JFK with Mary Meyer (far right). Antoinette Bradlee is second on the left.
Posted on 06/01/2005 8:02:05 PM PDT by epluribus unum1
"...Ultimately the story died because of money. The Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine - with my blessing - backed away in what would have been a case of "checkbook journalism."
Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was Antoinette Bradlee's sister, divorced Cord Meyer. The Bradlees set up Mary's apartment and art studio in their converted garage. In January, 1962, Mary began a sexual relationship with President John F. Kennedy. She told her friends, Ann and James Truitt, that she was keeping a diary about the affair.
In 1962 Mary began visiting Timothy Leary, the director of research projects at Harvard University. Leary supplied LSD to Mary who used it with Kennedy. According to his biography, Flashbacks, Leary claims that Mary phoned him the day after Kennedy was assassinated: "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much... They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm scared. I'm afraid."
Maybe Mary's brain was fried on LSD, but her murder seems all too convenient, doesn't it?
Please ping the list.
All who read this might want to be sitting down and take a few deep breaths.
Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy: Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?
by Mark Riebling
Timothy Leary, the CIA, and LSD: A Narrative Chronology. Touches on Angleton, JFK, and the mysterious unsolved murder of Mary Meyer.
EXT. THE WHITE HOUSE -- SUNSET -- (JULY 1962)
snip
Spring 1962: Mary Meyer, recently divorced from her CIA husband, visits Leary at Harvard. She leans against the door post, hip tilted provocatively, studying him with green-blue eyes. Leary will later recall here as "amused, arrogant, aristocratic." She tells him she has a "friend who's a very important man, who wants to try LSD for himself." At the time, though Leary does not know this, Mary is having an affair with President Kennedy, which will include more than thirty visits to the White House (later confirmed by Presidential Secretary Kenneth O'Donnell). Mary tells Leary that the government is studying ways to "use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing." She asks him to "teach us how to run [LSD] sessions, use drugs to do good." Leary agrees. He provides her with drug samples and "session" reports, and is in touch with her every few weeks, advising her on how to be a "brainwasher." She swears him to secrecy.
Late July, 1962: While the First Lady is away at the Kennedy summer home in Hyannisport, Mary calls on JFK at the White House. She records the visit in her diary, and later describes it to her close friend James Truitt of the Washington Post. She and the President of the United States smoke two joints of marijuana, reportedly prompting the leader of the free world to say, "This isn't at all like cocaine. I'll get you some of that." Once he is suitably "loosened up" -- Leary has emphasized the need to put subjects in a "benevolent state" before turning them on -- Mary dispenses to Jack a dose of LSD. As it starts to "kick in," he goes out and stands on Harry Truman's balcony overlooking the rose-garden fountain, a soothing sight before him....
Fall 1962: Leary meets Mary Meyer in a room at Boston's Ritz Hotel. She alludes to her "hush-hush love affair," and tells him that "top people in Washington are turning on." According to Leary's recounting, she also says: "Do you remember the American Veterans Committee, that liberal veterans group you belonged to after the war? The CIA started that." She explains to him that "CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents.... dissident organizations in academia are also controlled." When Leary asks her how she knows all this, she explains: "I knocked you with those facts to get your attention. It's a standard intelligence trick." She confides that CIA has not only been running left-wing groups as fronts, but has been sponsoring more psychedelic research than he will ever know. "You are doing exploratory work the CIA tried to do in the 1950s. So they're more than happy to have you do their research for them. Since drug research is of vital importance to the intelligence agencies of this country, you'll be allowed to go on with your experiments as long as you keep it quiet," she advises.
Spring 1963: Leary again meets Mary Meyer at the Ritz. She says that her love affair has been exposed, although no publicity has resulted. "I don't trust the phones or the mail," she warns. He is to make no contact with her until further notice. May-June 1963: Mary warns Leary, who is conducting a psychedelic summer camp in Mexico, that their "sessions" are "in jeopardy" because he is attracting "too much publicity."
September 1963: Mary drives up to see Leary, now conducting experiments at a large private estate in Milbrook, New York. She gives him, for his experiments, a bottle of "the best LSD in the world," from the National Institute of Mental Health. She takes countersurveillance precautions, and says: "We had eight intelligent women turning on the most powerful men in Washington. And then we got found out.... I made a mistake in recruitment. A wife snitched on us... I've gotten mixed up in some dangerous matters."
