The first would be a man named Samuel Colt. I was wise enough to pick as a great-great-grandfather an otherwise odious tyrant named Cyrus Meachum, who did one intelligent thing in a legendarily grim life as a Hartford hardware-store owner. He believed in young Samuel Colt and his twirling new gizmo called the revolver, and invested in the sprout’s first Connecticut plant (the first of all, in New Jersey, had failed). It was an excellent career move, as all of us subsequent generations of Meachums have benefited from the colonel’s invention, in a never-ending supply of just enough moolah to let us do what we wanted instead of what we needed. We had the best of schools, the best of holidays, the pleasures of big houses on hills under towering elms and of hearing the peasantry call our fathers “sir.” We rode the genocide of the Indians, the elimination of the Moros, the whipping of the Hun, the destruction of the Nazis, and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere to financial independence, happily. A few of us died in each of those campaigns, and my father, a career diplomat who served in the State Department before the war—in Paris, where I was raised, 1931–1937, where I picked up the language easily and totally—and in an outfit much heralded and, like all intelligence agencies, almost wholly worthless, called the Office of Strategic Services, which was actually more Red than Moscow was in the thirties! Then back to State for a genteel gentleman’s career. Thank you, Colonel Colt, for underwriting it all.
Here I should insert a footnote about the language that I learned “easily and totally.” It was not French, though I speak French. It was Russian. My nanny, Natasha, was an exiled White, a duchess, no less. An exquisite and cultured lady, she moved in high White circles, and Paris before the war was the White Russian Moscow, with the largest population of exiles anywhere on Earth. They were brilliant if deluded people: immensely cultured, extravagantly cosmopolitan, charming and witty and bold to a fault, of extremely high native IQ, generously seeded with genius, indefatigable in battle and literature. After all, they produced not only the great Nabokov but Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well. I may have even, as a small child, attended a soiree where N. himself was present, though I have no memory of it. So Russian was my first language, with a bit of aristocratic frost to it; meanwhile, my parents were busy doing the Paris scene, all but ignoring me, for which I thank them. Natasha’s lessons were far more meaningful and lasting than anything they could have taught me. This will explain much of what is to come in the tale ahead.
My second mentor was a man named Cleanth Brooks, of Yale, where I majored in American literature with a view toward going to Paris and working with some Harvard boys on an enterprise they had started up that seemed damn keen to me, called the Paris Review. Dr. Brooks had his problems, about which I will remain discreet, but he was the founder and high priest of an early-fifties discipline called the New Criticism. It held, with Spartan rigor, that text was everything. It didn’t matter what you read about a fellow in Time or Life, or what movie star he’d married or whether his dad had beaten him or his first wife had belittled the size of his dinger, none of that mattered. He didn’t even matter. Only the text mattered, and it must be examined closely, under laboratory conditions, without regard to personality or psychology or voodoo-hoodoo or what have you. Only then would its message, its meaning, its place in the universe, if any, be teased out. I loved the discipline of it, the zeal of it, the sense of probity. I suppose I longed to apply it to life, and I suppose I did, in some fashion.
Enough of those old ghosts. My most powerful mentor was a famous man, a glamorous man, a brave man, a man who sent me on my way. I must address him at some length for you to have any grasp of what happened and why in 1963.
His name was Cord Meyer. He recruited me on my father’s recommendation, spook-to-spook as it were, from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student in lit and alone insisted on the seriousness of a pornographer named V. Nabokov, to the Plans Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, where I was to toil and happily murder by proxy for forty years, every second of every day spent in the idea—or possibly delusion?—that I was helping my country against its enemies, that I was living up to the standards of dead Meachums the world’s battlefields over, that I was ensuring all those big words that made Hemingway cringe in the rain, such as “freedom” and “democracy.”
