by Peter Janney
James and Cicely Angleton were with Ben and Tony Bradlee at the Bradlees’ home when Tony Bradlee received the call. Cicely, our mother, told her daughter Guru Sangat Khalsa, “We all went to Mary’s house together.” She said there was no break-in because the Bradlees had a key. The diary was not found at that time.
Later, Tony Bradlee found it and gave it to James Angleton. He burned the pages that Meyer had asked to be burned [author’s italics] and put the rest in a safe. Years later, he gave the rest of the diary to Bradlee at her request.37
Is it now to be believed not only that Mary Meyer entrusted the safekeeping of her diary to Jim Angleton, but that she had also specifically instructed him to “burn certain pages of her diary if anything happened to her”? Nothing could be further from the truth. The conspiracy to conceal, on one level, clearly involved all of the intimates of Mary Meyer: her sister, Tony, her closest women friends—Cicely Angleton, Anne Truitt, and Anne Chamberlin—and, of course, her ex-husband Cord, Ben Bradlee, and Jim Angleton. However, the men conspired to something even more sinister.
Therein the diary’s “Rubik’s Cube” becomes even more mysterious, only because there were two conspiracies taking place simultaneously, both masterminded by the “Master Angler” himself—James Jesus Angleton. It is not known (nor likely ever will be) how Angleton twisted the arm of Anne Truitt to declare that on the night of Mary’s murder she should call the Bradlees and inform them that such a diary existed and that Mary had told her to make sure Angleton took charge of it, should anything happen to her. The answer to the question of who called the Truitts in Tokyo to inform them of Mary’s demise now becomes more obvious: It was Angleton himself.
Angleton’s ostensible concern was to protect the reputation of both President Kennedy and Mary Meyer, and the emerging myth of Camelot. This is likely how he first got the Truitts to participate. Mary’s diary, and any other of her incriminating papers or possessions, had to be commandeered and contained as quickly as possible for the sake of ‘a nation in mourning for its fallen leader.’ The other women—Cicely Angleton, Tony Bradlee, and Anne Chamberlin—then fell in line, wanting to protect their dear friend Mary and the fallen president. They all conspired to conceal two important facts: that Mary and Jack had been having an affair, and that there had been some level of drug use in their relationship, both of which were eventually revealed in 1976 by the National Enquirer, thanks to Jim Truitt, who finally broke ranks. There, Truitt revealed to the Enquirer that Mary and Jack had, in fact, smoked marijuana in the White House residence in July 1962. Whether the two together went on to share a psychedelic journey with a hallucinogen such as LSD or psilocybin will be discussed in a later chapter.
None of the women in this caper, however, was ever aware of the fact that Jim Angleton had already absconded with Mary’s real diary on the night of her murder, or what the diary actually contained. The only people who knew the diary’s contents immediately following the murder were Jim Angleton and Cord Meyer, the two CIA honchos, though Ben Bradlee certainly knew of its existence if it was retrieved from Mary’s studio on the night of the murder. Whether Bradlee actually read the real diary in its entirety isn’t known. Later on, as will be discussed subsequently, it appears Angleton shared the diary’s contents with at least one other CIA colleague and one other individual.
And so the charade for the search for Mary’s diary became a camouflage and deflection for something more sinister. Subsequent to the March 1976 National Enquirer bombshell, Tony Bradlee played down the contents of her sister’s sketchbook, purported to be her diary, as inconsequential. By all accounts, Mary’s artist sketchbook had allegedly been discovered by Tony Bradlee, though it’s not known exactly when—possibly on Tuesday, October 13, the day after Mary’s murder, or possibly not until Saturday, October 17. It was described by Tony in 1976 as “a sketchbook with a nice paisley colored cover on it…. It was kind of a loose leaf book, nothing like Ben’s book he was taking things down in, just a woman’s notes about what she had been doing. I swear I don’t remember what was in it. I went through it so quickly. And I remember there were some JFK’s in it. There were some references to him…. It was very cryptic and difficult to understand. Not much there, but some references to JFK.”38
Sometime before 2004, Tony Bradlee also told author Sally Bedell Smith that “everyone thought it [the sketchbook] was full of all kinds of gossip which it wasn’t. I think I burned it because there was interest in the diary [sketchbook], and I didn’t want the kids to get into it.”39 (God forbid “the kids,” or anyone else, should know the truth.) If the sketchbook was so innocuous and inconsequential, why was it destroyed? And why was it done so quickly after the initial public revelation of Mary’s affair with the president in 1976?40 Furthermore, nowhere does Tony Bradlee ever reveal or mention anything to do with Mary’s alleged request to Jim Angleton to “burn certain pages of her diary if anything happened to her.”
