← United States of Kennedy
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- [00:00]
Hans Charles
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:05]
Menelik Lumumba
1969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis, and at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
- [00:12]
Hans Charles
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the board of trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles.
- [00:27]
Menelik Lumumba
Our menelik Lumumba.
- [00:28]
Hans Charles
Listen to the a building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:34]
Ryder Strong
This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called the red weather. In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.
- [00:46]
Nina Burley
So, no, I am not your guru.
- [00:49]
Ryder Strong
And back then, I lied to everybody.
- [00:52]
Nina Burley
They have had this case for 30 years.
- [00:55]
Ryder Strong
I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:05]
Hans Charles
When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules.
- [01:11]
Nina Burley
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
- [01:17]
Hans Charles
Was he a businessman? A criminal?
- [01:20]
Nina Burley
A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [01:25]
Hans Charles
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:34]
Nina Burley
On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing. Hey, if they'll kill a cop and bury him, what are they gonna do to me? What really happened to the missing deputy? Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Listen to Valley of shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:13]
George Severis
I'm George Severis.
- [02:15]
Julia Claire
And I'm Julia Claire.
- [02:16]
George Severis
And this is United States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about an important character with whom you may not be familiar. Mary Pinchot Meyer.
- [02:32]
Julia Claire
Mary Pinchot meyer was a D.C. socialite, artist and confirmed mistress of President John F. Kennedy. While walking near her Studio on October 12, 1964, she was murdered in broad daylight. Less than a year after JFK's assassination, the man initially accused of shooting her was acquitted, and the case has been unsolved ever since. Like all of the untimely deaths in the Kennedy universe, hers has been the subject of immense speculation and conspiracy theories. Did we mention she was married to a CIA operative?
- [03:05]
George Severis
To help us decouple fact from fiction, today we are joined by investigative journalist and author of A Very Private the Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer, Nina Burley.
- [03:17]
Julia Claire
Nina, welcome to United States of Kennedy.
- [03:19]
Nina Burley
Thank you for having me.
- [03:21]
George Severis
So before we get into the nitty gritty of the details of this story that somehow Julia and I had not really heard of in great detail before, which is crazy, considering we have been talking about the Kennedys now for many, many months. I want to know. You wrote the book in 1998. You are still very much one of the experts people turn to when they talk about this case. We just listened to you on the Soledad o' Brien PODC that came out a few years ago. So clearly, Mary Meyer has defined a big chunk of your professional life. We were wondering what initially got you interested in her.
- [03:57]
Nina Burley
Sure. Yeah. So I was working at Time, you know, one of those paper legacy magazines, and Ben Bradley had published his memoir. And in those days, Time and Newsweek were in competition. And every Monday you'd go in and you'd open the other guy, see what the other, you know, Brand X had done. And they had excerpted Bradley's memoir. And I read it and, you know, I'm a young journalist and I, you know, I was Watergate. I knew about Watergate was one of those, you know, when I was a kid, like an influencing thing that, you know, Ben Bradley, hero of Watergate, brought down Nixon. And I read the memoir and I saw that he, you know, the piece of the memoir that they put out was the piece where he talks about his sister in law's murder. And in the memoir, he talks about what happened the night of the murder and how he and his wife, Mary Meyer's sister, went to Mary Meyer's art studio in Georgetown and found James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief and very weird dude, at the door picking a lock. And they realized he was looking for this diary, which, by the way, that's why they were there. They had been tipped off that there was a diary and that maybe they wouldn't want the police to have it. So according to br, they found the diary. They scanned through it. It was mostly just paint swatches, but there was some mention of Kennedy and her relationship to Kennedy. And they let Angleton walk off with this diary. And he never spoke of it, even though he testified at the trial. And a guy was on trial for murder and he never said by the way, there was this deep interest by the top counterintelligence chief of the CIA in her diary. And he knew that when he was on the stand and he didn't report it to the police. So, you know, my little journalist antennae go up, and that sounded pretty weird to me. And I started talking to some of the old folks around the Time Bureau who knew him and had been around in those days, and I said, what's up with this? I've never even heard of this. Who is this person Mary Meyer? And why on earth would the father of Watergate keep secret this interaction with the chief counterintelligence agent when somebody's on trial for murder? And the older people there who had been around during the Kennedy years said, well, oh, yeah, we all know the story of Mary Meyer, but nobody wanted to write about it while Jackie was alive. Nobody had wanted to sort of bring up this embarrassing situation for her. So there still was this kind of inside the club thing going on. And that was really the first time that I understood or had an inkling of, like, how the Washington elite and the Georgetown, set in the Cold War, in the Kennedy years, consisted of these people who were. Many of them were World War II veterans, but they're, you know, the cops, the CIA, the spies, the ambassadors, the diplomats, the journalists, and the elected officials were all kind of on the same side in certain ways. And they wouldn't tell on each other. They kept each other's secrets, which was so different from what was going on when I was in Washington, because that's when Monica Lewinsky was being revealed as, you know, the blue dress and the flashing, the thong, and everything's fair game. Right. So that's the long story of how I got into it. I thought, this is really interesting. And I had an agent who was looking to sell books about Washington, and she said, oh, I can probably sell that. And she did. It was my first book project. And you're right, it was pretty seminal because I was a young journalist, and I got to do something that I'd always wanted to do, which is write a book. And I've written many books since then, but it was the first book that I wrote, and it was a big deal for me, and I do get asked questions about it still.
