Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  While Meyer insisted that he had not fundamentally changed, something hardened within him, particularly after he and other CIA liberals were targeted by a McCarthy witch hunt in 1953. Allen Dulles came to his defense, saving his job, and he was ushered through a bureaucratic cleansing process by Richard Helms. During his purgatory, Meyer found solace in reading Kafka’s The Trial. Afterwards, observed Helms’s biographer Thomas Powers, “a note of harshness and rigidity entered [Meyer’s] political thinking; he became more Catholic than the Pope, and from a commitment to peace and international amity he gradually shifted toward a purely anti-communist fervor.”

  Meyer fell increasingly under the spell of the gloomy, Byzantine views of his CIA mentor Angleton. “Cord entered the agency as a fresh idealist and left a wizened tool of Angleton,” observed Tom Braden, Meyer’s boss early in his intelligence career. “Angleton was a master of the black arts. He bugged everything in town, including me. Whatever Angleton thought, Cord thought.”

  Mary Meyer was not happy with the way that the young world-reformer she had married was changing. At Georgetown parties Cord Meyer became a hectoring, self-righteous presence, sending other guests fleeing to far corners of the room. Even the passionately anticommunist saloniere, Joe Alsop, found him repellent, describing him as “a bright but rebarbative man with a certain genius for making enemies.” The couple grew apart. Mary began startling other CIA wives with her own remarks, which were openly critical of the agency’s ways. When their middle son, nine-year-old Michael, was fatally run down by a car on the curving road outside their McLean home in 1956, the marriage began to shatter. “Such a thing can either make or break a marriage,” observed a friend of the couple. “In their case it broke it.”

  Mary divorced her husband two years later, a bitter break-up in which Cord “acted like a 17th century cuckold,” according to another friend, denouncing her as “an unfit mother” and comparing her “to the whore of Babylon.” She immediately took her life in the opposite direction of her ex-spouse’s rigid world. Mary threw herself into the Washington art scene, starting an affair with a younger artist—the rising abstract painter Kenneth Noland—and embracing a pre-hippie lifestyle that included a wardrobe of peasant blouses and blue tights and a round of Reichian therapy, which promised enlightenment through orgasmic release.

  It’s easy to understand why JFK was entranced by her. The Mary Meyer who came into his life once again when he was in the White House was the same blonde beauty with sparkling green-blue eyes whom he had met when they were both teenagers. But now her mischievous and witty personality possessed something deeper, an earthy and wry wisdom that must have matched his own acute sense of life’s absurd tragedy. Unlike most other women in Kennedy’s circle, including the more refined Jackie, Mary could more than hold her own in a roomful of men. She got the joke. “When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell,” observed Kennedy biographer Herbert Parmet.

  While Kennedy enjoyed many erotic adventures in the White House, James Angleton observed, with Mary it was more serious. They “were in love,” the espionage official stated with conviction. “They had something very important.” Angleton’s wife, Cicely, was a good friend of Mary. But his information did not come from her. The spook had more direct sources, he told reporters during a weirdly confessional period late in his life: he had bugged the rooms and telephones in Mary’s Georgetown house. Angleton’s voyeurism is disturbing on several levels. There is the alarming specter of a CIA official spying on a president’s private life; there is the creepy perversity of peeping into the bedroom of a close friend’s ex-wife. And there is another twist, which Ben Bradlee suggested to me: “I think [Angleton] was perhaps even in love with Mary. They were great, great friends, and he was a very odd stick, Jim.”

  The CIA official’s snooping might have been prompted by a disturbing mix of illicit motives. But what is important here is what he found out about the relationship between Kennedy and Mary Meyer, in addition to its erotic details. Angleton would later tell reporters that the lovers experimented with drugs, smoking marijuana and dabbling with LSD. According to the spy, Meyer and Kennedy took one low dose of the hallucinogen, after which, he noted with a cringe-inducing delicacy, “they made love.”

