Love letters between Mary Pinchot Meyer and JFK rank amongst the most valuable documents in the Kennedy collectable economy. One note, written by the President, sold for $89,000: “Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me […] I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it.”
On the day she was murdered in 1964, about a year after the assassination in Dallas, Mary Meyer left her painting studio wearing walking gloves, carrying no purse or wallet, headed down the cobblestoned hill toward the C&O canal path running parallel to the Potomac.
Mary passed rows of Georgetown houses, with Allen Dulles’ abode not far away, because Mary knew all the CIA families. She had been a CIA wife herself; married to Cord Meyer, a company man on the executive team[1] of Operation Mockingbird, which sought to manipulate domestic American news media in the name of winning the Cold War.
On October 12th, the last acquaintance to see Mary alive was one of Washington’s most powerful women, Polly Wisner: “Good-bye, Maahry,” Polly called out from the back seat of a long black car with official plates. Polly was on her way to London where her husband, Frank Wisner, was stationed as the head of the CIA’s worldwide covert operations. Frank developed pathological excessive talking (logorrhea) and would later take his own life[2].
Mary walked a daily route along Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath, which was patrolled by park security, but the dense brush was also a known sleeping spot for drunks. Jackie Kennedy sometimes walked there too, and Mary passed an old brownstone trolley car garage that the CIA had turned into a site for training third-world police[3] forces. She was noticed by a white male jogger named William Mitchell.
After her murder, William Mitchell went to the police. He worked at the Pentagon, and later testified that he saw a Black man following Mary on the towpath. In Mary’s Mosaic, Peter Janney speculates that Mitchell was also intelligence, and possibly the true killer, but probably not. As we’ll see, everything about Mary’s case induces acute paranoia.
Somewhere down the path, a person emerged from behind a cottonwood tree. This person detained Mary, and she screamed for help before being shot in the head from behind. The murderer put another bullet in Mary’s shoulder and stood over the body.
About a hundred yards away, two mechanics heard the screams and gunfire. Henry Wiggens had been working on Canal Street with his partner Bill Branch—employees of a nearby Esso Station called to service a stalled Nash Rambler. The car was up on the street looking down on the towpath. Wiggens was a twenty-four-year-old Black veteran of a Military Police unit in Korea. He had only been out of his truck a minute before he heard the calls for help and the first gunshot. As he looked over a stone retaining wall, he heard the second. Down on the path, Wiggens saw a five-ten Black male with a tan jacket, dark slacks, and a golf cap. The man looked back at Wiggins and stuffed something into his pocket, walking away from the body in a calm manner.
Mary’s blonde hair, sweater, and gloves were soaked with blood. There was a bullet wound near her left eye, and scuffed ground indicating there had been a struggle. Her pants were ripped at the knee during the struggle, but she was otherwise clothed.
Three people believe they saw the suspect: The jogger, Wiggens, and a DC cop who briefly spots a Black male while searching in the canal woods. The murder happened near twelve, and by mid-afternoon, an African American man named Ray Crump was arrested. Crump had been dunked in the Potomac. He was soaking wet and said he fell into the water while fishing. No fishing pole or equipment was found. Crump’s fly was down, and when asked about it, Crump said to the officer, “You did it[4].”
After the arrest, Crump changed his story several times. A golf cap and a tan windbreaker were recovered from the water, and presented to him in jail. Crump said, “It looks like you got a stacked deck,” and began to sob inconsolably[5].
For Nina Burleigh, author of A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Mary Meyer, Crump is Bigger Thomas from Native Son; a poor twenty-five year old Black boy, descended from slaves, struggling to survive, and Mary Pinchot Meyer was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Burleigh notes that this mid-60s era of Washington D.C. history is a racial powder keg, and that Crump’s story is a harrowing depiction of impoverishment through systemic racism and overt oppression. Ray Crump Jr. was described as the “runt of the litter[6]” by his mother. He was a high school dropout, incurred a head injury when he was robbed, and served time for intoxication and petit larceny. Crump’s co-workers noted he seemed “not there” sometimes, and Civil Rights figures pointed to the dire state of Washington D.C. racial politics as primed to become the next Watts Uprising.