- [07:48]
Julia Claire
Yeah, clearly, you're here today with us. And as George said, neither he nor I really knew anything about her before we started doing the research for this episode. So we suspect that many of our listeners will be in the same boat. So with that in mind, could you just set the Scene. Tell us a little bit about who Mary Meyer was and her family, her upbringing and the person who she became.
- [08:14]
Nina Burley
Sure. Well, Mary Pinchot, born Mary Pinchot in 1920, I believe 20 or 24. She was born to a wealthy family, American aristocracy. The Pinchot family. They had Pennsylvania money. They also had a New York Avenue apartment. They were sort of early, I guess, liberals. Pinchot Gifford Pinchot was an uncle and he was out west. I think he was a governor out there. I think he was in the Roosevelt administration. He found the National Forest Service. There's a huge national park out there named after him. One of her other relatives, like, wrote the traffic rules for when cars first came to New York City. Can you imagine? Like cars are driving around with horses and there was no, there's nothing. There were no electric lights or you can't turn right, right on red. This guy like wrote those. So there were civic minded people. Her father was kind of a notorious, like anti, well, America Firster type. Even though he had kind of liberal leanings, he was revealed as being sort of anti Semitic before the Second World War. Her mother was a left wing woman when she was born. Her mother was a journalist, really interesting character, hung out in Greenwich Village, wrote for the Nation. So Mary Meyer and her sister Tony Antoinette are these beautiful daughters of Gifford, Pinchot and Ruth. And they grow up, you know, in New York City, Manhattan, Splendor. They go to the best schools, they go to Vassar. And again, it's part of this clique of aristos, American aristocrats. So she gets to know John Kennedy quite early on at a high school dance, I guess they're a prep school and they meet each other and they become young friends. And maybe, you know, people would say, you know, Jack fell in love with her immediately. Who knows, they were close, but they were part of the same group of people. Right. And then World War II comes and, you know, that's like the big break for that generation that was born in 1920 or 24. That's a huge. One of the things I really learned from the, from doing the research is how traumatic World War II was for them, for people. You know, imagine you're like 20, 21, 22, and all of a sudden, you know, Hitler's invading Czechoslovakia or sorry, not Czechoslovakia, Poland. Poland, yes, he invades Poland and you know, that is it. The boys go off, they're young men into this meat grinder and the women, you know, they're staying home. And so Mary, she goes to Vassar, she becomes a journalist in New York. She has like a romance with some other journalist guy who I guess he wasn't able to go to war. Most of them were at war. And then comes the married years. Cord Meyer, who is Meyer, is another wealthy family in New York. They had, they had made a lot of money in property on Long Island. Huge property owners. He comes back from the war and he's a war hero. His eye was blown out on one of the Pacific islands. He was a Marine, so of course hero. And he's young and he's dashing and he wears an eye patch. And she falls for this guy. So they're now they get married and they go to Washington. Why did they go to Washington? Because after World War II, this generation of upper class American veterans, many of them were attracted to doing public service for the country. They went down there because for Cordmire was invited to become a part of the nascent CIA. And the CIA at that time is off the books. It's basically run out of a Quonset hut on the Mall. It's off the books. It's black budget, black. This is where you get the very beginning of the CIA. It's Korg Meyer, it's Allen Dulles, it's the guys who conceived of the Bay of Pigs. And communism was the whole, the whole thing, whole point was like, keep the Russians at bay and America's duty is to patrol the whole planet because we've just gone through this trauma. And oh yeah, don't forget that the atom bomb had been dropped in Japan. And for that generation, that really was almost like a psychic break because they understood like, we're born into that era, so we're like, yeah, humans can blow up the world, right? We can destroy ourselves. It was really a psychic break for them in some way because they understood like, oh my God, Russians are going to get this bomb. We're in a race we can obliterate. I mean, unheard of amounts of firepower now. And so a lot of the men who came back From World War II, like her husband, were motivated by this idea of like, we can keep the world under control. And they were also super PTSD from the war. PTSD was not a thing then. It was not a. People didn't talk about it. It was, man up, you know, 1950s. And a lot of these guys were smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking, and three martini lunches and just, you know, medicating themselves. So the wives of these men, they're in world, they're in now, they're in Georgetown. And it's like this clique of women who have gone to white shoe schools or men who would have been in white shoe law firms or banks who are now working for the CIA. And Bradley is one of them. I mean, he's not in the CIA, but he was definitely connected to the OSS when he was in Europe. And so there's this group of women who are, like, married to these guys. They're damaged with ptsd, and they're like, you know, socialite. They're hosting dinners. They have money. The ones that were still alive when I interviewed them, they had these amazing accents. Like, they talked like 1930s movie actresses.
- [13:55]
Julia Claire
Like a transatlantic accent.
- [13:58]
Nina Burley
Yes. Oh, Nina. You know, it's also like Long Island Watcha darling, darling. And Jack was just such a float and had an affair with Jack, and, you know, that's how they talked.
- [14:11]
George Severis
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after this break.
