Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (37 page)

In 1965, after returning from an around-the-world trip, Leary tried to track down his old friend. Remembering that Mary was a Vassar graduate, he called the alumni office to find her whereabouts. The secretary who cheerily answered the phone grew somber when Leary gave her Mary’s name. “I’m sorry to say that she is, ah, deceased,” she told Leary. “Sometime last fall, I believe.” Digging frantically through old
New York Times
clippings he got from a contact at the newspaper, Leary began sobbing as he found out what happened. The previous October, while taking an afternoon walk along the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown, Mary had been shot twice, once in the head and once through the heart. There was no evidence that Mary, who left her purse at home, had been robbed or sexually assaulted. A suspect had been arrested—a twenty-five-year-old African-American day laborer named Ray Crump Jr. But Crump was later acquitted of the crime and it was never solved.

The murder of Mary Meyer would become one of the more baffling and bizarre subplots in the Kennedy drama. Assassination researchers have pored over accounts of the crime, seeking possible links between the murders of the two secret lovers. The spectral appearance of James Angleton in the Meyer murder story greatly contributed to the fog of suspicion floating around the case.

Following the murder, Ben and Tony Bradlee got an urgent overseas phone call from Mary’s friend Anne Truitt, who told them Mary had kept a diary containing sensitive information. Mary had requested that it be destroyed if anything ever happened to her, said her friend. When the Bradlees went looking for the journal, first at Mary’s house and then at her studio, they found a sheepish Angleton apparently in hot pursuit of the revealing notebook. The first time, the spy—known as “The Locksmith” in CIA circles—was already inside Mary’s house, rummaging through her belongings. On the second occasion, the Bradlees found him trying to pick the lock on Mary’s studio. The spook slinked off, with barely a word. The story grew even weirder the next day when Tony Bradlee, after finding the diary and reading about her sister’s affair with JFK, handed it over to Angleton so he could safely dispose of it—as if the CIA was the only power on earth capable of destroying a document. But Angleton did not do away with the diary, and when he admitted this to Tony years later, she demanded that he return it. Later, she claimed, she burned it in her fireplace. “None of us has any idea what Angleton did with the diary while it was in his possession, nor why he failed to follow Mary and Tony’s instructions,” Bradlee wrote in his 1995 memoir, an account that left more unexplained than answered.

Bradlee was still vague about the Angleton incident in an interview for this book, ascribing the CIA official’s illegal entry and attempted break-in to his eccentricity and his possible amorous obsession with Mary. “I thought Jim was just like a lot of men, who had a crush on Mary,” the legendary former
Washington Post
editor said, sitting in his office at the newspaper, where he occupies emeritus status. “Although the idea of him as a lover just stretches my imagination, especially for Mary, because she was an extremely attractive woman. And he was so weird! He looked odd, he was off in the clouds somewhere. He was always mulling over some conspiracy when he wasn’t working on his orchids. It was hard to have a conversation with him. I bet there are still twelve copies of Mary’s diary in the CIA somewhere.” Bradlee denied that the diary contained any secrets about the CIA or other revealing information, beyond the passages about her romance with JFK. “I thought about this when I wrote my book. I don’t think there’s anything hidden away in my psyche that I haven’t come clean on.”

At Mary’s funeral in the National Cathedral, the solemn, gray stone fortress overlooking Georgetown, Cord Meyer wept uncontrollably. He was consoled during the ceremony by his two closest friends in the CIA, Richard Helms and James Angleton, who sat on either side of him in the pew. A memo written at the time by William Sullivan, the number three man in the FBI, revealed that Helms and Angleton “have been very much involved with matters pertaining to the death and funeral of Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer.” In an interview years later with Mary Meyer’s biographer, Nina Burleigh, Helms could not recall just what it was about Mary’s passing that had required so much of his attention.

Friends of Mary told Burleigh they felt her killing was in some way connected to her relationship with Kennedy, but they had no proof. During the final months of her life, reported her biographer, Mary seemed to be the target of a disturbing surveillance, with her Georgetown house broken into on more than one occasion, including once when she and her two sons were sleeping upstairs. “What
are
they looking for in my house?” she was heard to plaintively ask.

In his 2003 book about Washington, D.C.’s intrigue-filled society world,
The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club
, author C. David Heymann told a remarkable story about visiting a fading Cord Meyer in his Washington nursing home, just six weeks before his death. Who did he think had killed his ex-wife, Heymann asked Meyer? “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” the mortally ill CIA man reportedly “hissed.” But the credibility of some of the author’s earlier work had been challenged, and his story about Meyer’s final testament received scant attention. The truth about Mary Meyer’s murder would remain clouded in the same mists that enveloped the demise of her lover.

What is clear is that Mary Meyer’s personal life was of intense interest to the CIA, before and after her death. Angleton was fully aware of the ecstatic sway she had over the president. And he believed that she actually influenced administration policy, nudging it in a more dovish direction. In some circles, this made her a figure to watch closely. “With her combination of access and disregard for convention, Mary Meyer became a female type, the classic dangerous woman,” wrote Burleigh.

Mary Meyer was John Kennedy’s link to a post–Cold War future that neither of them would live to see. She connected him to the phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, and mind exploration that would light up the late sixties. The tightly controlled JFK only allowed himself to sample these pleasures, but that was certainly enough to send a shiver of fear through the national security command. CIA officials were deeply involved in drug research aimed at rendering an enemy harmless. They worried that Kennedy was being similarly disarmed.

A friend of Mary later told the story of the time she brought a half dozen marijuana joints to the White House. Kennedy smoked three of them before they finally took effect. As he closed his eyes and let the reefer carry him away, he mused dreamily, “Suppose the Russians did something now.” The Cold Warriors with a window on the president’s extracurricular exploits no doubt wondered the same.

