Mary Pinchot Meyer Socialites Information

Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer (/ˈmaɪ.ər/; October 14, 1920 – October 12, 1964) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. Her work is considered part of the Washington Color School and was selected for the Pan American Union Art Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. She was married to Central Intelligence Agency official Cord Meyer from 1945–1958, and she became involved romantically with President John F. Kennedy after her divorce from Meyer.

Meyer was shot to death on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath on October 12, 1964, three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report, whose conclusions Meyer allegedly challenged. Meyer's long history of criticism of the CIA, the timing of her killing, the CIA's wiretapping of her phone, and the effort by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to retrieve Meyer's diary immediately after her death prompted investigation of possible CIA involvement in her murder. Additionally, Army personnel records for prosecution witness Lt. William L. Mitchell, released in 2015 and 2016 under the Freedom of Information Act, corroborate his ties to the intelligence community. CIA involvement has also been suggested by the phone call that was placed by top Agency official Wistar Janney to Ben Bradlee, hours before the police had identified Meyer's body. The man accused of the murder, Ray Crump, Jr., was acquitted at trial in July, 1965. The murder remains officially unsolved.

Pinchot was born in New York City, the elder of two daughters of Amos and Ruth (née Pickering) Pinchot. Amos Pinchot was a wealthy lawyer and a key figure in the Progressive Party who had helped fund the socialist magazine The Masses. Her mother Ruth was Pinchot's second wife and was a journalist who wrote for such magazines as The Nation and The New Republic. Mary was also the niece of Gifford Pinchot, a noted conservationist and two-time Governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot and her younger sister Antoinette (nicknamed "Tony") were raised at the family's Grey Towers home in Milford, Pennsylvania. As a child, Pinchot met such left-wing intellectuals as Mabel Dodge, Louis Brandeis, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Harold L. Ickes. She attended Brearley School and Vassar College, where she became interested in Communism. She started dating William Attwood in 1935 and, while with him at a dance held at Choate, first met John F. Kennedy in 1936.

After her graduation from Vassar in 1942, Meyer became a journalist, writing for the United Press and Mademoiselle. As a pacifist and member of the American Labor Party, she came under scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Pinchot met Cord Meyer in 1944 when he was a Marine Corps lieutenant who had lost his left eye because of shrapnel injuries received in combat. The two had similar pacifist views and beliefs in world government and married on April 19, 1945. That spring they both attended the UN Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, during which the United Nations was founded, Cord as an aide of Harold Stassen and Pinchot as a reporter for a newspaper syndication service. She later worked for a time as an editor for Atlantic Monthly. Their eldest child Quentin was born in November 1945, followed by Michael in 1947, after which Pinchot became a homemaker, although she attended classes at the Art Students League of New York.

Cord Meyer became president of the United World Federalists in May 1947 and its membership doubled. Mary Meyer wrote for the organization's journal. In 1950, their third child, Mark, was born and they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, her husband began to re-evaluate his notions of world government as members of the Communist Party USA infiltrated the international organizations he had founded. In 1951, Cord join the Central Intelligence Agency after being recruited by Allen Dulles.

With her husband's CIA appointment, they moved to Washington D.C. and became highly visible members of Georgetown society. Their acquaintances included Joseph Alsop, Katharine Graham, Clark Clifford, and Washington Post reporter James Truitt and his wife, noted artist Anne Truitt. Their social circle also included CIA-affiliated people such as Richard M. Bissell, Jr., high-ranking counter-intelligence official James Angleton, and Mary and Frank Wisner, Meyer's boss at CIA.

In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly accused Cord Meyer of being a Communist and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reported to have looked into Mary's political past. Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner aggressively defended Meyer and he remained with the CIA. However, by early 1954, Cord Meyer had become unhappy with his CIA career. He used contacts from his covert operations in Operation Mockingbird to approach several New York publishers for a job but was rebuffed.

During the summer of 1954, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie Kennedy bought the house next door to the Meyers'; Pinchot Meyer and Jackie Kennedy became acquainted and "they went on walks together." By the end of 1954, Cord Meyer was still with the CIA and often in Europe, running Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and managing millions of dollars of U.S. government funds worldwide to support progressive-seeming foundations and organizations opposing the Soviet Union.

One of Pinchot Meyer's close friends was her Vassar chum, Cicely d'Autremont, who married James Angleton. In 1955, Meyer's sister Antoinette (Tony) married Ben Bradlee, who was then Washington bureau chief of Newsweek. On December 18, 1956, the Meyers' middle son Michael, aged nine, was hit by a car near their house and killed. Although this tragedy briefly brought Mary and Cord Meyer closer for a time, Mary filed for divorce in 1958.

