Mary's Mosaic (43 page)

Yet Tony’s most telling insight, expressed during her 2001 interview with Smith, was that Jack’s behavior “struck me as odd.” She added, “[I]t seems odder knowing what we now know about Mary [and her relationship with Jack].” The significance of her momentary discernment eluded her. Given that she was already smitten, Tony’s infatuation was as much wishful thinking as Jack’s behavior was a strategic ploy. “I guess I was pretty surprised,” continued Tony, “but I was kind of flattered,” quickly adding, “and appalled too.”
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But once again, the game had snookered Tony. It appeared she had been left in the dark right up until Mary’s murder. “Jack had been attracted to her,” she maintained. “He had made several unsuccessful passes. Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist.”
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Years later, in 2007, Ben Bradlee still emphatically recalled how “
shocked
[Bradlee’s emphasis]” she had been when she found out Mary had been having an affair with Jack.
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One person who wasn’t fooled the evening of Jack’s forty-sixth birthday in May 1963, or anytime earlier, was journalist Charlie Bartlett, a close, dear friend of Jack’s who, with his wife, Martha, had first introduced him to Jackie. Bartlett, a distinguished journalist and Washington insider who spearheaded the Washington bureau of the
Chattanooga Times
, had also been a Yale classmate
of Cord Meyer’s. He was well acquainted with everyone in the Kennedy inner circle, and he and Martha often socialized with Jack and Jackie.

Emotionally closer to Jack than Ben Bradlee would ever become, Charlie Bartlett was perhaps one of Kennedy’s primary confidantes. Jack mostly compartmentalized his close friendships, yet he confided in Bartlett what he rarely shared with anyone else. “I really liked Jack Kennedy,” recalled Bartlett in late 2008 in an interview for this book. “We had great fun together and a lot of things in common. We had a very personal, close relationship.” Apparently that awareness didn’t go unnoticed. When Jack began his presidency, Bartlett thought it a bit odd that his Yale classmate Cord Meyer, then a chief operative in the CIA’s covert action directorate, wanted to begin having a more social relationship with him. “Cord and I saw a lot of each other after Jack Kennedy became president because I think someone at CIA told Cord to keep an eye on me.”
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Regarding Jack’s relationship with Mary, Bartlett bluntly admitted, “I didn’t particularly like Mary Meyer.” He had known both Mary and Cord when they were married. When asked by Nina Burleigh why he never considered investigating the story of Mary Meyer, he reportedly exclaimed nervously, “Oh, I can’t. Too many of my friends are a part of that one.”
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But what he didn’t mention to authors Burleigh or Sally Bedell Smith was what he had come to know about Jack’s affection for Mary.

“That was a dangerous relationship,” Bartlett recalled. “Jack was in love with Mary Meyer. He was certainly smitten by her, he was heavily smitten. He was very frank with me about it, that he thought she was absolutely great.” That there were moments when Jack couldn’t contain his affection didn’t go unnoticed, either. Recalling a number of excursions on the presidential yacht
Sequoia
and the Kennedy family boat
Honey Fitz
, Bartlett further added: “We had these boat parties and we could see it [Jack’s affection for Mary]. I even got a little mad with him on one of the boat parties, because it was more than obvious. He took it [his relationship with Mary] pretty seriously.”
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Charlie Bartlett’s observations further dovetailed with Kenny O’Donnell statements to Leo Damore. O’Donnell, who was as close to Jack as anyone could be on a daily basis during his presidency, knew firsthand Jack’s affection for Mary. “Kenny had always admired Jack as a cool champion, the man of political celebration,” Damore revealed in 1992. “He saw it start to collapse because of Mary. Jack was losing interest in politics. The fun for Jack was winning the job [being elected president].”
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Sometime in October 1963, said Damore, just a little more than a month before his death, “Jack confided to Kenny he
was deeply in love with Mary, that after he left the White House he envisioned a future with her and would divorce Jackie.”
⁵⁹

Mary was in the White House residence on Monday evening, August 6, 1962, just thirty-six hours after the apparent suicide of famed Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Her sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” appearance three months earlier at a combined fund-raiser and birthday party for Jack in New York had already become an iconic Americana moment. Surely Mary knew that Jack had been involved with Marilyn. But had she known how the relationship had disintegrated, or how his brother Bobby had recently “taken his turn” with the world’s most famous sex goddess—who had been unwilling “to go away quietly”? That Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford were at Marilyn’s house the day she died was suspicious enough; that Bobby returned a second time that evening, according to two witnesses, immediately prior to her “suicide” was a bit more unsavory.
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The situation, according to people who knew Marilyn closely, had become critical. Should she have proceeded with her intention to publicly reveal the affairs, the Kennedy political machine might have been dealt a severe blow. The events immediately following her death created more questions than answers.
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Marilyn’s alleged crusade “to expose the Kennedys for what they are” has had enormous reverberations, including the close guarding of fifty-four crates of Robert Kennedy’s records at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum that are so confidential even the library’s director is prohibited from knowing what’s in them.
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Such have been the extensive efforts of the Kennedy image machine to keep the full disclosure of truth from the American people.

Toward the end of 1962, inside the White House Mary Meyer had become “almost part of the furniture,” in the words of White House counsel Myer Feldman, according to author Nina Burleigh. “Unlike with some of the other women—and men—in the White House, the president did not ask her to leave the room when he discussed business,” wrote Burleigh. “So frequent was her proximity to the president, and so obvious Kennedy’s admiration for her, that Feldman felt Mary might make a good conduit to the president’s ear if and when Kennedy was unavailable to discuss matters of state with him.”
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Mary’s emerging presence in the White House was more than just what was documented in the entry logs.

