Mary's Mosaic (51 page)

With her husband unraveling, it was not only possible, but very likely, that the increasingly desperate Katharine turned to Clare Booth Luce for guidance and advice, her marriage having survived a similar crisis. If Clare believed LSD had “saved” her marriage, she might well have counseled Katharine in
that direction. And given Clare’s endorsement of LSD as a cutting-edge therapeutic tool, Katharine may have sought out Mary Meyer for assistance—not only to help Phil, but herself as well.

By 1963, however, it appeared Phil was beyond Katharine’s reach, that he would continue to wrest control of the
Post
away from her. According to Deborah Davis, “Katharine had pretty much given up on the marriage,” yet was desperate to retain control of her family’s newspaper. In an interview Davis gave in 1992, she told
Steamshovel Press
editor Kenn Thomas that “there’s some speculation that either she arranged for him [Phil] to be killed or somebody said to her, ‘don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.’”
¹¹⁶
While Leo Damore, Timothy Leary, and Deborah Davis never definitively connected all the dots, the “somebody” in this equation, in this author’s opinion, was the same element within the CIA that was orchestrating the assassination of President Kennedy. “Anybody can commit a murder,” said legendary CIA asset Bill Corson, “but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.”

Katharine Graham’s Faustian deal with the devil would give her complete control and ownership of the
Washington Post
, provided she maintained the same polices and agreements her husband had arranged before his “enlightenment,” post–Bay of Pigs. The deal had to have included Katharine not squealing on anything the Agency wanted kept secret, as well as her revealing any matters the CIA wanted to know about—including Mary Meyer’s influence on the president. Undoubtedly, Mary was aware of the kind of power the CIA wielded, as well as its treachery, and Katharine’s betrayal likely opened up an entirely new can of worms, even perhaps allowing Mary the realization that Phil’s demise might well become a harbinger of hers. Danger was lurking. Only the chosen few knew they were going to go to the source to cut off the head of the snake. Mary would be spared—so long as she made no waves. For Mary, that would eventually become impossible.

O
n September 24, the president traveled with Mary and her sister to their family’s Grey Towers estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, to dedicate a gift from the Pinchot family to the U.S. Forest Service. It consisted of a large parcel of Pinchot family land, as well as the Pinchot mansion, the former residence of Mary’s uncle Gifford Pinchot. Tony still had no inkling of her sister’s affair with Jack. “There was no sexual thing evident,” she told author Sally Bedell Smith. “He was easy with both of us. I always felt he had liked me as much as Mary. You could say there was a little rivalry.”
¹¹⁷

After the dedication ceremony, Jack and the two sisters went to their mother’s house to look at old family pictures. The elderly Ruth Pinchot, once a spirited champion of women’s equality and liberation, was now supporting Barry Goldwater in his bid to unseat Kennedy in 1964. Jack reportedly took it in stride and was jovial throughout the visit.

Unexpectedly, that same day the U.S. Senate ratified the president’s Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. Much had been done to convince the American public of the treaty’s importance. Under Jack’s supervision, Norman Cousins and the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had led a successful campaign for public approval. Nikita Khrushchev would sign the treaty sixteen days later. The Soviet premier considered the treaty to be his country’s and America’s greatest mutual achievement. He proposed that the two leaders use it as an opening “to seek solutions of other ripe international questions.” In a letter that followed, Khrushchev outlined certain tasks for immediate consideration, including ratification of a nonaggression pact between the countries of NATO and member states of the Warsaw Pact; creation of nuclear-free zones in various regions of the world; and a ban on the future spread of all nuclear weapons. He closed the letter with the following: “Their implementation would facilitate a significant strengthening of peace, improvement of international relations, would clear the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the delivering of peoples from the threat of war.”
¹¹⁸

“Khrushchev’s vision, as inspired by the test ban treaty,” wrote James Douglass, “corresponded in a deeply hopeful way to Kennedy’s American University address. In his letter, Khrushchev was signaling his readiness to work with Kennedy on a host of projects. If the two leaders should succeed as they had on the test ban treaty, in only a few of Khrushchev’s suggested projects, they would end the Cold War.”
¹¹⁹

With the ratification of the test ban treaty and Khrushchev’s imminent signing of the document, Kennedy had successfully fashioned a new path, bringing the world closer to a “genuine peace.” That he had learned the good news when he was with Mary, and that she, too, had long nurtured the goal of a world moving toward peace without war, had to have been a profound, defining moment between the two. An extraordinary accomplishment had unfolded that day, finally taking place at Mary’s family home. According to Kenny O’Donnell, present that day at the Pinchot estate, Mary and Jack were
furtively smiling at one another, the news of the ratification having reached the presidential entourage.
¹²⁰

Also that September, President Kennedy signaled his intention to develop two additional, significant paths toward peace: a plan for a secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro that would eliminate Cuba as a campaign issue in the 1964 election; and a new road map for ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam by the start of his second term as president. With regard to the latter, that September, Kennedy sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor that September on a ten-day fact-finding expedition in Vietnam, the goal of which was to determine America’s exit strategy from the war. Kennedy took the long view, reportedly confiding to his adviser Kenny O’Donnell, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy ‘red scare’ on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure I
am
reelected.”
¹²¹
President Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263) became a testament to his intention to the withdrawal from Vietnam.

