What Ben Bradlee Revealed About JFK’s Mistress 30 Years After Her Murder

What Ben Bradlee Revealed About JFK’s Mistress 30 Years After Her Murder 

Two days after Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead on a public towpath in Georgetown, the chief of counterintelligence for the CIA was on his knees at the door of her painting studio, picking the lock with professional tools. He was looking for her diary. So was Mary’s sister. So was Mary’s brother-in-law, who would 10 years later become the most famous newspaper editor in America.

 Nine months after that morning, the brother-in-law took the witness stand murder trial. The prosecutor asked him under oath what he had found inside Mary’s studio. He said, “A pocketbook, keys, a wallet, cosmetics, pencils.” He didn’t mention the diary. He didn’t mention the man at the door. He didn’t mention any of it.

30 years later, in a memoir, he revealed everything. This is a story of how a woman lost her voice because people decided to hide it. Welcome to Top Rewind. If you appreciate the kind of stories that don’t make it into the text books, subscribe. It helps us keep digging. Mary Pinchot Meyer finished a painting on the morning of October 12th, 1964.

 She set a small fan in front of a canvas to help the paint dry, and pulled on a blue angora sweater because the air had turned cold. Then she walked out the door of her studio for her usual lunchtime walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. She had been doing that for years. It wasn’t exercise.

 It was how a mother who had lost a son tried to outwalk the loss. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The painting she finished that morning was called Half Light. You can still see it if you want to. The Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired it in 1976. The painting is a circle, four colors painted on a circular canvas.

 She was 43 years old, two days short of her 44th birthday, and most of what’s been written about her since starts with the men she slept with, but she’s much more than that. Her painting is not a footnote to the men she knew, and I am not the only one who thinks that way. The Smithsonian agrees, too. Before those men and the painting, she had been someone else.

 The wife of Marine Corps Lieutenant Cordmeier, who had lost his left eye on Guam, came home a war hero and went into the CIA. They had three sons. They built a life in McLean, Virginia, next door to the family that would move into the White House. In December of 1956, their middle-aged son, Michael, aged nine, was hit by a car near the family house, and he died.

 Two years after that, Mary divorced Cord. She moved to Georgetown. She started painting again in a converted garage studio that her sister, Tony, and brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, owned around the corner from her own house. I think maybe the loss drove a wedge between her and her husband. Some things we never really quite heal from.

 We just have to power through it. Painting was how Mary pushed past the pain. It gave her a routine, and no, that routine wasn’t just about walking the same path to get lunch. The seeds of this particular one that I’m referring to were planted in 1937 at a school dance at the Choate School. Mary was 16 and went there with one boy, but Jack Kennedy, three years older than her, tried to cut in.

 She turned him down, but 24 years later, in October of 1961, she came back to him. She visited him for a few years. The White House logbooks have records of her going in and out of the residence from October 1961 through November 1963. Most of those visits happened when Jackie was traveling. The Kennedys had bought the house next door to the Myers in McLean in the mid-1950s.

 Jackie was Mary’s friend, but this didn’t stop Kennedy from writing a letter on White House stationery in October 1963, 1 month before he was killed in Dallas. He never sent that letter. His personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, kept it and it surfaced at auction in June of 2016, where it sold for just under $89,000. In the letter, he told Mary to leave suburbia.

 He told her it would be unwise and irrational, that she might hate it, but he would love it anyway. He told her she should give him a more loving answer than the one she’s been giving him all these years and signed the letter just J. It is the only love letter from a sitting United States president to his lover that has ever been authenticated, dated, and sold at public auction.

 Every other affair Kennedy had is from people’s testimony. This letter is an admission from the 35th president of the United States himself. Would he have sent it if Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t assassinated him? On September 27th, 1964, the Warren Commission released its report to the American public and claimed Oswald acted alone.

 According to them, there was no real conspiracy. Mary Meyer read it and according to her friends, she didn’t believe the conclusions. She reportedly believed it had been a cover-up. She had been Kennedy’s lover for 2 years and had her own opinions about who in Washington might have wanted him gone and she kept a diary.

 15 days after the Warren report came out on October 12th, 1964, she was dead on a towpath. If you’ve made it this far, hit the like button. It tells us that this kind of story is worth telling and it helps the channel keep going. At 12:30 in the afternoon of the day she died, Henry Wiggins, a mechanic at the SO station at Key Bridge, had been sent up Canal Road with his partner, Bill Branch, to start a stalled Rambler abandoned on the road.

