by Peter Janney
On the very day of President Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, Daniel was meeting with Fidel Castro. “I was happy about the message I was delivering. These two men seemed ready to make peace. I am certain about this! Certain! Even after all these years.”126 It was during this meeting with Fidel Castro that both men first learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. According to Daniel, after a long, shocked silence, Castro had said: “This is terrible. They are going to say we did it…. This is the end of your mission.”127 And it was. The Pentagon and the CIA had been working clandestinely against the president’s efforts to change policies towards both Cuba and Vietnam. Noted author David Talbot: “As the only man in the room who consistently opposed military escalation in Vietnam, the president was compelled to operate in a stealthy fashion to avoid becoming completely isolated within his own government.”128
During the fall of 1963, the Vietnam situation markedly deteriorated, with U.S. officials split over whether to back a military coup in Vietnam to oust the Diem regime. On October 2, journalist Arthur Krock’s column in the New York Times had quoted reporter Richard Starnes, whose interview with “a high United States source” privy to CIA operations in Saigon, had been, by Krock’s standards, unassailable: “The C.I.A.’s growth was ‘likened to a malignancy’ which the ‘very high official was not sure even the White House could control any longer,’” Krock wrote. He added, “If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government] it will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon. The agency ‘represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.’”129
A month later, the Catholic president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother were assassinated by a CIA-funded coup. The event devastated Kennedy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been present when Kennedy received the news; he would later say he had never seen the president so upset.130 That afternoon, Jack asked Mary to be with him. It appears this was Mary’s last documented trip to the White House, though it remains unknown whether it was the last time they saw one another.
Mary’s whereabouts when she first heard the fatal news from Dallas are also unknown. At 5:14 that afternoon, hours after Jack’s death, she called his personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln and left her phone number.131 Later, Mary asked Anne Truitt to spend the night with her at her house in Georgetown. “She was so sad,” recalled Truitt. “I tried to comfort her. We cried, but we didn’t talk that much.”132
As Jack lay in the Capitol Rotunda over the weekend, Mary visited his casket. On Monday, November 25, she attended the funeral and sat with Tony, who would years later recall that her sister “didn’t seem very upset. It puzzled me.”133 At the burial at Arlington Cemetery later that day, Mary was seen by one of her former art students, Ariel Dougherty, who had been in Mary’s painting classes at Georgetown Day School in the late 1950s. Alone, solemn, dressed in a long, gold-colored suede coat that belted around her waist, a scarf loosely wrapped around her neck, Mary stood adjacent to the gravesite throughout the entire ceremony.134 As far as their vision for world peace had come, it had been—in one instant on November 22, 1963—completely obliterated.
Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum 273 (NSAM 273), which set the tone for increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam by transferring the burden of increased covert operations against North Vietnam from the South Vietnam to the United States. The following March, Johnson penned NSAM 288, initiating the full escalation of the Vietnam War. Before its end, in undoubtedly the worst and most costly blunder of American foreign policy, approximately 3.8 million people would lose their lives, including more than 58,000 American combat soldiers.
In October 1963, Cuban UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga had delivered an official message to President Kennedy that Fidel Castro desired a lasting peace with the United States. Lyndon Johnson would have no part of it. In addition, he refused to sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, despite its passage by the U.S. Senate in September 1963.
A little more than a week after Dallas, Timothy Leary received a disturbing phone call from Mary Meyer. “Ever since the Kennedy assassination I had been expecting a call from Mary,” wrote Leary in Flashbacks. “It came around December 1. I could hardly understand her. She was either drunk or drugged or overwhelmed with grief. Or all three.”135
“They couldn’t control him any more,” said Mary between her sobbing and crying. “He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”136 Leary later recalled this exchange in 1990. He told Leo Damore, “She was very upset, distraught. Her call spooked me. And I never imagined she’d be killed less than a year later.”137
PART THREE
“ON ONE SMALL condition,” said Claudius, having been asked to promise his feared grandmother the Lady Livia Augustus that he would implore the new Roman Emperor Caligula to make her a goddess after her death.
“You see, there’s so much I want to know,” continued Claudius. “I’m a historian and I want to know the truth. When people die, so much dies with them, and all that’s left are pieces of paper that tell lies.”
“He wants to know the truth and he calls it a small condition!” exclaimed the Lady Livia Augustus.
“Grandmother, who killed Marcellus?” asked Claudius.
“I did!” said the Lady Livia Augustus.1
1 From the 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production of I, Claudius. (Based on: I, Claudius: from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius born 10 B.C. murdered and deified A.D. 54. and Claudius the God, both authored by Robert Graves. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989, originally published by Random House, 1935.
11
After Dallas
Do not forget your dying king. Show this world that this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Nothing, as long as you live, will ever be more important. It’s up to you.
—Attorney Jim Garrison
(during his summation
to the jury in the film JFK)
There’s something so mysterious about an orchid. They look as though they had been grown in damp underground caves by demons. They’re evil sickly flowers with no life of their own, living on borrowed strength.