  The CIA was no stranger to drug experimentation. The agency’s secret funding of LSD research, on witting and unwitting subjects (including at least one person who committed suicide while on a bad trip), has been credited with spawning the 1960s counterculture, the ultimate in unintended consequences. The CIA’s interest in psychedelic drugs lay in their possible military use; the agency was intrigued by LSD’s potential to control enemy minds. But Mary Meyer had something very different in mind with her drug experimentation. She wanted to turn on the Washington power structure in the interests of world peace. And there was no better place to start this sweeping transformation of the capital’s political consciousness than with her powerful lover.

  When America’s intelligence czars found out about Mary Meyer’s daring acid experiment, it must have blown their minds. Here was one more stark piece of evidence that they were dealing with an aberrant presidency. Kennedy was not only injecting himself with bizarre drug cocktails to control his chronic back pain and to boost his energy; he had now fallen under the erotic sway of Cord Meyer’s peculiar ex-wife, a woman who seemed increasingly unhinged to her old CIA friends after the death of her son and her divorce. And the president’s unconventional mistress was engaged in a mind-control experiment aimed not at the Kremlin, but the White House.

  To carry out her psychedelic peace mission, Meyer sought the help of Timothy Leary, the handsome Boston-Irish rogue who was becoming known as the country’s leading proponent of LSD’s revolutionary powers. When she showed up at his office at Harvard’s Center for Personality Research in spring 1962, the forty-one-year-old psychology professor was still clinging to academic respectability. Except for his white tennis shoes, the bespectacled Leary still looked every inch the tweedy, tenure-track Ivy League scholar. But he had fallen under the watchful eye of the more conservative overseers at Harvard—an institution he respected but came to regard as a “finishing school for Fortune 500 executives”—as well as his drug research rivals at Langley. The attractive middle-aged woman who was leaning provocatively against his door that day was, like him, a renegade—in her case from the CIA world. And Leary—who collected women, celebrities, and trouble—was impressed by what he saw: “Good looking. Flamboyant eyebrows, piercing green-blue eyes, fine-boned face. Amused, arrogant, aristocratic.”

  As he would later write, she addressed him in a cool voice: “Dr. Leary, I’ve got to talk to you.” She stepped presumptuously into his office and held out her hand. “I’m Mary Pinchot. I’ve come from Washington to discuss something very important. I want to learn how to run an LSD session.”

  Mary told Leary that she had a friend in Washington “who’s a very important man.” This man was intrigued by her LSD experiences and wanted to try the drug himself. She wanted Leary’s advice about how to guide him through his psychedelic journey. Though Mary didn’t name her powerful friend, she left little doubt who he was. “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,” she told Leary. “Isn’t that the idea—to get powerful men to turn on?”

  Leary agreed it was worth a try. “Look at the world,” he said. “Nuclear bombs proliferating. More and more countries run by military dictators. No political creativity. It’s time to try something, anything new and promising.”

  Over the next year and a half, Mary continued to pop in and out of Leary’s life, picking his brain about acid experimentation protocol and soliciting doses of the drug to take back to Washington. Ironically, Leary had known Cord, but not Mary, from their days in the American Veterans Committee, where the two young visionaries had clashed. Leary was surprised that someone as free-spirited as Mary could have been with a man whose persona
lity he found implacable. “Mary was so much more outgoing and much more fun and much more lively [than Cord]—he was a monster machine,” Leary later said.

  In middle age, Mary’s ex-husband was settling into a bitter acceptance of the world’s grim realities. “You have to live with sorrow,” Cord would tell a visitor to his Georgetown house, a domicile the visitor described as “remarkable for its museum-like neatness.” Meyer was sitting on his sofa, cleaning his pipe. “What was Carlyle’s remark? I think it was Carlyle,” he mused aloud. “Somebody told him, ‘I accept the universe,’ and he answered, ‘You damn well better.’”

  But Mary Meyer did not accept the universe. She still burned with the utopian fever of her and Cord’s visionary youth. She would use the transcendent power of sex and drugs—the magical charms that the emerging sixties generation thought could change the world—to enchant the Washington power structure.

