JFK and Mary Meyer

by Jesse Kornbluth

Five years today.

  Time doesn’t heal.

  I see him so often. In Georgetown, so many boys look like Michael that I try not to be on the street when school gets out.

  Cord said it’s sick to hold on to that bloodstained blouse. Not sick. It’s a reference point, it’s the home of memory.

  In a painting, I matched that color. Rust.

  Sometimes, late at night, drinking certain red wine, I taste it.19

  DECEMBER 19

  The Christmas bazaar at St. John’s was selling bayberry candles.

  My parents had them. I like them in the bedroom. A de la Tour glow.

  They’re my present to TC. To be opened in his bedroom.

  DECEMBER 20

  The White House Christmas card arrives. Ducks on a pond!

  DECEMBER 24

  Socialists don’t want much. Communists are more materialistic.

  Castro no longer insists on bulldozers. He now says he’ll release the Bay of Pigs prisoners in exchange for $62 million in food and medical supplies.

  Jack will say yes. Food and medicine go quickly. Bulldozers are forever.

  DECEMBER 25

  I gave the boys stock in General Motors and U.S. Steel. They gave me an electric toothbrush.

  Anne and James gave me a new cookbook thick as a Russian novel. 500 recipes!!!! Vichyssoise. Coq au vin. Clafoutis.20

  If I give a dinner party a month and cook only from this book, I wouldn’t get to the end until I’m seventy or eighty.

  DECEMBER 27

  The thing about the horizon is that it always recedes. You never get there.

  In art, the horizon is fixed—it literally divides the picture into sky and earth, sky and water, earth and water, color and color. It focuses the viewer’s eye. It’s right there.

  I think I think about horizons because I’m eager to get somewhere. To arrive. To know where I am. And to know who I’m with.

  DECEMBER 31

  The entire world is skiing or in Palm Beach.

  A quiet dinner with Anne and James.21 I cooked coq au vin from the book they gave me.

  After the first bottle of wine, Anne spoke French, imitating Jackie.

  “Like a French Marilyn Monroe,” James said.

  After the second bottle of wine, James told us about a Japanese tradition—on New Year’s Eve, you write a poem that would be read at your funeral if you died in the coming year. A new tradition? By the time we finally die, we’ll each have a book.

  Mine came in a flash.

  Standing naked in your doorway.

  Wearing out my heart.

  And watching all the time…

  Anne and Jim’s were funny, but I don’t remember them because I was trying to figure out who I was talking to in my “poem.”

  For the first time in a long time, I didn’t think: “If I’m not loved, I don’t exist.”

  1 Advise and Consent is a 1959 novel by Allen Drury. The subject was explosive: Senate confirmation of a secretary of state nominee who had, decades earlier, briefly been a member of a Communist cell. It was on the bestseller list for 102 weeks. In 1962, it became a successful movie, directed by Otto Preminger.

  2 In 1957, when Kennedy was a senator, he hired Pam Turnure (b. 1937) as his secretary. As soon as he became president, he encouraged Jackie to hire Turnure—who was then just twenty-three—as her social secretary. After the assassination, she worked for Jackie in her New York office; when she married, Jackie hosted a party. Turnure’s close working relationship with Jackie is perplexing, even incomprehensible—she was a Jackie lookalike who became one of Kennedy’s lovers soon after he hired her. In 1958, Turnure’s landlady, Florence Kater, publicly and loudly complained that Senator Kennedy was making late-night visits to her tenant, tossing pebbles at her window and calling to be let in. Kater and her husband put tape recorders in the air vent in Turnure’s room and recorded Turnure and Kennedy chatting and making love. When they evicted Turnure, Kennedy asked Mary to take her in; Mary, who was leaving Washington for a few weeks, let Turnure be her house sitter. The Katers learned where Turnure was staying and, late one night, took photos of Kennedy leaving Mary’s house. Mrs. Kater contacted some thirty magazines and newspapers with her evidence; according to Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie’s The Road to Camelot, she finally succeeded in getting her story out “in a newsletter published jointly by people active in both the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.” In 1963, she made one last effort to embarrass Kennedy—she sent her files to J. Edgar Hoover.

