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Mary Pinchot Meyer


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  • 1 year later...
Peter Janney's book seems just about compleet. Was unaware that Dick Russell was also involved.

Has anyone heard an update on the movie?

http://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Pinchot...n/dp/0979988632

Peter tells me the current plan is to try and use the publicity generated by the book to get the film made. The script is already written.

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  • 1 month later...

I couldn't agree more. Hope it has some meat to it.

If there ever was another patsy in waiting beside Oswald, it would seemingly be Ray Crump Jr, although he certainly was no boy scout as later events would prove.

To me one of the most interesting things in Nina Burleigh's book is where it is mentioned "On Canal Road above the [murder] scene, two men had just arrived to service a stalled Rambler."1 They were William Branch and Henry Wiggins.

Wiggins, would later state that Crump was the man who was standing over Mary's body after the second gunshot. 2

If Crump was setup to take the blame for another persons murder, I would certainly want to know more about the "stalled Rambler."

1 page 231; A Very Private Woman - Nina Burleigh

page 234; obid.

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It wouldn't happen to be a green Rambler wagon, would it? :rolleyes:

Well, the problem is that the reference I cited is the only one in Nina's book, if I am not mistaken. Logic demands that if Crump was setup, and there is circumstantial evidence that he was, [i mean he was acquited] then there has to be clues at the scene of the crime that point to that, hence I would like to know more about the Rambler, even if it wasn't a green station wagon.

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  • 11 months later...
It wouldn't happen to be a green Rambler wagon, would it? B)

Well, the problem is that the reference I cited is the only one in Nina's book, if I am not mistaken. Logic demands that if Crump was setup, and there is circumstantial evidence that he was, [i mean he was acquited] then there has to be clues at the scene of the crime that point to that, hence I would like to know more about the Rambler, even if it wasn't a green station wagon.

I'm interested in the Rambler too. But first --

Does anyone believe that President Kennedy went on an LSD trip? I read the book about Mary Pinchot Meyer by Nina Burleigh. She describes how the Georgetown housewives got together on these LSD trips. These women had children, I'm sure, at least most of them. Only a few years before, Jackie Kennedy was a Georgetown housewife. And I remember seeing a picture of Jackie walking on the same towpath! Would the women Jackie was friends with take LSD while their husbands were away? I can't picture this.

Kathy C

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  • 2 weeks later...

http://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Pinchot...n/dp/0979988632

No pressure or anything Peter.

This book has I think been delayed twice perhaps on account of Janney's detour? into the Dino Brugioni NPIC interviews. I have been looking forward to it for about three years now.

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Guest Tom Scully

Kathy,

You can picture Mary's adultery with JFK, and Jackie with that creepy Onassis, but you can't picture the experimentation with an obscure hallucinogenic drug recommended and probably provided by Dr. Leary of Harvard?

Have you ever experienced the effects of LSD? It's intense effects are intense for less than six hours, especially if you are taking it in the company of supportive friends with experience taking it. No novice should try it under circumstances other than that, because it potentially has the effects of panic and paranoia, not nice to feel if you are inexperienced and you are alone.

It was a different time. Since it also had the potential of making you think your entire perspective had changed for the better, providing you with what you perceived as an out of this world, best day you ever had, kind of experience and lingering memory, how hard do you suppose it was for a respected friend with an advanced degree to talk you into experiencing it? It was a social thing to do, to share with an interested but understandably apprehensive first timer.

Unless a novice suffers a negative reaction that friends cannot soothe/talk the frightened, disoriented individual down from, 12 hours away from family responsibilities would be sufficient to complete "a trip."

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Kathy and Tom-- I also think its very important to place this chemical in context. There is an excellent book I think called Storming Heaven: a social history of LSD, and thats just what it is , a social history ie. not some celebration of druggery. Well anyway, we need to remember that our connotations of this drug are largely based on post 1966 illegality period and San Francisco media connotations etc.

In 62 early 63 period, these connotations were absolutely not there.

It was a psychotherapeutic mothers massive helper for the upper middle class and had connotations of Huxley etc. Now I think there is a danger here of some rejecting this LSD narrative out of a sense that this is one more "media smear" campaign against JFK etc. Some of this may have been in evidence in Jim di Eugenio's comments about Peter Janney and John Simkin re the MPM case. To me that particular comment of di Eugenio's seemed like an example of wide elbow's on Jim D's part; a somewhat mean spirited dismissal of the ENTIRE MPM narrative, while it was very unclear about which particular aspect of that narrative Jim D. was disagreeing with. Perhaps it was typical of many others who might see the LSD part of the narrative as automatically more of Sir Seymour of Langley-Sink- Throwing.