Even more ludicrous, the principals in this caper couldn’t keep their stories straight as to what the sketchbook actually contained. Ben Bradlee admitted in 2007 in an interview for this book that his memory wasn’t what it used to be, but he was adamant about what he had seen:
“I had that diary in my hands for twenty minutes and thumbed through it. It was just an artist’s sketchbook. If the thing had sixty pages in it, that’s a lot. Most of it was swatches, colors. Every now and then in a little unused corner of a page, there would be writings. To call them diary entries magnifies it out of proportion. I never saw Jack’s name in it. He wasn’t referred to as ‘the president’ or ‘Jack Kennedy.’ It was about an affair. She obviously had more than one affair, too.”41
Yet in his 1995 memoir, Bradlee recounted the reading of the “sketchbook” with his wife as something that clearly informed both of them of Mary’s affair with the president. Not wanting to shatter the emerging Kennedy myth of Camelot, he and Tony felt that it was up to them to “decide what to do with the diary.” He wrote the following:
“[A]nd we both concluded that this was in no sense a public document, despite the braying of the knee jerks about some public right to know. I felt it was a family document, privately created by Mary, privately protected by her thorough instructions to Anne Truitt, which should be followed.”42
He also wrote: “To say we were stunned [about the affair] doesn’t begin to describe our reactions. Tony, especially, felt betrayed, both by Kennedy and by Mary.”43 Years later, in 2007, Bradlee reiterated the fact that “Tony was shocked, and I mean shocked [Bradlee’s emphases], when she found out Mary had been having an affair with Jack.”44 Yet Bradlee, too, never mentioned anything about Mary’s request that Angleton burn designated pages of the diary upon her death.
Anne Truitt’s final reflections about “Mary’s sketchbook” may have revealed some of her confusion about what had taken place. Having been in Japan when Mary was murdered, it appears she only saw the sketchbook right before it was burned by Tony Bradlee in 1976. In an interview with author Sally Bedell Smith shortly before Anne’s death in 2004, she referred to the “sketchbook” (advertised to the public as Mary’s diary) as the “little notebook with a pretty cover.” She told Smith that it “consisted mostly of jottings about Mary’s art, and paint swatches on otherwise blank pages. Only about ten pages were devoted to Kennedy, who was never mentioned by name.” Even more revealing, Anne Truitt was “just floored,” she said, about its lack of details. There was “nothing, nada, a series of scrawls and notes, not in order, no chronology, no real facts.”45 Truitt also confirmed in this interview that she and Tony Bradlee had allegedly burned the sketchbook in Tony’s fireplace sometime shortly after the National Enquirer exposé in March 1976.46 Tony herself had stated in 1976 that “the diary [sketchbook] was destroyed. I’ll tell you that much is true,”47 later on clarifying that the destruction took place “after James Truitt’s interviews with the National Enquirer.”48 Her statement implied that sometime between March and July of 1976, someone—o
r possibly a group of people—decided that the updated story to be given to the public would now include Angleton returning the sketchbook to Tony, who would then burn it in her fireplace in Anne’s presence. It appeared that Tony made the decision unilaterally, but there was never any confirmation as to how this decision was made, who exactly made it, or when it occurred. And, again, Anne Truitt never said anything about Mary’s alleged specific request that Angleton burn particular diary pages.