- [14:19]
Hans Charles
Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.
- [14:22]
Menelik Lumumba
I'm in lick Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated, and black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protest broke out on an.
- [14:33]
Hans Charles
Un unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
- [14:49]
Menelik Lumumba
To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying.
- [14:54]
George Severis
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
- [14:58]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
- [15:05]
Menelik Lumumba
This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
- [15:13]
Hans Charles
Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [15:20]
Nina Burley
Segregation in the day, integration at night.
- [15:25]
Hans Charles
When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.
- [15:30]
Nina Burley
We didn't worry about what was going on outside. It was like stepping in another world.
- [15:36]
Hans Charles
Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.
- [15:43]
Nina Burley
You saw the kkk. Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform.
- [15:48]
George Severis
The KKK set out to raid Charlie.
- [15:51]
Nina Burley
Take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [16:00]
Hans Charles
From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's place, a story that was nearly lost to time until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [16:19]
Ryder Strong
This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast Called the Red Weather.
- [16:23]
Nina Burley
It was many and many a year.
- [16:26]
Hans Charles
Ago in a kingdom by the sea.
- [16:28]
Ryder Strong
In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.
- [16:37]
Nina Burley
So, no, I am not your guru.
- [16:41]
Ryder Strong
And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody.
- [16:46]
Nina Burley
There were years, Ryder, where I could.
- [16:48]
Hans Charles
Not say your name.
- [16:49]
Ryder Strong
I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened.
- [16:58]
George Severis
Isn't it a little bit weird that.
- [16:59]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
They obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend?
- [17:02]
Nina Burley
They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of come round here in my wife.
- [17:08]
Menelik Lumumba
Boom, Boom.
- [17:10]
Ryder Strong
This is the red weather. Listen to the red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:19]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?
- [17:27]
Julia Claire
Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
- [17:29]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.
- [17:41]
Hans Charles
What?
- [17:41]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.
- [17:44]
Julia Claire
Okay, I don't think that's true.
- [17:46]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:28]
Julia Claire
And we're back with more United States of Kennedy.
- [18:31]
George Severis
So I wanted to take just one second to talk about the Georgetown social scene, because this was, as Julia mentioned before, one of the more fascinating elements of this, just historically. I mean, we have this list of people that were kind of in Mary and Cord's circle. So you mentioned Ben Bradley, who was married to Mary's younger sister. Tony Bradley at the time was the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Newsweek before he, you know, went to the Post Angleton, who you mentioned, and his wife Sicily were also two of the Myers closest friends. Angleton was the head of counterintelligence at the CIA. James Truitt worked for Life magazine and Time magazine. He was also part of that circle. And his wife Anne was Mary's best friend. Then we have Katherine Graham, who was the publisher of the Washington Post, Dean Atchison, the former Secretary of State and Frank Wner Court's propaganda bus at the CIA. And then of course, in 1954, the Myers got new neighbors. Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline. So that was in 1954, before JFK was president. They were suddenly neighbors with the Kennedys and they were the Kennedys assimilated into this pre existing friend group and social scene. So you mentioned that she first met JFK when they were both in high school at a choate dance, but then didn't really interact with him until later on when they were neighbors. So what was her relationship with JFK like when they met again as adults?
- [19:57]
Nina Burley
Well, I'm not quite sure. I can't remember when they actually met again. They had interactions over the years and obviously when he gets to Washington, they're all invited to these same parties in Georgetown. I know that her husband Cord felt competitive with Kennedy even before they, you know, had the same. I mean she wasn't, I don't think she was cheating on Cord with Kennedy. I think that at some point she hooked up with him after they were divorced. But Cord felt that he was kind of, you know, because he was in the CIA, because all of his great deeds for the country were by necessity secret. He wasn't going to get the accolades that he should get the way Kennedy was. And so there was this deep anger and unhappiness about the situation, I think. And you know, it's kind of spurred him. And then what happened was they lost a child, there was a car accident and the middle child died in that kind of crashed their relationship eventually and they divorced. And she was still young and beautiful. She's in her mid-40s, young-40s. And that's when she starts to hook up with Kennedy. And of course, as you guys know, since you were doing this, that Kennedy was really a sex addict, I guess, moving young women or any women of any age in the front door and out the back door of the White House. And so Mary, who's basically not an intern, who's more of his class, his social class, is somebody that he palled around with more. And people would say, you know, the ones I interviewed Some would say, you know, he really was in love with her. She was just his type completely. She was this ethereal blonde, fun to be with, flirty and smart and had a great education and sexy and kind of avant garde for that crowd. Right. She was, she was the one who was dropping acid with Timothy Leary and like proto hippie kind of person. Right. But long before hippies were hippies, there was this kind of avant garde of the intelligentsia. And that's. The seeds of the 60s are in that group. They weren't religious people. They were, they had dispensed with that. They were Freudian, they were into psychoanalysis, they were listening to jazz. They considered themselves culturally sophisticated. A lot of them had been to Europe, obviously the men had been there and they were, you know, multilingual. And so they're, they're sophisticated intelligentsia and they're the creme de la creme of American, you know, the elite. And they're running the world from this point in Washington.
- [22:27]
Julia Claire
So they're kind of like the beatniks of the 1950s, like an early counterculture who are also kind of intermingling with CIA operatives.