The history of LSD must be born in mind here. If the Leary aspect of the narrative is open to question then bring those questions on! To assume automatically, however, that the LSD stuff is automatically outlandish because of its 1967 associations is ahistorical. Sure this ahisoricism might be taken advantage of by sink throwers, but that does not excuse the responsibility of true researchers from making these finer points rather than dismissing the whole MPM narrative, baby and bathwater. What a long, strange and ahistorical trip it's been makes for an awkward lyric.

Edited by Nathaniel Heidenheimer
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Guest Tom Scully

As I posted, Kathy, it was a different time, and for a brief period, the media had a different message, a different agenda.

Early adapters, the elite had their party and then became concerned that widespread use of hallucinogenics had the potential of removing the "sheeple" from the people, that cooperative ,unquestioning "sheep like" quality, the controlling influence on the masses from which the elite derive their personal security, the security of their assets, and the wealth inequity concentrated in their hands, almost completely unchallenged by the "have not", American masses. You have to tip toe around a populace you have propagandized/religionized into consistently voting against their own, best interests!

http://www.hofmann.org/papers/clarify/index.html

THE JOURNAL OF NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE Vol. 140, No. 3

Copyright © 1965 by The Williams & Wilkins Co. Printed in U.S.A.

CLARIFYING THE CONFUSION REGARDING LSD-25

CHARLES SAVAGE, M.D.1 AND MYRON J. STOLAROFF, M.A.

In recent months, both the lay and medical press have been filled with warnings about the dangers and harmful effects of the hallucinogenic agents such as LSD-25, mescaline and psilocybin. These warnings have risen in response to flagrant misuse of the substances by illicit operators using black-market materials for parties and "kicks," and by irresponsible investigators who, enthralled with the remarkable possibilities of these chemicals, have sponsored and encouraged their widespread use under improperly controlled conditions without medical supervision.

In the furor, sight has been lost of the great value of these agents. Summaries of the LSD controversy have appeared in the medical newspapers (3, 11), and two editorials that have been widely quoted in the public press have appeared in American Medical Association journals (6, 10). It is doubtful if any medical subject has received such complete coverage in the popular magazines over a short period of time (1, 4, 5, 7-9, 13, 14, 18, 26, 27). While all these articles have pointed out the dangers of the hallucinogens, they largely leave the reader unaware that there have been numerous studies of these agents as treatment for neurotic disturbances, and that encouraging success has resulted from their use. Few substances show such promise for deepening the understanding of mental phenomena, clarifying the many complex theories of personality, dynamics and behavior, and permitting rapid resolution of emotional difficulties.

An excellent review of the literature by the National Institute of Mental Health psychologist, Sanford Unger, appeared in the May 1963 issue of Psychiatry (25). This comprehensive review has not been mentioned in the recent publicity. It is true that much more work, with tighter research designs and more carefully controlled studies, is desirable. Also, the agents are powerful and require special training for safe use. The same, however, may be said of X-rays. .

....2) Lack of knowledge of factors affecting the experience:Contrary to the belief of many investigators, the hallucinogens do not produce experiences but inhibit repressive mechanisms that ordinarily operate and simply allow subjects to explore the contents of their own minds. The nature of his exploration will depend on a) the mental content, the subject's individual personality, conditioning, attitudes, values and beliefs; :rolleyes: his preparation for the experience, which determines in part how he will use the opportunity; and c) his environment during the experience, which very appreciably affects how he will deal with the material he touches on and the opportunities afforded. Most investigators now agree that preparation and setting profoundly affect the subject's experience, and the presence of supportive, understanding, accepting companions is essential to a comfortable and rewarding session....

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,...1613675,00.html

When the Elite Loved LSD

By John Cloud Monday, Apr. 23, 2007

It's difficult to recall now, but there was a period 50 years ago when psychedelics were not only part of the mainstream but of the Establishment. Many academics and wealthy experimental types believed that the way psychedelics work — by expanding sensory awareness even as they disrupt control over the way you normally process information — would lead people to great insights. It didn't always turn out that way: some people had great insights; others ended up with not-so-great addictions.