December 1, 1963: Around this time Mary calls Leary, who had been "expecting a phone call from [her]... ever since the Kennedy assassination." According to Leary, she says: "They couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast. They've covered everything up.... I'm afraid. Be careful."
October 12, 1964: Mary Meyer is shot to death, execution-style, at 12:45 p.m., on a park towpath by the Georgetown Canal in Washington, D.C. Her body is identified by Ben Bradlee, Cord Meyer's brother-in-law, editor of the Washington Post. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton confiscates and later burns the diary in which Mary has recorded her liaisons with JFK. A black laborer with a wife and five children, 26-year old Raymond Crump, Jr., is arrested on suspicion of murdering Mary in a robbery attempt, but she had not been carrying a purse, and there is no credible eyewitness testimony placing Crump at the site.
July 20, 1965. A jury deliberates only eleven hours before acquitting Crump in Mary Meyer's death. The murder weapon is never found; the crime is never solved.
1965-66: FBI agents openly surveil Leary's drug experimentation compound at Milbrook. Leary, intimidated, considers relocating to Mexico. For jurisdictional reasons, the Bureau turns the case over to former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, now a county prosecutor, who later says: "The word was that at Leary's lair the panties were dropping as fast as the acid." Liddy leads a raid by sheriffs in March 1966. Leary is charged with possession of illegal drugs, but the case is dropped on technicalities after the Supreme Court's Miranda decision in June. This series of events imprints on Leary a deep distrust of the FBI and of "cops" generally.
January-August 1967: Ramparts, a radical magazine, exposes CIA sponsorship of the National Student Association, a Cord Meyer project. Meyer's best friend, James Angleton, assigns CIA officer Richard Ober to begin a leak investigation into the Ramparts story. Ober's probe is soon expanded into a spy program on the countercultural and student-protests movements, code named CHAOS.]
http://tinyurl.com/94f6m
Why would you ever throw out a book? Why wouldn't you donate it?
I'll never get to sleep tonight unless I push away from the computer SOON.
I am reading a wealth of info from this link!
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm
Harold Ickes (maybe the senior Ickes) and all kinds of names involved with Mary Meyers. This stuff goes DEEP.
James Angleton.
John Kennedy.
Phillip Graham.
Richard Helms.
Howard Hunt.
This is just unreal.
When I read things like this, I think of a mentor who died years ago. He felt that the elite of the Media controlled the Democrats. The MSM elites could elect a no body to become president or destroy anyone they wanted to. He all ways felt that Watergate and the resignation of Nixon was manipulatied by these MSM elites.
JFK with Mary Meyer (far right). Antoinette Bradlee is second on the left.
FYI and indexing.
"Yep. Did it once, thought they'd do it again."
"Damn our MSM. They are truly the enemy within."
Checkout my tagline re the MSM.
We are moving. We have over 12,000 books. A lot of them are coming with us. We donated the good ones in good condition. The others were tossed, and Graham's was one of 'em.
After leaving Vassar she obtained work as a journalist at United Press. This included writing for magazines such as Mademoiselle. Mary also became a member of the American Labor Party. This insured that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a file on Meyer's political activities. Mary, like her parents, was also a devoted pacifist.
In 1944 Mary met Cord Meyer, a lieutenant in the US Marines who was recovering from serious shrapnel injuries that had resulted in him losing an eye. The couple married on 19th April, 1945. Soon afterwards the couple went to San Francisco to attend the conference that established the United Nations. Cord went as an aide to Harold Stassen, whereas Mary, who was working for the North American Newspaper Alliance at the time, was one of the reporters sent to cover this important event.
snip
For a while Mary worked as an editor for the Atlantic Monthly. Her first child Quentin was born in 1945. After the birth of Michael in 1947 she became a housewife but still managed to attend classes at the Art Students League in New York City.
Like her husband, Mary became an advocate of world government. In May, 1947, Cord Meyer was elected president of the United World Federalists. Under his leadership, membership of the organization doubled in size. Albert Einstein was one of his most important supporters and personally solicited funds for the organization. Mary wrote for its journal, The United World Federalists.
Mary's third child, Mark, was born in 1950. The family now moved back to Cambridge. Cord was showing signs of becoming disillusioned with the idea of world government. He had experienced problems with members of the American Communist Party who had infiltrated the organizations he had established. It was about this time that he began working secretly for the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1950 Meyer formed the Committee to Frame a World Constitution with Robert Maynard Hutchins and Elizabeth Mann Borgese. As a result of this work Meyer made contact with the International Cooperative Alliance, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Indian Socialist Party and the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism. It is almost certain that this had been done on behalf of the CIA.
