Mary's Mosaic (52 page)

A little more than a week after Dallas, Timothy Leary received a disturbing phone call from Mary Meyer. “Ever since the Kennedy assassination I had been expecting a call from Mary,” wrote Leary in
Flashbacks.
“It came around December 1. I could hardly understand her. She was either drunk or drugged or overwhelmed with grief. Or all three.”
¹³⁵

“They couldn’t control him any more,” said Mary between her sobbing and crying. “He was changing too fast. They’ve covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m afraid. Be careful.”
¹³⁶
Leary later recalled this exchange in 1990. He told Leo Damore, “She was very upset, distraught. Her call spooked me. And I never imagined she’d be killed less than a year later.”
¹³⁷

P
ART
T
HREE

“
O
N ONE SMALL
condition,” said Claudius, having been asked to promise his feared grandmother the Lady Livia Augustus that he would implore the new Roman Emperor Caligula to make her a goddess after her death.

“You see, there’s so much I want to know,” continued Claudius. “I’m a historian and I want to know the truth. When people die, so much dies with them, and all that’s left are pieces of paper that tell lies.”

“He wants to know the truth and he calls it a small condition!”
exclaimed the Lady Livia Augustus.

“Grandmother, who killed Marcellus?” asked Claudius.

“I did!” said the Lady Livia Augustus.
¹

1
    From the 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production of
I, Claudius
. (Based on:
I, Claudius: from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius born 10 B.C. murdered and deified A.D. 54
. and
Claudius the God
, both authored by Robert Graves. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989, originally published by Random House, 1935.

11

After Dallas

Do not forget your dying king. Show this world that this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Nothing, as long as you live, will ever be more important. It’s up to you.

—Attorney Jim Garrison

(during his summation

to the jury in the film
JFK
)

There’s something so mysterious about an orchid. They look as though they had been grown in damp underground caves by demons. They’re evil sickly flowers with no life of their own, living on borrowed strength.

—Mary Pinchot (Meyer)

(from her short story “Futility,”

Vassar Review and Little Magazine
, 1941)

A
SHOCKED AND
traumatized nation attempted to fathom the death of its president. The eye of the storm was centered in Washington, encased within a hurricane of concealed controversy. In Dallas, an hour and fifteen minutes after the president’s death, a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked in the Texas School Book Depository—the place where shots had allegedly been fired at the president—was arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Oswald had, according to one eyewitness, entered the theater “shortly after 1:00
P.M
.”
¹
Charged first with the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit, which had taken place at approximately 1:15
P.M
. several blocks away, Oswald was eventually charged with the assassination of the president several hours later.

Two days later, in one of the most bizarre, phantasmagorical events ever witnessed on national television, Oswald was fatally shot by a man identified as Jack Ruby, adding to the bewilderment of an already stunned audience of viewers. So unprecedented had been the spectacle of horror, Agnes Meyer, mother of
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham, reportedly seethed, “What is this, some kind of goddamn banana republic?”
²
The American media struggled to sustain a semblance of calm and order, still insistent Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone crackpot assassin and had acted unilaterally. But observers and journalists in other countries had already started speculating Oswald had been killed to keep him from talking.

P
ublic distraction, supported by an obsequious, manipulative media, has long obscured what diligent researchers over the years have uncovered: that before Dallas, there were at least two other plots to assassinate President Kennedy. One assassination attempt against the president was planned to take place in Chicago on November 2, 1963. It would have involved multiple gunmen, as well as a designated “patsy,” a mentally handicapped ex-Marine named Thomas Arthur Vallee. Curiously, like Lee Harvey Oswald, Thomas Vallee had also served at a U-2 base in Japan under the Joint Technical Advisory Group (JTAG), the CIA’s code name for its U-2 spy plane surveillance unit. Vallee then “found work” in the fall of November 1963 in a building overlooking a Chicago street immediately adjacent to an L-shaped turn that would be on the route for the upcoming presidential motorcade. The plot finally had been foiled only because certain members of the Secret Service had acted quickly. President Kennedy had also canceled the trip as a result of President Diem’s assassination in South Vietnam. Having uncovered evidence in Chicago of a four-man assassination hit team with high-powered rifles, the Secret Service arrested two members of the team, although two others escaped.
³

A second plot was set to unfold during President Kennedy’s trip to Miami on November 18, but the presidential motorcade was canceled. Word of the plot had been forwarded to the Secret Service from police intelligence in Miami. A secretly tape-recorded meeting between Miami police informant Willie Somerset and right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer on November 9 had revealed that an assassination attempt might be made in Miami “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.”
⁴
Consequently, the president flew by helicopter from the Miami airport to the Americana Hotel, where he delivered his scheduled speech.