But now that research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics has begun again, it's worth recalling that age when psychedelics were more elite drugs than "street" drugs.

As Robert Greenfield writes in last year's highly entertaining

Timothy Leary: A Biography, the term psychedelic was coined by a British psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, who had ingested mescaline in 1951. "To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic," he quipped, setting the expansive tone regarding the drugs that Leary would later popularize.

Osmond was close to Aldous Huxley, the novelist and fellow psychedelic enthusiast, and in the mid-'50s the two men met with a vice president from J.P. Morgan & Co., Gordon Wasson, who — in the racial and stilted language of the day — called himself and a photographer friend "the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms." He meant psychedelic mushrooms, which Wasson had found in an Indian village in Mexico in 1955.

Wasson and his buddy's mushroom trip might have been lost to history, but he was so enraptured by the experience that on his return to New York, he kept talking about it to friends. As Jay Stevens recalls in his 1987 book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, one day during lunch at the Century Club, an editor at Time Inc. (the parent company of TIME) overheard Wasson's tale of adventure. The editor commissioned a first-person narrative for Life.

Reading the resulting piece — which Life published in its May 13, 1957, issue — is hilarious today. Wasson describes his hallucinations at great length, in reverent terms: "The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life." This is druggie talk — febrile and largely meaningless. That it was printed in Life magazine — the most influential publication of the day — without irony shows how na�ve we were. (Wasson in particular: he gave mushrooms to his 18-year-old daughter the day after his first trip.)

After Wasson's article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America to "turn on, tune in, drop out." In other words, you can draw a woozy but vivid line from the sedate offices of J.P. Morgan and Time Inc. in the '50s to Haight-Ashbury in the '60s to a zillion drug-rehab c enters in the '70s. Long, strange trip indeed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Jj8EAAAAM...son&f=false LIFE May 13, 1957 - Page 101

A New York Banker goes to Mexico's mountains to participate in the age-old rituals of Indians who chew strange growths that produce visions.

by R. Gordon Wasson

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,830527,00.html

Worship: Instant Mysticism

Friday, Oct. 25, 1963

.....In every age, men have struggled to perceive God directly rather than as a tenuously grasped abstraction. Few succeed, and the visions of the world's rare mystics have normally come only after hard spiritual work—prayer, meditation, ascetic practice. Now a number of psychologists and theologians are exploring such hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD-25 as an easy way to instant mysticism.

In large enough doses, these drugs can simulate the effects of certain forms of psychosis—to the point, in some cases, of permanent derangement. But in controlled, minute doses the drugs produce weird and wonderful fantasies of sight and feeling; in Greenwich Village and on college campuses, they seem to be replacing marijuana as the hip way to get kicks. Some investigators who have tried the drugs claim to have undergone a profound spiritual experience, and these men are seriously, if gingerly, studying the undefined relationship between drug-induced visions and the classic forms of mystical ecstasy....

.....Union With God. This kind of experience seems to be at least subjectively religious; but there are less convincing cases in which drug takers appear to have read religion into their visions or rigged the setting to induce a spiritual experience. One professor at a Protestant divinity school recalls that he was handed a rose to contemplate after taking his dose of LSD. "As I looked at the rose it began to glow," he said, "and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose. A few days later when I reread the Biblical account of Moses and the burning bush it suddenly made sense to me."

Selling LSD: Clare Boothe and Henry Luce and coverage of LSD in Time, 1954 - 1968

Page 2 of 32 - http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa...2/p202932-2.php

...When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings topped the paper back best seller list in 1966, Time noted that “the hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD.” 4 In 1966, LSD was the focus of nine articles in Time, America’s highest-circulation magazine at that time, including one titled “Mysticism in the Lab,” which began: St. Paul was converted while riding on the road to Damascus by a sudden vision of the Risen Christ, who appeared to him in the form of a blinding light that struck him to the ground. Teresa of Avila, the 16 th Century saint, had poetic visions of “pure water running over crystal, the sun reflecting it and striking through it.” Simone Weil, the lonely Jewish girl who turned into a Christian mystic, tells how the recitation of lines by George Herbert, such as, “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,” acted on her intuitive conscious like prayer. “Then it happened,” she recalled. “Christ himself came down, and he took me.” Deep within myself. Most experiences of mystical consciousness ...

