ONE MAN'S LONG JOURNEY - FROM A ONE-WORLD CRUSADE TO 'THE DEPARTMENT OF DIRTY TRICKS'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84-00499R000200070001-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 7, 1973
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2001/09/04: CIA-RDP84-00499R000200070001-7
The New York Times Magazine/January 7, 1973
One man's long journey From a one-world crusade
to the 'department of dirty tricks'
By Merle Miller
What if he should get out of his
hole and explain the matter rea-
sonably to both sides? "Fellow
human beings," he would begin.
"There are very few of us here
who in private life would kill a
man for any reason whatever. The
fact that guns have been placed
in our hands and some of us wear
one uniform and some another is
no excuse for the mass murder
we are about to commit. There are
differences between us, I know,
but none of them worth the death
of one man. Most of us are not
here by our own choice. We were
taken from our peaceful lives and
told to fight for reasons we cannot understand.
Surely we have far more in common than that
which temporarily separates us. Fathers, go back to
your children, who are in need of you. Husbands,
go back to your young wives, who cry in the night
and count the anxious days. Farmers, return to
your fields, where the gruin rots and the house
slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this in-
sanity will be the rotting bodies upon which the
sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw
down these guns that we hate. With the morning
we shall go together and in charity and hope build
a new life and a new world.
-FROM "WAVES OF DARKNESS" BY CO" MEYER JR.
I first read "Waves of Darkness," the only pub-
lished fiction by Cord Meyer Jr., in the fall of 1945,
and I thought that it was one of the best-
maybe the best-short pieces of writing that had
thus far come out of the war. A few months later,
on a gentle spring evening in 1946 (everything and
everybody was gentler in those days), I heard
Meyer speak. I took voluminous notes, so I know
that he said, in part: "World government is pos-
sible. It is possible in our lifetime. We can and
we will make it happen, and by so doing we shall
achieve peace not only for our children but for our
children's children, a peace that will survive to the
end of time. . . . Those who wrap the skirts of
nationalism around themselves are living in the
dangerous past, and we cannot be satisfied with
that because it has produced the present....
There was a standing ovation for Meyer at the
end of his speech; I remember that, and later that
night in my journal I put down some of what he
had said and added: "... No one of my generation-
at least no one I have heard or heard of-is as
Merle Miller's most recent novel is "What Hap-
pened." He is currently working on a nonfiction
b
k
oo
about Marshalltown,, Iowa.
1 1`1.hJjHC Vb'l~+
Lieut. Cord Meyer. Jr. with his bride, Mary, in
1945; at bottom, a U.W.F. poster and the C.I.A.
seal, emblems of his career.
passionate and persuasive a speaker as Cord Meyer.
To listen to him you think that anything is pos-
sible, including world goyernment. Not only that
he writes beautifully, damn it.... If Cord goes into
politics he'll probably not only be President of the
United States; he may be the first president of the
parliament of man. And if he becomes a writer,
he's sure to win the Nobel Prize. At least."
The years passed; we heard that after retiring
from the World Federalist crusade Cord had gone
into the C.I.A., but in those days, the early nine-
teen-fifties, that was a respectable- even an ad-
mirable-thing for a liberal and humane man to do.
It was necessary to keep the agency out of the
hands of the reactionaries, and some years later
didn't McGeorge Bundy, then himself still a knight
in fairly shining armor
sa
th
,
y
at there were m e
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liberal intellectuals in the C.I.A. than any place
else in Government? And hadn't he named Meyer
as one of the best examples?
True, in 1967, when it was revealed that Meyer
was in charge of covertly funding such organiza-
tions as the National Student Association and pub-
lications like Encounter, some people, myself in-
cluded, were upset at the deception and hypocrisy
involved, but at least the money had gone to organ-
izations more or less on the non-Communist left,
and the main criticism, in the beginning anyway,
had come from the most reactionary members of
Congress, not the liberals.
But then last summer-it was a season of heart-
break-Meyer went into the offices of Harper &
Row to ask, among others, his old ally of the world
government movement, Cass Canfield, to let the
C.I.A. see the galleys of a book called "The Politics
of Heroin in Southeast Asia." The book claimed
that the C.I.A. had more than a
little to do with the traffic in nar-
cotics in Southeast Asia. Publish-
ing it might, Meyer said, be
against the best interests of this
country; what's more, the book
was very likely full of inaccura-
cies and was possibly libelous as
well.