Cord was a toot and a half, believe me. I still have dreams and nightmares about him; I’ll never escape him. Perhaps you know the story: he was one of the most famous men the Agency ever produced, and, I would say, having known most of them, the best. He was thrice touched by fire when I went to work for him in 1961. He had first of all lost an eye as a marine officer in the Pacific. Cord never discussed it, but we are given to understand that he saw the hardest of hard combat, even the gory squalor of hand-to-hand with bayonet and entrenching tool against a desperate enemy. Cord was too diffident to wear an eye patch, knowing that it would make him too famous too young. He simply slipped a glass orb in the vacant socket, and only a man studying him would notice. It was the idea of the eye gone on Iwo or Entiwok or one of those god-awful, never-heard-of-again places that was far more powerful than a showy patch would have been.
His background after the war is probably pertinent. He emerged a pacifist, having seen too many bayonets crammed into the bellies of teenage boys who’d never gotten around to getting laid. He was attracted to the idea of one-world government, so that nations wouldn’t send fleets of boys with bayonets after one another on flyspecks in far oceans. He was active in the United Nations movement and labored sweatily in service to that dream. Somehow, around 1948, after three years of hard work, it dawned on him that the whole outfit had been infiltrated and taken over by Commies and that it would henceforth work exactly the opposite of its intended mission—that is, it had come to exist to enforce the hegemony of the red over the blue. Disillusioned, he made contact with Mr. Dulles, who, duly impressed, offered him a position.
He had a talent, a nose for it. Within five years he became head of Clandestine Services, in the Directorate of Plans, and if you don’t yet know, Clandestine was where it all happened, a hatchery for mayhem. Other outfits would call such a unit “Operations,” and it would acquire flashy nicknames like “The Ranch” or “The OK Corral,” and its operatives would be called “cowboys” or “gunslingers” or some such. It never looked as deadly as it was: a bayful of mild-looking Yalies (a few Princetonians and Brownies thrown in, the odd nonpedigreed genius with special skills) with narrow ties (never loosened), horn-rims or black-framed heavy plastics, Brooks Brothers dark gray or summer-tan suits, Barrie Ltd. pebbled brogues or loafers, as dull as the Episcopal ministry. On weekends, a lot of madras, rather lurid Bermudas (red was popular, I recall), old Jack Purcell tennis shoes, usually battered orange by clay courts, khakis, old blue button-downs, maybe an old tennis shirt. Little would one know that behind those bland eyes and smooth faces lurked minds that plotted the downfalls and upswings of tyrants, the murders of secret-police colonels, an invasion or two, and a coup or three.
Back to Cord, wizard of Clandestine. His second immersion in flame was not cool or enviable. It was awful. In 1958 he lost his second child, a nine-year-old son, who was fatally hit by a car in, of all places, the spiritual home of all us Yalies waging the Cold War, Georgetown. The loss of a child is something I cannot fathom. As emotion embarrasses me, I will not linger on it, nor try to conjure its effects on him. It cannot have inclined him to a merry view of the universe.
It was his third tragedy that made him famous, pitied, beloved, scorned, doubted, mistrusted, suspected, and yet somehow vivid. He was, in his way, a pre–George Smiley Smiley, in that his public cuckolding served allegorically for the earnestness with which he loved his country and the disdain with which it repaid him. The name of his disaster was Mary Pinchot Meyer.
I suppose she could be termed a transitional woman. She came too late to be called a beatnik and too early to be called a hippie. “Well-bred bohemian,” though it has no public cachet, is probably
the most accurate term. It goes without saying that she was beautiful, that she had the social ease being well bred confers upon its progeny (why do I insist on “progeny” instead of “children”? fancy again!), that she had beautiful flashing legs, that most everybody fell in love with her, that she was witty, effervescent, charismatic, that she had a great mane of hair, tawny and thick, and that lipstick looked redder on her than on any woman in Washington. She must have been sexually precocious, she must have loved danger, she must have had in her the seedlings of feminism and a need to be a person outside the illustrious reign of her husband as warrior-king of the Cold War and smartest of the very smart people who coagulated in then-seedy, dumpy, but somehow glamorous-amid-the-rot Georgetown.
