Mary's Mosaic (12 page)

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Conspiracy to Conceal

Nobody believes a rumor here in Washington until it’s officially denied.

—Edward Cheyfitz

It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.

—President Richard Nixon

O
N
O
CTOBER
14, 1964, just two days after the Georgetown murder of Mary Meyer, her mourners filed into Washington National Cathedral for the funeral. The day was also her forty-fourth birthday. The burial service took place at 2:00
P.M
. in Bethlehem Chapel on the lower level of the church. It was the same place that Mary had chosen for the funeral of her nine-year-old son Michael in December 1956.

After the funeral, Mary Pinchot Meyer was laid to rest next to son Michael on a ridge at the Pinchot family burial plot in the Milford, Pennsylvania, cemetery, just a short distance from her family’s estate, Grey Towers. The previous year, the Pinchot family had donated a portion of their estate to the U.S. Forest Service. Mary, along with her sister and other family members, had accompanied President Kennedy to Grey Towers for the dedication on September 24, 1963, of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation. Publicly, the event had celebrated the environmentally conscious pioneering work of Mary’s uncle Gifford Pinchot, but privately, the furtive glances between Mary and Jack that day marked a turning point for the secret lovers and their mission together. For on that day, during the dedication at Grey Towers, President Kennedy learned that the Senate had ratified his Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with
the Soviets by a vote of 80-19. His intention of creating such a treaty had been revealed for the first time three months earlier during his commencement address at American University. The unprecedented speed with which the treaty had been negotiated during the summer of 1963 was due in large part to his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy and Khrushchev had become secret partners in the pursuit of world peace; both wanted to bring the Cold War to an end. The significance of the treaty ratification that day was not lost on Mary. She had, according to Kenny O’Donnell’s statements to Leo Damore, become a beacon for Jack as he explored a new trajectory after the near calamity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which could have easily made the entire planet uninhabitable had it not been resolved. Though there was no possibility of a public declaration of love, the two secret lovers had exchanged smiles and small nods on hearing the news from Washington that day. It was a turning point in President Kennedy’s newfound political direction.
¹

But at her funeral a year later, among the elite of Washington who filled the pews—their presence a testament to her social standing and appeal—very few knew how extensive Mary’s influence had been. The mourners included historian and presidential insider Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; journalist Theodore White; former presidential assistant McGeorge Bundy; Richard Helms, the CIA’s deputy director for plans; Katharine Graham, owner of the
Washington Post
; and Madame Hervé Alphand, wife of the popular French ambassador. Also present was journalist Charlie Bartlett, a Yale classmate of Cord Meyer’s and a very close friend of President Kennedy’s, and his wife, Martha. The Bartletts had introduced Jack to Jackie at a dinner party in 1951. But Jacqueline Kennedy, flaunted as “a close friend” of Mary Meyer’s, did not attend. Several of Mary’s Vassar College classmates were also in attendance, including Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald; my mother, Mary Draper Janney, and my father, Wistar Janney; and journalist Anne Chamberlin, also a dear friend to Mary. Cicely d’Autremont Angleton, another close friend of Mary’s, was present and sat between her husband, Jim Angleton, and Cord Meyer.
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In addition, a score of Mary’s fellow artists lined the pews. Even in death, the “Georgetown artist with a hundred thousand friends” seemed to draw them all to her farewell gathering.
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Two of the four pallbearers—William (“Bill”) Walton and Kenneth Noland—were artists, like Mary herself. Bill Walton had formerly been a journalist and a war correspondent. He was a close, discreet confidante to both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, as well as to Jackie. Divorced, and reportedly more inclined to the same sex, Walton had functioned as Mary’s escort to many
White House social functions where she and Jack often captured a few intimate, stolen moments together. Ken Noland had been a progenitor of the Washington Color School of art in the late 1950s. He and Mary had been intimately involved immediately after her separation and divorce from Cord. New York art dealer André Emmerich, who did not attend the funeral, recalled that Noland had told him that “the art world in Washington was buzzing with rumors that Mary’s murder was in some way connected with her love affair with JFK.” On that day, however, secrets for the most part were being kept.