After a monumentally unin-
spired exchange of letters between
Harper & Row and various face-
less individuals in the C.I.A.--
Meyer surfaced only once later, to
say that he had never intended
"suppressing" the book-the pub-
lisher agreed that the agency
could take a look at the galleys,
but did not, to be sure, promise to
make any changes.
The galleys were supinely dis-
patched to Washington, where some presumably
literate person or persons, no doubt including
Meyer, read them, and a week or so later the re-
quest for changes arrived back at the offices of
Harper & Row. The writer's editor, Elisabeth Jakab,
said that they were "laughably pathetic," and hav-
ing read them in The New York Review of Books,
I am inclined to think that she was being kind.
The suggestions, and they were meager indeed,
had to do with the public image of the C.I.A. rather
than anything remotely consequential. Harper &
Row at last decided that "the best service we can
render the author, the C.I.A. and the general public
is to publish the book as expeditiously as possible."
How intrepid.
Anyway, the book was published intact in mid-
September; it got long and generally laudatory
reviews, and it has since sold reasonably well,
although it has yet to show up on anybody's best-
seller list. Nor has it caused any great cry for inves-
(Continued on Page 53)
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vT~oii4ar48v~i~Os7
family MeYer w s quite yftho told me, , "It
or was a happy houselroldld as-
suming anybody from, the out
(Continued from Page 9)
tigation or legislation. The re-
public appears to remain more
or less intact, and so does the
C.I.A., and despite the fact
that President Nixon re-
peatedly declared war against
it during the fall campaign,
the drug traffic appears to be
flourishing in Southeast Asia
and everywhere else in the
world.
Still, as the writer, a 27-
year-old Yale graduate stu-
dent named Alfred W. McCoy,
later said: "...submitting the
raw manuscript to the C.I.A.
for prior review is to take the
first step toward abandoning
the First Amendment protec-
tion against prior censorship."
Of course it is. But publish-
ing houses have not generally
been noted for their courage,
although James H. Silberman,-
editor in chief of Random
House, has twice turned down
similar requests from the
C.I.A., on the sensible ground
that he had no right to do any-
thing else, that a book be-
longs to the writer, not the
publisher.
The whole thing, was, to
put it gently, sleazy, but it
was not surprising. Of course
the C.I.A. would try to-well,
not censor books. After all,
there are a lot of present and
former members of the Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Union in
that mausoleum in McLean,
Va. No, not censor, just make
publishers a little more timid
the next time a book on the
agency comes along. If it does
come along. The agency some
time earlier got an injunction
against the publication of an
unwritten book that was to
have been by Victor L. Mar-
chetti, a former agent who
had signed some sort of agree-
ment promising not to kiss
and tell. As if some of the
liveliest and most important
books in all of literature
weren't by gossipy folks who
did just that.
You know the only astound-
ing thing about the whole
affair? That Cord Meyer Jr.
can never really be explained.
They can only be guessed at,
wondered about, investigated,
analyzed. When early in No-
vember I went to Washington
to talk to some people who
were Meyer's friends in the
old days and some who are
his friends now (in general,
the two are not the same)
one man who had not seen
him for 15 years said, "The
man who wrote 'Waves of
Darkness' must have died a
little the day he walked into
Harper & Row, assuming there
is any of that man still left
in Cord."
Meyer wrote of the death of
the youngest marine in a
machine-gun platoon: "An un-
reasoning indignation shook
him against all who had
placed Everett where he lay.
For the frightened enemy that
shot Everett and was probably
already dead he had only pity.
'But I wish,' he thought, 'that
all those in power, country-
men and enemy alike, who de-
cided for war, all those who
profit by it, lay dead with
their wealth and their honors
and that Everett stood upright
again with his life before
hiim.1"
CORD and his twin
brother, Quen-
side can ever tell a thing like
that. They were civilized peo-
ple, witty; everybody laughed
a lot, and there was certainly
never any worry about money,
not even in the depths of the
Depression." Cord Jr.'s great-
grandfather had made a con-
siderable fortune as cofounder
of a huge sugar refinery; his
grandfather had been state
chairman of the Democratic
party and had added to the
family fortune by developing
huge tracts of land on Long
Island, a project in which Cord
Sr. and his brothers joined.
