Benjamin Bradlee was born
in Boston on 26th August, 1921. One of
his closest friends as a child was Richard
Helms. While at Harvard University
Bradlee married Jean Saltonstall, the daughter of Senator Leverett
Saltonstall. After graduating in 1943 Bradlee joined naval intelligence
and worked as a communications officer. His duties included handling
classified and coded cables.
At the end of the war Bradlee
went to work as a clerk for the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU). Deborah
Davis (Katharine the Great)
points out that as the ACLU is an "organization that promotes
various progressive causes, including conscientious objection to war.
This job, so out of character for the young patriot, may or may not
have been an intelligence assignment."
In 1946 Bradlee purchased
the New Hampshire Times. He worked
for the newspaper until it was sold to William Loeb. As a result of
a family friend who knew Eugene Meyer, Bradlee found work on the Washington
Post as a crime reporter. Bradlee also got to know Philip
Graham, Eugene
Meyer's son-in-law, and associate publisher of the newspaper. In 1951
Graham helped Bradlee to become assistant press attaché in
the American embassy in Paris.
In
1952 Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and
Educational Exchange (USIE), the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced
films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the
the Central
Intelligence Agency throughout
Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America,
a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural information"
worldwide. While at the USIE Bradlee worked with E.
Howard Hunt and Alfred Friendly.
According
to a Justice Department memo from a assistant U.S. attorney in the
Rosenberg Trial Bradlee was helping
the CIA to manage European propaganda regarding the spying conviction
and the execution of Ethel Rosenberg
and Julius Rosenberg on on 19th June,
1953.
Bradlee
was officially employed by USIE until 1953, when he began working
for Newsweek. While based in
France, Bradlee divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot.
At the time of the marriage, Antoinette's sister, Mary
Pinchot Meyer,
was married to Cord
Meyer,
a key figure in Operation
MB,
a
CIA program to influence the American media.
Antoinette
Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d'Autremont,
who was married to James Angleton.
Bradlee
worked closely with Angleton in Paris. At the time Angleton was liaison
for all Allied intelligence in Europe. His deputy was Richard
Ober, a fellow student of Bradlee's at Harvard
University.
In
1957 Bradlee created a great deal of controversy when he interviewed
members of the FLN. They were Algerian guerrillas who were in rebellion
against the French government at the time. According to Deborah
Davis (Katharine
the Great) this had all the "earmarks of an intelligence
operation". As a result of these interviews, Bradlee was expelled
from France.
Bradlee
now began working at Newsweek
in Washington. While working for the
journal Bradlee became a close friend of John
F. Kennedy.
This included publishing stories beneficial to the career of the ambitious
politician. Bradlee later wrote two books about Kennedy: That
Special Grace (1964) and Conversations
with Kennedy (1975).
JFK
with Mary Meyer (far right). Antoinette Bradlee is second on the left.
In
1961 Richard
Helms tipped
off Bradlee that his grandfather, Gates White McGarrah, was willing
to sell Newsweek. Bradlee went
to Philip
Graham with
the story. Graham was interested in buying the journal and gave Bradlee
a handwritten check for $1 million to convey to McGarrah as a down
payment.
Mary
Pinchot Meyer,
who was Antoinette Bradlee's sister, divorced Cord
Meyer.
The Bradlees set
up Mary's apartment and art studio in their converted garage. In January,
1962, Mary began a sexual relationship with President
John
F. Kennedy.
She told her friends, Ann and James Truitt, that she was keeping a
diary about the affair.
In 1962 Mary began visiting
Timothy
Leary,
the director of research projects at Harvard University. Leary supplied
LSD to Mary who used it with Kennedy. According to his biography,
Flashbacks, Leary claims that
Mary phoned him the day after Kennedy was assassinated: "They
couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning
too much... They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm
scared. I'm afraid."
On 12th October, 1964,
Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead as she
walked along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath in Georgetown. Henry
Wiggins, a car mechanic, was working on a vehicle on Canal Road, when
he heard a woman shout out: "Someone help me, someone help me".