Page 28 of 32 http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_.../p202932-28.php

......37 Clare Boothe Luce noted Heard’s presence in journals of six LSD trips and discussed obtaining and using the drug in numerous correspondences. Heard was a remarkable figure. Born in London in 1889, he published the first of his thirty-one philosophical books in 1924. In 1937, he immigrated to the United States to for a brief stint as the head of Duke University’s historical anthropology department. In 1939, Heard encountered Swarmi Prabhavananda in Hollywood and became a student of Vendanta, the Swami’s sect of Hinduism. See Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. 38 Gerald Heard, “Can This Drug Enlarge Man’s Mind?” The Psychedelic Review, 1:1 (June 1963), 9. 39 Albin Krebs, “Clare Boothe Luce Dies at 84: Playwright, Politician, Envoy,” New York Times, October 10, 1987. 40 Ibid. 41 Clare Boothe Luce kept a transcript of a conversation she held with her husband concerning this episode in their marriage and discussed her reaction in other personal writings. See “Conference between HRL and CBL,” and “Imaginary interview,” Clare Boothe Luce Collection, box 796, container 4, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 42 Swanberg, Luce and his Empire, 403. 43 She discussed her psychological state in a letter addressed to Heard but with instructions for him to pass it along to Cohen. See Letter to Gerald Heard, Dec. 20, 1959, Clare Boothe Luce Collection,, box 796, container 12, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 44 Ibid. During the March 11, 1959 trip Clare turned down a phone call from “Nixon,” telling her aide that she would return the call later. Clare was active in the Republican party and served as national co-chair for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. See “Experiment with LSD 11 March 1959, Phoenix, Arizona,” Clare Boothe Luce Collection, box 793, container 4, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 45 In her LSD journals, Luce typically listed those present with initials only. However, correspondence with both Murray and Heard confirms that they took LSD together. See letter from Gerald Heard dated February 13, 1960, Clare Boothe Luce Collection, box 766, ....

http://books.google.com/books?ei=-T6AS63DG...nG=Search+Books

Spread and perils of LSD.‎ - Page 28

Magazine - LIFE - Mar 25, 1966 - v. 60, no. 12 - 136 pages

A Remarkable Mind Drug he colorless, odorless, tasteless substance called LSD

can be made in any college chemistry lab. A black market dose costs only $3 to

lifelsd.jpg

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=837770

4 February 2009

A trip down memory lane

Writer, photographer and filmmaker Lawrence Schiller has led a remarkable life since making his name shooting American icons of the 1960s. But, he tells, Lucy Davies, he got his big break shooting acid freaks - a story that opened the world's eyes to the pleasures and terrors of LSD...

....These were just some of the experiences recorded by photo-grapher Lawrence Schiller for Life magazine's 25 March 1966 issue. The story ran under the headline 'Turmoil in a capsule', and featured 20 or so images, of which two are on show as platinum prints at Asprey in London this month. They're the grubby cousins of Schiller's portraits of 1960s icons, which include a naked Marilyn posing by the pool, a revealing shot of political campaigning as RFK catches sleep during a plane tour, plus candid images of Paul Newman, Sophia Loren and Alfred Hitchcock, Terence Stamp, James Earl Jones and Lee Harvey Oswald, and which are now selling for upwards of £15,000.

Acid adventure

When the Life essay was published, LSD was still legal. Dr Albert Hofmann had discovered its psychoactive properties some 30 years previously, and ethically impaired British and American governments had conducted furtive tests on federal prisoners and dollar-hungry students. Whispers of its mind-expanding effects soon spread, and the drug emerged from laboratories into the rundown rooms of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.

The psychedelic generation had already been primed for living free by their Beat predecessors, and figures such as erstwhile Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary loomed large, advocating the drug as a route to personal growth. He and Richard Alpert criss-crossed the American continent, extolling spiritual enlightenment. What started as a bohemian, intellectual exercise grew rapidly into a dangerous new fad, and in the same year that the Life article was published, Joan Didion described San Francisco as the place 'where the haemorrhaging of American society made itself felt'. The cringe-worthy adage states that if you remember the 1960s, you weren't really there, but fortunately Larry Schiller declined to join the ruckus and provided us with a rather more coherent account. He inspired Life to report on the pheno-menon, adamant they should pursue his story.

