(Abraham Zapruder 8MM Camera And Film, 1963. Photo Bell & Howell.)
“I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.”
– James Schlesinger’s first words upon becoming DCI in 1973
I mentioned yesterday that I looked at a film clip and got agitated. You can see it for yourself: it is not hard to find. Google up the search term “Zapruder Film” and you can find it in a nano-second.
I watched it and was profoundly disturbed. I remember as a kid seeing the still photos that Life Magazine published; the Warren Commission considered it the best evidence of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and clear evidence that the deranged lone gunman- the iconic deranged lone gunman- took out the most powerful man in the world.
You don’t have to look far down the list of Google hits before more hallucinogenic items pop up. You can go, frame by frame, through the short film, and discover analysis that says the whole thing is fake, just like the landings on the moon.
It was all done on a Hollywood sound set, according to some commentary that seems rational, enough, but is tinged with rhetoric that is really eerie.
The Zapruder film was finally shown in 1975- by Geraldo Rivera, natch- and caused a public outcry. The film had been sequestered for twelve years. Since Geraldo is a showman, first and foremost, his characterization only stoked the controversy over conspiracy that had been swirling about the murder since the very beginning.
The film appeared to support the contention that the President might have been hit by a second gunman, firing from a position in front of the motorcade. You can make up your own mind on that; everyone else has.
The Congress responded by established the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to re-open the investigation. They poured over everything and issued the final report in 1979, with the findings that JFK was likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The conclusion was based in large part on a Dictabelt audio recoding that had some major problems, but suggested an additional shot had been fired.
They were very nice about the conclusion, though, and specifically exonerated the governments of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Anti-Castro groups or The Mob.
It is sort of weird conclusion, since everything stems from the fact that if Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, then someone got away with murder- the most high-profile murder in history.
The Committee also helpfully sealed the bulk of its evidence for fifty years.
My pal Mac always maintained that, single gunman or not, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the man who had the most to gain and profited directly from the crime. You can certainly make a case for the boys from the Suite 8F group that met at the Lamar Hotel in Houston did pretty well after LBJ took over.
I don’t have an opinion on the matter, though like everyone I share a grim fascination with the period when everything began to go wrong.
The war that John Kennedy had enthusiastically supported in SE Asia was going badly; the War on Poverty quickly evolved into the mass arson of America’s major inner cities; Doctor King and JFK’s brother quickly joined the ranks of the Martyrs, and it seemed that all through it the Agencies that were designed to protect us had been up to some very shaky antics.
If you ha a suspicious mind- and we Boomers all did- it was pretty apparent that Something’s Happening Here, though what it was…well, it wasn’t exactly clear.
People like Timothy Leary were as helpful as the Select Committee. He revealed something interesting about the martyred President that was not reported at the time.
JFK (and later his brother) lived in a marvelous home in Mclean known as “Hickory Hill.” Some nice people- and some not so nice- lived in the quiet bucolic neighborhood.
A couple named Cord and Mary Meyer lived nearby. Cord had been a combat Marine in the big one, and became radicalized by his experience. Mary was a leftie by way of Vassar College, and both were active in Fellow Traveler groups in the early fifties.
Along the way, Allen Dulles made contact with Cord the year I was born- 1951- and signed him up for a project that was extremely sensitive in the Office of Policy Coordination, the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Directorate for Operations. Cord was to report to Frank Wisner and participate in “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
CIA HQ is just up Dolly Madison Highway from the neighborhood where the Meyers and the Kennedys lived.
After one of their children was killed by a speeding car on the road near their house, at Langley Commons, the tensions in the marriage caused it to unravel.
Cord moved out, Mary stayed in the house. She became friends with Jackie Kennedy and often walked with her. When they left to move into the White House, Bobby Kennedy moved in with Joan and the kids to Hickory Hill.
In October 1961, Mary began visiting the Kennedy’s at the White House, and some sources reported that she began an affair with the President. The rumors certainly seem credible these days; Like Marilyn Monroe, apparently she was keeping a diary, and the top Counter-Intelligence officer at The Agency, James Jesus Angleton, reportedly began bugging her bedroom.
There is nothing new about JFK being a man with a high libido, bad back or not, nor of government agencies like J Edgar Hoover’s FBI collecting dirt to blackmail politicians. But interestingly, Mary’s progressive politics caused her to reach out to Dr. Timothy Leary in 1962 when he was director of research projects at Harvard.
Leary claimed later that he had supplied LSD to Mary, who in turn told him she used it with Kennedy before amorous encounters.
A White House assistant named Meyer Feldman later claimed in an interview that the President had substantive conversations with Mary, beyond the purely personal, and he had a high regard for her progressive opinions.
In his 1983 biography, Dr. Leary claimed that Mary phoned him the day after the assassination in Dallas, to say that “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much… They’ll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m scared. I’m afraid.”
(Mary Meyers crime scene, 1964. Photo Washington Post.)
On 12th October, 1964, Mary was murdered as she walked along the C&O Canal towpath in Georgetown. Witnesses heard two gunshots, which police said were point-blank shots in the back of her head and to her chest.
An African-American man was detained shortly there after, and although there was no powderburns on his hands, nor the murder weapon, they had their man.
The public defender claimed the man was innocent, and feeble minded to boot. Mary’s private life, her marriage to a senor intelligence official and the rest was suppressed. The diary, if there was one, never showed up.
The accused was acquitted. The case remains unsolved, unlike the assassination in Dallas, which was the act of a deranged lone gunman.
No less a figure than Ben Bradlee of Washington Post fame knew Mary well, and was connected by marriage. He remarked that a strange thing happened after the murder. During the trial he had gone to Mary’s house to look for the diary, which she had told friends about, and when they got to the house they found James Jesus Angleton inside looking for the same thing.
It is not that things are strange in Washington today, but things were really weird here in the 1960s. That is one of the reasons that Dick Nixon felt he really had to clean house.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com