A Very Private Woman

One of the enduring mysteries of recent decades was the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the well-born, beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a CIA official, who was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath in 1964. Mary Meyer was a mistress of JFK, and after her death, news that she had kept a diary set off a tense search for the document by CIA spymaster James Jesus Angelton as well as Mary's brother-in-law, journalist Ben Bradlee. But the crime was never solved, and today her life and death are still a source of fascination, as Nina Burleigh will reveal in a book that looks at a heady, sometimes glamorous period in the nation's capitol, and at a woman who embodied the grace and turbulence of her times.