Was it mere coincidence or irony that Mary’s two other pallbearers were high-level CIA officials Jim Angleton and Wistar Janney, both longtime close friends of Mary’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, who was also a high-ranking Agency operative? Of course, the mercurial, almost emaciated and ghostlike presence of James Jesus Angleton wasn’t at all surprising. A close friend of Cord’s since Yale, their friendship had endured and deepened as CIA colleagues. Angleton’s outward proclivities and hobbies—photography, poetry, orchid growing, and fly-fishing, including designing and crafting his own fishing lures—suggested a modern-day Renaissance man of considerable talent and interest. Early on, he had ingratiated himself with Mary. She appreciated what appeared to be a man of unusual complexity and knowledge—so much so, in fact, that Jim Angleton had been designated as the godfather to the three Meyer children.

But Mary’s close friendship with Angleton’s wife, Cicely, had long ago made her aware of the shadows that lurked beneath Jim’s exterior, nurtured by the endless rivers of gin and bourbon that spawned a kind of paranoia that demanded control and domination. Nonetheless, in 1964 Angleton was at the top of his game, and had already become something of a legend. A former member of the elite Office of Strategic Services (OS) during World War II, Jim Angleton had distinguished himself early in his career; and for some unknown reason, Allen Dulles had handpicked him in 1954, when Angleton was only thirty-seven, for the position that he would hold for the duration of his career: chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence division in the Directorate of Plans. Angleton would head the Agency’s most secretive department. Colleagues, including many who feared him, often called him by such names as “Mother,” “the locksmith,” even “the CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle.” Angleton’s reputation within the world of intelligence would remain epic during his entire life, and would extend even after his death in 1987. No one at Mary’s funeral, however—except Angleton’s titular boss, Richard Helms, and possibly one or two other Agency honchos—was aware that with the recently released Warren Report, Jim Angleton and his former chief, Allen Dulles (a Warren
Commission member), had just masterminded possibly the greatest cover-up in American history.

Mary Meyer had come to disdain the work of the intelligence establishment. It was one of the reasons why she had finally initiated her divorce from Cord. In 1951, Cord had succumbed to the recruiting tactics of Allen Dulles, seeing no possibility for the fledgling United World Federalists to keep the tenuous peace in an emerging Cold War. Seduced into betraying the vision that had originally united Mary with him in 1945, Cord’s entrance into the CIA would eventually foreshadow a rupture in their union that would never heal. The Dulles inner circle soon surrounded Mary’s life, complete with its lordly Ivy League sense of entitlement. No law, and certainly no moral compass, would be allowed to stand in the way of American hegemony, she soon learned. Her fights and pleadings with the man to whom she had pledged her deepest trust were to no avail. Mary’s eventual escape in 1957, followed by divorce a year later, had been final, or so she thought.

Yet now, even in death, she was once again encircled. Mary’s fourth pallbearer was my father, Wistar Janney. Like Cord Meyer and so many others who joined the CIA in its infancy, Wistar Janney was part of an idealistic group of World War II veterans that never again wanted to see the possibility of a world at war. A strong, centralized post–World War II intelligence apparatus seemed like an almost ideal solution, and a good career for a group of men who were already, by birth, financially well endowed and secure. In the aftermath of World War II, America had come out on top. They wanted to keep it that way.

The youngest of six children of a wealthy, prominent investment banker, my father was raised in Bryn Mawr on Philadelphia’s Main Line. His given name at birth, resembling an almost royal title, was Frederick Wistar Morris Janney. To his close friends, immediate colleagues, and family, he was “Wistar,” or “Wis.” To his CIA subordinates, he was known as Fred Janney. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Wistar Janney graduated from Princeton in 1941. About to be drafted, he enlisted in the Navy to become a naval aviator, allegedly after viewing the movie
Flight Command
, starring Robert Taylor—in addition to having had yet another fight with his aloof, investment banker father. Piloting a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber off the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater, Wistar was not expected to survive by anyone in his family, including his father.