Finally, for some reason it has appeared that Mary’s close friend Anne Chamberlin couldn’t stand the heat. She wouldn’t actively participate in the conspiracy to conceal. It was as if something had scared her. She didn’t want any part of it, and she didn’t want her name mentioned in any subsequent account. Anne Chamberlin left Washington abruptly after Mary’s murder and fled to Maine. Twenty-five years later, in the late 1980s, she spoke to author Leo Damore, then went completely silent after Damore’s “suicide” in 1995. Chamberlin’s public, long-standing “omertà pledge” of silence has always aroused suspicion. Whatever she knew, she took with her to her death on the last day of 2011, save for what she shared with author Leo Damore, which the reader will come to know in a future chapter.
So is it to be believed that a former professional journalist like Mary Meyer would have relegated her deepest, intimate thoughts and revelations, something that was to be sacredly preserved for her children in the event of her death, to a mere artist’s sketchbook—most of it color swatches with “cryptic” scribbles “in little unused corner[s] of a page”? Is the public so gullible as to believe that this haphazard “little notebook with a pretty cover” contained everything that Mary was struggling with during the final year of her life as she tried to make sense of all the dimensions and implications of her relationship with Jack, as well as the conspiracy that had put an end to his life, and the even bigger conspiracy she found herself witnessing to “cover everything up,” as she had told Timothy Leary?49
Mary Meyer was a pensive, complex individual who had a lifelong penchant for serious reflection in written form. Having been a professional journalist for several years right after college, and having kept an extensive diary at the time of her half-sister Rosamund’s 1938 suicide as well as a chronicle of her father’s grief and mental deterioration, she had long embraced the tool of journal writing and the outlet it provided, particularly during times of crisis and duress. This earlier diary is still, in fact, in existence today.50 Moreover, during her marriage to Cord, she was well aware of her husband’s diary, and sometimes even invaded it to write comments on what he had written when she was unable to reach him any other way. Obviously, Mary knew the value of keeping a separate, special notebook for the pursuit of deeper reflection. But her artist sketchbooks were just that—sketchbooks that were clearly devoted to the details of her pursuits as a painter with a few notes to herself that she probably intended to reflect upon in more depth at a later time. Furthermore, she had confided to both Anne and Jim Truitt in 1962 that she was having an affair with the president. Before the Truitts left for Japan, she had told them that she was keeping a diary and that she wanted that diary safeguarded in the event of her demise so that her eldest son, Quentin, could read it when he turned twenty-one.51 Why would any of Mary’s closest friends believe that one of her sketchbooks, filled mostly with swatches of colors and vague, off-the-cuff thoughts and notes of her painting, would even remotely resemble a serious diary of a previously established journalist?
Jim Truitt, in turn, kept a diary-journal of his own about everything that Mary had shared with him. Curiously, Truitt’s journal and “his 30 years of carefully kept records,” according to his widow Evelyn Patterson Truitt, were stolen right after his 1981 death, an apparent suicide. In a letter Evelyn Truitt wrote to author Anthony Summers in 1983, she alleged that “ex-CIA agent Herbert Barrows,” who lived nearby, had stolen all of her husband’s “carefully kept records.”52 The missing papers, of course, included Jim Truitt’s own documentation of Mary Meyer’s affair with the president. The theft seemed once again to implicate Jim Angleton, who was fast becoming legendary for such so-called “cleanups.” Angleton had earlier absconded with the personal papers of his colleague Winston Scott, the Mexican CIA station chief, two days after Scott’s suspicious death in 1971. Significantly, Scott’s papers included classified documents, tapes, photographs, and a manuscript, most of which not only contradicted the findings of the Warren Commission, but further revealed Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections in Mexico—things that the CIA wanted nobody to know about.53
Mary’s self-possession had always been a hallmark of her character. However overwhelmed she had felt by the vast implications of what had occurred in Dallas, not only for herself, but for the world at large, her temperament and moral rectitude demanded that at the very least she attempt to make sense of it all. What better way to cope with the enormity of that task than to set aside periods of time for reflection, aided by a valuable tool she had utilized effectively in the past? Neither a recluse nor one to be intimidated by authority, Mary wanted to understand what had occurred. The sheer magnitude of Jack’s assassination had catapulted her through endless shock waves, eventually forcing her to recognize the enormity of what had occurred—not only the events in Dallas, but the subsequent cover-up taking place right before her eyes. This cover-up, in fact, is the subject of a later chapter of this book.