- [22:38]
George Severis
I know, that's what's so fascinating. It's like she is this interesting, progressive, artistic woman. She then ends up fully committing to her art practice and becoming this sort of emerging artist. She has pretty left wing views, depending on who you ask. And yet the two most important romantic relationships in her life are with a CIA operation with the President of the United States. It's such a fascinating, unique story.
- [23:03]
Nina Burley
Well, also in Kenneth Noland, who was actually a New York Color school artist and considered to be one of the modern artists of that era. Somewhat a minor but well known at the time. But I wouldn't go so far as to say they were beatnik. That would be a step beyond. They really are, you know, elite. They're capitalists, hardcore. These people are coming from American fortunes and they're capitalists. You know, she might have been breaking away from them that and been, as you say, leaning to the left. And some of them were. Would have been leaning to the left, I think. I mean, obviously the ones that McCarthy was going after were, you know, considered to be communist by the standards of that day. And some of them were card carrying, I guess. But this group, you know, they were pretty conservative in their.
- [23:49]
George Severis
They remind me almost of, you know, the, the sort of Upper east side set that on the one hand is very wealthy and well to do, but then will host fundraisers for some sort.
- [23:58]
Nina Burley
Of progressive cause, I think that's probably a better analogy than the beatnik.
- [24:03]
Julia Claire
Okay, so we kind of have laid the foundation of how Mary Pinchot and JFK met and how they met again some 20 years later when their affair began. How serious was it and how long did it last?
- [24:18]
Nina Burley
Well, let's see. He's in the White House. It was certainly going on in, like, 62, 61. 62 certainly wasn't before he was president. So he's elected in 60. That means he starts in the White House in 61. What was the depth of it? I guess. Well, again, he's. I don't like to use the word womanizer. I mean, more like a sex addict. He really was, like, you know, insatiable. He had to have, like, these young women coming through. All the interns in later years would tell stories about how he was pushing himself on them. And there was just a lot of women, you know, Marilyn Monroe was around and Judith Exner and all. All kinds of women in and out of the White House. And, you know, so he's married to Jackie, but Mary also is friends with Jackie. Like, she's part of their crowd. So she would show up. You know, she'd probably be in the parties that they were having. In fact, Jackie being, again, this is like the sophisticated crowd, she kind of knew what was going on. And she would seat Mary next to Jack to keep him entertained. I mean, she kind of knew that this was like. I mean, I wouldn't say that they were polyamorous, but at some level, that's what was going on. So they were. I think they were having sort of frolic, but also a kind of a somewhat intellectual connection.
- [25:38]
George Severis
Yeah, that's what seems to be the main difference between her and some of the other women that have come up.
- [25:43]
Nina Burley
Judith Exeter or somebody like that. She was educated and she was avant garde in a way that he would have thought was cool.
- [25:50]
George Severis
And it did last pretty consistently for almost first two years. I mean, I'm reading here in our research doc, Mary signed in to see The President officially 15 times between October 1961 and August 1963, almost exclusively when Jackie was out of town. So that's, you know, it betrays sort of a. A pretty consistent affair. And then, of course, there's hearsay that, you know, there's. There's other people that say it was even more. I mean, it says. A decade later, journalist James Tritt, whose wife Anne was Mary's close friend and fellow artist, claimed that Mary was chauffeured to the White House by a Secret Service Driver. Two to three nights a week. Now, that seems extreme to me, but I mean, you know, oftentimes with these kinds of stories, there's some. Some truth to it. If it wasn't two to three nights a week, maybe it was two to three nights a month.
- [26:33]
Nina Burley
Right. I'm the one actually who got that number. I went to the Kennedy Library and you could see the sign in. I'm sure that I looked at the Jackie travel and then those dates and that's how we came up with that. But yeah, there probably were more interactions, for sure.
- [26:50]
Julia Claire
So, as we've discussed, Jack, his lasciviousness was very well known and it's something that remains part of his public image today. And this is actually one of the few affairs that has hard evidence attached to it. Not only the White House logs, but also an authenticated letter that he wrote to her asking her to come visit him at the Cape or in Boston. So it's beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why do you think we haven't heard. Heard more about her or why do you think that her affair is less well known than someone like Marilyn Monroe, who it seems like has less definitive evidence?
- [27:32]
Nina Burley
Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess I think my book should have been more widely read.
- [27:39]
George Severis
That's a perfect answer.
- [27:41]
Julia Claire
Yes.
- [27:41]
Nina Burley
I don't know why I wasn't a bestseller. I should have been a bestseller. I think because if people were that interested in Kennedy, then I think one of the reasons my book didn't sell is that I wasn't 100% down with the conspiracy theory of her murder. People really, really attached themselves to that idea. And the other is, well, look, celebrities, I guess Marilyn Monroe is much more. There's more salacious attention to that because actually there are a lot of other women who you're not mentioning, these interns and young women who were around. If you go into the record and look, you'll see that they were writing books and talking about it years later. And you can find them having been interviewed and talked about it. So I just think she didn't have the, like, star power that Marilyn Mon.
- [28:23]
George Severis
And we should mention there is one of the most famous Kennedy books that people keep recommending is Ask not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, which is sort of one of those oft cited books about women that became collateral damage over the years.
