ABSTRACT
When Tom Braden left the CIA in September 1954 to run an Oceanside, California, newspaper, his deputy Cord Meyer became head of the International Organizations Division.1 Braden had been a hands-off manager; Meyer was widely seen as an obsessive autocrat. Journalist Stewart Alsop – Braden’s best friend – described Meyer as “a bright but rebarbative man, with a positive genius for making enemies.”2 Colleague Jim McCargar remembered him as “dictatorial – not quite the word but nearly. When he spoke, you were supposed to listen, and if you were smart, you’d agree.”3 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saw him as a former friend who had “swung from the extremes of idealism to the extremes of realism” to become “an apparatchik of formidable rigidity.”4 On this basis, prior accounts of the Congress have portrayed Cord Meyer as the CIA manager who established comprehensive Agency control over the Congress and issued prolific directives to Josselson.5 For Josselson, however, Meyer was a godsend. Rather than interfering with the Congress, Meyer left Josselson alone – even as Encounter did nothing to rebut anti-American stereotypes and declared the Vietnam War a disaster.6 Indeed, Meyer all but guaranteed Josselson’s independence by deliberately assigning case officers to the Congress who were, to a man, literary-minded idealists like Meyer himself, not doctrinaire proponents of American foreign policy. And, in Meyer, Josselson found the most sympathetic possible audience for the Congress’s abstract cultural mission – so much so that Meyer would write to other agencies rapturously of the Congress’s potential to “provide fresh insights into contemporary ideological issues.”7 Meyer, in sum, was not a manager to be resisted; he was a man who deeply admired and identified with the intellectuals associated with the Congress to such a degree that he sent fan mail to Encounter’s editor. What kind of man was Cord Meyer? Given that he single-handedly ran the International Organizations Division for nearly twenty years, Meyer’s temperament mattered a great deal to the fate of the operations under his jurisdiction. At first glance, his background resembled countless other, privileged Agency hires of the era. He was the tall, well-spoken son of a prominent and wealthy family; his grandfather and namesake chaired the New York Democratic Party. He
deemed “some passable verse,” and graduated in 1942, summa cum laude and the winner of the Snow Prize, given to the senior who best embodies Yale’s traditions of intellectual achievement and character. His wife, Mary Pinchot, was the standout graduate of her Vassar class, a gifted painter and the daughter of an equally connected family.8 Unlike most of his Agency colleagues, however, Meyer joined the Marines, rather than OSS, in 1943. There he served on the front lines in the South Seas (of which his main point of reference was “literary descriptions . . . derived from Conrad, Stevenson, and Maugham.”)9 There were no daring drops into occupied territory, only a Japanese charge at Eniwetok in which “we cut them down like overripe wheat, and they lay like tired children with their faces in the sand.” Between skirmishes, he wrote letters home that were published in Atlantic Monthly, and reflected, “I really think, if possible, I should like to make a life’s work of doing what little I can in the problem of international cooperation.”10 He nearly lost the chance. A Japanese soldier slid a grenade into his foxhole, killing his fellow lieutenant and costing Meyer his left eye, three teeth, and ruptured eardrums. He convalesced by writing “The Waves of Darkness,” winner of the 1946 O. Henry Prize for the year’s best short story, about an unnamed protagonist startled by the hiss and sudden explosion of a grenade who awakens to see the stars’ dim light with his lone remaining eye.11 He brooded: “My future to a frightening extent is in my own hands,” he wrote. “I owe to those who fell beside me . . . the assurance that I will do all that is in my small power to make the future for which they died an improvement upon the past. The question is how?”12 The answer, at first, was to champion some of the era’s most idealistic causes. He served as an aide to Harold Strassen in San Francisco, at the founding conference of the United Nations.13 Meyer left disappointed, convinced that the UN Charter had done little to advance the fundamental goal of creating a supranational government capable of “transform[ing] the anarchy in which we live into the order and justice of which the Preamble to the Charter wishfully speaks.” So he helped found the United World Federalists, an organization dedicated to creating world government under the theory that there was a “real possibility that the Russian leaders are primarily motivated by fear of external aggression” and that the solution was to simply eliminate national sovereignty.14 With disabled veteran Charles Bolte, Meyer also founded the American Veterans Committee, dedicated to rallying veterans behind the causes of expanding the New Deal and promoting universal human rights.15 The group quickly became a target for Communist infiltration (and thus the subject of considerable CIA interest).16 Bolte and Meyer led an opposing faction to resist infiltration and squeaked out a narrow victory. For Meyer, it was an eye-opening exposure to Communist tactics – and to how pervasively Soviet front groups had spread.17 Meyer’s first book, Peace or Anarchy (1947), was a manifesto for the world federalist movement that featured an ecstatic blurb from Albert Einstein. Journalist Louis Fischer wrote of it, “Young Meyer’s pen is so able, his imagination so vivid, his facts about atomic and bacteriological warfare-preparations so
to 1949, he traveled 40,000 miles, gave seven speeches a week, and enlisted thousands in world federalist student chapters. If world government did not come about by 1951, he told crowds, he would move his young family to Africa.19 Instead, 1951 was the year Cord Meyer joined the CIA. He had resigned from activism two years earlier, concluding that it was “[t]wo years spent in exhorting, pleading, warning, until my own reserves of confidence and hope have been so heavily overdrawn that it is hard for me to urge others on to action, when I now doubt the efficacy of any kind of action.”20 He accepted a fellowship in Harvard’s government department, the main perks of which included “sitting next to Vladimir Nabokov ten years before Lolita made him famous.”21 In 1950, he testified before Congress that “we have failed in many respects to meet the ideological challenge and no quantity of bombs can make up for that failure to appeal to the hearts and minds of men.”22 In 1951, Meyer was adrift and looking for a new job to satisfy “the need to be actively involved in a cause that I believed in.”23 The Agency was not Meyer’s first choice, but it became his only choice. Meyer, seen as one of the most promising men of his generation a few years earlier, was virtually unemployable in 1951. Ford Foundation director Robert Hutchins promised to look for a suitable position, but cautioned, “We shall probably not dare use the words ‘world government’ out loud.”24 Secretary of State Dean Acheson told Meyer he was delighted by Meyer’s interest in the State Department.25 But Meyer’s contacts “were not encouraging. They explained quite frankly that my prominent association with the world federalist movement had made me so controversial that the department could not risk the public criticism my appointment might cause.”26 Allen Dulles alone offered Meyer a post.27 But, even then, Meyer’s past in the United World Federalists movement branded him such a serious security risk that Dulles had to overrule the FBI to get him cleared. “Back came a report from the FBI that he was a ‘dangerous individual, Communist tendencies,’ ” Tom Braden recalled:
Allen found this out, he gets down to the dirt, “What do you mean he’s got Communist tendencies?” . . . Eventually, the FBI excuses were so puerile and childish that we got rid of them, we cast them aside. . . . What’s a Communist tendency? I suppose to a stupid American reviewer, it would be anyone who’s for world government must have Communist tendencies.28
