Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

by Peter Janney

  Four days later, on April 21, 1964, Dulles wrote a four-page memorandum to a former colleague, CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, documenting his meeting with President Truman on April 17. It was in this memorandum that Dulles fabricated Truman’s retraction of his December 22 Washington Post editorial; the memorandum would be placed in CIA files. It first documented all the extraneous topics of Dulles’s conversation with Truman, as well as all the adulation he had bestowed upon his former boss during their meeting. The Dulles memorandum then documented their discussion of Truman’s editorial in the Post. Allegedly, Dulles had produced a copy of the editorial that he proceeded to review with Truman in person. Dulles claimed in his memorandum to Houston that Truman had “studied attentively the Post story and seemed quite astounded by it. In fact, he said that this was all wrong. He then said he felt it had made a very unfortunate impression.”48

  But President Truman never wavered from the position he had stated in his December 22 Washington Post editorial, in which he had completely opposed the CIA’s covert operations arm. In fact, and ironically, one year exactly after Kennedy’s historic American University address, Truman repeated his warning in a June 10, 1964, letter to Look magazine managing editor William Arthur, underscoring his position that the CIA “was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”49

  Why would Allen Dulles—the man whom Mary Meyer once compared to “Machiavelli, only worse”—go to such extremes to discredit a former president’s written opinions? While the Truman editorial had been cut off at the pass, Dulles had to be worried about the possibility the editorial might be resuscitated at some point, adding weight to suspicions of CIA involvement in the death of the president and its subsequent cover-up.

  “Dulles would have wanted to be in position to flash the Truman ‘retraction,’ with the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud,” said disaffected former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who in 2003 co-founded the organization Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). “As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to exculpate himself and any of his associates, were any commissioners or investigators—or journalists—tempted to question whether the killing in Dallas might have been a CIA covert action.”50 The Dulles-Truman incident in April 1964 was yet another example of chicanery that illustrated the actions Allen Dulles and his loyal cadre were prepared to undertake in order to protect themselves and the secrets of the Agency they served.

  One person Mary was almost sure to have sought out after Dallas was her friend and fellow artist William (“Bill”) Walton, the man who had been her escort to many of the White House social events she had attended. According to Leo Damore, Mary had engaged Walton’s counsel sometime in 1964. Walton had been aware, Damore said, of how distraught she was. According to Damore, he discreetly divulged to Mary the fact that Bobby long suspected the worst of foul play in his brother’s demise, but that he had to keep a low profile for the time being. It was too dangerous to do anything else. Bobby did have a plan, Walton told her. Bobby would position himself to take back the presidency, but it would be years before he could do anything. “Throw yourself back into your work” had been his advice, as he, too, despaired over what had occurred. That’s what he was doing, he told her.51 It is not known whether Walton ever revealed to Mary the secret, historic mission he had undertaken at Bobby’s request during a trip to the Soviet Union shortly after Jack’s burial.

  Bill Walton had met Jack Kennedy in Georgetown after World War II, and their friendship developed into something extraordinarily special. “I think he was deeply fond of me,” Walton recalled in 1975. “I was of him. I haven’t had many male friends as close as he became finally.”52 Fondly calling him “Billy Boy,” Jack allowed Walton a level of access to the White House that few enjoyed. And so did Jackie, who thoroughly enjoyed his company and came to rely upon him. She also took a keen interest in Walton’s two children, Matthew and Frances, whom Bill was raising alone since his divorce.

  “I got to know Jackie Kennedy a good deal,” recalled Bill Walton’s son, Matthew, in an interview for this book. “She came around to our house a lot. She was very kind to me, and paid attention to me. I wrote a diary in those days, and she’s the only one of my father’s friends I mentioned. She listened to me and remembered our conversations later.”53

  But the other variable that made Walton “safe” was his sexual orientation. Though Walton was not openly gay (which in that era and social strata would have been social suicide), it was clear where his proclivities lay. Even so, he was “a man’s man,” yet “safe” to women like Jackie who came to revere his confidence.

