Mary's Mosaic (13 page)

In his eulogy, Moore referred to “Mary’s honesty, her friendship, her rare sensitivity, that beauty which walked with her and which flowed from her into each of our lives.” But he could not answer the question that no doubt plagued many of those in attendance, although not all of them. “We cannot know why and how such a terrible, ugly, irrational thing should have happened. We can only sense that it was, in some way, bound up in this sin and sickness of the entire world.”
⁷

Perhaps at the time publicly oblivious, the suffragan bishop wasn’t about to speak to any “pattern,” invisible or not, among those who thought it possible to play God for the purposes of a well-ordered world. While Moore, like most Americans, may have been initially seduced into believing that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the president, a few years later his personal awakening would impel him to champion civil rights for African Americans, stridently oppose the Vietnam War, and ordain an openly gay woman as a priest in the Episcopal Church. But that afternoon, Moore only requested prayers “for that poor, demented soul who has brought about this essentialist tragedy.”
⁸

“I remember catching a little criticism for that,” Moore recalled. “Some folks thought it was inappropriate to pray for the person who had killed Mary. They were a little uneasy about it. This didn’t come from the family. In fact, they thought it was okay—even positive.” Moore’s highest priority, he said, was “my relationship with the Pinchot family, which goes back to my parents. I didn’t want to do anything that would in any way offend them.”
⁹

But even in the elite, affluent neighborhoods of Georgetown, home to many of Washington’s global power brokers, the rumbling of rumors had already begun. There was talk, too, of some kind of cover-up, links to the Kennedy White House, perhaps even some CIA involvement, and even possibly “Soviet complicity” in her murder—this last from CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton himself.
¹⁰

Bishop Moore had not intended to presume guilt on the part of Ray Crump Jr. “On the contrary,” Moore said in 1991, “I’m fascinated, obviously, because it’s always bothered me. I never felt the police really put this case to bed. There was a lot of paranoia surrounding Mary’s murder. And you know, you still hear a lot of rumors about it.”
¹¹
Moore’s uncertainty, however, even in 1991, nearly thirty years after the murder took place, was not unique. There were a number of facts—and stories—that didn’t add up, and were even contradictory, with more to come, leaving loose ends that inevitably “bothered” a lot of people, including me.

I
n the wake of Mary Meyer’s murder on that October 12 afternoon, who among her close friends and family first knew that she was dead? And how did they come by that knowledge? The answers to these questions, depending on whom you ask, are riddled with confusion and ambiguity that persist to this day. The truth—elusive though it has been—about when and how Mary’s friends and family learned of her death is part of the key to unraveling the mystery of who killed her, and why.

To begin, the first public revelation that Mary Meyer had been romantically involved with President Kennedy came through a story in the
National Enquirer
in its March 2, 1976, edition.
¹²
The details of the story had been given to the
Enquirer
by James Truitt, a close friend of Mary’s (along with his wife, Anne), who had been a vice president of the
Washington Post
before he was abruptly fired by Ben Bradlee in 1969. The
Enquirer
story was strangely, even remarkably, well-documented, because Mary Meyer had confided her affair with President Kennedy to her friends, the Truitts. Jim Truitt, a seasoned journalist himself, had kept a record of everything Mary had shared with him. The
Enquirer
exposé revealed the fact that Mary had been keeping a diary of her affair, as well as the fact that she and the president had smoked marijuana in the First Family’s residence in the White House. It also disclosed, for the first time, the fact that following her death, Mary’s diary was found by her sister, Tony, in Mary’s studio, and that this diary—labeled by Mary’s closest intimates as just an “artist’s sketchbook”—along with “several love letters” from JFK and other “private papers” belonging to Mary, had been given to the CIA’s counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton to be burned, which he never did. The
Enquirer
story became an overnight bombshell that rocked Washington, already roiling and swirling through post-Watergate congressional hearings on illegal CIA activities, as well as further investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Rightly sensing that there might be more to this story, Yale-educated journalist Ron Rosenbaum and his colleague Phillip Nobile went to work interviewing a number of principals close to Mary Meyer, including Jim Angleton and Ben and Tony Bradlee, as well as continuing to draw upon the input of Jim Truitt. In July, several months after the
National Enquirer
article appeared, Nobile and Rosenbaum published “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair” in the investigative weekly magazine
New Times
. The article has remained a seminal account of what allegedly took place during the immediate aftermath of the murder. The two journalists spent considerable time researching and interviewing their article, finally conceding the story was “immensely complex,” and incomplete, primarily because many of Mary’s friends and relatives “understandably drew back from the public controversy. Many refused all comment, others misled and misspoke.”
¹³