While the magnitude of such threats would have been communicated to the president, it wasn’t clear how much detail was given to him. However, according to one Washington insider with ties to the Kennedy family, quoted in a 1996 article by Bennett Bolton and David Duffy, “Jack told Mary before his death that he believed there was a conspiracy in the works to assassinate him, and that the people behind the plot were close to him.”
⁵
In an interview for this book, Bennett Bolton verified the research he and his partner undertook for the article, though he wouldn’t divulge the source of the quote.
⁶
What was certain was that weeks before Dallas, it appeared the president had been marked for a well-organized assassination.
⁷

T
hough Mary has been previously portrayed as not believing in any conspiracy to assassinate her lover the president, her biographer claiming that she “accepted the idea that Oswald was the lone assassin,”
⁸
the deeper evidence beneath the surface reveals a far different story. Throughout the last year of her life, Mary Pinchot Meyer was deeply engaged in exploration; her suspicion had been aroused, and it grew stronger. She wanted to know the real truth of what had taken place. Understandably preoccupied with Jack’s assassination, she maintained a collection of “clippings of the JFK assassination” in the bookcase in her bedroom, next to the place where she kept her diary.
⁹
The lingering question was how far Mary had gone in her investigation, and what impact it might have had. She wasn’t the kind of person to stand idly aside in the face of an event of this magnitude. She was well aware of her ex-husband Cord’s work and his connection to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s infiltration of the media. Her vigilance would have caused an awareness of whatever narrative the media was peddling, particularly if Jack had shared with her any information about what the Secret Service had uncovered earlier in November.

Mary was a “Washington insider” with many relationships and connections inside the Kennedy coterie and beyond. As such, she was privy to information and individuals that few people could access. Given the president’s regard for her, her presence within the intimate confines of the White House for two years had accorded her an unique status. Kenny O’Donnell certainly respected Mary as a special, trusted person in the president’s life. There were even times, he told Leo Damore, where he “feared the hold she had on Jack.”
¹⁰

In fact, Mary had sought out O’Donnell several weeks after the assassination, inquiring about his recollection of events that horrific day in Dallas.
According to O’Donnell’s statements to author Leo Damore, he (O’Donnell) confided to Mary what both he and Dave Powers had witnessed from their vantage point in the car directly behind the president’s. The smell of gunpowder, the sound of rifle shots, as well as other features of gunfire were well known to the two close Kennedy advisers, both seasoned World War II combat veterans. Both remained adamant for the rest of their lives that at least
two shots
had come “from behind the fence [on the grassy knoll],” in
front
of the motorcade. What O’Donnell had told Mary, he reiterated to author Leo Damore, although O’Donnell never spoke about it publicly. His account was further confirmed twenty-five years later by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill in his 1987 memoir
Man of the House.
At a private dinner five years after the Kennedy assassination, O’Neill recalled a conversation with Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, during which they had told him that at least “two shots” had come from in front of the motorcade “behind the fence.”
¹¹

“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” the astonished Tip O’Neill had said to O’Donnell.

“You’re right,” O’Donnell replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.”

“I can’t believe it,” the Speaker said. “I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth.”

“Tip, you have to understand,” continued O’Donnell. “The family—everybody wanted this behind them.” Before O’Neill published his memoir, he checked with Dave Powers to make sure his memory was not failing him, since O’Donnell had already died. “As they say in the news business,” wrote O’Neill, referring to Powers, “he stands by his story.”
¹²

Not only did Dave Powers stand by his story, he went several steps further a few years later. WCAP radio producer Woody Woodland in Lowell, Massachusetts, interviewed Dave Powers in late 1991, shortly after the release of Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
. At the time, Powers was still the museum curator of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. After the interview, Powers walked with Woody Woodland to his car.

“I know this is a painful subject matter for you, Mr. Powers,” said Woodland as they walked into the parking lot. “But have you seen that movie [Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
]?” Powers confirmed he had indeed already seen the film.

“What did you think of it?” inquired Woodland.

“I think they got it right,” said Powers.

“Really?” said Woodland, somewhat taken aback.

“Yes,” continued Powers. “We were driving into an ambush. They were shooting from the front, from behind that fence [on the grassy knoll].”

“But you didn’t say that to the Warren Commission,” Woodland pressed.

“No [I didn’t], we were told not to by the FBI,” Powers replied.
¹³

Whatever conversation Mary had with O’Donnell, her worst suspicions would have likely been confirmed. Over the years, scores of other eyewitness accounts from people who were in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination have been gathered, analyzed, and published that corroborate the O’Donnell-Powers account. Specifically, over fifty people, including Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was riding in the third car of the motorcade with Lyndon Johnson, immediately behind O’Donnell and Powers, would recount that the motorcade had actually come to a near-complete stop—immediately before the fatal head shot to the president.
¹⁴

But the real clincher was what the FBI was doing to the most important witnesses in Dallas: pressuring them by whatever means necessary to conform to a deliberately contrived narrative—that there were just three shots, all from
behind
the motorcade, and all from the Texas School Book Depository. The second conspiracy—to manipulate and cover up the real evidence of the first—was under way posthaste, and neither Kenny O’Donnell nor Dave Powers, in the aftermath of the dastardly deed of Dallas, was willing publicly “to take a bullet for the truth.” Had they done so, they could have altered the course of history as we know it today. Instead, they succumbed to the intimidation of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI; and the cancerous malignancy rapidly spread.