JFK and Mary Meyer

by Jesse Kornbluth

  38 Roger Blough (1904–1985) was the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of U.S. Steel from 1955 to 1969. Kennedy correctly believed Blough violated a private, unwritten agreement for U.S. not to raise prices. What Kennedy didn’t consider: the decision to raise U.S. Steel’s prices had been made in consultation with its board of directors, which included executives of Morgan Guaranty Trust, First National City Bank of New York, Prudential Insurance, and AT&T—some of the most powerful companies in the country. The Fortune magazine editorial expressed the business elite’s newfound loathing of Kennedy: “Steel: The Ides of April.” A year later, Kennedy joked about their hatred: “I was their [the steel industry’s] man of the year last year. They wanted to come down to the White House to give me the award, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let them do it.”

  39 Clark Clifford (1906–1998) was an adviser to four Democratic presidents. Kennedy appointed him chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

  40 The business community was frosted by Kennedy’s attack. So were TIME magazine and traditionally Republican newspapers the Los Angeles Times and the New York Herald-Tribune. Kennedy was so infuriated by the Herald-Tribune’s criticism that he cancelled the twenty-two White House subscriptions.

  41 Kennedy used a three-foot shoehorn because he couldn’t bend his back. If he dropped a pencil, he never tried to pick it up. The famous rocking chair wasn’t an affectation—it was to relieve the low back pain that began when he was young. After a back operation in October 1954, he developed a urinary tract infection and became so sick his family called a priest to administer last rites. After a fifth operation in September 1957, he gave up on surgery. He wore a back brace, took several hot baths a day, and, when no photographers were around and he wasn’t in public view, often walked with crutches.

  42 In Mary’s Mosaic, Peter Janney recounts a two-hour interview he recorded with Timothy Leary in 1990. After dinner with Mary, Leary said, they decided to take a low dose of magic mushrooms. He recalled the following exchange. Mary: “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into. You don’t really understand what’s happening in Washington with drugs, do you?” Leary: “We’ve heard some rumors about the military.” Mary: “It’s time you learned more. The guys who run things—I mean the guys who really run things in Washington—are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control. But there are people like me who want to use drugs for peace, not for war, to make people’s lives better.” Janney writes: “Leary recalled feeling a bit uneasy. Mary seemed calculating, a bit tough, perhaps as a result of living ‘in the hard political world,’ as he put it.” The next day Leary drove Mary to the airport, having “loaded her with books and papers” about the Harvard Psilocybin Project in preparation for her training as a psychedelic guide. He told Mary he didn’t think she was ready to start running sessions yet. She agreed. She would come back soon, she told him, for more practice.

  43 These women were highly visible in the Washington government/ social set. Anne Truit was married to a Washington Post executive. Anne Chamberlin (1920–2012), a Vassar classmate, reported from Paris in the 1950s for Life magazine, then covered Kennedy’s presidential campaign for TIME. Cicely Angleton was the wife of the CIA director of counterintelligence.

  44 By Flopsie and Mopsie, she means “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen. These presidential assistants weren’t known for their secretarial skills—“Neither did much work,” a Secret Service agent recalled—but they were reliable companions in Kennedy’s postlunch romps in the White House swimming pool. The shopping reference is to Jackie’s binges in New York; in 1961 and 1962, she spent an average—in today’s dollars—of $250,000 a year, about half of that on clothes. Art and antique dealers learned that shipping expensive treasures to the White House without confirming with Kennedy’s secretary that the bill would be paid meant a quick round-trip.

  45 Jackie often chose the movies shown in the White House theater. Last Year at Marienbad was unlikely to thrill her husband—it’s an enigmatic, arty French film about a woman and a man who may have met the year before and may have had an affair. On June 21, 1962, Jackie screened Jules and Jim. Kennedy stayed to the end.

  46 Although photos of Jackie Kennedy smoking are rare—the press honored the White House’s insistence that her smoking was a private matter, not to be photographed—she was a chain-smoker, consuming as many as three packs of cigarettes a day. In the White House years, she was said to favor L&M, Newport, Parliament, and Salem.

  47 Mary wasn’t a close observer of the White House Press Office, so she might not have noticed the arrival of a nineteen-year-old intern, Mimi Beardsley. During her senior year at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, Beardsley wrote to Jackie, a Miss Porter’s alum, to request an interview for the school paper. Jackie was too busy, but Letitia Baldrige, her social secretary and chief of staff, offered to be interviewed. Beardsley got the tour of the White House from Priscilla (Fiddle) Wear, a recent Miss Porter’s graduate, had her interview with Baldrige, met the president, and wrote what Baldrige called “a charming article.” A year later, she was invited to intern at the White House. From day one, it was clear: she wasn’t chosen for her office skills.

  In June 1962, on her fourth day at the White House, Beardsley was invited to a lunchtime swim; that afternoon, she had cocktails with the president. In Jackie’s bedroom, he undressed her, asked if she was a virgin—she was—and had quick, perfunctory sex with her on his wife’s bed. Until November 1963—the same seventeen months that Mary was having an affair with him—Kennedy had twice-a-week sex with Beardsley. She traveled with him, waiting patiently in her hotel room until she got the call to service him. Once, in the White House pool, Kennedy swam over to her and whispered, “Dave Powers looks a little tense. Would you take care of it?” She went to Powers, who was dangling his feet in the water, and used her mouth to relieve his distress.

  In 2012, Random House bought Mimi Beardsley Alford’s Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath for an advance said to be close to $1 million. For that money, she shared every detail of their arrangement. The unromantic seduction: “Beautiful light, isn’t it?” The sleepovers in the White House: “Do what you want. You can go home or you can stay.” Her lack of concern for Jackie: “I was merely occupying the president’s time when his wife was away.” And the total absence of affection: “I don’t remember the president ever kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex.”

  48 Joseph Alsop (1910–1989) was a journalist and newspaper columnist. As a young man, he affected an English accent that accompanied a superior attitude, which he got away with because he was freakishly bright; at Groton, he was the only student who had ever scored 100 percent on Harvard’s English entrance examination. “It was an essay test and I wrote an essay on five different questions because I read the instructions incorrectly,” he explained. “All you had to do was one.” Although he was a longtime Republican, he and his wife, the socially prominent Susan Patten, became such close friends of Jack Kennedy that the Washington Post described their dining room as “the absolute center of Georgetown’s social scene” during Kennedy’s presidency. Like this: “Theirs was the only private home Kennedy visited on his inauguration night, stopping in for a bowl of terrapin soup.” Alsop was carefully closeted; the revelation that he had affairs with men would have ended his career. Like others in their circle, Mary knew the intimate details of the Alsop marriage—and, because her private life was also complicated, she didn’t judge them. When she met Kennedy away from the White House, it was often at the Alsops’ home.

  49 According to James Truitt’s 1976 interview with the National Enquirer, quoted in Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary produced “a snuff box with six marijuana cigarettes” in Jack’s bedroom. “She and the presid
ent sat at opposite ends of the bed and Mary tried to tell him how to smoke pot.” Truitt says she told him: “He wouldn’t listen to me. 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…At first he didn’t seem to feel anything, but then he began to laugh: ‘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, ‘We’ve killed the president.’ But then he opened his eyes. 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.” Did Kennedy ever take a small dose of LSD with Mary? Based on his reading of Mary’s diary, James Angleton claimed they did. As Gertrude Stein liked to say, “Very interesting…if true.”

  50 In the summer of 1954, Mary and Tony, both married, both bored, traveled to Europe. In Paris, Tony met Ben Bradlee. In Positano, Mary met a yachtsman who claimed to be a count; she sailed with him and had a summer fling. In 1955, she and Cord traveled to Paris for Tony and Ben’s wedding; when Cord returned to Washington, she rushed to see her lover. The fling turned serious; they made plans to divorce their spouses and move to a farm in Montana or Colorado. A year later, she confessed to Cord, who could not have been more scornful.

  51 André Emmerich (1924–2007) owned a New York art gallery that represented the major artists of the New York Abstract Expressionist School: Hans Hoffmann, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro, and Morris Louis.

  52 Morris Louis (1912–1962) radically altered conventional thinking about the look of a finished painting. He generally used acrylic paint, which he diluted. Pouring his paint onto large, raw canvases, he created vertical bands and stripes in overlapping colors that seem to be lit from within. Years of inhaling paint vapors led to the cancer that killed him.

  53 Edwin Walker (1909–1993) was the only Army general to resign in the twentieth century. The cause: The Joint Chiefs criticized him for giving an interview in which he praised the John Birch Society and described Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “pink.” When he resigned, he said, “It will be my purpose now, as a civilian, to attempt to do what I have found it no longer possible to do in uniform.” That meant going to Mississippi and calling the government’s effort to integrate the university “a conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation.” In 1976, he was arrested on a charge of public lewdness in a restroom at a Dallas park; he pleaded no contest and paid a fine. Seven months before Kennedy was shot, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill Walker in Dallas.

  54 Anne Truitt told Sally Bedell Smith she’d made a mistake accepting this invitation. “I think I was corrupt. I knew the president and Mary were having an affair. I should never have put my feet under Jackie Kennedy’s table.”

  55 A U-2 spy plane had sighted construction of missile sites in Cuba on October 19. Tense days followed in Washington, with military advisors urging a military solution: bombing the sites. Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who years later leaked the Pentagon Papers, reported, “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles.” (Decades later, at a conference in Havana, Russians revealed how disastrous it would have been for the United States to bomb Cuba. The missiles were the least of the Russian threat—also on the island were 40,000 Russian troops and tactical nuclear missiles.) The crisis ended with the Russians agreeing to withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba and the United States agreeing to remove rockets from Turkey.

