by Peter Janney
“Weren’t you at least curious?” asked Damore.
“Mary was like a crusader,” responded Leary. “The early ones were almost always crusaders for a higher consciousness, like ministers of the gospel. And a lot of them were women. Peggy Mellon Hitchcock was another.” Indeed, so enthralled by the potential of hallucinogenic consciousness expansion was Ms. Hitchcock that when Leary was fired from Harvard in 1963, she and her brothers offered their family’s Millbrook, New York, estate as a base for psychedelic research. The legendary en masse exodus from Cambridge to Millbrook had taken place almost immediately.22
“What about details? How was she putting this together?” Damore wanted to know.
“When we met, it was clear Mary was unwilling to talk about specifics,” Leary recalled. “I really didn’t pay that much attention to her. I helped her when I could, when she called or came up to Boston, but I never gave much thought about it until after I found out she’d been murdered. Both at Harvard and Millbrook, we were being besieged from people all over the country and all over the world. It was overwhelming and never-ending.”23
One person still alive today, Mary’s close friend Anne Chamberlin, might well be able to authoritatively comment on Mary’s mission, because she was, according to Damore, part of Mary’s LSD cell group in Washington. But Anne Chamberlin has repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book, although she did apparently talk with Damore on several occasions, starting in the late 1980s. During his interview of Leary, Damore revealed that he had been in contact with Chamberlin on more than one occasion:
One of the women who was involved with Mary in the LSD group is now living in Maine. And I’ve talked to her at great length. Anne Chamberlin. Anne Chamberlin is a writer, an essayist, extremely wealthy, out of San Francisco, out of Washington—out of, out of fear, actually. And Anne is more and more forthcoming because I think enough time has passed and those people in power who felt threatened by Mary Pinchot Meyer as a person who held an awful lot of information and a lot of secrets who could make certain politicians in this town very uncomfortable.24
In a follow-up request to Anne Chamberlin in early 2009, I alerted her to my ownership of the Damore material and the fact that I had become privy to some of what she had told him. I offered her every confidentiality if she would be willing to talk with me about it.25 A week later she replied by letter: “It saddens me that you continue to pursue the long-gone phantom prey. I have nothing to say about Mary Meyer, or anything connected with Mary Meyer. I have told you this before. I am telling you now. Don’t make me tell you again.”26 For whatever reason, Ms. Chamberlin never wanted to make known her relationship with Mary Meyer, nor reveal why she apparently abruptly left Washington shortly after Mary’s murder.
Leo Damore was curious about other sources of information regarding Mary’s possible use of psychedelics, though he wanted primarily to hear from the LSD guru himself where Mary had gone for assistance. Purportedly, there had been one other account. In 1989, C. David Heymann published the book A Woman Named Jackie. There, Heymann quotes from an alleged interview with former CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton. Angleton was said to have told Heymann—referring to Mary’s affair with Kennedy—that “Mary kept an art diary in which she began making notations concerning their meetings, of which there were between thirty and forty during their affair—in the White House, at her studio, in the homes of friends.” Angleton then, according to Heymann, said that Mary and Jack “took a mild acid [LSD] trip together, during which they made love.”27
But no record of Heymann’s Angleton interview has ever been produced, nor have records of Heymann’s other alleged interviews with Timothy Leary and Tony Bradlee, which he told Damore he had conducted.28 Moreover, to my knowledge, Angleton never confirmed the statements he made to Heymann with anyone else before his death in 1987.29 Yet Angleton’s alleged statements might have been the sort of details Mary would have noted in her real diary—the one that Angleton stole on the night of her murder, not the artist’s sketchbook that the Bradlees and others designated as the diary, which was only a decoy.
