Mary's Mosaic (67 page)

Two hours after receiving the Trento threat, Gregory Douglas responded in kind:

From: G Douglas [email address deleted]

Sent: Sunday, November 03, 2002 9:15
P.M
.

To: Joe Trento [email address deleted]

Subject: RE:

Mr. Trento:

The documents I received from Bob Crowley, mailed by his son Greg, in 1996, were freely given to me as an author. Bob had been assisting me with important material for several years previously.

His only caveat was that I not make use of these before he died and I have not done so.

I know from Bob that he gave a copy of the Kennedy file to Corson and that it vanished after his death.

What I have are the originals and also the originals of many other fascinating subjects.

Please be advised that Bob sent these to me
prior
to his death and that they therefore do not fall under any literary property over which you now claim to have rights.

In answer to your specific demands, be advised that I have no intention of sending you any list of this material in question and neither do I have any intention of sending you anything else.

In the event that you dare to address me again, I will personally post some of the more sensitive documents on the Internet and personally thank you for having sent me these from your own holdings of Crowley’s papers.

Bob told me you were a light weight hack and it is also obvious that you have no knowledge of the law.

GD
⁴⁰

It would seem the elusive, infamous Gregory Douglas (a.k.a. Peter Stahl/Walter Storch) may have been somewhat truthful regarding what had transpired between himself and Bob Crowley. But it will never be known
how
truthful, unless Douglas produces both the Crowley cache of documents and the recordings he allegedly made of their conversations. Yet despite the remaining ambiguity surrounding the Crowley-Douglas affair, the details purportedly revealed by Crowley—about Mary Meyer, her diary, and her murder—are solidly supported and substantiated by other events and accounts covered in this book.

B
en Bradlee never took kindly to anyone who accused him of having CIA connections. Bob Crowley not only reiterated Bradlee’s role in bringing
Newsweek
to the
Post
through the gracious hands of the CIA’s Richard Helms, but he also referred to Bradlee as “one of the company’s [CIA’s] men,” who was “on the
Post
now.” Had the sale of
Newsweek
to the
Post
started opening doors for “good old Ben”? During the 1950s and 1960s, working for, or with, the CIA, directly or indirectly, didn’t necessarily mean being on the CIA payroll
as an employee. In the Cold War era, many journalists considered cooperation with the CIA a kind of patriotic duty. After Watergate, however, it was considered deeply suspicious, if not downright duplicitous, because so much CIA chicanery had been exposed.

Deborah Davis and her book
Katharine the Great
paid the ultimate price in 1980 when, under great pressure from both Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, her publisher, William Jovanovich, recalled and shredded her book—some twenty thousand copies—just two months after the book’s release. (It appears that “Freedom of the press,” as A. J. Liebling once famously put it, “is guaranteed only to those who own one”). It was Davis’s assertion in her book that Bradlee’s job as press attaché at the American Embassy in Paris in 1952–1953 functioned as a CIA front at the time. Bradlee was writing propaganda aimed at “persuading” Europeans that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were spies and deserved to be executed. Of course, Bradlee was purposely not on any CIA payroll as an employee; that would have made it too obvious. Yet his assertion that he “never worked for the CIA” was just semantics.
⁴¹

In later editions of
Katharine the Great
, Davis included documents that corroborated Bradlee’s CIA connections. One such document was a United States Government Office Memorandum, dated December 13, 1952, which a Rosenberg case assistant prosecutor named Mr. Maran wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney Myles Lane describing Bradlee’s request to examine the Rosenberg file, which Maran was safeguarding (see
appendix 4
). Bradlee stated to Maran that he (Bradlee) had been sent to review the Rosenberg case file “by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris.” Bradlee also disclosed, again according to Maran, that he was to have been met “by a representative of the CIA at the airport, but missed connections,” and was therefore “trying to get in touch with Allen Dulles but … [had] been unable to do so.”
⁴²
Despite the first edition of the Davis book being recalled in early 1980, damage to Bradlee’s reputation had already been done. It upset Bradlee profoundly—and shook the pedestal onto which the
Washington Post
had been elevated since Watergate.

“He [Bradlee] went totally crazy after the book came out,” said Davis in an interview in 1992. “One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast, having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it wasn’t true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said.”
⁴³

It would seem Ben Bradlee’s penchant for impenetrable deception, his playing fast and loose with pivotal facts and events that he hoped had long
escaped public scrutiny, has all along been part of the Bradlee persona, karmically following like a shadow. How could Bradlee in 1965 testify under oath during the Crump murder trial that he had entered Mary’s studio with no trouble on
the night of the murder
, and then thirty years later spin a cock-and-bull story that he only first entered the studio the
next day
with his wife? “We had no key,” said Bradlee, “but I got a few tools to remove the simple padlock, and we walked toward the studio, only to run into Jim Angleton again, this time actually in process of picking the lock.”
⁴⁴
Part of the Bradlee story may have been designed to convince the public that he and Angleton, and the CIA, had always been adversaries, when they had been nothing of the sort. In this particular case—breaking into Mary Meyer’s studio to find her diary—they were collaborating. Bradlee never once publicly mentioned he had been inside Mary’s studio on the night of the murder. The only revelation of that fact was contained in the 1965 Crump murder trial transcript; it was never again mentioned by Bradlee himself, or anyone else (until now), including journalist-author Ron Rosenbaum or Nina Burleigh.

