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

by Peter Janney

  34. Deborah Davis, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., March 17, 2009. I also had a number of subsequent phone conversations with Ms. Davis about Timothy Leary, whom she came to know well, in addition to Jim Truitt.

  35. Bernie Ward and Granville Toogood, “Former Vice President of Washington Post Reveals JFK 2-Year White House Romance,” National Enquirer, March 2, 1976, p. 4.

  36. Ibid.

  37. January 1962 was the date first disclosed by James Truitt in the March 1976 issue of the National Enquirer. Ibid.

  38. White House Secret Service logs at John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass. This date was also substantiated by Sally Bedell Smith and Nina Burleigh in their respective books, Grace and Power and A Very Private Woman, pp. 329-330.

  39. Smith, Grace and Power, pp. 233–234. This is the latest and most thoroughly researched book documenting these facts.

  40. Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial, 1983), pp. 306–307.

  41. Dino Brugioni, interview by the author, January 30, 2009. During the Kennedy presidency, Brugioni was the top deputy for Arthur C. Lundahl, director of the CIA’s most secretive facility: the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). Brugioni knew personally some of the agents in Kennedy’s Secret Service detail; they told him that they took the president on a number of occasions to Mary Meyer’s house in Georgetown. Brugioni is also the author of the best-selling book Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1990).

  42. Benjamin C. Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 268.

  43. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 54.

  44. Ralph G. Martin, Seeds of Destruction: Joe Kennedy and His Sons (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 371.

  45. Damore, interview. Damore mentioned this incident the very first time we met in February 1992 and repeated it several times subsequent to that.

  46. Ben Bradlee, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., January 31, 2007.

  47. Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, p. 43.

  48. Bradlee, A Good Life, p. 232.

  49. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, p. 187. Bradlee said the remark was made on April 29, 1963.

  50. Smith, Grace and Power, p. 364.

  51. Ibid., p. 365.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid., pp. 144–145.

  54. Bradlee, interview.

  55. Charles Bartlett, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., December 10, 2008.

  56. Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, p. 298.

  57. Bartlett, interview.

  58. Damore, interview. Damore also shared O’Donnell’s comments with his close friend and attorney Jimmy Smith, as well as with Timothy Leary during their interview in November 1990.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Donald H. Wolfe, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe. (New York: William Morrow, 1998), pp. 461–462; Donald H. Wolfe, interview by the author, June 2, 2005. Wolfe’s account was meticulously researched and substantiated by several different sources.

  61. Wolfe, Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, p. 462.

  62. Bryan Bender, “A Dark Corner of Camelot,” Boston Globe, January 23, 2011.

  63. Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, p. 194.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Memorandum for the President, December 29, 1962, JFKPOF-065-019, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass. See also Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, p. 194.

  66. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 167. See also Tim Weiner, “The True and Shocking History of the CIA,” July 30, 2007, RINF News, www.rinf.com/alt-news/latest-news/the-true-and-shocking-history-of-the-cia/876/.

  67. John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 2007), p. 98.

  68. Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 293.

  69. The most recent and thorough account is Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

  70. John Foster Dulles and the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had been the legal counsel for the United Fruit Company for decades. John Foster and Allen Dulles were both major shareholders in the company, with Allen serving as a member of United Fruit’s board of trustees. See Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), pp. 129–130; Walter La Feber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 120–121.

  71. Donald E. Deneselya, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., April 10, 2007.

  72. L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (New York: Citadel, 1996), p. 155.

  73. Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005), p.162. Author Mellen’s exact reference for this quote was as follows: “Forty years later, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy adviser, would remark quietly to Jim Garrison’s old classmate Wilmer Thomas that they had been at war with ‘the national security people.’”

  74. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profiles of Power (New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 103.

  75. David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 1980), p. 118.

  76. Daniel Schorr, commentary on Noah Adams’s NPR program All Things Considered, March 26, 2001.

  77. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner, 1992), pp. 98–99.

  78. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 428.

  79. Willie Morris, New York Days (Boston: Little Brown, 1993), p. 36.

  80. According to James Srodes in his book Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), p. 547, Dulles did not learn that he would be fired from the CIA until the last week of August 1961. President Kennedy then announced on September 27 that John A. McCone would replace him.