During his 1990 interview of Leary, Damore asked him point-blank: “Do you believe there’s any doubt he [Jack] was using acid [LSD] in the White House with her [Mary]?” Leary’s response was adamant: “I can’t say that,” he told Damore emphatically. “That was only my assumption…. There’s no question in my mind now that she had proposed to use LSD with Jack. I had heard that Bobby had also been interested.”30
“But from all of the hints she was giving you,” Damore further pressed, “wasn’t it almost a given?” Again, Leary conceded he thought it was very possible, even likely, but would go no further.31 Six years later, in 1996, the year he died, Leary reiterated this same unwavering position to author Nina Burleigh. “Mary Meyer might have dropped acid [ingested LSD] with Kennedy,” he told Burleigh, but again made it clear that “he had no proof.”32
At the time of the 1990 Damore-Leary interview, the only other account of any drug use by Mary and Jack came indirectly from James Truitt for the breakout story he gave to the National Enquirer in 1976. Despite the subsequent smear campaign engineered to discredit Truitt, he was an established journalist and a former vice president of the Washington Post, who over the years had amassed a large set of papers and files that included portions of what Mary had confided.33
While researching material for her book Katharine the Great, author Deborah Davis read the 1976 Enquirer exposé and found it more than just credible. “Truitt’s story in the National Enquirer was strangely well documented,” Davis later recalled in 2009. “So much so, I actually went to Florida and talked to both the editor and writer about the story. It was after that I went to visit Jim Truitt in Mexico.” Davis interviewed Truitt for more than ten hours over a three-day period during 1976. The two then corresponded further by mail.34
Perhaps as a prelude, Mary may have wanted to see Jack’s reaction to something far less potent than a hallucinogen like LSD or psilocybin. Based on the information Mary shared with Truitt, there was at least one encounter when Mary and Jack smoked marijuana together in the White House residence. On Monday evening, July 16, 1962, according to Truitt’s notes, Mary produced “a snuff box with six marijuana cigarettes” in Jack’s bedroom. “Let’s try it,” Jack reportedly said to Mary.35
“She and the President sat at opposite ends of the bed and Mary tried to tell him how to smoke pot,” Truitt was quoted saying in the 1976 National Enquirer article. “He wouldn’t listen to me,” Mary told Truitt. “He wouldn’t control his breathing while he smoked, and he flicked the ashes like it was a regular cigarette and tried to put it out a couple of times.”
“Mary said that at first JFK didn’t seem to feel anything, but then began to laugh and told her: ‘We’re having a White House conference on narcotics here in two weeks!’
“She said that after they smoked the second joint, Jack leaned back and closed his eyes. He lay there for a long time, and Mary said she thought to herself, ‘We’ve killed the President.’ But then he opened his eyes and said he was hungry.
“He went to get something to eat and returned with soup and chocolate mousse. They smoked three of the joints and then JFK told her: ‘No more. Suppose the Russians did something now!’
“She said he also told her, ‘This isn’t like cocaine. I’ll get you some of that.’ She said JFK wanted to smoke pot again a month later, but never got around to it.
“When Mary got home that night she realized with horror that she’d left her slip in the President’s bedroom. It wasn’t until 8:30 the next morning that she was able to reach him by phone. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said he told her. ‘It’s in the Presidential safe in an envelope with your name and the Presidential seal on it.’”36
While folklore maintained that the actual affair between Mary and Jack didn’t begin until January 1962, it likely started much earlier.37 According to the account Kenny O’Donnell gave to Leo Damore shortly before his
death in 1977, Mary was in the White House in Jack’s company shortly after he took office as president in early 1961. She often came into the White House, said O’Donnell, under the guise of “Dave Powers plus one” entries in the Secret Service logs before she was listed by her own name in the logs. The “Dave Powers plus one” entries were numerous all through 1961 and beyond. Her first documented solo private entrance into the White House residence (as noted in the White House Secret Service logs) occurred on October 3, 1961,38 followed by some thirteen other documented private visits during the Kennedy presidency. Mary also attended all six of the White House dinner dances, as well as any number of luncheons and smaller dinner parties given by Jack and Jackie.39 The secret lovers also met a number of times alone at the Georgetown home of Joseph Alsop, who had offered his house when he was away.40 Finally, there were a number of instances during his presidency when Jack met with Mary at her house in Georgetown.41
Mary’s privacy about the affair, however, no matter when it began, was of paramount concern. It appeared that she established an early ground rule in her relationship with Jack. A private person whose solitude was sacred, she didn’t want to be a topic of conversation in scandal-mongering Washington, nor of yesterday’s gossip, like so many of Jack’s dalliances. Jack appeared to have agreed to this condition, but couldn’t always restrain his bravado.