'It all began in Canter's late-night deli on Fairfax Boulevard,' he says. 'I was doing this small story on (Phil) Spector. Each night, after a session, he used to go in his limousine to Canter's for sandwiches. One night, we're all sitting in the restaurant and everyone seemed really stoned, on marijuana I guessed. Then one of the guys took a sugar cube, dropped it in his coffee, leaned over and said, "Boy, am I gonna have a trip". I didn't know, believe it or not, what he meant. But I was introduced that night to a whole roomful of people dropping acid.'

Intrigued, he went back several times. On one of these occasions he went with a young girl who was 'a little bit out of control' to an all night convenience store. 'She sat in the aisle looking at cereal, like cornflakes, transfixed by the coloured patterns on the boxes. She started freaking out, so I took her back to her apartment. I was introduced to her friends - groups of kids that got together in random rooms and had these psychedelic trips.'

Two days later, he went to Life. The editor was reluctant because, at that point, there was no scientific data on the drug, so Schiller walked down the hall and visited the Time office, urging its staff to run an article. His doggedness paid off and Time published a column probing the drug's medical effects. Schiller then marched back up the corridor with the article and landed himself a three-month investigation for Life with reporter Gerald Moore.

'I was ecstatic' he says. 'At the time, I was so frustrated: 300 assignments every year. I longed to be an essay journalist. I was 29 and it was an emotional moment in my life.'

Take a trip

He and Moore, an ex-policeman, started to integrate into the scene. At first, the kids were afraid: 'They admitted to using the drugs, but when it came to pictures and interviews they said no.' But one contact passed them on to the next until eventually they reached the people they had been searching for. 'There were some who had a sort of missionary quality,' says Schiller. 'They not only wanted to tell about their experiences; they seemed as though they had to.'

The trail led Schiller and Moore from Los Angeles to New York, and from Houston to Detroit, where they met Leary and Alpert, Laura Huxley, Billy Hitchcock and Ken Kesey. At Millbrook, the rambling mansion near Poughkeepsie that was Leary's Camelot, they encountered Owsley Stanley, the largest manufacturer of 'good, clean acid'. US agents described him as 'the man who did for LSD what Henry Ford did for the

motorcar', Leary as 'God's secret agent': either way, Luc Sante of The New York Times later described Millbrook as 'filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas and numerous raids and arrests'.

Neither Schiller or Moore tried LSD during their investigation, and I wondered the photographer had ever been tempted. 'When I photographed good trips, where we all went into the woods and looked at the stars, yes, but I photographed bad trips too,' he says.

'People were losing their minds; terrified, screaming. And I wanted to remain objective. I wasn't investigating the experience of the drug; I was investigating the culture it had created.'

The fallout

The photographs take an equally balanced view, providing no answers, just a vivid depiction of the world of LSD. Moore would later add that he and Schiller found themselves 'feeling terribly protective about these people. We wanted to show they weren't just the antisocial fringe'.

At the end of their travels, Schiller gave Life 100 rolls of film. 'They lay it out, 10 pages and we've got this strong cover, a picture inside one of Kesey's Acid Tests, with strobe lights going off, and big lettering - L-S-D,' he says. 'It was a great, great cover. And then in walks the ad guy and says "What's LSD? Lowest sales denominator? You can't run that cover, I won't sell any ads".'

The cover that went to press was a rather more subdued affair - a photograph of a hand with coloured squares mapped onto the fingertips - but the fallout from the piece was spectacular. Life had asked, 'What are the police going to do?', and just seven months later its question was answered when LSD was outlawed in the US and all scientific research programmes on the drug shut down.

The amazing life of Lawrence Schiller

Brooklyn-born Lawrence Schiller began his photographic career as a teenager, and was hailed as 'A Pro at Sixteen' in US Camera after publishing in Sport magazine and The New York Times. His first photo was published in Life two years later in 1956, ....

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  • 3 weeks later...

Anne Truitt and Cicely d’Autremont Angleton comment in The New York Times on Ben Bradlee's depiction of events surrounding Mary Pinchot Meyers' diary:

In Angleton's Custody

Published: November 5, 1995

We write to correct what in our opinion is an error in Ben Bradlee's autobiography, "A Good Life" (review, Oct. 1).

This error occurs in Mr. Bradlee's account of the discovery and disposition of Mary Pinchot Meyer's personal diary. The fact is that Mary Meyer asked Anne Truitt to make sure that in the event of anything happening to Mary while Anne was in Japan, James Angleton take this diary into his safekeeping.