  3 Antoinette (Tony) Pinchot Bradlee (1924–2011) was Mary Meyer’s younger sister and the second wife of Ben Bradlee. Like Mary, she graduated from the Brearley School in New York and Vassar College. She worked at Vogue, married a lawyer, and had four children. On a trip to France with Mary in 1954, she met Bradlee, then the chief European correspondent for Newsweek. Two marriages ended; in 1957, she and Bradlee married. As an artist, she painted and made jewelry and ceramics. She had one show, in 1972, in Washington. “What makes these works remarkable is not the hardness of their shells, but the delicacies of their interiors,” wrote Post art critic Paul Richard. “These pieces do not yell, they do not gobble space. Their shapes are generally simple—spheres, columnar pods, and discs—but each shape has an opening, a window, and there is nothing simple about what goes on inside.” After her divorce from Bradlee in 1975, Tony withdrew from Washington society to make art and study the teachings of George Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic who believed that most of mankind sleeps through life and that it takes a prodigious effort to wake up.

  4 Ben Bradlee (1921–2014) is best known as the executive editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation. He was played by Jason Robards in the film adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s book, All the President’s Men. Robards won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, cementing the image of Bradlee as a tough-talking icon of journalistic integrity. Long forgotten were the first few years of his career, when he wrote propaganda for an organization funded by the CIA. In I954, he joined Newsweek. He then divorced his wife and married Tony Pinchot in 1957. In 1973, he left that marriage to live with Sally Quinn, a Washington Post style writer. In 1975, he published Conversations With Kennedy. While he praised Kennedy in that book as “this remarkable man who lit the skies of this land with hope and promise as no other political man has done in this century,” he also noted that Jack and Jackie were “remote and independent people” who were “not normally demonstrative.” Bradlee said Kennedy’s death changed his relationship with Jackie: “Our friendship, which had always been a foursome, didn’t work as a threesome.” Later, it didn’t work at all; after Jackie read Bradlee’s book, she never spoke to him again.

  5 Mary used initials to identify her lovers. Who were “TC” and “RB”? Unknown. It is known that Mary juggled lovers. These are invented.

  6 Lee Radziwill (1933–2019) was Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister. Her first marriage was to a publishing executive. Her second, to Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, a Polish aristocrat, produced two children. Her third was to film director Herb Ross; cynics said this was the first time a princess married a queen. She had several careers—decorator, actress, writer—but succeeded at none; she is remembered as a style icon and international socialite. Her relationship with her sister was complicated; she brokered Jackie’s friendship with Aristotle Onassis, with whom she may have been having an affair. It is hard to know what to make of Jackie’s will, which excluded any material provision for Lee, “for whom I have great affection, because I have already done so in my lifetime.”

  7 Cord Meyer (1920–2001) was Mary’s husband from 1945 to 1958. He arrived in her life with glittering credentials. At Yale, he was goalie for the hockey team, an editor of the Yale Literary Magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and winner of the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize for “the senior adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring his classmates.” He enlisted in the Marines, lost an eye to a Japanese grenade
, and won the 1946 O. Henry Prize for a short story condemning war and urging world peace.

  His initial attraction for Mary was intellectual and political—Mary was committed to global democracy, and Cord was considered a visionary, certain to become a major player in American politics. In 1947, when he was twenty-seven, he was elected president of the United World Federalists, a global citizens movement created that year by activists who believed the newly established United Nations was too similar to its predecessor, the League of Nations; supporters included Winston Churchill, Albert Camus, Jawaharlal Nehru, and E.B. White.

  In 1949, Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence, recruited him; he quickly ascended at the CIA. He was the “principal operative” of Operation Mockingbird (which secretly influenced domestic and foreign media), head of the Covert Action Staff of the Directorate of Plans, station chief in London, and three-time winner of the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Award.