- [28:35]
Nina Burley
That's the Maureen Callahan book, correct?
- [28:37]
George Severis
Yeah. Yeah. But I'm glad you brought up the actual crime at the center of this story. And it's time we actually approached it Head on. So it is now a few months after JFK's assassination. Mary Meyer has recommitted to her art practice. She is a working artist. She has a studio in D.C. what can you tell us about the actual logistics of the murder itself?
- [29:01]
Nina Burley
Well, it's definitely more than a few months after the murder. I mean, Kennedy's assassinated in what, November of 63, and she dies in October of 64. And the incident that everybody remembers that preceded it the most closely is that she was murdered 10 days after the Warren Commission Report came out. That's the spark for the conspiracy theorists, because you know what, the Warren Commission Report, I'm sure you've talked about it on your show. It's been challenged repeatedly, explored and investigated, and still to this day, people don't agree on it. And so the idea was that this thing came out and she knew something, and that since she knew something, the conspiracy theory is based on that. That this, this, you know, here's the Warren Commission Report. It says it's this, you know, this one lone gunman, crazy guy, and yet Mary Meyer knows something and that she must die. That's the conspiracy theory. And I like conspiracy murder as much as anyone else. I also am stuck with my journalistic training that, you know, you have to have the facts. So I couldn't find the evidence that she would have known something that they would have had to kill her for. That's my problem with that theory. You know, one of the theories is, oh, she did acid with Timothy Leary, which Leary says in his book. And I interviewed Leary like two months before he died. It was fascinating in Santa Monica at. As he was basically on his deathbed, and he says that she came to his office at Harvard and said, I want to turn on powerful men or something. That's his memory of it. So the acid, you know, Johnny Appleseed or Mary Appleseed of acid's conspiracy theories, that she turned him on to lsd, which then turned him on to world peace, which then provoked him to be more pacific towards the Cubans and that then, of course, he had to die because he was about ready to say to the Russians and the Cubans, hey, we're all friends or no more. Military industrial complex. So you got, you know, they're going to hate the military industrial complex, aided him, the Cuban Mafia, the Cubans hate him. And he has to go, right? That's the theory about why he dies. And then she sort of is thrown in there like, well, she did acid with him and she knows she was turning him on to World peace. Maybe it was even because she gave acid that he suddenly saw the world in a different way. Why can't we get all get along kind of way. And so she knew that. And then after the war inflation report comes out, somehow she needs to die.
- [31:34]
George Severis
Right. So it's. As far as I can tell, the two theories which are interconnected are either that Mar guides JFK through an acid trip, that then turns him onto pacifism as a sort of worldview. Then he no longer wants to be as aggressive in terms of, you know, his foreign policy and in terms of American power. And that's why he has to die. And then the other theory, which again is related is this idea that because of her connections and because of her relationship with jfk, she knew a lot about the CIA secrets and was openly critical of the CIA in a way that seemed dangerous to people.
- [32:09]
Nina Burley
Yes. And also because she was so close to the CIA that she knew something about the murder because there's that sort of train of the conspiracy theories. The CIA was involved in a murder and therefore because of Kord Meyer and her sort of uncontrollable woman kind of act like, because she was, you know, avant garde and doing drugs and having fun and not, you know, on the right side of the program, that the CIA thought she would blab something that she maybe knew about the CIA's and that that would be why James Angleton wanted the diary. So you have to think about what was going on like in. I found the, as you see, I think, and again I found the society and the social scene there so fascinating because, you know, we live in a time now where Washington's very polarized, it's totally different and you know, yes, it's full of intrigue, but there was something about this group because the bomb, the nuclear bomb was like a shadow over everything. It was terrifying. We're used to it now. But then it like, and, and actually it was brinksmanship and there was, you know, there was this tension with the Russians and there were spies in Russia, Russian spies in Washington and American spies in Russia and the CIA was all over everything and they were spy versus spy. That's what that was. And so, you know, it is conceivable, I guess, that she may have been somehow co opted by Russian spies or you know, I mean, if you want to go down that road, but there's no evidence of it. And I tried and tried and tried to find like from all the friends that I could talk to who were still alive, did she ever evince interest in that kind of thing. Did she ever say anything to you? And I came to the conclusion I don't think she was the kind of person who was like really that into that kind of intrigue and that I think she was more happy. Go lucky Social had a decent spirit and you know, a good spirit and you know, was progressive. But I'm not sure that she was somebody that anybody would share the secrets with. Like that kind of a secret, like, hey, guess what, you know, the Russian spy is next door or whatever. And so that's one of my problems with the theory.
- [34:21]
George Severis
Yeah, well, you're, you're obviously painting this portrait of just paranoia permeating every kind of interaction and you know, just even permeating like simple news gathering. Like there's always this suspicion that everyone has an ulterior motive, which makes me think like even if she wasn't the type of person, would just the paranoia that she could be be enough. Enough for that to happen?
- [34:43]
Nina Burley
Actually that's a really good point. And, and what I have not said to you is that I often think of this as like, when I think of this as like a TV show or something, it's like the Mad men of the A bomb. Because the way they treated women, the way they thought of women, it was like ass pinching and grab them and throw, you know, wham, bam, thank you ma'.
