Dr. Peter Janney, a psychologist reared amongst Washington's elite in the family of a high-ranking CIA official, undertook a decades-long effort to solve one of the nation's most important murder mysteries. The result is: "Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace."

::::::::

 

Dr. Peter Janney, a psychologist reared amongst Washington's elite in the family of a high-ranking CIA official, undertook a decades-long effort to solve one of the nation's most important murder mysteries.

The result is: Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace. Janney, above, described his findings this week on the MTL Washington Update radio show I co-host with network founder Scott Draughon.

Janney's 548-page book is well-crafted, entertaining, courageous, suspenseful, passionate, and so controversial that most media outlets dare not address its themes, although they would doubtless use other excuses if pressed.

By the book's end, I am persuaded that major news outlets worthy of the name owe it to their audiences at least to challenge Janney's impressive documentation.

To set the stage for Janney's book: It would be hard to imagine a more explosive and complex theme in modern politics -- or an independent author better-positioned to provide a best-effort at unraveling the mysteries.

Let's start with the big controversy: Janney concludes that Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful and warm-hearted mother of his best friend, was murdered in a well-crafted hit by the CIA in 1964.

The reason? She was, in Janney's view, on the verge of denouncing as bogus the Warren Commission's then-recent announcement that Lee Harvard Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John Kennedy, who was Mary's lover, friend, and sympathizer in reducing Cold War tensions to advance world peace.

Further, Janney argues that the CIA at its highest levels, including his own father, nearly framed an innocent black man for Mary Meyer's shooting death in the C&O canal pathway in Georgetown while she was walking along her regular exercise route.

Janney shows also that Newsweek/Washington Post icon Benjamin Bradlee had long and compromising ties to the CIA and to the victim. Also: Bradlee was complicit in blocking basic news coverage -- and perhaps in much more sinister activities.

The All-Star Cast

Mary Meyer was Bradlee's sister-in-law and also the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, the CIA's high-ranking news industry liaison.

Descendant of a wealthy and politically prominent family from Pennsylvania, she was extraordinarily beautiful, capable, and gracious beginning in her high school years. Kennedy first became attracted to her at a Choate prep school dance in 1936 when she was 15. She published a poem in the New York Times at age 19, portending her auspicious future.

An independent spirit, she married Cord, a prize-winning Yale grad, after he became a World War II war hero. He went on to become a best-selling author, and worked closely with her to become, at age 26, one of world's most famous and influential peace advocates.

The CIA, begun in 1947, heavily recruited such well-bred Ivy grads. Mary divorced Cord in 1956 when she could not bear his revised mission of working for the CIA, where employees kept their activities secret even from their families.

We now know that he directed such initiatives as Operation Mockingbird. This was a program to tilt the nation's news coverage to CIA-friendly themes by tips, payments, and job pressures on journalists, often at the specific direction of cooperating newspaper publishers, such as Philip Graham, owner of the Washington Post.

Cord Meyer's work included spinning CIA's covert initiatives around the world. Declassified documents and many books have shown that CIA Director Allen Dulles and Counterintellience Director James Jesus Angleton, among others, pulled off a wide array of activities with scant accountability by anyone. These included overthrow of democratically elected leaders perceived by the CIA as too left-wing, bribes, false flag incidents, and assassinations.

Near the end of Angleton's life in 1985, he confided in Joseph Trento, who would publish in 2001, The Secret History of the CIA, based in part on records Angleton and two top colleagues had liberated from the CIA. Citing Trento's thus authoritative account, Janney quotes Angleton as saying with regret about his career, "You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed."

Camelot in Washington

But that was later, and it was a different story in 1961.

Reuniting with John Kennedy, Mary Meyer had a torrid sexual and spiritual affair with him through most of his White House years. He invited her to formal appearances throughout his presidency, as well as to many secret liaisons. At times, she even attended official meetings.

Kennedy once seated her and her sister,Toni Bradlee, at either side of him at a formal dinner. For years, the president flirted with Toni, married to the president's pal, Ben. Janney writes that this was to divert attention away from his romance with Mary, portrayed with president  above on Sept. 23, 1963 in photo from Janney's book.