  In 1956, Jack and Jackie Kennedy moved next door to the Meyers in McLean, Virginia. Mary and the Kennedys were friends. Jack and Cord were not—in 1945, when Kennedy was working as a journalist, he attended a United Nations conference; Meyer refused to grant him an interview. At the CIA, Meyer’s personality didn’t sweeten; the idealistic Global Democrat had become a contentious and alcoholic Cold Warrior. In 1958, two years after one of their three sons died in a road accident, the Meyers divorced.

  8 Anne Truitt (1921–2004), Mary’s best friend in Washington, was a minimalist artist best known for wood pillars painted with many alternately horizontal and vertical layers of acrylic, then sanded between each application of paint to produce highly polished fields of color. From 1947 to 1971, she was married to James Truitt, who was the Washington correspondent for Life magazine and then personal assistant to Philip Graham, owner of the Washington Post. Later, she published three volumes of journals that are revealing about many subjects, though not about Mary Meyer.

  9 Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) was a prominent art critic who was an early champion of abstract expressionism.

  10 In Madame Claude: Her Secret World of Pleasure, Privilege & Power, William Stadiem describes Kennedy’s tryst in Paris during that visit. Kennedy was, Stadiem writes, “drawn to Jackie’s looks but wanted a more seductive, sexual version. Such was Anouk Aimée…” According to Stadiem, Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, called Madame Claude, the legendary Paris procuress, who contacted the actress. Aimée reportedly described Kennedy as a “puerile warmonger” and declined. Madame Claude found a replacement: a twenty-three-year-old Sorbonne graduate who looked very much like Jackie. As she was a fitting model for Givenchy, it wasn’t difficult for her to borrow a Givenchy dress exactly like the one Jackie would be wearing that night at Versailles. According to Madame Claude, on the day of the ball at Versailles, Kennedy visited this woman in her walk-up apartment. He reportedly told her that his wife was more interested in fashion than sex; the model demonstrated that she was interested in both. An hour later, Kennedy returned to his suite at the Palais des Affaires Étrangères. At the candlelit supper in the Hall of Mirrors, he was eloquent about his wife’s beauty and her Givenchy gown.

  11 Campaigning exhausted Kennedy in 1960. Mark Shaw, a Life magazine photographer, introduced him to Max Jacobson, a New York doctor a few days before the first presidential debate. “Doctor Feelgood” gave Kennedy an intramuscular injection of vitamin B-complex, A, E, D, B-12, 10 mg. of amphetamines, and an intravenous injection of calcium and vitamin C—a mixture that Jacobson claimed produced “miracle tissue regeneration.” Kennedy wasn’t curious about the ingredients: “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.” Jacobson made thirty visits to the White House in 1961 and 1962. He was in Vienna with Kennedy for the summit meeting with Khrushchev. And he flew to Paris with the Kennedys, injecting them both before the evening at Versailles. A year later, Kennedy’s doctors concluded that the drugs had affected the president’s judgment. His orthopedic surgeon bluntly told him: “No president with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.” His official government doctor agreed. Jacobson was expelled from the White House, and Kennedy was eased off his drug regimen. Jacobson continued to boast about his connection to the Kennedys: “I worked with the Kennedys. I traveled with the Kennedys. I treated the Kennedys. Jack Kennedy, Jacqueline—they never could have made it without me.”

  In 1969, Mark Shaw died due to “acute and chronic intravenous amphetamine poisoning.” His death at forty-seven was a news story. An investigation by the Bureau of Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs revealed that Dr. Jacobson was the source of that amphetamine. In 1975, Jacobson’s medical license was revoked.

  12 Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was an Indian philosopher. As a teenager, he was promoted as a Great Teacher by his mentor, the president of the Theosophist Society. He later renounced all claims to moral or spiritual authority and urged people to work to understand themselves without reliance on religion.

  13 Corn Hill is a colony of small houses on a bluff near Provincetown, Massachusetts. It has a spectacular view of Cape Cod Bay and the ocean beyond.

