Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

by Peter Janney

  Why would Phil Graham have committed suicide at a time when, by all accounts, his condition was improving? In June, with Katharine’s support, he had voluntarily returned to Chestnut Lodge. Well into July, those who visited Phil all spoke of his increasingly stable disposition, of his coming to terms with his illness and making a recovery. Might he have succeeded in returning to his former life and continuing his reign at the Post? Whether he recovered or not, the risk may well have been that the wealthy, powerful media mogul Phil Graham was no longer willing to toe the party line, that he could no longer be counted on to turn a blind eye if needed.

  The silent, invisible tsunami was approaching. An excruciating, earth-shattering moment in American history was about to explode in three months’ time. As little as possible could be left to chance. Not only would there be a well-planned, well-executed conspiracy to take out a sitting American president, but an even more critical and insidious conspiracy—a cover-up—had to be successfully, and immediately, orchestrated in the aftermath. That, of course, meant all the major sources of news—newspapers—had to be securely on board, willing to turn a blind eye to the government’s contrived, fictitious post-assassination narrative, as well as Allen Dulles’s appointment to the Warren Commission. In the approaching moments of a horrific calamity, Phil Graham, owner and editor of the Washington Post, had become a problem. Increasingly regarded as a loose cannon, he could no longer be trusted; he had criticized the CIA’s infiltration of the media and its manipulation of news, as well as having ceremoniously told off some of the CIA’s own collaborators—publishers and senior editors of the mainstream media—in person, in Phoenix, in January 1963.

  On August 9, Jack and Jackie lost their second child at birth, a boy they had named Patrick Bouvier. Jackie had gone into premature labor two days earlier, and the infant succumbed to complications. Jack reportedly wept inconsolably.103 For Jackie, the loss had to have been compounded by her realization that, in the wake of her son’s death and on the eve of her tenth wedding anniversary, Jack and Mary Meyer were still very much involved.

  A month later, Jack and Jackie would celebrate their anniversary in Newport, Rhode Island. Jack would reportedly get down “on one knee, begging Jackie not to go” on a private cruise with Aristotle Onassis.104 She was apparently unmoved by his display; she would spend the first two weeks of October cruising the Aegean with Onassis on his yacht Christina, her sister, Lee, brother-in-law Stas Radziwill, and friends Sue and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. in tow. For Jackie, it was now payback time. The White House would spin the trip as a getaway for Jackie’s convalescence, but Bobby Kennedy was furious; he vehemently detested Onassis. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., no stranger to the rogue Onassis, asked Bobby how he should position himself during the trip. Bobby grimly replied, “Sink the fucking yacht!”105

  Peter Evans, author of Ari, the only authorized biography of Aristotle Onassis, later documented in his subsequent book Nemesis that it was on this October cruise that Jackie and Onassis first became lovers. “According to Onassis,” wrote Evans, “Jackie’s susceptibility at that moment was considerable, especially in the context of her hurt at Jack’s continuing unfaithfulness.” Evans’s research had led him to Mary Meyer: “It was this affair, believed one White House insider, that was the final straw that persuaded Jackie to continue with the cruise despite her husband’s objections and pleas to cut it short.”106

  Sometime before September 24, Timothy Leary said, he received a late-afternoon telephone call from Mary Pinchot. Leary described her as sounding on the verge of “hysteria.” She had rented a car at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and had driven up to Millbrook, wanting to meet with Leary privately, but not at the estate. They agreed on a more remote location where, as he wrote, the “trees were turning technicolor” with fall’s foliage, the “sky glaring indigo—with the bluest girl in the world next to me.”107

  According to Leary, Mary told him: “It was all going so well. We had eight intelligent women turning on the most powerful men in Washington. And then we got found out. I was such a fool. I made a mistake in recruitment. A wife snitched on us. I’m scared.” She burst into tears. Initially, Leary thought her state might have been the result of a bad drug experience; he attempted to console her. She corrected him. Her state of mind wasn’t drug-related at all. “That’s all been perfect,” she told him. “That’s why it’s so sad. I may be in real trouble. I really shouldn’t be here.” Leary asked a second time if she was, at that moment, on drugs.

  “It’s not me. It’s the situation that’s fucked up. You must be very careful now, Timothy. Don’t make any waves. No publicity. I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid for all of us.” The gravity of Mary’s concern was still lost on Leary. He suggested that they go back to the house and have some wine, “maybe a hot bath and figure out what you should do.” Mary persisted.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “This is not paranoia. I’ve gotten mixed up in some dangerous matters. It’s real. You’ve got to believe me. Do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” he finally replied.

  “Look, if I ever showed up here suddenly, could you hide me out for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.” Mary then pulled a pill bottle out of her handbag.

  “This is supposed to be the best LSD in the world. From the National Institute of Mental Health. Isn’t it funny that I end up giving it to you?”108

  Timothy Leary watched Mary drive away. It would be the last time he would see her alive.

