Nina Burley
Appearances
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
Bad Luck, Mary
At the time that I called the police, he knew I had called him and left the house with a firearm and was texting me that he was going to use it.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
Bad Luck, Mary
At the time that I called the police, he knew I had called him and left the house with a firearm and was texting me that he was going to use it.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
As Nina Burley describes it, She was an educated woman and a reader, and she had ideas. And her husband was also a reader, well-educated. And when they got together, they bonded over ideas and not just, you know, their passion, but they had ideas and they shared ideas.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Kennedy shows up there as a journalist, which it's so hard to believe Kennedy as a journalist. But for one shining moment, he had a press pass and he went to this conference about world peace. That's right.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
They're literally in a train going back from their honeymoon. And they stop in Chicago and pick up a newspaper. The headline is that this incredible weapon of mass destruction has been dropped. For Cord, the writing was on the wall. His world peace mission felt doomed.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
The most important moment in these lives of people born in 1920 was the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, followed by the dropping of the second atom bomb on Nagasaki. Needlessly.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
For people who didn't grow up with nuclear weapons, for humans that didn't grow up with the knowledge like we did, that humans can now incinerate the planet. this was a traumatic experience because they remembered what it was like before. And they were grappling with this existential new situation. Cord wrote a letter to the New York Times.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
And so the CIA, the excuse that they would make for what they were doing was that they had to prevent this from happening. They had to keep control over everything.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
But for years, tension had been brewing in her marriage. And so they no longer had this kind of intellectual relationship that had inspired her in the first place. So that was a problem.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
He was depressive and he sort of went into kind of a more withholding position vis-a-vis her.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Cord was keeping a journal, and apparently Mary had access to it at some points.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Otherwise, he was very repressed and he was drinking a lot and he kept a journal because one of his issues was that he felt that he was a writer and he was not able to write. He was not also getting public acclaim the way Kennedy was, because if you work in the CIA, you can't get public acclaim.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
And so you can see in the journal his writing and then her notes on the side, like something straight out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
At one point, Cord wrote of the growing Korean conflict, quote, I am without hope, and yet I live from day to day as before. And in the margins, Mary wrote in her large loopy script, quote, when you say you are without hope, you imply that you thought humans were not what they are, humans. unquote. There were more personal jabs, too.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Another example, he wrote a poem about a beautiful woman who, quote, who wears her beauty carelessly like a bright dress lent for a night by some indulgent guest. And in the margins, Mary drew an arrow to the last lines and observed, she bites her fingernails, fails to shave under her arms, has no sense of humor, and is a totally mundane soul.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
But silence fires the imagination of the spiritually timid.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
So she's making fun of him in his own journal. Very toxic relationship.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Their kids thought that they worked at the post office.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
All these men had PTSD before they called it PTSD. And especially when they all went into the CIA and decided, you know, now we're going to keep this world under control and we're never going to have a world war like that again, so we have to control everything around the planet. Of course, that stressed them out.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
What those women were able to do was, you know, they were entertainment and they were social. They had dinner parties and they kept the men amused. And at those gatherings, they knew they weren't supposed to repeat what they overheard. And in those interactions, these social interactions, they did pick up, you know, lots of gossip.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
You know, let's say Alan Dulles thought about a certain, you know, journalist being a spy. You know, they would pick up little bits and pieces here and there. And the danger of that kind of a woman in that society for the men is, is that they're going to blab it or they're going to tell somebody else what was going on or, you know, this is the Cold War.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
I mean, the Cold War and, you know, the stakes are incredibly high.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Washington at the time was just riven with spies. And so if you have a woman like that in your crowd who is not on board with what's happening, which she eventually was not, then that person could pose a challenge to people like Dulles or James Angleton, the super paranoid counterintelligence chief, She was very attractive.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
So she presented a challenge because women are, by definition, subversive because they're not members of the power structure there. So not to be entirely trusted.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
They didn't fully step out and into these roles of, I'm the artist, I'm the lawyer, I'm a career woman. That didn't even occur to them. She was busting out of that a little bit by the time she got divorced.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
The middle son ran across the street in the dark and was hit by a car and died by the side of the road.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
The death, of course, was devastating. She never got over it. He probably didn't either, as you don't when you lose a child.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
That accident actually was the catalyst for her divorce and really for her changing her life from, you know, to being more of an artist and practicing more creatively.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
She heard something by the road. The middle son ran across the street in the dark and was hit by a car and died by the side of the road. Quentin saw his brother curled up on the road, lifeless. It was Quentin's screams that caught Mary's attention. And she ran down and there was a car that had hit her son and the driver was hysterical.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
So, you know, there's her son dead on the side of the road and she's trying to calm the driver, which... of course, is unusual behavior. But again, these are people who are, you know, trained from birth to maintain a kind of a facade of being unemotional. And incredibly, it rose to the fore at that moment.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Well, she was raised bohemian by the standards of that day. They summered on this property in Pennsylvania where they swam nude. Everybody was nude. They went horseback riding nude. Things in the 1920s and 30s that you would associate with a very bohemian upper crust society people.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
Her dad started the American Civil Liberties Union. Her mother was his second wife and had been a writer for The Nation.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
After graduation, the world was going to war. And one of the aspects of her very tragic, really, generation, even though they call it the greatest generation, the World War II boys, is that, you know, the boys all left in 1939, 40. And the women were left behind in New York.
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien
The CIA Wife
So she went to work as a journalist, and lots of women went to work. That's where you get Rosie the Riveter, right? All the men are gone, and the women are now doing the jobs the men used to do.