 He was on the roadside of the canal opposite the towpath and then he heard a woman scream, “Someone help me. Someone help me.” What followed was a gunshot and then another. Henry ran across Canal Road to the wall overlooking the towpath and looked down. He saw a black man standing over the body of a white woman. He saw the man take a dark object out of his hand and put it in his jacket pocket.

 The man looked up at Wiggins for a couple of seconds, turned, and walked calmly to the trees on the other side. Wiggins testified that the man he saw was about 5 ft 8 around 185 lb and was wearing a fully zipped light beige jacket. Nothing on the jacket showed signs of struggle. There was no blood, no tearing. 45 minutes later, the police arrested a man named Ray Crump Jr.

 at the canal edge half a mile away. Crump is 5 ft 3 and 1/2. He weighed 130 lb. His clothes were wet and he had scratches on his hands. He told police he was on the towpath fishing and fell into the canal and that the fishing pole was back at his house. Mary Meyer had been shot twice, once in the back of the head in front of her right ear, once near the heart.

 Both shots were close range and precise. Nothing was stolen and there was no sexual assault. There is something else I find pretty interesting. The man the police arrested was 50 lb lighter and 5 in shorter than the suspect the eyewitness actually described. But somehow, he was charged with first-degree murder and indicted without a preliminary hearing.

 The speed of trying to get that case closed was faster than usual. It was the speed of trying to arrive at a conclusion that may or may not have been the truth. Yet the rabbit hole goes deeper than this. Mary’s body was identified at the morgue in the late afternoon by Ben Bradlee. He was her brother-in-law and the Newsweek bureau chief in Washington.

 His wife Tony was Mary’s sister. That night, the Bradleys received an international phone call from Tokyo. The caller was Ann Truitt, the sculptor, Mary’s closest friend. Truitt told them there was a diary. Mary had asked her years earlier to make sure that if anything ever happened to her, the diary would be put into the hands of James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton was the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. He was Cord Meyer’s closest friend at the agency, godfather to Mary’s sons, and a frequent guest at the Bradley’s Georgetown dinner parties. He was already at the Bradley’s house when the call from Tokyo came in. The next morning, Bradley and his wife walked around the corner from their house to Mary’s studio.

 They had no key to the studio door, but Bradley had brought tools to break the padlock. When they arrived, the door was already being worked on. Angleton was on his knees picking the lock with specialized equipment. Inside the agency, his nickname was the locksmith. He was known as a man who could pick his way into any house in town.

 That morning, they didn’t find the diary. Two days later, Tony went back studio and found it herself. It was a small notebook, mostly filled with paint swatches and color notes, and shorthand ideas for her work. About 10 pages discussed an affair with an unnamed lover. Tony and Ben read those pages. They identified the lover. They handed the diary to Angleton and asked him to destroy it.

 The only thing we know about that diary is what they claim to have seen. But if it was just paint swatches, the locksmith would have been on his knees trying to get into it before Bradley and his wife. Now, there was still a prosecution to run, and the existence of that diary could have changed everything about it. In July 1965, Ray Crump Jr.

 went on trial for Mary Meyer’s murder, having sat in jail for 9 months awaiting trial. The judge is Howard Corcoran, the brother of Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of Lyndon Johnson. Corcoran ruled at the start of the trial that Mary Meyer’s private life cannot be entered into the court record. Anything about her affair, anything about her ex-husband’s job at the CIA, anything about James Angleton, none of it was admissible.

 When I look at why the judge entered this ruling, I find it kind of strange. Wouldn’t details about Mary’s life provide a deep insight into the case itself? Ben Bradlee was the first witness the prosecution called. The chief prosecutor, Alfred Friendly Huntley, asked him under oath what he had found in his sister-in-law’s studio.

Bradlee said a pocketbook, keys, a wallet, cosmetics, pencils. He didn’t mention the diary. He didn’t mention Angleton at the door. So, the prosecution didn’t know about the diary. The defense didn’t know about the diary. The jury never hears about any of it. Crump’s defense attorney was a woman named Dovey Roundtree.