He then heard two gunshots. Wiggins ran to the edge of the wall overlooking
the towpath. He later told police he saw "a black man in a light
jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white
woman."
Soon afterwards Raymond
Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was
arrested and charged with Mary's murder. The towpath and the river
were searched but no murder weapon was ever found.
The media did not report
at the time that Meyer had been having an affair with John
F. Kennedy.
Nor did it reveal that her former husband, Cord
Meyer, was a senior figure in CIA's covert operations. As a result,
there was little public interest in the case.
During the trial Wiggins
was unable to identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's
body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police
had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.
On 29th July, 1965, Crump was acquitted of murdering Mary
Pinchot Meyer. The case remains unsolved.
In 1965 Katharine
Graham appointed Bradlee as assistant managing editor of the Washington
Post under Alfred Friendly, his former colleague at USIE.
Graham then requested Walter Lippmann
to suggest to Friendly that he should retire in order that Bradlee
could take over his job as managing editor. After a meeting with Graham
he agreed to resign.
Graham was pleased with
the way Bradlee edited the Washington Post
and in 1968 she appointed him vice president of the company.
Bradlee became a strong supporter of the Vietnam
War. This was reflected in the journalists he selected to report
on the conflict.
Ben Bradlee, Edward
Bennett Williams and Art Buchwald
Daniel
Ellsberg was member of the McNamara Study Group that in 1968 had
produced the classified History of Decision
Making in Vietnam, 1945-1968. Ellsberg, disillusioned with
the progress of the war, believed this document should be made available
to the public. He gave a copy of what later became known as the Pentagon
Papers to William Fulbright. However,
he refused to do anything with the document, so Ellsberg gave a copy
to Phil Geyelin of the Washington Post.
Katharine Graham and Bradlee decided
against publishing the contents on the document.
Ellsberg now went to the
New York Times and they began
publishing extracts from the document on 13th June, 1971. This included
information that Dwight Eisenhower
had made a secret commitment to help the French defeat the rebellion
in Vietnam. The document also showed
that John
F. Kennedy had
turned this commitment into a war by using a secret "provocation
strategy" that led to the Gulf of Tonkin
incidents and that Lyndon B. Johnson
had planned from the beginning of his presidency to expand the war.
Bradlee was criticised
by his journalists for failing to break this story. He now made attempts
to catch up and on June 18, 1971, the Washington
Post began publishing extracts from the
History of Decision Making in Vietnam, 1945-1968. However,
Bradlee concentrated on the period when Dwight
Eisenhower was in power. The first story
reported on how the Eisenhower administration had delayed democratic
elections in Vietnam.
Richard
Nixon now made attempts to prevent anymore extracts from the Pentagon
Papers being published. The Supreme Court
ruled against Nixon and Hugo Black commented
that the two newspapers "should be commended for serving the
purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly".
While editor of the
Washington Post Bradlee promoted the career of Bob
Woodward. Like
Bradlee, Woodward had been a communications officer for naval intelligence.
In July, 1972, Bradlee arranged for Woodward to work with Carl
Bernstein on
a story about a growing political scandal concerning the Nixon administration.
On
3rd July, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio
Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard
L. Barker and James W. McCord were
arrested while removing electronic devices from the Democratic
Party campaign offices in an apartment block called Watergate.
It appeared that the men had been to wiretap the conversations of
Larry O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic
National Committee.
The
phone number of E.Howard Hunt was found
in address books of the burglars. Reporters were now able to link
the break-in to the White House. Woodward began receiving information
from a secret source using the codename "Deep Throat". He
told Woodward that senior aides of President Richard
Nixon, had paid the burglars to obtain information about its political
opponents. There has been much speculation about the identity of "Deep
Throat" but one possibility is Bradlee's CIA friend, Richard
Ober.
Nixon
continued to insist that he knew nothing about the case or the payment
of "hush-money" to the burglars. However, in April 1973,
Nixon forced two of his principal advisers H.
R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman,
to resign. A third adviser, John Dean, refused
to go and was sacked.
