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)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please provide constructive or informative comments.