"Cord's childhood was very
well-ordered, and all four
boys, Cord perhaps more than
the others, grew up with the
kind of manners that people
who are not of that class find
arrogant. Quentin was gentler
than Cord. They were not
identical twins, but I think
that they were as close as two
brothers could possibly be."
Quentin and Cord went to
St. Paul's, and they both
played hockey and played it
well, although Quentin was
the better athlete. Cord was
the brain, the intellectual, and
at Yale (naturally it was Yale)
he edited the literary maga-
zine, was Scroll and Key and
Phi Beta Kappa; he was grad-
uated summa cum laude.
Because of the wartime aca-
tin, were born on Nov. 20, demic speed-up, the Yale
1920, in Washington, D.C. class of 1943 was graduated
Their father, a well-to-do real- in December, 1942, and Cord,
estate developer with an im- . who had finished the aca-
pressive sense of noblesse demic requirements a semes-
oblige, was in the diplomatic
corps, and in the first four
years of the twins' lives, Cord
Sr. was stationed in Cuba,
Italy and Sweden.
When a second set of twins
was born, Thomas D. and Wil-
liam B., the parents decided
that the family was too large
for moving around. Cord Sr.
retired from the corps, and
they settled in New York, first
in a brownstone on the East
Side of Manhattan, then at
various watering spots on
Long Island. Later, they
moved to Little Boars Head,
N.H., where Cord's mother,
the former Katharine Blair
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was the man to make the Thaw, btill spends her sum- it seemed that the -applause
request. Not to be believed. I mers. She spends her winters would never die down, that
couldn't help wondering what in Naples, Fla. She is 79 and the cheering would never stop.
would have happened if I had a gracious and still socially And there was not a dry eye
suggested such an unlikely active woman. The Thaws in the house. People tend to
scene to Cord at the time I were just as well-off and just get very emotional during a
knew him, more than 20 years as social, both in New York war, particularly at the be-
would I think I know. I think he and in Washington, as the
would have dismissed it as Meyers. Altogether, Cord's ginning. Very emotional things
preposterous. antecedents could not have are said, too. President Sey-
It. happened, though, and I been more WASP-ish, more mour told the graduates that
wondered why. Such things proper, more secure. they must "... save our na-
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ter before that so that he
could enlist in the Marine
Corps, returned to New Haven
from officers' candidate school
in Quantico, Va., for the
commencement.
President Charles Seymour,
his voice shaking with emo-
tion, announced that in ad-
dition to all his Other honors
Cord had won the Alpheus
Henry Snow award as "the
senior adjudged by the faculty
to have done most for Yale
by inspiring his classmates."
Meyer, very tall and fair
and handsome in his dress
blues, received what no doubt
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1-7
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGA2
 tion, indeed the whole w A ik OVBiifl& 2dWaWWWIA-RDP84-00499R000200070001-7
day said recently, "We all
knew whom Seymour had in
mind to lead that battle; the
rest of us would willingly,
you might say worshipfully,
be Cord's lieutenants in the
fight."
In the next two and a half
years Cord Meyer Jr. became
a first lieutenant, made a
combat landing on an obscure
Pacific atoll called Eniwetok,
and in late July, 1944, he and
his machine - gun platoon
landed on Guam. That night, a
Japanese grenade rolled into
his foxhole and exploded. He
was severely burned and,
among other wounds, he lost
an eye.
Describing the harrowing
night that followed, he wrote
in "Waves of Darkness":
"There was no hatred in his
heart against anyone, but
rather pity.... It would have
been better for man, he felt,
if he had been given no trace
of gentleness, no desire for
goodness, no capacity for love.
Those qualities were all he
valued but he could see they
were the pleasant illusions of "'I wish,' he thought, 'that all those in power, countrymen and enemy alike, who decided for
children. With them men war, all those who profit by it, lay dead with their wealth and their honors and that Everett
hoped, struggled pitifully, and stood upright again with his life before him:"' So wrote Meyer on the death of a young marine
were totally defeated by an in "Waves of Darkness." Above, a marine lies as he fell at Iwo Jima.
alien universe in which they
wandered as unwanted stran-
gers. Without them, an animal,
man might happily eat, repro-
duce, and die, one with what
is."
