What Ben Bradlee Revealed About JFK’s Mistress 30 Years After Her M.u.r.d.e.r

Mary Pinchot Meyer finished a painting on the morning of October 12, 1964. She placed a small fan in front of the canvas to help the paint dry, pulled on a blue angora sweater against the cold air, and left her studio for the usual lunchtime walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown.

She had walked that path for years. It was not merely exercise. It was the routine of a mother who had lost a child and needed the motion to keep moving through the loss.

The painting she completed that morning was called Half Light, a circular canvas of four colors.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum later acquired it. She was forty-three years old, two days short of her forty-fourth birthday.

Most accounts of her life begin with the men she knew. Yet she was a painter firSt. Before the public stories, she had been the wife of Cord Meyer, a Marine lieutenant who lost an eye on Guam, returned a war hero, and entered the Central Intelligence Agency.

They had three sons and lived in McLean, Virginia, next door to the family that would later occupy the White House.

In December 1956 their nine-year-old middle son, Michael, was struck by a car near the house and died.

Two years later Mary divorced Cord. She moved to Georgetown and returned to painting in a converted garage studio owned by her sister Tony and Tony’s husband, Ben Bradlee.

The loss of the child had driven a lasting wedge into the marriage. Painting became the way she pushed past the pain.

It gave her structure. The path along the canal was part of that structure. Years earlier, at a school dance in 1937, sixteen-year-old Mary had turned down a young Jack Kennedy when he tried to cut in.

Twenty-four years later, in October 1961, she returned to him. White House logbooks record her visits to the residence from that month through November 1963, most of them while Jacqueline Kennedy was traveling.

The Kennedys had bought the house next door to the Meyers in the mid-1950s. Jackie was Mary’s friend.

That did not prevent Kennedy from writing an unsent letter on White House stationery in October 1963, one month before Dallas.

His secretary kept it. In 2016 the letter sold at auction for nearly eighty-nine thousand dollars.

In it he urged Mary to leave suburbia, called the idea unwise and irrational, said she might hate it but he would love it, and asked for a more loving answer than the ones she had given over the years.

He signed it simply J. It remains the only authenticated, dated love letter from a sitting American president to a lover ever sold at public auction.

Fifteen days after the Warren Commission released its report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, Mary Meyer was dead on the towpath.

Friends said she had read the report and did not accept its conclusions. She believed it was a cover-up.

She had been Kennedy’s lover for two years and held her own views about who in Washington might have wanted him gone.

She kept a diary. At half past twelve on the afternoon she died, a mechanic named Henry Wiggins was on Canal Road opposite the towpath when he heard a woman scream for help.

A gunshot followed, then another. He looked down and saw a Black man standing over the body of a white woman.

The man placed a dark object in his jacket pocket, looked up at Wiggins for a few seconds, and walked calmly into the trees.

Wiggins described the man as about five feet eight and one hundred eighty-five pounds, wearing a fully zipped light beige jacket that showed no signs of struggle.

Forty-five minutes later police arrested Ray Crump Jr. Half a mile away at the canal edge.

Crump was five feet three and a half and weighed one hundred thirty pounds. His clothes were wet and his hands scratched.

He said he had been fishing and had fallen into the water. Mary had been shot twice at close range, once behind the right ear and once near the heart.

Nothing was stolen. There was no sexual assault. The man arrested was fifty pounds lighter and five inches shorter than the description given by the only eyewitness.

He was nevertheless charged with first-degree murder and indicted without a preliminary hearing. Mary’s body was identified at the morgue that afternoon by Ben Bradlee, her brother-in-law and Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief.

That night the Bradlees received a call from Tokyo. Ann Truitt, the sculptor and Mary’s closest friend, told them Mary had asked years earlier that if anything happened to her, the diary should be given to James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton was chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, Cord Meyer’s closest friend at the agency, godfather to Mary’s sons, and a regular guest at the Bradlees’ dinner parties.

He was already at the Bradlees’ house when the call came through. The next morning Ben and Tony walked to Mary’s studio.

They had no key. Bradlee brought tools to break the padlock. When they arrived, Angleton was already on his knees picking the lock with specialized equipment.

Inside the agency he was known as the locksmith. That morning they did not find the diary.

Two days later Tony returned and found it herself. It was a small notebook filled mostly with paint swatches, color notes, and ideas for her work.

About ten pages discussed an affair with an unnamed lover. Tony and Ben read those pages, identified the lover, and handed the diary to Angleton with the request that he destroy it.

The only account of its contents is what they later claimed to have seen. In July 1965 Ray Crump went on trial after nine months in jail.

The judge, Howard Corcoran, ruled at the outset that Mary Meyer’s private life could not be entered into the record.

Nothing about an affair, nothing about her former husband’s work at the CIA, nothing about Angleton was admissible.

Ben Bradlee was the first prosecution witness. Asked under oath what he had found in his sister-in-law’s studio, he listed a pocketbook, keys, a wallet, cosmetics, and pencils.

He did not mention the diary. He did not mention Angleton at the door. The jury never heard of either.

Crump’s defense attorney was Dovey Roundtree, a Black woman trying a capital case in 1965 Washington for a Black laborer already presumed guilty.

She had become the first Black member of the previously all-white Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia only three years earlier.

She took the case for a fee of one dollar. She destroyed the prosecution’s case.

The sole eyewitness could not identify Crump in court. There was no murder weapon, no forensic link to the body, no motive.

Crump did not match the physical description given on the day of the crime. The jury acquitted him on July 29, 1965.

Roundtree won without ever knowing the murdered woman had been the president’s lover, had kept a diary about it, or that the CIA had taken that diary from her studio before police could find it.

For eleven years the public knew none of this. Then Angleton admitted he had not destroyed the diary.

Tony demanded it back and burned it herself with a witness present. Three people in Washington decided the public should not know what was inside and destroyed it.

In February 1976 James Truitt, Ann Truitt’s husband and a former Washington Post vice president, spoke to the National Enquirer.

He described the affair, the diary, and the scene at the studio. By then Bradlee was running the Post, the paper that had won the Pulitzer for Watergate.

He ordered the Post to ignore the story. The paper ran it anyway. Bradlee denied it.

Angleton denied it. They denied it for another nineteen years. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney later said knowledge of the diary would have changed the trial.

Roundtree wrote that what Bradlee had concealed deeply unsettled her. In 1995, in his memoir A Good Life, Bradlee finally admitted the break-in, the diary, the destruction, and the fact that he had not told the truth under oath.

By then Mary Meyer had been dead thirty-one years. Angleton was dead. Most people who might have asked follow-up questions were either dead or had worked for Bradlee.

He chose his moment carefully. The diary is gone. There is not a single sentence in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s own handwriting about the man she had loved who was shot in Dallas eleven months before she was shot in Georgetown, about her former husband’s work, or about the Warren Report she had read and rejected in the final weeks of her life.

What remains is what other people said about it. The cost 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 remains officially unsolved. After the acquittal, police drove Ray Crump to the Virginia border and told him never to return to the District.

He had six children living there. He later led a troubled life and was never charged with another murder.

James Angleton ran CIA counterintelligence until he was forced out in 1974. Ben Bradlee guided the Washington Post through Watergate, oversaw the coverage that helped bring down a president, and was buried in 2014 as a defender of the public’s right to know.

In 1995 he told most of the truth about what he had done in his sister-in-law’s studio.

The painting Half Light remains in the Smithsonian. The diary is ash.