Mary Pinchot Meyer was an American socialite, and minimalist painter. She was the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and a key figure in the 'Progressive Party' who had helped fund the 'socialist' magazine, 'The Masses'. She attended Vassar College, where she became interested in Communism. While at a dance held at Choate Rosemary Hall she first met 'John F. Kennedy' .... I suspect that you are way ahead of me now, but lets get there in the normal way. She left Vassar and became a journalist, writing for the United Press amongst other publications, where as a pacifist and member of the 'American Labor Party' she first came under scrutiny of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
She met one Cord Meyer in 1944 when he was a US Marine Corps lieutenant who had lost his left eye because of shrapnel injuries received in combat. The two had similar pacifist views and beliefs in a world government and married on April 19, 1945 .... her husband apparently changed his views after members of the Communist Party USA infiltrated the international organizations he had founded. He began secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was soon a "principal operative" of Operation Mockingbird, trying to sway US print and broadcast media toward the CIA line. Mary may also have done some work for the CIA during this time but her tendency towards
spur-of-the-moment love affairs reportedly made the agency wary of her.
In 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly accused the Meyers of being a communists and the FBI was reported to have examined both their political pasts ... but because of the rivalry between the CIA and FBI, initially Dulles aggressively defended the Meyers and her husband remained with the CIA. During the summer of 1954 John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie Kennedy bought a house not far from where the Meyers lived .... (
getting closer).
By the end of 1954 Cord Meyer was still with the CIA and often in Europe, running Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty .... by 1958 Mary had filed for divorce. Her divorce petition alleged "
extreme cruelty, mental in nature, which seriously injured her health, destroyed her happiness, rendered further cohabitation unendurable and compelled the parties to separate." She began
painting again in a converted garage studio at the home of her sister 'Tony', and had a close relationship with abstract-minimalist painter Kenneth Noland, while becoming 'friendly' with the other Kennedy, Robert.
Pinchot Meyer visited John F. Kennedy at the White House in October 1961 and their relationship became intimate. Pinchot Meyer told Ann and James Truitt she was
keeping a diary of the affair. Mary Pinchot Meyer and John F. Kennedy reportedly had "about 30 trysts" and at least one author has claimed she brought marijuana or LSD to almost all of these meetings (
LSD was not illegal in the U.S. at that time and that its use to facilitate psychotherapy and artistic endeavors was not uncommon in some of Pinchot Meyer's social circles). In January 1963 Philip Graham an an American publisher disclosed the Kennedy-Pinchot Meyer affair to a meeting of newspaper editors, but his claim was not reported by the news media at the time.
On October 12, 1964, eleven months after John F. Kennedy's assassination and two weeks after the Warren Commission report was made public, Pinchot Meyer went for a walk along a Canal towpath in Georgetown. A mechanic on Canal Road and heard a woman cry out, "
Someone help me, someone help me." He heard two gunshots and ran to a low wall looking upon the path where he saw "
a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman" ... it was Pinchot Meyer. She had two bullet wounds, one at the back of the head and another in her heart. An FBI forensic expert later said "
dark halos on the skin around both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close-range, possibly point-blank" ... this implied a possible 'hit', or then again just a struggle in a robbery.
For those who do like a conspiracy, when the '
black man' that they arrested came to trial. The Judge Howard Corcoran ruled Mary Pinchot Meyer's private life could not be disclosed in the courtroom ... and indeed the defence lawyer, later remarked that she could find out almost nothing about the murder victim: "
It was as if she existed only on the towpath on the day she was murdered" ... the *suspect was acquitted of all charges and the murder remains unsolved (*
He wasn't some passing innocent, he led a life of crime thereafter). The 'diary' was found, and its said to have confirmed Meyer's intimate friendship with Kennedy, but nothing else.
Trivia:
- Timothy Leary the LSD experimenter and friend of Meyer, later claimed Pinchot Meyer influenced Kennedy's "views on nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Cuba".
- Leary also made a lot of other claims, including that she was taking part in a plan to avert worldwide nuclear war by convincing powerful male members of the Washington establishment to take mind-altering drugs ... this included conducting LSD sessions with these powerful men, including, she had strongly implied, President John F. Kennedy
- He went on to suggest 'conspiracies' and other attention seeking claims, which you can believe or not, as is your nature. I choose not to.
- 'An American Affair', was a 2009 film starring Gretchen Mol as a character based on Mary Pinchot Meyer (the colour pictures attributed as Meyer on some web sites are I believe the actress Mol).
Quote: "
Mary's visits to Timothy Leary during the time she was also Kennedy's lover suggest that Kennedy knew more about hallucinogenic drugs than the CIA might have been telling him. No one has ever confirmed that Kennedy tried LSD with Mary. But the timing of her visits to Timothy Leary do coincide with her known private meetings with the President" - journalist Nina Burleigh and Pinchot Meyer's biographer.
Pictures:
