by Peter Janney
Overwhelmed by literally hundreds of outside inquiries received each week, the affable, bubbly forty-one-year-old Irish Harvard tweed Leary was looking forward to a trip to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, in search of a more isolated retreat for his psychedelic research. As he was preparing to leave, the curious, unexpected visitor from Washington, D.C. arrived. She was someone he would encounter seven times over the next year and half. Twenty years later, in 1983, Timothy Leary recalled his initial impressions of their first meeting.
“Dr. Leary,” he remembered her saying “coolly,” “I’ve got to talk to you.” She had offered her hand for a formal greeting and, Leary recalled, introduced herself as “Mary Pinchot,” not Mary Meyer. “I’ve come from Washington,” she had said, “to discuss something very important. I want to learn how to run an LSD session.”2
Always partial to beautiful women, Timothy Leary was receptive. “That’s our specialty here,” he said. “Would you like to tell me what you have in mind?”
“I have this friend who’s a very important man,” Mary had told him. “He’s impressed by what I’ve told him about my own LSD experiences and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself. So I’m here to learn how to do it. I mean, I don’t want to goof up or something.”3
Timothy Leary hadn’t understood at that moment that Mary was alluding to the president of the United States. Whether he was aware then that the president’s sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy had reportedly undergone LSD sessions in the late 1950s wasn’t known, but the president’s brother-in-law Stephen Smith, husband of Jean Kennedy, had already contacted Leary about his own desire to explore LSD. Tim had referred him to another early LSD proselytizer, his close friend Van Wolfe in New York, who subsequently acted as a psychedelic guide for the Kennedy family member in the early 1960s.4
“Why don’t you have your important friend come here with you to look over our project for a couple of days?” Leary responded. “Then if it makes sense to all concerned, we’ll run a session for him.”
“Out of the question. My friend is a public figure. It’s just not possible.”
“People involved in power usually don’t make the best subjects,” Leary cautioned.
“Look,” she said, according to Leary. “I’ve heard Allen Ginsberg on radio and TV shows saying that if Khrushchev and Kennedy would take LSD together they’d end world conflict. Isn’t that the idea—to get powerful men to turn on?”
“Allen says that, but I’ve never agreed. Premier Khrushchev should turn on with his wife in the comfort and security of his Kremlin bedroom. Same for Kennedy.”
“Don’t you think that if a powerful person were to turn on with his wife or girlfriend it would be good for the world?”
Nothing was certain, Leary explained. “But in general we believe that for anyone who’s reasonably healthy and happy, the intelligent thing to do is take advantage of the multiple realities available to the human brain.”
“Do you think that the world would be a better place if men in power had LSD experiences?” Mary asked.
“Look at the world,” Leary responded. “Nuclear bombs proliferating. More and more countries run by military dictators. No political creativity. It’s time to try something, anything new and promising.”5
The two continued talking and went out for a drink. Leary invited Mary back to his house for dinner. Michael Hollingshead, a burned-out eccentric who had been a Cambridge University philosophy instructor, now living in Leary’s attic, mixed more drinks as they discussed the changes that took place during the psychedelic experience. After dinner, they decided to take a low dose of magic mushrooms. While Hollingshead explained to Mary how to guide people in the throes of panic, Leary became aware of Mary’s frowning and recalled the following exchange.
“You poor things,” Mary said. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into. You don’t really understand what’s happening in Washington with drugs, do you?”
“We’ve heard some rumors about the military,” Leary said.
“It’s time you learned more. The guys who run things—I mean the guys who really run things in Washington—are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control.”
“Yes,” Leary said. “We’ve heard about that.”
“But there are people like me who want to use drugs for peace, not for war, to make people’s lives better. Will you help us?”
“How?”
“I told you. Teach us how to run sessions, use drugs to do good.”
Leary recalled feeling a bit uneasy. Mary seemed calculating, a bit tough, perhaps as a result of living “in the hard political world,” as he put it. He asked her again who her friends were that wanted “to use drugs for peace.”
“Women,” she said laughing. “Washington, like every other capital city in the world, is run by men. These men conspiring for power can only be changed by women.”
The next day Leary drove Mary to the airport, having “loaded her with books and papers” about the Harvard Psilocybin Project in preparation for her training as a psychedelic guide. He told Mary he didn’t think she was ready to start running sessions yet. She agreed. She would come back soon, she told him, for more practice.