“I’d walk in and out of the office all the time,” Feldman told Burleigh, “and I would see her in the Oval Office or over in the residence. Around eight-thirty, when the day was over, often I’d walk over to the residence and she’d
be sitting there. There wasn’t any attempt to hide her the way there was with some of the other women.”
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In addition, Mary’s evolving position within the Kennedy White House senior staff was never second tier. Mention of her name could even be considered advantageous for employment, in the opinion of Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In a two-page December 1962 memo in support of fellow historian Trumbull Higgins’s proposal to write the official White House account of the Bay of Pigs debacle, Schlesinger stated, “I know Higgins slightly. He is an old friend of Mary Meyer’s, who knows him better.”
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Higgins eventually published a book on the Bay of Pigs fiasco entitled
The Perfect Failure
(1987), in which he concluded that President Kennedy had inherited a catastrophe in the making that had been prepared by the CIA under Kennedy’s predecessor President Eisenhower.

A
llen Dulles was finally granted his wish by President Dwight Eisenhower to be director of the CIA (DCI) in 1953. But Eisenhower, even before leaving office, had regretted the Dulles appointment. With the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Eisenhower finally realized the Agency was dangerously out of control. He was advised to get rid of Dulles, but didn’t. It proved to be a huge mistake. Several year later, right before Eisenhower’s May 16, 1960, peace summit with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the CIA engineered the May 1 downing of its own U-2 reconnaissance spy flight over Russian territory as a way to undermine any possibility of rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had planned to orchestrate a Soviet détente before he left office, so that he could cut the defense budget and redirect resources toward America’s domestic needs. That dream was quickly vanquished as tensions between the two emerging superpowers resumed unabated. Through fear-mongering, the CIA had achieved its goal, urging upon Congress the strategic necessity for further increases in its budget. As he left office, President Eisenhower would finally explode at Dulles. “The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty,” he told the director. “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this. Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor. I leave a ‘legacy of ashes’ to my successor.” By 1964, the Agency’s clandestine service and operations would consume nearly two-thirds of its entire (classified) budget and, according to author Tim Weiner, 90 percent of the director’s time.
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In his farewell speech, President Eisenhower warned the public to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought,” by what he called “the military-industrial complex.” Warning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” Eisenhower pointed to “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” as the antidote. But the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower spoke had a third, unnamed component: intelligence.

Established in 1947, the CIA was, from its inception, virtually unaccountable to any authority. It was subject to little, if any, congressional oversight, a fact that would increasingly haunt both President Harry Truman and his successor, President Eisenhower. As a career military general, Eisenhower was skeptical about the role of civilians in clandestine paramilitary operations. In addition, he was troubled by the fact that the Agency had a carte blanche “get out of jail free card” for anything it attempted. President Truman’s 1948 National Security Council (NSC) had so imbued the Agency with unchecked, absolute power, it threatened the entire foundation of America’s constitutional premise.

That year the NSC approved what became known as “Top Secret Directive NSC 10/2,” a virtual bottomless pit of nefarious, illegal quicksand. The directive defined covert operations as actions conducted by the United States against foreign states “which are so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can
plausibly disclaim
any responsibility for them.” Creating what came to be known as “plausible deniability,” the directive sanctioned and authorized U.S. intelligence, principally the CIA, to carry out a broad range of clandestine activities and paramilitary operations that included preventive direct action, propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, demolition, subversion against “hostile states,” assassinations, and “support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” Years later, George Kennan, the directive’s original sponsor and architect, bluntly told Yale historian John Lukacs: “That was the greatest mistake I ever made in my life, because you know what the Central Intelligence Agency has devolved or evolved into.”
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In the mid-1970s, Kennan again reiterated before a U.S. Senate committee that it was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
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During the 1950s, in the interests of promoting American economic growth and hegemony, the emerging Dulles calling card was an uncanny expertise in overthrowing foreign governments, many of them democratically elected. Eisenhower’s predecessor, President Harry Truman, had had his own confrontations with covert operations run by the Dulles cadre. Iran, in 1951,
had decided to nationalize its oil industry, which before had been controlled exclusively by Britain. Winston Churchill had implored Truman before he left office in 1952 to order the CIA to join with British forces in MI6 and arrange for a coup against the newly democratically elected Mosaddeq government in Iran. Truman, without equivocation, said no. A year later, Eisenhower, seduced by Dulles, caved in. In August 1953, Operation Ajax overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq and installed the Shah, leaving the Iranian people to suffer unimaginable horrors under the reign of SAVAK, the shah’s heinous praetorian guard, trained in surveillance, interrogation, and torture by the CIA.
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A year after the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the CIA (again under Dulles’s tutelage) would take down the government in Guatemala. President Arbenz, who had been democratically elected by his country in 1950 with 65 percent of the vote, was deemed “leftist” by the mainstream American media—no doubt reflecting the influence of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird in the press—and vulnerable to the approach of a “Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere.” The Arbenz government’s “mortal sin” was land reform in its own country; it wanted to put a stop to private corporations like the United Fruit Company taking land away from the Guatemalan peasant population. Although few knew it then, both Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, owned sizable stock in United Fruit, with Allen Dulles himself serving as a member of the company’s board of trustees. The company lobbied hard for Washington to remove the Arbenz government, and in 1954, the CIA did so.
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Under Dulles-CIA auspices, similar coups would occur in Hungary, North Vietnam, and Laos before the 1960 election.