What is history, but a fable agreed upon?
-Napoleon Bonaparte
(Day Laborer Ray Crump is arrested as the only suspect in Mary Pinchot Meyers execution. Photo Washington Post)
Mid-October in Washington is about as good as it gets here in Your Nation’s Capital.
There are those who love the Spring, and it is delightful and filled with promise. There are others, with whom I inclined to agree, who love the Fall best. There is the poignancy of the dying year, the sweet sense of impending loss and the memory of acts accomplished and not.
Mary Pinchot Meyer put on a gray sweater to fend off the chill, and then another blue one atop it. The air is moist along the C&O towpath. She set off from her house with the detached studio at 1523 34th St NW to head south to the towpath while a painting dried on her easel. She was killed 1.3 miles and about a half hour later.
I commend a fine independent investigation to your attention:
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/Meyer.html
(Zalin Grant. Photo by Claude Boutillon – August 9, 2010)
Zalin Grant unemotionally paints a comprehensive appreciation of the background to the hit. His approach combines an appreciation of who Mary Pinchot Meyer really was (as does Nina Burleigh in her book “A Very Private Woman”) and the nuts-and-bolts of a clinical murder (Peter Janney’s “Mary’s Mosaic”).
Zalin concludes (with Janney) that the facts of the murder case assembled by the government after Mary’s body was found against a day-laborer named Raymond Crump don’t make sense. A pioneering lawyer named Dovey Roundtree got the jury to agree. Crump was acquitted, the case unsolved and officially closed. There has been much more to come out of the woodwork on the matter, though.
You might think that someone as well connected as Mary would have her socialite friends band together in a quest for justice. You would be wrong.
The Washington Post pronounced Ray Crump guilty only two days after Mary was executed- the same newspaper that was up to its neck in the CIA media manipulation- Operation MOCKINGBIRD. And there the matter rested, until the story of Mary’s association with President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as related by Mary’s pal James Truitt was finally published by the bottom-feeding National Enquirer in 1976.
My pal Mac was part of the big clean-up. By that, of course, I do not mean cover-up. The recommendations of the Rockefeller Commission were implemented to ensure that the intelligence community would be reigned in, and put back on the reservation from which it had so widely strayed.
I invite your attention to the Burleigh, and Janney books, which come to opposite conclusions on who was responsible for killing Mary. I like Zalin’s crisp synthesis of the facts.
See what you think. Given what we know now, it is pretty clear that things do not line up. As in so many of the strangely convenient deaths, evidence has been disappeared. Documents have been destroyed. Secrets have been held.
Many of them have been leaked, either officially or through FOIA.
For example, the apparent penetration of the Communist party of the United States by J. Edgar Hoover has now been made public in 44 volumes of documents about the agent team code-named SOLO and in reality a . I hate to burnish the posthumous reputation of a man I consider a monster, but from my initial scanning of the documents, it appears Hoover produced something good and useful about Soviet and Chinese intentions that served the nation well. Check it at:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB375/
Sometimes the more you know, the less you understand.
There was a lot to cover up. They did, mostly.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com