When she learned that Mary had been killed, Anne Truitt telephoned person-to-person from Tokyo for James Angleton. She found him at Mr. Bradlee's house, where Angleton and his wife, Cicely, had been asked to come following the murder.

In the phone call, relaying Mary Meyer's specific instructions, Anne Truitt told Angleton, for the first time, that there was a diary; and, in accordance with Mary Meyer's explicit request, Anne Truitt asked Angleton to search for and to take charge of this diary. Consequently, according to Cicely Angleton, those present agreed that a search should be made. This search was carried out, Mrs. Angleton affirms, in Mary Meyer's house in the presence of her sister, Tony Bradlee; the Angletons, and one other friend of Mary Meyer's.

When Tony Bradlee found the diary and several papers bundled together in Mary Meyer's studio, she gave the entire package to Angleton and asked him to burn it. Angleton followed this instruction in part by burning the loose papers. He also followed Mary Meyer's instruction and safeguarded the diary. Some years later, he honored a request from Tony Bradlee that he deliver it to her. Subsequently, Tony Bradlee burned the diary inthe presence of Anne Truitt.

CICELY D'AUTREMONT ANGLETON ANNE TRUITT Arlington, Va.

A version of this letter appeared in print on November 5, 1995, on page 75 of the New York edition.

Article link: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/books/l-...ml?pagewanted=1

- Steve

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Anne Truitt and Cicely d’Autremont Angleton comment in The New York Times on Ben Bradlee's depiction of events surrounding Mary Pinchot Meyers' diary:

In Angleton's Custody

Published: November 5, 1995

We write to correct what in our opinion is an error in Ben Bradlee's autobiography, "A Good Life" (review, Oct. 1).

This error occurs in Mr. Bradlee's account of the discovery and disposition of Mary Pinchot Meyer's personal diary. The fact is that Mary Meyer asked Anne Truitt to make sure that in the event of anything happening to Mary while Anne was in Japan, James Angleton take this diary into his safekeeping.

When she learned that Mary had been killed, Anne Truitt telephoned person-to-person from Tokyo for James Angleton. She found him at Mr. Bradlee's house, where Angleton and his wife, Cicely, had been asked to come following the murder.

In the phone call, relaying Mary Meyer's specific instructions, Anne Truitt told Angleton, for the first time, that there was a diary; and, in accordance with Mary Meyer's explicit request, Anne Truitt asked Angleton to search for and to take charge of this diary. Consequently, according to Cicely Angleton, those present agreed that a search should be made. This search was carried out, Mrs. Angleton affirms, in Mary Meyer's house in the presence of her sister, Tony Bradlee; the Angletons, and one other friend of Mary Meyer's.

When Tony Bradlee found the diary and several papers bundled together in Mary Meyer's studio, she gave the entire package to Angleton and asked him to burn it. Angleton followed this instruction in part by burning the loose papers. He also followed Mary Meyer's instruction and safeguarded the diary. Some years later, he honored a request from Tony Bradlee that he deliver it to her. Subsequently, Tony Bradlee burned the diary inthe presence of Anne Truitt.

CICELY D'AUTREMONT ANGLETON ANNE TRUITT Arlington, Va.

A version of this letter appeared in print on November 5, 1995, on page 75 of the New York edition.

Article link: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/books/l-...ml?pagewanted=1

- Steve

Did Ben Bradlee ever make a comment on this apparent "correction" of his story by Mrs. Angleton and Anne Truitt?

Cheerio

Peter Fokes

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  • 1 month later...

Peter,

I don't know the answer to your question, but I'll bet Peter Janney does.

Review and Preview of Mary Meyer books from Turkey.

http://mylatinablogs.bau.web.tr/2010/04/09/a-very-private-woman-the-life-and-unsolved-murder-of-presidential-mistress-mary-meyer/

A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer

51kzLMUIGtL._SL160_.jpgA Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer On a Soon to Be Released New Book… – Linda T – Bellingham, WA

As others have said in earlier reviews, this is a tediously written book, on a deliriously fascinating subject. How one could have possibly made the subject boring is beyond imagining, yet that is exactly what has occurred in Nina Burleigh's accounting of Mary Pinchot Meyer's bigger-than-life, art and politics filled world.

For those looking for a better rendering of the subject, reviews for the soon-to-be-released book "Mary's Mosaic: Mary Pinchot Meyer & John F. Kennedy and their Vision for World Peace," by Peter Janney, are looking very good.

