Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (36 page)

Meyer would always insist that he did not betray his youthful idealism by entering the Cold War’s dark underworld. He simply decided that as long as the forces of Stalin and communist tyranny stood in the way, world peace was not possible. His crusade remained the same, he told friends, even if he now operated undercover. Meyer was part of a wave of idealistic, anticommunist liberals who enlisted in the CIA after the war. He would rise to become the number two man in the agency’s clandestine operations—known by critics as “the department of dirty tricks.” Along the way, he secretly financed labor unions, youth groups, writers’ organizations, and literary journals—a mission he saw as building a bulwark against the global communist propaganda offensive. The once promising writer, who considered abandoning his intelligence career early on for a career in the book publishing industry, must have gained a private satisfaction from playing the role of secret patron. But when Meyer’s covert philanthropy was exposed in the late 1960s, his detractors charged that it was an insidious corruption of the country’s liberal infrastructure.

Cord Meyer never entirely let go of his youthful creative temperament. Even his close friendship with the CIA’s gaunt master of black arts, the legendary James Jesus Angleton—the deeply spooky figure in charge of keeping the agency pure of communist infiltration—made sense in this context. They were the agency’s bohemians. Before ascending to his exalted position within the espionage world, Angleton, like Meyer, had been a youthful Yale poet, editing a literary journal,
Furioso
, that published the work of e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief approached his work with artistic eccentricity, trying to divine the secret stratagems of world communism from within his sepulchral, heavily draped office at Langley. He would emerge at midday to take his customary lunch at the Rive Gauche in Georgetown, where he was often joined by Meyer, floating through the afternoon on a stream of cocktails, red wine, and cognac like a Left Bank libertine. It is not surprising that Meyer, with his visionary and artistic inclinations, would be drawn to Angleton. The half-Mexican, anglophilic spymaster was part of the WASPy CIA culture, and yet he hovered above it. With his sunken cheeks and burning eyes—a face his wife described as springing from El Greco—James Jesus Angleton seemed like the haunted prophet of American intelligence.

While Meyer insisted that he had not fundamentally changed, something hardened within him, particularly after he and other CIA liberals were targeted by a McCarthy witch hunt in 1953. Allen Dulles came to his defense, saving his job, and he was ushered through a bureaucratic cleansing process by Richard Helms. During his purgatory, Meyer found solace in reading Kafka’s
The Trial
. Afterwards, observed Helms’s biographer Thomas Powers, “a note of harshness and rigidity entered [Meyer’s] political thinking; he became more Catholic than the Pope, and from a commitment to peace and international amity he gradually shifted toward a purely anti-communist fervor.”

Meyer fell increasingly under the spell of the gloomy, Byzantine views of his CIA mentor Angleton. “Cord entered the agency as a fresh idealist and left a wizened tool of Angleton,” observed Tom Braden, Meyer’s boss early in his intelligence career. “Angleton was a master of the black arts. He bugged everything in town, including me. Whatever Angleton thought, Cord thought.”

Mary Meyer was not happy with the way that the young world-reformer she had married was changing. At Georgetown parties Cord Meyer became a hectoring, self-righteous presence, sending other guests fleeing to far corners of the room. Even the passionately anticommunist saloniere, Joe Alsop, found him repellent, describing him as “a bright but rebarbative man with a certain genius for making enemies.” The couple grew apart. Mary began startling other CIA wives with her own remarks, which were openly critical of the agency’s ways. When their middle son, nine-year-old Michael, was fatally run down by a car on the curving road outside their McLean home in 1956, the marriage began to shatter. “Such a thing can either make or break a marriage,” observed a friend of the couple. “In their case it broke it.”

Mary divorced her husband two years later, a bitter break-up in which Cord “acted like a 17th century cuckold,” according to another friend, denouncing her as “an unfit mother” and comparing her “to the whore of Babylon.” She immediately took her life in the opposite direction of her ex-spouse’s rigid world. Mary threw herself into the Washington art scene, starting an affair with a younger artist—the rising abstract painter Kenneth Noland—and embracing a pre-hippie lifestyle that included a wardrobe of peasant blouses and blue tights and a round of Reichian therapy, which promised enlightenment through orgasmic release.

It’s easy to understand why JFK was entranced by her. The Mary Meyer who came into his life once again when he was in the White House was the same blonde beauty with sparkling green-blue eyes whom he had met when they were both teenagers. But now her mischievous and witty personality possessed something deeper, an earthy and wry wisdom that must have matched his own acute sense of life’s absurd tragedy. Unlike most other women in Kennedy’s circle, including the more refined Jackie, Mary could more than hold her own in a roomful of men. She got the joke. “When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell,” observed Kennedy biographer Herbert Parmet.

While Kennedy enjoyed many erotic adventures in the White House, James Angleton observed, with Mary it was more serious. They “were in love,” the espionage official stated with conviction. “They had something very important.” Angleton’s wife, Cicely, was a good friend of Mary. But his information did not come from her. The spook had more direct sources, he told reporters during a weirdly confessional period late in his life: he had bugged the rooms and telephones in Mary’s Georgetown house. Angleton’s voyeurism is disturbing on several levels. There is the alarming specter of a CIA official spying on a president’s private life; there is the creepy perversity of peeping into the bedroom of a close friend’s ex-wife. And there is another twist, which Ben Bradlee suggested to me: “I think [Angleton] was perhaps even in love with Mary. They were great, great friends, and he was a very odd stick, Jim.”

The CIA official’s snooping might have been prompted by a disturbing mix of illicit motives. But what is important here is what he found out about the relationship between Kennedy and Mary Meyer, in addition to its erotic details. Angleton would later tell reporters that the lovers experimented with drugs, smoking marijuana and dabbling with LSD. According to the spy, Meyer and Kennedy took one low dose of the hallucinogen, after which, he noted with a cringe-inducing delicacy, “they made love.”

The CIA was no stranger to drug experimentation. The agency’s secret funding of LSD research, on witting and unwitting subjects (including at least one person who committed suicide while on a bad trip), has been credited with spawning the 1960s counterculture, the ultimate in unintended consequences. The CIA’s interest in psychedelic drugs lay in their possible military use; the agency was intrigued by LSD’s potential to control enemy minds. But Mary Meyer had something very different in mind with her drug experimentation. She wanted to turn on the Washington power structure in the interests of world peace. And there was no better place to start this sweeping transformation of the capital’s political consciousness than with her powerful lover.

When America’s intelligence czars found out about Mary Meyer’s daring acid experiment, it must have blown
their
minds. Here was one more stark piece of evidence that they were dealing with an aberrant presidency. Kennedy was not only injecting himself with bizarre drug cocktails to control his chronic back pain and to boost his energy; he had now fallen under the erotic sway of Cord Meyer’s peculiar ex-wife, a woman who seemed increasingly unhinged to her old CIA friends after the death of her son and her divorce. And the president’s unconventional mistress was engaged in a mind-control experiment aimed not at the Kremlin, but the White House.

To carry out her psychedelic peace mission, Meyer sought the help of Timothy Leary, the handsome Boston-Irish rogue who was becoming known as the country’s leading proponent of LSD’s revolutionary powers. When she showed up at his office at Harvard’s Center for Personality Research in spring 1962, the forty-one-year-old psychology professor was still clinging to academic respectability. Except for his white tennis shoes, the bespectacled Leary still looked every inch the tweedy, tenure-track Ivy League scholar. But he had fallen under the watchful eye of the more conservative overseers at Harvard—an institution he respected but came to regard as a “finishing school for Fortune 500 executives”—as well as his drug research rivals at Langley. The attractive middle-aged woman who was leaning provocatively against his door that day was, like him, a renegade—in her case from the CIA world. And Leary—who collected women, celebrities, and trouble—was impressed by what he saw: “Good looking. Flamboyant eyebrows, piercing green-blue eyes, fine-boned face. Amused, arrogant, aristocratic.”