In a way, Burleigh argues that Mary was killed because her WASP-ish life rested upon a bedrock of invisible immiseration. The Pinchot family were old money blue bloods, and Mary’s adolescence involved horseback riding, private waterfalls, and cotillion dances. The most impoverished Black neighborhoods of D.C. were not far from the White House parties Mary attended, or the ritzy art galleries where Mary’s paintings hung.
For Burleigh, the lesson of Mary Meyer’s story is that there was no amount of security and protection that could keep the CIA’s own Georgetown neighbors safe from America’s moral-economic-racial failures. And this version is valuable to consider, since it leads back to material conditions, but Mary had a lot more than wealth, whiteness, and femininity to make her a target.
***
Ray Crump’s trial was full of ambiguity and odd prosecution strategies. Supposedly, no one knew who Mary’s husband was, or what the dead woman’s connections to Kennedy were.
Officials drained the canal, but no murder weapon turned up. No gunshot residue was found on Crump, and going for a swim wouldn’t have washed it off. Reasonable doubt made Ray Crump a free man. Burleigh and others point to Crump’s future crimes as retroactive evidence—he goes on to rack up quite a few arsons, and was accused of sexual assault, but it was never prosecuted. It’s alleged that Crump was dropped at the city limits after acquittal and told to never return to Washington D.C., but Burleigh doubts this story. Either way, somehow, Crump’s crimes after the trial went unnoticed and unconnected to the murder a CIA official’s wife.
The stalled Nash Rambler that Wiggins was called to work on disappeared without either mechanic servicing it. And many of the first-hand accounts looked back after the trial with suspicion: “You know,” Henry Wiggens said in a later interview, “sometimes I’ve had the feeling I was kinda set up there that morning to see what I saw[7].”
Arthur Ellis, an AP photographer, recalled that the crime scene was odd[8]: “The police kept us on the other side of the canal for a long time. I took the picture with a long-angle lens, and when I look at it now I wonder who all those men in the picture were. There were park Police there, which is normal for the C&O Canal, and homicide police as well. There just seemed to be so many plainclothesmen there. I’m curious, in light of what we know about the CIA now, who those men were.”
Crump’s attorney later said, “I believe, too, that in winning acquittal for Ray Crump, I made it impossible for the matter of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder to be sealed off and forgotten, as the government so clearly wanted to do[9].”
Shortly after her death, somebody[10] phoned Mary’s brother-in-law—Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. They told Bradlee that Mary had a secret diary, and in the case of an emergency, her friends needed to retrieve it.
Ben and his wife, who lived less than a ten-minute walk from Mary’s home, arrived at the converted brick garage studio on the night of the murder. There, they ran into one of the most powerful CIA officials in the agency’s history: James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was accompanied by his wife, and brought some lock-picking tools.
Angleton’s presence here is understandable in that he was a mentor to Cord Meyer, and godfather to Mary and Cord’s children. One of the most intense counterintelligence agents of the Cold War was a family friend—the kind of buddy who openly admits to tapping your wife’s phone and bugging her bedroom[11].
James Jesus Angleton was one of the most paranoid and criminal CIA men to have ever graced the halls—one of the OG spooks who was so deluded by Cold War paranoia that the Kremlin considered Angleton an unwitting asset—a man so psychotically anticommunist that he interfered with the efficiency of the CIA. Our problem is that James, and many of these CIA guys, spent most of their lives smashed on martinis, lying to journalists for fun.
We know that after this group of Meyer family friends located the diary in Mary’s studio, they read the contents, and handed it over to Angleton for safe keeping. Ben Bradlee said he objected to this, and clashed with Angleton at the scene, but others have claimed Bradlee was a spook himself[12], and collaborated.
Mary’s Georgetown friends made a pact not to discuss her death because they didn’t believe the public had a right to know this private person’s diary. Angleton said he burned the book at CIA headquarters, along with Mary’s personal correspondence, but he didn’t, because Angleton is a liar. The diary was probably a great piece of blackmail, and it reemerged years later, only to be (reportedly) burned by Tony Bradlee and Anne Truitt. Even then, “some parts of the diary may have been preserved and passed around for a short period,” notes Burleigh.
