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
Their shared hopes for a peaceful future had all but vanished. Here's Nina Burley again.
They started taking their grievances about each other to an especially personal space, Cord's diary.
I know it sounds odd or even unhealthy, but it indicates how unhappy they were. Still, for Cord, his diary was the place he felt comfortable expressing his frustrations.
His diary wasn't something that was meant to be kept private from his wife, at least not according to Mary's handwritten annotations inside of it.
Cord would write about his disappointments over his career and the dimming prospects of peace. And then Mary would dive in.
Mary was not a gentle editor.
It wasn't easy to be the wife of a CIA man. To begin with, what do you tell the children?
Accord was definitely not delivering the mail. And over time, this high-stakes secrecy took its toll.
This is Lance Morrow again.
Some CIA men had lived through war. They'd seen death from the front lines. And they woke up to the reality of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, women were compelled to be caretakers and homemakers, both out of duty to their husbands and families, and of course, systemically, by design.
For CIA wives, it was a job they took very seriously, hosting dinner parties.
And given these high stakes, an independent thinker like Mary Meyer would have been looked at with suspicion.
So women, Mary included, continued to play the roles assigned to them. Driving kids in carpools, gardening, and cooking family dinners. But Mary also did something for herself, self-care before we called it that. She took art classes at American University, and when she had time, she painted in the shed in her backyard. Still, being a mother took precedence.
Both Mary and Dovey came up long before Betty Friedan argued that women should and could work outside the home. The Feminine Mystique was only published in 1963, just a few years before I was born. and the year before Mary's murder. In the 1950s, most women lived with certain limits.
Maybe Mary thought she'd be a CIA wife forever, but she chose independence. After her son died, her life took a different turn. And that was true for Dovey, too. She'd married her college sweetheart, William Roundtree. But Dovey and William wanted different things by the time she decided to pursue the law. Here's Dovey speaking to the National Visionary Leadership Project.
Dovey said she didn't want to be reined in by her husband. She took a job in another state. He went into the civil service, and they parted ways. Incredibly, both Mary and Dovey got divorced at a time when ending a marriage wasn't common. When doing so would have opened them up to no small amount of ridicule. Mary's father had divorced his first wife. Still, he was a man. He had money.
Mary was not only a woman, but a mother, choosing independence over family in the 50s. It was so unusual, most women wouldn't dream about it, let alone do it. As for Dovey, well, she had neither an example to follow or money. She had only her own will, her own goals to follow. Both Mary and Dovey were ahead of their time. Lance Morrow saw the similarities between them. He said Dovey...
By 1954, Cord, unfulfilled by his job, was continuing to drink heavily, but was also rising quickly through CIA ranks. Mary's patience wore thin. She went on a European trip with her sister, Toni. Each sister had affairs with new men. Toni's was with Ben Bradley, and they married the following year. Mary met a man that a family friend described as an Italian count.
She went back home to the suburbs, feeling liberated, and Cord sensed a shift. It was the beginning of the end of their relationship. He thought he could wait out his wife's love affair, but the distance between them grew. Mary stopped attending CIA dinners and social outings. And then came that awful day, that December day that would break up her family for good.
Showing 401–420 of 904 · page 21 of 46
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