The Lost Diary of M

by Paul Wolfe

  The Kentucky Derby is a hallowed event in Georgetown, for reasons I have never quite fathomed. A full day of ritual and revelry over a horse race that lasts two minutes. It’s like sex.

  I sipped a mint julep, thinking about the nature of horses, thinking of the thoroughbreds grazing everywhere in the fields of Kentucky, dreaming of the Derby, thinking of my old black Arabian, Comanche, and my ghost sister Rosamond’s midnight stallion, Excalibur. After two juleps, to the wild applause of a crowd ready to go berserk over horses, Polly and I stood up and sang a rousing rendition of my favorite song, “Chantilly Lace.” No one knew its hidden meaning except me. The Big Bopper spoke in teenage code on that 45 rpm record for the cellular evolution of mankind.

  “Chantilly Lace, and a pretty face and a ponytail, hanging down . . .” While everyone clapped, James Angleton did a maniacal version of the Twist—I believe he had downed an entire bottle of Glenlivet at that point—and staggered over to where Lorraine Cooper sat. Lorraine lifted her veil and gazed at the cadaverous figure swaying like a samba to the drums of alcohol. I anticipated a meaningful pronouncement of some sort, but all Lorraine said was: “Down, boy.”

  I waited for some sort of inebriated praise for our performance of “Chantilly Lace,” but James had something else in mind. He struggled to retrieve it from a world beyond his skull, but it was mired, it seemed, in some internal tableau. Finally, it surfaced.

  “I met E. E. Cummings at Yale, you know,” he slurred. “We invited him to address our gallant little literary magazine Furioso, and he showed up to read, even though he was Harvard.”

  “Yale,” I said. “Fucking Yale. My father was Yale, my uncle was Yale, my ex-husband was Yale, most of my dates at Brearley were Yale. Hey, all my favorite spies walking around this party right now, you all went to Yale too!” I don’t know the source of this outburst, but Vangie Bruce shook her finger at me. She has begun tapping me at parties, I notice, indicating that my mouth betrays me. I tread too carelessly over the unwritten rules of the secretively powerful and the powerfully secretive. Evangeline protects me—she is like Isabelle, my French nanny back at Grey Towers who also tried to protect me, who also detected an urgent need for me to behave.

  “Who’s your horse, James?” I asked, steering the conversation back to the Derby. “I figure you for Crimson Satan!”

  “So E. E. Cummings addressed our little literary band,” he continued and began reciting from memory:

  if I should sleep with a lady called death

  get another man with firmer lips

  to take your new mouth in his teeth

  (hips pumping pleasure into hips).

  “A lady called death?” I blew a puff of Marlboro in his direction, a protective smokescreen no doubt, and called out to Frank Wisner, “Frank, am I a lady called death?”

  “I’ve heard it said,” Frank answered quietly, noncommittal right down to his quips. To which I responded: “From the Big Bopper to E. E. Cummings in one afternoon. Who says Washington is a cultural wasteland?”

  I realized the double entendre inherent in this sexual poet’s name, Cummings, and James repeated the lascivious phrase: “Hips . . . pumping . . . pleasure . . . into . . . hips.” He popped the p’s for emphasis, and I knew something was coming that would need handling, and I preferred it didn’t.

  “Mary, Mary,” he said. “I should have been with you instead of with your roommate from Vassar.”

  It is a woman’s job to stop men when they get stupid. I stood up and told him to shut up, I spoke it to penetrate his drunken stupor: “Cicely is a poet and a treasure, and she has put up with you, James, all these many years.” His body laughed, his face didn’t join, and I sensed the great unburdening he longed for from the fortress of secrets he carried in his scrawny body. “Mary, Mary,” he repeated, but before he could venture onto a new tangent, I stood up and said: “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I led him through the French doors and out into the Wisner garden, Venetian lanterns splashing light through the foliage though it was still daylight. How sweet the flowers smelled in Georgetown! I felt like James Angleton’s guide on some secret rendezvous as I pushed his long, almost comically angular body onto a concrete bench.

  “Mary,” he said, not missing a beat, “you know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence?” His breath was rancid with liquor.