After the divorce, Pinchot Meyer and her two surviving sons moved to Georgetown. She began painting again in a converted garage studio at the home of her sister Tony and Tony's husband, Ben Bradlee. She also started a close relationship with abstract-minimalist painter Kenneth Noland and became friendly with Robert Kennedy, who had purchased his brother's house, Hickory Hill, in 1957. Nina Burleigh, in her book A Very Private Woman, writes that after the divorce Meyer became "a well-bred ingenue out looking for fun and getting in trouble along the way."

Angleton told Joan Bross, the wife of John Bross, a high-ranking CIA official, that he had begun tapping Mary Meyer's telephone after she left her husband. Angleton often visited the family home and took her sons on fishing outings. Pinchot Meyer visited John F. Kennedy at the White House in October 1961 and their relationship became intimate. Pinchot Meyer told Anne and James Truitt she was keeping a diary.

Rumors and tabloid press reports of her affair with Kennedy were confirmed by her brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life.

Timothy Leary later claimed Pinchot Meyer influenced Kennedy's "views on nuclear disarmament and rapprochement with Cuba." In an interview with Nina Burleigh, Kennedy aide Myer Feldman said, "I think he might have thought more of her than some of the other women and discussed things that were on his mind, not just social gossip." Burleigh wrote, "Mary might actually have been a force for peace during some of the most frightening years of the cold war ..."

In a 2008 interview with author Peter Janney for his book Mary's Mosaic, journalist and Kennedy intimate Charles Bartlett emphasized the serious nature of Pinchot Meyer's romance with the late president, stating, "That was a dangerous relationship. Jack was in love with Mary Meyer. He was certainly smitten with her, he was heavily smitten. He was very frank with me about it."

In October 1963, one month before his assassination, Kennedy wrote a letter to Mary Meyer, imploring her to join him for a tryst. The unsent letter, written on White House stationery and retained by Kennedy's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, sold in June 2016 at auction for just under $89,000. The letter reads: "Why don't you leave suburbia for once – come and see me – either here – or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it – on the other hand you may not – and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years – you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don't you just say yes." The letter is signed "J."

On October 12, 1964, Pinchot Meyer finished a painting and went for her customary daily walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. Mechanic Henry Wiggins was trying to fix a car on Canal Road and heard a woman cry out, "Someone help me, someone help me." Wiggins heard two gunshots and ran to a low wall looking upon the path where he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."

Pinchot Meyer's body had two bullet wounds, one in the left temple and one in the back. An FBI forensic expert later said "dark haloes on the skin around both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close-range, possibly point-blank".

Approximately forty minutes after the murder, Washington D.C. Police Detective John Warner spotted a soaking-wet African American man named Ray Crump about a quarter of a mile from the murder scene. Crump wasn't running; "he was walking," Detective Warner testified at the murder trial. Crump was arrested at 1:15 pm at the murder scene based on car mechanic Wiggins' statement to police that Crump was the man he had seen standing over the victim's body. The day after the murder, a second witness, Army Lt. William L. Mitchell, came forward and told police that when jogging on the towpath the preceding day, he had seen a black man trailing a white woman he believed was Mary Meyer. Mitchell's description of the man's clothing was similar to the clothing Crump had been wearing that day. On the strength of the statements of these two witnesses, Crump was indicted without a preliminary hearing. However, no gun was ever found, and Crump was never linked to any gun of the type used to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer. The FBI Crime Report, withheld from the defense during the trial and published by Peter Janney in his book Mary's Mosaic, documented that there was no forensic evidence linking Crump to the victim or murder scene. Despite the fact that Pinchot Meyer bled profusely from her head wound, no trace of her blood was found on Crump's person or clothing. On the afternoon of the murder, hours before police had identified the body, CIA official Wistar Janney first placed a call to Meyer's brother-in-law Ben Bradlee, and then subsequently to Cord Meyer, notifying them both of Meyer's death.

When Crump came to trial, Judge Howard Corcoran ruled Mary Pinchot Meyer's private life could not be disclosed in the courtroom. Pinchot Meyer's background was also kept from Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Crump's lawyer, who later recalled she could find out almost nothing about the murder victim: "It was as if she existed only on the towpath on the day she was murdered." At trial, Roundtree demonstrated the porousness of the police dragnet and showed that the black man described by the two witnesses was approximately 50 pounds heavier and five inches taller than Crump. Crump was acquitted of all charges on July 29, 1965, and the murder remains unsolved. Post-trial revelations, however, appear to further corroborate his innocence in the Meyer murder, notably the likely presence of another black man at the scene after his arrest and the fact that the police search for his jacket was dispatched 15 minutes before his arrest. Crump's attorney Dovey Roundtree, in her autobiography Justice Older than the Law, stated that Crump had an alibi witness but that she disappeared before trial.

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