  Over the years, Walton had become the supreme Kennedy confidant and loyalist, not only to Jack and Jackie, but to Bobby as well. Both Jack and Jackie shared intimate secrets with him, often using him to communicate with one another. A bit older than both Jack and Bobby, Walton brought to the table an urbane sense of tasteful style and elegance that had its foundation in sincerity coupled with integrity. The president appointed him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission in 1963. Jackie and Bill Walton collaborated to safeguard various historic sections of the city, including the period architecture around Lafayette Square in downtown Washington. Yet, unlike the other political animals who surrounded the Kennedys, Walton had no need to play favorites; he had no expectation or desire of any reward. No doubt privy to any number of intimate secrets regarding Jack and Jackie, as well as Bobby, Walton never betrayed their confidences—not even to his children—or revealed the full extent of his access during his lifetime.

  Having escorted Mary Meyer to the White House on many occasions, he obviously was aware of her romantic liaison with Jack, as were a number of other people—even if Ben and Tony Bradlee wanted to maintain they weren’t. How much Jack actually confided in Billy Boy about his feelings for Mary (as he had done with Charlie Bartlett), no one knows, not even Walton’s own children. The Walton trademark was always zipped lips. “He didn’t talk much about what he really knew,” recalled Matthew, “either about the Kennedy assassination or Mary Meyer’s murder.”54 Surprisingly, not even Walton’s children were aware of their father’s secret mission after Dallas, ostensibly for the support of the arts in Russia.

  In fact, it was not until 1997, some thirty-four years after Dallas, and three years after Walton’s own death, that Yale historian Timothy Naftali and Russian historian Aleksandr Fursenko revealed the staggering account of the mission Bobby Kennedy had asked Walton to undertake immediately following President Kennedy’s burial. Before Dallas, Walton had been scheduled to leave for Russia on November 22 on a goodwill mission to open a dialogue with Russian artists. The idea was part of President Kennedy’s many-tiered peace initiative with the Soviet Union that had begun with his American University commencement address in June, followed by the historic nuclear test ban treaty in August. Walton was to be the president’s emissary to Leningrad and Moscow, where he would preside over the opening of an American graphic arts exhibit for the U.S. Information Agency. But as he was preparing to leave for Russia that day, he received word of the president’s death and immediately canceled his trip.

  A few days after the president’s burial at Arlington Cemetery, Bill Walton and his children, Matthew and Frances, visited Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate. Jackie and Bobby were both present. Years later, in an interview for this book, Walton’s daughter, Frances Buehler, still vividly remembered Bobby taking her father into another room with Jackie and “closing the door.” She also recalled seeing her father walking with Bobby alone outside later that afternoon. “We had no idea what was being said,” recalled Frances. In fact, the pieces of that puzzle would not be fully revealed to her until 2007, when her brother showed her David Talbot’s book Brothers.55

  As author Talbot details in his book, Bobby Kennedy, like his brother, trusted Bill Walton unconditionally. The loyal Kennedy ally had proven his integrity on innumerable
occasions and to a degree rarely seen in the political snake pit of Washington. That day, during the Waltons’ visit to Hickory Hill, within days of the assassination, Bobby and Jackie asked their close friend to quickly reschedule his artistic mission to Russia. They wanted him to deliver a special, secret message to Georgi Bolshakov, formerly a KGB agent under journalistic cover in Washington, who the Kennedys had come to rely upon when they needed to communicate with Khrushchev directly during critical moments. Indeed, Bolshakov had once been referred to by Newsweek as the “Russian New Frontiersman” because he had become so close to Bobby. Official Washington was, of course, averse to using a known KGB agent for diplomatic missions, but that didn’t stop Bobby from developing a substantial relationship that had proven its reliability over time.56