In their account, based on information gleaned from Jim Angleton himself, Rosenbaum and Nobile contended that the first person to realize that Mary Meyer was dead was Angleton’s wife, Cicely. At some point during the afternoon of October 12, Cicely Angleton allegedly heard a radio bulletin about a murder on the C & O canal towpath. It is not known what level of detail
the bulletin included—perhaps only that the victim was a middle-aged white female—but the location of the murder seemed enough to supposedly cause Cicely to fear the worst for her friend, who she knew was in the habit of daily walks on the towpath. In response to the broadcast, Cicely reportedly called her husband, the forty-six-year-old counterintelligence chief at the CIA. Jim Angleton was in “a big conference at CIA headquarters” when his wife’s urgent call reached him. He was said to have been irritated by the interruption and told her that he thought her fear was a “silly fantasy.” Reminding her of their plans to attend a poetry reading with Mary Meyer that same evening, he dismissed her paranoia and hung up.
¹⁴

More than three decades later, Cicely Angleton would be the only close woman friend of Mary Meyer willing to talk with author Nina Burleigh, whose book,
A Very Private Woman
, was published in 1998. In interviews with Burleigh, it appeared that Cicely never mentioned the alleged radio bulletin on the day of Mary’s murder—nor her alleged panicked call to her husband at CIA headquarters.
²
Simply incomprehensible was that Ms. Angleton might have forgotten such a detail, and that Burleigh—who acknowledged Rosenbaum’s groundbreaking work—would not have asked her about it. “News of the murdered woman on the towpath traveled fast in white Washington,” Burleigh wrote in
A Very Private Woman
. “And some of Mary’s friends suspected immediately the victim might be their friend.”
¹⁵
Other than Cicely Angleton, the so-called friends that Burleigh referred to were never identified. In addition, it also appears that Cicely Angleton may have revealed another layer of her husband’s deceit, which her three children would inadvertently make public after their mother’s death in the fall of 2011.

Even more perplexing, and certainly no less disturbing, was Ben Bradlee’s account of who first learned the tragic news about Mary Meyer. More than thirty years after her murder, and twenty years after being interviewed by Rosenbaum and Nobile (to whom he never revealed the following event), Bradlee finally offered his own answer to the question of who first learned about the murder. According to Bradlee, it was he.

In his 1995 memoir
A Good Life
, the former executive editor of the
Washington Post
wrote that “[i]t was just after lunch” on the day of the murder when he received a telephone call from “my friend,” asking if he had been listening to the radio—a reference, presumably, to the broadcast bulletin that Cicely
Angleton claimed had alarmed her. Bradlee hadn’t heard it. The caller also asked Bradlee if he knew where Mary Meyer was. He didn’t. “Someone [has] been murdered on the towpath,” Bradlee reported the caller saying. “From the description,” said the caller, “it sounded like Mary.”
¹⁶
At the time of this call—”just after lunch,” wrote Bradlee—Mary had been dead for less than two hours, but the police still didn’t know her identity. That would only be finally confirmed “sometime after” six that evening, when Bradlee himself identified her corpse at the D.C. morgue.
¹⁷

Until he wrote about it in 1995, Bradlee had never publicly mentioned the phone call, nor was this call ever referenced in any police report, or elicited in Bradlee’s testimony at Mary’s murder trial in July 1965. Furthermore, while Bradlee revealed the identity of the caller in his 1995 memoir, a fact that will later be discussed in some detail, he neglected to mention, or omitted deliberately, that his caller “friend” was a career, high-ranking CIA official.

Bradlee has never said why he waited more than thirty years to reveal the mysterious phone call. According to Rosenbaum, Bradlee had considered divulging Mary Meyer’s affair with the president in his 1975 book
Conversations with Kennedy
(published a year before the story first appeared in the
National Enquirer
), “until others pressured him against it.”
¹⁸
It was never known who the “others” were. By the time Bradlee published
A Good Life
in 1995, his CIA friend—the man who had first alerted him on the day of Mary’s murder—had died.

The question still lingered: How could Bradlee’s CIA friend have known “just after lunch” that the murdered woman was Mary Meyer when the victim’s identity was still unknown to police? Did the caller
wonder
if the woman was Mary, or did he
know
it, and if so, how? This distinction is critical, and it goes to the heart of the mystery surrounding Mary Meyer’s murder.

So does the following detail. The CIA caller’s suggestion that something might have happened to Mary Meyer was plausible enough to send Bradlee rushing home to prepare his family for the possibility that the dead woman might, in fact, be his wife’s sister. But it would not be until that evening—sometime before six, in Bradlee’s recollection—that the police would knock on his door to inform him that the dead woman might be Mary. It was only then, shortly before six, that Bradlee went to the morgue to identify Mary’s body.
¹⁹
This raises another question: If Bradlee had been given information “just after lunch” that Mary Meyer might have been killed, why didn’t he go to the D.C. morgue, or police, sooner?

A
ccording to the 1976 Rosenbaum and Nobile account, Jim and Cicely Angleton arrived at Mary Meyer’s house the evening of her murder to pick her up on their way to a Reed Whittemore poetry reading. They noticed her car was in the driveway, but her house was dark. They got no answer when they rang the doorbell. It wasn’t clear whether Mary’s house was locked, or whether, and how, the Angletons gained entry at that time. According to Angleton, it was at his wife’s urging that he called Mary’s answering service—perhaps from inside Mary’s house, perhaps from another location; it was never known. Either way, Rosenbaum and Nobile’s article claims that it was from Mary Meyer’s
answering service
that Jim Angleton first learned that she was dead. The Angletons then went straight from Mary’s house to Ben and Tony Bradlee’s house where, according to Rosenbaum, they gave their condolences and offered to help with funeral arrangements. How did Mary Meyer’s
answering service
know that she had been killed? And if the answering service had that information, who informed the service? Furthermore, why would they dispense it so freely? The police had only confirmed Mary’s identity when Bradlee identified her body “sometime after” 6:00
P.M
.
²⁰

Ben Bradlee returned home that evening after identifying Mary’s body at the D.C. morgue. As he recalled in 1995, the Bradlee house was filling up with friends, “the phones rang, the doorbell buzzed. Food and drink materialized out of nowhere.” He was surprised to receive a call from Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s former press secretary, who was in Paris, expressing “his particular sorrow and condolences.” The Bradlees had not been aware that Mary Meyer had known Salinger, or in what context.
²¹

Another overseas call, this one from Japan, wasn’t a surprise. Sculptor Anne Truitt had been one of Mary Meyer’s closest friends. She and her husband,
Newsweek
journalist James Truitt, had moved to Tokyo in early 1964. As already noted, Anne and her husband had been well aware of Mary’s relationship with the president, because Mary had confided to both of them about the affair. A number of other people in Jack Kennedy’s intimate circle knew about the relationship as well, but Ben Bradlee, once again, couldn’t seem to get his story straight. In 1976, according to Rosenbaum, Bradlee even denied “that he was aware of the JFK–Mary Meyer affair before the [1976]
Enquirer
story,” though he admitted to having read through the diary in 1964.
²²
Another source further confided to Rosenbaum that Bradlee had considered exposing the affair himself in his 1975 book
Conversations with Kennedy
, “until others pressured him against it.”
²³