Mary's Mosaic (40 page)

One former patient of Jacobson’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity, worked in the doctor’s lab at night as a way to defray the costs of his services. “I would mix up some of the cocktails given to JFK,” said this source. “They were labeled ‘Beaker A, B, and C.’ Nobody knew what was in them except Jacobson. He [Jacobson] would code label the directions as to how to mix the cocktails. There were things in those cocktails that exacerbated his [JFK’s] sex drive, I’ll tell you that right now!”
⁵⁴
Jack became so dependent on these drugs, he had no intention of stopping them. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” he told his brother Bobby, who thought he should have Jacobson’s elixirs analyzed by the FDA. “It’s the only thing that works.”
⁵⁵

Y
et whatever infirmities Jack battled—including a rampant sexual addiction—however fragmented and impaired his capacity for genuine intimacy, something kept driving him toward Mary Meyer. Something kept driving him toward Mary Meyer. Had it been the memory of some young, pristine romantic force that was first awakened that Saturday evening at Choate in February 1936? Had the intensity of his wartime romance with Inga Arvad engendered some distant hope of absolution in love? Or was it the possibility of redemption, one last chance to bridge the gulf between himself and another—in love—so as to heal himself in such a way that he might become more whole?

With all his charm, good looks, wealth, and presidential aura, Jack could have attracted almost any woman, and often did. Certainly, there were many documented contenders—Helen Chavchavadze, Diana de Vegh, Mimi Beardsley (Alford), Judith Exner, and Marilyn Monroe among them—but none who became important to him in the way that Mary Meyer did. Her allure for Jack wasn’t that of an imagined, superficial sexual escapade—though her eroticism, firmly imbedded in her femininity, was known to have brought many a man to his knees.

Mary’s primary attraction for Jack may have ultimately been trust—in the end, love’s most powerful aphrodisiac. She was independent and self-contained, free of any need for any kind of entrapment or manipulation. Jack respected her as an equal. With Mary, the spark of redemption was likely ignited in the wounded darkness of his shadow. After all, real love was the foundation for the approach of healing, the process of which for Jack would have required a lifelong “work-in-progress” commitment to self-examination and recovery. Yet even in the midst of an uncontrollable, compulsive sexual addiction, the question remained. Had a shared bridge of hope with Mary helped him further define the unique track of his presidency—a trajectory that finally during the last six months of his life would embrace the pursuit of world peace initiatives, away from the Cold War?

9

Mary’s Mission

He’s lost in the wilderness. He’s lost in the bitterness.

This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world …

But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.

—James Brown

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could be better described as serendipity.

—Dr. Albert Hofmann

The so-called sixties “drug culture” was not a campus fad. It was a worldwide renaissance of the oldest religions.

—Timothy Leary

S
ITTING
AT
HIS
desk in a cramped office at 5 Divinity Avenue in the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard, Dr. Timothy Leary looked up and saw “a woman leaning against the door post, hip tilted provocatively,” studying him intently. “She appeared to be in her late thirties. Good looking. Flamboyant eyebrows, piercing green-blue eyes, fine-boned face. Amused, arrogant, aristocratic.”
¹
It was April 1962, and the Harvard lecturer had for months been immersed in the onslaught of problems and crises that his Harvard Psilocybin Project had been attracting. Mounting publicity had resulted in increasing
scrutiny, not all of it by any means good. Both Leary and his colleague, Professor Richard Alpert, had been recently “vigorously criticized” at a faculty meeting for ethical and empirical violations that involved giving the hallucinogen psilocybin to undergraduates. Ordered to surrender their supply, they were forbidden to continue their research.

Overwhelmed by literally hundreds of outside inquiries received each week, the affable, bubbly forty-one-year-old Irish Harvard tweed Leary was looking forward to a trip to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, in search of a more isolated retreat for his psychedelic research. As he was preparing to leave, the curious, unexpected visitor from Washington, D.C. arrived. She was someone he would encounter seven times over the next year and half. Twenty years later, in 1983, Timothy Leary recalled his initial impressions of their first meeting.

“Dr. Leary,” he remembered her saying “coolly,” “I’ve got to talk to you.” She had offered her hand for a formal greeting and, Leary recalled, introduced herself as “Mary Pinchot,” not Mary Meyer. “I’ve come from Washington,” she had said, “to discuss something very important. I want to learn how to run an LSD session.”
²

Always partial to beautiful women, Timothy Leary was receptive. “That’s our specialty here,” he said. “Would you like to tell me what you have in mind?”

“I have this friend who’s a very important man,” Mary had told him. “He’s impressed by what I’ve told him about my own LSD experiences and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself. So I’m here to learn how to do it. I mean, I don’t want to goof up or something.”
³

Timothy Leary hadn’t understood at that moment that Mary was alluding to the president of the United States. Whether he was aware then that the president’s sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy had reportedly undergone LSD sessions in the late 1950s wasn’t known, but the president’s brother-in-law Stephen Smith, husband of Jean Kennedy, had already contacted Leary about his own desire to explore LSD. Tim had referred him to another early LSD proselytizer, his close friend Van Wolfe in New York, who subsequently acted as a psychedelic guide for the Kennedy family member in the early 1960s.
⁴

“Why don’t you have your important friend come here with you to look over our project for a couple of days?” Leary responded. “Then if it makes sense to all concerned, we’ll run a session for him.”

“Out of the question. My friend is a public figure. It’s just not possible.”

