Mary's Mosaic (47 page)

Phil remained at Chestnut Lodge for approximately two weeks under the care of Dr. Leslie Farber and Dr. John Cameron. He finally convinced them to release him, whereupon he visited Katharine for one day, then flew to New York with his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams. There, he plotted to wrest complete control of the
Washington Post
away from Katharine, changing his will at least twice over a period of several months, giving Robin Webb a controlling interest in his estate.
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All through the winter and spring of 1963, Katharine was both devastated and humiliated by the entire course of events, but determined to prevent the
Post
from falling into Phil’s control and ownership, even if it meant she had to have Phil declared insane.
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Phil Graham’s Phoenix outburst in January was further destabilizing. Contemplation of such a diabolical deed as the overthrow of an American president would need the kind of trustworthy tentacles that could stretch deep into the grinding wheels of media establishments. Around town, word had gone out: Phil Graham could no longer be trusted.
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Eleven days after the incident in Phoenix on January 28, Mary Meyer signed into the White House residence using her own name. Jackie, who was away at her rented hideaway, Glen Ora, decorating the family’s new Wexford estate, had become aware of the affair. According to Kennedy aide Godfrey McHugh, “Jackie knew about his [Jack’s] women.” She had, in fact, asked McHugh, a man she had once dated, to tell her about her husband’s women.
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Bill Walton, the closest to Jack, Bobby, and Jackie, uncharacteristically let it slip to author Ralph Martin: “You know, in the end, Jackie knew everything. Every girl. She knew her rating, her accomplishments.”
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But Mary wasn’t just another dalliance for Jack, and Jackie knew it. By 1963, Mary had become a fixture in the president’s life, as close a confidante as he was capable of having.

On March 8, 1963, the Kennedys hosted their sixth and, as fate would have it, last White House dinner dance. Mary attended on the arm of Blair Clark, an old friend of Jack’s from Harvard. “I brought Mary to one of the White House parties,” Clark recalled in 1983, and “she simply disappeared for a half hour. Finally I went looking for her. She had been upstairs with Jack and then had gone walking out in the snow. So there I was, ‘the beard’ for Mary Meyer.”
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The bottom of Mary’s dress was muddy and wet, indicating that she had been walking outside. She later told her friend Anne Truitt that she had become “unhappy” and taken a walk. Upon returning, she couldn’t find Blair Clark, and so, according to Sally Bedell Smith, “Bobby Kennedy called a White House limousine, put her in the back and sent her home.”
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During the evening of the final dinner dance, Jackie told her dinner partner, Adlai Stevenson, “I don’t care how many girls [Jack sleeps with] as long as I know he knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway that’s all over for the present.”
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A beleaguered, increasingly desperate Jackie, trying to save face, told Stevenson she and her sister had “always talked about divorce as practically something to look forward to.” Then she told him, “I first loved you” when she had met Stevenson in Illinois shortly after she and Jack were married.
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By March, Jackie had not yet announced publicly she was pregnant, but it appeared she had given Jack an ultimatum, just prior to that evening. Had Jack attempted to end the affair with Mary that evening, or had the two staged the contretemps to appear that way? Whether their split that night was real or not, the separation didn’t last long, at least officially. On May 29, Mary would attend the president’s forty-sixth birthday party on the presidential yacht
Sequoia.

I
n April 1963, President Kennedy’s future trip to Dallas, Texas, was discussed privately between himself, Vice President Johnson, and his chief aide, Kenny O’Donnell. On April 23, Johnson announced plans for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas during a luncheon speech to Texas newspaper and radio station executives. The next day, the
Dallas Times Herald
wrote about the announcement.
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During the Easter weekend of April 13–14, special White House aide Joseph W. Shimon enjoyed the company of his daughter, Toni, who lived on Long Island with her mother. Shimon had worked in the White House at the highest levels. In 1963, he was assigned officially as a “Washington Police Inspector,” though he was also secretly working for the Justice Department and was a liaison to the CIA, having risen up through the ranks through the Metropolitan Police Department beginning in the early 1930s. Shimon had established a reputation for discretion in service to various presidents. He had won the confidence not only of President Franklin Roosevelt, but his successors as well. President Kennedy consulted Shimon regularly. The two were known to have taken numerous walks together on the White House grounds.
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Shimon had one child, a college-age daughter named Toni, with whom he was extremely close in spite of being divorced from her mother. During the 1963 Easter weekend, Shimon and his daughter Toni were walking near Shimon’s North Stafford Street home in Arlington, Virginia, when he revealed something to his daughter that would come back to haunt her. As they strolled together, Toni began to feel a sense of foreboding, suspecting she would soon
be missing her father’s company once again. Something else was coming, however, something she couldn’t foresee.

“You’re on the outside and I’m going to hit you with something,” Shimon told his daughter. “Tell me right off the top of your head what you think.”

“Okay,” she said, not expecting to hear what followed.

“The vice president [Lyndon Johnson] has asked me to give him more security than the president,” said Shimon. As they continued walking, Toni’s mood began to darken. There was something ominous in her father’s voice, she remembered feeling.

“What’s he afraid of, Dad?” she asked her father.

“What do you think?” Her father responded, wanting to see if she understood and connected the dots. There was an awkward silence. She knew she was being tested. Toni would remember that moment and the darkness that had come over her that day.