Allen W. Dulles made contact with Cord Meyer in 1951. He accepted the invitation to join the CIA. Dulles told Meyer he wanted him to work on a project that was so secret that he could not be told about it until he officially joined the organization. Meyer was to work under Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Meyer became part of what became known as Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the American media. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post): Meyer was Mockingbird's "principal operative".
Mary and the family now moved to Washington where they became members of the Georgetown Crowd. This group included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze. The Meyers also socialized with other CIA officers or CIA assets James Angleton (Cicely Angleton), Wistar Janney (Mary Wisnar), Ben Bradlee (Antoinette Bradlee) and James Truitt (Anne Truitt).
In August, 1953, Joseph McCarthy accused Cord Meyer of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer "security clearance". Suspicion also fell on Mary at this time and it was revealed that the FBI had been investigating her activities. However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against the Meyers. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner both came to Meyer's defence and refused to allow him to be interrogated by the FBI.
The FBI eventually revealed the charges against Meyer. Apparently he was a member of several liberal groups considered to be subversive by the Justice Department. This included being a member of the National Council on the Arts, where he associated with Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party and its presidential candidate in 1948. Meyer was eventually cleared of these charges and was allowed to keep his job.
Cord Meyer became disillusioned with life in the CIA and in January, 1954, he went to New York City and attempted to get a job in publishing. Although he saw contacts he had made during his covert work with the media (Operation MB) he was unable to obtain a job with any of the established book publishing firms. In the summer of 1954 the Meyer family's golden retriever was hit by a car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. The dog's death worried Cord. He told colleagues at the CIA he was afraid the same thing might happen to one of his children.
In the summer of 1954 the Meyers got new neighbours. John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie Kennedy purchased Hickory Hill, a house several hundred yards from where the Meyers lived. Mary became good friends with Jackie and they went on walks together.
In November, 1954, Meyer replaced Thomas Braden as head of International Organizations Division. Meyer began spending a lot of time in Europe. One of Meyer's tasks was to supervise Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States government broadcasts to Eastern Europe. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) Meyer was "overseeing a vast 'black' budget of millions of dollars channeled through phony foundation of a global network of associations and labor groups that on their surface appeared to be progressive".
On 18th December, 1956, Mary's nine-year-old son, Michael, was hit by a car on the curve of highway near their house and killed. It was the same spot where the family's golden retriever had been killed two years earlier. The tragedy briefly brought the couple together. However, in 1958, Mary filed for divorce. In her divorce petition she alleged "extreme cruelty, mental in nature, which seriously injured her health, destroyed her happiness, rendered further cohabitation unendurable and compelled the parties to separate."
Mary continued to live with her two sons in the family home of Langley Commons. She took up art and her sister, Antoinette Pinchot and her husband Ben Bradlee, allowed her to set up a studio in their converted garage. Mary also began a relationship with the abstract artist, Kenneth Noland. Mary also got to know Robert Kennedy, who had moved in to his brother's house, Hickory Hill, after John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy moved out in 1960.
snip
According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) James Angleton began bugging Mary's telephone and bedroom after she left Cord Meyer. This information came from an interview with Joan Bross, the wife of John Bross, a high-ranking CIA official. Angleton became a regular visitor to the family home and took Mary's sons fishing.
In October 1961, Mary began visiting John F. Kennedy in the White House. It was about this time she began an affair with the president. Mary told her friends, Ann and James Truitt, that she was keeping a diary about the relationship.
In 1962 Mary began visiting Timothy Leary, the director of research projects at Harvard University. Leary supplied LSD to Mary who used it with Kennedy. Leary also claimed that Mary helped influence Kennedy's views on nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Cuba. It was later discovered that the FBI was keeping a file on Mary. Later, James Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA admitted that the agency was bugging Mary's telephone and bedroom during this period.
Kennedy aide, Meyer Feldman, claimed in an interview with Nina Burleigh that the president might have discussed substantial issues with her: "I think he might have thought more of her than some of the other women and discussed things that were on his mind, not just social gossip."
In January, 1963, Philip Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, attended a convention of American newspaper editors in Phoenix. Graham, who was suffering from alcoholism, disclosed at the meeting that John F. Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Meyer. No newspaper reported this incident but Kennedy decided to bring an end to the affair. However, they continued to see each other at social functions.
