Mary's Mosaic (31 page)

—Cord Meyer Jr.
“Waves of Darkness” (1946)

There is a huge difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports—one planet indivisible, with clean air, soil and water; with liberty, justice and peace for all.

—William Sloane Coffin
Former Yale University chaplain

(Riverside Church, New York City, 2003)

I
N AN ATTACK
on a Japanese stronghold on the island of Guam during the morning of July 21, 1944, Lieutenant Cord Meyer Jr. climbed up the steep beaches leading a machine-gun platoon of forty-four men in the 22nd Marine Regiment. That evening, the thirty surviving Marines dug in for the night in their foxholes. For hours, bullets had been flying everywhere. One had sideswiped Cord and literally cut the tip off a cigar that had been in the breast pocket of his jacket. He lit the cigar later that day and “pretended a courage” he didn’t feel. That night, a heavy barrage of American firepower from ships offshore answered repeated Japanese assaults.
¹

Cord Meyer lay alongside his sergeant in a foxhole that was barely a foot deep. The two had agreed that one should keep guard while the other rested. Every two hours, they switched roles. To combat his fear as the night sky darkened with rain clouds, Cord tried to conjure lust by summoning pornographic images in his mind. “It proved a poor substitute,” he would write two years later. The power of terror was as overwhelming as it was debilitating. With each attack, the lieutenant and his sergeant fought back and then endured the deafening silences between rounds.

Cord wondered how he had arrived at the place he now found himself: every moment facing down his fear of death. In a state of mental detachment, he was able to see the entire spectacle of war that confronted him. On one side were his countrymen, “lying in their scooped out holes with their backs to the sea, each one shivering with fright yet determined to die bravely.” On the other side, “the poor peasantry from which the enemy recruited his soldiers were being herded into a position like cattle, to be driven in a headlong charge against the guns.” How could it be possible, Cord had wondered that night, that such a human tragedy as war was now taking place? After all, “adult human beings of the civilized world did not slaughter one another. There must be some mistake which could be corrected before it was too late.” Two years later, in 1946, Cord was awarded the O. Henry Prize for his short story “Waves of Darkness,” in which he articulated a passionate appeal for world peace that would, at least for a period of time, inform every aspect of his life and work:

What if he should get out of his [fox] hole and explain the matter reasonably 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 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 grain rots and the house slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this insanity 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.”
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But during early the morning of July 22, Cord experienced anything but “charity and hope.” At 0300 hours, a Japanese grenade rolled into his foxhole, exploding in his face and killing his sergeant. Cord lay mortally wounded, contemplating death, bleeding everywhere, pieces of his teeth like half-eaten peanuts awash in his mouth of blood. The blast had shattered one eye completely and left the other so badly damaged it was swollen shut. With horror, Cord realized he was blind. Still conscious, he searched with one hand for his.45-caliber pistol to end his misery. Reviewing his short life, he realized that he had “no hatred in his heart against anyone, but rather pity.”
³
Why had he not followed his conscience and refused military service, he bemoaned as he lay there dying, cursing nation-state savagery and war.

Cord’s father had feared the worst for his sensitive, artistic son. Meyer senior had reportedly looked his four boys over, having had his own combat experience in World War I. “Of all his sons, he decided Cord Jr. would be able to take it least of all,” wrote journalist Croswell Bowen in 1948. “If any of them crack up under it,” he told Bowen, “it will be Cord.” Cord’s mother was also convinced he would be killed.
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Found the next morning, Cord was immediately transported to a nearby hospital ship, where the doctor told those around him, “He’s got about 20 minutes to live,” and listed him as dead on the battalion roster, causing his parents terrible distress. Cord would, in fact, live—and thrive; but his mistaken death notice foreshadowed his twin brother Quentin’s loss a year later.

C
ord Meyer Jr. was born in Washington D.C. on November 10, 1920. His twin brother Quentin was named for his father’s best friend, Quentin
Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt. The twin brothers grew up in Bayside, Long Island, as well as New York City. Wealthy and socially prominent with strong political ties, the Meyer family was an influential one.

Like their father, the twins Cord and Quentin were educated at the elite St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. The school was a breeding ground for those who would one day assume positions of power in business and politics. While Quentin often stood out athletically, Cord was the academic star who also had intense feelings of social responsibility. Gerald Chittenden, a former teacher at St. Paul’s, recalled in 1948 that “Cord was fundamentally a poet,” yet he was imbued with a kind of temperament “that had a fixed habit of going off the deep end; he blew like a half gale. He may sometimes have been a little absurd in those days, but when he cooled down as he sometimes did, he amused himself as much as he did the rest of us. There was no vanity in him.”
⁵

Yet, as Chittenden further observed, “the cold and faded oyster of cynicism drove him [Cord] to absolute fury.” In point of fact, Cord’s emotional intensity was a double-edged sword, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Channeled constructively, it might have compelled an entire country to seek out something yet unimagined. For as Chittenden astutely observed: “On questions of morals and morale, he [Cord] was always right.”
⁶
But unfocused and without discipline, that same “absolute fury” could turn destructive and, like a cyclone, destroy everything in its path.