  “Are you sure you want to be telling me this, James?” I asked, a familiar chill returning to my chest. I recalled Polly Wisner saying she made a point of never learning anything about Frank’s clandestine work so she could never accidentally reveal a secret. I wished to know nothing more about James’s squalid business, this ridiculous omnipresence of James Angleton in my life.

  He ignored me, and the unburdening proceeded of its own weight. “I got to be head of counterintelligence because I agreed not to polygraph Allen Dulles.” The statement hung in the warm night. His body swayed on the bench. “I agreed to ignore all the background checks on Mr. Allen Dulles and his closest friends. They were petrified that their intimate business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come spilling out like vomit onto their shiny shoes, along with their business dealings, along with their care and feeding of Nazi criminals. Along with the obstructions and impediments they put in place to hinder the Nuremberg trials. Along with the ratlines they built to Chile and Argentina for their Nazi friends who never repented. You want some names? I’ll give you names. Wolff. Dollman. Rauff. The CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed.”

  I stopped him: “You sure you want to be telling me this? Are you hoping I’ll unremember it?”

  I suddenly felt a wave of foreboding. Was it his men who were entering my house and moving things? Was he trying to warn me, signal me, threaten me? And what would happen tomorrow when the alcohol wore off, when James Jesus Angleton sat again in his dark office, lit up a Virginia Slim, and remembered what he had whispered to Cord Meyer’s ex-wife in a Georgetown garden?

  “The founding fathers of US intelligence were liars,” he said. I could not tell if he was confessing or boasting. “The better you lied, the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted, and they all had an overriding trait in common: a desire for absolute power. Allen Dulles. Richard Helms, our gracious host standing in that living room, Mr. Frank Wisner—they’re all grandmasters of mendacity. I’m telling you all this, Mary, even though I’ve never told your roommate from Vassar.”

  I stopped him again. “Please leave Cicely out of this.”

  “I’m a part of it, Mary, Mary. If you were in a room with these men, you had to believe you were in a room full of people that would deservedly end up in hell. And I’ve loved every minute of it.”

  MAY 7

  I was invited to Kay Graham’s mansion for tea. She is intrigued by Chantilly Lace, and she has a nose for news. She asked me once again to review my ideas for world peace. I hope she will help me; the Washington Post is growing in influence.

  I lightened the mood by complimenting her on her lawn. Who in tiny old Georgetown, with all the old Federalist houses built flush up to the street, can boast such a lush front lawn? She is a depressive sort of person, saying Phil certainly won’t mow it, so it’s another burden. The burden of a big house, which always falls on a woman. As does the continual hosting of parties, choreographing and casting them perfectly so you have the right mix of age, professions, nationalities, and always a few beautiful young women thrown in.

  “You know, Mary,” she said, “historically a woman had only three options in Washington, DC. You could be a political wife, you could run a boardinghouse, or you could be a madam. Put them all together, and you have a Washington hostess!”

  MAY 13

  In the book of these times, when the chapter called “Cold War” is written, ten thousand years from now, they will say: It has come to pass. For it has come to pass. The deed has been done. The occurrence has occurred. Chantilly Lace is realized. I have led the most powerful man on earth on to the next st
ep in cellular evolution. Jack and I took LSD.

  It was Sunday at Joe Alsop’s house on Dumbarton. Jackie was at a farm in Virginia. Jack told her he would be in National Security meetings all day, he told the Joint Chiefs he would be in Virginia, and Kenny O’Donnell made it all work. The Secret Service sat outside in a van all day, with one red-faced skinny block of stone stationed in the garden next to Joe Alsop’s bronze statue.

  Jack wanted to turn on here because he loves Joe’s queenly presence. This is where he came to smoke cigars and chat the night of the inauguration, when he couldn’t sleep and wanted to pretend for just a moment that nothing in his life had changed.

  Sunday was a shimmering blossoming of May in Georgetown. Joe Alsop hovered over us like a mother hen in his bow tie and slippers, waving his cigarette holder in the air like a wind instrument.