Theories of decoy diaries abound, but all of this speaks to Mary’s deep lore inside the world of intelligence and the press.
While her death mirrors the Kennedy assassination, it came to mean much more for paranoids in the counterculture. Especially after Timothy Leary published his memoir, Flashbacks.
***
Written in 1983, long after Mary’s murder, Leary had every incentive to self-aggrandize his role in the greater Kennedy saga while tying his memoir to salacious tabloids. But everyone admits that Leary’s dates line up, and it’s confirmed that he and Mary knew each other and hung out[13].
The first time they met, Mary showed up at Leary’s Harvard Psilocybin Project lab, which the school was threatening to shut down. Just like every dude (including biographers like Janney) Leary was smitten with Mary’s charm, and together, they went back to Leary’s house and tripped psilocybin mushrooms. Leary says that Mary started disclosing insider knowledge mid-trip: “The guys who run things,” she said. “I mean the guys who really run things in Washington—are very interested in psychology and drugs in particular. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control[14].”
A few sources have claimed Mary was part of a circle of Georgetown women who were experimenting with drugs—a counterculture cell in the heart of the national security state. Like Leary, Mary was interested in “utopiates” as a solution to the Cold War—if only someone could get close enough to the President to dose broke-back-Jack. Mary wanted to learn to “run an LSD session” for “this friend who’s a very important man,” and Leary loaded her up with books and papers for training to become a psychedelic guide.
No one has ever proven that Meyer and Kennedy took LSD together, but Mary did bring joints to the White House and got high with Kennedy. It would be a debilitating scandal for 60s voters to find out that JFK experimented drugs, but he probably wanted to soothe his back pain besides Dr. Feelgood injections. Pot made JFK hungry for “soup and chocolate mousse[15].”
The day after the assassination in Dallas, after Meyer and Kennedy’s romance had cooled into a WASP-ish D.C. companionship, Leary said that Mary Pinchot Meyer called him up. Mary said the president was killed because “he was changing too fast; they couldn’t control him anymore,” but she didn’t express this opinion widely.
By this point, Mary had divorced Cord and was openly critical of the CIA. Two weeks before she was murdered, the Warren Commission Report was published. Mary bought and read it[16]—a document James Angleton mettled with[17]. The theory goes that Mary voiced objections about the Oswald narrative to her ex-husband Cord, and she was planning to use her media connections to oppose it on a bigger scale. She might even out herself as a Kennedy mistress.
Dorothy Kilgallen and Lisa Howard were, allegedly, also said to be members of Mary’s LSD cell. Both women’s lives ended in suspicious drug overdoses[18] shortly after the JFK assassination, and Howard was said to be threatening to “blow the whole lid” off of Dallas.
Many JFK mistresses had the state department directly mettle in their lives, like Ellen Rometsch, an East German call girl, who was “abruptly deported” when her Kennedy affair threatened to become a scandal. Judith Campbell was harassed and spied on by FBI agents, who broke into her house, possibly taking something to blackmail the president[19]. When Marilyn Monroe’s affair with the president (and Bobby Kennedy) threatened to become a scandal, the FBI spent extensive resources tracking Monroe—she was surrounded by secret informants like her housekeeper. Monroe overdosed on barbiturates in 1962. Mary Pinchot Meyer was on the White House logs during all kinds of Cold War crisis, like the Cuban Missile one, and she was there within days of Monroe’s suicide, comforting JFK, Nina Burleigh speculates[20].
The CIA was more than a little interested in Mary Pinchot Meyer, which makes the Ray Crump narrative strange. Angleton admits she had been tracked and bugged in the past, but when Mary ends up on the C&O canal path facing down a gun, there is no agent assigned to her that day? Or, we are to believe, one year after Dallas, intelligence agencies stopped paying attention to a mistress who was also a Kennedy confidant—“almost part of the furniture” according to Kennedy’s White house consul. Mary was present during briefings; she went on trips with Kennedy; she was part of the trusted inner circle.