AS AN ORATOR, JOHN
Kennedy is known primarily for two speeches—his anthemic “ask not” inaugural address in which he challenged Americans to new heights of national purpose and his dramatic June 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in which he confronted a communist system that was forced to wall in its own people. Video images from these two ringing addresses have become enshrined in the national memory through endless replay.

But Kennedy’s greatest moment as the voice of his nation came two weeks before his tumultuous Berlin appearance, on the morning of June 10, when he delivered the commencement address at American University in Washington. The president’s Peace Speech, as it became known, caused little stir at the time. But it carried one of the most radical messages ever delivered by an American president: it is possible to live peacefully in the world with even the most formidable enemies. This was a concept with profound implications during the deep freeze of the Cold War.

President Kennedy delivered his visionary remarks from a stage wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting that had been erected on the university’s Reeves Athletic Field. Looking out at the crowd assembled under a bright, cloudless sky, Kennedy made history by proposing an end to the Cold War. It was time for Americans and Russians alike to break free of militarism’s cold grip, he said. The public had been indoctrinated to believe that peace was impossible, he told the audience, but that was not true. “Our problems are man-made—therefore, they can be solved by man.” Political speeches during the Cold War era typically vilified the Communist enemy and glorified the American way of life. But, remarkably, the American University speech challenged Americans, as well as Russians, to rethink their attitudes toward peace and each other. “Every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home,” declared Kennedy. His call for national introspection about the defining conflict of the day marked a sharp break from the period’s triumphalist rhetoric.

Kennedy then did something equally startling—he sought to humanize the Russians, our Cold War bogeyman. Americans might “find communism profoundly repugnant…but no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” With this ice-breaking statement, Kennedy launched into a passage of such sweeping eloquence and empathy for the Russian people—the enemy that a generation of Americans had been taught to fear and hate—that it still has the power to inspire. This passage ended with poetic cadence: “We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

The president concluded his speech by vowing that America would “never start a war. We do not want a war…. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression.” It was a stark rejoinder to the hard-liners in his administration who were pushing for a preemptive military solution to the Cold War.

The Peace Speech received a muted reaction. After one week, it elicited only 896 letters from the public. (A bill on the cost of freight brought over 28,000 into the White House during the same week.) Goldwater and other Capitol Hill Republicans paid scant attention, succinctly—and predictably—brushing aside the speech’s “soft stand.” Moscow signaled its pleasure with the speech by allowing the Voice of America to broadcast it into Russia and by reprinting the full text in
Izvestia
. But eleven days after the speech, Khrushchev used it to win points with his Central Committee, strangely mirroring Kennedy’s domestic enemies by belittling the president’s call for peace as an expression of weakness. (Privately, however, the Soviet leader called it “the best speech by any president since Roosevelt.”)

The Peace Speech has grown more lustrous with time, with historian Michael Beschloss anointing “the lyrical address” as “easily the best speech of Kennedy’s life.” This estimation is shared by surviving dignitaries of the administration. At a “Recollecting JFK” forum at the Kennedy Library in October 2003, Robert McNamara grew euphoric when the speech was evoked. “Let me comment on this speech,” he told the audience. “Most of you, probably all of you, have never read it, never heard it. Please read it. It’s one of the great documents of the twentieth century.”

In a recent interview, the former defense secretary elaborated on the speech’s historic significance. “The American University speech laid out exactly what Kennedy’s intentions were,” McNamara told me in a voice gravelly with age. “If he had lived, the world would have been different, I feel quite confident of that. Whether we would have had détente sooner, I’m not sure. But it would have been a less dangerous world, I’m certain of that.”

Kennedy’s landmark speech was nothing less than an attempt to end the nuclear stare-down between the two superpowers that had held the world in its thrall for over a decade, ever since the Soviets had begun their own atom bomb testing in 1949. In recent years, it has become fashionable for conservatives and hawkish liberals to claim Kennedy as one of their own. But Kennedy’s impassioned American University address clearly demonstrated he was no longer a Cold War liberal. “No, Kennedy was not a hawkish Cold Warrior,” Ted Sorensen remarked years later. He was a pragmatist, said Sorensen, who was deeply aware of how human folly led to tragedy. And he was determined to demilitarize relations between the nuclear powers before catastrophe could strike.

Kennedy, a realist, understood that the journey to end the Cold War would stretch “a thousand miles,” but he was determined to take the first step. Though he was under no illusions about the Soviet system and its ambitions, he yearned to break free from the fevered spell of anticommunist demonology. Ever since World War II, America had been dominated by “a permanent war establishment,” in the words of maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills. This war establishment—which included the country’s militarized executive branch and corporate sector as well as the defense colossus headquartered in the Pentagon—justified its existence by creating a constant, free-floating state of anxiety and animosity. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end,” Mills wrote in his durable 1956 work,
The Power Elite
. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” But the Kennedy presidency tried to secede from this reign of fear. The boldness of this attempt has not been fully appreciated by historians.

The Peace Speech was the masterpiece of the Kennedy-Sorensen creative partnership. Here was the heart of the administration laid bare. The speech was born of JFK’s deepest aspirations as a world leader—and his sharp sense of political timing. But the soaring, utopian language was Sorensen. Presidential historian James MacGregor Burns has suggested that leaders rarely achieve greatness without taking their nations to war. But what the American University address eloquently argued was that great leadership in the nuclear age came from avoiding war—a spasmodic exchange of fire and poison that would mean “all we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours,” as Kennedy told the audience that morning.