  81. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 82.

  82. James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell, “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?,” American Prospect 5, no. 19 (September 1994): pp. 88–96.

  Chapter 10. Peace Song

  1. Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 315.

  2. John F. Kennedy, “Cuban Missile Crisis Address to the Nation” (televised speech, October 22, 1962), American Rhetoric, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcubanmissilecrisis.html (authenticity certified).

  3. James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008), p. 20.

  4. Known as the “Pen Pal Correspondence,” the private letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev were published together in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1961–1963, vol. 6., Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966). They can also be accessed online; see “Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges,” U.S. Department of State, www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/volume_vi/exchanges.html. All quotations from that correspondence appearing in this chapter were obtained at that web page.

  5. Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, September 29, 1961, “Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges,” no. 21. See note 4 above for location.

  6. Letter from President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, October 16, 1961, “Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges,” no. 22. See note 4 above for location.

  7. Leo Damore, interviews by the author, February 1992 and October 1992. Damore shared a number of incidents that Kenny O’Donnell had told him about concerning Mary and Jack, specifical
ly mentioning Mary confronting Jack on the dangers of the resumption of nuclear testing in April 1962.

  8. Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, October 26, 1962, “Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges,” no. 65.

  9. Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 27, 1962, “Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges,” no. 66.

  10. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 497–498.

  11. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008), p. 4. See also Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 341; Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Records in the Assassination of JFK (printed by author, 2009), pp. 1710–1711, pp. 1716–1718, p. 1774. The most thorough account is contained in John D. Gresham and Norman Polmar, Defcon-2 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).

  12. Interview with Robert S. McNamara, December 6, 1998, Episode 11, National Security Archive, George Washington University. Located at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/mcnamara1.html

  13. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 575. The author interviewed a retired SAC wing commander who told him, “I knew what my target was—Leningrad.” The wing commander’s SAC alert bombers “deliberately flew past their turn around points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat which Soviet radar operators would certainly have recognized and reported. The bombers only turned around when Soviet freighters carrying missiles to Cuba stopped dead in the Atlantic.”

  14. Gresham and Polmar, Defcon-2, pp. 244–246.

  15. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 524.

  16. Ibid., p. 525.

  17. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 44.

  18. For background information on the life of Philip L. Graham, see David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1975); Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979); Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage, 1998); and Carol Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story (New York: Seven Stories Press,1993).

  19. There is extensive documentation of the existence of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, as noted in previous chapters. I am particularly indebted to the former CIA operative and author Victor Marchetti for the information he provided me during my interview with him on November 18, 2005, and October 4, 2007, in Ashburn, Virginia.

  20. Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and the Post, pp. 372–373.

  21. Ibid., pp. 197–198.

  22. Halberstam, Powers That Be, pp. 381–382.

  23. Ibid., pp. 215–216.

  24. Davis, Katharine the Great (1979), p. 164.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Smith, Grace and Power, p. 349.

  27. William Shover, interview by the author, March 18, 2009. Leo Damore also interviewed Shover on October 8, 1993.

  28. Ben Bradlee, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., January 31, 2007.

  29. Smith, Grace and Power, p. 349.

  30. Graham, Personal History, p. 310.

  31. Carol Felsenthal, interview by the author, August 10, 2010.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and the Post, p. 216.

  34. Felsenthal, interview.

  35. White House telephone logs, calls to Evelyn Lincoln on January 18, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts.

  36. Davis, Katharine the Great (1979), p. 165.

  37. H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2009), p. 115.

  38. Davis, Katharine the Great (1979), p. 165. See also Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and the Post, p. 206, p. 210.

  39. Ibid., p. 168; Deborah Davis, interview by the author, March 17, 2009. See also “An Interview with Deborah Davis,” in Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader, ed. Kenn Thomas (Lilburn, Ga.: IllumiNet Press, 1995), p. 83; Felsenthal, Power, Privilege and the Post, pp. 371–373.

  40. Davis, Katharine the Great (1979), p. 160.

  41. Ralph G. Martin, Seeds of Destruction: Joe Kennedy and His Sons (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 322–323.

  42. Ibid., p. 372.

  43. Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Macmillan, 1983), p. 354.