  Jack was unusually frightened. “What if the Russians attack while I’m on this?”

  I laughed.

  “What if I don’t come back all the way?”

  I told him Tim Leary had given me a hypodermic packed with Thorazine.

  “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” he said, remembering the first time we met and danced in 1936. He has no fear in the outer world, pushing his ship through the storms in the Pacific, running the nation in the face of pain and illness. A warrior prince. But Kennedys don’t do inner lives very well. They are trained to attack in the outer world. What lives inside leaves them lost, so this psychedelic journey may be the biggest challenge of his life. Mine too.

  And then the time came. I trembled because somewhere I knew the fate of the world had slipped onto my shoulders. I took two tablets, each one containing 300 micrograms of Owsley lysergic acid diethylamide, and placed one on his tongue and one on mine. He is no stranger to concoctions racing in his bloodstream. I have seen him racing on amphetamines after a shot from Dr. Feelgood, and I’ve seen his face puffed up from who knows what chemical interactions, but this was different. It was 11:00 a.m. when we swallowed the pills.

  We waited for the drug to take effect, silent and nervous. He looked deeply at me and grinned. Jack was always up for a grin for me. I took his hand. He lit a cigar, and I began to feel the chemicals take hold of my nervous system, like a slow melt into the Garden of Eden. I was becoming a new human, and suddenly the cigar smoke smelled foul, and I felt like throwing up.

  I picked up Tim Leary’s version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and began to read aloud. “Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual activity. Realization of the Voidness, the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade, the Unformed, implies Buddhahood, Perfect Enlightenment—the state of the divine mind of the Buddha.”

  Joe Alsop sat beside us with his arms folded, amused and fascinated. A parakeet chirped in a cage above his head. I saw the Greek vase on the table in front of him, and suddenly I knew we were in Greece. I couldn’t explain it in a trillion years, but Washington was Greece, and I had the idea we were doing it over because we didn’t do it right the first time.

  We stood up, both at the same time—it just happened, we didn’t discuss it—and walked out to the little pool in the garden. The pool was tucked neatly against a brick wall tangled with a hair of vines. The Secret Service man was sweating profusely, looking back and forth at me and Jack. He knew something was odd, but we had told no one of our purpose here, not even Secret Service. I looked at his aviator sunglasses, and suddenly it all seemed so fake. He was a big little boy with pink skin, exuding fear like a wave of poison gas. I could see that he couldn’t see through himself, as I could now see through myself and through Jack, and all the Secret Service man could do was hide behind the mirrors of sunglasses.

  Jack wore shades too so no one could see his eyes. I held his hand as we walked the winding brick lane that Joe had designed for his garden. “You won’t leave me,” he said suddenly, the same words I had once said to Allen Ginsberg. I truly don’t believe Jack had ever uttered those words to any human being in his life. “I’ll never leave you,” I said, and started pulling off my blouse and pulling down my capri pants and then my panties so I was naked and the Secret Service man tried desperately to look away. I jumped into the pool and splashed the water at Jack. He kept laughing. “Why are you in there?” he muttered, though the words didn’t come out right, and he repeated them a second time. This time, what came out sounded more like “Where are you there?” which we knew made no sense, and we laughed hysterically because human speech was suddenly so abysmally funny. Then Jack stepped into the pool at the shallow end, shoes and all in the blue-green water. “Water isn’t really wet,” he said, and I nodded. “Water isn’t even really water.” Nodded again. “We should invite Khrushchev to jump in the pool with us,” I said, and splashed a giant splash out to the Secret Service man, who just sat there like a stone, baking in the sunshine in his white shirt and pretending I hadn’t splashed him.

  “I think Fidel Castro would have a good time here,” Jack said. “We could settle everything. Have some tacos and enchiladas here for him—I don’t know what they eat in Cuba. Do you know what they eat in Cuba, Mary?” and I said, “Beans. Human beans.” We burst out laughing again.