“If only we could run wild, Benjy,” he said to Ben Bradlee, looking over all the women at one of the White House dinner dances.42 Aware of Mary’s beauty and allure from across the room at the third White House dinner dance in February 1962, Jack had leaned in and commented to Bradlee, “Mary would be rough to live with.” According to Bradlee, it wasn’t the first time Jack had made the comment. “And I agreed, not for the first time,” recalled Bradlee.43 Had Jack’s remark revealed something about the nature of his relationship with Mary?
Look correspondent Laura Bergquist, married to Fletcher Knebel, a Harvard classmate of Jack’s, had had access to Jack ever since his 1952 senatorial campaign. Many years later, she insightfully characterized Jack as deeply vulnerable. “I think he always felt an insecurity about himself,” she told social historian Ralph Martin in an interview for his 1995 book Seeds of Destruction. “Not simply because he was part of the upward-mobile Irish, but because I think he recognized himself as an image that had been manufactured. And the questions came up: ‘Who loves me and wants me for myself, and who loves me for what they think I am, and what I can do?’” Martin’s next sentence read: “One of the women who loved him for himself was Mary Pinchot Meyer….”44
And Mary would have demanded Jack’s self-examination, demanded that he open his eyes, his heart, his soul, the core of his being to both the artifice and the reality of his existence, including his sexual promiscuity. She would have refused to allow him to hide behind his physical incapacity, his sense of obligation to his father or the Kennedy family, his fear of public ridicule or recrimination, or any indifference to such issues as civil rights or the dangers of the Cold War. She would have taken him to task in a way that some part of him deeply longed for, knowing the emotional pain he would have to confront. In order to reclaim himself, Jack would have had to brave a kind of grief and emotional intensity similar to what Mary herself had faced with the loss of her son Michael. Mary knew the drill—the crashing surf of unbearable sorrow, and what was required to survive it. The “prima female assoluta” would have been at once tender and firm with him, yet demanding that he show up, engage, and stop running.
For Jack, Mary may have represented the hope of a lost love, a magnetic, romantic passion, the kind of erotic chemistry he had once experienced with Inga Arvad, tempered by the same kind of no-bullshit, heartfelt bond he had shared with his departed sister Kathleen. Indeed, there were undoubtedly moments when Mary was “rough to live with,” but something in Jack had been awakened by Mary’s entrance into his life—something that kept him engaged, and apparently wanting more. Such was the fire and hope not only of love’s redemption, but a more clearly defined reclamation of himself and the kind of president he wanted to become.
Kenny O’Donnell confided to Leo Damore that Mary had been quite outspoken and confrontational with the president when he was about to resume nuclear testing in April 1962. “She openly challenged him to do something different, not fall into the trap of getting into a pissing contest with the Russians,” said Damore in 1992, based on O’Donnell’s statements to him. O’Donnell sometimes, according to Damore, even feared Mary because of the power she had over Jack, saying the president would “feverishly” pace around the Oval Office when he wasn’t able to get in touch with her by phone.45 Vulnerability isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness; very often it’s the emerging strength of a healing heart crying out for connection. “Mary had a serenity about her,” reflected Ben Bradlee pensively about a quality in her that he found unusual. “She was a serious person. If she fell in love with somebody, I suspect that person was really loved.”46
For a period of time the Bradlees, particularly Tony, may well have been kept in the dark about what was taking place. Mary would have insisted that Jack keep any knowledge of their affair from them, but that presented a problem, for the Kennedys were close friends with the Bradlees, before and during Jack’s presidency. Part of Mary’s ground rule was to keep her sister and brother-in-law off the scent of the trail. The two lovers hatched a scheme: Jack would dote on Tony and give the impression that she, not Mary, was the Pinchot sister who caught his eye. Tony Bradlee had always lived in Mary’s shadow. Four years younger, she was said to have been the “more reserved and shy of the two sisters.”47 And while they were not overtly competitive, Tony harbored a quiet jealousy toward her sister, who was always regarded as the more beautiful, more attractive, more enchanting of the two.
