A Very Private Woman
   Nina Burleigh
  1998 Bantam Books NY USA
   ISBN: 0553380516


The Life & Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. A Golden Girl of the 40s & 50s she lived a charmed yet fragile life with a finger on the pulse of power of that time.

While Nina Burleigh's A Very Private Woman will be considered a biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a poised, likable & no-nonsense woman, it is as much an account of the history of Georgetown & Washington, DC; the burgeoning of the CIA & a commentary on the social lives of wives & minorities of that time.

From the Introduction: ‘Anyone wanting to write about a member of the silent generation of women that mothered the baby boom and married the cold warriors confronts a peculiar obstacle: Many of these women believe their lives were utterly unremarkable.' Anyone reading further, enters a time warp of seamless expressiveness & rich detail.

A beautiful woman is murdered on a Georgetown towpath beside a canal on a bright, dry October day in 1964. How this woman died, where her personal diaries & papers disappeared to & how did her killer fare, can be gleaned in this quiet, poised investigation of one woman's life.

Born in the 1920s to a fourth generation upper-class millionaire with an old & large estate along the Delaware River, a ranch in Montana & a Park Avenue apartment, Mary Pinchot grew up, through the Great Depression, a child of athletic good health & plain tastes, needing for nothing. She graduated from upper-class schools & all through her schooling she was immensely popular, destined for the debutante circuit. During her schooling, at balls & country weekends, she met both of the men who would, later, become husband & lover.

After graduation, as a reporter for Madmoiselle, during WW2 she was sent to San Diego to interview graduates from the progressive colleges there. ‘As with so many of Mary's generations, she was deeply troubled by the war and was unable to see beyond the end of the disaster. These young women eagerly sought advice for a “modern marriage.” Although they had been educated and were theoretically prepared for fuller lives than that of homemaker and wife, the social scientists advised that that was unhealthy and against what was scientifically proven to be “natural”. And science, in those modern years [of the 1940s] was believed to be as powerful as God, if not to have replaced the deity altogether.'

And then Mary Pinchot married Cord Meyer in the family's New York apartment, It was April 1945. Two weeks before Hitler would commit suicide & only four months before the first atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan. Cord's writings of his war experiences, his war wounds & his understanding of the international political situation had given his career new direction. The newly married Cord Meyers boarded a train for San Francisco where he would be Commander Harold Stassen's assistant at the upcoming United Nations convention. Aboard the train, Mary discovered both that she was to be a mother & that her husband had an impatient & derisive temper.

Eventually, the couple gravitated to a suburb of Washington,DC where the strategic command center of the cold war had been set up. Life in the CIA had begun. The wives unaware & preferring to remain that way, of what their husbands were doing. To these wives fell the full weight of running a household & raising the children while their husbands transformed themselves into cold warriors with unending secrets.

Nina Burleigh has caught the flavor, the pace & the outlooks of an era; as you read, images from black-and-white magazines come to life. It is a richly woven tapestry of legendary decades. Mary Pinchot Meyer was one elusive, interesting person whose life & times rise from the pages of this book to remind us that every life makes a difference.
(05/09/99)

Rebecca