On 20th April, Dean issued a statement making it clear that he was
unwilling to be a "scapegoat in the Watergate case". When
Dean testified on 25th June, 1973 before the Senate Committee investigating
Watergate, he claimed that Richard Nixon
participated in the cover-up. He also confirmed that Nixon had tape-recordings
of meetings where these issues were discussed.
The Special Prosecutor now demanded access to these tape-recordings.
At first Nixon refused but when the Supreme
Court ruled against him and members of the Senate began calling
for him to be impeached, he changed his mind. However, some tapes
were missing while others contained important gaps.
Under extreme pressure, Nixon supplied tapescripts of the missing
tapes. It was now clear that Nixon had been involved in the cover-up
and members of the Senate began to call for his impeachment. On 9th
August, 1974, Richard Nixon became the
first President of the United States to resign from office. Nixon
was granted a pardon but other members of his staff involved in helping
in his deception were imprisoned.
Bradlee and the
Washington Post received a great
deal of credit for exposing the Watergate Scandal and in 1973 the
newspaper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for journalism.
In March, 1976, James
Truitt, a former
senior member of staff at the Washington
Post, gave an interview to the National
Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Mary
Pinchot Meyer
was having an affair
with John
F. Kennedy
when he was assassinated. He also claimed that Meyer had told his
wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship
in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary
"if anything ever happened to me".
Ann Truitt was living in
Tokyo at the time that Meyer was murdered on 12th October, 1964. She
phoned Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary.
Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair
with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled what
he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until
the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks
to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got
inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told
us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary."
James
Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew
of Mary's relationship with John
F. Kennedy and
was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that
would reveal details of the affair. According to Bradlee, it was Mary's
sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few
days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's
studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed
he burnt the diary.
Leo Damore claimed in an
article that appeared in the New York Post
that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was
that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was
involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to
the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot,
it was Caligula's court'?"
Bradlee retired as executive
editor of the Washington Post
in 1991, but continued as a vice president of the company. In 1995
he published his memoirs, A Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures.
Forum Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Ben Bradlee
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
Deborah
Davis, Katharine the Great
(1979)
Nineteen
fifty-six. Ben Bradlee, recently remarried, is a European correspondent
for Newsweek. He left the embassy for Newsweek in 1953, a year before
CIA director Allen Duller authorized one of his most skilled and
fanatical agents, former OSS operative James Angleton, to set up
a counterintelligence staff. As chief of counterintelligence, Angleton
has become the liaison for all Allied intelligence and has been
given authority over the sensitive Israeli desk, through which the
CIA is receiving 80 percent of its information on the KGB. Bradlee
is in a position to help Angleton with the Israelis in Paris, and
they are connected in other ways as well: Bradlee's wife, Tony Pinchot,
Vassar '44, and her sister Mary Pinchot Meyer, Vassar '42, are close
friends with Cicely d'Autremont, Vassar '44, who married James Angleton
when she was a junior, the year he graduated from Harvard Law School
and was recruited into the OSS by one of his former professors at
Yale.
Also at
Harvard in 1943, as undergraduates, were Bradlee and a man named
Richard Ober, who will become Angleton's chief counterintelligence
deputy and will work with him in Europe and Washington throughout
the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. Both Bradlee and Ober
were members of the class of '44 but finished early to serve in
the war; both received degrees with the class of '43. Ober went
into the OSS and became a liaison with the anti-Fascist underground
in Nazi-occupied countries; Bradlee joined naval intelligence, was
made a combat communications officer, and handled classified and
coded cables on a destroyer in the South Pacific. He then worked
for six months as a clerk in the New York office of the American
Civil Liberties Union, an organization that promotes various progressive
causes, including conscientious objection to war. This job, so out
of character for the young patriot, may or may not have been an
intelligence assignment.
In 1956
Ben and Tony Bradlee are part of a community of Americans who have
remained in Paris after having been trained in intelligence during
the war or in propaganda at the Economic Cooperation Administration.