“They couldn’t control him any more,” she sobbed on the telephone with Timothy Leary sometime in early December 1963, just after the assassination. “He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”54 Determined to understand and unravel what was taking place, she confronted what amounted to a mysterious jigsaw mosaic. The pieces had to be placed where they belonged. That process would take time, reflection, and awareness. What better way to engage the conundrum than to reclaim the exercise of journaling?
What then happened to Mary’s real diary? (Hereafter, the word “diary” refers only to Mary’s real journal/diary and not to her artist sketchbook.) The “diary as MacGuffin” in this piece of history doesn’t need any Hollywood embellishment; the story is stranger than fiction, only because it’s real. Yet no one has managed to put together the factual sequence of events that would unravel the mystery that has enshrouded this caper for nearly fifty years.
One of the most significant details in the 1976 Rosenbaum and Nobile article may have even eluded its own authors. It was this: The authors let it be known that after Jim Angleton arrived at the Bradlee house on the evening of the murder, and after he had fielded Anne Truitt’s telephone call from Japan, he later returned to Mary Meyer’s house that evening and ostensibly “rescued three kittens from the empty house.”55 If the real diary wasn’t in Mary’s studio on the night of her murder, as Bradlee and Angleton had likely investigated (given Bradlee’s testimony at the trial), Angleton knew where to look for the diary in Mary’s house, only because Anne Truitt had probably told him where to look when she reached him earlier that evening. Mary was “accustomed to leaving her diary in the bookcase in her bedroom,” Rosenbaum noted. “The diary wasn’t there after her death.”56
But why, then, was Jim Angleton again in Mary’s house the following morning, when Ben and Tony Bradlee surprised him there? If he had the diary, why go back? Perhaps Angleton wanted to be seen searching for the diary so that no one would suspect that it was already in his possession. But more likely, as the reader will come to understand, Mary’s actual diary was highly incriminating of Angleton himself and the CIA’s role in orchestrating what had occurred in Dallas. Determined to erase as much as possible from the last years of Mary Meyer’s life, Angleton wanted to take into his possession and eliminate any other documents, papers, letters, or personal effects that might further jeopardize the Warren Report and the public’s acceptance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt.
In a situation such as this, the unwritten rule of any CIA undercover operation is that the fewer
people in the know, the better; compartmentalization is an absolute necessity—as long as it’s maintained, and the story is kept straight. The only people who really knew what was taking place were the mastermind himself, Jim Angleton, his colleague Cord Meyer, and to one extent or another Ben Bradlee. What incriminated Bradlee, as will be further detailed later, was that he never once revealed during the trial the telephone call from his “friend”—the career high-ranking CIA official—that came “just after lunch,” less than two hours after Mary’s unidentified corpse lay sprawled on the C & O Canal towpath. Instead, he allowed the court to believe that it was only when Sergeant Sam Wallace of the D.C. police arrived at his house shortly before six that evening that he first became aware of his sister-in-law’s demise.
No one in this cesspool’s morass could ever be trusted, but it appears some part of the deceit was passed down to some of participants’ children. After Anne Truitt’s death in 2004, I talked with her daughter Alexandra in the latter part of 2005. When I introduced myself and told her of my book project, Alexandra was momentarily (and cautiously) hopeful that I might be taking a different slant from author Nina Burleigh’s. Intriguingly, she made it clear that subsequent to Mary Meyer’s death she had been “coached” that the subject of Mary’s murder was taboo.
“I’ve heard over the years that a lot of people have been threatened,” Alexandra said, after I mentioned author John H. Davis’s remark to Jimmy Smith in 1999. “That’s always been everybody’s feeling around the whole event [Mary’s murder] I’ve grown up with. You don’t talk about it because it’s dangerous.” Later during our conversation, she added, “I’m incredibly discreet. I never talk about this. I talked about it with my mom. I think I know everything she knew. But I don’t talk about it because it’s dangerous.” Alexandra became eager to know what I had discovered, but I wouldn’t divulge any information over the phone. I suggested instead we meet in New York so that we could talk privately in person. Ambivalent about that prospect, she changed the subject.