  14 William Walton (1909–1994) was a journalist and painter. A close friend of Jack Kennedy in the 1950s, he became a valued friend to both Kennedys in the White House—he was “Billy Boy” to JFK, “Baron” or “Czar” to Jackie. Kennedy appointed him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission; with Jackie’s encouragement, he restored several of Washington’s best-known but neglected monuments. He was a great gossip and the ideal “extra man.” As an artist whose art was collected by museums, he and Mary were instant friends; she was his favorite date for White House dinners.

  15 James Angleton (1917–1987) was the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975. Consider the span of that career: for six CIA directors, he was the ultimate authority on counterintelligence. At Yale, he had been a poet; at the CIA, he applied some of the techniques of literary criticism to investigate Russian spycraft and became obsessed with the idea that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA. When the New York Times revealed that Angleton had run a large, secret program to spy on domestic antiwar and black nationalist movements, CIA Director William Colby fired him; he was soon secretly rehired. Angleton was certainly pathologically paranoid; he was very likely an alcoholic; he may be the creator of the surveillance state. He had one unwavering obsession: the Meyers. He was the godfather of Cord’s career and all three Meyer children, and he seemed to need to know everything about Mary in the last year of her life.

  Cicely Angleton (1922–2011) met her husband when they were students at Cambridge: “There was nothing in the room except a large reproduction of El Greco’s View of Toledo. It showed a huge unearthly green sky. Jim was standing underneath the picture. If anything went together, it was him and the picture. I fell madly in love at first sight. I’d never met anyone like him in my life. He was so charismatic. It was as if the lightning in the picture had suddenly struck me. He had an El Greco face. It was extraordinary.” She wrote her PhD thesis on the Cathars, a persecuted sect of the Catholic Church; after her husband’s death, she published a book of poems.

  16 Gianni Agnelli (1921–2003) was the largest shareholder of Fiat and its president, and thus the most important capitalist in Italy. He had many mistresses and was named by Esquire magazine as one of the five best-dressed men in the history of the world—men who wear their watches over the shirt cuff are paying homage to him. His wife, Marella (1927–2019) was famously photographed by Richard Avedon and immortalized by Truman Capote as “European swan numero uno.” She was a dedicated gardener and art collector. For all her privilege, her trademark was “understated glamour.”

  17 Oleg Cassini (1913–2006) was an American designer adept at reinterpreting European fashion. He visualized Jackie as an American queen, but instead of creating clothes that reflected status and wealth, he designed outfits for her that used expensive fabric in the service of a clean, unadorned, “classic” look. He became her exclusive
couturier in 1961 and was thereafter known as “Secretary of Style.”

  18 Grey Towers was the Pinchot family estate, built by Mary’s grandfather, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946). Twice elected governor of Pennsylvania, he was a conservationist far ahead of his time; Theodore Roosevelt appointed him the first head of the US Forest Service. The forty-three-room mansion, modeled after a French château, is set on 102 acres overlooking the Delaware River, in Milford, Pennsylvania, seventy-one miles from New York. In 1963, Pinchot’s heirs donated Grey Towers to the Forest Service. Two months before his assassination, with Mary and her sister at his side, President Kennedy inaugurated the Pinchot Institute.

  19 On December 18, 1956, Michael Meyer, the second of the Meyers’ three sons, was killed by a car in the road near their home in Virginia. Mary cradled him in her arms until the ambulance arrived, then consoled the driver of the car who hit her son. Michael Meyer was nine years old.

  20 The cookbook was Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.

  21 James Truitt (1921–1981) was Washington correspondent for Life magazine. In 1960, he became the personal assistant for Washington Post publisher Philip Graham; later he was the Post’s vice president. Ben Bradlee forced him to resign nine years later, citing the decline of his mental stability. After he and Anne divorced in 1971, he moved to Mexico. In 1976, he sold information about Mary’s romance with Kennedy to the National Enquirer. He committed suicide in 1981.

  1962

  JANUARY 1

  RESOLUTIONS

  more attentive to the boys

  one stable relationship

  one picture in a show (but if I had two, it wouldn’t swell my head!)

  travel

  smoke less

  a little inner peace (don’t be greedy!)

  JANUARY 4

  I apply the paint so thinly it looks like the canvas came that way.