—Mary Pinchot (Meyer)
(from her short story “Futility,”
Vassar Review and Little Magazine, 1941)
A SHOCKED AND traumatized nation attempted to fathom the death of its president. The eye of the storm was centered in Washington, encased within a hurricane of concealed controversy. In Dallas, an hour and fifteen minutes after the president’s death, a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked in the Texas School Book Depository—the place where shots had allegedly been fired at the president—was arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Oswald had, according to one eyewitness, entered the theater “shortly after 1:00 P.M.”1 Charged first with the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit, which had taken place at approximately 1:15 P.M. several blocks away, Oswald was eventually charged with the assassination of the president several hours later.
Two days later, in one of the most bizarre, phantasmagorical events ever witnessed on national television, Oswald was fatally shot by a man identified as Jack Ruby, adding to the bewilderment of an already stunned audience of viewers. So unprecedented had been the spectacle of horror, Agnes Meyer, mother of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, reportedly seethed, “What is this, some kind of goddamn banana republic?”2 The American media struggled to sustain a semblance of calm and order, still insistent Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone crackpot assassin and had acted unilaterally. But observers and journalists in other countries had already started speculating Oswald had been killed to keep him from talking.
Public distraction, supported by an obsequious, manipulative media, has long obscured what diligent researchers over the years have uncovered: that before Dallas, there were at least two other plots to assas
sinate President Kennedy. One assassination attempt against the president was planned to take place in Chicago on November 2, 1963. It would have involved multiple gunmen, as well as a designated “patsy,” a mentally handicapped ex-Marine named Thomas Arthur Vallee. Curiously, like Lee Harvey Oswald, Thomas Vallee had also served at a U-2 base in Japan under the Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG), the CIA’s code name for its U-2 spy plane surveillance unit. Vallee then “found work” in the fall of November 1963 in a building overlooking a Chicago street immediately adjacent to an L-shaped turn that would be on the route for the upcoming presidential motorcade. The plot finally had been foiled only because certain members of the Secret Service had acted quickly. President Kennedy had also canceled the trip as a result of President Diem’s assassination in South Vietnam. Having uncovered evidence in Chicago of a four-man assassination hit team with high-powered rifles, the Secret Service arrested two members of the team, although two others escaped.3
A second plot was set to unfold during President Kennedy’s trip to Miami on November 18, but the presidential motorcade was canceled. Word of the plot had been forwarded to the Secret Service from police intelligence in Miami. A secretly tape-recorded meeting between Miami police informant Willie Somerset and right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer on November 9 had revealed that an assassination attempt might be made in Miami “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.”4 Consequently, the president flew by helicopter from the Miami airport to the Americana Hotel, where he delivered his scheduled speech.
While the magnitude of such threats would have been communicated to the president, it wasn’t clear how much detail was given to him. However, according to one Washington insider with ties to the Kennedy family, quoted in a 1996 article by Bennett Bolton and David Duffy, “Jack told Mary before his death that he believed there was a conspiracy in the works to assassinate him, and that the people behind the plot were close to him.”5 In an interview for this book, Bennett Bolton verified the research he and his partner undertook for the article, though he wouldn’t divulge the source of the quote.6 What was certain was that weeks before Dallas, it appeared the president had been marked for a well-organized assassination.7
Though Mary has been previously portrayed as not believing in any conspiracy to assassinate her lover the president, her biographer claiming that she “accepted the idea that Oswald was the lone assassin,”8 the deeper evidence beneath the surface reveals a far different story. Throughout the last year of her life, Mary Pinchot Meyer was deeply engaged in exploration; her suspicion had been aroused, and it grew stronger. She wanted to know the real truth of what had taken place. Understandably preoccupied with Jack’s assassination, she maintained a collection of “clippings of the JFK assassination” in the bookcase in her bedroom, next to the place where she kept her diary.9 The lingering question was how far Mary had gone in her investigation, and what impact it might have had. She wasn’t the kind of person to stand idly aside in the face of an event of this magnitude. She was well aware of her ex-husband Cord’s work and his connection to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s infiltration of the media. Her vigilance would have caused an awareness of whatever narrative the media was peddling, particularly if Jack had shared with her any information about what the Secret Service had uncovered earlier in November.
Mary was a “Washington insider” with many relationships and connections inside the Kennedy coterie and beyond. As such, she was privy to information and individuals that few people could access. Given the president’s regard for her, her presence within the intimate confines of the White House for two years had accorded her an unique status. Kenny O’Donnell certainly respected Mary as a special, trusted person in the president’s life. There were even times, he told Leo Damore, where he “feared the hold she had on Jack.”10
In fact, Mary had sought out O’Donnell several weeks after the assassination, inquiring about his recollection of events that horrific day in Dallas. According to O’Donnell’s statements to author Leo Damore, he (O’Donnell) confided to Mary what both he and Dave Powers had witnessed from their vantage point in the car directly behind the president’s. The smell of gunpowder, the sound of rifle shots, as well as other features of gunfire were well known to the two close Kennedy advisers, both seasoned World War II combat veterans. Both remained adamant for the rest of their lives that at least two shots had come “from behind the fence [on the grassy knoll],” in front of the motorcade. What O’Donnell had told Mary, he reiterated to author Leo Damore, although O’Donnell never spoke about it publicly. His account was further confirmed twenty-five years later by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill in his 1987 memoir Man of the House. At a private dinner five years after the Kennedy assassination, O’Neill recalled a conversation with Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, during which they had told him that at least “two shots” had come from in front of the motorcade “behind the fence.”11
“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” the astonished Tip O’Neill had said to O’Donnell.