 She is a black woman trying a capital case in 1965 in Washington for a black laborer everyone has already decided is guilty. Three years earlier, she had become the first black member of the previously all-white Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia. The fight to admit her had taken a vote.

 She had taken Crump’s case for a fee of $1 and she completely destroyed the prosecution. The only eyewitness, Wiggins, could not identify Crump in court. The prosecution had no murder weapon. They had no forensic evidence linking Crump to Mary’s body. They had no motive. Crump was 50 lb lighter and 5 in shorter than the man Wiggins had described in the original police statement.

 The jury acquitted him on July 29th, 1965. A black defense attorney won a capital case in 1965 Washington without ever knowing the murdered woman had been the president’s lover, had kept a diary about it, and that the CIA had taken the diary from her studio before the police could ever find it. Whatever happened in that courtroom, it should not be confused with justice.

 For 11 years, the public knew none of it. Then there was another twist. Angleton didn’t destroy the diary as he promised, and Bradley and Tony found out years afterwards when Tony asked him point blank what he had done with it. He admitted that he hadn’t destroyed it. Bradley’s wife demanded it back.

 When he returned it, she burned it herself with a friend as a witness. Three people in Washington held a meeting over a dead woman’s notebook and decided the public shouldn’t get to know what was in it. They burned it themselves. In February 1976, James Truitt, Ann Truitt’s husband, and a former vice president of the Washington Post, gave an interview to the National Enquirer. He told them about the affair.

He told them about the diary. He told them about Bradley and Angleton in the studio. By 1976, Bradley was running the Washington Post. The paper had won its Pulitzer for Watergate 3 years earlier with him at the helm. He was vacationing at the time the Enquirer story broke with his new wife, Sally Quinn.

 He gave orders for the Post to ignore it. Bradley built a reputation of bringing Washington’s secrets to the light, but was very determined about keeping this one in the dark. A senior editor at the Post, Harry Rosenfeld, said on the record, “We’re not going to treat ourselves more kindly than we treat others.” The Post ran the story.

 Bradley denied it. Angleton denied it, and they denied it for 19 more years. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney went on the record saying the knowledge of the diary at the time would have changed the entire trial. Nieman told an interviewer in 1991 that having known about the diary and the affair could have changed everything.

 Roundtree wrote in her 2009 autobiography that what Bradley had concealed deeply unsettled her. Then in 1995, in his memoir, A Good Life, Bradley admitted everything. The break-in, the diary, the destruction, the fact that he had not told the truth on the witness stand. By the time he admitted it, Mary Meyer had been dead for 31 years. James Angleton was dead.

Cord Meyer was alive, but had long since retired from the CIA. The judge was dead. Most of the people who could have asked Bradley a follow-up question were either dead or working for him. He chose his moment well. And here’s the part that bothers me. The diary is gone. We don’t have a single sentence in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s own handwriting about her affair, about the man she loved who had been shot in Dallas 11 months before she was shot in Georgetown, about her ex-husband’s job, about the Warren Report she had read and disagreed with

in the last 2 weeks of her life. What we have is what other people said about it. Bradley in 1995, Tony in the interviews, Truitt in 1976, Angleton over martinis at retirement parties telling reporters whatever he felt like telling them that night. What we don’t have is her voice. The cost of what they did has nothing to do with whether the diary contained a conspiracy.

 The cost is that she lost her voice on the page the same week she lost it on the towpath, and she never got it back. The case is officially unsolved. After the acquittal in July 1965, DC police drove Ray Crump to the Virginia border and told him never to set foot in the district again. He had six children living there.

 He went on to a long troubled criminal life and was never charged with another murder. James Jesus Angleton ran CIA counterintelligence until 1974 when he was forced out for unrelated reasons. Ben Bradley took The Washington Post through Watergate, oversaw the coverage that brought down a president, and won his paper its 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, and was buried in 2014 hailed as a defender of the public’s right to know.

 In 1995, in his memoir, he finally told most of of truth about what he had done in his sister in law’s studio. In 1998, the journalist Nina Burleigh published the first serious biography of the woman whose diary that they had burned. In 2025, the Trump administration released 80,000 pages of declassified Kennedy assassination files.

 None of those files mention Mary Pinchot Meyer. The painting is still in the Smithsonian. It’s half light, a circle with four colors. You can go see it any day the museum is open. The diary is ash. I’ll see you next time.