  56 Benno Graziani (1923–2018) met Jackie when they were both young photojournalists. From 1949 to 1960, he was editor of Paris Match, which operated almost like a club for elegant, well-connected journalists and photographers. In the 1950s, he was a friend of Federico Fellini; he was the model for Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita. When Jackie was asked what she fed her dogs, she once responded: “Reporters.” But Graziani was her friend; he accompanied Jackie and her sister on their 1962 trip to India. “There are people who make history, those who endure it, and those who tell about it,” he said. “That’s me.”

  57 In Bluemont, Virginia—fifty-two miles from Washington—the government built an underground city. Literally: It had sewage treatment, reservoirs, fire and police departments, all underground. It had beds for three thousand people. Most of the bathrooms were for men.

  58 Mary got the call because Kennedy insisted. Jackie was frosted—nobody knew about her and Jack, so it must have been something between Jackie and Jack. According to Barbara Leaming, in Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years, Jackie didn’t express her displeasure directly. Instead, she told her husband she wouldn’t fly with him to Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral, and she didn’t appear at the dinner until long after the guests had arrived. At dinner she was noticeably “ill at ease.” After dinner Jackie repeatedly played—and sang along with—“PT 109,” a song inspired by the World War II sinking of Kennedy’s Patrol Torpedo boat off the Solomon Islands in 1943. Kennedy swam to seek help; he towed an injured crewmate with a life-vest strap and led the survivors to safety. He was self-effacing about his status as a hero: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

  59 This was the sixth anniversary of Michael’s death.

  60 Elaine De Kooning (1918–1989) was the wife of painter Willem de Kooning. She was known for her Abstract Expressionist work, but she was also a gifted landscape and portrait artist.

  61 In 1964, a few months after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy bought a few of Elaine de Kooning’s paintings and drawings. She knew there were many more, and she went to de Kooning’s studio to see them. She particularly responded to two charcoal drawings that showed Kennedy with his legs open and one leg over the arm of the chair. Given the Kennedys’ marital history, it’s a mystery why she chose those drawings—any viewer’s eye would be drawn to his crotch. In a season when the world went out of its way to give the widow anything she wanted, de Kooning said she wanted to keep them. This refusal grated. “Well, they make him look like a fag on the Riviera,” Jackie said. And with that, de Kooning decided not to sell anything to her.

  1963

  JANUARY 8

  The Kennedys return from Palm Beach.

  Jackie had been there a month.

  Jack: Seventeen days in Florida…a very long time for him to be with her.

  JANUARY 10

  The Oval Office. In a quiet moment, Jack talked about Elaine de Kooning.

  - She drove me nuts. She’d say: Please don’t move. She finally got a ladder and worked from the top, looking down.

  - A smart solution.

  - Why didn’t you get the commission?

  - She’s good.

  - You’re not?

  - I don’t do portraits. And I’m not married to Willem de Kooning.

  - You could be—you’re much more beautiful than Elaine.

  Like everything comes down to that!

  JANUARY 17

  Bad news travels fast—I heard this from three people.

  Yesterday, at a convention of newspaper editors and publishers in Phoenix, a very drunk Phil Graham62—who wasn’t scheduled to speak—staggered to the podium, pushed the speaker aside, and delivered an incoherent rant about his competitors, who were all fools and knaves. Then he moved on to a story the press never covered, namely, who was sleeping with whom. He thought he might as well start right at the top: Jack, who was sleeping in the White House with Mary Meyer, his new favorite, who had been married to Cord Meyer of the CIA and was the sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife.

  As Phil was raving, he was also taking off his clothes, so even the people who heard him may not have taken him seriously.

  Somebody called the White House, and Jack sent Phil’s doctors to
Phoenix on a government jet.

  JANUARY 18

  Jack called, with a terrible story only he knows.

  Hours before Phil grabbed the microphone and slandered everyone in his world, he called the White House and talked to Evelyn Lincoln. He said he needed Curtis LeMay to call him.63 And that he was in love and was getting remarried as soon as he could get a divorce from Kay.

  At midnight, he called the White House again, demanding to talk to Jack. By then, Phil’s doctors were landing in Phoenix. Phil was sedated and brought back to one of those private hospitals where his only audience will be his doctors.

  Hard to be upset for myself when I consider what Kay must be feeling.

  JANUARY 22

  I read Dwight Macdonald’s review in the New Yorker of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. Thirteen thousand words! Fifty pages! Must be the longest review the magazine ever published.

  I asked Jack if he had read it. Of course. He had an idea: he’ll mark the passages he thinks are key, and I’ll mark my copy, and then we’ll compare.

  Did he also ask Jackie to do this? Doubtful—poverty is of no interest to her.

  What I marked:

  Eleven percent of our population is nonwhite. Twenty-five percent of our poor are.

  Forty-fifty million Americans—25 percent of the population—are now living in poverty. Real poverty. Like not getting enough to eat.

  Eight million “senior citizens”—that’s 50 percent of them—live in poverty.

  One million have less than $580 a year.

  You’d think it’s better in the North, but it’s not. In 1959, a quarter of all New York families were below the poverty line ($4,000).

  “The left-behinds have so long accepted poverty as their destiny that they need outside help to climb out of it.”