It was surely no accident that at the very first White House dinner dance on March 15, 1961, just two months into the Kennedy presidency, Mary was seated next to Jack at the president’s table; but the price of that admission was that Tony would be seated on Jack’s other side, “making the Beautiful People from New York seethe with disbelief,” according to Ben Bradlee.48 Some thought Mary’s affair with Jack had not yet begun, but according to the information Kenny O’Donnell shared with Leo Damore, it surely had.
Even Jackie, it appeared, fell for the trick for a period of time. As late as April 1963, when the Bradlees were dining alone with the Kennedys at the White House, Jackie had intriguingly remarked, “Oh Jack, you know you always say that Tony is your ideal [woman].”49 It appeared the remark already had a history. With Mary in attendance during Jack’s raucous forty-sixth birthday bash on May 29 on the presidential yacht Sequoia, the celebration had cruised up and down the Potomac River until “1:23 A.M.” It was a particularly “wild party” on a hot, humid Washington evening, complete with thunderstorms and periods of torrential rain, people drinking heavily while getting soaking wet, and Teddy Kennedy ripping half his pants off at the crotch. “But it was Jack himself,” noted author Sally Bedell Smith, “who misbehaved in an especially reckless fashion.”50
That observation was based in part on Smith’s interview with Tony Bradlee. According to Tony, she played up the fact that Jack had been “following her” around that birthday evening. “He chased me all around the boat,” Tony told Smith. “A couple of members of the crew were laughing. I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies room and made a pass. It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered.”51
Yet Tony’s most telling insight, expressed during her 2001 interview with Smith, was that Jack’s behavior “struck me as odd.” She added, “[I]t seems odder knowing what we now know about Mary [and her relationship with Jack].” The significance of her momentary discernment eluded her. Given that she was already smitten, Tony’s infatuation was as much wishful thinking as Jack’s behavior was a strategic ploy. “I guess I was pretty surprised,” continued Tony, “but I was kind of fl
attered,” quickly adding, “and appalled too.”52 But once again, the game had snookered Tony. It appeared she had been left in the dark right up until Mary’s murder. “Jack had been attracted to her,” she maintained. “He had made several unsuccessful passes. Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist.”53 Years later, in 2007, Ben Bradlee still emphatically recalled how “shocked [Bradlee’s emphasis]” she had been when she found out Mary had been having an affair with Jack.54
One person who wasn’t fooled the evening of Jack’s forty-sixth birthday in May 1963, or anytime earlier, was journalist Charlie Bartlett, a close, dear friend of Jack’s who, with his wife, Martha, had first introduced him to Jackie. Bartlett, a distinguished journalist and Washington insider who spearheaded the Washington bureau of the Chattanooga Times, had also been a Yale classmate of Cord Meyer’s. He was well acquainted with everyone in the Kennedy inner circle, and he and Martha often socialized with Jack and Jackie.
Emotionally closer to Jack than Ben Bradlee would ever become, Charlie Bartlett was perhaps one of Kennedy’s primary confidantes. Jack mostly compartmentalized his close friendships, yet he confided in Bartlett what he rarely shared with anyone else. “I really liked Jack Kennedy,” recalled Bartlett in late 2008 in an interview for this book. “We had great fun together and a lot of things in common. We had a very personal, close relationship.” Apparently that awareness didn’t go unnoticed. When Jack began his presidency, Bartlett thought it a bit odd that his Yale classmate Cord Meyer, then a chief operative in the CIA’s covert action directorate, wanted to begin having a more social relationship with him. “Cord and I saw a lot of each other after Jack Kennedy became president because I think someone at CIA told Cord to keep an eye on me.”55
Regarding Jack’s relationship with Mary, Bartlett bluntly admitted, “I didn’t particularly like Mary Meyer.” He had known both Mary and Cord when they were married. When asked by Nina Burleigh why he never considered investigating the story of Mary Meyer, he reportedly exclaimed nervously, “Oh, I can’t. Too many of my friends are a part of that one.”56 But what he didn’t mention to authors Burleigh or Sally Bedell Smith was what he had come to know about Jack’s affection for Mary.