Mary Meyer, Judith Campbell Exner, and Mea Culpa

Some years ago, these Chronicles gave considerable endorsement to a biography of Mary Meyer by Peter Janney, and were about to do so with the Judith Campbell Exner story due to some comments made by John Newman that there may be substance to it. Fortunately we pulled back before making the same mistake twice. It turns out that both stories are bunk from the same people who are part of the Second Assassination of John Kennedy.

We were swindled into the Meyer story because it seemed to fit well with James Douglass' thesis in JFK and the Unspeakable that Kennedy was maturing in his foreign policy outlook - outgrowing the knee jerk cold warrior persona into a more nuanced and peace oriented statesman who avoided the extremisms of his predecessor and the security state.

In Janney's telling, it was socialite Mary Meyer and LSD which brought Kennedy his new insights and peace orientation such as the nuclear test ban treaty. In Douglass' telling, it was facing the specters of multiple Hiroshimas and Nagasakis many times over in the event of nuclear war with the USSR. Each story, at least to us at the time, complemented or reinforced the other.

We were also fooled by the credentials of Janney, someone with sterling academic achievements and close connections to the families allegedly involved in or affected by the murder - starting with his own father Wistar, the family friends the Meyers, and the Bradlees of Washington Post fame. Surely we thought that someone with the academics and connections of Janney would tell a story properly sourced and documented. As we recently found out, such was not the case.

Much more recently, we encountered some comments made by Professor John Newman that the Judith Campbell Exner story of her affairs with John Kennedy should not be dismissed out of hand just because they came from Seymour Hersch. But because we had dismissed that one as sensationalist gossip, we never placed any credence in it. So we poked around to see if credible substantiation could be found.

In search for this elusive confirmation, we came across a couple of articles by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease which demolished the Janney and Exner stories, resulting in our belated retraction of endorsement of Mary's Mosaic.

Though the authors level considerable criticism over literary deficiencies in Mary's Mosaic, the more serious critiques center on Janney's use of dubious and discredited sources such as Gregory Douglas, Leo Damore, and James Truitt, the latter two who were authors or journalists. DiEugenio documents the mental illnesses of Damore and Truitt, and their difficulties with publishers and employers such that it makes sense that neither one told anything truthful in regards to Meyer or Exner.

In the case of Damore, Random House took him to court to recover advance money for Senatorial Privilege. In the case of Truitt, Ben Bradlee fired him from Newsweek for problems stemming from alcoholism.

Janney also relied upon documentation which he failed to reproduce for other researchers, such as transcripts of interviews. So we are supposed to accept the honor system as the standard for scholarly attestation. This standard does not work for topics as serious as these.

The two most substantive remarks made by these reviewers concern the guilt of Ray Crump, and Kennedy's foreign policy ideas developed while senator.

We had accepted Janney's rehabilitation of Crump as a patsy because we knew that CIA did that kind of thing regularly and well. And it made such a great story to have a victimized black man as the underdog who was rescued by the heroic Dovey Roundtree in a triumph of racial justice. The problem with this story is that Roundtree got a violent man out of jail who would later be arrested at least 22 times, many times on violent charges. He indeed he murdered Mary Meyer.

But with Crump vindicated by the courts, then who killed Meyer? For us, we are very open to the idea that the CIA murdered Meyer because of her alleged power to cause the security state problems with its coverup of Kennedy's murder. After all, the agency has murdered hundreds of witnesses - why not Mary Meyer?

As it turned out, DiEugenio shows that Meyer was not all that powerful - in fact not at all - and her relationship with Kennedy was quite conventional with both Jackie and Jack. There was nothing political or sexual about it.

DiEugenio also makes the cogent case that Kennedy's foreign policy ideas were developed well before the alleged 1962/3 encounters with Meyer. For example, he briefly describes Kennedy's visit to Saigon in 1951 in order to understand the problems in Viet Nam which were all about repulsing French colonialism rather than becoming another domino in its theory.

The lynch pin to the murder is the alleged diary that Mary kept which held regime secrets which the CIA could ill-afford to see the light of day. Janney spends many pages developing a Keystone Cops kind of circus with Wistar Janney, Ben and Toni Bradlee, James and Anne Truitt, James and Cicely Angleton all fumbling around like inspectors Clousseau looking for the radioactive diary which provided the motive for murdering Mary.

