by Peter Janney
While John Davis was at work on his Mary Meyer book, author Noel Twyman published Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1997. The book was exhaustive in its research, ultimately laying the blame for the president’s assassination at the front (and back) door of the CIA. Davis was unequivocal: Twyman had “completely solved the crime of the century.” Bolstered by Damore’s research, Twyman’s book further substantiated for Davis why the CIA had a keen interest in Mary Meyer after the Warren Report was made public.
But like Leo Damore, John Davis would never complete his book about Mary, despite his access to Damore’s discoveries and what certain members of the Kennedy family had shared with him. There may be several explanations for this. Both John Davis and Leo Damore ultimately linked the murder of Mary Meyer to the assassination of President Kennedy, which Davis had firmly come to believe had been masterminded by the CIA. Was it just coincidence that the two attempts to demonstrate a CIA conspiracy in the demise of Mary Meyer would never be published during this period? I don’t think so. John H. Davis was a cum laude graduate of Princeton and, like Leo Damore, a prolific author and respected researcher. It was possible that Davis’s alcoholism, well known to his close friends, prevented the book’s publication, and the fact that he eventually suffered a severe stroke, though that didn’t occur until 2002. When I interviewed Davis in New York in 2004, his disorientation and confusion were apparent; intermittently, he was incoherent. But his friend Jimmy Smith, who had been Damore’s attorney and close friend, recalled a chilling telephone conversation with Davis in early 1999.
“John,” inquired Jimmy Smith, “what the hell is going on with the book on Mary Pinchot Meyer?”
“Oh, I’m not doing that,” replied Davis. “I decided I wanted to live….”13
When I queried Smith about this remark, he said he was sure Davis’s life had been threatened, that an attempt would have been made on his life had he published John F. Kennedy and Mary Pinchot Meyer: A Tale of Two Murdered Lovers. Davis’s previous books on the Kennedy assassination and the Mafia made him no stranger to the world of organized crime. He likely would have been able to discriminate between a serious threat and one that wasn’t.
Journalist Nina Burleigh contacted me in 1996 to talk about Mary Meyer. Our initial interview lasted several hours. I was heartened at the time by some of her insights, and for the next two years or so continued to offer suggestions when asked. Though Nina would eventually acknowledge my assistance, as well as quote me throughout, I was very disappointed by her conclusions in A Very Private Woman. Despite some well-researched biographical information on Mary’s early life, Burleigh’s portrayals of Mary’s relationship with Timothy Leary, the nature of her relationship with Jack Kennedy, and her final disposition toward Mary’s alleged assailant, Ray Crump Jr., and his attorney, Dovey Roundtree, were not only shortsighted, but also ultimately inaccurate and misinformed.
Who then bears the “burden of guilt,” as Leo Damore once coined it, for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer? And who among us would weep for the ruined life of the wrongfully prosecuted Raymond Crump Jr.—a defenseless, meek young African American man scapegoated for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed? Who would dare to step forward to undertake the journey for the deeper truth of what really occurred? Author Leo Damore may well have given his life for this story. It is his burden—and Mary Meyer’s—that I have ultimately endeavored to shoulder.
Members of my immediate and extended family, as well as Wistar Janney’s remaining friends and community, may find my conclusions all too outrageous and troublesome. Everyone is, of course, ultimately entitled to his own opinion—but not to his own set of facts. And the hidden history of this narrative—the true facts beneath the surface, much of which is revealed here for the very first time—strongly supports the conclusions that I have established.
Whatever remaining anguish—mine, as well as the blemish upon the soul of America—my faith dictates that eventually it will have a redemptive impact, only because truth, when it is confronted and finally understood, has the power to heal.
1
Fate’s Engagement
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
—Anaïs Nin
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
—Edward Abbey
In some far place, where all the lovely things
Of earth are born, the gods no longer weep.
She has returned to them. And what she brings
We lose, but always keep.