Many have now addressed themselves to fighting communism, a less
visible but more invidious enemy than nazism had been. Some of them,
like Bradlee, are journalists who write from the Cold War point
of view; some are intelligence operatives who travel between Washington
and Paris, London, and Rome. In Washington, at Philip Graham's salon,
they plan and philosophize; in foreign cities, they do the work
of keeping European communism in check.
Bradlee's
childhood friend Richard Helms is part of this group. He has written
portions of the National Security Act of 1947, a set of laws creating
the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency,
the latter to support the CIA with research into codes and electronic
communications. Helms is the agency's chief expert on espionage;
his agents penetrate the government of the Soviet Union and leftist
political parties throughout Europe, South America, Africa, and
Asia.
Angleton
and Ober are counterintelligence, and run agents from Washington
and Paris who do exactly the opposite: they prevent spies from penetrating
American embassies, the State Department, the CIA itself. Head of
the third activity, covert operations, is Phil Graham's compatriot
Frank Wisner, the father of MOCKINGBIRD, whose principal operative
is a man named Cord Meyer, Jr.
(2)
Ben
Bradlee, The Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures (1995)
On a Saturday
morning I went to my immediate boss, the embassy's public affairs
officer, Bill Tyler, for help. Since we couldn't get any help from
Washington, why didn't we send our own man - me, obviously - to
New York to read the transcript of the entire Rosenberg Trial (and
appeals), return to Paris as quickly as possible, and write a detailed,
factual account of the evidence as it was presented, witness by
witness, and as it was rebutted, cross-examination by cross-examination?
Tyler thought that was a great idea. When could I - should I leave?
Right away. Fine, but it was Saturday. The banks were closed and
no one had cash for the air fare. "That's all right,"
said Tyler. "We'll ask Bobby for some francs."
Bobby was
Robert Thayer, son of the founder of St. Mark's School, a longtime
friend of my mother and father, and the CIA station chief in Paris.
He reached nonchalantly into the bottom drawer of his desk and fished
out enough francs to fly me to the moon, much less to the Federal
Courthouse in the Southern District of New York, and I left that
afternoon. This incident caused me some embarrassment years later,
when a woman named Deborah Davis argued in a book about Katharine
Graham that I had worked for the CIA as an agent. Her "evidence,"
obtained through a Freedom of Information request, was an internal
CIA document noting that Bobby Thayer had advanced the cash for
my air fare.
(3)
Nina Burleigh,
A Very Private Woman (1998)
By the 1970s,
the CIA was seen as an unsavory ally and Bradlee and other journalists
were extremely upset about assertions that they had ever been associated
with it even unofficially. (Deborah) Davis published a justice Department
memo from an assistant U.S. attorney involved in the Rosenberg case
which specifically indicated that Ben Bradlee was helping the CIA
manage European propaganda regarding the Rosenbergs' spying conviction
and death sentences. Bradlee denied working for the CIA. Pressure
from Bradlee and Katharine Graham, who wrote that an assertion that
Phil Graham helped the CIA was Davis's "CIA fantasy,"
apparently played some role in persuading Davis's first publisher
to shred printed copies of the book. But according to Carl Bernstein,
a former deputy director of the CIA said, "It was widely known
Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from. Frank Wisner dealt
with him." Davis included the Bradlee memo in a second edition,
published almost ten years after the shredding of the first copies.
(4)
Deborah Davis,
interviewed
by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press (1992)
Kenn Thomas:
Let's get back to Ben Bradlee. I know part of what's in the book
and part of what upset those forces that caused the withdrawal of
its first publication is what you've said about Ben Bradlee and
his connection to the Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg trial. Would you
talk about that a bit?
Deborah
Davis: In the first edition, the one that was recalled and shredded,
I looked in State Department lists for '52 and '53 when Bradlee
was serving as a press attache supposedly in the American embassy
in Paris. This was during the Marshall Plan when the United States
over in Europe had hundreds of thousands of people making an intensive
effort to keep Western Europe from going Communist. Bradlee wanted
to be part of that effort. So he was over in the American embassy
in Paris and the embassy list had these letters after his name that
said USIE. And I asked the State Department what that meant and
it said United States Information Exchange. It was the forerunner
of the USIA, the United States Information Agency. It was the propaganda
arm of the embassy. They produced propaganda that was then disseminated
by the CIA all over Europe. They planted newspaper stories. They
had a lot of reporters on their payrolls. They routinely would produce
stories out of the embassy and give them to these reporters and
they would appear in the papers in Europe. It's very important to
understand how influential newspaper stories are to people because
this is what people think of as their essential source of facts
about what is going on. They don't question it, and even if they
do question it they have nowhere else to go to find out anything
else. So Bradlee was involved in producing this propaganda. But
at that point in the story I didn't know exactly what he was doing.
