Likewise, The Post celebrates Bradlee’s championing of “the people’s right to know” when a Republican was in the White House, but fails to mention his perjury in the trial of the man accused of murdering his sister-in-law Mary Pinchot Meyer in 1964, the ex-wife of CIA propagandist Cord Meyer.
Upon hearing news of her murder, Bradlee raced to Mrs. Meyer’s residence to break in and find her diary (which presumably documented her affair with JFK). To his surprise, Bradlee discovered that the CIA’s legendary head of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton had picked the lock ahead of him and was ransacking the place. Bradlee explained that he ultimately burned her diary because he’d “concluded this was in no sense a public document, despite the braying of the knee jerks about some public right to know.”
Mrs. Meyer’s murder remains officially unsolved.
In 1979, Mrs. Graham and Bradlee teamed up to get the publisher of an unauthorized biography entitled Katharine the Great to withdraw the book from circulation.
Now, you might think that this maelstrom of sex, secrets, and death swirling around The Washington Post’s glamorous central figures would make a lively soap-opera-ish film. But the Eagle Scout Spielberg is uninterested in their sex lives and instead wants to portray them as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington idealists.