  44. Smith, Grace and Power, pp. 351–352.

  45. Ibid., p. 352. Adlai Stevenson’s letter to Marietta Tree on March 10, 1963, is in the collection Papers, 1917–1995, housed in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Boston, Mass.

  46. Smith, Grace and Power, p. 352.

  47. Horne, Assassination Records Review Board, 5: pp. 1382–1383.

  48. Toni Shimon, interviews by the author, June 17, 2004, February 15, 2007, January 7, 2008, and March 30, 2010.

  49. Shimon, interview, February 15, 2007.

  50. Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), p. 162.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid., p. 163.

  54. Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2006), p. 199.

  55. Timothy Leary, High Priest (Oakland, Calif.: Ronin, 1968), pp. 256–257.

  56. Leary, Flashbacks, p. 171.

  57. Leo Damore, interview by the author, Centerbrook, Conn., April 1993. Damore and I discussed the postcard Mary Meyer had allegedly sent Leary (Flashbacks, p. 171), which, according to Damore, was further confirmation of what his confidential source had told him. I suspected that the source of this information was Mary Meyer’s close friend Anne Chamberlin, whom I also knew, but who refused to be interviewed by me. Anne Chamberlin died on December 31, 2011.

  58. Greenfield, Timothy Leary, p. 547. As of June 2011, the entire Timothy Leary archive has been purchased by the New York Public Library. The collection includes some 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs, and more. See Patricia Cohen, “New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers,” New York Times, June 16, 2011, p. C1–2.

  59. Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 199.

  60. Alun Rees, “Nobel Prize Genius Crick Was High on LSD when He Discovered the Secret of Life,” Associated Newspapers, 2004. This article originally appeared in the Mail on Sunday (London), August 8, 2004. It can be viewed at Serendipity, www.serendipity.li/dmt/crick_lsd.htm.

  61. Alcoholics Anonymous, “Pass It On”: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A.A. Message Reached the World (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1995), pp. 370–371. See also Rich English, “The Dry Piper: The Strange Life and Times of Bill Wilson, Founder of A.A.,” Modern Drunkard Magazine, www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/01-05/0105-dry-piper.htm.

  62. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. xviii–xix.

  63. Interview with Oliver Stone on Real Time With Bill Maher HBO (episode #159). Original airdate: June 27, 2009.

  64. R.R. Griffiths, W.A. Richards, U. McCann, and R. Jesse (2006) “Psilocybin can occasion mystical experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Psychopharmacology 187: pp. 268 - 283. Also, Griffiths, R.R.; Richards, W.A.; Johnson, M.W.; McCann, U.D.; Jesse, R. 2008. “Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later.” Journal of Psychopharmacology 22(6): pp. 621-632.

  65. Theodore Sorensen, interv
iew by the author, January 10, 2006.

  66. John F. Kennedy, “American University Commencement Address” (speech, American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963), American Rhetoric, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html (authenticity certified).

  67. Max Frankel, “Harriman to Lead Test-Ban Mission to Soviet in July; Kennedy Envoy Expected to Tell Khrushchev of Hope for Nuclear Breakthrough,” New York Times, June 12, 1963, p. 1.

  68. Kennedy, “American University Commencement Address.”

  69. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 311.

  70. Kennedy, “American University Commencement Address.”

  71. Ibid.

  72. Ibid.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Ibid.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Message from Chairmen Khrushchev and Brezhnev to President Kennedy, July 4, 1963, Department of State, Presidential Files: Lot 66 D 204 (no classification marking). The source text is a Department of State translation of a commercial telegram from Moscow. Another copy of this message and the transliterated Russian text is in the National Security Files, Countries Series, USR, Khrushchev Correspondence, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass.

  78. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 46.

  79. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profiles of Power (New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 545.

  80. Ibid., p. 549.

  81. John F. Kennedy, “Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Address to the Nation,” (televised speech, July 26, 1963), American Rhetoric, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfknucleartestbantreaty.htm (authenticity certified).

  82. Joseph Alsop to Evangeline Bruce, June 12, 1963, Joseph Alsop and Steward Alsop Papers, Part III, Box 130, Library of Congress.

  83. William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 133–134.

  84. John F. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Address” (televised speech, June 11, 1963), American Rhetoric, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcivilrights.htm (authenticity certified).