“People involved in power usually don’t make the best subjects,” Leary cautioned.

“Look,” she said, according to Leary. “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. Isn’t that the idea—to get powerful men to turn on?”

“Allen says that, but I’ve never agreed. Premier Khrushchev should turn on with his wife in the comfort and security of his Kremlin bedroom. Same for Kennedy.”

“Don’t you think that if a powerful person were to turn on with his wife or girlfriend it would be good for the world?”

Nothing was certain, Leary explained. “But in general we believe that for anyone who’s reasonably healthy and happy, the intelligent thing to do is take advantage of the multiple realities available to the human brain.”

“Do you think that the world would be a better place if men in power had LSD experiences?” Mary asked.

“Look at the world,” Leary responded. “Nuclear bombs proliferating. More and more countries run by military dictators. No political creativity. It’s time to try something, anything new and promising.”
⁵

The two continued talking and went out for a drink. Leary invited Mary back to his house for dinner. Michael Hollingshead, a burned-out eccentric who had been a Cambridge University philosophy instructor, now living in Leary’s attic, mixed more drinks as they discussed the changes that took place during the psychedelic experience. After dinner, they decided to take a low dose of magic mushrooms. While Hollingshead explained to Mary how to guide people in the throes of panic, Leary became aware of Mary’s frowning and recalled the following exchange.

“You poor things,” Mary said. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into. You don’t really understand what’s happening in Washington with drugs, do you?”

“We’ve heard some rumors about the military,” Leary said.

“It’s time you learned more. The guys who run things—I mean the guys who
really
run things in Washington—are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control.”

“Yes,” Leary said. “We’ve heard about that.”

“But there are people like me who want to use drugs for peace, not for war, to make people’s lives better. Will you help us?”

“How?”

“I told you. Teach us how to run sessions, use drugs to do good.”

Leary recalled feeling a bit uneasy. Mary seemed calculating, a bit tough, perhaps as a result of living “in the hard political world,” as he put it. He asked her again who her friends were that wanted “to use drugs for peace.”

“Women,” she said laughing. “Washington, like every other capital city in the world, is run by men. These men conspiring for power can only be changed by women.”

The next day Leary drove Mary to the airport, having “loaded her with books and papers” about the Harvard Psilocybin Project in preparation for her training as a psychedelic guide. He told Mary he didn’t think she was ready to start running sessions yet. She agreed. She would come back soon, she told him, for more practice.

“And don’t forget,” she said. “The only hope for the world is intelligent women.”
⁶

T
imothy Leary’s 1983 book
Flashbacks
portrayed Mary Meyer during the period of 1962 to 1963 in such a way that has aroused as much fascination as it has skepticism. The biggest, most unsettled question was left unanswered: Had Mary and the president actually wandered into the psychedelic Garden of Eden together during his presidency, and if so, when, and with what result? Leary’s account of his relationship with Mary also underscored Mary’s ongoing antipathy toward the nefarious nature of the CIA, specifically the Agency’s MKULTRA program, which was experimenting with all kinds of drugs for chemical warfare and mind control, including hallucinogens such as LSD. In addition, by April 1962, when Mary allegedly first appeared at Leary’s office at Harvard, her influence in Jack Kennedy’s life was already well established. Not simply a visitor to the White House residence when Jackie was away, Mary was seen in the Oval Office regularly. She attended any number of policy meetings at which the president discussed sensitive national security business and sought out her counsel.
⁷
Mary’s close friend Anne Truitt described the importance of their relationship: “He saw she was trustworthy. He could talk to her with pleasure, without having to watch his words.”
⁸

Appearances to the contrary, Mary’s decision to become involved with Jack wasn’t motivated by a selfish, manipulative desire to turn him on to drugs. If they did share a psychedelic experience,

Jack would have undoubtedly been a willing participant. Several accounts attest to the fact that Mary and Jack’s love relationship was serious, not a passing fling of intermittent one-night stands. Author Leo Damore had become convinced that by the time Kennedy reached the presidency, “Jack was
a broken man. He had lived a life as an instrument of his father’s ambition, not his own.” It was Mary, said Damore, who took Jack by the hand. “She could see the brokenness in him, and didn’t need anything from him. In this relationship the power resided with Mary, and it was she, through her love, who bestowed the great gift of healing.”
⁹
Yet Mary, too, appeared to have surrendered. “She told me she had fallen in love with Jack Kennedy and was sleeping with him,” said Anne Truitt. “I was surprised but not too. Mary did what she pleased. She was having a lovely time.”
¹⁰

Just as fascinatingly, Timothy Leary’s account of the mysterious “Mary Pinchot from Washington,” depicted Mary as a kind of missionary for the ascension of world peace through the sagacious use of hallucinogens. Could an opportune mind-altering experience in the lives of powerful political figures, specifically the leader of the free world, awaken the kind of awareness, and leadership, that would take mankind away from war and strife toward the province of peaceful coexistence? Mary’s latent intention, Leary finally realized, had not only been to invite her lover the president to take a psychedelic excursion with her, but to train a small group of eight women in Washington, all of whom who were intimately involved with powerful public figures. Could the inducement of a psychedelically induced religious mystical experience in the politically powerful support a movement away from militaristic war and domination, toward harmonious peaceful coexistence throughout the world? It appeared that Mary had hatched a plan. Her pacifism and abhorrence of all violent armed conflict motivated a curiosity she thought worthy of exploration.