Mary's Mosaic (5 page)

Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s foremost men of letters, once remarked that Damore’s work spoke to “a strong moral backbone. He writes of the moral choices people must make in their lives and the consequences of these choices—made or not made.”
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A graduate of Kent State University’s School of Journalism and a reporter for the
Cape Cod Times
from 1969 to 1974, Leo Damore first published
The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
in 1967. Drawing on anecdotes from neighbors, employees, friends, and acquaintances, the book sought not to sensationalize or focus on Kennedy’s politics, sex life, or even his presidency, but to focus on capturing the flavor of the area where the young John Kennedy and his family spent their summers. “Leo wrote his simple but eloquent biography in a scholarly fashion,” noted fellow Cape Cod
journalist Frances I. Broadhurst, “painstakingly drawing from all local sources available in print or through hundreds and hundreds of interviews.”
¹⁰

After the release of
Senatorial Privilege
, Damore returned to his research on Mary Pinchot Meyer, which had originally been sparked by President Kennedy’s longtime friend and closest adviser Kenneth (“Kenny”) P. O’Donnell. Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers were President Kennedy’s two closest aides and confidantes, part of the “Irish Mafia” that served the political careers of both Jack and his brother Bobby. In 1966, Damore had the good fortune to be introduced to O’Donnell by attorney James (“Jimmy”) H. Smith, Esq., of Falmouth, Massachusetts. Both would work for O’Donnell’s unsuccessful Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign in 1970. Shortly before O’Donnell’s death in 1977, Leo Damore did a favor for the ailing Kennedy insider, having located an estranged family member. In appreciation, O’Donnell agreed to allow Damore to interview him in depth about Mary Pinchot Meyer, her involvement in the Kennedy White House, and her love affair with the president. That interview would inspire Damore’s fascination with what he termed “the Goddess behind the throne….”

I first met Leo Damore in the winter of 1992. He had already been researching Mary Meyer’s life for nearly three years. Our friendship grew quickly. For nearly two years, we spent hours talking on the phone, interspersed with my visits to his Connecticut residence. Knowing Mary Meyer’s family and some of her community as I did, I was often able to assist in his understanding certain dynamics of some of the people in Washington. While Leo shared with me a good deal of what he had uncovered, it was by no means everything, as I discovered many years later.

In the spring of 1993, a groundbreaking event occurred in the course of Damore’s research. It allowed him, he told me, to finally solve the murder of Mary Meyer and uncover why certain forces within our government had targeted her for “termination.” However, later that same year, Leo began a mysterious downward spiral of paranoia and depression, the causes of which may never be fully known. Several of his closest friends reported he believed his phone had been wiretapped, and that he was being followed. He told one close friend that he was convinced he’d been poisoned. In October of 1995, Leo Damore shot himself in the presence of a nurse and a policeman. An autopsy later revealed an undiagnosed brain tumor, but this was not without suspicion. Damore never completed a final manuscript for “Burden of Guilt,” but his research—most of which eventually came into my possession—became one of the cornerstones for my own sojourn, as did my friendship with him.

As news of Leo’s death spread, two well-known authors and one newcomer would begin vying to pick up what Damore had started. The first was the prominent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In November of 1995, less than a month after Leo’s death, Hersh wrote to Damore’s principal research assistant, Mark O’Blazney, seeking Damore’s materials, saying that he knew how “active and very diligent Damore had been in his research—some of those he sought to interview told me of his requests, not only for his book
Senatorial Privilege
but in his current pursuit about the story of Mary Meyer. I also know from his earlier work that few had come to understand the [Kennedy] family as he had, essentially from his earlier book on Ted [Kennedy].”
¹¹
Hersh’s courtship of O’Blazney, who closely guarded Leo’s vault, was short-lived, however. O’Blazney rightly claimed that Damore had bequeathed his research to him, since the author had been unable to remunerate O’Blazney for the work he had done during the last year of his life. As members of the Damore family considered mounting a legal battle for ownership, Hersh decided it was too big a bother, though he always suspected the real story behind Mary Meyer and her death to be a giant bombshell.
¹²

Within a year, two other journalists came upon the scene almost simultaneously. The first was John H. Davis, an author of six books, who was a wellknown, respected Kennedy assassination researcher, himself a Kennedy insider and a first cousin to Jackie Kennedy. Davis had an inside track to the Kennedy family that gave him a unique perspective. As a relative who had ingratiated himself, he knew many of the confidential workings of the Kennedy clan, including some family members’ real beliefs about the Kennedy assassination. Davis himself had absolutely no confidence whatsoever in the Warren Report. In particular, his book
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(1988) has remained a highly respected work with regard to the role of organized crime in JFK’s assassination. With the assistance of attorney Jimmy Smith, Davis acquired access to Leo Damore’s research on Mary Meyer. In May 1996, editor Fred Jordan at Fromm Publishing International offered Davis a hefty book contract that included an immediate advance of $110,000. The book was to be titled
John F. Kennedy and Mary Pinchot Meyer: A Tale of Two Murdered Lovers
, and was scheduled to be completed by June 30, 1997. Davis took the same position in his attempt as his predecessor Leo Damore: namely, that Mary Meyer hadn’t been wantonly murdered, but assassinated because “she knew too much.”

While John Davis was at work on his Mary Meyer book, author Noel Twyman published
Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
in 1997. The book
was exhaustive in its research, ultimately laying the blame for the president’s assassination at the front (and back) door of the CIA. Davis was unequivocal: Twyman had “completely solved the crime of the century.” Bolstered by Damore’s research, Twyman’s book further substantiated for Davis why the CIA had a keen interest in Mary Meyer after the Warren Report was made public.