She left him in 1961, citing the usual suspect of that age, the catch-all “mental cruelty,” whatever that meant, and I suppose it means anything its attorneys want it to mean. Did she begin her famous affair before or after the divorce? Was Cord officially cuckolded, or did the two lovebirds have the courtesy to keep it legal until the papers were served? No one will ever know, and it’s doubtful that Cord ever told anyone. He never told me.
The two were Georgetowners before 1960. It is known that she was friendly with and passed time with his gorgeous if slightly vague wife. Moreover, they must have seen each other in the streets, perhaps at the grocery, perhaps at the various drunken lawn parties to which their set, our set, “the” set seemed to gravitate, all the bold young shapers of the future, all the technocrats of the fashionable agencies (and our agency was very fashionable, while the poor boobs of the FBI were not), and all the young, ambitious journos who would write books about us and end up richer and more powerful than any of us.
It is not known when Mary Pinchot Meyer began to sleep with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before the November 1960 election or after; nor if they waited till the divorce was final. But have at it they did, and she is credited with at least thirty visits to the White House during his three years, at many odd times of day or night. It was such a terribly kept secret in the Washington of the era that it could hardly be called a secret at all, although perhaps she was most in the dark, for she may never have quite caught on to the fact that if he was sleeping with her, he was in the meantime trying to bed every vagina between Baltimore and Richmond, with the odd movie-star bang thrown in for good measure. Other rumors swelled in the wake of the two. She had some mysterious connection to the least interesting man of the period, Timothy Leary (Harvard, of course! agh!). So it was said that she brought LSD and marijuana into the White House and introduced the president to them, in hopes of somehow lessening his childish aggression. Apologies, I have no inside dope on this and mention Mary only because she was part of Cord’s glamour and because this was one more reason why Plans—not the Agency as a whole, as there is no Agency as a whole, only a loose confederation of tribes, some of whom get along and some of whom do not—was not a big Kennedy supporter.
Possibly I will address that later; let me just assure you that as far as I am concerned, sexual jealousy was not part of the equation—it would not be recognized under the New Criticism—and that I, little Hugh, latest of Cord’s Yale wonder boys, was not secretly in love with Mary. I always loved Cord, I never loved Mary (and let me hasten to add, I had NOTHING to do with her murder in 1964 or whenever it was); I did what I did for the dreariest of reasons—a policy dispute. Again, you’ll have to suffer my fancy for prose another few pages before I discuss that.
So I did not murder JFK to punish him for sleeping with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of my boss and mentor and a far better man, in all respects, than he was. Too bad; it would give a nice spin to what follows, would it not, if the assassin of Camelot turned out to be the noblest of them all, and the man he slew the rankest of dogs? It would turn popular history, where by default I am the most hated of all men on Earth, on its ear. The truth is, I never saw or met Mary; she was only a ghost, a whisper, a legend. As I said: I did it for the policy.
Let us pick a beginning spot. I know exactly when my subconscious announced its decision to me and my life turned on its axis. I also know that the subcon had been busy grinding away for months, trying to fit new intelligence, new insights, new relationships into a sort of coherent action plan that I felt I must engineer even before I conceptualized it. Something was wrong in the kingdom, and it would kill the kingdom if it was not stopped, and yet nobody had recognized it, no vocabulary existed by which the issue could be discussed, and when that vocabulary emerged, it would be too late, we’d be gone, we’d be doomed. If you believed, you had to act now; if you didn’t act now, you were letting people down, even if they had no framework by which they could comprehend your motives.
Beginning spot: a party in Georgetown, at Win Stoddard’s, the crummy west side of Wisconsin Avenue, he and his family in an old, decaying pile of bricks, painted yellow to scare the termites, with a garden straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, all thick and jungly and rancid with moisture and rot. Pathetic fallacy? Dangerously close, I agree, and will not mention the garden again.