“Something’s coming down, Dad,” she said. “Does President Kennedy know about this?”

“I haven’t mentioned it,” she remembered her father telling her.

“What do you think?” her father asked again.

“Something’s going to happen and Johnson knows about it,” Toni immediately responded.

“Good girl!” said Shimon, proud of his tutelage of his only child.
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L
ater that spring, Mary returned to Boston for her third visit with Timothy Leary. Without mentioning any names, she reportedly alluded to Phil Graham’s outburst in Arizona earlier that year. “Oh God, where to begin,” Leary recalled her saying. “There’s a tremendous power struggle going in Washington. A friend of mine was losing the battle, a really bloody one. He got drunk and told a room of reporters about me and my boyfriend.
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“It’s really scary,” Mary continued. “You wouldn’t believe how well-connected some of these people are, and nobody picked it up.”
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Mary was alluding to the fact that Graham’s Phoenix outburst had not appeared in any newspaper or media outlet. She urged Leary to keep a lower profile with his psychedelic research. They also discussed the state of world affairs, with Mary telling him, “America doesn’t have to be run by these cold-war guys. They’re crazy, they are. They don’t listen. They don’t learn. They’re completely caught up in planning World War III. They can’t enjoy anything but power and control.”
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Her comments to Leary suggested that Jack might have told her about the July 1961 National Security Council (NSC) meeting in which the Pentagon
and the CIA seriously considered a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviets in late 1963.

Leary invited Mary to Mexico for further training in leading psychedelic sessions. She declined and offered a warning: “If you stir up too many waves, they’ll shut you down. Or worse.” She no longer trusted the phones or the mail, she told him, but said she would find a way to stay in touch. “And do be careful,” she underscored.
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On the sixth of May, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted to fire Timothy Leary, not for giving hallucinogens to students, but for failing to show up and teach some of his classes that spring. Leary received the news while in Mexico. He appeared to be relieved. His former Harvard boss, Professor David McClelland, the man who originally brought Leary to the university in 1959, thought he had become psychotic; his biographer thought he’d never been happier.
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Five years later, Leary reflected on his firing from Harvard:

I was never able to commit myself to the game of Harvard or even to the game of rehabilitation. Not even to the game of proselytizing for LSD itself. Nothing that doesn’t ring true to my ancient cell wisdom and to that central vibration beam within can hold my attention for very long. From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society, and that we would spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently disregarding the parochial social insanities.
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While in residence that May just north of Acapulco, Leary lamented: “One thing that didn’t happen was a visit from Mary Pinchot. I received a short cryptic note, postmarked Washington, D.C., typed and unsigned.” The note read:

PROGRAM GOING VERY WEL HERE. EXTREMELY WEL!!! HOWEVER, I WON’T BE JOINING YOU. TOO MUCH PUBLICITY.

YOUR SUMMER CAMP IS IN SERIOUS JEOPARDY.

I’LL CONTACT YOU AFTER YOU RETURN TO USA.
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The note, in all probability, was from Mary, but what did it mean? According to author Leo Damore, it was corroborating evidence of a “mild LSD trip” that Mary and Jack had shared at Joe Alsop’s home in Georgetown in May
1963. Sometime after Damore’s November 1990 interview with Timothy Leary, it appeared that Damore learned of this event. When I met with Damore in April 1993, he confided that the same confidential source who had told him about Mary and Jack’s rendezvous in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1959 had later also confided that Mary and Jack had, in fact, taken a “mild LSD trip” together several weeks before Jack’s commencement address at American University, and before his forty-sixth birthday party on May 29. Despite my repeated inquiry about the identity of the source, however, Damore would never reveal it.
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As to the note’s authenticity, it appeared to be legitimate: Timothy Leary was well known to be an obsessive pack rat who never threw away anything. According to his biographer, Robert Greenfield, Leary’s hoarding of his papers, letters, any kind of communication whatsoever, was legendary. “Throughout his life, Tim saved every scrap of paper that had ever crossed his desk,” said Greenfield. “The archive he had assembled was second to none. The sheer volume of the 465 boxes holding his papers was so overwhelming that at his death, they entirely filled a large two-bedroom apartment in the San Fernando Valley.”
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D
uring what would turn out to be the last five months of his life, President Kennedy would further define himself and his presidency. His newfound political trajectory would eventually distance him from Cold War ideology and move him closer to setting the stage for world peace. For years, Kennedy had been quietly nurturing the notion of disarmament. The Cuba debacles had awakened and emboldened the president. Twice burned by both the military and the CIA, Kennedy’s independence became clear. After the Cuban Missile Crisis and for the remainder of his presidency, he sought not only to avoid military and intelligence oversight, but also to evade their scrutiny as well. He was determined to forge a path toward setting the world stage for peace.

Yet despite ongoing secret negotiations with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain and Khrushchev in the early part of 1963, President Kennedy seemed pessimistic about the possibility of a nuclear arms treaty. At his news conference on March 21, when asked about the possibility of a test-ban agreement, he replied, “Well, my hopes are dimmed, but nevertheless I still hope.” On May 20, just three weeks before his historic, unprecedented commencement address at American University on June 10, he was quoted as saying, “No, I’m not hopeful, I’m not hopeful…. We have tried to get an
agreement [with the Soviets] on all the rest of it and then to the question of the number of inspections, but we were unable to get that. So I would say, I’m not hopeful at all.”
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