But like Leo Damore, John Davis would never complete his book about Mary, despite his access to Damore’s discoveries and what certain members of the Kennedy family had shared with him. There may be several explanations for this. Both John Davis and Leo Damore ultimately linked the murder of Mary Meyer to the assassination of President Kennedy, which Davis had firmly come to believe had been masterminded by the CIA. Was it just coincidence that the two attempts to demonstrate a CIA conspiracy in the demise of Mary Meyer would never be published during this period? I don’t think so. John H. Davis was a cum laude graduate of Princeton and, like Leo Damore, a prolific author and respected researcher. It was possible that Davis’s alcoholism, well known to his close friends, prevented the book’s publication, and the fact that he eventually suffered a severe stroke, though that didn’t occur until 2002. When I interviewed Davis in New York in 2004, his disorientation and confusion were apparent; intermittently, he was incoherent. But his friend Jimmy Smith, who had been Damore’s attorney and close friend, recalled a chilling telephone conversation with Davis in early 1999.

“John,” inquired Jimmy Smith, “what the hell is going on with the book on Mary Pinchot Meyer?”

“Oh, I’m not doing that,” replied Davis. “I decided I wanted to live….”
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When I queried Smith about this remark, he said he was sure Davis’s life had been threatened, that an attempt would have been made on his life had he published
John F. Kennedy and Mary Pinchot Meyer: A Tale of Two Murdered Lovers.
Davis’s previous books on the Kennedy assassination and the Mafia made him no stranger to the world of organized crime. He likely would have been able to discriminate between a serious threat and one that wasn’t.

Journalist Nina Burleigh contacted me in 1996 to talk about Mary Meyer. Our initial interview lasted several hours. I was heartened at the time by some of her insights, and for the next two years or so continued to offer suggestions when asked. Though Nina would eventually acknowledge my assistance, as well as quote me throughout, I was very disappointed by her conclusions in
A Very Private Woman.
Despite some well-researched biographical information on Mary’s early life, Burleigh’s portrayals of Mary’s relationship with Timothy Leary, the nature of her relationship with Jack Kennedy, and her final
disposition toward Mary’s alleged assailant, Ray Crump Jr., and his attorney, Dovey Roundtree, were not only shortsighted, but also ultimately inaccurate and misinformed.

W
ho then bears the “burden of guilt,” as Leo Damore once coined it, for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer? And who among us would weep for the ruined life of the wrongfully prosecuted Raymond Crump Jr.—a defenseless, meek young African American man scapegoated for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed? Who would dare to step forward to undertake the journey for the deeper truth of what really occurred? Author Leo Damore may well have given his life for this story. It is his burden—and Mary Meyer’s—that I have ultimately endeavored to shoulder.

Members of my immediate and extended family, as well as Wistar Janney’s remaining friends and community, may find my conclusions all too outrageous and troublesome. Everyone is, of course, ultimately entitled to his own opinion—
but not to his own set of facts
. And the hidden history of this narrative—the true facts beneath the surface, much of which is revealed here for the very first time—strongly supports the conclusions that I have established.

Whatever remaining anguish—mine, as well as the blemish upon the soul of America—my faith dictates that eventually it will have a redemptive impact, only because truth, when it is confronted and finally understood, has the power to heal.

1

Fate’s Engagement

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

—Anaïs Nin

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

—Edward Abbey

In some far place, where all the lovely things

Of earth are born, the gods no longer weep.

She has returned to them. And what she brings

We lose, but always keep.

—Mary Pinchot (Meyer)

(From her poem “Requiem”)
¹

A
CHILLY
O
CTOBER
wind sent leaves scudding across the cobblestones of Washington’s elegant Georgetown streets as Mary Pinchot Meyer set out on her customary early morning walk to her art studio. She was lithe and feminine, radiant with a beauty that still turned heads. On that day, too, she was almost ageless with grace. Her svelte frame belied the strength within her, fed perhaps by a rare reservoir of spiritual intensity. It was Monday morning, October 12, 1964. Two days later would be her forty-fourth birthday, the first
without the man she had come to love, and with whom she had shared her hope for a world in pursuit of peace.
²

In spite of the raw autumn temperature just above freezing that signaled winter’s approach, there was the promise of an impending sun’s warmth. Still, the weather called for several layers of clothing in anticipation of the longer walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that had become her daily ritual each afternoon after she painted. The walk from her Thirty-Fourth Street home took less than ten minutes. Her artist’s studio, a converted brick garage with two skylights in its tin roof, was located in the alleyway behind her sister Tony and brother-in-law Ben Bradlee’s N Street house, itself a poignant reminder, only because its location was just seven doors away from where her lover, the president, had lived before moving into the White House in 1960. That morning, however, she may have pondered the recent estrangement from her sister and brother-in-law. Months earlier, a schism had developed, primarily involving Ben, whom she had come to distrust. “Since his first marriage was a failure,” she told her friends Jim and Anne Truitt, “he’s trying twice as hard with Tony. One and a half would be enough.”
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The capital city was still reeling from the unfathomable trauma that had taken place eleven months earlier in Dallas. It had left a deep wound in the fabric of America’s soul and identity, and in the meaning of civilization across the globe. Festering, the wound wasn’t about to heal, or even recede. That would require, among other things, an elixir called truth, not its subversion in the form of the so-called Warren Report that had emerged three weeks earlier from Supreme Court justice Earl Warren’s commission on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For Mary, the report may have been further evidence of the infection that had already taken hold, long before the nightmare in Dallas. Like a viral cancerous army, rogue elements within the highest levels of the American government had usurped the hope and vision she and Jack had shared and nurtured, ending America’s dream for the president’s new trajectory toward world peace. She wasn’t about to let the Warren Commission lie go unchallenged. She had made her decision to stand up and be counted.
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