I published
the first book just saying that he worked for USIE and that this
agency produced propaganda for the CIA. He went totally crazy after
the book came out. One person who knew him told me then that he
was going all up and down the East Coast having lunch with every
editor he could think of saying that it was not true, he did not
produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said
that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction
was totally out of proportion to what I had said.
Kenn Thomas:
You make a good point in the book that other people who have had
similar kinds of--I don't even know if you want to call them accusations--but
reports that they in some way cooperated with the CIA in the '5Os,
that the times were different and people were expected to do that
kind of thing out of a sense of patriotism and they blow it off.
Deborah
Davis : That's right. People say, yeah, this is what I did back
then, you know. But Bradlee doesn't want to be defined that way
because, I don't know, somehow he thinks it's just too revealing
of him, of who he is. He doesn't want to admit a true fact about
his past because somehow he doesn't want it known that this is where
he came from. Because this is the beginning of his journalistic
career. This is how he made it big.
Subsequent
to my book being shredded in 1979, early 1980, I got some documents
through the Freedom of Information Act and they revealed that Bradlee
had been the person who was running an entire propaganda operation
against Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg that covered forty countries
on four continents. He always claimed that he had been a low level
press flack in the embassy in Paris, just a press flack, nothing
more. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg had already been convicted of being
atomic spies and they were on death row waiting to be executed.
And the purpose of Bradlee's propaganda operation was to convince
the Europeans that they really were spies, they really had given
the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians and therefore they
did deserve to be put to death.
The Europeans,
having just very few years before defeated Hitler, were very concerned
that the United States was going fascist the way their countries
had. And this was a very real fear to the Europeans. They saw the
same thing happening in the United States that had happened in their
own countries. And so Bradlee used the Rosenberg case to say, "No
this isn't what you think it is. These people really did this bad
thing and they really do deserve to die. It doesn't mean that the
United States is becoming fascist." So he had a very key role
in creating European public opinion and it was very, very important.
This was the key issue that was going to determine how the Europeans
felt about the United States.
Some of
the documents that I had showed him writing letters to the prosecutors
of the Rosenbergs saying "I'm working for the head of the CIA
in Paris and he wants me to come and look at your files." And
this kind of thing. So in the second edition, which came out in
1987, I reprinted those documents, the actual documents, the readers
can see them and it's got his signature and it's very, very interesting.
He subsequently has said nothing about it at all. He won't talk
about it all. He won't answer any questions about it. So I guess
the point about Bradlee is that he went from this job to being European
bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and to the executive editorship
of the Post. So this is how he got where he is. It's very clear
line of succession. Philip Graham was Katharine Graham's husband,
who ran the Post in the '50s and he committed suicide in 1963. That's
when Katharine Graham took over. Bradlee was close friends with
Allen Dulles and Phil Graham. The paper wasn't doing very well for
a while and he was looking for a way to pay foreign correspondents
and Allen Dulles was looking for a cover. Allen Dulles was head
of the CIA back then and he was looking for a cover for some of
his operatives so that they could get in and out of places without
arousing suspicion. So the two of them hit on a plan: Allen Dulles
would pay for the reporters and they would give the CIA the information
that they found as well as give it to the Post. So he helped to
develop this operation and it subsequently spread to other newspapers
and magazines. And it was called Operation Mockingbird. This operation,
I believe, was revealed for the first time in my book.
