JFK and Mary Meyer

by Jesse Kornbluth

  - I knew that there were Texans who hated Jack—but why would they hate him so much?

  He seemed surprised.

  - The oil depletion allowance.

  - What’s that?

  - You and Kennedy never talked about it?

  - No.

  - Clint Murchison. Sid Richardson. H.L. Hunt. Brown & Root. These names never came up?

  - No.

  - You keep a diary?

  - Yes.

  - A record of your time with Kennedy?

  - Of course not!

  - Too bad. Early October of ’62 and early January of ’63 would have been good times to hear him talk about the politics of taking a $300 million bite from Texas oilmen so he could help the poor and elderly.

  - I’ll look.

  He turned my tape recorder off.

  - Some people in your world may know who killed Kennedy.

  - Who?

  - Allen Dulles…Angleton…your ex-husband…

  I rubbed my eyes. I felt like crying.

  - I see I don’t have to draw you a map. So if you hear anything…

  - You’d like that Pulitzer, wouldn’t you?

  - Two kids to put through college? Sure.

  He got up to leave.

  - I love this country. And some bastard killed my president. That burns me. It burns you. So…help us.

  MAY 16

  Looked at my January 1963 entries.

  There it was: I pressed Jack about funding for federal efforts to help the elderly and the poor.

  MAY 20

  Idea for sculpture: “Grief Stones.”

  I’ve never made sculpture.

  I may never make another one.

  In appearance, it will look like a Tibetan stupa—a pile of stones; a mound, really—that enshrines sacred relics. Add a stone to a stupa by the side of the road, and, according to the Buddhists, you’ll receive benefits.

  I see polished and varnished stones—stones that look like Anne painted them.

  Why a stone sculpture for Jack?

  In memory.

  As a reminder of what was.

  And as a warning about what is—and what is to come.

  With Jack gone, we live in a different world.

  Good-hearted people solving problems rationally—one man with a gun put an end to that.

  If it was only one man.

  What if there was more than one?

  The question stares us in the face. We can’t look at it. We can’t look at it because it tells us that the official story of the assassination is a fairy tale. If you can read without moving your lips, you know that. And you know we’ll never find out what really happened.

  Whoever did it…they got away with it.

  What’s even worse: they know you know that, and they don’t care.

  This terrifies me: if they can kill the president and get away with it…who can’t they kill?

  They can condemn and eliminate you at any time, and your death will get less attention than a missing cat poster at the supermarket.

  OK, that’s the extreme case. Scale down the drama. Look at our daily lives. We are the most prosperous nation in the history of the world, but because the people on the top want more and more and more, the people on the bottom have to make do with less and less.

  What can we do? Nothing. The generals, the gun makers, the plane builders, the big corporations, the banks—they rule.

  Look in the mirror. Say these words and watch yourself say them: We’re not free—we’re prisoners in our own country.

  That’s why I’ll make Grief Stones.

  Time reduces pain.

  Reduced pain reduces memory.

  Stones endure.

  They’re permanent reminders and permanent accusations—rage in the form of beauty.

  JUNE 7

  School’s out.

  The boys are bigger, stronger, sparkling.

  In a week, they’re off to camp.

  Then a month with Cord.

  Please let him take a house on Nantucket, please let him take them sailing—at the least, it will keep him from drinking early in the day.

  JUNE 9

  Anne and I ate in the kitchen tonight because the dining room table was covered with books and newspapers and binders.

  - What are you getting out of this?

  - The truth.

  - It can’t be the truth, because you can be sure they have buried that.

  - They are arrogant and careless, and drunk and sleepy after lunch—they can make mistakes.

  - Yes. Tidbits will slip out.

  - Tidbits are breadcrumbs. They make a trail.

  - And what’s at the end of it? Nothing. It’s a snipe hunt. So…why?

  I didn’t say. But I know why.

  1) I owe it to Jack. I saw him change from a politician to a statesman. In the last year, he cared about more than winning elections—he really wanted a better world. And that was one reason for the CIA and the defense industry and other businesses to want him dead. If I could find something out and if that knowledge could be made public…I know little Mary Meyer can’t solve the crime of the century, but I’m here in Washington, I know people who might be involved or have more knowledge, and because I was once their friend, I might gather breadcrumbs no one else can. And not being taken seriously…that would make it easier for me.

  2) No alternative. What am I going to do—buy a cottage in Truro and live with my easel, my looks wrecked by the weather and me just not caring?

  JUNE 10

  Dinner at Tony and Ben’s with Arthur Schlesinger.

  Ben makes a perfect martini, and Arthur likes them almost as much as he liked a good seat at a White House dinner.

  Arthur had two.

  Then the four of us drank two bottles of wine.

  And then Ben asked about Arthur’s “conversations” with Jackie, which ended—Ben somehow knew this—just a week ago.

  There were seven sessions, Arthur said. Tape-recorded, with tapes and transcripts probably not to be released while any of us are alive.

  Ben: This started…?

  Arthur: March 4.

  Ben: Three months after Jack’s death? Amazing that she can talk at all.

  Arthur said he sent Jackie condolence notes from the White House staff, and that prompted her to talk to Bobby about the staff recording their memories. And then the project expanded to include her. And because Arthur was a friend, she thought she could do it.

  Ben: You mean, control it.

  Arthur: That, too.

  We all wanted to know what Jackie said. Usually Arthur would wave us off. But…the martinis, the wine.

  Arthur made us swear silence.

  The biggest thing that jumped out at him, he said, was Jackie’s view of Negroes. Like her memory of George, the butler who brought Jack’s breakfast tray. When he had the shakes, Jackie said, “another slave” would bring it. Arthur didn’t react, he said, but he was stunned.97

  It got worse. She said she couldn’t see a picture of Martin Luther King “without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible.” Jack told her that Hoover had a tape of King from the March of Washington. In the hotel, Hoover told Jack, King arranged for a big party—it sounded like an orgy.

  I asked about the marriage.

  Arthur: She said the first winter in the White House was tough. Trouble sleeping. Very tired. Jack understood and—her words—“sent her away.” And when she returned, she was happy.

  No one said anything.

  She described their married life as “renewals of love after brief separations.”

  I bit my cheek. Ben said, “Wow.”

  What else? The expected. Jack was a hard worker. Constant reader. Dedicated napper. Said his prayers every night. Never complained about his back pain.

  Any humor? The holes in the floor of the Oval Office—Eisenhower walked around in his golf shoes.

  I asked: Who killed Jack?

  Ben, icy: It’s late, good night. And he walked out
of his own living room.

  JUNE 20

  The basement door was open this morning. It’s heavy—too heavy for me to open. I could file another police report, but why?

  JUNE 23

  Dorothy Kilgallen98 published an article in the New York Journal-American: “One of the biggest names in American politics—a man who holds a very high elective office—has been injected into Britain’s vice-security scandal.” Nobody saw it. The word is that Bobby called the publisher, who removed the article from later editions.

  JULY 2

  Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act—Jack’s bill, but he couldn’t get a vote for six months because Howard Smith, one of those Southern Dems who love segregation more than their wives, wouldn’t let the bill out of the Rules Committee.

  LBJ bullied it through. Then it got jammed in the Senate by another Neanderthal Dem, James Eastland. Fifty-four days of filibuster, then approval of a weaker bill.

  Not really “Jack’s legacy.” More an LBJ triumph.

  JULY 7

  Some days I almost think I understand what happened.

  Some days I can almost say the word “coup.”

  JULY 8

  Cord, on the phone.

  - Don’t hang up—I haven’t called to yell at you.

  - Are the boys OK?

  - They’re hellions, but they’re fine. I’m calling because I’m concerned.

  - About?

  - You.

  - What have I done now?

  - You’re a very good student. And you’ve done a lot of reading. And you’ve come away from it with a point of view—a very understandable point of view, considering what you’ve read.

  - There’s a “but” coming…

  - But you’re talking to people.

  - Why is that a bad thing?

  - You’re making them doubt.

  - I’m making them think.

  - And that’s a good thing, just not about the assassination.

  - Why is that?

  - Because you don’t have Alpha information.

  - What is that?

  - Inside information. Authoritative. The real story. Which is the information you need.

  - And that would lead me to the point of view you need.

  - Which is….?

  - Oswald acted alone. He wasn’t with the Russians.

  - And you think he was?

  - I think Oswald was working with the FBI.

  - And us?

  - Cord, that goes without saying.

  - If the Commission’s report was out now, you wouldn’t have your doubts, and you wouldn’t be sharing them with our friends, who then tell others, and…

  - What are you going to do? Put me in a room…stuff me with LSD?

  - I want to introduce you to someone you very much need to meet.

  - Who?

  - He knows ballistics.

  - He’s going to…

  - He’s not going to sell you a story. He’ll lay out some facts. He’ll leave. You’ll do whatever you do. And…we never had this call. No one came to see you.

  “Alpha information”….the attitude behind that! The smugness, the conceit!

  JULY 10

  Mr. Ballistics carried a briefcase.

  His name was Joe…“a forensic scientist specializing in ballistics.”

  He didn’t have a card. Too bad. I would have loved to see that job title in print. And to see if his name was really Joe. Not that the card would have proved anything.

  No coffee, no tea. Just one request: to sit at the kitchen table.

  - Why?

  - Lighting’s better.

  He put a bullet on the table.

  - 6.5 millimeter Carcano. An extremely solid bullet: copper-

  jacketed, military-grade, hardened so it doesn’t fragment.

  He took out a stack of photos and put them to the side.

  He took out a toy car—a Lincoln convertible, like the official one—and put some toy people in it: Jack, Jackie, the Connallys, the driver.

  Holding the bullet, he demonstrated how Oswald killed Jack.

  - First there was a shot to the President’s back…He reaches for his throat, moves his arms—a common response to neurological damage…the bullet exits, still solid…now destabilized but moving at about the same speed…It hits John Connally…passes through Connally’s chest, his wrist, and his thigh…and emerges, still solid. And then, of course, the fatal shot to the right side of the President’s head.

  - How do you explain one bullet causing all that damage to two people who aren’t standing or sitting right in front of each other?

  - As long as the bullet stays nose forward and is mostly passing through soft flesh, it doesn’t fragment when it hits bone—it just changes course. And keeps moving.

  I knew he wanted to keep the conversational technical, “scientific.” But then there were the facts.

  - I read somewhere the bullet that did all that damage ended up on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Doesn’t that strike you as…comical?

  - In terms of preserving evidence, I’d say “lucky.”

  - Joe…that bullet had more moves than Fred Astaire.

  He handed me a photograph of John Connally.

  - Look at the entry wound. If Connally had been the first person that bullet hit, the entry wound would be a nice round hole. But it’s caused several wounds. By the time it exits…seven. The bullet is no longer pristine.

  - The Commission’s report will say one bullet caused seven wounds?

  - I believe so.

  - And people will believe that?

  - It’s what happened, ma’am.

  - One shooter. In less than nine seconds?

  Silence.

  I thought: there is a purpose to this visit. It has been accomplished. Thank him for his time. Show him out. But how many chances do you get to talk to the CIA?

  - What if it happened another way? What if there was more than one gunman—say, someone in front of the limo?

  - I only do ballistics.

  - Well, consider the exit wound of the first shot. Was the hole in the president’s throat neat or jagged?

  - I haven’t seen that photo.

  - Say it was neat.

  - It would tell me nothing about the direction. As I say, a case-hardened bullet…

  - Let me put it another way: Observers—many observers—say they heard shots coming from the Book Depository…and from another direction at almost exactly the same time. If that happened, what would you call it? A one-in-a-billion coincidence? Or…a conspiracy?

  He said nothing, but his expression suggested great disappointment, like he had just discovered that the well-dressed, educated, seemingly sensible woman living in a clean house—a woman once married to one of the gods of the Agency—was, as people in Langley had said, a nut case.

  JULY 15

  Republicans nominate Goldwater. What Jack hoped for: “I will have the biggest victory since FDR. Maybe bigger.”

  AUGUST 7

  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Jack wanted few soldiers in Vietnam. Now there will be more. The defense companies must be cheering. LBJ gave them what Jack was going to take away.

  If I were a hypocrite —or just smart—I’d invest in defense stocks.

  AUGUST 11

  Corn Hill

  The return of a stranger: LL, the professor, unannounced. I was at the picnic table, reading pieces I’d collected about the assassination. I told him about Oswald and the flawed investigation.

  - Have you seen Little Caesar?

  - The gangster movie? From the Depression?

  - Yes.

  - What’s it about?

  - Will this be on the final?

  - He was played by Edward G. Robinson. In the movie, his name was…

  - Rico.

  - Caesar Enrico Bandello. Who was modeled on Al Capone. But the movie isn’t really about Rico—it’s about “Big Boy.” He lives in a mansion at the top of a hill in the very best neighborhood. He
’s a patrician: firm jaw, gray at the temples, custom-

  tailored smoking jacket. Completely respectable…and he’s the city’s crime leader. Ultimate power is his—on a whim, he could terminate Rico.

  - I missed all of that.

  - Everybody did. Audiences went to watch Rico’s rise and fall. They barely noticed Big Boy. Look what happens at the end. Broke and alone, Rico makes a manic phone call, insulting the cops. They trace the call. He hangs up, walks down an empty industrial street. A car pulls up, the cops shoot Rico. Do you remember his dying words?

  - “Is this the end of Rico?”

  - Yes, it’s the end of Rico—and the end of the movie. We don’t see Big Boy again. There would be no point. What could you show? He’s in evening clothes, in his mansion at the top of the hill, sipping champagne with the swells. No remorse at all. For him, nothing has happened.

  - What does this have to do with the assassination?

  - Simply this: The permanently powerful use the hungry and ambitious to do their dirty work and then discard them when they get in the way.

  - I don’t get your point.

  - Jack Kennedy was Rico.

  This was stunning.

  Then I thought of Jack taking on U.S. Steel. Those CEOs bristled. It was as if Jack were a Negro caddy who started quoting M.L. King as he took a nine-iron out of the bag.

  I told LL that was the first interesting idea I’d heard in a while. We drank wine, talked.

  Leaving, he offered advice: Find a happy man, make him happier.

  - Is that you?

  - Find out.

  AUGUST 13

  Something is in the way of starting with anyone—and it’s me.

  I don’t know how I feel.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I don’t know what I want.

  AUGUST 19

  Dorothy Kilgallen’s bombshell column: At a secret session of the Warren Commission, Jack Ruby told the Warren Commission members that “I want to tell the truth, and I can’t here,” and that “Maybe certain people don’t want to know the truth that may come out of me.” The Commission rejected Ruby’s request to be transferred to a jail in another state so he could speak freely.99