The truth of the matter was that there was no diary. So many different stories have been told about it that it can only be one of those chimeras which only existed as a fictional device to further a story and an agenda.

Before realizing all of these problems, we had come across a comment by John Newman, author of many books about the Kennedy administration and assassination, in which he gave some credence or plausibility to the assertions of Judith Campbell Exner who claimed to have been a go-between for Kennedy and Sam Giancana because Kennedy needed help in winning the West Virginia primary, and then later in murdering Fidel Castro.

The only evidence for this story is that White House logs show that Campbell called the White House a few times, but nothing ever came of it other than Kennedy telling his staff to ignore them - not because he was covering up anything, but that she was a flake or pest. Telephone calls do not prove sexual liaisons or bagman services for Kennedy and the mob. Given Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, this should have been obvious.

And that is all there is to the story beyond Exner's late-in-life confessions - after Kennedy and Giancana were both dead. She took no secrets to her grave.

Both stories were fun up to a point, but upon critical examination turned out to be tabloid trash. Good riddance to both.

Reference

Lisa Pease, Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic, Part 1, Kennedys and King (website), June 21, 2012, located( Kennedys And King - Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic (Part 1) accessed 3/14/2021)

James DiEugenio, Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic, Part 2, Kennedys and King (website), July 12, 2012, located(Kennedys And King - Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic (Part 2), accessed 3/14/2021)

James DiEugenio, The Posthumous Assassination of JFK, Probe, September-October 1997, vol 4, no 6, located(Probe V4N6: The Posthumous Assassination of JFK (the-puzzle-palace.com), accessed 3/14/2021)

Copyright 2021 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

First Impressions: Mary's Mosaic

First James Douglass, then Mark Lane, and now Peter Janney joins to make a trilogy of works which relentlessly and incontrovertibly makes the case that the CIA murdered President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, TX. Janney paints the faces on the otherwise dark impersonal forces whose ghoulish actions proved once and for all that America is ruled by an oligarchy whose Georgetown values do not correspond with those of Main Street.

While other researchers have meticulously developed the forensic and legal arguments to indict and convict the CIA, in Mary's Mosaic Janney develops the psychological angle driving the CIA to murder a man in cold blood before a mortified nation. By naming names and profiling the socio-economic character of the criminals, we see how their minds worked to inevitably compel them to the murder of the century without so much as a crocodile tear.

One of the common characteristics of the CIA leadership is its patrician Ivy League pedigree. Nearly all of its leaders had alma maters such as Yale, Princeton, Harvard and sported, either genuinely or artificially, intellectual affectations. Quite frequently these Ivy alumni had known each other from prestigious boarding schools, exclusive social connections, and other privileged networks begun earlier in life.

Janney describes CIA senior executive Cord Meyer (Yale) as a fallen star, a man whose writing was Pulitzer caliber and whose artistic sensibilities were snuffed out in the disillusion of his idealistic dreams for world peace – a dream he once shared with his wife Mary Pinchot (Vassar). James Angleton (Yale), the godfather of the Meyer children, receives similar treatment as a man of letters, but who most likely did not have the sensitivities of the young Meyer.

The CIA leadership, goons that they were, hobnobbed in high society, a vantage from which Janney holds a fine view. His father, Wistar, hailed from a financially prosperous family who socialized with his peers while plotting and committing murders for "national security."

As noted, the social networks of these men encompassed not just their inbred Ivy League leadership. The Meyers had frequent intercourse with the Kennedys who were every bit as financially and socially credentialed as Allen Dulles, Wistar Janney, or James Angleton. The Kennedys would of course prove to be the cup of trembling for this crust of society when it ate two of its own.

Mary’s Mosaic encompasses far more than a narrative of her life and murder. Janney attempts to colorize the personalities and events swirling in official and unofficial Washington, and particularly among the beautiful people of Georgetown. It is here where the book makes its distinctive contribution to the Kennedy corpus – the time honored love, hate, and sex of power politics.