From July, 1944, until Jan-
uary, 1945, Meyer was in vari-
ous naval hospitals in the
Pacific and in the States; then
he was discharged from the
Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a
Bronze Star and a Purple
Heart. As for his future, he
had written his parents some
months before: "I really think,
if possible, I should like to
make a life's work of doing
what little I can in the prob-
lems of international coopera-
tion. No matter how small a
contribution I should happen
to make, it would be in the
right direction. We cannot
continue to make a shambles
of this world, and already a
blind man can see the short-
sighted decisions that point
inevitably to that ultimate
Armageddon."
In April of that year, Cord
married Mary Eno Pinchot,
whom he had first met before
the war while he was still a
student at Yale and she was
at Vassar. In her way, Mary
Eno Pinchot was really quite
as golden as he. She had been
one of the prettiest, most
popular and most brilliant
members of the class of '42.
She was the niece of Gifford
Pinchot, the former Governor
of Pennsylvania and one of
the founders of the conserva-
tion movement, an ecologist
before most people had ever
heard the word. Her father,
Amos Pinchot, had been one
of the founders of Theodore
Roosevelt's Bull Moose Pro-
gressive party. Mary herself
was a painter and a good one.
She had been a reporter for
the United Press and was a
contributor to various maga-
zines. She, like Cord, was a
committed liberal, a crusader
for newer, braver worlds.
The wedding was one of the
social events of the season,
and it was not surprising that
such a prestigious ceremony
should be presided over by the
Rev. Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr,
who was then surely the most
prestigious Protestant clergy-
man in America. Also not sur-
prisingly, after a brief stay in
New Haven, where Meyer
studied law, he went off to
San Francisco, where he was
one of the two veterans who
served as aides to Comdr. Har-
old Stassen, a United States
delegate at the drafting of the
United Nations Charter.
About that time, Cord found
out that Quentin had been
killed during the awful battle
for Okinawa. A friend said,
"Cord has always been very
contained, but you could see
that he suffered greatly from
Quentin's death. They were,
after all, twins, and loving
twins.... It was as If Cord felt
that part of himself had gone.
... And he was more than
ever determined to spend the
rest of his life as a crusader
for peace. As. he wrote in that
letter to his parents, 'If there
be a God may He give us all
the strength and the vision
that we so badly need."'
In San Francisco, Meyer
met, among others, Charles G.
Bolte, a young Dartmouth
graduate who had fought with
the British Army and lost a
leg at Alamein. Bolte was
chairman and one of the
founders of an evangelical
new organization, the Amer!-
can Veterans Committee,
which was once and for all
going to put an end to such
power-grabbing, self-seeking
organizations as the American
Legion and the Veterans of
-Foreign Wars.
To be sure, Bolte and Meyer
left San Francisco disillu-
sioned. What they had seen
was not the making of a
forceful new organization that
could keep the peace; the
U.N. was, they felt, no better
than the League of Nations
had been, perhaps not even
as good. When Meyer heard
the heads of the various dele-
gations mumbling their na-
tionalistic platitudes, he com-
pared them to "a group of
priests going mechanically
through the ritual of a re-
ligion in which no one any
longer believes."
The only answer - how
could people have been so
blind?-was a world govern-
ment, a supranational organi-
zation with the power to en-
force the peace. Meyer wrote
later in his book "Peace or
Anarchy": "I left San Fran-
cisco, with the conviction that
World War III was inevitable
if the U.N. was not substan-
tially strengthened in the
near future.
"Then the annihilation of
Hiroshima suddenly pro-
claimed that peace was no
longer merely desirable but
absolutely necessary to the
survival of a large proportion
of the human race. . . . This
book... is based on the con-,
viction that we, the survivors
of two world wars, stumble
toward a more massive disas-
ter not through any general
failure of moral intention but
driven by the nature of the
archaic institutions that we
have the capacity to change."
Neither Bolte nor Meyer was
much surprised by what had
happened at San Francisco.
