A VERY PRIVATE WOMAN:
The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential
Mistress Mary Meyer
By Nina Burleigh
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The name Mary Meyer is unfamiliar to most Americans. Those living in Washington and Georgetown know it well. Mary Pinchot Meyer's story has waited 34 years for just the right author. An author capable of relating an insightful portrait of DC and Georgetown in the days of "Camelot." An author who could with high-drama dissect Washington's most intriguing murder mystery. Nina Burleigh, a contributing editor at New York Magazine and a resident of New York City is the writer who now steps forward to tell Mary's story of mystery and intrigue.
Burleigh's credentials include living and working in Washington, D.C., covering politics from 1992 to 1997. She covered the 1992 Clinton campaign and during 1992 followed Hillary Rodham Clinton and her health care proposal for People Magazine. As a full-time contributor at the Washington bureau of Time beginning in 1994, she covered the Clinton White House, the Republican Congress of 1995, and Patrick Buchanan's run for president in 1996. She was one of the first Americans to enter Iraq after the Gulf War. Her articles have appeared in Time, the Washington Post, New York, Redbook, Spy, Regardie's, the Chicago Tribune, Mirabella and other publications.
"October 12, 1964. The sky over Washington was crisp as a blue flag snapping in the breeze . . . 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 . . . But this postcard view did not reveal everything."
Mary Meyer propped her painting before a fan to let it dry. "She put on a gray mink and lambs-wool sweater, then a light-blue angora sweater over it, donned her Ray-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." Before she reached the end of her walk, Mary would be dead.
As the wife of a top-level CIA official and one of John Kennedy's lovers during his
Presidency, Mary's death sparked speculation of high-level cover-ups and conspiracy. Burleigh unravels the story giving readers an inside view of "Camelot" as we've never seen it before. The 100 plus interviews conducted, and hours of meticulous research, a section of documented notes along with a full index, display the author's passion for this captivating biography.
Burleigh says in her 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. The cold war wives review years spent raising children and keeping house, arranging dinner parties for dignitaries, making art, or getting jobs. They find their personal histories bland compared to their husbands', men with war wounds on their bodies and secrets of state in their brains, men whose turf ranged from Havana to Moscow and Paris to Bucharest, and whose work altered world
history.
"When the woman in question (Mary Meyer) had an affair with a married president of the United States and then died violently, the obstacle of humility is compounded by embarrassment and sorrow. Mary Pinchot Meyer's sister and closest friend say they burned her diary, and a CIA official destroyed her other papers, obliterating her voice from history. Her closest surviving friends made an informal pact not to discuss her."
Obstacles did not stop Burleigh from digging out the story in all it's florid detail.
The names involved with Mary's life shock, the circumstances of her death horrify, but the lifestyle of the times presented in Washington and Georgetown may prove more than readers can bear to receive. Those who feel the debacle going on in our Capitol today is the worst that can happen will find themselves, at the end of this biography, incredulous and wondering how such things could transpire with only a few small whispers of truth filtering through the blanket of secrecy surrounding Mary Meyer's life and death.
Indeed, many will shake their heads' and ask, "Monica who?"
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(Jones is a published writer & a literary critic for the Tulsa World)
Copyright 1998 Patricia Ann Jones
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