—Mary Pinchot (Meyer)
(From her poem “Requiem”)1
A CHILLY OCTOBER wind sent leaves scudding across the cobblestones of Washington’s elegant Georgetown streets as Mary Pinchot Meyer set out on her customary early morning walk to her art studio. She was lithe and feminine, radiant with a beauty that still turned heads. On that day, too, she was almost ageless with grace. Her svelte frame belied the strength within her, fed perhaps by a rare reservoir of spiritual intensity. It was Monday morning, October 12, 1964. Two days later would be her forty-fourth birthday, the first without the man she had come to love, and with whom she had shared her hope for a world in pursuit of peace.2
In spite of the raw autumn temperature just above freezing that signaled winter’s approach, there was the promise of an impending sun’s warmth. Still, the weather called for several layers of clothing in anticipation of the longer walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that had become her daily ritual each afternoon after she painted. The walk from her Thirty-Fourth Street home took less than ten minutes. Her artist’s studio, a converted brick garage with two skylights in its tin roof, was located in the alleyway behind her sister Tony and brother-in-law Ben Bradlee’s N Street house, itself a poignant reminder, only because its location was just seven doors away from where her lover, the president, had lived before moving into the White House in 1960. That morning, however, she may have pondered the recent estrangement from her sister and brother-in-law. Months earlier, a schism had developed, primarily involving Ben, whom she had come to distrust. “Since his first marriage was a failure,” she told her friends Jim and Anne Truitt, “he’s trying twice as hard with Tony. One and a half would be enough.”3
The capital city was still reeling from the unfathomable trauma that had taken place eleven months earlier in Dallas. It had left a deep wound in the fabric of America’s soul and identity, and in the meaning of civilization across the globe. Festering, the wound wasn’t about to heal, or even recede. That would require, among other things, an elixir called truth, not its subversion in the form of the so-called Warren Report that had emerged three weeks earlier from Supreme Court justice Earl Warren’s commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For Mary, the report may have been further evidence of the infection that had already taken hold, long before the nightmare in Dallas. Like a viral cancerous army, rogue elements within the highest levels of the American government had usurped the hope and vision she and Jack had shared and nurtured, ending America’s dream for the president’s new trajectory toward world peace. She wasn’t about to let the Warren Commission lie go unchallenged. She had made her decision to stand up and be counted.4
Since Dallas, Mary had experienced a rough year of adjustments, with no real end in sight. For months, she had attempted to retreat into her discipline as an artist. She was by now an established painter in the Washington Color School. Her dream of recognition as a contemporary abstract painter had started to be realized just five days before the horror in Dallas had struck. Her first solo art opening at the Jefferson Place Gallery in Washington had been a solid success. Reviewing her paintings on November 24, Washington Post art critic Leslie Judd Ahlander heralded Mary’s artistry, writing, “Her work has always shown a quality which m
ade one want to see more. Now she is working very hard and the results are gratifying indeed.” Describing Mary’s tondo (circular canvas) approach using acrylic paint, Ahlander had praised her presentation as “luminous and carefully thought out…. a lyrical and emotional statement rather than a cooly [sic] calculated one. It is easy to see that the artist has brought a great deal of thought to bear on the adjustment of areas and colors.”5 The recognition was an affirmation of the creative path she had long desired.
Mary’s painting had provided some respite in the wake of the president’s assassination and eventually led to a second 1964 exhibit in May with the Pan American Union’s Nine Contemporary Painters: USA exhibit in Washington. Three of her most recently completed works, Fire Island II, Clearing, and Foxglove, had been included in the show. Overall, the exhibit had been even more successful than her first. In November, it was due to be shipped to the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires for an international opening, her first worldwide public exhibition—one she would not live to witness.
Tormented since Jack’s death, Mary had refused to accept the lies being peddled to the public. At times despondent, she had asked her friend and fellow artist Bill Walton, a Kennedy insider who had escorted her many times to White House functions that included stolen moments with the president, “why Bobby wasn’t doing more about what had really happened to Jack in Dallas.” Bobby did have a plan, Walton told her, to attempt to retake the White House, but time would have to pass first. Best to keep throwing herself back into her work, Walton counseled, as Walton himself was doing.6
It wasn’t enough. She would take matters into her own hands, she had finally decided.7 Throughout the past year, she had made it her business to learn what had really taken place in Dallas that late-November day. Like most Americans, Mary grieved over the violent death of her president; for her, however, his departure had also been uniquely personal. She and Jack had not only been lovers, but had also grown into the deepest of allies—kindred spirits in the pursuit of peace for the world. It hadn’t been Mary’s first attempt at such a feat. Nearly fifteen years earlier, she had worked tirelessly with her then-husband, war hero Cord Meyer, to promote a world government structure that might maintain the hard-won, fragile peace of a postwar nuclear world. But Cord had ultimately chosen a different path and, in doing so, had foreclosed on their marriage. With Jack, Mary had finally prevailed. Everything, at least for a few moments, had looked so promising. And that was really what she wanted—to give peace a chance.
Her prior access to Jack and his White House coterie had allowed her to quietly interrogate the few who would talk about that day in Dallas. She had read and collected some of the various reports and articles that questioned the falsehoods that had been propagated and were now worming their way into the public mind. Those writings occupied a special place in the bookcase in her bedroom, next to her diary, the final repository of reflections and analysis of what she had come to understand.8
The past year had also been a grueling duel with despair. It had taken a huge toll. “What’s the use?” Mary bemoaned to her dear friend Anne Truitt before she had left for Japan earlier that year. “Everything I love seems to die.”9 Melancholy had periodically opened the wounds of past losses in Mary’s life: her half-sister Rosamund’s suicide in 1938; the death of her father, Amos, in 1944. Neither, however, had prepared her for the unspeakable horror of losing her son Michael in 1956. That tragedy had propelled her into an emotional typhoon that she struggled long and hard to resolve. While scar tissue might stop the bleeding, the wound of such a loss (as every mother either imagines or knows firsthand) never really healed.