Mary saw in Kennedy a man who increasingly shared her pro-peace viewpoint, as illustrated by his numerous actions to exercise more control over the CIA and Pentagon while opportunities for de-escalation presented themselves with the Soviet Union, Cuba and in curtailing military actions in Vietnam while the nation's commitment was just 25,000 troops.

Her affair with Kennedy was totally unknown to the general public until 1976, when the National Enquirer revealed it. Yet the affair, although Kennedy's most serious by far during the many during his marriage, is just part of the larger story that Janney describes.

The Basics

Janney grew up during the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s. His father, Wistar Janney, was a senior career CIA official. The Janney family was intimately involved with many of Washington's social and political elite, as well as other high-ranking CIA officials.

Janney is a 1970 graduate of Princeton who earned a Ph.D. at Boston University. He extensively footnoted his book, drawing on previous commentaries, court records and confidential interviews. Some involve the papers of previous researchers, one of whom killed himself. Another abandoned a planned book, reputedly out of fear of deadly reprisal.

The U.S. Department of Justice made a huge effort to convict in Mary Meyer's murder a befuddled black day laborer, Raymond Crump, Jr., found drunk in the park. 

A jury acquitted him after his church persuaded Dovey Rountree, a skilled African-American lawyer, to represent him for free.

Sensing great injustice, she put her career on the line to commit vast time, her personal finances and her exceptional skill to the defense. Against a top prosecutor, she proved reasonable doubt to the jury that the slightly built Crump could have overpowered the taller victim, who was shot twice during a hands-on struggle.

For those with a reasonably open mind or curiosity about history, the book is a trove of insider commentary on an ostensibly glamorous era in Georgetown and at the "Camelot" White House, whose public image was shaped by myth-makers.

With a dramatic story-line, Janney assembles scattered evidence to show, for example, that Kennedy planned to dump Vice President Lyndon Johnson from the 1964 re-election ticket, and divorce Jacqueline Kennedy following his political career in order to wed Mary.

Further, Janney assembles evidence that Mary -- part of an influential circle of Georgetown/McLean friends (which included the CIA's Angleton and his wife) -- was preparing to challenge the Warren Commission's 1964 conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy by himself.

The Warren Commission, which used Angleton as a major research resource via Commssioner Allen Dulles, announced its findings in Setpember 1964 to wide acclaim. Mary Meyer was killed several weeks later.

The murder was on the same day when Angleton said he stopped by her home in the evening with his wife so they could attend a poetry reading together. Angleton and Ben Bradlee later rummaged through the victim's home to find her diary, with Bradlee later saying Angleton should keep what they found because it was a family matter. This is also literally an old boy network of news management. 

Janney argues that Angleton masterminded the murder plot against Mary as a small-scale replica of Kennedy's death in Dallas, using both a patsy and a trained killer.

While such evidence is necessarily incomplete and of course controversial, Janney presents it in a reasonable manner.

He asserts that Attorney General Robert Kennedy, below, a resident of McLean, Virginia near CIA headquarters, privately disputed the Warren Commission Report, as did several other close Kennedy confidantes. But they regarded President Johnson, his Texas financial backers, and the government apparatus they controlled as too powerful to make any public challenge to the Warren findings, except to reclaim the presidency ASAP, in 1968. We know what happened then.

  

Janney's book has largely been ignored, as might be expected even though his publisher took the extra step of blanketing relevant Capitol Hill committees with review copies. The Boston Globe, one of relatively few mainstream newspaper treatments so far, published a balanced feature May 26, entitled, Peter Janney on JFK confidante Mary Pinchot Meyer's death.

Nina Burleigh, a previous biographer of Mary Meyer, and Tim Weiner, a specialist author on CIA-related topics, are among those quoted as challenging Janney's thesis. In a column for Daily Beast/Newsweek, Burleigh argued that Crump committed the murder. Weiner dismisses CIA complicity as an unproven theory.