  Bobby and Jackie knew that through Bolshakov their message to the Soviets would be directly communicated to Nikita Khrushchev. They wanted “the Russian who they felt best understood John Kennedy to know their personal opinions of the changes in the U.S. government since the assassination.” On November 29, Walton resuscitated his trip to Russia. He had explicit instructions from Bobby to bypass the American Embassy upon arrival in Moscow and to meet with Bolshakov at some unofficial location, so Walton sat down with Bolshakov at the Sovietskaya restaurant. Walton’s message was crystal clear: “Dallas was the ideal location for such a crime,” he told the Soviet intelligence officer. “Perhaps there was only one assassin, but he did not act alone.” Bolshakov, who had been deeply upset by the assassination, listened intently as Walton explained that the Kennedys now believed there had been a large domestic political conspiracy at work. While Oswald appeared to have ostensible connections to the Communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president had been murdered by “domestic opponents.”57

  Walton also communicated an even bigger bombshell: that the Kennedys considered the selection of Lyndon Johnson for the vice presidency to have been “a dreadful mistake.” Lyndon Johnson’s ties to big Texas oil and military defense companies would, in their own way, sabotage John Kennedy’s unfinished plans for world peace and détente with the Soviet Union. “Robert McNamara, in his position of secretary of defense, was the only one to be trusted now,” he said. He described McNamara as “completely sharing the views of President Kennedy on matters of war and peace.” Bobby did have a plan, Walton told Bolshakov, to eventually retake the White House where he would then continue his brother’s vision for world peace, but that wasn’t going to be possible before 1968.58 Yet this historic mission further demonstrated how the Kennedys, from the very beginning, never believed in the Warren Commission or the final Warren Report, released in September 1964. If, as Bobby Kennedy believed, his brother “had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government’s secret anti-Castro operations,” they were sadly powerless to do anything about it, “since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government.”59

  Bill Walton appeared never to have never talked about his secret mission to Moscow with anyone. Even his own children weren’t aware of it until years after his death. “My father never really said much about the Kennedy assassination, even though he had the entire-volume set of the Warren Commission,” recalled Matthew. He did recall a strange outburst from his father one evening at dinner shortly after his Moscow return. Had Oswald really done it? a friend asked him at dinner. Bill Walton, the usually calm, even-tempered, urbane gentleman, exploded. “It doesn’t fucking matter!” he yelled, startling everyone at the table. “Who gives a shit!”60

  Ten months later—the day Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered—Bill Walton received the upsetting telephone call. “My father answered the phone and then told me she [Mary Meyer] had been shot, shot on the towpath,” Matthew said. Further recalling that his father was never given to emotional outbursts, Matthew said the elder Walton did something very uncharacteristic. “I was so struck at how upset he was,” Matthew continued. His father had become enraged. “What’s happening to everybody?” Walton screamed. “Everybody I know is killed, murdered, assassinated. Killed by strangers!” Whereupon he rushed outside and burst into tears. “He wasn’t the kind of person who usually did this,” his son recalled. “It was so unusual for him to burst out in the way he did.”61

  Had the murder of Mary Meyer signaled a reminder—don’t talk, your life, possibly that of your children, might well be in danger? Walton was never given to gossiping anyway, even whispering. Nonetheless, as Bobby’s presidential bid started to take form in 1968, Bill Walton once again embraced the Kennedy dream, excitedly planning to do whatever he could for Bobby’s campaign. And once again—this time forever—the Kennedy dream would die with Bobby’s assassination. Bill Walton retreated into seclusion, even stopped painting for an extended period. According to Matthew, his father could occasionally be heard yelling, “Fuck life!”62

  The Kennedy antipathy toward Lyndon Johnson was well known. “A dreadful mistake” had indeed taken place when Johnson manipulated himself into the position of vice president. Mary had to have known of both Jack’s and Bobby’s animosity toward him, and she likely knew they intended to dump him prior to the 1964 election. Lyndon Johnson had long since become a political liability. His involvement in scandals with his aide Bobby Baker and business tycoon Billie Sol Estes were about to make headlines. By 1963, Billie Sol Estes had been convicted on more than fifty counts of fraud. Leaks from prison suggested he had paid off the vice president on any number of occasions. Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary, noting the implications, asked the president three days before Dallas (November 19) who his choice for a running mate might be. “He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, ‘At this time, I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.’”63

  During the summer of 1963, Life magazine had been developing a major feature story concerning Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his scandalous dealings with Bobby Baker. The in-depth story was scheduled for publication in late November, right after the president’s trip to Dallas. The story, according to James Wagenvoord, at the time the chief assistant to Life’s Publishing Projects Director, Phil Wootton, had been researched and written by members of the senior staff at Life who had a direct line to Bobby Kennedy. The article would be published without bylines.

  “It was all coming from Bobby,” recalled Wagenvoord. “It was going to blow Johnson right out of the water. We had him. He was done. Bobby Baker had taken the fall for Johnson. Johnson would have been finished and off the 1964 ticket, and would have probably been facing prison time.”64

  In fact, on the very day of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the Senate Rules Committee on Capitol Hill was meeting, presided over by Senator B. Everett Jordan of North Carolina. During the proceedings, Senator John Williams of Delaware—who in October had already begun investigating the activities of Lyndon Johnson’s close aide Bobby Baker—was being given documented testimony from a panicked Don Reynolds, a close associate of Bobby Baker’s, who had been asked by Baker to arrange Lyndon Johnson’s life insurance policy. The Reynolds bombshell was that he had seen Bobby Baker with a suitcase containing what Baker alleged was a $100,000 payoff to Lyndon Johnson for his role in securing the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) contract for General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. Reynolds also stated that he had refused several attempts by Johnson to buy his silence. However, Reynolds’s testimony abruptly ended when news reached the committee that President Kennedy had been assassinated. What was clear was Reynolds’s information would not only have ended Lyndon Johnson’s political career, it also would have resulted in a criminal indictment.

  In November 2009, former Life magazine chief assistant James Wagenvoord revealed to John Simkin at Spartacus Educational the logistics of what took place at Life immediately subsequent to the Kennedy assassination: “The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the
week of November 24th (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on November 26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death, research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film.”65

  Wagenvoord further substantiated in an interview for this book how the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was controlling Life magazine at the time. “All of our people would always go down to Washington to be debriefed by the CIA after they did big world trips before they came home,” recalled Wagenvoord. “That was our news source. A lot of the high-level executives in publishing companies had been involved with the OS during the war. The whole publishing thing was hooked into the government so tightly, in the same way the Internet companies are now.”66

  Edward K. Thompson, a senior editor at Life during 1963, was, according to Wagenvoord, a close friend of Allen Dulles’s. Wagenvoord remembered being introduced to Dulles in Thompson’s office, having been called to the office to deliver a $10,000 check made out to the former CIA director. “We paid Allen Dulles $10,000 for a nothing story,” recalled Wagenvoord. But that event paled alongside what Wagenvoord witnessed at Life’s offices on Sunday morning, November 24—before Oswald was gunned down on national television.

  As James Wagenvoord stood outside his boss’s office, a man in a gray suit pushed through the glass door that opened from the elevator bank. He handed Wagenvoord a lumpy manila envelope. “This is Oswald material,” the man said, giving Wagenvoord the package as he flashed his FBI credentials, and then quickly left.67 Wagenvoord remembered opening the envelope and taking out a small, blue plastic reel that appeared to be a short 16-millimeter film, which he viewed later that day. The unsolicited footage, which had been shot months earlier by a New Orleans television news cameraman, was of Oswald handing out pro-Castro flyers on Canal Street near the World Trade Center in New Orleans, an event that had been staged to falsely portray Oswald as a Communist sympathizer, which, of course, he wasn’t. “An hour later [after the film arrived at Life] the Fat Lady sang an encore. Jack Ruby shot Oswald,” said Wagenvoord. The government’s second conspiracy, the cover-up, had already penetrated the major media outlets, including Life.68