- [35:02]
Hans Charles
Am.
- [35:02]
Nina Burley
That group of men, I mean, they just didn't have like the sense that, you know, what you would confide in, I don't think. But yes, she could be in the mold of like Martha Mitchell. Martha Mitchell was like, oh, she went off the rails, you know, and she needs to be medicated and like secreted away somewhere because she's gonna tell everything about the plumbers or whatever it was that they knew.
- [35:27]
Julia Claire
I thought of Martha Mitchell when I was doing the research for this. I think it's hard not to.
- [35:31]
Nina Burley
Yeah, it's like the rogue woman theory. Oh, she's out of control. And again, that is, is a valid theory, I think. And I balanced that off against my sense of who she was when I was interviewing people. And also my research into the accused, who I think probably did do it. And I know that people disagree with that, but I think he went on to a life of pretty spectacular crimes.
- [36:00]
George Severis
We're going to take a short break. Stay with us.
- [36:06]
Hans Charles
Welcome to the A Building. I'm Hans Charles.
- [36:09]
Menelik Lumumba
I'm in Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated and black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protest broke out on an.
- [36:19]
Hans Charles
Unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two protests. Prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Senior, and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
- [36:36]
Menelik Lumumba
To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying.
- [36:41]
George Severis
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
- [36:45]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
- [36:52]
Menelik Lumumba
This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind.
- [36:59]
Hans Charles
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:06]
Nina Burley
Segregation in the day, integration at night.
- [37:12]
Hans Charles
When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.
- [37:17]
Nina Burley
We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like sipping on another world.
- [37:22]
Hans Charles
Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.
- [37:30]
Nina Burley
You saw the kkk. Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform.
- [37:34]
George Severis
The KKK set out to raid Charlie.
- [37:38]
Nina Burley
Take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [37:47]
Hans Charles
From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Myrtle beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time until now. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:06]
Ryder Strong
This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called the Red Weather.
- [38:10]
Nina Burley
It was many and many a year.
- [38:12]
Hans Charles
Ago in a kingdom by the sea.
- [38:15]
Ryder Strong
In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.
- [38:24]
Nina Burley
So, no, I am not your guru.
- [38:28]
Ryder Strong
And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody.
- [38:32]
Nina Burley
There were years, Ryder, where I could.
- [38:35]
Hans Charles
Not say your name.
- [38:35]
Ryder Strong
I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California in I interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened.
- [38:44]
George Severis
Isn't it a little bit weird that.
- [38:46]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
They obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend?
- [38:49]
Nina Burley
They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of come around.
- [38:54]
George Severis
Here in my wife, Boom boom.
- [38:56]
Ryder Strong
This is the red weather. Listen to the red weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your your podcasts.
- [39:06]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg. But did you know he was also A spy?
- [39:13]
Julia Claire
Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
- [39:16]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.
- [39:31]
Julia Claire
Okay, I don't think that's true.
- [39:33]
Narrator of Secret World of Roald Dahl
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did the Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past? See into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:15]
George Severis
And we're back with United States of Kennedy.
- [40:18]
Julia Claire
Let's talk a little bit about the murder itself. It happened on October 12, 1964, which, as we said, is less than a year after JFK is murdered. So I would love to hear you set the scene and describe the murder itself, any eyewitnesses, and the investigation that unfolded thereafter.
- [40:38]
Nina Burley
Okay, so Mary Meyer had just recently turned, I believe, 44. She was in her studio painting. She was in the habit of taking a walk on the tow path along the canal that runs through Georgetown to this day. It's a nice park, and at that time, it was not a nice park. The area was pretty rough. And you know, what you have to put into context here is that this period of time is really the beginning of urban crime. And there's civil rights. Things were starting to happen, but there was also a lot of tension. There's racial tension going on. And she takes a walk from her house down into the topath, which is below street level. It's like a park. There's water down there. And a black truck driver had stopped on the upper part of the road and hears this. Someone help me. Someone help me scream. Looks down, sees a white woman. And what he says, a black man of a certain height and weight struggling. And he calls the police come, and they find her shot. She's been shot. Close range, head and chest. And she's lying there. She's dead. And the police go on a manhunt looking for this person who. Who the truck driver has eyewitnessed. And they find Ray Crump, who had recently been released from jail, who was known to the police as like a kind of a vagrant. And he had drinking problems. And they pick him up. He's got no shirt on. I think he's soaking wet. And he's been. He tells them different stories about what he's doing down there. They don't find a gun. They will never find the gun. He tells them different stories about what he's doing. Maybe he was fishing, you know, maybe he was doing something else, fell asleep or something. So they bring him back to the station and they book him. And his mother gets an attorney who is a really amazing character. The only, I think, black female defense attorney in Washington at the time. This is a time when there weren't even bathrooms for women in the court building. And she was also a minister, ordained minister. So a great orator and a very smart, canny woman. And she takes the case for almost no money, and she puts on this trial. And the prosecutors are also not told that there was this interest from the CIA. Nobody tells them that Mary Meyer had a diary. Nobody tells them that James Angleton was interested in it. They put the whole trial on without that information. And the jury is mostly black. It might have been all black. I can't remember. I think it was. But it was more black than white. And this is the beginning of, you know, now it's 1965, so, like, Watts is burning. It's the very beginning. Remember, the 1964 Civil Rights act is 1964. Right. So there's a lot of racial tension in this country. It's like the beginning of a new era. And the African American community in Washington is just as upset about their treatment as anywhere else. And so dovey, raunchy plays to that. It's, you know, look at this poor little guy. Look at these white. The white prosecutor and all these white people have just ganged up on him. And of course they're gonna say, he killed this woman. And look, he's too tiny. She kind of does, like, the glove doesn't fit thing. He's much tinier than what the witness claimed. But the witness is looking down from above. So anyway, he gets acquitted. And the Georgetown set is reeling. They think that he's guilty. There's not gonna be any justice done. They assume that he was guilty and that he got away with it. And, you know, end of story.