  Even the evangelistic Leary found Mary’s ambition “scary.” One can only imagine how alarming it was to the intelligence officials who were eavesdropping on Mary and her affair with the president.

  In winter 1963, Mary asked to see Leary again, meeting him in her room at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. A visibly tense Mary told the acid guru that her Washington drug experiments were still proceeding smoothly, but that her affair had been “exposed publicly.” A friend of hers, she said, “got drunk and told a room full of reporters about my boyfriend.” She was apparently referring here to the notorious incident in January 1963 when Phil Graham, the increasingly erratic publisher of the Washington Post who would later commit suicide, grabbed the microphone at a newspaper industry conference in the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix and delivered a disjointed harangue during which he exposed the affair between JFK and the president’s “favorite” mistress, Mary Meyer. (Kennedy promptly dispatched an Air Force plane with Graham’s psychiatrist on board to pick up the publisher, who was tranquilized and hospitalized for several weeks.) Graham’s bombshell was covered up, Mary told Leary. “I’ve seen it a hundred times in media politics,” she said. “The manipulation of news, cover-ups, misinformation, dirty tricks.”

  The last time Leary saw Mary, he recalled, she was deeply distraught. She phoned him at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York, where he had moved his research after leaving Harvard, and asked him to pick her up in the local village. As they drove through the splendor of the autumn countryside, where the trees glowed with what Leary described as a “Technicolor” intensity, Mary told him that her Washington drug experiment had come crashing down. “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.” Mary burst into tears. She told the drug researcher he must be very careful now. “I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid for all of us.” Leary thought she was being paranoid. He reached over to stroke her hair. But her alarm began to seep into him. If she ever showed up at the estate, Mary asked him, could she hide out there for awhile? Leary assured her that she could. Then she bid farewell to him. Leary never heard from Mary Meyer again.

  In 1965, after returning from an around-the-world trip, Leary tried to track down his old friend. Remembering that Mary was a Vassar graduate, he called the alumni office to find her whereabouts. The secretary who cheerily answered the phone grew somber when Leary gave her Mary’s name. “I’m sorry to say that she is, ah, deceased,” she told Leary. “Sometime last fall, I believe.” Digging frantically through old New York Times clippings he got from a contact at the newspaper, Leary began sobbing as he found out what happened. The previous October, while taking an afternoon walk along the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown, Mary had been shot twice, once in the head and once through the heart. There was no evidence that Mary, who left her purse at home, had been robbed or sexually assaulted. A suspect had been arrested—a twenty-five-year-old African-American day laborer named Ray Crump Jr. But Crump was later acquitted of the crime and it was never solved.

  The murder of Mary Meyer would become one of the more baffling and bizarre subplots in the Kennedy drama. Assassination researchers have pored over accounts of the crime, seeking possible links between the murders of the two secret lovers. The spectral appearance of James Angleton in the Meyer murder story greatly contributed to the fog of suspicion floating around the case.

  Following the murder, Ben and Tony Bradlee got an urgent overseas phone call from Mary’s friend Anne Truitt, who told them Mary had kept a diary containing sensitive information. Mary had requested that it be destroyed if anything ever happened to her, said her friend. When the Bradlees went looking for the journal, first at Mary’s house and then at her studio, they found a sheepish Angleton apparently in hot pursuit of the revealing notebook. The first time, the spy—known as “The Locksmith” in CIA circles—was already inside Mary’s house, rummaging through her belongings. On the second occasion, the Bradlees found him trying to pick the lock on Mary’s studio. The spook slinked off, with barely a word. The story grew even weirder the next day when Tony Bradlee, after finding the diary and reading about her sister’s affair with JFK, handed it over to Angleton so he could safely dispose of it—as if the CIA was the only power on earth capable of destroying a document. But Angleton did not do away with the diary, and when he admitted this to Tony years later, she demanded that he return it. Later, she claimed, she burned it in her fireplace. “None of us has any idea what Angleton did with the diary while it was in his possession, nor why he failed to follow Mary and Tony’s instructions,” Bradlee wrote in his 1995 memoir, an account that left more unexplained than answered.

