MARY PINCHOT MEYER : WAS SHE THE PRESIDENT'S TRUE SOUL MATE? WAS SHE ASSASSINATED BY THE C.I.A?

Image from Wikipedia

MARY PINCHOT MEYER

(October 14, 1920 to October 12, 1964)

Like other women in the life of promiscuous womanizer John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before and during his marriage and his Presidency of the United States in the early 1960's, Mary Pinchot - Meyer knew she was involved in an affair with a married man. The comparison of her to other known Mistresses of J.F.K. stops there.

Unlike Judith Campbell Exner or Mimi Alford, two other of his Mistresses who have been featured over the last couple months here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, Mary came from J.F.K's. same set of people - preppies.  She associated with people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the best women's colleges called "The Seven Sisters." She was "age appropriate" being only about three years younger than he.  They first met at a 1936 prep school dance, when she was fifteen. Like him she had grown up in a wealthy eastern seaboard family with social clout.  She'd been a debutant and expected to marry well. She had married well, mothered three sons, and divorced within that set, to a man named Cord Meyer, a World War II veteran and hero, like J.F.K. who'd come home injured. Often the men served in World War II and joined the CIA like Cord.  She was considered to be well off, not in need of his money.

But wait.  As conservative as all these people seemed to be, there is also the possibility that they considered themselves sophisticates with a rather "European" mentality when it came to having sexual adventures. The men had World War II macho but were they really wife swappers?  It's possible that Mary and the President were kind of like secret hippies, trying marijuana and a hallucigen - some say L.S.D. other psychedelic mushrooms, together.

So much will never be known.

But hey, have you ever seen the television drama series called Mad Men?  Because that was the era, pre-hippies, when even gentleman tried L.S.D.  Some people smoked pot or cigarettes at work, especially creatives.  L.S.D. was used in psychiatric offices as a mind expander. According to author Peter Janney, whose book is the prime reference for this month's posts on Mary Pinchot Meyer, our Mistress of the Month, she knew L.S.D. guru Timothy Leary - this was before it was illegal.  He was a professor at Harvard ; J.F.K's school. She went up there to talk to him about it.  Was turning public officials on to hallucinogenic trips the latest craze among her set?

He came back into her life socially in the late 1950's. Some say a genuine friendship turned into a flirtation and then into an affair.

Maybe what was really radical, so to speak, was that Mary, with her sons off to college and living apart from her ex, was getting involved in the movement for world peace.  She may have influenced J.F.K. to get the United States out of possible war in Viet Nam,  to sign nuclear treaties, to end the Cold War with Russia. If only he had lived.

Only a handful of people knew she was the President's Mistress and many think he really was going to divorce Jackie and marry Mary, his soul mate. This included her sister Tony and her husband, Ben. Or so she thought.

As part of the Georgetown elite, many of their friends and neighbors, people who came to her funeral after she was murdered shortly before her 44th birthday, were likely spies.  Her murderer might have been there among the mourners.  Was someone just angry because she had an affair - say an ex husband or someone getting revenge for Jackie's sake?  according to one interview of author Janney that I listened to, on his death bed Cord Meyer, her ex husband said the same people who killed J.F.K. killed Mary.

Peter Janney, who wrote a book called Mary's Mosaic, calls it, assassinated, just like J.F.K. had been eleven months before! One bullet at close range to the brain, the next to the heart. A professional job, maybe even with a plan to find a dupe who could be accused of murder.

What did she know? Was she set up? Who could be so heartless? Her murder remains unsolved just like Nicole Brown Simpson's is. 

What could have caused this attractive and idealistic woman, who had become an artist, a painter whose work had been exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, to be murdered on a walking path near a canal, a path she walked daily for exercise after a morning of painting in her garage studio over at her sister's house.

Though a love letter from the President asking her to show up where he was going was found years later, and went up for auction, during their affair Mary showed up at White House dinners with a man named William Walton, who had run J.F.K. Presidential campaign for New York, as her companion. She signed in to the log.  She wasn't brought in through a back way.

Her sister Tony was married to Ben Bradlee, an important newsman. They too had dined at the White House with Jack and Jackie Kennedy. They knew there was supposed to be a secret diary about the affair and so hours after Mary's body was identified, they went to her house and then her art studio looking for it.  Each time they encountered a man named James Jesus Angleton, who had managed to enter before them or was trying to pick the locks.  Serious business.  Mary had said that she got the feeling at times that someone had been in her house when she was gone. This man was the chief of the C.I.A. Counterintelligence from 1954-1975.  

The diary may still exist today. A small artists diary with a few notes that had been found was turned over to Egleton.  Some say, no that was not the diary full of details about the affair.  It may have been burned by Toni and Ben.

Repeatedly I've read that this particular affair was the serious one that could have lead to marriage, if and when Jack divorced Jackie.

This month we'll learn more about this interesting woman who didn't deserve the fate she got.

If interested, in November 2015 I devoted the month to Nicole Brown Simpson, the most famous unsolved murder victim, wife of O.J. Simpson and Mistress to him before their marriage.  You may also want to check other months dedicated to those surrounding the Kennedys, such as Kick Kennedy, J.F.K's sister, Little Edie Bouvier, Jackie Kennedy's cousin, or just run a search for Presidential Mistresses.

My archives are in Pages or you can use the search feature embedded in the blog.

C 2020 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot
All Rights Reserved