Mary's Mosaic (16 page)

Mary’s self-possession had always been a hallmark of her character. However overwhelmed she had felt by the vast implications of what had occurred in Dallas, not only for herself, but for the world at large, her temperament and moral rectitude demanded that at the very least she attempt to make sense of it all. What better way to cope with the enormity of that task than to set aside periods of time for reflection, aided by a valuable tool she had utilized effectively in the past? Neither a recluse nor one to be intimidated by authority, Mary wanted to understand what had occurred. The sheer magnitude of Jack’s assassination had catapulted her through endless shock waves, eventually forcing her to recognize the enormity of what had occurred—not only the events in Dallas, but the subsequent cover-up taking place right before her eyes. This cover-up, in fact, is the subject of a later chapter of this book.

“They couldn’t control him any more,” she sobbed on the telephone with Timothy Leary sometime in early December 1963, just after the assassination. “He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”
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Determined to understand and unravel what was taking place, she confronted what amounted to a mysterious jigsaw mosaic. The pieces had to be placed where they belonged. That process would take time, reflection, and awareness. What better way to engage the conundrum than to reclaim the exercise of journaling?

What then happened to Mary’s
real
diary? (Hereafter, the word “diary” refers only to Mary’s real journal/diary and not to her artist sketchbook.) The “diary as MacGuffin” in this piece of history doesn’t need any Hollywood embellishment; the story is stranger than fiction, only because it’s real. Yet no one
has managed to put together the factual sequence of events that would unravel the mystery that has enshrouded this caper for nearly fifty years.

One of the most significant details in the 1976 Rosenbaum and Nobile article may have even eluded its own authors. It was this: The authors let it be known that after Jim Angleton arrived at the Bradlee house on the evening of the murder, and after he had fielded Anne Truitt’s telephone call from Japan, he later returned to Mary Meyer’s house that evening and ostensibly “rescued three kittens from the empty house.”
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If the real diary wasn’t in Mary’s studio on the night of her murder, as Bradlee and Angleton had likely investigated (given Bradlee’s testimony at the trial), Angleton knew where to look for the diary in Mary’s house, only because Anne Truitt had probably told him where to look when she reached him earlier that evening. Mary was “accustomed to leaving her diary in the bookcase in her bedroom,” Rosenbaum noted. “The diary wasn’t there after her death.”
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But why, then, was Jim Angleton again in Mary’s house the following morning, when Ben and Tony Bradlee surprised him there? If he had the diary, why go back? Perhaps Angleton wanted to be seen searching for the diary so that no one would suspect that it was already in his possession. But more likely, as the reader will come to understand, Mary’s actual diary was highly incriminating of Angleton himself and the CIA’s role in orchestrating what had occurred in Dallas. Determined to erase as much as possible from the last years of Mary Meyer’s life, Angleton wanted to take into his possession and eliminate any
other
documents, papers, letters, or personal effects that might further jeopardize the Warren Report and the public’s acceptance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt.

In a situation such as this, the unwritten rule of any CIA undercover operation is that the fewer people in the know, the better; compartmentalization is an absolute necessity—as long as it’s maintained, and the story is kept straight. The only people who really knew what was taking place were the mastermind himself, Jim Angleton, his colleague Cord Meyer, and to one extent or another Ben Bradlee. What incriminated Bradlee, as will be further detailed later, was that he never once revealed during the trial the telephone call from his “friend”—the career high-ranking CIA official—that came “just after lunch,” less than two hours after Mary’s unidentified corpse lay sprawled on the C & O Canal towpath. Instead, he allowed the court to believe that it was only when Sergeant Sam Wallace of the D.C. police arrived at his house shortly before six that evening that he first became aware of his sister-in-law’s demise.

N
o one in this cesspool’s morass could ever be trusted, but it appears some part of the deceit was passed down to some of participants’ children. After Anne Truitt’s death in 2004, I talked with her daughter Alexandra in the latter part of 2005. When I introduced myself and told her of my book project, Alexandra was momentarily (and cautiously) hopeful that I might be taking a different slant from author Nina Burleigh’s. Intriguingly, she made it clear that subsequent to Mary Meyer’s death she had been “coached” that the subject of Mary’s murder was taboo.

“I’ve heard over the years that a lot of people have been threatened,” Alexandra said, after I mentioned author John H. Davis’s remark to Jimmy Smith in 1999. “That’s always been everybody’s feeling around the whole event [Mary’s murder] I’ve grown up with. You don’t talk about it because it’s dangerous.” Later during our conversation, she added, “I’m incredibly discreet. I never talk about this. I talked about it with my mom. I think I know everything she knew. But I don’t talk about it because it’s dangerous.” Alexandra became eager to know what I had discovered, but I wouldn’t divulge any information over the phone. I suggested instead we meet in New York so that we could talk privately in person. Ambivalent about that prospect, she changed the subject.

“I thought Nina Burleigh’s book was terrible,” she said. “I thought it was badly researched and embarrassingly inaccurate.” I then attempted to defend some of Burleigh’s early descriptions of the Pinchot estate, Grey Towers, and their life in Milford, Pennsylvania—if only to keep our conversation going. It was already clear Alexandra knew much more than she was letting on. “I think it’s too dangerous to talk to you, I really do,” she finally said. Our conversation ended amicably. I suggested the possibility of some follow-up through email a couple of weeks later, but was quickly rebuffed.
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What could still be “too dangerous” to talk about more than forty years after the fact? The clue, of course, was Alexandra’s comment that she had talked with her mother at some length, concluding, “I think I know everything she knew.” Anne Truitt had concealed something. Like Anne Chamberlin, I wondered, had Leo Damore’s apparent “suicide” in October 1995 immediately after the publication of Ben Bradlee’s memoir,
A Good Life
, frightened Alexandra from talking further?