- [44:13]
George Severis
It sort of is spectacular to think regardless of whether or not he was in fact, guilty. It's just that a black man accused of murdering a White woman in the 60s would be acquitted, considering.
- [44:25]
Nina Burley
Well, it has a lot to do with Dovey Roundtree.
- [44:27]
George Severis
Yes. And Dovey Roundtree, we should say, she really was a, an incredibly important civil rights figure. She was one of the first women to be commissioned an army officer. She secured the ban on racial segregation on interstate buses. And she took this case on as basically a political statement, as you mentioned, was paid like a dollar for it. And the inconsistencies, as far as I understand, go both ways. I mean, as you mentioned, the eyewitness had said that the suspect was on the taller side, 510 ish or 59 or 5 10. And then in fact he was 5 4, he was much smaller. Additionally, he had said that he was there to go fishing, but in fact his fishing rod was back home. So that also didn't quite track. She didn't have, I mean, these are smaller details, but she didn't have her purse with her, from what I understand. And that was used to argue that it could not been a mugging or a robbery. And then there were no signs of resistance. Is that true?
- [45:21]
Nina Burley
Well, I mean, she fought him off, I think was screaming and fighting him off. Right. That's what at least witnessed. Yeah. I mean, as I said, the crime scene itself is. And that the eyewitness is black looking at a black man. You know, the way he acted, you know, when he was arrested, I mean, obviously he could have been, you know, drunk or mentally unwell, and I think he wasn't well, but, you know, there's always the possibility of it was a sexual. He grabbed her. It was a sexual thing. You know, there are some convincing pieces of evidence for the other side. I mean, the two shots, perfectly aimed, that, you know, wow, I'm gonna shoot you in the head and then I'm gonna shoot you in the heart to make sure you're dead. That doesn't seem like a drunken rapist act. And we do know that she was married to a high level CIA bi. And so maybe they, you know, they thought that she was gonna blast. But at the time when I was doing the book, I did get out of the Bureau of Prisons what his life was like afterwards. Mr. Crump. And he was still alive, actually. And I wrote to him and his mother or somebody else wrote back and threatened me, like, don't you come near us. So I didn't, I didn't get to talk to him, but I did get Bureau of Prisons records and I did end up meeting a woman who was a wife or a girlfriend who had literally A scar on her neck from him trying to kill her, according to her. And there was a child rape charge and there were arsons, and all of those things together suggest. And I talked to criminologists. Like, those things are connected to a type of criminal, like a type of person with a propensity for killing or, you know, raping. It's raped, actually. So maybe, you know, I mean, I think it's possible that he was out there looking for trouble. You know, Dovey Roundtree said something to me, and I think I put it in the book where she told me a parable about another defendant that she had represented. And she said, you know, I think the most important thing is forgiveness and starts with being able to forgive yourself. And then she talked about this woman that she had represented who had clearly had done the murder, the crime, and her hands were covered with blood, and, you know, she had done this thing. And Dovey Rountree basically said, as long as you can forgive yourself, I can work with you, or something like that. It's in the book. And I. And I thought that was the kind of an interesting thing to tell me. He didn't have to like and that he was just trying to explain what it was to be a defense attorney. But anyway, so those things together, plus the question of whether there was a motive, I think the motive that you bring up about rogue woman, possibly out of control. CIA doesn't want that. You know, maybe. And, you know, I know Peter Janney. I know him. He was my source for the book. I interviewed him, and then he went off and wrote his own book. I know that he is absolutely obsessed with the notion that his father, who was also in the CIA, murdered her or, you know, participated or helped plot. And I actually had a chance the other day to meet one of my sources for the book, reconnect with a woman who I couldn't believe was still alive. She's 100. She was in Georgetown, still kicking, still sharp as a tack. And I actually went down there and spent two days recording her because I think her story's so amazing. I mean, she's of that generation, and she was very involved in American politics. She was there in the kitchen when Bobby was shot. She was involved in the Marshall Plan. She started the Head Start program for Johnson. She had six children. So a working mother. She was a journalist, and she was a pal of Mary. She's one of that generation of women. You know, they're interesting people. And her name is Marie Ritter from the Knight Ritter Media Company. And. And very Moneyed. And I asked her about this. She knows about the Janney theory and she knew all these people and she said, Darling, Mr. Janney would never do that. He was a teddy bear. I don't think of her as a naive person at all. I mean, the way she talked about the affairs that she had and the affairs that all these other women were having, I mean it was, it was wild. And I don't think that she's unsophisticated about what the CIA could be doing. So anyway, all of those things together, I'm just not in the conspiracy camp. But you know, there's always a possibility that Kennedy murder, one of those enduring mysteries. And this woman is one of many about whom there are legit questions about what was going on in her life with him.