With her friends Anne and Jim Truitt having left for Tokyo in early 1964,10 Mary had recently, perhaps mistakenly, spoken to another woman she knew only peripherally, not realizing the woman had been sent to find out what Mary had learned about the dastardly deed in Dallas and its orchestration. Mary wasn’t going to sit by and let it happen all over again, she told the friend, who suggested that it might be better to leave well enough alone.11 The cover-up had reached its final public crescendo with the release of the Warren Report on September 24, about three weeks earlier. Mary had bought the abridged paperback version and read it with her trained editor’s eye, making numerous notes in the margins and turning down page corners for markers. Sensing it had been crafted as the final narcotic designed to deaden any serious inquiry or public scrutiny, she had furiously confronted her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, a CIA honcho who in turn had informed his close friend and colleague Jim Angleton, also the longtime godfather to her children.12 Of course, it hadn’t been the first time she’d openly spoken out against their beloved Agency. During the preceding years, Mary—unlike other CIA wives—had been outspoken at cocktail and dinner parties, “always making wisecracks,” one Agency wife remembered, about what the CIA was doing in the world.13
The art studio was cold when she entered it. Her morning ritual included turning on the electric space heater, pouring coffee from her thermos, and lighting up a Salem, so as to begin. The transition into painting allowed her to quiet, if only for a while, the challenges she knew she would soon ace.
The hour was approaching noon as she stepped back from her morning’s meditation—a tondo focus of unprimed canvas containing “swaying velvety semicircles of color” so rich in vivid acrylic pigment.14 Whether that morning’s endeavor was further informed by her recent thematic, ongoing analysis of peace and harmony wasn’t known, but Mary’s former intimacy with artist Ken Noland in the late 1950s had given her a particular vantage point for her evolving exploration. Noland’s “target” paintings had influenced her, as they had expressed a distinct commentary about war. She had taken this target circular device in her most recent painting, Half Light, and expressed the four elements—fire, wind, water, and earth—using color to underscore harmony with the earth, and the universe itself. Her “one-world” harmony in the past year may have been an homage to Jack and their shared vision for world peace. It was, after all, only a vision—perhaps her vision, or their vision—of where mankind should always be focused now and in the future. There was still purpose to be explored, and she would continue to fight, even without Jack. Seven years later, someone by the name of John Lennon would sing a song called “Imagine,” capturing where Mary had been headed.15
While Mary’s work that morning may have echoed her recent painting Half Light, something within Half Light’s conception of one-world harmony might have died in order to be reborn. Hope and despair in the end had been engaged in an epic battle, and not just in her life alone. Stepping back from her morning’s work, she might have thought of naming the painting Lost Light, or just No Light at all. The title would eventually emerge—as it always seemed to—however private the artist’s meaning for the world to see. Her mother’s discipline, from which she had built her own, would ensure it.
The day beckoned her to be on her way. Her usual long walk after a morning’s artistic focus was another workday ritual she always looked forward to. The paint was still damp on the circular canvas. Having positioned an electric fan toward the wet painting, she collected her Mark Cross leather gloves and her sunglasses and pulled on her blue cable-knit angora hooded sweater over a lighter sweater and white oxford cloth shirt.16 There was no need to take her purse; she liked to walk freely with no encumbrance. Her paint-spattered PF Flyer canvas sneakers likely squeaked across the wooden floor as she pivoted out the door.
The October breeze suggested the cooler days ahead, bringing welcome relief from Washington’s oppressive humidity, which sometimes lingered well into September. Even so, by noontime the day had already warmed. Circling the block to N Street, Mary walked down the steep incline of Thirty-Fourth Street toward the C & O Canal towpath. Crossing the inevitable M Street traffic, she found herself face-to-face with an approaching limousine, the long, black, official kind with government license plates that at an earlier time could have been taking Jack to some official function or meeting.
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“Good-bye, Mary,” yelled Polly Wisner, one of Washington’s more aristocratic women. The wife of Frank Wisner, one of the founding fathers of CIA covert operations, Polly was preparing to fly to London without Frank, whose descent into a labyrinth of depression, mania, and compulsive talking, or logorrhea, had finally ended his intelligence career in 1962. Mary would never know that a year later, in 1965, Wisner would be found dead, an apparent suicide, a small-gauge shotgun his final companion. His daughter would wonder whether her father had suffered some kind of delayed guilt reaction over the CIA’s recruitment and shelter of a number of high-level Nazis after the war.17 But the small-gauge shotgun somehow kept emerging as “the final companion of choice.” Just a year earlier, in August 1963, Mary’s friend, Philip L. Graham, owner-publisher of the Washington Post, had allegedly embraced such a firearm for himself. There would be others, too, all unbeknownst to Mary. In 1977, the CIA asset George de Mohrenschildt, once in charge of keeping Lee Harvey Oswald positioned in Dallas, would also appoint the small-bore shotgun as his final companion—immediately before he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Mary would not survive to witness the self-destruction that would explode in the years to come. She passed Polly Wisner, undoubtedly waving in response to Polly’s greeting, and moved onward toward the canal towpath. Polly would be the last acquaintance to see Mary alive.18