On February 23, 1976, the National Enquirer published a frontpage story headlined "Former Vice President of Washington Post Reveals JFK 2-Year White House Romance." The article included prominent pictures of James Truitt in a black turtleneck, vaguely resembling James Coburn, and appearing to be rolling a cigarette; Mary Meyer looking young and plump and also with a cigarette in her hand; Angleton sporting a sly smile beneath the rim of a felt hat; and half of a photo of the Bradlees and the Kennedys on a White House couch, showing only JFK and Tony Bradlee. The story's biggest bombshell was Truitt's allegation that the president and Mary had smoked marijuana joints that Truitt had provided. The story also revealed that Kennedy had hidden "one of Mary's undergarments in the Presidential safe." Truitt claimed Mary loved Kennedy but realized their romance would never be more than an illicit affair. To report the story, the tabloid sent reporters down to San Miguel de Allende to interview Truitt. The tabloid also contacted Tony Bradlee and Angleton and tried to talk to Ben Bradlee.

Bradlee was furious. When the National Enquirer sent a reporter to talk to him in his Post office, the editor erupted in a shouting rage and had the reporter thrown out of the building. Bradlee and Truitt went way back together, socially and professionally, and Truitt's betrayal hit Bradlee especially hard. Both had worked in the Washington bureau of Newsweek and both had been right-hand men to Phil Graham. When the newspaper fired Truitt, as part of his settlement he took $35,000 on the written condition that he not write anything for publication about his experiences at the Post that was "in any way derogatory" of the Post company, Phil Graham, or the Graham family. Because he had been an assistant to Graham as well as a party buddy, it was presumed he had knowledge of a great deal of the publishing family's dirty laundry.

No one knows exactly what motivated Truitt to sell Mary's story. Some journalists who talked to him believed he wanted to embarrass Bradlee in the wake of his 1976 bestseller, Conversations with Kennedy. Truitt was disgusted that Bradlee was getting credit as a great champion of the First Amendment for exposing Nixon's seamy side in Watergate coverage after having indulgently overlooked Kennedy's hypocrisies. He wrote Bradlee a letter when he heard about Bradlee's plans to publish his Kennedy book and demanded to know whether Bradlee would expose Kennedy's affair with his sister-in-law. At the time the Post was running editorials demanding the White House "let it all hang out" in the Watergate matter. Bradlee mentioned Mary five times in his book, never divulging a hint of the true nature of her relationship with the president, with the coy exception of the comment that Kennedy had once noted that "Mary would be hard to live with." Truitt also might have wanted to hurt his ex-wife, Anne. He probably did not betray Mary for the money: The National Enquirer paid him just one thousand dollars for his story in 1975 and didn't run it until after the revelations about Judith Campbell Exner's affair with Kennedy were made public during House hearings into the Kennedy assassination the following year.

Advance word of the upcoming tabloid scoop provoked the Washington Post to cover it. Ben Bradlee was vacationing in the Virgin Islands with his new wife, Sally Quinn. Reached there, Bradlee objected to running the story until he could get a "clear focus" on it, but the editors vetoed waiting. "We're not going to treat ourselves more kindly than we treat others," one of the editors, Harry Rosenfeld, said.

A Post reporter was dispatched to see Truitt in Mexico, where Truitt again recounted the details of Mary's private life. The Post ran an article on page one filled with the denials of Kennedy aides. One of them, Timothy Reardon, told the Post "nothing like that ever happened at the White House with her or anyone else." Kenneth O'Donnell called Mary "a legitimate, lovely lady" and denied that there had been a romance. Angleton told the Post he had assisted the Meyer family in a purely private capacity and said Mary had been a "cherished friend" of his wife. He refused to say whether there had been a diary.

Mary's women friends were angered by the National Enquirer story and horrified that the husband of one of their own had been the source of the disclosures. Their efforts to counter the revelations came in the form of unsourced quotes later found in small items in venues such as Time. While not denying the sex outright, they tried to put it in a more ladylike context, away from the insinuating tabloid sordidness. "She was not the kind of person to get into a dalliance," insisted "one old friend of the Meyer family" to Time. "This wasn't some tawdry affair."

The least horrified person involved seemed to be Mary's sister, Tony Bradlee, who matter-of-factly confirmed the fact of the romance but insisted that it be described as a "fling," not an affair. "Neither the relationship of Mary with JFK nor the existence of the diary has ever been made public before," Tony told National Enquirer reporter Jay Gourley. "It was nothing to be ashamed of. I think Jackie might have suspected it, but she didn't know for sure." Later she told the Post that the tabloid had taken her words out of context "to make it appear that I corroborated their story." But she denied none of it.

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.

It is only a matter of time, Angleton feels, until Bradlee makes a serious mistake, as he eventually does with the publication of Conversations with Kennedy, in which he mentions that Mary Meyer was murdered, but only in a footnote. A former Post editor named James Truitt is enraged at this; according to Truitt, Bradlee has forced him out of the paper in a particularly nasty fashion, with accusations of mental incompetence, and now Truitt decides to get back at Bradlee by revealing to other newspapers his belief that Bradlee's story on the Cord Meyers in Conversations with Kennedy was not the whole story; that Mary Meyer had been Kennedy's lover and that the day of her murder, James Angleton of the CIA searched her apartment and burned her diary. Their feud unnecessarily implicates Angleton, to his disgust and bitterness.