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JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story
Jesse Kornbluth
By
Published: Nov 20, 2023
Category:
Fiction
Can it really be 60 years since John Kennedy was assassinated? If you are a Senior Boomer, November 22, 1963 marked the end of your childhood and the start of a skepticism about reported reality that has deepened with every decade — it is a bruise that can never heal. If you weren’t born then, JFK might as well have been FDR or even Lincoln — with your TikTok sense of time, anything that occurred more than a week ago merges in a fog of images, songs, and movies. It doesn’t really touch you.
This I know: There were two John Kennedys. One was a politician, and in his short presidency he struggled nobly to redefine America’s mission in the world at the same time as he committed blunders that cost millions of Asian and 54,000 American lives. The other JFK was a sex addict. We don’t know much about that second JFK, because Jackie shrewdly created a myth — Camelot — that is as romantic and tender as it is unreal. No one will be blamed for misting over at this invented love story. But if JFK ever loved a woman, that woman was Mary Pinchot Meyer.
I’m a Senior Boomer. I was 17, a senior at a prep school Robert and Ted Kennedy attended, when JFK was killed. Decades later, I learned that Mary Meyer was murdered while taking a lunchtime walk in Georgetown. And that no one was convicted of her murder. And that she kept a diary. And that it was burned. And I thought: why don’t I read 100+ books and re-imagine her diary? I was pleasantly surprised when New York Times bestselling authors and a writer/producer of an acclaimed political TV series praised my book.. And then the Times published an enthusiastic review twice.
Let this short video be your introduction to that story.
FACT: John F. Kennedy said he needed sex every three days or he got a headache. While he was president, he never had a headache — women streamed into the White House to share his bed, and when he traveled, there was almost always a woman waiting for him. Affairs that became real connections? He wasn’t interested. And yet, from January 1962 until his death, he had one constant lover: Mary Pinchot Meyer, a family friend and a frequent guest at White House dinners. Like his wife, she was expensively educated and socially prominent — but she was an artist, more adventurous, opinionated, and sensual.
FACT: On October 12, 1964, eleven months after Kennedy’s assassination and two days before her forty-fourth birthday, Mary took her noon walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. A gunman shot her, execution style, in the head and the heart. An African-American man was arrested, tried, and acquitted. Her murder remains unsolved.
FACT: That night, Mary’s best friend, then living in Japan, urgently called Mary’s sister Tony and Tony’s husband, Ben Bradlee — yes, the Ben Bradlee who edited the Washington Post. “Mary had a diary,” she said. “Please get it and secure it.” There are several versions of the events that followed; the most intriguing has the Bradlees rushing to Mary’s studio and finding James Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA, holding a bolt-cutter. Eventually, Ben Bradlee has written, they found a small notebook, mostly filled with paint swatches, sketches, and shorthand ideas for her art — and no more than ten pages about an affair with an unnamed lover.
The Bradlees quickly understood the identity of that lover. As Bradlee would later write, “To say we were stunned doesn’t begin to describe our reactions.”
Bradlee burned the notebook. Let me put it bluntly: He destroyed evidence that might have been useful to the police and, certainly, to historians.
My novel is the diary I imagine Mary Meyer might have written — not the notebook the Bradlees and Angleton found, but a full account of her life from 1961 to 1964. We know the dates she saw the president at the White House, and we know about every White House dinner she attended and the private parties where she and Kennedy were guests. And just enough has been written about a friendship that became a romance for me to imagine what Kennedy and Meyer felt, and when they felt it. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. To buy the Kindle edition, click here.]
Fact and imagined fact jostle one another in my book. There are indelible verified scenes of social events — for example: a star-studded lunch at the White House, with Frank Sinatra shouting out to JFK, “Hey, Chickie baby!” as the First Lady grimaces.
There is insider gossip: After the Cuban fiasco, Jackie was going through the President’s suit before sending it out to be cleaned, and, a clever friend suggested, she found a folded cocktail napkin in his pocket. On it was written: DO NOT FORGET — AIR COVER.
There is Mary’s meeting with Timothy Leary, which he recorded in his diary and, later, a book. “My idea,” she says, “is to get powerful men to take LSD and see that peace is possible.”
Several sources led me to imagine Mary’s assessment of Kennedy before their affair begins: “I get a very cold image, like being in line at a counter. There’s someone in front of you, and you’re waiting your turn, and there’s someone behind you, waiting her turn. And someone behind her.”
I invented Jack and Mary’s first night together, and her guilt-free confession: “I also see… someone. Is that a problem?” He replies: “I also see… a few people. Is that a problem for you?”
I had no problem typing Kennedy’s chilly take on Jackie as if he were sharing his harsh view of his wife over an after-dinner cigar: “If Jackie hit twenty-five without a husband… she would have started going to Wall Street buildings at noon, taking the elevator to the top floor, and doing her absolute best to meet a guy before they got to the lobby.”
Mary’s take on the Kennedy marriage was not much of a stretch for me: “In public, Jack’s proud of Jackie; in private, I’ve seen him treat her as if he’s doing her a favor. It sounds awful, but I think their deepest connection is that they’re out for themselves, and if their marriage helps them get there, she’ll endure his infidelity and he’ll put up with her snobbery.”
You read every published account of the Kennedy Presidency and Mary’s life, and you start to live in Mary’s head: “How many times I thought: This will never be. You fool, you risked your heart, knowing that it would end…that he would end it. And then he didn’t leave me. He left himself.” Did she inadvertently fuel the assassination plot? “If I was any influence on Jack at all…on race and poverty and Vietnam… if I moved him away from safe ideas to dangerous ones… then I am partly responsible for his death.”
In “JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story,” the personal and the political stories merge. Two lovers, both shot to death. Two murders, eternally unsolved. Were these murders isolated events: a demented loner in Dallas, a demented loner in Georgetown? Or was his assassination a coup? If so, was her murder just a bit of… housekeeping?