  Bradlee was still vague about the Angleton incident in an interview for this book, ascribing the CIA official’s illegal entry and attempted break-in to his eccentricity and his possible amorous obsession with Mary. “I thought Jim was just like a lot of men, who had a crush on Mary,” the legendary former Washington Post editor said, sitting in his office at the newspaper, where he occupies emeritus status. “Although the idea of him as a lover just stretches my imagination, especially for Mary, because she was an extremely attractive woman. And he was so weird! He looked odd, he was off in the clouds somewhere. He was always mulling over some conspiracy when he wasn’t working on his orchids. It was hard to have a conversation with him. I bet there are still twelve copies of Mary’s diary in the CIA somewhere.” Bradlee denied that the diary contained any secrets about the CIA or other revealing information, beyond the passages about her romance with JFK. “I thought about this when I wrote my book. I don’t think there’s anything hidden away in my psyche that I haven’t come clean on.”

  At Mary’s funeral in the National Cathedral, the solemn, gray stone fortress overlooking Georgetown, Cord Meyer wept uncontrollably. He was consoled during the ceremony by his two closest friends in the CIA, Richard Helms and James Angleton, who sat on either side of him in the pew. A memo written at the time by William Sullivan, the number three man in the FBI, revealed that Helms and Angleton “have been very much involved with matters pertaining to the death and funeral of Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer.” In an interview years later with Mary Meyer’s biographer, Nina Burleigh, Helms could not recall just what it was about Mary’s passing that had required so much of his attention.

  Friends of Mary told Burleigh they felt her killing was in some way connected to her relationship with Kennedy, but they had no proof. During the final months of her life, reported her biographer, Mary seemed to be the target of a disturbing surveillance, with her Georgetown house broken into on more than one occasion, including once when she and her two sons were sleeping upstairs. “What are they looking for in my house?” she was heard to plaintively ask.

  In his 2003 book about Washington, D.C.’s intrigue-filled society world, The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club, author C. David Heymann told a remarkable story about visiting a fading Cord Meyer in his Washington nursing home, just six weeks before his death. Who
did he think had killed his ex-wife, Heymann asked Meyer? “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” the mortally ill CIA man reportedly “hissed.” But the credibility of some of the author’s earlier work had been challenged, and his story about Meyer’s final testament received scant attention. The truth about Mary Meyer’s murder would remain clouded in the same mists that enveloped the demise of her lover.

  What is clear is that Mary Meyer’s personal life was of intense interest to the CIA, before and after her death. Angleton was fully aware of the ecstatic sway she had over the president. And he believed that she actually influenced administration policy, nudging it in a more dovish direction. In some circles, this made her a figure to watch closely. “With her combination of access and disregard for convention, Mary Meyer became a female type, the classic dangerous woman,” wrote Burleigh.

  Mary Meyer was John Kennedy’s link to a post–Cold War future that neither of them would live to see. She connected him to the phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, and mind exploration that would light up the late sixties. The tightly controlled JFK only allowed himself to sample these pleasures, but that was certainly enough to send a shiver of fear through the national security command. CIA officials were deeply involved in drug research aimed at rendering an enemy harmless. They worried that Kennedy was being similarly disarmed.

  A friend of Mary later told the story of the time she brought a half dozen marijuana joints to the White House. Kennedy smoked three of them before they finally took effect. As he closed his eyes and let the reefer carry him away, he mused dreamily, “Suppose the Russians did something now.” The Cold Warriors with a window on the president’s extracurricular exploits no doubt wondered the same.

  AS AN ORATOR, JOHN Kennedy is known primarily for two speeches—his anthemic “ask not” inaugural address in which he challenged Americans to new heights of national purpose and his dramatic June 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in which he confronted a communist system that was forced to wall in its own people. Video images from these two ringing addresses have become enshrined in the national memory through endless replay.