(5)
Katharine
Graham, Personal History
(1997)
On my way to Europe right
after Phil's death, I wrote to two men whom I regarded as unfriendly
- Ben Bradlee and Arnaud de Borchgrave. I thought of them as Phil's
people, Phil's friends, and both of them had stood clearly and decisively
with Phil for their own good and separate reasons. Ben felt he owed
Phil loyalty for his purchase of Newsweek, but I think he, and actually
most of the people at Newsweek, simply didn't know The Washington
Post Company or feel any loyalty to anyone but Phil himself. When
they saw things coming apart, they tried to cut a straight professional
line and separated Phil from me, naturally taking his side.
Arnaud was
a friend of Robin's from Newsweek's Paris bureau, which made me
all the more wary of him. But he played a large and useful, if ambiguous,
role abroad for Newsweek. He was a dashing figure, a charmer of
sorts who knew many of the monarchs, rulers, and leaders, and a
fine reporter. And he was good for the magazine. (He also lived
very well off it.)
What I said
to both of them was that the past was past and that I hoped we could
all go forward together. Ben doesn't remember receiving such a letter,
but I am very clear about having written to both men. I knew enough
even then to understand that personal feelings shouldn't enter into
professional situations. My later relationship with Ben, of course,
became one of the most cherished professional and personal relationships
of my life, and one of the most productive. Arnaud remained more
or less distant from me and seemed to feel that I was "out
to get him." If I was, it took me an inordinately long time,
since he was at the magazine for seventeen more years, until he
was fired by the editors in 1980 over an editorial disagreement.
Even then, when Lester Bernstein, Newsweek's editor at the time,
told me that the editors had unanimously decided to part company
with Arnaud, I asked if they were certain, stating that Arnaud did
have a lot of talent. Lester's response was, "I came to tell
you, not to consult you."
(6)
Joseph
Trento, Secret History of the CIA (2001)
On the evening
of October 12, 1964, Angleton and his wife, Cicely, were invited
to a poetry reading at the house of an old friend, the artist Mary
Meyer. Meyer's dreams had died in Dallas, too.
Twenty years
earlier, just out of Vassar, Mary Pinchot as she was then, had married
a promising young man, Cord Meyer, who later became one of Allen
Dulles's top clandestine executives at the CIA. Mary Meyer came
to hate her husband's job, and in 1956, she divorced him and moved
to Georgetown to start a new life. That new life included a love
affair with John Kennedy, which ended only with his murder. While
Kennedy had many affairs while in the White House, Angleton insisted
that the president and Mary Meyer "were in love. They had something
very important."
The day
of the poetry reading, Cicely Angleton called her husband at work
to ask him to check on a radio report she had heard that a woman
had been shot to death along the old Chesapeake and Ohio towpath
in Georgetown. Walking along that towpath, which ran near her home,
was Mary Meyer's favorite exercise, and Cicely, knowing her routine,
was worried. James Angleton dismissed his wife's worry, pointing
out that there was no reason to suppose the dead woman was Mary-many
people walked along the towpath.
When the
Angletons arrived at Mary Meyer's house that evening, she was not
home. A phone call to her answering service proved that Cicely's
anxiety had not been misplaced: Their friend had been murdered that
afternoon. The Angletons went to the nearby home of Mary's sister,
Antoinette, then married to Newsweek's Washington bureau chief,
Benjamin C. Bradlee. They comforted the family and helped them make
funeral arrangements.
As police
later reconstructed that day's events, Mary had painted in the morning
and at about noon had set off on her daily walk. It was cool outside.
When the police were called to the murder scene, they found her
dressed in slacks and an angora sweater. A detective commented that
she was beautiful, even after the gunman had put two bullets into
her. She was two days shy of her forty-fourth birthday. The D.C.
police, always willing to cooperate with the government on potentially
embarrassing matters, quickly arrested a local black man for killing
Meyer.
A police
officer had found the man, Raymond Crump, Jr., soaking wet, not
far from the murder scene. Crump claimed that he had drunk some
beer and fallen asleep and that he woke up only when he slid down
the bank of the canal into the water. A jacket fished out of the
canal after the shooting fit him. An eyewitness said the killer
was black and was wearing that very windbreaker.