  Mary wasn’t one to be spooked easily by anything. Leary had no idea what other woman in Washington could be causing her such alarm. During the 1990 Leary-Damore interview, however, the Millbrook incident was discussed at some length.109 Both Leary and Damore had come to believe that the woman in question—the woman Mary believed had betrayed her (“A wife snitched on us”)—was, in fact, Katharine Graham. Damore’s theory was that in her desperation to bring her husband under control, Katharine was frantic enough to try anything, including supporting Phil in undertaking a psychedelic exploration. That meant, according to Damore, that Katharine Graham might have been one of the eight women in Mary’s group. His conversation with Anne Chamberlin, a close friend of Katharine Graham’s, may have led him to this conclusion.

  Katharine Graham’s biggest influence in this direction, however, likely came from her close friends Henry and Clare Booth Luce, who were, like Katharine and Phil Graham, media moguls. The Luces owned Time Inc. Over the years, Katharine Graham and Clare Booth Luce would become very dear friends.

  In the late 1950s, her marriage unraveling because Henry wanted to leave her for a younger woman, Clare Booth Luce, like Mary Meyer, first experimented with LSD. Under the direction of Dr. Sidney Cohen, Clare, at loose ends, further continued her exploration during a time of personal turmoil. In spite of her extraordinarily successful careers, which included writing four critically acclaimed Broadway plays in the 1930s, serving as managing editor of Vanity Fair from 1933 to 1934, becoming a two-term congresswoman in the 1940s, serving as American ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956, and finding herself regarded as one of the world’s ten most admired women—Clare described herself as “deeply unhappy.”110 Again, like Mary Meyer and Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, Clare’s psychedelic voyages would turn her into an LSD proselytizer. Starting in 1954 and through 1968, both Time and Life would publish a number of enthusiastic articles about hallucinogens. According to Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley, Clare also believed that her use of hallucinogens had “saved our marriage.”111

  Katharine Graham first caught sight of Henry and Clare Booth Luce in 1948. She marveled at “how important they looked—and indeed they were.”112 The two couples fast became friends in 1954. Clare became aware of Phil Graham’s deterioration sometime in 1962,113 the same year that Mary Meyer first introduced herself to Timothy Leary and told him she wanted to bring together a group of women who were involved with politically powerful men in Washington. Following Phil
Graham’s death in 1963, Katharine turned to Clare as a role model: “Clare gave me interesting and useful guidance on how to handle myself at work … much of it being about a woman in a man’s world. I took to heart what she said.”114 Years after the Washington Post’s Watergate crisis, Katharine would recall how she had, during critical moments, “engaged in a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth with Clare Booth Luce.”115

  With her husband unraveling, it was not only possible, but very likely, that the increasingly desperate Katharine turned to Clare Booth Luce for guidance and advice, her marriage having survived a similar crisis. If Clare believed LSD had “saved” her marriage, she might well have counseled Katharine in that direction. And given Clare’s endorsement of LSD as a cutting-edge therapeutic tool, Katharine may have sought out Mary Meyer for assistance—not only to help Phil, but herself as well.

  By 1963, however, it appeared Phil was beyond Katharine’s reach, that he would continue to wrest control of the Post away from her. According to Deborah Davis, “Katharine had pretty much given up on the marriage,” yet was desperate to retain control of her family’s newspaper. In an interview Davis gave in 1992, she told Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas that “there’s some speculation that either she arranged for him [Phil] to be killed or somebody said to her, ‘don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.’”116 While Leo Damore, Timothy Leary, and Deborah Davis never definitively connected all the dots, the “somebody” in this equation, in this author’s opinion, was the same element within the CIA that was orchestrating the assassination of President Kennedy. “Anybody can commit a murder,” said legendary CIA asset Bill Corson, “but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.”

  Katharine Graham’s Faustian deal with the devil would give her complete control and ownership of the Washington Post, provided she maintained the same polices and agreements her husband had arranged before his “enlightenment,” post–Bay of Pigs. The deal had to have included Katharine not squealing on anything the Agency wanted kept secret, as well as her revealing any matters the CIA wanted to know about—including Mary Meyer’s influence on the president. Undoubtedly, Mary was aware of the kind of power the CIA wielded, as well as its treachery, and Katharine’s betrayal likely opened up an entirely new can of worms, even perhaps allowing Mary the realization that Phil’s demise might well become a harbinger of hers. Danger was lurking. Only the chosen few knew they were going to go to the source to cut off the head of the snake. Mary would be spared—so long as she made no waves. For Mary, that would eventually become impossible.