“You’re right,” O’Donnell replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”
“I can’t believe it,” the Speaker said. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”
“Tip, you have to understand,” continued O’Donnell. “The family—everybody wanted this behind them.” Before O’Neill published his memoir, he checked with Dave Powers to make sure his memory was not failing him, since O’Donnell had already died. “As they say in the news business,” wrote O’Neill, referring to Powers, “he stands by his story.”12
Not only did Dave Powers stand by his story, he went several steps further a few years later. WCAP radio producer Woody Woodland in Lowell, Massachusetts, interviewed Dave Powers in late 1991, shortly after the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. At the time, Powers was still the museum curator of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. After the interview, Powers walked with Woody Woodland to his car.
“I know this is a painful subject matter for you, Mr. Powers,” said Woodland as they walked into the parking lot. “But have you seen that movie [Oliver Stone’s film JFK]?” Powers confirmed he had indeed already seen the film.
“What did you think of it?” inquired Woodland.
“I think they got it right,” said Powers.
“Really?” said Woodland, somewhat taken aback.
“Yes,” continued Powers. “We were driving into an ambush. They were shooting from the front, from behind that fence [on the grassy knoll].”
“But you didn’t say that to the Warren Commission,” Woodland pressed.
“No [I didn’t], we were told not to by the FBI,” Powers replied.13
Whatever conversation Mary had with O’Donnell, her worst suspicions would have likely been confirmed. Over the years, scores of other eyewitness accounts from people who were in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination have been gathered, analyzed, and published that corroborate the O’Donnell-Powers account. Specifically, over fifty people, including Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the third car of the motorcade with Lyndon Johnson, immediately behind O’Donnell and Powers, would recount that the motorcade had actually come to a near-complete stop—immediately before the fatal head shot to the president.14
But the real clincher was what the FBI was doing to the most important witnesses in Dallas: pressuring them by whatever means necessary to conform to a deliberately contrived narrative—that there were just three shots, all from behind the motorcade, and all from the Texas School Book Depository. The second conspiracy—to manipulate and cover up the real evidence of the first—was under way posthaste, and neither Kenny O’Donnell nor Dave Powers, in the aftermath of the dastardly deed of Dallas, was willin
g publicly “to take a bullet for the truth.” Had they done so, they could have altered the course of history as we know it today. Instead, they succumbed to the intimidation of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI; and the cancerous malignancy rapidly spread.
Immediately after Dallas, there were a number of suspicions swirling around Washington that Mary, given her position, would unquestionably have accessed. According to some accounts, there were direct accusations leveled at the CIA almost immediately, and from within the Kennedy family itself. In his 2007 book Brothers, David Talbot recounts the fact that Bobby Kennedy, upon learning that his brother had been killed, placed a telephone call to a ranking official at CIA headquarters in Langley—reportedly less than an hour after the shooting—demanding to know, “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?”15 Bobby’s question was confounding and staggering. What would have led the attorney general of the United States to suspect that the nation’s premier intelligence apparatus—the Central Intelligence Agency—might be involved in assassinating the president?
Whether it was at the prompting of Bobby’s phone call, or on his own initiative, CIA director John McCone arrived at the Kennedy compound in McLean a short time later that afternoon. For three hours on that November 22 day, the two walked together on the grounds of the Hickory Hill estate. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bobby directly confronted Mc-Cone about whether the Agency had assassinated his brother. Schlesinger claims that Bobby later reported: “You know, at the time I asked McCone … if they [the CIA] had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”16 That may have been Bobby’s feeling at the time, but it would very quickly change.
While Bobby’s fears and concerns may have initially been assuaged that afternoon, he knew that McCone, “a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, was not in control of his own agency.”17 Bobby Kennedy’s own monitoring of the Agency right after the Bay of Pigs had acquainted him with many of the CIA’s operational plans and methods; in fact, Bobby himself knew more about many of these things than McCone. John McCone had replaced Allen Dulles, the infamous father of American intelligence whom Jack had fired. But the elite of the Agency—people like Dick Helms, Jim Angleton, Cord Meyer, Tracy Barnes, Bill Harvey, even Bob Crowley—still “carried the flag” for Allen Dulles behind the scenes. Their loyalty to Dulles kept McCone in the dark, ostensibly because his strict Catholic religious principles might have been offended by many of the CIA’s covert operations. “Bobby would realize that while he had taken his question to the very top of the CIA,” Talbot concluded, “he had asked the wrong man.”18