“When I strapped a Grumman Avenger to my ass, it was do or die,” he murmured late one night, not wanting to recall the death of his fellow pilot and close friend Eddie Larkin during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. He
had not had the chance to reconcile with his father, who died unexpectedly just a few days before the largest naval battle in history. The father-son duo had remained estranged, in spite of the fact that Wistar’s father—Walter Coggeshall Janney—knew his time was near. At the end of the summer of 1944, “Lord of the Manor” Walter elected to return to Bryn Mawr from his summer estate on Cape Cod in the station wagon driven by his caretaker-gardener John Martin, not in his customary chauffeur-driven Packard. Midway across the Bourne Bridge, which connected Cape Cod to the mainland, he ordered Martin to stop the car, whereupon he got out and took one last gaze at the Cape Cod panorama where his family and beloved progeny had, since the late 1920s, thrived amid the bounty and fortune he had amassed. At that moment, he told Martin that he would not live through another winter. Asking Martin “to stay on and take care of the estate and Mrs. Janney,” he resumed his journey to Bryn Mawr.
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The father-son schism, however, remained—passing through invisible ethers into the next generation and beyond.

Wistar Janney made sure that Eddie Larkin would be awarded the Navy Cross posthumously. Finally emerging victorious from battle, Janney himself came home with his own, and a slew of other medals. Every workday, he proudly wore his Navy Cross pin on his suit jacket’s left lapel, sometimes along with his naval aviator necktie. Awarded one of Yale’s first master of arts in Russian area studies in 1948, my father was soon recruited into the CIA by Allen Dulles, also a Princeton graduate. Technically, he was for many years a Soviet analyst in the Agency’s Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), but it wasn’t ever clear what Wistar’s job(s) actually entailed. There were periodic trips to Europe, and then Iran. “Your father was a company man,” said disaffected former CIA staffer and author Victor Marchetti in an interview for this book in 2005. More time would pass before I finally began to understand what that might mean.

At Mary’s funeral, Wistar’s pallbearer assignment had been requested by Cord in his hour of need. Wistar himself was never fond of Mary, particularly after she jettisoned Cord, devastating him, by all accounts. Moreover, what infuriated Wistar even more was the fact that over the years Mary had become increasingly outspoken about her displeasure with what the CIA was doing in the world. No other CIA wife had ever dared such public bluntness, certainly not Wistar’s. But that hadn’t stopped Mary Meyer, even if my father’s well-oiled temper might be the kind of assault any civilized person would want to avoid. His signature point of view was that if you didn’t work for the Agency, you really didn’t know anything; furthermore, “opinions were like assholes—everyone
had one,” he would say as one of his favored retorts. Any discussion would quickly turn into what one friend in the late 1960s once called a kind of unending “Tet Offensive” with Wistar inevitably asserting at some point that the CIA had the only key to a treasure called “the truth.” They (he, the CIA) knew; you didn’t. End of conversation. How dare you think otherwise.

Seated immediately adjacent to Mary’s casket was her ex-husband and their two remaining sons: Quentin, eighteen, and Mark, fourteen. Cord, habitually imperious, sobbed uncharacteristically throughout the ceremony. He had been away in New York on Agency business when Mary was murdered. Comforted by his CIA colleagues, as well as by Mary’s mother, Ruth Pickering Pinchot, Cord was the recipient of a magnanimous show of support that included Ben and Tony Bradlee, Mary’s younger sister and only sibling. Cord’s grief, however, appeared to be purely ceremonial and ephemeral. After the funeral, he would “advise” his two remaining sons that there were to be no more tears over the loss of their mother.

Bishop Paul Moore Jr., suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, conducted the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer. A close friend of both Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer, the bishop, like Cord himself, had gone to St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and then Yale, graduating in the class of 1941, a year and a half ahead of Cord. “I was away at a convention when the murder happened,” Moore told author Leo Damore in 1991. “Benny [Ben Bradlee] called me and I flew in for the funeral.”
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Moore didn’t have a pastoral relationship with Mary. “I knew her much better earlier [in her life]. She and Cord and my first wife and I were very close friends when Cord came back from overseas the same time I did, around the time they were married. I didn’t see much of Mary in later years, so I wasn’t close to her,” he recalled. Even so, Moore was glad to officiate. “Over the years I’ve done weddings and funerals for the family. They weren’t members of my parish or anything. I was, in an informal way, their official pastor. Most of those folks don’t have any clergy friends they’re close to. It’s just that we’re old friends, so it was natural for them to turn to a priest or bishop when they needed somebody.”
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