The Barnes & Noble Review
In October 1964, Washington socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of CIA cold warrior Cord Meyer and one of the more distinguished mistresses of President John F. Kennedy, was found shot to death in the Georgetown section of the nation's capital. Ray Crump, an African American man, was lurking near the murder scene, and was subsequently fingered as the single suspect in the case, only to be found not guilty due to reasonable doubt. Almost 35 years later, Meyer's murder remains unsolved, and like many cases of that particular era, its lack of resolution reeks of a conspiracy.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a New York debutante, attending Brearley High School and Vassar College and traveling in social circles that included the young John F. Kennedy, among other future luminaries. During World War II, she became a feature writer for the United Press and, being the free spirit that she was, moved in with a navy man who worked for a military newspaper, before sacrificing her freedom to marry war veteran and CIA division head Cord Meyer. What began as a marriage of shared ideals quickly unraveled, as Cord grew more confrontational and temperamental, and their fledgling marriage gave way to infidelities on both sides. Mary left her husband to pursue her painting, and achieved a sense of independence that was rare for women of that generation. She experimented with Reichian therapy, LSD sessions with Timothy Leary, and carried on a series of love affairs with men from both the art world and politics.
Because of her marriage to Cord, and her intimate liaison with the President, Mary Meyerwasthought to have had access to highly classified government secrets and was considered a risk to national security. CIA psychologist John Gittinger assessed Meyer's personality type as "Internalizer, Flexible, and Uniform" because she was, in his words, "self-oriented and kept her own counsel, was open to experiences but tended to be unfocused...and that she would have at some point in her life rejected the mores she had been brought up with." To this day, no one really knows what Mary knew, for her diaries, which copiously documented every detail of her life, were apprehended by the CIA and presumably destroyed, leading many to believe that her murder was, in fact, part of a CIA conspiracy.
Burleigh describes the various conspiracy theories that surround Meyer's death, but A Very Private Woman, does not attempt to solve the mystery. Rather it is the author's intention to portray the enchanting, original spirit this woman possessed, set against the backdrop of the baby boom, the cold war, and the beginning of one of America's most pivotal, most tempestuous decades. She succeeds in this aspect, and further succeeds in evoking the tempo and texture of Washington, D.C., and the bravado and disillusionment of the CIA agents during the height of the era. Ultimately, the greatest strengths of this biography lie in the thoroughly rendered depictions of the paranoiac James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA's counterintelligence division; Meyer's brother-in-law and newsman Bill Bradlee; the promiscuous nature of John F. Kennedy; and Ray Crump's lawyer Dovey Roundtree, an African American woman whose courtroom charisma and strong defense earned her client an acquittal.
Written with the chilling pace of a thriller, A Very Private Woman, is page-turning entertainment and an enlightening lesson in postwar American history.
Kera Bolonik, barnesandnoble
Patricia O'Brien
. . .[A] book that is filled with speculation and sometimes feverishly overwritten. . . .we have little to give us a sense of who [Mary Meyer] was and wanted to bewhat she cared aboutwhat she regretted. . . .In the endshe comes across as a not untypical woman of the 1960s. The New York Times Book Review
New York Post
[An] intriguing look into the all-too-sordid world of Washington politics.
New York Observer
Provocativeerudite. . .engaging.
Megan Harlan
While Burleigh avoids offering theories about the unsolved murder, she vividly evokes one conspiracy of titillating interest today: how Washington insiders of the era kept their "secretly swinging" activities discreet. -- Entertainment Weekly
Glamour
Prove[s] that every Washington sex scandal is juicy in its own way.