After graduating second in his class at St. Paul’s, Cord entered Yale in 1939, just after war had been declared in Europe. Despite the distant thunder of marching German armies, Cord immersed himself in the academic cornucopia that lay before him. He was dazzled by the brilliance of Yale’s legendary faculty. “I had great respect for Cord,” recalled his classmate and former journalist Charlie Bartlett. “He was always a dedicated student of anything he took on. He got the best marks in our class because he worked so damn hard.”
⁷

During late-night dormitory arguments at Yale’s Davenport College, the war in Europe inevitably took center stage. For Cord, there were no merits to debate. His was the heart of a conscientious objector when it came to all things war. “Of one thing, he was certain: War was a violation of all the things, all the accumulated learning, all the teachings of the poets and philosophers who were increasingly commanding his respect.”
⁸
Cord’s fundamental dilemma was this: If murder was against the law within a sovereign state, why, then, was it “a glorious achievement to be rewarded with appropriate honors and acclaim when committed on a member of a neighboring state?” The contradiction
caused Cord to view war as nothing less than internationally sanctioned anarchy, and it would later become the chief organizing principle of his work for world peace.

Yet however “fundamentally a poet,” or philosophically a conscientious objector, Cord became bound by the conventions of his time. Circumstances being what they were, he ultimately took refuge in Plato: “A citizen could not accept the protection of the laws and the education provided by the state and then refuse to obey those laws when they required him to bear arms in the state’s justifiable defense.” With Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, “the only question left for debate was which branch of the service to join,” Cord recalled in 1980.
⁹
Like almost everyone who went to war, Cord’s life would be permanently altered by it.

Enlisting in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia, Cord completed his Yale graduation requirements early. By the time he graduated in December 1942, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, played goalie for the Yale hockey team, and had been a publishing editor of the
Yale Literary Magazine
. His crowning achievement was receiving Yale’s highest honor at graduation, the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize for being “the senior adjudged by the faculty to have done most for Yale by inspiring his classmates.” Yale president Charles Seymour bestowed the honor on Cord, his voice quivering with emotion. Years later, journalist Merle Miller would recall that moment when Cord, in full Marine regalia, received the honor. “Tall and fair and handsome in his dress blues,” Miller wrote, Cord received “no doubt what was his first standing ovation,” and the applause and cheering seemed never to end. President Seymour told the departing graduates that it was up to them to “save our nation, indeed the whole world.” One acquaintance who was there that day recalled, “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.”
¹⁰

The reality of war came soon enough. Like many soldiers in combat, Cord wrote letters home, chronicling his experiences and their effect on him. So eloquent and forthright were Cord’s letters that Edward Weeks, editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, when shown the letters by Cord’s uncle, decided to publish them even before Cord returned from the Pacific. “His writing, I felt, had a timeless style,” Weeks told author Croswell Bowen in 1947. “Like Conrad, his prose gets you—so much so that you can’t read it aloud. There is a maturity and vividness about his phrasing. He seems to reach out and grab the exact word he needs.” Readers responded to Cord’s collection of missives, “On the
Beaches,” with enormous enthusiasm, and the
Atlantic
received an unusually high number of requests for reprints.
¹¹
So began the opening of doors upon Cord’s return.

Cord spent the rest of the summer and fall of 1944 in convalescence. Returning to his family in New York in September, he made frequent trips to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital for the delicate removal of coral sand out of his one remaining eye. One piece of shrapnel was considered too dangerous to move. He also had to be fitted for a glass eye. He emerged as a hero from his convalescence, having earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Cord’s journal entry in September 1944 revealed a new sense of calling as he contemplated his future: “The general notion of what I have to do is clear. I owe it to those who fell beside me, and to those many others who will die before it’s done, 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? In what field or endeavor? Where to begin? Education? Politics? Writing? Continue my education or not?”
¹²

T
hat fall, Cord began “seeing a lot of Mary Pinchot.” He described her as “intensely concerned about the catastrophe of war which had beset their generation.”
¹³
The two had met before Cord went to war, but no sparks had ignited. Their connection this time, however, fueled a passion that was as intellectual and spiritual as it was physical. For Cord, Mary was a “roman candle” who not only demanded and supported his vision of a world without war, but also shared an emerging focus on how to convince the masses of its rightness. It was to be a partnership of equals as their crusade began to take place on the world stage. Throughout the fall and into the winter of 1945, Mary and Cord deepened their union while forging and exploring the possibilities for action.

Still uncertain of a path for his vision, Cord entered Yale Law School in February 1945, commuting back and forth from New York. Not interested in entering his family’s well-established, highly profitable real estate business, he considered a legal career to be a sound stepping-stone to public life. But the drudgery of the law curriculum bored him; he longed to continue writing. In April 1945, Cord received word that former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, soon to be a U.S. delegate to the San Francisco Conference that would establish the United Nations, had chosen him to be one of his aides for the conference. Cord leaped at the chance and immediately went to Washington to meet with Stassen. The following day, he returned to New York where he
and Mary were quietly married at her mother’s apartment. The two would attend the conference together. Mary would report the event for UPI.