probably saw white. There are so many shades of white--cloud white, shell white, sail white, sand white--but this was like no white she had ever known, more painful than the blinding white of sunlight. She fell. The gun was applied once more to her shoulder blade and the bullet tore into her aorta, shutting off the blood to her heart, turning everything black in one breath, shutting out color, ending her life, and leaving her dead body to police and to the speculation of the ages.
The National Cathedral is built of gray stone at the highest point of Wisconsin Avenue, overlooking Georgetown. Light streaks its echoing nave, pouring in through stained-glass windows that depict the history of America from the Indians to the astronauts. The construction of the cathedral took a century, and parts of it were still unfinished in 1964, when two hundred mourners gathered inside the cathedral's Bethlehem Chapel to pay their last respects to Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer on what would have been her birthday, October 14, 1964. It fell to her brother-in-law to do much of the funeral planning. Ben Bradlee hired the undertakers and arranged for the organ music at the service. The altar was framed by white lilies and chrysanthemums, and their heavy scent filled the air in the crowded chapel. The coffin was draped with a flag. Some of the deceased artist's friends felt the journalist had overdone it a bit, given Mary's taste for simplicity. But the setting was appropriate to the mourners, many of whom were accustomed to official pomp.
   Most of the men and women at the service that day were members of Washington's upper echelon, consummate insiders and veterans of the social scene swirling around the Kennedy administration. The mourners were as accustomed to wending their way across third-world tarmacs to waiting planes as they were to undergoing psychoanalysis, attending private clubs, receiving White House invitations, and dressing for dinner. They placed monogrammed matchbooks in the crystal ashtrays at their homes. The women were witty and conversant in the latest political gossip, and they wielded power decisively with the guest lists for their dinner parties. Their men were some of the nation's most influential fixers, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, spies, and journalists. Family money made their government salaries superfluous. Many of them lived in Georgetown.
The Potomac River, not politics and statecraft, initially gave colonists a reason to settle at what became Georgetown. Slaves, ice, and coal were all shipped and unloaded at the waterfront in the early years, but tobacco was the port's mainstay. In the eighteenth century tobacco was shipped up the river from southern plantations and stored in Georgetown warehouses on its way to England. The tobacco trade conferred prosperity on many a local merchant. The "George" of Georgetown was England's King George II, but the name might as well have referred to Scottish merchant George Gordon, owner of the port's largest wharf warehouse.
   In 1871 Congress annexed Georgetown to the newer federal capital city of Washington. A few decades later its separate name was officially erased. But Georgetown retained its identity long after it became part of Washington. Residents always listed addresses in "Georgetown" without mentioning the District of Columbia. For years Georgetown was considered a slum, but by the 1960s the area was beginning to have a certain status. It was on its way to being Washington's Beacon Hill. A restoration effort begun in the 1930s had transformed the neighborhood into a white upper-class enclave within a city. The change was rapid and sweeping. Blacks made up twenty-two percent of the neighborhood in 1940, but by 1960 they were less than three percent. They were replaced by white men returning from World War II and their families. With the advent of the cold war, a generation of elite young men who might previously have gone back to the family business or to Wall Street were attracted to Washington. The old townhouses in Georgetown were conveniently located, charming, and cheap. Real estate agents bought whole blocks and sold them to the new white arrivals. Soon the only vestiges of the black community in Georgetown were a few churches, to which parishioners traveled every Sunday from their new homes across town.
   Georgetown in 1964 was a cozy place where people left their doors unlocked. But the community was home to too many important people to be truly quaint, and too full of classified information to be called friendly. Dean Acheson, Alien Dulles, Robert McNamara, and Frank Wisner were among the powerful men with addresses in the little colonial village. A new being, the national media celebrity, was also an inhabitant: Joseph Alsop, Ben Bradlee, Walter Lippmann, Rowland Evans, and Art Buchwald were among them. The professional intimacy among the spies, policy makers, and journalists reflected a social continuity. They dined at each other's homes, wrote letters of introduction for each other's children and wives traveling abroad, and recommended each other's sons to Harvard, Yale, or St. Paul's School.
By October each year, Washingtonians who summered in the country--Maine, Maryland, and Virginia were favorite retreats--had returned. Georgetown women and children traditionally left the city during the summers, which were so uncomfortably humid before the age of air-conditioning that diplomats received hardship pay if they were posted to the American capital. The men stayed in the sweltering city to attend to affairs of state or to run national magazines and newspapers. Summers in midcentury Washington were such a men's club that one of the Georgetown women who stayed behind was designated head of "The Wives' Protective Association" by the other wives. They were half serious. The capital's moral tone was set by Congress, where in the secretly swinging 1950s and early 1960s senators and representatives were accustomed to the occasional assignation with a willing woman from the typing pool or reception desk. Private morality rarely matched public appearance.
   Mary Meyer's murder stunned the little community. While she was not one of the city's premier hostesses, Mary was a well-liked member of a social group that had formed around the cold warriors and the Kennedy administration. She was from a prominent family and related by marriage to one of the city's highest-profile journalists. Her ex-husband was one of the top officers at the CIA. She had been a fixture at the Kennedy White House and--a fact known to a few--one of the late president's lovers.
