- You’ve said this before.
- But I didn’t mean it. I mean it now.
- It’s very nice to hear that.
- I’ll go further.
- Jack…no.
- I’ve been thinking about this. Next year…after the election…
- No.
- Yes. That. I want to divorce Jackie and…
- No. No.
- …you would be a much better wife.
- It would be such a misery.
- Misery is separate bedrooms.
- You would be hated. I would be Wallis Simpson.73
This was true. He knew it. Knew it before he said a word. What was driving this?
- After the election, Jack—that’s so far away. Let’s just get there. And then sort it out.
- I like goals, Mary.
- Ok…you have one.74
And then—for the first time, a year after we became lovers—he kissed me.
JUNE 15
Jack and women he respects—that’s a short list.
There isn’t one woman in his cabinet.
I’m the closest thing he’s got to a female advisor.
Someone said of Jackie: When Jack comes upstairs, she’ll never ask, “So, what happened at the office today?”
I don’t have to ask—I’m in the office!
When I look at Jack’s initiatives—peace, racial justice, poverty relief—I have to think our conversations were a factor—maybe a big factor—in the way he thinks now. All my hopes for Cord—twenty years later, they could come true with Jack. And come true at a scale that makes history, improves lives.
Why would I choose color-field painting over helping Jack change the world?
Later: Why would I have to choose one? Why not choose both?
JUNE 16
Jack, on the phone, explaining why Jackie isn’t a concern.
- Jackie believes I’ll replace you with women who aren’t our friends. And you’ll move on. And if we tried to start up again, we’d find no fire, only ashes. She’s said this before, about other women: “You can’t reheat a cold soufflé.” But this time…
- When Chuck called me…
- He was freelancing.
- I thought you encouraged him so he’d blab, and word would get back to Betty and she’d tell Jackie that Chuck and I were an item.
- Clever. But too clever by half.
- No, Jack, you’re exactly that clever.
A long silence.
- And now?
- I imagine Jackie will be out of Washington all summer. What about you?
- No plans. I could rent something near Provincetown…or I could stay in town.
- It would please me if you stayed.
As ever, the master of understatement.
JUNE 18
I gushed to Jack about the American University speech.
He told me it was reprinted—in full—in Russia, and Khrushchev said it was the greatest speech by an American since FDR.
Then he pushed a report across the desk: the weekly mail.
So far, 896 letters about the speech. 28,000 about a bill to regulate the price of freight.
I was stunned.
- That is why I tell people in Congress they’re crazy if they take their mail seriously.
JUNE 20
Jackie’s at Glen Ora.
I went to the WH, with a question: The man who killed Medgar Evers…sick, misguided, or evil?
Jack asked my opinion.
I talked about a conversation I’d had with Anne. She had seen a van Gogh hanging next to Gauguin—for her it was a dramatic explanation for the end of their friendship. “Gauguin was attracted to wickedness. Van Gogh understood evil exists.” I said: I’m with van Gogh.
Jack thought the killer was a prisoner of history.
- He only knew Negroes as slaves. He didn’t have a window into another way of relating. Redemption isn’t likely…but it’s possible.
- For everyone?
- Yes.
- Including you?
- Starting with me.
- How can you tell?
- I was in Palm Beach when I got the word Jackie had gone into labor with John-John. I made the quickest exit of my life, but I didn’t get back in time for the birth, and I had to complain loudly that I should have been told the baby was coming early. Nobody blamed me—I’d made the effort.75
JUNE 28
Days of triumph for Jack.
“Ich bin ein Berliner.” 450,000 Germans turned out to see Jack. Followed by an Irish homecoming.
I’ve never seen him lit up like this—he’s delighted with himself.76
JULY 7
Jack must be bored with me as a lover. He suggests “games.”
- Like backgammon?
- Like: “serving your president.”
- That’s not a game. It’s a fantasy.
- Even better.
- I don’t do fantasies.
He dropped it.
What I wanted to say—what I should have said—was: Listen, idiot, here’s how it works. On the far side of sex is love. Which includes trust. Get there and I will play any dirty little game you want.
JULY 10
A show at the Jefferson Place Gallery—it’s on! In November! Thrilled! I feel a party coming on…
JULY 15
I never remember my dreams, and when I read a book and a character has a dream, I immediately turn the page—nothing is more boring than a dream that doesn’t include you.
But twice I’ve had the same dream: I was on the Titanic, and now I’m in a lifeboat. It’s full. We can’t do anything to save the men freezing to death in the water. Then I spot a familiar face just ahead. He sees me, raises his hand. I reach out my hand. Our fingers touch. The boat drifts, and he becomes another dot in the water.
A sudden thought: I see myself in the lifeboat, eager to rescue others. But what if I’m in the icy water, desperate for rescue, reaching out—and just missing a man’s outstretched hand? What if I’m the one who’s doomed?
AUGUST 3
Phil Graham was released from the psychiatric hospital for a weekend with Kay at the farm. While Kay napped, he killed himself in the bathroom with a shotgun.
Sad on the surface, but liberating, too—Kay is free of him.
AUGUST 5
Historic: After eight years of negotiations, the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater, or in the atmosphere.77
Relief. Joy. Pride in our negotiators. Pride in Jack.
AUGUST 6
Corn Hill.
The now-familiar crowd: psychiatrists, professors.
The now-familiar dinner: lobster, corn.
We talked about therapy, how long it takes for people to heal, how uncertain it is that they will.
LL—a professor—recited a poem:
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
I didn’t raise my hand or blurt out the author, but I knew: Wordsworth.
I remembered Anna Kichel’s sophomore English class at Vassar. She had us compare King Lear to Woodrow Wilson. Talking ideas, ideas, deep into the night.
AUGUST 9
Patrick Kennedy died. He lived less than two days. This time Jack was there.
I wrote to Jackie. I didn’t n
eed to remind her that I had also lost a son. But that shared pain—pain only mothers can know—was in every word: “Anything I write seems too little; nothing that I feel seems too much. I am so very sorry.”
AUGUST 14
Jackie left the hospital.
Hard to believe what I’m seeing on the screen: Jack, who has always walked ahead of her, is holding her hand.
Anyone who doesn’t know them would say: He’s holding her up, she’s drawing on his strength.
I see just the opposite: He’s broken, she’s holding him up.
AUGUST 20
At a news conference: “How many weapons do you need? How many megatons do you need?”
Making a transition here: the man I love has become the president I love.
AUGUST 28
The March on Washington. Watched. Wept.
Maybe the force of goodness and love can triumph—or at least fight evil to a draw.
SEPTEMBER 2
TV interview: Jack says—clearly—he doesn’t want to get drawn into Vietnam. “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment. We can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam.”
SEPTEMBER 10
Not a word from Jack. Maybe he really is trying to make up to Jackie. More likely, he’s moved on from both of us.
SEPTEMBER 21
At the United Nations, Jack proposes a joint US/USSR expedition to the moon. Peaceful cooperation in space? No “space race”? Thrilling.
SEPTEMBER 24
My uncle gifted Milford to the Forest Service, which will use it as a center for research in the environment and natural resources. Glad for the city kids who will study here.
Tony and I flew to Milford in Jack’s helicopter to watch him dedicate Grey Towers as the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.
I told Jack stories about Grey Towers.
He was interested in my grandfather’s political career: two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, then…nothing, until Teddy Roosevelt made him the first chief of the US Forest Service and he and Roosevelt created 200 million acres of new national forest.
He loved Gifford’s World War II suggestion that life rafts should have fishing tackle.
He pretended not to care about the story of the Pinchot girls swimming nude below the falls. But one quick smile was…encouraging.
Impressive precautions. I never saw so many police in Milford—local, state, Secret Service in suits, firefighters in dress uniforms.
No crawl space under the speakers’ platform. Roped-off paths. The landing site was off-limits to everybody.
A huge crowd cheered Jack. Someone said 10,000—it sounded like 20,000.
Tony and I stood on the platform with Jack. He was eloquent and generous, and gracious to my mother, who very much hopes Barry Goldwater will be president.
Something I noticed but would never say: Jack has the beginning of a double chin.
On the helicopter back, Jack learned that the Senate had ratified the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When he told us, he didn’t make a big deal of it: “The vote was eighty to nineteen.” But we knew better.
SEPTEMBER 26
Millbrook. Tim Leary. So agitated.
- Are you high?
- No!
- Not coming off a bad trip?
- No. It’s my group. Eight women agreed to convince their husbands to take LSD. I trusted them all. Someone snitched.
- Snitched?
- The government knows.
- Mary, who are these women?
- I can’t tell you.
- Sure you’re not on drugs?
- I’m scared. All the way from the city, I was crying.
- Let’s consider…paranoia.
- No. This is real.
- What can I do?
- For yourself: be careful. For me: if I need to hide out…
- Of course.
But he was humoring me.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Between 1962 and 1983, when he first mentioned Mary, Timothy Leary published seventeen books. And in those twenty-one years, he wrote not one word about Mary Meyer. I am including Mary’s account of this late September visit because it has appeared, without questions about its accuracy, in other accounts that describe her interest in using consciousness-expanding drugs to change history. If Leary’s memory is correct, Mary flew to New York and drove to Millbrook, where she freaked out. But it is possible that this encounter never happened—Leary was a master of Unreliable Narrating.
OCTOBER 1
Jackie flies to Greece, to cruise on Onassis’s yacht.78 I know what Jack’s thinking: Onassis will try to sleep with her, and with her emotions unsteady, she just might.
OCTOBER 17
Jackie returns.
The question that dare not speak its name: did she and Onassis become lovers?
OCTOBER 25
This week: I’m filling out applications for boarding schools. I wish they weren’t going away, but I don’t want to hide my life from the boys, and with them in the house, that gets harder.
OCTOBER 31
After all the years when I looked forward to seeing the boys in their Halloween costumes, this year they’re very aware this is their last Halloween at home—they’re going to a party with friends. Does that include girls? “Maybe.”
NOVEMBER 1
Coup in Vietnam: Diem and his brother shot and stabbed.
Jack called, said he wasn’t going to the Army-Air Force game, would I come over?
His bed was not the destination.
We talked in the Oval Office.
He couldn’t have been gloomier.
He’d lost—he could see that the forces in our government that wanted war would now get what they wanted.
His torment wasn’t about the politics, but about our soldiers who would now be caught in a war we shouldn’t be fighting and couldn’t win.
- I was going to bring them home.
- When?
- After the election.
I hugged him, and off he went to spend the weekend with Jackie in Virginia.79
NOVEMBER 14
Televised press conference. Jack announces he’s ordering up a plan for Vietnam: “how we can bring Americans out of there.”80
Such courage! I cheered.
NOVEMBER 17
Gallery opening: my first solo show!
Art looks different when it’s hung and lighted.
“Half Light” is five feet by five feet—it’s the only painting on that wall, it looks even bigger.
The place was packed. Lots of praise. No one announced a purchase, but I don’t care—this night was indelible.81
There is someone I would have liked to be there.
Perhaps he will slip in on a quiet night, when the gallery is closed.
NOVEMBER 22
Come back. Come back. Come back.
NOVEMBER 23
Killed? Dead? Say it over and over until I can accept it.
I can’t believe it’s come to this.
No breath. Shaken from the inside out.
Feeling like I’m shedding weight at ten pounds a second, like I’m going to lift off and float away.
How many times I thought: This will never be. You fool, you risked your heart, knowing that it would end…that he would end it.
And then he didn’t leave me. He left himself.
Jackie. No way she can get through life without hearing a car backfire or a police siren.
How many thousands of times will she panic?
Private visitation: the casket, on display for VIPs at the White House. Tony called. I said I didn’t want to go. She didn’t understand, I didn’t explain.
Rain. All day.
Listening, over and over, to Peter, Paul and Mary: Where have all the flowers gone?
Two bourbons. Maybe now I can sleep.
Can’t sleep.
I don’t think he ever said, “I love you,�
� to a woman before. He said it to me. Twice. That is gold. It goes into my treasure box.
I may not love you forever, Jack, but tonight I love you so.
Dear Lord, please open the gates for this man.
NOVEMBER 24
TV. Oswald shot.
TV: The casket, carried on horse-drawn wagon to Capitol. Hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. Muffled drums. Horses’ hooves.
Can’t watch, can’t turn it off.
John-John saluting the casket.
Who can bear this?
I want to believe what the Buddhists believe—the body is a garment that the soul puts on and off. But Jack filled his body. He was completely alive in it. He radiated life and energy, even when he was crippled. What is Jack without his body?
My mind’s like a waterbug—it skitters.
Shaky. Called Tim Leary.82
NOVEMBER 25
The funeral. I sat with Tony. No tears. Numb.
Arlington Cemetery: The flyover. Devastating.
Fifty fighter jets, followed by Air Force One, flying so low and so slowly it seemed to be floating.
Directly over the cemetery, it dipped its wings left and right…an acknowledgment, a final bow.
Then it disappeared in the vapor trails of the fighter jets.
So beautiful, so artful, so, so sad…sadder even than all those people filing past the coffin at the Capitol, crying for him but even more for themselves…sadder even than seeing Jackie in the ghostly black veil, lighting the flame at the gravesite.
NOVEMBER 26
What I learned from Jack…what Jack believed…is that you’re never really bonded with anyone.
Even if you think you are, it’s never complete.
At the end, after all the wishing for intimacy, he gave up. He was how he was, and nobody got close enough to see the loneliness, so it was his secret. Not even a bitter secret, a recognition of a defect, because it never got in his way—he sold aloneness as a life truth very convincingly to himself.
And, by circumstance, to me.
Now I feel it: I am alone, I will be alone. The kids. Yes. But soon they’ll be gone for good.
I’m all I’ve got.
This is my new definition of hope: the postponement of disappointment.
NOVEMBER 27
How can this be?
JFK and Mary Meyer Page 9