The next
weekend, the Angletons, along with others of Mary's friends, began
searching through her townhouse. They were frantically looking for
a diary she had kept - really a sketchbook - which included details
of her love affair with John Kennedy. Despite an exhaustive effort,
they failed to find it.
A few days
later, Antoinette Bradlee found the diary and many personal letters
in a metal box in her sister's studio. It was hard to see how the
earlier searchers could have missed it. Had it been removed and
then replaced? James Angleton, who was close to Meyer's sons, was
given the diary and letters for safekeeping. He allowed some people
to reclaim letters they had written to Meyer, but he told everyone
that he had burned the diary. He had not. In July 1978, he said,
"I kept it for her children.... You must understand that it
was a personal, not a professional, responsibility."
(7)
Nellie
Bly, The Kennedy Men: Three Generations of Sex, Scandal and Secrets
(1996)
Some time
before she died, Mary Meyer confided to her friends James and Anne
Truitt that she was having an affair with the President and keeping
a diary about it. Truitt was then vice president of the Washington
Post; his wife Anne was a sculptor and confidante of Mary. Following
the 1963 suicide of Phil Graham, Truitt was sent to the Tokyo bureau
of Newsweek, a Post company Before they left for Japan, Mary discussed
the disposition of her diary in the event of her death. She asked
the Truitts to entrust it to James Jesus Angleton, chief of counterintelligence
for the CIA.
The Truitts
were still in Tokyo when they received word of the towpath murder,
but the Saturday after Mary Meyer's murder, five other friends,
including Angleton and his wife Cicely, gathered at her Georgetown
home to search for her diary.
They knew
that Mary usually left her diary in the bookcase in her bedroom,
where she also kept clippings about the assassination of JFK, but
the diary was not there.
Drawing
on his training and all the specialized tools at his disposal, Angleton
combed her deep, narrow town house. But it was her sister, Tony,
who finally found the diary in Mary's studio, locked in a steel
box filled with hundreds of letters. She turned it over to Angleton
and asked him to burn it. According to a November 12, 1995 letter
to the New York Times Book Review jointly signed by Cicely Angleton
and Anne Truitt, Angleton followed this instruction in part by burning
the loose papers. He also followed Mary Meyer's instruction and
safeguarded the diary. Years later, he honored a request from Tony
Bradlee that he deliver it to her. Subsequently, Tony Bradlee burned
the diary in the presence of Anne Truitt...
Fourteen
years after the murder, the National Enquierer a story headlined
JFK 2 YEAR WHITE HOUSE ROMANCE ... SOCIALITE THEN MURDERED AND DIARY
BURNED BY CIA. The main source for the story was James Truitt. The
former publishing executive had been motivated, he said, by Ben
Bradlee's lack of candor in his own book, Conversations with
Kennedy. "Here is this great crusading Watergate editor
who claimed to tell everything in his Kennedy book," said Truitt,
"but really told nothing,"
The Poses
reaction to the story was to smear Truitt in a February 23 story
that cited a doctor's certifications contained in court records
that Truitt had suffered from a mental illness "such as to
impair his judgment and cause him to be irresponsible." It
quoted an anonymous Washington attorney to the effect that Truitt
had threatened Bradlee and others in recent years with exposure
of the "alleged scandals."
Journalists
Ron Rosenbaum and Philip Nobile wrote about the mystery in New
Times and concluded that: "the Post, while giving admirable
play to an extremely touchy subject, created the hard impression
that Truitt was an unreliable source-even though Bradlee knew that
Truitt was essentially truthful about Mary Meyer and JFK."
(8)
Ben
Bradlee, The Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures (1995)
Two telephone
calls that night from overseas added new dimensions to Mary's death.
The first came from President Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre
Salinger, in Paris. He expressed his particular sorrow and condolences,
and it was only after that conversation was over that we realized
that we hadn't known that Pierre had been a friend of Mary's. The
second, from Anne Truitt, an artist/sculptor living in Tokyo, was
completely understandable. She had been perhaps Mary's closest friend,
and after she and Tony had grieved together, she told us that Mary
had asked her to take possession of a private diary 'if anything
ever happened to me.' Anne asked if we had found any such diary,
and we told her we hadn't looked for anything, much less a diary.