After the mourners filed in and took their seats, after the whispering and sniffling sounds of grief had died down, another Yale graduate, dressed in the white and red vestments of a suffragan bishop in the Episcopal Church, walked to the altar. Bishop Paul Moore was a family friend who had known Ben Bradlee, Mary Meyer, and her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, since the 1930s. He spoke of Mary's "honesty, her friendship, her rare sensitivity, that beauty which walked with her and which flowed from her into each of our lives." He then called for forgiveness in a six-minute oration. "We cannot know why such a terrible, ugly irrational thing should have happened. We can only sense that it was in some way bound up with sin and sickness of the entire world ... somewhere perhaps in a pattern invisible to anybody else except God Himself," he said. Then Moore asked for prayers for "that demented soul" who caused the "senseless tragedy." But many were not prepared to forgive the murderer, and the less liberal members of the crowd were incensed at the minister for bringing politics into the chapel by trying to portray the alleged killer as a victim and the killing as an act perpetrated by poverty and injustice.
   There was much quiet murmuring in the cathedral that afternoon about the accused. Some people did believe the police theory--that Mary was the unlucky victim of an assault randomly committed by a twenty-five-year-old day laborer named Ray Crump Jr., who was arrested not far from the murder scene. Others were uncertain. Mary had been a sometimes reckless woman with access to the highest levels of the American government. There were so many spies at her funeral. It was less than a year since the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission's report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in shooting the president in Dallas had been released just two weeks before Mary's murder. Most people didn't question its conclusion, at least not yet. But this murder, coming so soon after the assassination, was disquieting. "It was strange, especially the way the police and newspapers rushed to judgment about who did it. It felt wrong," said one of Mary's friends.
One man sobbed unconsolably throughout the ceremony. Cord Meyer was a wounded World War II hero now overseeing a network of CIA front groups, and until that day many in Georgetown had not realized how much he still loved the woman who had divorced him seven years before. Meyer was a tall man whose boyish handsomeness had hardened into a gray statue of itself. The glass eye that replaced the one destroyed by shrapnel from a Japanese grenade stared always straight ahead. He was a man who had started life with a map, and only in middle age had he begun to realize that the map didn't fit the terrain. Instead of the life of public service and acclaim he had envisioned for himself, he was buried deep in the secret bureaucracy of the CIA, his service to his country forever classified. Throughout the early 1960s, including in newspaper articles about his ex-wife's murder, when Cord Meyer was mentioned he was always referred to simply as a "government employee." Within a month of her death he left on a trip abroad, identifying himself on his passport application as a "writer" on a "pleasure" trip. There was some truth to the cover. Cord Meyer considered himself a writer whose novels were forever delayed by the demands of his government job. The passport application had also required him to answer the question "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" He typed "No." Well-bred and intelligent, Cord was known around town as a confrontational man whose worldview was growing more hawkish by the day and who sometimes drank too much and disrupted dinner parties with his arguments. His passionate need to win every disagreement was legendary. He was also a collector of modern art who could recite the poetry of Stephen Spender.
   Cord Meyer was comforted at the funeral by two men from the top of the CIA. Richard Helms, a thin, impeccably mannered man who would eventually head the CIA, had taken the day off to attend the service. He and Cord Meyer were colleagues but also warm personal friends. Cord Meyer had sponsored Helms and his wife for membership in the Waltz Group, which hosted dinner-dances for the Washington elite several times a year. The two went back more than a decade in the CIA and had weathered many crises together.
   The fact that Mary's death concerned the CIA bigwigs is noted in a declassified, heavily redacted FBI memo regarding the rescheduling of a meeting between CIA director John McCone and Helms and FBI officials. The reason for the meeting is not stated in the memo, which was written by an FBI agent named William C. Sullivan, J. Edgar Hoover's number-two man. "On 10/14/64, Helms advised the Liaison Agent that it will be impossible for CIA officials to meet with me and Supervisor [name redacted] on 10/14/64, and suggested that the meeting be held at 10:00 a.m. 10/15/64. Helms explained that both he and Angleton have been very much involved with matters pertaining to the death and funeral of Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer. She is the woman who was murdered on the canal towpath near Georgetown on 10/12/64. She was the former wife of Cord Meyer, a CIA official." In an interview, Helms could not recall exactly what personal involvement the memo noted beyond his attendance at the funeral.
   The "Angleton" referred to in the memo was Cord Meyer's closest friend and fellow Yale graduate, James Jesus Angleton, second only to J. Edgar Hoover as the nation's greatest collector of personal secrets. Angleton had been personally close to Mary as well. He occupied the post of CIA counterintelligence chief, charged with deciding which of America's spies might be traitors. Half Mexican, half Anglo-Saxon, Angleton was stooped and cadaverous, with fingers stained yellow from years of heavy smoking. Angleton's passions included Italy and anything English, dry-fly fishing, and raising orchids. He had a reputation for paranoia. He never opened the blinds in his office and kept the drapes pulled on top of them. He was rarely seen. CIA official David Atlee Phillips said Angleton was so reclusive, Phillips mistook another man for Angleton for fifteen years. His pronouncements were taken seriously. Some called him "the CIA's answer to the Delphic Oracle."
   Among his many responsibilities in the fight a
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