In his 1987 book
The Twilight Struggle
, former ambassador William (“Bill”) Attwood documented that he was a special adviser on African affairs at the United Nations in September 1963. He then mentioned that he was talking to ABC news reporter Lisa Howard about Africa when she casually brought up the fact that she had recently interviewed Fidel Castro. In an interview for this book, Bill Attwood’s wife, Simone, added something more. Simone was adamant that both she and Bill knew of “Mary’s affair with Kennedy. I think a lot of people knew,” she added. According to Simone, after Bill’s return from Africa in June, Mary Meyer had had a hand in persuading Attwood, her former boyfriend, to contact Lisa Howard as a way to begin moving the sour relationship with Cuba toward rapprochement.
¹²²
Already, as early as March 1963, President Kennedy had been instructing his staff to “start thinking along more flexible lines” vis-à-vis the island nation and its leader. According to White House aide Gordon Chase, who became Bill Attwood’s White House contact that fall, Kennedy was interested in “quietly enticing Castro over to us.”
¹²³

A secret Bill Attwood–Lisa Howard alliance with Cuba’s United Nations representative Carlos Lechuga developed. Lechuga told Attwood that Kennedy’s American University address had impressed Castro, and he invited
Attwood to Havana to begin a dialogue with the Cuban leader. The CIA, meanwhile, was taking it all in. The Attwood-Howard effort with Cuba on Kennedy’s behalf became a target of CIA surveillance. According to David Talbot, “In one call to Havana, [Lisa] Howard was overheard excitedly describing Kennedy’s enthusiasm for rapprochement. The newswoman had no sense of the shock waves she was causing within the halls of Washington power.”
¹²⁴

On October 3, Jean Daniel, editor of the French weekly
L’Observateur
, told Bill Attwood that he was on his way to Havana to see Castro. Attwood arranged for Daniel to meet with Kennedy before he left for Cuba. “When I left the Oval Office of the White House,” Daniel recalled, “I had the impression that I was a messenger for peace. I was convinced that Kennedy wanted rapprochement, that he wanted me to come back and tell him that Castro wished the rapprochement too.”
¹²⁵

On the very day of President Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, Daniel was meeting with Fidel Castro. “I was happy about the message I was delivering. These two men seemed ready to make peace. I am
certain
about this!
Certain!
Even after all these years.”
¹²⁶
It was during this meeting with Fidel Castro that both men first learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. According to Daniel, after a long, shocked silence, Castro had said: “This is terrible. They are going to say we did it…. This is the end of your mission.”
¹²⁷
And it was. The Pentagon and the CIA had been working clandestinely against the president’s efforts to change policies towards both Cuba and Vietnam. Noted author David Talbot: “As the only man in the room who consistently opposed military escalation in Vietnam, the president was compelled to operate in a stealthy fashion to avoid becoming completely isolated within his own government.”
¹²⁸

During the fall of 1963, the Vietnam situation markedly deteriorated, with U.S. officials split over whether to back a military coup in Vietnam to oust the Diem regime. On October 2, journalist Arthur Krock’s column in the
New York Times
had quoted reporter Richard Starnes, whose interview with “a high United States source” privy to CIA operations in Saigon, had been, by Krock’s standards, unassailable: “The C.I.A.’s growth was ‘likened to a malignancy’ which the ‘very high official was not sure even the White House could control any longer,’” Krock wrote. He added, “If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government] it will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon. The agency ‘represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.’”
¹²⁹

A month later, the Catholic president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother were assassinated by a CIA-funded coup. The event devastated Kennedy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had been present when Kennedy received the news; he would later say he had never seen the president so upset.
¹³⁰
That afternoon, Jack asked Mary to be with him. It appears this was Mary’s last documented trip to the White House, though it remains unknown whether it was the last time they saw one another.

M
ary’s whereabouts when she first heard the fatal news from Dallas are also unknown. At 5:14 that afternoon, hours after Jack’s death, she called his personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln and left her phone number.
¹³¹
Later, Mary asked Anne Truitt to spend the night with her at her house in Georgetown. “She was so sad,” recalled Truitt. “I tried to comfort her. We cried, but we didn’t talk that much.”
¹³²

As Jack lay in the Capitol Rotunda over the weekend, Mary visited his casket. On Monday, November 25, she attended the funeral and sat with Tony, who would years later recall that her sister “didn’t seem very upset. It puzzled me.”
¹³³
At the burial at Arlington Cemetery later that day, Mary was seen by one of her former art students, Ariel Dougherty, who had been in Mary’s painting classes at Georgetown Day School in the late 1950s. Alone, solemn, dressed in a long, gold-colored suede coat that belted around her waist, a scarf loosely wrapped around her neck, Mary stood adjacent to the gravesite throughout the entire ceremony.
¹³⁴
As far as their vision for world peace had come, it had been—in one instant on November 22, 1963—completely obliterated.

Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum 273 (NSAM 273), which set the tone for increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam by transferring the burden of increased covert operations against North Vietnam from the South Vietnam to the United States. The following March, Johnson penned NSAM 288, initiating the full escalation of the Vietnam War. Before its end, in undoubtedly the worst and most costly blunder of American foreign policy, approximately 3.8 million people would lose their lives, including more than 58,000 American combat soldiers.

In October 1963, Cuban UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga had delivered an official message to President Kennedy that Fidel Castro desired a lasting peace with the United States. Lyndon Johnson would have no part of it. In addition, he refused to sign the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, despite its passage by the U.S. Senate in September 1963.