Mary (Pinchot) Meyer stars in the story of her own murder and that of John Kennedy. Janney offers convincing evidence that she and Kennedy shared a substantial relationship based upon love and respect rather than hormones. What made a tomcat like Kennedy settle down for Mary when he had a wife with glamour and intelligence?

Mary was neither an ordinary Georgetown socialite nor an ordinary woman by the standards of the mid 20^th century. She might be described as a free spirited libertine who respected nothing of ordinary conventions. She took lovers as she chose, expressed views without discretion, and defied any sense of female orthodoxy even though by all accounts she possessed feminine mystique in abundance. She was quickly developing into an artist of substantial stature at the time of her death. She combined many of  the attributes of an intellectual and artistic person, consequently drawing an avid and bewitched following.

Kennedy and Meyer most likely started their affair in the very late 1950s when the Kennedys moved in as neighbors to the Meyers in Virginia outside Washington. Although the dalliance continued into the White House, and as a secret to Americans, it was no secret to Jackie who had learned to grin and bear the infidelities of her husband.

Mary was certainly in the vanguard of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, becoming a devotee of Timothy Leary and his hallucinogenic remedies, something which Janney deplorably glamorizes. He provides reasonable, though inconclusive, evidence that she had proselytized a group of about 8 Georgetown society women into LSD cells who in turn were influencing their husbands to drop bellicose virtues for peaceable ones.

More surprisingly, Janney makes the reasonable case that Meyer “turned on” the President to marijuana and LSD in a couple of experimental drug trysts, activities coinciding with his reinvention as a peace champion from a cold warrior. It is this intervention and influence over Kennedy which I believe pushed the oligarchs over the edge.

The young, photogenic, and charismatic Kennedy was never a favorite among the power brokers of Washington – especially of Georgetown. Although a war hero himself and of the same social class as the troglodytes of the CIA, he was viewed by them as a parvenu lightweight who lacked the gravitas or time in grade to be president – especially when he threatened the prosperity of the military industrial complex.

It is without doubt – to me at least – that these men, heavy boozers, womanizers, and chain smokers,  felt little kindred to Kennedy and felt that his flirtations with drugs justified the application of “executive action”, a CIA euphemism for murder.

Janney depicts the minds of many of these men as “patriotic” and acting in the best interests of their country. Indeed, most, if not all, of the early CIA leadership were World War 2 veterans who wished to spare their sons the gory battlefields and deaths they endured in combat. That was, at least, the visible rationale for their actions when they were not groveling before Wall Street titans to advance their masters’ financial interests.

These CIA leaders were national chauvinists in the extreme, brooking no challenge to American conquest and hegemony. Thus it mattered little how many lives they snuffed out to maintain the empire. The callous contempt for life was best expressed by Lyndon Johnson when he answered a reporter’s question at a party about why he wanted to fight in Viet Nam by pulling out his penis with exclamation, “Because of this!”

I surmise that the Georgetown junta determined that drug usage was a severe threat to national security and that Kennedy did not have enough good sense to keep his sexual organs away from women who would lead him down a primrose path to destruction. So they off and killed him they did.

Other fascinating insights are provided in Mary’s Mosaic. Janney tells of Washington Post eminence Ben Bradlee’s involvement with the murder of Mary Myer and his complete and total exposure as a CIA man, whose rapid rise at the Post was due in large measure to his perjury at the murder trial of Mary Meyer in 1965.

Janney also partially rehabilitates Gregory Douglas, the JFK research “pariah” who first exposed the notorious operation Northwoods and Operation Zipper, the CIA plot which planned and covered-up the murder of John Kennedy. He shows that Douglas’ information corresponds favorably with his own research and divulgences obtained from high ranking CIA officials such as Robert Crowley.

One of Janney’s named sources also admitted that the CIA murdered tens of thousands of people because they had to be moved out of the way and that the news is so faked as to be useless.

Calling Mary’s Mosaic a masterpiece would probably be as flatulent as some of the euphonies paid to Mary Meyer in the book, but at the same time, this work is perhaps the most important treatment of the murder because it exposes the names, psychology, and the unbridled arrogance of this still unaccountable organization of international terror.

References

Mary's Mosaic, Peter Janney

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.