According to his biography, Flashbacks, Timothy Leary claims that Mary phoned him the day after Kennedy was assassinated: "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much... They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm scared. I'm afraid."
In the summer of 1964 Meyer told friends that she believed someone had been inside her house while she was away. On another occasion she told Elizabeth Eisenstein that "she thought she had seen somebody leaving as she walked in". Mary reported these incidents to the police. Eisenstein said Mary was clearly fightened by these incidents.
On 12th October, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me". He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the tow path. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."
snip
(13) James DiEugenio, The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy, The Assassinations ((2003)
As noted earlier, Jim Truitt gave this curious tale its first public airing in 1976, on the heels of the Church Committee. From there, the Washington Post (under Bradlee) picked it up. There had been an apparent falling out between Truitt and Bradlee, and Truitt said that he wanted to show that Bradlee was not the crusader for truth that Watergate or his book on Kennedy had made him out to be. In the National Enquirer, Truitt stated that Mary had revealed her affair with Kennedy while she was alive to he and his wife. He then went further. In one of their romps in the White House, Mary had offered Kennedy a couple of marijuana joints, but coke-sniffer Kennedy said, "This isn't like cocaine. I'll get you some of that."
The chemical addition to the story was later picked up by drug guru Tim Leary in his book, Flashbacks. Exner-like, the angle grew appendages. Leary went beyond grass and cocaine. According to Leary, Mary Meyer was consulting with him about how to conduct acid sessions and how to get psychedelic drugs in 1962. Leary met her on several occasions and she said that she and a small circle of friends had turned on several times. She also had one other friend who was "a very important man" whom she also wanted to turn on. After Kennedy's assassination, Mary called Leary and met with him. She was cryptic but she did say, "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much." The implication being that a "turned on" JFK was behind the moves toward peace in 1963. Leary learned about Meyer's murder in 1965, but did not pull it all together until the 1976 Jim Truitt disclosure. With Leary, the end (for now) of the Meyer story paints JFK as the total '60s swinger: pot, coke, acid, women, and unbeknownst to Kennedy, Leary has fulfilled his own fantasy by being Kennedy's guide on his magical mystery tour toward peace.
But there is a big problem with Leary, his story, and those who use it (like biographers David Horowitz and Peter Collier). Leary did not mention Mary in any of his book
http://tinyurl.com/ddq4w
Julie & Tricia might. Their dad has been vilified and it looks like we are all going to learn what was really going on back then.
I thought the same thing.
In her book, Katharine the Great-which Mrs. Graham worked hard to suppress-Deborah Davis perhaps provided the real key to Watergate, charging that the Post's famed Watergate source-"Deep Throat"-was almost certainly Richard Ober, the right-hand man of James Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief and longtime liaison to Israel's Mossad.
Miss Davis revealed that Ober was in charge of a joint CIA-Israeli counterintelligence desk established by Angleton inside the White House. From this listening post, Ober (at Angleton's direction) provided inside information to the Post about Watergate that helped bring down the Nixon administration.
All told, considering the record of Katharine Graham and her Washington Post empire, Washington humorist Art Buchwald probably wasn't far off from the truth when he told the Washington elite who gathered for Mrs. Graham's 70th birthday: "There's one word that brings us all together here tonight. And that word is fear."
******
Graham was a manic depressive (first diagnosed in 1952) and a alcoholic. It is not uncommon for CIA people to suffer from psychotic illness. It probably is something to do with the job. Frank Wisner had similar problems. So did James Jesus Angleton.
Have either of Nixon's daughters commented?
This whole thang is too messy and we need to keep track of the lies, because it's looking like a typical raid or exposure wherein it'll soon be every man for himself and about that time, some pieces of truth will emerge.
The stories are already contradicting other stories.
IS THIS TRUE?!!!
******
The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. 8
MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:
* Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)
* William Paley (President, CBS)
* Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
* Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)
* Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)
* Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
* Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)
* James Copley (Copley News Services)
* Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
* C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
* Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
* ABC
* NBC
* Associated Press
* United Press International
* Reuters
* Hearst Newspapers
* Scripps-Howard
* Newsweek magazine
* Mutual Broadcasting System
* Miami Herald
* Old Saturday Evening Post
* New York Herald-Tribune
Must admit with three kids under three yrs I wasn't paying close attention to Watergate at the time....more concerned with Viet Nam.
But Nixon may be given a new look & more fair look with this revelation....I hope so. There is at least some perspective after all these years.
AS they say in the movie WALL STREET: Greed is good!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.