Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer (; October 14, 1920 – October 12, 1964) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. She was married to Cord Meyer from 1945 to 1958; she became involved romantically with President John F. Kennedy after her divorce from Meyer.
Meyer was murdered on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath in Washington, D.C., on October 12, 1964. A suspect, Ray Crump Jr., was arrested and charged with her murder but was acquitted. Beginning in 1976, Meyer's life, her relationship with Kennedy, and her murder became the subjects of numerous articles and books, including a full-length biography by journalist Nina Burleigh.
Early life Mary Eno Pinchot was born in New York City, the older 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 liberal intellectual figures as Mabel Dodge, Louis Brandeis, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Harold L. Ickes. She attended The 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 the Choate School, first met John F. Kennedy.Attwood, William. The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. pp. 133-134.
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.
Marriage 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 oldest 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 joined 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 the CIA.
In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly accused Cord Meyer of being a Communist. 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.
In the summer of 1954, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie Kennedy bought the house in McLean, Virginia next door to the Meyers'; at some point Meyer and Jackie Kennedy became acquainted. Eventually, after both had moved back to Georgetown, "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 Meyer's close friends was a fellow Vassar alumna, Cicely d'Autremont, who married James Angleton. In 1955, Meyer's sister Antoinette 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 died. Although this tragedy brought Mary and Cord Meyer closer for a time, Mary filed for divorce in 1958.
Relationship with Kennedy After the divorce, 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 F. 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."
Counter-intelligence official James Angleton told Joan Bross, the wife of John Bross, a high-ranking CIA official, that he had begun tapping Meyer's telephone after she left her husband. Angleton often visited her Georgetown home and took her sons on fishing outings. Meyer visited John F. Kennedy at the White House in October 1961; their relationship became sexually intimate. Meyer told Anne and James Truitt that she was keeping a diary.
More than ten years after Meyer's death, rumors of her affair with Kennedy began to circulate. In 1976, they were confirmed first by the National Enquirer,Ward, Bernie and Toogood, Granville. "Former Vice President of Washington Post Reveals JFK - 2 Year White House Romance." National Enquirer. March 2, 1976. then by the Washington Post. Nineteen years later, Post editor Ben Bradlee went into great detail about his sister-in-law Meyer's life and murder in his autobiography A Good Life.
In Timothy Leary's 1983 memoir titled Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era, he claimed to have known Meyer personally, and said she had 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 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." Meyer was a guest at the intimate party hosted by Jacqueline Kennedy in honor of President Kennedy aboard the yacht Sequoia on his 46th and last birthday celebration, May 29, 1963.
In October 1963, one month before his assassination, Kennedy wrote a letter to Mary Pinchot 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."
Murder and investigation
On October 12, 1964, Meyer finished a painting, then 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 a woman squeal "ouch" 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."
Meyer's body had two bullet wounds, one in the left temple and one in the back. An FBI forensic expert testified at trial that "dark haloes on the skin around both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close range, possibly point blank".United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United States of America v. Ray Crump, Jr., Defendant, Criminal Case No. 930-64. Washington, DC, July 20, 1965, p. 75-76. The precision, placement and instantaneous lethality of the wounds suggested to the District of Columbia medical examiner that the killer was highly trained in the use of firearms. as cited in
Approximately forty minutes after the murder, Washington, D.C., police detective John Warner spotted a black 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.US District Court for the District of Columbia, United States of America v. Ray Crump, Jr., p. 381. Crump was arrested at 1:15 pm near 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 as well as Crump's inability to give police a coherent explanation for his presence in the area. Crump's clothes were wet and there were scratches on his hands.44 Years Later, a Washington, D.C. Death Unresolved by Lance Morrow at smithsonianmag.com Crump gave different stories to police, first claiming he'd entered the canal to recover a lost fishing pole and subsequently claiming he'd fallen into the canal after drinking beer. Police later found Crump's jacket and hat in the river, while the fishing pole was discovered in his home. 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 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. No gun was ever found, however, 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 Meyer bled profusely from her head wound, no trace of her blood was found on Crump's person or clothing.