Not only are we offered a new biography on one of the most under-known, captivating women of the 20th C., but we are being given an entirely new perspective on that life, one that, in all her coverage, Burleigh seems to have entirely missed. (Perhaps that is not quite fair. It seems possible that Burleigh may have covered the subject, but that, in my haste to be once and finally done with the book, I skipped over whatever was said. My inherent feeling is that it is simply too contemplative an idea for her to have covered it in such a complexly written, yet paradoxically superficial and derived book.)

The new book, at least through its title, as well as the few reviews that have already been written about it, appear to offer the same perspective, that, even more than his father, mother, or wife, it was Mary Meyer who held the swaying influence over John Kennedy's personal views on leadership and international peace. For one who lived through those times, to learn that this influence came at just the right time in our chosen leader's life, when those views would be what saved the world from what seemed, at least at the time, an inescapable, horrific self-annihilation, is emotionally satisfying, spiritually refreshing, and yet utterly mind-boggling, all at the same time.

Enough so, in fact, to almost completely forgive Burleigh for the banality and flatness of her writing, as it was through her book that I was most fully introduced to the Meyer's tale. That introduction may have proven, ultimately, unfulfilling, but I am glad for it, nonetheless. The story of Mary Meyer is one that has quietly, yet completely, affected my own personal history, and is something of which I still, even now, in my latter years, have an insatiable yearning to learn. For the good or bad of it, it is through the efforts of Nina Burleigh that I can now hardly wait to read Jaffey's soon-to-be-released book. In particular, the reviewers all make special mention the final chapter, which, if it lives up to the hype, I feel certain will prove its most controversial. In it, we are assured, not only of an answer to Mary Meyer's assassination- long-sought by we thousand's of fans of Mary Pinchot Meyer's life, fully decades after it was stolen from her- but that that answer will be one wholly new and unsolicited within the mainstream conspiracy theorist genre. Without its long-held tradition of blaming the CIA, organized crime, or any of the usual Black Ops groups (supposedly so far underground and undercover that they do not have identities at which fanatics can point their angry fingers of blame), I'm not sure how well such a solution will be accepted, but do know that I'm already excited at the possibility of an answer, especially one that is being touted to fit the facts and clues surrounding Meyer's long-cold murder.

Just imagine it: a well-written biography, filled with intrigue, plotting, and collusion on the subject of a beautiful artist/social activist, her association with the leader of, unarguably, one of the most important political administrations of the 20th C., as well as her consequent murder, coming only months after the tragic fall of that same regime, and the assassination of that same leader, plus the unexpected resolution to that murder. I am actually sorry "well-written" cannot be said of the Burleigh volume, but the thought that that all the above things are what we will be offered by Peter Jaffey's (sic Janney's?) book is enough to make this conspiracy fanatic's head swoon with all the possibilities. It is, I must admit, also enough to get me to keep my Burleigh volume close at hand and not sell or trade it at my local used book store. While I was sorely disappointed that it did not give me the joys and sorrows I was hoping to find in such a tragic story, at least I do trust, from the quality of work that it offers, that it can be used for fact-checking against any future books that may actually prove to be the better written, yet offer less potentially credible research.

: In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation, as Nina Burleigh reveals in her widely praised book, the first to examine this haunting story. On October 12, 1964, socialite Mary Meyer was shot to death along a wooded path where she was taking her afternoon walk. Ordinarily such a crime wouldn't attract the attention of the CIA's head of counterintelligence, but Meyer was no ordinary Washington socialite. Born into a wealthy, bohemian family in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Meyer studied at Vassar, worked as a journalist during World War II, married–and later divorced–a war hero, became a proto-feminist, experimented with drugs, and had an affair with John F. Kennedy. When Meyer decided to try LSD, she didn't get it from some random dealer and trip in the park. Instead she turned to Timothy Leary himself–and, evidence suggests, she might have eventually shared her stash with the President of the United States. Shortly after Meyer was found dead, her diaries were spirited away: her brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, turned the documents over to the aforementioned CIA official, James Jesus Angleton, believing that it was in her, and others', best interest that her secrets die with her. A Very Private Woman pieces together some of these secrets, and hints at many more. It's a compelling story not only of a woman who lived at the edges of power, influence, and history, but who lived in and was buffeted by some of the most significant cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century. –Lisa Higgins

Edited by William Kelly
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