What did one expect of old
men? Not a single delegate
had been under 30. In those
days, those of us who were
under 30 - the ones who
counted, anyway, the shakers
and movers, anyway - were
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allegorically all Seabees, six nights to finish the job in policy, one of the longest and
whose slogan in the Pacific the first place. But did we angriest I ever attended, didn't
had been, "The difficult we do have that long? end until after 7 A.M.
immediately; the impossible Meyer, who was indefatiga- Meyer was a brilliant but
takes a little longer." And at ble (did he ever sleep?), was acerbic chairman, a master of
the time that slogan applied impatient with those who "Robert's Rules," and the
not only to the building of air thotight that creating a world plank of the platform for
strips; it was, to us, true for government might take as which he was largely respon-
the whole of the world. long as a year, say. He had sible was eventually app
Although Meyer and I had arrived at an intellectual; posi- but the victory seemed to give
both been on Eniwetok at the tion. World government was him no satisfaction. He con-
same time in the spring of necessary; it was logical, and tinued to brood over the fact
1944, we had not met, what anybody who couldn't see that during the battle he had
with one thing and another. that was either stupid or been called a great many un-
Our first encounter was hard- venal or both. He did not suf- pleasant names by the Com-
ly historic, but what then was fer fools gladly; he didn't suf- munists, among them a phrase
fer them at all. picked. up, I believe, from
not historic? It was at a meet- Izvestia, describing him as
ing of the National Planning REMEMBERING "the fig leaf of American im-
after of A.V.C., shortly those days and "the fig Some said that
after the first time I heard nights - N.P.C. meetings al- maybe he had never been
him speak on that night in ways lasted into the early called a name before; I don't
1946. morning-one participant said know.
The N.P.G. was an impres- recently, "There was always
sive group; at least we im- a streak of fanaticism in In in event, Milwaukee, after er the
he
al-
pressed each other, and we Cord, surprising in a sense be- triumph In any
most everybody's interest in
were forever being inter- cause people, in that class are t' dwindle, in
viewed and photographed, seldom fanatic. Though per- A.V.C. Cseemed d to muas
and we were always identi- haps that is too strong a Communists had
fied as "the leaders of to- word. You can with safety fu d once
efeattheeC . om Im addition,
morrow"; I for one never say that Cord was always ben bee been n by ed. nd jobs and
doubted it. dogmatic."
We included Franklin D. But he was right, too, and added worry a family ily res respoponrsiibrilities
lities
Roosevelt Jr., Oren Root Jr., almost everybody in the to
ship stopped growing, then
who almost alone had been American. Veterans Committee ship to drop off.
responsible for Wendell Will- agreed with him-agreed with started t Meyer did not abandon
kie's nomination for the Presi- him, that is, until the early But dency at the Republican Na- autumn of 1946, when our his crusade for world govern-
tional Convention in 1940; Gil membership started growing ment. His book, "Peace or
Harrison, who was to become with amazing rapidity. We Anarchy," most of which he
editor-in-chief of The New Re- were delighted. Despite the wrote while a Lowell Fellow
public; Michael Straight, who hostility-or was it only in- at Harvard, was published in
was then editor of The difference?-of the press and October, 1947, and Meyer be-
New Republic and is now as- the media generally, we were, came president of several
sistant to Nancy Hanks on or we thought we were, final- smaller world-government
the National Endowment for ly catching on. New members groups that were brought
the Arts; G. Mennen (Soapy) were joining up at the rate of together as United World
Williams, who was to become hundreds a month, especially Federalists. That year, too, the
Governor of Michigan and in the large cities and particu- Junior Chamber of Commerce
during Jack Kennedy's thou- larly in New York. I remem- chose him as one of the 10
sand days an Assistant Sec- ber someone, possibly me, outstanding young men in the
retary of State; Robert Nath- saying, "It just goes to show United States; most of the
an, the economist who was you how truth and justice pre- other names mean little now,
an adviser to Franklin D. vail if you'work hard enough." with the possible exception of
Roosevelt Sr. and other Presi- Then, I forget how, but it "Richard M. Nixon, 34, of
dents, and more recently to was probably by reading The Whittier, Calif., Congress-
George McGovern; and Cord Daily Worker, we discovered man." Meyer was chosen as
Meyer Jr. that the American Commu- the outstanding young man
nists had finally abandoned of 1947 by the. Young Men's
John F. Kenneus, but he dy had de- their plans to infiltrate the Board of Trade