I
n late 1990, author Leo Damore conducted a two-hour face-to-face recorded interview with Timothy Leary, which will be discussed in some detail in a later chapter. During the interview, he told Leary that Mary’s real diary still existed and he had discovered its whereabouts. “Angleton offered the diary in
1980 to a person who I know,” Damore told Leary. “I know where it is, and the man who I believe has it is maddeningly this week in Hawaii.”
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Damore had sometimes cryptically referred to Mary’s diary as “the Hope Diamond” of the Kennedy assassination, but he guarded the fact that he had come into possession of it and only finally shared this bit of information with his attorney at the end of March in 1993.

Meanwhile, Cord Meyer would maintain that Jim Angleton was a “very close friend of ours, and he successfully dealt with a diary that might have been embarrassing, assured that it didn’t come out. That was not done to protect state secrets or anything like that. It was done to protect a friend.”
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Again, Cord does not mention that Mary had specifically entrusted her diary to Angleton, or asked him to “burn certain pages of her diary if anything happened to her.” And which “diary” was Cord referring to? Mary’s sketchbook, or the real diary that Angleton and possibly Bradlee had stolen on the night of the murder?

Sixteen years after his ex-wife’s murder in 1980, Cord would finally reveal in his book
Facing Reality
who had contacted him in New York on the afternoon of Mary’s murder to tell him what had happened—again,
before
police had any idea of the victim’s identity. It was the same “friend” that had called Ben Bradlee “just after lunch,” a man who happened to be a close CIA colleague—a fact that Cord, too, failed to mention in his account.
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2
    Cicely Angleton twice declined to be interviewed for this book. She died on September 23, 2011.

3
    Anne Chamberlin died on December 31, 2011 in Sarasota, Florida.

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Deus Ex Machina

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

—Thomas Jefferson
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Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

—Joseph Goebbels

(Hitler’s propaganda minister)

W
HILE THE MOST
intense grief attended Mary Pinchot Meyer’s funeral at the National Cathedral on Wednesday, October 14, the Reverend Jesse A. Brown also consoled a member of his own congregation at the Second Baptist Church in Southwest Washington, D.C., only a few miles away in distance, yet worlds apart in social class and community. Martha Crump had been undone by Mary Meyer’s murder, too. Her son, twenty-five-year-old Raymond Crump Jr., was in police custody, charged with committing the crime. Reverend Brown spoke to Martha Crump that day not only of matters spiritual, but of matters practical as well. Something had to be done to help “Mr. Ray,” whom he believed had been wrongly accused.

Like most black churches in the 1960s, Second Baptist was a stronghold in its community, a spiritual refuge with a social conscience. Community
outreach, drug and alcohol abuse counseling, care for the elderly, housing assistance—Second Baptist offered guidance that went beyond tending to the souls of the faithful. The church had a well-established record of fighting racebased discrimination and social injustice. As its founding pastor, Reverend Brown led the charge.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s owed much to churches like Second Baptist, where members gathered to stoke the causes of equal and fair treatment under the law. The black church functioned independent of white interference—that is, until the churches became centers of organized activism. When that occurred, they also became targets for those who would rather see the churches burn than have their congregations achieve equality. Across the American south, black churches were being firebombed, members of their faithful lynched. Violence was rampant. By 1964, there was a siege mentality in black churches.

Shortly after Ray Crump’s arrest, Reverend Brown had been trying, through ministry channels, to reach attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree, someone he often referred to as a “righteous lawyer” and something of a legend already in the black community. In addition to being a “righteous lawyer,” Roundtree was also a highly regarded associate minister of the Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a sought-after public speaker. She was an attractive, petite woman with delicate features, and a complexion that belied her fifty years. The only hints of her age were the strands of gray that streaked her hair.

Roundtree had been raised with a fierce understanding of—and belief in—justice. The only thing she believed in more absolutely was God. Behind her graceful appearance was a will of iron. “Her voice, like her demeanor, was kind, deliberate and thoughtful,” recalled attorney George Peter Lamb in 1991. “But she’s all business. She likes to look you square in the eye. There was something impossibly appealing about her. It’s difficult not to like this woman.”
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Dovey Roundtree had seen up close the failings and abuses of power in an American legal system rife with racism. Born Dovey Mae Johnson on April 17, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina, she never forgot the night her grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, pushed her, her mother, and her sisters under the kitchen table as members of the Ku Klux Klan approached. Grandma Rachel extinguished the kerosene lamp, closed all the shutters, and braced her daughter and crying grandchildren for the worst. Like an approaching freight train, howling men on horseback galloped past their house. Grandma Rachel clutched a broom in case she needed a weapon, and her husband, the Reverend Clyde L. Graham, kept vigil through the slats of a shuttered window.

After Dovey’s father died during the influenza epidemic of 1919, Grandma Rachel brought her daughter’s family to live with her and her husband in the parsonage attached to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where he pastored. To the white bankers in Charlotte, Rachel Graham was just the Negro woman who did their laundry and ironed their shirts. To her granddaughter, “she was a force of nature.” Darkness didn’t scare her. Neither did the weather. While Grandpa Clyde took cover from summer thunderstorms, Grandma Rachel went out to the front porch to shake her fist at the lightning. The way she saw it, it was Mother Nature who was scaring her family, and that just wouldn’t do.
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