Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace by Peter Janney

Author:Peter Janney [Janney, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781620872826
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

By 1962, Philip and Katharine Graham’s marriage had come apart and was in freefall. Estranged from Katharine, drinking heavily amid manic-depressive episodes, Phil and his new mistress, Newsweek reporter Robin Webb, were living together and hosting dinner parties for Washington’s social elite. Phil Graham and President Kennedy were also friends. According to some accounts, they had been known to philander together as a team. “The pair of them were sleeping around with the same people,” said Jean Friendly, wife of Post editor Al Friendly. Eventually, both Phil and Katharine Graham became aware of President Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer.21

In mid-January 1963, Phil and Robin Webb flew to Phoenix on the Post’s chartered jet. During one intoxicated evening, Graham intruded on dinner at the midwinter meeting of the Associated Press board of directors at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. Phil proceeded to ask if he could address the audience, at which point he became unhinged. According to David Halberstam’s 1975 account, Graham addressed his audience as “fat bastards” who were “afraid of the truth,” that he “wouldn’t wipe his ass with any of their papers.”22Newsweek foreign correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, a witness, said the crowd became “thunderstruck” with disbelief as Graham “singled out various publishers and began to revile them.” Mr. de Borchgrave told author Carol Felsenthal that Graham’s “around the bend” but “brilliant” performance consisted of caricaturing all of the important media people present—including Otis Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, Ben McKelway of the Washington Star, and others, finally accusing them all of “having no balls.”23

But it was author Deborah Davis who, in 1979, based on her interviews with James Truitt, first claimed that Graham had told the crowd, many of whom knew him, that he was going to reveal exactly who was sleeping with whom in Washington, beginning with President Kennedy. It was at this moment that Graham revealed that the president’s “favorite was now Mary Meyer, who had been married to CIA official Cord Meyer and was the sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife, Tony.”24 Davis then claimed that someone at the dinner who witnessed Graham’s outburst called President Kennedy at the White House to alert him. This information allegedly came from James Truitt, who was at Katharine Graham’s house when a call came in for her, allegedly from President Kennedy himself. Katharine at that very moment was meeting with Post executives at her home. They began strategizing how to bring Phil back “forcibly” and commit him to a psychiatric hospital. According to Truitt’s statements to Davis, he himself apparently got on the phone with Kennedy and asked him to send Phil’s doctor, Dr. Leslie Farber, to Phoenix on a military jet.25

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