Soledad O'Brien
speaker
904 appearances
45 recordings
7 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Feb
Soledad O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Ruth is leaving because she has a plan. She's going to get surgery, elective surgery. Surgeons will switch Ruth's nerves, so her optical nerves are connected to her hearing, and her hearing to her eyes. Everything she sees, she'll hear, and everything she hears, she'll see. It doesn't exactly make sense, but that is the point. Mary's heroine craves the unconventional, the weird.
Or, as Ruth says as she leaves the party, It will all be different tomorrow.
Ruth wants to cure her boredom through radical change. Did Mary want that too? Her heroine was willing to do whatever it took. Here's Ron Rosenbaum again.
Mary Pinchot might show up to the party, but that didn't mean she'd follow any of the rules. And whatever she did do, she did with a confidence that usually made others notice.
Mary started writing features for United Press International, a newspaper syndication service.
Mary knew she'd eventually get married and have children. But for now, she wanted something more. The war took its toll on so many young people, made them realize the senselessness of killing, the futility and waste of it all. She wanted a world free of war. She wanted a husband who also believed in that cause. And as the wounded young men started coming home from battle, Mary found Cord Meyer.
He was a man of many talents, a poet, an intellectual, but the thing he wanted most was world peace.
In their short lives, Mary and Cord had seen plenty of death and darkness. Mary had lost an older sister to suicide. Cord enlisted in the Marines after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He had seen soldiers die. But on their wedding day in the spring of 1945, they both looked overwhelmed with happiness, hopeful. The war was in its waning days. Hitler would be gone weeks later.
Death on such a large scale had never been seen by anyone before. It left a mark. But maybe now there were better days ahead. especially for Mary and Cord, because they'd found each other.
The young couple was married in the Pinchot family's apartment on Park Avenue. Mary wore a green and white daydress with a string of pearls and a pair of reading glasses around her neck. Cord wore his marine dress uniform. In one image of that day, Mary, arm in arm with Cord, cranes her gaze upward toward her new husband.
Wide-eyed and flashing a white smile through red lips, it's as if she sees her future in Cord. By the time they married, Cord knew war was absurd. He had been sent home after he lost an eye in a grenade explosion. He had become a pacifist. On the day of the nuptials, Cord got some good news. He learned he'd get to go to a UN convention in San Francisco to work toward world peace.
Mary joined him there. The perfect honeymoon for two idealists. Not on a beach, but at an international conference to end all war. But in San Francisco, Cord became quickly disillusioned. The U.S., France and China demanded veto power over U.N. resolutions. Cord knew world peace had no chance if one country's interests won out.
Cord was interviewed at the convention by a reporter for The New York Times. He barely mustered any optimism. He just said it had been a step in the right direction. There was one more journalist at the convention who wanted to talk to Cord, but Cord wouldn't allow it.
Cord refused JFK's request for an interview. Kennedy wrote skeptical remarks about Cord's pessimistic takeaway from the convention in a personal notebook. The two men, who were both war vets from prominent New England families, couldn't find common ground. But fate kept Kennedy in Mary's close orbit. And then, on their way back east, the newlyweds got unforgettable news that shook the world.
The newsreels showed the unimaginable, and everyone was watching.
For a few years, Cord set out on the lecture circuit, going from college to college. He made advocating for world peace alluring, apparently, because students pinned images of Cord, the pacifist with an eye patch, on the walls of their dorm rooms. But Cord was growing pessimistic. The U.S. fight against communism had ramped up, and nuclear testing continued.
So when Cord's father set him up with a meeting, Cord was despondent enough to listen to what the CIA had to say. Here's Lance Morrow.
Cord hoped the agency could help quell the threat of nuclear war.
If Kord couldn't work toward world peace through international cooperation, maybe this was the next best option. Kord took the job.
In 1951, Mary, her husband Cord, and their three young boys moved to a well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C. Mary was excited. Now she could take care of her boys in a big farmhouse. And she could meet up with old Vassar friends who had settled in the district.
Showing 381–400 of 904 · page 20 of 46
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