It was mid- to late October, the year of our lord 1963, two and a half years into the Kennedy era, Camelot Anno Duo and all that, and what was happening was nothing much: a shop party. That is to say, the glamour Ivies of the Clandestine Services subgroup of the Directorate of Plans met to let their hair down (figure of speech; we wore neat trims in those days) and ease office competitions, grudges, cabal forming, and the like by applying copious quantities of gin or vodka (anthropological note: we did not favor brown drinks) as a lubrication to the competitive friction of the place, as well as a dash of fizz and some citrus wafer in each glass, the martini being entirely too uptown Mad. Ave/gray flannel for us crusaders. It was, I suppose, any staff party, any department party, any unit party, any entity party in any town in any state on Saturday night in America in 1963: cigarettes dangling insouciantly from lax mouths, points made stabbingly, everyone too loud, too close, too drunk, maybe some jazz playing on the hi-fi. (We were the last pre-rock generation.) You know how such things go, and that’s how they went: in the early hours, the high officials pay their obligatory visits. Even old man Dulles, though deposed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, came by for a quick drink with his old boys; and there was an obligatory look-at-me appearance by his successor, Mc-Cone, if memory speaks the truth, and to have them both would have been a good nab for Win. Cord came with his youngest boy, Tommy, though I don’t think he stayed late and just glowered with tragic nobility while holding a glass of gin in one hand and absently running his other through the boy’s thick hair and smiling at the gifts of wit and insight his supplicants brought him. The almost legendary Frenchy Short came and went quickly with a beautiful Chinese girl in tow; an honorary drop-in had to be James Jesus Angleton, a friend of Cord’s, even if he was charged with catching theoretical doubles and could destroy any of us with a whisper of suspicion. It was probably better to suck up to him than to ignore him, though it was always a tough call. The dry stick Colby was there briefly, though he had bigger fish to fry that night. Des FitzGerald, who’d run the Bay of Pigs and was, rumor had it, engaged in replacing Fidel, came, got drunk, and left early by cab. Just powerful, secretly famous men behaving with mild sloppiness, no harm done, probably better for morale that way anyhow.
By 11 the big shots were gone; by 11:30 most of the wives, all of them luscious and creamy, tans not yet faded from their summers at Bethany, and since most lived in then-safe Georgetown, there were no difficulties about leaving. They had been upstairs anyway, my own dear Peggy among them, Smith girls mostly, as we were Yale boys mostly; they’d come down, give the sweet peck on the check, warn us not to drink too much, and remind us that we were due at early Mass or to serve communion or something ceremonial the next morning at St. Whatever or First Whatever. Memory speaks: I remember a sea of ragged, baggy tweed jackets, an ocean of blue or white button-downs, maybe a faded madras here or there, dimpled khakis, the more frayed the better, loafer
s or possibly those suede things that used to be called “dirty bucks.” The hair was short, the cheeks clean, the noses straight, the teeth white. We were square yet cool, brazen yet innocent, savage yet mild.
Win demanded the floor. “My brothers,” he cried, “I need an ethical finding.”
Laughter. We never discussed ethics; to discuss it was not necessary, as it was part of our heritage to know what was and was not allowed. (Hmm, yes, I would say that I would soon push that line a bit.) So that set the key, which was irony, accelerated by gin or vod, and the need to be funny if not coherent.
“Win, you gave up on ethics the night you stole Morison’s final in American Classics,” and again everyone laughed because the idea of Win stealing from Samuel Eliot Morison was quite amusing, partially because the old admiral was Harvard and Win hated Harvard.
“He never locked his windows, what can I say?” joked Win. “Anyhow.” He paused, refortified the gin surge to his system, took a puff on cigarette thirty-five or forty, and proceeded dramatically. “Anyhow, you know how Cord encourages us to dip into wire transcripts from the embassy teams?”
Everybody groaned. It was a testing ground for newbies, their patience and diligence, but Cord liked to see people seriously busy, and if you found, as the business often produced, an odd spare hour or half hour in the duty day, he encouraged you to wander down to Embassy Wire, pick up typescript of recent interceptions, and peruse. Did anything ever come of this? I don’t know. Not until tonight.