Janny points out that both Crump and Oswald are lone-gunmen who attack while their victims are far away from home, in a random strike of violence. Crump’s supposed motive is either sexual assault or pure murder, which, to the greater D.C. Black community during the trial, sounded like it was written by a Klansmen in order to provoke a riot. Surely, that’s not something the CIA would ever do.
Crump later said he was meeting a mistress down by the canal to drink and “fool around,” and that he fell asleep and woke up in the water. His girlfriend had vanished, and now there were cops around, and a dead woman not far away. Who could plan such a conspiracy? Who could greenlight an operation to use a patsy and a hit man? How about a guy who was fully capable, had a strong motive, and was an alcoholic with a talent for lying—Cord Meyer.
***
Running in the same East Coast prep-school circles, Cord Meyer pursued Mary Pinchot through the greater Park Avenue social scene. She was a Vassar graduate, and he was a tall handsome man with a plan.
Cord served in the Pacific during World War II, and was injured. A Japanese grenade killed a fellow soldier and the shrapnel destroyed Cord’s right eye. Like many of his generation, Meyer returned home and became a heavy drinker with more war scars than just the flesh. He blasted cigs all day long at his desk, with co-workers noting the smoke that would curl up into his unaffected glass eye.
Mary and Cord were progressive for their class. Both were well-bred pacifists who wanted an end to all war, and Cord came back from combat determined to make it so by becoming a powerful man. He found his chance in World Federalism.
As World War II drew to a close, United World Federalists believed that a one world government was coming, and that it should be intentionally structured. They advocated for a super-charged United Nations which would be capable of settling disputes between nations, and of regulating the world’s nuclear power stations. In his public persona, Cord Meyer became a kind of “sex-symbol for peace,” and got good at blocking communists from positions in organizations like the American Veterans Committee.
In 1949, ambition landed Cord Meyer in the CIA near the agency’s beginning; an institution with near-zero oversite until the mid-70s. It became Cord’s job to stir up phony labor strikes in Latin America, and set up fake student organizations to track Civil Rights advocates, socialists, communists, intellectuals, organizers, etcetera. Meyer was likely involved with the various assassination plans for Castro—like the exploding cigar bit—and as a wannabe writer himself, Cord headed up Operation Mockingbird, which recruited leading American journalists to do propaganda work.
By the time of Mary’s death in 1964, both Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton had been powerful intelligence men for over a decade. Both were alcoholics, and Cord’s drinking and combativeness intensified over time. Cord could always ruin a party[21], friends said, and throughout the Vietnam War, Meyer only got more vocal and hawkish.
Despite being a philanderer himself, Cord was deeply hurt by an affair Mary conducted with—not Kennedy—but an Italian sailor who Mary met abroad. Their divorce was acrimonious. Intelligence Asset Mom and CIA Dad put the kids in the middle. After the tragic death of their son Michael, who was struck by a vehicle on a road near their Georgetown house, Cord hoped to salvage the relationship, but times were changing, and Mary was becoming an independent 1960s woman, nursing a private grief.
Cord and Mary were separated long before the Kennedy fling began, but Cord worked with JFK in a professional context, and disliked Camelot. Kennedy disliked Cord right back[22]. Cord’s diary contains notes about the president’s ‘queer’ relationship to his ex-wife, and explains that his own career was stalled by JFK’s reign. Cord was excluded from a White House position, and the greater Kennedy social scene his ex-wife moved through seamlessly. This powerful CIA man would have to wait till the next administration to achieve his true ambitions, and Cord fantasized about pursuing public acclaim through journalism instead of politics[23].
During the affair, Meyer was indistinguishable from a spy. She passed information about Cord to Kennedy, and the reverse was probably true. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the President became increasingly hostile to the agency, and Angleton himself thought JFK was cocky—“That little Kennedy,” he’d let slip later in life, “he thought he was a god[24].”
In 1963, Kennedy told the New York Times he was going to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” The President threatened to cut the agency’s budget by 20%.
***
One January morning, while Mary and her sons were asleep upstairs, the maid found the doors to the garden open. Mary filed a report with the police, but on another occasion, she found a heavy wooden door ajar in her basement—a door neither she nor her sons could open without help. More than once, she wondered aloud, “What are they looking for in my house?” Elizabeth Eisenstein recalled, “She did say to me she was scared about seeing somebody in her house… She thought she had seen somebody leaving as she walked in. She was frightened.”