  I remember it all as if remembering the day through a huge fabric of gauze. It was as if on acid I could see the foolishness of objects; I saw the filter we live through and how everyone agrees to live in the filter and that’s how we have a world and then everyone forgets they’re living in a filter. And when you go to the other side of the filter, words mean nothing, so you don’t try. Words are just more stuff in the context of everything else, rather than some superior construct that is outside everything else and defines it. I’m sure that makes no sense. So you laugh, but the laughter is not humor. Laughter is a gasp of overwhelm. Laughter is the sound of the mind dying.

  I put my clothes back on, and we walked to the brick patio. We looked at the bronze god in the birdbath, and Jack took off his shoes. Joe had built this house because he’s an amateur architect and wanted a modern house. He did not believe in re-creating a Georgian house like all the other homes in Georgetown. He thinks re-creating historical styles is fakery.

  We sat in a wisteria-covered loggia, and the full dose hit. I took a piece of paper from my pocket and began to read aloud to Jack, though I wasn’t sure how my mind was reading and how my mouth was forming speech. They were words I had copied down from the French poet Rimbaud:

  I dreamed of Crusades, senseless voyages of discovery, republics without a history, moral revolution, displacement of races and continents. I believed in all the magics. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

  I saw Jack smiling, crying—I don’t know if he heard the words or what he was feeling, but he kept disappearing and appearing. It was like a roller coaster when you reach the top so slowly, slowly, then suddenly drop into free fall. The terror of freedom. The terror of gravity unleashed, of not knowing where you will land or where it will end. I felt a fool for not having a guide, for not having Tim here with his soothing voice. I experienced my birth, I experienced my death. So much work, I kept saying to myself. So much work. Was I ready to die? I saw the fierce attachment that kept me here, that made me fear death, that made myriads of people fear death, and I knew one inch further, just another inch, and I would never fear death again.

  Eventually we came down, came back to ourselves, sat there on the stone bench by the pond, exhausted. I stared at Jack as if for the first time because whoever I was before, I no longer was, and we were both sitting together as if for the first time. Jack said he needed to get back to work, and I told him to stay and breathe, the world was turning without him. He said “Really?”

  I said: “Really.”

  “Mary, Mary, quite contrary.”

  Quietly, quietly, the president of the United States and I reentered what is commonly called reality.

  MAY 15

  I returned to the White House on Tuesday, two days after the acid, fearing what I would enco
unter when I hugged America’s first psychedelicized president. I wondered if I was insane; had Amos and Ruth’s headstrong daughter put the entire Planet Earth in peril by leading Jack Kennedy into a cataclysmic shattering of self in Joe Alsop’s garden?

  My fears were allayed when Jack entered the lounge adjoining the Oval Office, a place he likes to smoke cigars and relax. His commitment to control was clearly in command, the commitment that had overridden a shipwreck at sea, a catalog of pain and illness, the exhaustion of marshaling an entire nation to vote him in as a leader, an election some whisper he had actually lost. And now it overrode what LSD plainly reveals: the illusion of the self.

  Jack was in control, but he was also in a mood; I can tell by the way his eyes droop back in a weird angle in their sockets. He said the world hadn’t changed during our trip, and that Khrushchev was still driving him crazy. He asked how I was, and I said that I was quite fine, that reentry from LSD is always a challenge, that somehow you have to return to yourself and carry on but remember the lessons.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. “It’s like I was shipwrecked again and had to float back again, and now I have to ignore it so I can carry on.”

  He looked at me tenderly for a moment, and I kissed him. We were silently acknowledging that we had undergone something profound together, all the more profound because it would remain a secret to history. A secret he could reveal to no one, not to his family, nor his closest ally, Kenny O’Donnell, not even to Bobby. Then he spoke of Khrushchev and said he had been rethinking his posture toward the Soviets. He wants to propose a nuclear test ban. It’s a beginning, he said, and he’s considering a speech that will set us out in a new direction. That, instead of demonizing Russians, will uphold our common humanity. Why leave people more frightened than they already are? he said. I hugged him.

  He walked back into the office, took a document from his desk, and brought it out. “I asked Ted Sorensen to write this. I told him to write the speech he would deliver if he wanted to end the Cold War, if he wanted to save humanity. This is what he wrote.”