“And don’t forget,” she said. “The only hope for the world is intelligent women.”6
Timothy Leary’s 1983 book Flashbacks portrayed Mary Meyer during the period of 1962 to 1963 in such a way that has aroused as much fascination as it has skepticism. The biggest, most unsettled question was left unanswered: Had Mary and the president actually wandered into the psychedelic Garden of Eden together during his presidency, and if so, when, and with what result? Leary’s account of his relationship with Mary also underscored Mary’s ongoing antipathy toward the nefarious nature of the CIA, specifically the Agency’s MKULTRA program, which was experimenting with all kinds of drugs for chemical warfare and mind control, including hallucinogens such as LSD. In addition, by April 1962, when Mary allegedly first appeared at Leary’s office at Harvard, her influence in Jack Kennedy’s life was already well established. Not simply a visitor to the White House residence when Jackie was away, Mary was seen in the Oval Office regularly. She attended any number of policy meetings at which the president discussed sensitive national security business and sought out her counsel.7 Mary’s close friend Anne Truitt described the importance of their relationship: “He saw she was trustworthy. He could talk to her with pleasure, without having to watch his words.”8
Appearances to the contrary, Mary’s decision to become involved with Jack wasn’t motivated by a selfish, manipulative desire to turn him on to drugs. If they did share a psychedelic experience,
Jack would have undoubtedly been a willing participant. Several accounts attest to the fact that Mary and Jack’s love relationship was serious, not a passing fling of intermittent one-night stands. Author Leo Damore had become convinced that by the time Kennedy reached the presidency, “Jack was a broken man. He had lived a life as an instrument of his father’s ambition, not his own.” It was Mary, said Damore, who took Jack by the hand. “She could see the brokenness in him, and didn’t need anything from him. In this relationship the power resided with Mary, and it was she, through her love, who bestowed the great gift of healing.”9 Yet Mary, too, appeared to have surrendered. “She told me she had fallen in love with Jack Kennedy and was sleeping with him,” said Anne Truitt. “I was surprised but not too. Mary did what she pleased. She was having a lovely time.”10
Just as fascinatingly, Timothy Leary’s account of the mysterious “Mary Pinchot from Washington,” depicted Mary as a kind of missionary for the ascension of world peace through the sagacious use of hallucinogens. Could an opportune mind-altering experience in the lives of powerful political figures, specifically the leader of the free world, awaken the kind of awareness, and leadership, that would take mankind away from war and strife toward the provi
nce of peaceful coexistence? Mary’s latent intention, Leary finally realized, had not only been to invite her lover the president to take a psychedelic excursion with her, but to train a small group of eight women in Washington, all of whom who were intimately involved with powerful public figures. Could the inducement of a psychedelically induced religious mystical experience in the politically powerful support a movement away from militaristic war and domination, toward harmonious peaceful coexistence throughout the world? It appeared that Mary had hatched a plan. Her pacifism and abhorrence of all violent armed conflict motivated a curiosity she thought worthy of exploration.
In the early 1960s, the world was fighting a war, albeit a Cold War, fraught with tensions that were constantly on the verge of escalating. Watching this unfold, Mary had a “catbird seat” as Cord’s wife. Perhaps through her own experience, psychedelic exploration had predisposed her to Allen Ginsberg’s vision. In any case, Timothy Leary portrayed Mary as a woman in possession of considerable feminine power, someone who had undergone her own personal transformation who now wanted to become an acolyte for world peace, intent on laying the groundwork for such a mission. Yet no one else has ever gone public to substantiate Leary’s claims about Mary’s mission, nor publicly verified the existence of any “LSD cell group” that she was supposedly working with. There is, however, one caveat to this dilemma that will be discussed shortly.
In addition, some of Leary’s critics (and there are many) even doubt that he actually had any contact with Mary Meyer at all. The majority of these critics believe he shamelessly exploited the story of Mary Pinchot Meyer, and engineered it for publicity for Flashbacks. In particular, the thrust of this criticism has been that if Leary had a relationship with Mary that began in 1962, why did he wait until 1983, some twenty years after the fact, to write about it? After all, Timothy Leary was a prolific author. Two of his major books from mainstream publishers, High Priest and The Politics of Ecstasy, both published in 1968—four years after Mary Meyer had been murdered—contain no mention of her.
However, it appeared that Leary did make an initial attempt to investigate Mary’s murder in late May of 1965 when he returned from his around-the-world honeymoon with his new wife. He told Leo Damore, and stated in Flashbacks, that he had finally called Vassar College in 1965 to find out Mary’s current whereabouts, only to discover she’d been murdered the previous fall. It was only at this juncture that Leary learned Mary had been married to Cord Meyer. In Flashbacks, Leary recorded that he broke down and sobbed at the time; he recounted the event to Damore in 1990.11 Enlisting the support of his friends Van Wolfe and Michael Hollingshead, Leary planned to do his own investigation and write a book about it. According to Van Wolfe, someone in “police intelligence in Washington” had told him Mary’s murder had been an assassination. The Leary-Wolfe plan was to “dig up the facts,” but Wolfe’s attorney warned him “nobody wanted this incident investigated,” that it was too dangerous to pursue.12
Another unanswered question still lingered: If Timothy Leary had returned from his around-the-world travels to Millbrook, New York, in the early summer of 1965, why hadn’t he followed Mary’s murder trial, particularly after having been so shocked and upset over her murder?
In an in-depth, nearly two-hour recorded interview in 1990, never before published, Leary told Damore that he did, in fact, know the trial was about to begin that summer, but that he had been blindsided by the emotional intensity of the breakup of his new marriage, as well as the crumbling of his Millbrook community, which included an onslaught of intimidation by local police. The campaign of police surveillance and interference had started just after Leary’s return, right before Ray Crump’s trial for the murder of Mary Meyer. After nearly a full year of harassment, the final hammer came down in March 1966, when G. Gordon Liddy, who had been attached to J. Edgar Hoover’s elite personal staff at FBI headquarters (and who would eventually become notorious as one of the Watergate break-in artists in 1972), raided Leary’s Millbrook compound.