As he would later write, she addressed him in a cool voice: “Dr. Leary, I’ve got to talk to you.” She stepped presumptuously into his office and held out her hand. “I’m Mary Pinchot. I’ve come from Washington to discuss something very important. I want to learn how to run an LSD session.”

Mary told Leary that she had a friend in Washington “who’s a very important man.” This man was intrigued by her LSD experiences and wanted to try the drug himself. She wanted Leary’s advice about how to guide him through his psychedelic journey. Though Mary didn’t name her powerful friend, she left little doubt who he was. “I’ve heard Allen Ginsberg on radio and TV shows saying that if Khrushchev and Kennedy would take LSD together they’d end world conflict,” she told Leary. “Isn’t that the idea—to get powerful men to turn on?”

Leary agreed it was worth a try. “Look at the world,” he said. “Nuclear bombs proliferating. More and more countries run by military dictators. No political creativity. It’s time to try something, anything new and promising.”

Over the next year and a half, Mary continued to pop in and out of Leary’s life, picking his brain about acid experimentation protocol and soliciting doses of the drug to take back to Washington. Ironically, Leary had known Cord, but not Mary, from their days in the American Veterans Committee, where the two young visionaries had clashed. Leary was surprised that someone as free-spirited as Mary could have been with a man whose personality he found implacable. “Mary was so much more outgoing and much more fun and much more lively [than Cord]—he was a monster machine,” Leary later said.

In middle age, Mary’s ex-husband was settling into a bitter acceptance of the world’s grim realities. “You have to live with sorrow,” Cord would tell a visitor to his Georgetown house, a domicile the visitor described as “remarkable for its museum-like neatness.” Meyer was sitting on his sofa, cleaning his pipe. “What was Carlyle’s remark? I think it was Carlyle,” he mused aloud. “Somebody told him, ‘I accept the universe,’ and he answered, ‘You damn well better.’”

But Mary Meyer did not accept the universe. She still burned with the utopian fever of her and Cord’s visionary youth. She would use the transcendent power of sex and drugs—the magical charms that the emerging sixties generation thought could change the world—to enchant the Washington power structure.

Even the evangelistic Leary found Mary’s ambition “scary.” One can only imagine how alarming it was to the intelligence officials who were eavesdropping on Mary and her affair with the president.

In winter 1963, Mary asked to see Leary again, meeting him in her room at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. A visibly tense Mary told the acid guru that her Washington drug experiments were still proceeding smoothly, but that her affair had been “exposed publicly.” A friend of hers, she said, “got drunk and told a room full of reporters about my boyfriend.” She was apparently referring here to the notorious incident in January 1963 when Phil Graham, the increasingly erratic publisher of the
Washington Post
who would later commit suicide, grabbed the microphone at a newspaper industry conference in the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix and delivered a disjointed harangue during which he exposed the affair between JFK and the president’s “favorite” mistress, Mary Meyer. (Kennedy promptly dispatched an Air Force plane with Graham’s psychiatrist on board to pick up the publisher, who was tranquilized and hospitalized for several weeks.) Graham’s bombshell was covered up, Mary told Leary. “I’ve seen it a hundred times in media politics,” she said. “The manipulation of news, cover-ups, misinformation, dirty tricks.”

The last time Leary saw Mary, he recalled, she was deeply distraught. She phoned him at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York, where he had moved his research after leaving Harvard, and asked him to pick her up in the local village. As they drove through the splendor of the autumn countryside, where the trees glowed with what Leary described as a “Technicolor” intensity, Mary told him that her Washington drug experiment had come crashing down. “It was all going so well. We had eight intelligent women turning on the most powerful men in Washington. And then we got found out. I was such a fool. I made a mistake in recruitment. A wife snitched on us. I’m scared.” Mary burst into tears. She told the drug researcher he must be very careful now. “I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid for all of us.” Leary thought she was being paranoid. He reached over to stroke her hair. But her alarm began to seep into him. If she ever showed up at the estate, Mary asked him, could she hide out there for awhile? Leary assured her that she could. Then she bid farewell to him. Leary never heard from Mary Meyer again.