Washington Post Book World
A revealing peek through the salon window.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This past July, freelance journalist Burleigh confessed, in the pages of Mirabella, to playing footsie with Clinton on Air Force One. Later, in a Washington Post story, she publicly offered to fellate the president "to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Contrast this with the politesse of Burleigh's subject, Mary Meyer, who was able to conduct an affair with President Kennedy and still get invited to dinner by Jackie. If Burleigh didn't learn discretion from her study, she still does an admirable job of conveying both the restrictive milieu of official Washington in the 1950s and early '60s (at least where women were concerned) and the personality of one woman who was, for a time, able to dictate the terms of her own life. She was born Mary Pinchot to a prominent Pennsylvania family in 1920 and, after attending Vassar, married Cord Meyer, a natural politician who resigned himself to a life behind the scenes. Burleigh repeats allegations, first published over 20 years ago, that Mary Meyer turned JFK on to marijuana and quite possibly LSD. Other notables in the book include abstract artist Ken Noland, who was Mary's lover; CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton; acid guru Timothy Leary; and Mary's brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who was instrumental in destroying Mary's diary after her 1964 murder. Though the title bills Mary's murder as "unsolved," Burleigh is forced to conclude that the man brought to trial, Raymond Crump, is the likeliest suspect and was acquitted because a spirited defense caught the prosecution off guard. Despite the absence of new information on the conspiracy front, Burleigh's biography is an excellent study of both its subject and its time. (Oct.)
Library Journal
How times have changed. The media are full of stories about President Clinton's private life, and reporters now dig into the lives of everyone in the White House. One of President Kennedy's romantic attachments was with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a CIA wife and the sister-in-law of the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee, who lived a glamorous life in Georgetown. For a short period, she was a good friend of both President and Mrs. Kennedy. About a year after Kennedy's assassination, though, she was murdered herself, and a vagrant man was charged but acquitted. Burleigh, who has written for the Washington Post and Time, tries hard to find a conspiracy, but it's all conjecture. We are left with a book about a moderately interesting woman who was romantically involved with President Kennedy and who was murdered after his death. Mary Meyer led a private life, and Burleigh should have left it that way. Not recommended.--Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, MA
The New York Post
[An] intriguing look into the all-too-sordid world of Washington politics.
Wash. Post Book World
A revealing peek through the salon window.
Kirkus Reviews
The most riveting personality in this thin biography by freelance writer Burleigh is not its murdered subject, Georgetown socialite Mary Meyer, but instead the lawyer who successfully defended the murder suspect.
Meyer was the divorced wife of CIA division chief Cord Meyer and one of the parade of women who had affairs with President John F. Kennedy. Her sexual liaison with the President probably ended in late 1962. She was murdered in October 1964. A black man, Ray Crump, who had no good explanation for his presence near the murder scene, was arrested and tried. The prosecution couldn't prove its case, and Crump was found not guilty. (Crump's lawyer was Dovey Roundtree, who had worked her way through college as a domestic, went on to become a successful criminal defense lawyer in Washington, and could, as she said, 'talk the fat off a hog.') The real controversy surrounding Mary Meyer's murder wasn't the Crump verdict but the fact that her diary, which presumably contained details of her affair with JFK and possibly CIA secrets, disappeared. Conspiracy theories were swirling around the Kennedy assassination, and Mary's death was incorporated into some of those theories.
Journalist Burleigh examines the evidence without turning up much that is new; the purpose of her book is to tell Mary's not-very-interesting story. Well-born into the Pinchot family, well-bred (Vassar), and well-connected, Mary was also attractive, intelligent, and charming. She developed a minor talent as a painter; her friends admired her for a somewhat free-spirited lifestyle (she questioned Timothy Leary on how to guide LSD sessions).
Short on solid information, many firsthand sources are dead or not talking, and Mary's papers were destroyed; the book is also carelessly written and carelessly edited. Another 'I Slept With JFK' scenario, disingenuously and pretentiously veiled as the story of a 'woman on a quest.'
From the Publisher
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets Camelot.”—Washington Post Book World
“Power is so utterly fascinating. Sometimes it’s used for evil purposes, like the kind of power that has silenced the telling of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s mysterious murder for over three decades. In A Very Private Woman, Nina Burleigh has finally told this tragic tale of a privileged beauty with friends in high places.”—Dominick Dunne
“A superbly crafted, evocative glimpse of an adventurous spirit whose grisly murder remains a mystery.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Proves that every Washington sex scandal is juicy in its own way.”—Glamour
“Nina Burleigh has dissected Washington’s most intriguing murder mystery and produced a captivating biography, a thriller, and an insightful portrait of Georgetown in its golden presidential age.”—Christopher Ogden, bestselling author of Life of the Party: The Life of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman
“Provocative, erudite . . . pure Georgetown noir.”—New York Observer
“A rich array of real-life characters.”—New York Times Book Review