The Globe reported:

Most key figures in Janney's book are long gone. James Angleton died in 1987, Cord Meyer in 2001, Tony Pinchot Bradlee just last year. In 2007, Janney interviewed Ben Bradlee but says his memory of long-ago events was not that sharp. Now 90, Bradlee, through a family member, had no comment on Janney's book. Janney has also sent copies of the book to congressional leaders and Justice Department officials, asking that Meyer's murder be reinvestigated. He's had no response.

More background information, including media coverage and an introduction by the prominent JFK assassination author Dick Russell, is on the book's site.

Suggested Reader Perspective

Helpful now, I believe, is to suggest a reader framework for understanding such controversial matters. Simply excerpting parts of Janney's arguments or that of his critics is inevitably a highly subjective process given the amount of relevant materials and the layers of intrigue that have always permeated this mystery in particular.

Further, huge conflicts of interest exist for many researchers in reporting on this story.

Nina Burleigh, for example, is the author of A Very Private Woman, published in 1998 about the murder case. It suggested the jury erred in failing to convict Crump. Her career is that of a free-lancer, a tough business that requires high skill and good relationships with prestigious outlets willing to pay. The current Daily Beast / Newsweek acquired Newsweek from the Washington Post in 2010 for just $1 plus debts because the Post wanted to maintain editorial policies prevalent during its Post ownership. The Post still lists Bradlee on its masthead as vice president at large.

I'm not suggesting a conscious motive for her or anyone else. But the power structure got its name for a reason, and does not always work at the conscious level. The clear facts in this story are so pat -- Kennedy meets the belle of the ball three decades later and they plan world peace -- that it it would make a great yarn as a novel or film. But somehow few want to touch the more important real-life version.

An even greater obstacle for reader understanding than reporrter conflicts and financial incentives is the sensitivity still surrounding the Warren Commission findings. Veteran journalist Fred J. Cook, one of the first to attack the findings in print circa 1966, said he had never seen such universal acclaim in his career for an official report than the 1964 praise for the Commission's lone gunman theory. He recalled that even his wife told him -- for the first time in his long career -- to back down from a story: "Who are you to criticize the Warren Commission?!"

Showing further what Mary Meyer would have been up against, establishment journalists popularized the term "Conspiracy Theory" during that  period to debunk critics of the commission by implying they were borderline crazy. This sneering term enables their news organizations to claim they covered all points of view, but also signals to VIP news sources that the reporters and authors are still trustworthy enough to deserve access to officials, which is the bread-and-butter of working journalists and even many biographers. 

My view, which is shared by my thoughtful radio co-host, Scott Draugon, is to cut back on the self-censorship, name-calling, and let reasonably diligent authors have their say.

Calling something a conspiracy theory, for example, is a sign of weak research. Many conspiracies actually exist and succeed, as Republican Party pioneer Abraham Lincoln argued as a congressman in opposing what he regarded as President Polk's deceptive descriptions of military encounters against Mexico.

This week, we provided a forum for another independent voice, Peter Janney. Click here to listen to our interview, now available nationally by archive via the My Technology Lawyer (MTL) network. Better yet, sample his book at the link at the top of this column

Even those who might disagree with Janney's evidence or conclusions can admire his courage, passion, and craftsmanship in creating a remarkably well-done book of its genre.

This column is excerpted from a longer version with more background links at the author's Justice Integrity Project. 

Authors Website: http://www.justice-integrity.org

Authors Bio:

Andrew Kreig is an investigative reporter, attorney, author, business strategist, radio host, and longtime non-profit executive based in Washington, DC.

His most recent book is "Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters," the first book about the Obama administration's second term. The book grew out of his work leading the Justice Integrity Project, a non-partisan legal reform group that investigates official misconduct.

In a diverse career, he has advocated for the powerful, and investigated Mafia chiefs, Karl Rove, and top Obama administration officials. The major "Who's Who" reference books have listed him since the mid-1990s.

He holds law degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago, and a b.a. in history from Cornell. His experience includes work as law clerk to a federal judge, as an attorney at a national law firm, and as president/CEO of a worldwide high-tech trade association.

The contact for interviews, lectures, and review copies is Mary Byers at Eagle View Books. The author has lectured on five continents, held research fellowships at three major universities, and appeared on more than 100 radio, television and cable news shows as an expert commentator.