- [49:47]
Julia Claire
Right. So from what you've laid out, it seems like you are pretty convinced that the, the liability more likely than not falls with Ray Crump. Do you think that maybe if we compare it to OJ as you hinted at, do you think that this ultimately wasn't just that he had a good defense attorney, but that also the prosecution was too thin?
- [50:11]
Nina Burley
I don't recall that that was. I mean, they just didn't have, you know, they didn't have the evidence, they didn't have a gun. And I don't know what more they could have done. What they really needed to do was get Ren Bradley to tell the truth and drag Angleton in there and ask all these questions of them in that trial.
- [50:27]
George Severis
Sorry to interrupt. Just to confirm, you know, they didn't mention the diary as you said. So at no point in the trial was it at all known that this woman actively had a two year affair with the President.
- [50:38]
Nina Burley
It certainly wasn't known to the jury.
- [50:41]
George Severis
Okay.
- [50:41]
Nina Burley
And I don't think it was known to dovey Rountree. In fact, you know. No, they didn't know that. She just knew that there was this line of like white men in gray suits paying close attention in the back of the room.
- [50:51]
Menelik Lumumba
Room.
- [50:52]
Nina Burley
And you know, she assumed again, she's part of the black community. Oh, these are the elites.
- [50:56]
George Severis
Exactly.
- [50:57]
Julia Claire
Yeah.
- [50:57]
Nina Burley
She didn't know and neither did the prosecutor know and the cops didn't know and there, there were, you know, interviews with them later when this all came out and they were upset about it. I mean the prosecutor and the cop were like, we would have been asking different questions and, and then you wouldn't have, maybe you wouldn't have this ongoing theory or maybe they would have proven unlikely, but they might have proven that the CIA hired a gunman.
- [51:22]
George Severis
Well, you know, as often happens on this podcast, we have an incredibly interesting conversation that is really informed by meticulous research, and then we are left with more questions than answers.
- [51:33]
Julia Claire
Yeah, regardless.
- [51:34]
George Severis
I mean, we talked to, you know, someone who has truly, like, dedicated years of her life doing as much research as possible, and there's a part of me that's still like, wait, so what happened?
- [51:45]
Nina Burley
You know, you could bring on the other biographer, and, you know, his dad was in the CIA, so.
- [51:49]
George Severis
So it seems like everyone somehow in this story was somehow connected to the CIA. I mean, I feel insecure that I have no CIA connections.
- [51:56]
Julia Claire
I know.
- [51:57]
Nina Burley
I don't.
- [51:57]
Julia Claire
Yeah, great.
- [51:59]
George Severis
That. That we know of. But, of course, the truth will come out. Nina, thank you so much for doing the podcast. This was a really fascinating conversation and one of. One of the most interesting stories we've talked about. And as with so many things in the Kennedy universe, it's shocking to me that it's not talked about more. So thank you so much. This was great.
- [52:16]
Nina Burley
You're awesome.
- [52:18]
Julia Claire
So that's it for this week's episode.
- [52:20]
George Severis
Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all things Kennedy.
- [52:23]
Julia Claire
Every week, United States of Kennedy is hosted by me, Julia, Claire, and George Severis.
- [52:29]
George Severis
Original music by Joshua Topolski.
- [52:31]
Julia Claire
Editing by Graham Gibson.
- [52:33]
George Severis
Mixing and mastering by Doug Boehm.
- [52:35]
Julia Claire
Research by Dave Bruce and Austin Thompson.
- [52:38]
George Severis
Our producer is Carmen Laurent.
- [52:40]
Julia Claire
Our executive executive producer is Jenna Cagle.
- [52:42]
George Severis
Created by Lyra Smith.
- [52:43]
Julia Claire
United States of Kennedy is a production of I Heart Podcast.
- [52:50]
Menelik Lumumba
1969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
- [52:58]
Hans Charles
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the board of trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. Is the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles.
- [53:12]
Menelik Lumumba
I'm Menelik Lumumba.
- [53:14]
Hans Charles
Listen to the a building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [53:20]
Ryder Strong
This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called the red weather. In 1995, my neighbor Anna Trainor disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs.
- [53:31]
Nina Burley
So, no, I am not your guru.
- [53:35]
Ryder Strong
And back then, I lied to everybody.
- [53:37]
Nina Burley
They have had this case for 30 years.
- [53:40]
Ryder Strong
I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [53:51]
Hans Charles
When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner Charlie Fitzgerald had his own rules.
- [53:57]
Nina Burley
Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.
- [54:02]
Hans Charles
Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero?
- [54:06]
Nina Burley
Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
- [54:11]
Hans Charles
Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [54:20]
Nina Burley
On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing. Hey, if they'll kill a cop and bury him, what are they gonna do to me? What really happened to the missing deputy? Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Listen to Valley of shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [54:50]
Julia Claire
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [54:52]
Hans Charles
Guaranteed Human.