(The Fugs, live in 1966.)
It certainly does not get less crazy as the time passes. What an astonishing decade it was. We have been talking about the events between the assassination of a President, and the murder of one of his many lovers on the towpath of the C&O Canal a year later.
The murder of Mary Pinchon Meyer in an enigmatic event- a tragedy, of course, and the abrupt and early termination to a life in transition. There are allegations that she managed a small cadre of other women coming to an evolved feminist consciousness in the first half of the 1960s. It is alleged that in addition to her romantic involvement with John Kennedy, she introduced him to marijuana and a mild acid trip.
It is an astonishing revelation, of true. I mean, the issues of the day were so astonishing as to defy the imagination. We dodged an atomic bullet in the very near catastrophic confrontation over the Soviet Missiles in Cuba. How close we got to obliterating American cities in an exchange over a land invasion of the island were not fully understood until the Berlin Wall fell, and the archives were (briefly) opened and leaders of the former USSR were allowed to speak candidly about the crisis.
Had the more hawkish wings of the United States Government prevailed in the policy struggle prevailed, we might have discovered that local Russian commanders had authority to use nuclear weapons in self-defense, a consequence of the less-than-reliable command-and-control mechanism that connected Moscow and Havana.
The theory regarding the murder of (one of them) Mary Pinchon Meyer is that: “a disgruntled CIA, in unholy alliance with a sitting Vice President, staged a coup d’etat. There were loose ends. Mary was one of them. Her murder was a hit organized by a rogue CIA.”
This is a wild and powerful accusation. It is predicated on a belief system, and belief is a problematic creature.
For example, I got a mild correction to my personal history yesterday- I was not actually at the concert to Free John Sinclair, the noted founder of the White Panther Party and manager of The MC5. That band will stand forever, with The Fugs, as being absolutely the defining examplars of anti-war Rage Rock.
It appears, based on expert testimony, that we may have been somewhere else at the time of the concert on the 10th of December 1971. It is possible. After all, the concerts all blur together: for sure we were at the following at Crisler: Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, with the Allman Brothers and Dr. John the Night Tripper as the openers.
Plus, there were all those amazing Blues Shows we attended were at Hill Auditorium. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. Hill was where we saw the astonishing Mountain featuring the guitar stylings of Lesley West.
Plus the headliners at the Goose Lake international music festival that made us citizens of- if not the Woodstock Nation- but part of something abroad in the land that was completely new. I mean, look at it.
It was a big deal that John Kennedy did not wear the traditional Homburg hat as he walked to his inauguration on the 20th of January, 1961.
We were at the brink of nuclear war by October, 1962.
Mary began an affair with the President that year, and was a visitor to the White House more than 30 times as documented in the official logs. At the private residence, she may have convinced the priapic President to try drugs.
John Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963.
Mary Pinchon Meyer’s life was snuffed out shortly before her 44th birthday the next year, on October 12, 1964.
The Fugs were performing revolutionary music in New York at the same time. Homburgs to Fugs inside three years.
By 1968 several more Americans of stature are dead and the summer of rage has scourged the cities. By 1969 drug use has become mainstream and Woodstock Nation is born. But I digress. This is not intended to be a rumination about cool bands of some bygone age. It is rather a discussion of memory and its vagaries, the truth revealed in records, and falsehoods uttered so often and so fervently that they have assumed lives of their own.
My pal Dave is a highly regarded entrepreneur. He is skiing at the moment, something I wish I could do, but he sent me a story that needs no elaboration nor elegant snide commentary from me. It stands as something that I could not make up, nor even imagine as something that could be done in the guise of working for the United States Government, which I did with pride and energy for more than a quarter century.
Take a look at it and see Your Taxpayer Dollars at work.
http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-03-14/news/cia-lsd-wayne-ritchie-george-h-white-mk-ultra/
This is just part of what was going on. But how much of what they are saying now is fable, and what is fact? MKULTRA is true. Is JFK on acid true, too?
The source for that part of the fable is Dr. Timothy Leary’s book “Flashback,” which quotes Mary Pinchon Meyer extensively on this matter, and parts of it appear to be confirmed by research on Mary Pinchot Meyer by Peter Janney in his book “Mary’s Mosaic” and Lisa Burleigh in her biography “A Very Private Woman.”
Both books are meticulously researched, and arrive at very different conclusions from the identical information.
Mary’s alleged acid circle, her murder and theories about subsequent cover-ups continues at a variety of more (or less) hysterical places, most of which veer across known facts about the clandestine CIA acid program known as MKULTRA, first disclosed by Sy Hersh in 1974 as revealed by the Rockefeller Commission which are weird enough and the program documents were deliberately destroyed by order of Director Richard helms in 1972.
(Dr. Timothy Leary around the time of his relationship with Mary Pinchon Meyer.)
Leary’s account is interesting but less than authoritative- after all, the dialogue he quotes is all from him, and he was a showman and a lifelong psychoactive drug user. Leary and his recollections can be challenged, just like mine.
The Good Doctor had a wild ride after his relationship with Mary was ended by her death- his quote from her about the President in the aftermath of the killing was “they can’t control him- he is changing too fast” is one of the keys to the CIA conspiracy-murder theory.
But who can you trust? This quote is from a unique press conference held at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 18, 1974. It was sponsored by a group calling itself People Investigating Leary’s Lies, or PILL, and in their book Acid Dreams Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain sum it up this way:
“A can of worms had been opened. Paranoia was rampant among radicals who feared that Leary might be talking about any number of people he’d been in contact with over the years. Some blamed Leary for being a turncoat, others directed their anger at the government and the criminal justice system. The discussion grew increasingly acrimonious as the afternoon wore on. There for all to see were the signs of disintegration — fear, backstabbing, confusion, resentment, animosity. “The 1960s are finally dead,” said Ken Kelley after the conference adjourned. “That was just the funeral.”
For my part, I will content myself to accept the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Committee’s final report in 1979 concluded: “President John F. Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” They specifically excluded the governments of the USSR and Cuba, and the Committee was of the opinion that the Mob and/or anti-Castro had nothing to do with the murder- although individuals may have.
The Committee could not rule out individual members of any of those groups acting together, though, and that pretty much leaves you with the idea that a rogue confederation of the USG itself was responsible.
I won’t go beyond the fact that there was more than one shooter, and that means the Warren Commission report was wrong, and possibly intentionally so.
JFK and LSD? Leary says so. The lady that knew for sure was dead. We can be done with that tomorrow, if memory serves.
(Mary Pinchon Meyer.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com