  On September 24, the president traveled with Mary and her sister to their family’s Grey Towers estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, to dedicate a gift from the Pinchot family to the U.S. Forest Service. It consisted of a large parcel of Pinchot family land, as well as the Pinchot mansion, the former residence of Mary’s uncle Gifford Pinchot. Tony still had no inkling of her sister’s affair with Jack. “There was no sexual thing evident,” she told author Sally Bedell Smith. “He was easy with both of us. I always felt he had liked me as much as Mary. You could say there was a little rivalry.”117

  After the dedication ceremony, Jack and the two sisters went to their mother’s house to look at old family pictures. The elderly Ruth Pinchot, once a spirited champion of women’s equality and liberation, was now supporting Barry Goldwater in his bid to unseat Kennedy in 1964. Jack reportedly took it in stride and was jovial throughout the visit.

  Unexpectedly, that same day the U.S. Senate ratified the president’s Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. Much had been done to convince the American public of the treaty’s importance. Under Jack’s supervision, Norman Cousins and the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had led a successful campaign for public approval. Nikita Khrushchev would sign the treaty sixteen days later. The Soviet premier considered the treaty to be his country’s and America’s greatest mutual achievement. He proposed that the two leaders use it as an opening “to seek solutions of other ripe international questions.” In a letter that followed, Khrushchev outlined certain tasks for immediate consideration, including ratification of a nonaggression pact between the countries of NATO and member states of the Warsaw Pact; creation of nuclear-free zones in various regions of the world; and a ban on the future spread of all nuclear weapons. He closed the letter with the following: “Their implementation would facilitate a significant strengthening of peace, improvement of international relations, would clear the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the delivering of peoples from the threat of war.”118

  “Khrushchev’s vision, as inspired by the test ban treaty,” wrote James Douglass, “corresponded in a deeply hopeful way to Kennedy’s American University address. In his letter, Khrushchev was signaling his readiness to work with Kennedy on a host of projects. If the two leaders should succeed as they had on the test ban treaty, in only a few of Khrushchev’s suggested projects, they would end the Cold War.”119

  With the ratification of the test ban treaty and Khrushchev’s imminent signing of the document, Kennedy had successfully fashioned a new path, bringing the world closer to a “genuine peace.” That he had learned the good news when he was with Mary, and that she, too, had long nurtured the goal of a world moving toward peace without war, had to have been a profound, defining moment between the two. An extraordinary accomplishment had unfolded that day, finally taking place at Mary’s family home. According to Kenny O’Donnell, present that day at the Pinchot estate, Mary and Jack were furtively smiling at one another, the news of the ratification having reached the presidential entourage.120

  Also that September, President Kennedy signaled his intention to develop two additional, significant paths toward peace: a plan for a secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro that would eliminate Cuba as a campaign issue in the 1964 election; and a new road map for ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam by the start of his second term as president. With regard to the latter, that September, Kennedy sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor that September on a ten-day fact-finding expedition in Vietnam, the goal of which was to determine America’s exit strategy from the war. Kennedy took the long view, reportedly confiding to his adviser Kenny O’Donnell, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy ‘red scare’ on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure I am reelected.”121 President Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263) became a testament to his intention to the withdrawal from Vietnam.

  In his 1987 book The Twilight Struggle, former ambassador William (“Bill”) Attwood documented that he was a special adviser on African affairs at the United Nations in September 1963. He then mentioned that he was talking to ABC news reporter Lisa Howard about Africa when she casually brought up the fact that she had recently interviewed Fidel Castro. In an interview for this book, Bill Attwood’s wife, Simone, added something more. Simone was adamant that both she and Bill knew of “Mary’s affair with Kennedy. I think a lot of people knew,” she added. According to Simone, after Bill’s return from Africa in June, Mary Meyer had had a hand in persuading Attwood, her former boyfriend, to contact Lisa Howard as a way to begin moving the sour relationship with Cuba toward rapprochement.122 Already, as early as March 1963, President Kennedy had been instructing his staff to “start thinking along more flexible lines” vis-à-vis the island nation and its leader. According to White House aide Gordon Chase, who became Bill Attwood’s White House contact that fall, Kennedy was interested in “quietly enticing Castro over to us.”123

  A secret Bill Attwood–Lisa Howard alliance with Cuba’s United Nations representative Carlos Lechuga developed. Lechuga told Attwood that Kennedy’s American University address had impressed Castro, and he invited Attwood to Havana to begin a dialogue w
ith the Cuban leader. The CIA, meanwhile, was taking it all in. The Attwood-Howard effort with Cuba on Kennedy’s behalf became a target of CIA surveillance. According to David Talbot, “In one call to Havana, [Lisa] Howard was overheard excitedly describing Kennedy’s enthusiasm for rapprochement. The newswoman had no sense of the shock waves she was causing within the halls of Washington power.”124

  On October 3, Jean Daniel, editor of the French weekly L’Observateur, told Bill Attwood that he was on his way to Havana to see Castro. Attwood arranged for Daniel to meet with Kennedy before he left for Cuba. “When I left the Oval Office of the White House,” Daniel recalled, “I had the impression that I was a messenger for peace. I was convinced that Kennedy wanted rapprochement, that he wanted me to come back and tell him that Castro wished the rapprochement too.”125