SUZY
Byline: Aileen Mehle
It is almost a maxim that the best fiction is nonfiction. And that is what the rebirth of interest in the unsolved Oct. 12, 1964, murder of Mary Meyer, President John F. Kennedy’s last romantic interest, is all about.
Although several writers are poring through files and requesting release of material under the Freedom of Information Act, John H. Davis, the well-known biographer (“The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster”), is said to be on top of the story. Davis is continuing the research into the mystery that was begun by the late Leo Damore several years ago. Damore, who wrote “Senatorial Privilege,” an investigative work on Senator Ted Kennedy’s role in the tragedy at Chappaquiddick — it was on the bestseller list for a year — committed suicide earlier this month, but not before he had amassed several hundred pages of information including sensitive interviews for “Burden of Guilt,” an account of the secret life and subsequent murder of Mary Meyer, the Washington socialite whose former husband, political columnist Cord Meyer Jr., had been a high-ranking CIA operative. During her year-long affair with Kennedy, Mary’s brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, a Kennedy pal, was Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, later to be editor in chief of the Washington Post.
One of Mary’s curious legacies that came to light following her murder — almost a year after Kennedy’s assassination — was the highly explosive diary alleged to have documented every one of her 40 clandestine meetings with Kennedy. In his memoirs, “A Good Life,” Ben Bradlee mentions the incendiary diary, which he claims was returned to his then-wife Tony Meyer Bradlee, Mary’s sister, by James Jesus Angleton, the CIA chief of counterintelligence to whom Tony Bradlee had entrusted it after her sister’s murder. Tony knew that the diary was crammed with explosive Kennedy pillow talk and allegedly burned it right away.
The thrust of Damore’s quest was Mary’s carefully annotated account, reportedly Xeroxed by the late Angleton, and if so, who had the Xeroxes? What secrets had she and JFK discussed? Certainly, considering her friendship with James Angleton and his wife, Cicely, her kinship to the Ben Bradlees and, of course, her ex-CIA husband, Cord Meyer Jr., her trysts with JFK in the White House and at her Georgetown studio (recorded by the Secret Service), Mary Pinchot Meyer was in the middle of it all.
Leo Damore had delved beyond the tip of the iceberg and uncovered why Mary Meyer was so ignominiously killed after JFK’s death — and who was responsible, who was the hit man who shot her in the head as she walked along a Georgetown tow path one afternoon. Damore’s son has released his father’s notes to John Davis, who has begun work on a book. Since research has shown that Mary, a teenage pal of JFK’s since his days at Choate School, could well have been the love of his life, Davis’s working title is: “A Tale of Two Murdered Lovers: Mary Pinchot Meyer and John F. Kennedy.” Stand back.
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