We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I
walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked,
as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton,
and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for
Mary's diary.
(9)
James DiEugenio, The Posthumous Assassination of John F.
Kennedy, The Assassinations ((2003)
As noted
earlier, Jim Truitt gave this curious tale its first public airing
in 1976, on the heels of the Church Committee. From there, the Washington
Post (under Bradlee) picked it up. There had been an apparent
falling out between Truitt and Bradlee, and Truitt said that he
wanted to show that Bradlee was not the crusader for truth that
Watergate or his book on Kennedy had made him out to be. In the
National Enquirer, Truitt stated that Mary had revealed her
affair with Kennedy while she was alive to he and his wife. He then
went further. In one of their romps in the White House, Mary had
offered Kennedy a couple of marijuana joints, but coke-sniffer Kennedy
said, "This isn't like cocaine. I'll get you some of that."
(10)
Ben
Bradlee, The Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures (1995)
The boys
(Bob Woodward and Carl Beinstein) had one unbeatable asset: they
worked spectacularly hard. They would ask fifty people the same
question, or they would ask one person the same question fifty times,
if they had reason to believe some information was being withheld.
Especially after they got us in trouble by misinterpreting Sloan's
answer about whether Haldeman controlled a White House slush fund.
And, of
course, Woodward had "Deep Throat," whose identity has
been hands-down the best-kept secret in the history of Washington
journalism.
Throughout
the years, some of the city's smartest journalists and politicians
have put their minds to identifying Deep Throat, without success.
General Al Haig was a popular choice for a long time, and especially
when he was running for president in the 1988 race, he would beg
me to state publicly that he was not Deep Throat. He would steam
and sputter when I told him that would be hard for me to do for
him, and not for anyone else. Woodward finally said publicly that
Haig was not Deep Throat.
Some otherwise
smart people decided Deep Throat was a composite, if he (or she)
existed at all. I have always thought it should be possible to identify
Deep Throat simply by entering all the information about him in
All the President's Men into a computer, and then entering as much
as possible about all the various suspects. For instance, who was
not in Washington on the days that Woodward reported putting the
red-flagged flower pot on his window sill, signaling Deep Throat
for a meeting.
The quality
of Deep Throat's information was such that I had accepted Woodward's
desire to identify him to me only by job, experience, access, and
expertise. That amazes me now, given the high stakes. I don't see
how I settled for that, and I would not settle for that now. But
the information and the guidance he was giving Woodward were never
wrong, never. And it was only after Nixon's resignation, and after
Woodward and Bernstein's second book, The Final Days, that I felt
the need for Deep Throat's name. I got it one spring day during
lunch break on a bench in MacPherson Square. I have never told a
soul, not even Katharine Graham, or Don Graham, who succeeded his
mother as publisher in 1979. They have never asked me. I have never
commented, in any way, on any name suggested to me. The fact that
his identity has remained secret all these years is mystifying,
and truly extraordinary. Some Doubting Thomases have pointed out
that I only knew who Woodward told me Deep Throat was. To be sure.
But that was good enough for me then. And now.
(11)
New York Times (15th March,
2001)
Mr. Meyer
had married the former Mary Pinchot, a freelance writer and editor,
in 1945. One of the couple's three sons, Michael, died at age 9
in a car accident. Soon after that, the couple divorced.
Mrs. Meyer
was fatally shot in 1964 as she walked along the towpath of the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. A day laborer found hiding
in the bushes along the canal was acquitted of the crime, and it
remains unsolved.
After her
death, Mrs. Meyer's sister and brother-in-law said they saw the
top C.I.A. counterintelligence officer, James J. Angleton, try to
break into her home and take her diary.
Mrs. Meyer's
brother-in-law, Benjamin C. Bradlee, later became executive editor
of The Washington Post. The diary, which Mr. Bradlee and his wife
found later that day, disclosed an affair between Mrs. Meyer and
President John F. Kennedy.
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