In Nina Burleigh’s account, it’s implied that we probably know all of the most scandalous details of Mary’s diary—the affairs, Kennedy’s drug use, the greater drama of the DC social scene. Peter Janney believes there was more—maybe the final proof of JFK’s assassination, performed by the CIA, and the Mafia, shot by a French sniper on the grassy knoll.
It’s hard to say since Mary’s story contains a thousand tangles. Mary was a blue blood through and through, but she was also a woman trying to find liberation after a motherhood spent raising the children of CIA men. She was becoming a known painter in the Washington Color School Movement, and she smoked doinks with the President. Maybe she served as an LSD guru, leading terrified boys away from their desires to spread hot death worldwide, casting all living things in the endless fallout of nuclear winter; the grand ceasing of life that the Cold War men seemed to crave, and fear, and sometimes find erotic. For more than one person, Mary Pinchot Meyer was a kind of peace deity at war with nuclear annihilation; the love anima protecting humanity from intercontinental ballistic holocaust.
Leary’s telling of Mary aggrandizes himself, but it also aggrandizes the reach and permeation of the counterculture. If half of what Leary said is true, there’s a cosmic irony to Cord Meyer, who spent his life sabotaging the Left, ordering assassinations, using violence to create peace. The history of the CIA is soaked in the blood of people we’ll never know the names of, and in trying to murder disagreement, Cord turned the love of his life into the embodiment of everything he spent his career trying to kill.
Or, is Mary’s story that of America’s long-repressed racial animosity—a fury that suddenly, randomly, bursts the white Georgetown bubble of safety and segregation. A moral failure so widespread and fundamental in the American body politic that even the CIA could not keep its own neighborhoods safe. Blowback from the constant sabotage of Civil Rights movements, and poor people’s campaigns, and the virulent racism of the Jim Crow Era.
It’s hard to say. This whole story is exponentially muddled by evidence that was destroyed, sealed JFK docs, and a whole corral of authors hawking tell-all books. The Georgetown elites of the mid-century were natural secret keepers, rife with manic-depressive alcoholics and repressed Washington insiders; families of the national security state with a reputation to maintain.
After Crump’s trial, in some sort of inside joke, along with a white cross planted at the murder scene, someone painted “Mauvais Coup, Mary,” in white on a nearby canal bridge. The phrase is a French idiom meaning, “bad shot,” or “bad luck.”
A decade passed before Mary’s story even circulated as local party gossip. “Bad shot, Mary” is what the Shirley Jackson town would paint on the canal bridge, signing their dirty work.
Then again, it could be a saccharine in-joke. A prep school phrase painted by a grieving friend; maybe another one of Mary’s lovers whose pain and heartbreak were thoroughly inconsequential to the historical record, and had nothing to do with the CIA.
[1] Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire (1979) by Deborah Davis, pg. 127
[2] A Very Private Woman, the Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (1988) by Nina Burleigh, pg. 11
[3] Ibid, pg. 11
[4] Ibid, pg. 234
[5] Ibid, pg. 234
[6] Ibid, pg. 261
[7] Mary’s Mosaic, The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2012) by Peter Janney, pg. 319
[8] Ibid, pg. 294
[9] Ibid, pg. 139
[10] Some say Anne Truitt, others say Winsar Janney
[11] A Very Private Woman, pg. 182
[12] Katherine the Great, pg. 129
[13] A Very Private Woman, pg. 171
[14] Ibid, pg. 171
[15] Mary’s Mosaic, pg. 85
[16] Ibid, pg. 484
[17] “Lisa Pease – James Jesus Angleton and The Warren Commission”
[18] A Very Private Woman, pg. 223-224
[19] Ibid, pg. 226
[20] Ibid, pg. 329
[21] Ibid, pg. 124
[22] Ibid, pg. 204
[23] Ibid, pg. 203
[24] New York Days by Willie Morris, pg. 35
— Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in The Nation, Chicago Quarterly Review, Slate, Boulevard, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. Rep: Erik Hane. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.