And who, if anybody, had accompanied Bradlee when he went to the studio on the night of Mary’s murder? According to CIA covert operative Bob Crowley, it was Jim Angleton. It was at this time, said Crowley—who mentioned it twice—that the real diary (not Mary’s artist sketchbook—the decoy) was discovered and given to Angleton for safekeeping. Ultimately, the exact account of what actually took place may never be fully known. But more than likely, as Crowley maintained, the diary was taken on the night of her murder—either from Mary’s studio, or from the bookcase in her bedroom. Mary’s bedroom, according to the statements Jim Truitt made to Ron Rosenbaum in 1976, was where she usually kept it.
⁴⁵

Finally, one last bit of commentary on the 1995 Bradlee memoir. On the one hand, concerning Mary’s murder, the memoir was so rife with factual errors, omissions, and contradictions that it cried out for careful scrutiny. (There was a reason why Ben Bradlee turned down Leo Damore’s request for an interview in 1991).
⁴⁶
On the other, Bradlee had further divulged
the most critical and revealing event
of the entire Mary Meyer murder conspiracy: CIA man Wistar Janney’s telephone call “just after lunch” informing Bradlee that “someone had been murdered on the towpath … and from the radio description it sounded like Mary.”
⁴⁷

Ben Bradlee was even more circumspect in 2010 when being interviewed for David Baldacci’s
Hardcover Mysteries
television documentary about Mary Meyer’s murder. Asked off-camera by director Gabe Torres how he first learned
that Mary had been killed that day, Bradlee responded cryptically, “A friend called me,” carefully choosing not to reveal the identity of the “friend.”
⁴⁸

Forty-five years earlier, Bradlee had been equally tight-lipped. “Mr. Bradlee, I have just one question,” said defense attorney Dovey Roundtree during the Crump murder trial in 1965. “Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law? Do you know how she met her death? Do you know who caused it?”

“Well, I saw a bullet hole in her head,” Bradlee replied, dodging her inquiry.

“Do you know who caused this to be?” persisted Roundtree.

“No, I don’t,” Bradlee maintained.
⁴⁹

It had to have been a defining, life-changing moment in the life of forty-three-year-old Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee. Nine months earlier, he and others had conspired to erase his sister-in-law’s private life. Privy to the “master key event” of Wistar Janney’s telephone call, Bradlee, once again, lied through omission, withholding not only the critical evidence of Mary’s diary (the motive), but also the Janney telephone call (evidence of conspiracy). Was it just a case in which the ends justified the means?

At the time of the trial in July 1965, Bradlee’s career was already being transformed. Several months earlier, in March, he had been wooed back to the
Washington Post
after a fourteen-year hiatus by none other than Katharine Graham herself. That August, a month after the trial ended, Bradlee returned to the
Post
, where he had once worked as a “crime reporter,” with a new title: “Deputy Managing Editor.” Less than three months later, in October that same year, he would be promoted to “Managing Editor.”
⁵⁰

In 1976, after the first revelation of Mary’s relationship with President Kennedy appeared in the
National Enquirer
, Bradlee told journalist Ron Rosenbaum in an interview that there had been no “CIA angle,” no Agency “shadow” in Mary’s demise. “If there was anything there,” boasted Bradlee, “I would have done it [written the story] myself.”
⁵¹
The statement was as ludicrous as it was egregious. But it pales against the statement in his 1995 memoir in which he mischaracterizes and thereby minimizes the last moments of Mary Meyer’s life: “She [Mary] was walking along the towpath by the canal along the Potomac River in Georgetown, when she was grabbed from behind, wrestled to the ground, and shot just once under her cheek bone as she struggled to get free. She died instantly.”
⁵²

No. Mary hardly “died instantly.” By all police, witness, and forensic accounts, she struggled mightily, screaming for twenty seconds or more, before the first gunshot ripped through her skull. Death be not proud, nor even swift.
Whatever Mary’s thoughts or feelings during the final conscious seconds of her life, she had to be aware her death was fast approaching, yet she would not succumb without a fight, before the second fatal shot ended her life. Perhaps Ben Bradlee wanted to assuage his guilt by publicly spinning yet another yarn that his sister-in-law hadn’t really suffered, or that she hadn’t faced head-on the terrifying realization that her life was about to end violently. Whatever his motivation, Ben Bradlee played as fast and loose with the facts in this instance as he had with nearly every other aspect of Mary’s death.

T
ony Bradlee, subsequent to the death of her sister and the “shock” of discovering Mary’s affair with Jack, retreated to studying sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art, as well as exploring the mystical and spiritual traditions of George Gurdjieff and his disciple P. D. Ouspensky. During the next few years, her marriage to Ben slowly disintegrated. For the Bradlees, “Jack Kennedy and Mary Meyer had been murdered out of our lives,” noted Ben during his meteoric rise on the
Post
, “out of our reservoir of shared experience, and we both had changed in coping with their loss.”
⁵³

Mary’s death took a severe toll, not only on her children, but also on other members of her extended family. “Mary believed the world could change … she was such a fascinating figure in the family,” said Nancy Pittman Pinchot, daughter of Tony Bradlee by her first marriage to Steuart Pittman. “She had a quality of aliveness. We watched the full flowering of Mary as the kind of woman that Mom [Tony Bradlee] might have become. Instead, Mom lived off the idea that JFK had a crush on her for years—before she disappeared up the asshole of spirituality. It was such a blow to her to find out Mary and Jack had been together.”
⁵⁴

Asked in a letter by Leo Damore in 1991 whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the events surrounding her sister’s death, Tony avoided any possibility of an encounter, replying, “I feel as I have always felt—that the case is closed, that Crump was indeed guilty. Also, I am loathe to get involved in going over that event again, with all its unhappy memories.”
⁵⁵
Tony Bradlee died in Washington on November 9, 2011.