“Had this been planned deliberately to keep you away from Mary’s murder trial?” Leo Damore asked Leary in 1990.
Prompted by Damore’s query, Leary entertained the possibility that the harassment might well have been deliberately timed to coincide with Mary’s murder trial. There had been an uptick in harassment and surveillance activity at Millbrook, said Leary, all through that summer and fall. Not wanting to stay for the winter, Tim and his new lady friend, Rosemary Woodruff, took off for the Yucatán in Mexico, only to be arrested at the Laredo, Texas, border crossing for “smuggling marijuana.” Rosemary Woodruff would famously remark: “Have you ever been in the situation where you feel all the gears shift, when everything changes? Poignant doesn’t begin to express it. I think Tim knew as well. Something like this had been waiting in the wings for a long time.”13
Media headlines all across the country would herald the Leary arrest. The backlash against him, and all recreational drugs, had begun. In spite of doing all he could to publicize and garner support for his trial, he was convicted on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to thirty years in jail and a $20,000 fine. The judge would eventually dismiss all the charges because of a failure to advise Leary and his family of their Miranda rights. But Leary was jailed again in 1969 on other drug charges, and then fled the country in 1970 and lived in exile for nearly three years. Finally captured in Afghanistan and extradited back to the United States, Timothy Leary would remain in the California prison system until April 1976.14 For more than ten years, Timothy Leary would be under siege, fighting for his life.
Upon his release from prison in 1976, having read the National Enquirer exposé about Mary’s affair with Jack published earlier that year, Leary would attempt a second investigation of Mary’s murder after coming across a copy of Deborah Davis’s book Katharine the Great at the home of his friends Jon and Carolyn Bradshaw.15 The Davis book revealed more details about who Mary Meyer had been, including her marriage to the CIA’s Cord Meyer, as well as her affair with the president. So incensed had Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham become over the book’s publication—purportedly because it accused Bradlee of having CIA connections—the two pressured publisher William Jovanovich of publishing giant Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to recall and shred the book.16
Leary would eventually oversee a further effort by Rebel magazine in the early 1980s to investigate Mary’s murder. He produced for Leo Damore several lengthy letters/reports from a private investigator by the name of William Triplett, whom he and Rebel had hired to do investigative work. Damore further confirmed the authenticity of Triplett’s investigation and association with Leary in early 1991.17
While Timothy Leary’s biographer, Robert Greenfield, lamented that Leary’s book Flashbacks wasn’t entirely accurate, he persisted in quoting many of the events in the book to support his portrait of Leary as a narcissistic miscreant. Greenfield did, however, verify in an interview for this book that Tim Leary knew Mary Meyer, and “probably did supply her with psychedelics.” Moreover, Mary was using her maiden name when she began their association. He wasn’t aware, perhaps intentionally so on Mary’s part, that she had been married to CIA operative Cord Meyer, with whom Leary himself had had a number of combative encounters when he was part of the American Veterans Committee (AVC) during his graduate student days at the University of California at Berkeley.18
“Tim didn’t like Cord Meyer,” said Greenfield. “His secretary in Berkeley confirmed that for me, as well as his relationship with Mary. My sense was that this [Leary’s relationship with Mary Meyer] did happen. If she came to him at Harvard, that’s the period where he was out to turn on the world and the aristocracy—people like Robert Lowell, Barney Rosset, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, and Maynard and Flo Ferguson. At Millbrook, Tim still had the patina of respectability. He looked straight. He was an ex Harvard professor. It was the early sixties, pre-psychedelic. Based on all the research I did, it seems entirely likely to me Tim would have met with somebody like
this, only Tim would have not made the association, given that Mary was only identifying herself as Mary Pinchot.”19
As authoritative and well-researched as Robert Greenfield’s 2006 biography of Timothy Leary had been, Greenfield didn’t have access to the important two-hour tape-recorded interview of Leary with the late author Leo Damore in November 1990. The Leary-Damore interview focused almost entirely on Leary’s relationship with Mary and the events surrounding her death, in addition to what was taking place in Leary’s own life at the time. During this interview, Leary offered many fascinating new details and insights about Mary and what he had learned about her activities. Damore and Leary also had a number of follow-up telephone conversations for nearly three years after the initial 1990 interview.20
“I knew Cord quite well in 1946 during my involvement with the American Veterans Committee,” Leary told Damore. “He was an absolute fanatic who fought with everyone, a real monster-machine!”21 Again, this may have indicated Mary’s knowledge that confrontations between Cord and Leary had taken place years earlier; Mary’s deception was likely deliberate. She clearly understood some of the risks involved in being identified, Leary told Damore, and she had wanted to keep a low profile from the very beginning. Throughout the interview, Leary reiterated several times that Mary never mentioned names.
“Mary first wanted to turn on the wives and girlfriends of important powerful men,” Leary explained. “That’s what she said. She never gave me any indication who these men were, or the women for that matter.”
