Although I am definitely NOT a big believer in conspiracy theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy continues to hold a fascination for me and countless others. There are so many unanswered questions about the Warren Commission Report. There are also the mysterious deaths of two women who seemed to know too much about the assassination, - - journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and Washington D.C. socialite and abstract painter Mary Pinchot Meyer,
On November 8, 1965, Kilgallen died under strange circumstance while probing the JFK assassination. She was the only journalist to interview Jack Ruby one-on-one after he killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Dorothy considered the idea that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy "laughable" and spent 18 months investigating the JFK assassination. She died before she could publish her findings, from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. At the time, newspapers reported that her death was likely accidental. It seems, however, that something more sinister could have taken place, because Dorothy's many pages of research were never found.
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| Kilgallen |
Mary Eno Pinchot was born in New York City in 1920. Her father, Amos Pinchot, was a well-to-do lawyer and important figure in the Progressive Party. He supported the socialist magazine The Masses. Mary attended Vassar College, a prestigious liberal arts institution located in New York's picturesque Hudson Valley.
Mary first met JFK in 1937 while with a date at a dance held at the Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. Kennedy reportedly tried to cut in on her date that night, Choate alumnus William Attwood, a journalist and future diplomat. Mary was apparently offended by JFK's behaviour and they likely had no contact for over a decade. Attwood later joined Kennedy's 1960 campaign for president. In the early days of the Kennedy administration, he served as ambassador to Guinea.
After graduating from Vassar College in 1942, Mary Pinchot worked as a journalist for the United Press and Mademoiselle. On April 19, 1945, Mary married Cord Meyer (1920-2001), who later served as a CIA official. Mary and Cord held similar pacifist views. They both believed in world government, and in 1947, Cord became president of the United World Federalists. In 1950, the couple's third child was born and they relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1951, Cord joined the Central Intelligence Agency. After his CIA appointment. the family moved to Washington D.C., where they became part of the Georgetown social set.
In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly accused Cord of being a communist, although, according to Peter Janney's book Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, Cord had apparently moderated his left-wing views when he joined the CIA. Members of the Communist Party USA had infiltrated the international organizations that he had established.
In the mid-1950s, John and Jacqueline Kennedy bought bought the home next door to the Meyers in McLean, Virginia soon after JFK became a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. He and Jackie purchased the white brick Georgian estate known as Hickory Hill from the widow of Justice Robert Jackson. After JFK failed to win the 1956 Democratic vice presidential nomination, Hickory Hill was transferred to his brother Robert. Mary and Cord Meyer divorced in 1958. After the divorce, she and her children retuned to Georgetown. Cord Meyer served om senior senior CIA roles until 1977. He remarried in 1996 and died in 2001.In an interview with author Peter Janney, for his book Mary's Mosaic, Charles Bartlett, a journalist and Kennedy confidant, expressed his concern about the serious nature of Meyer's romantic relationship with JFK. He stated, "That was a dangerous relationship. Jack was in love with Mary Meyer. He was certainly smitten with her, he was heavily smitten. He was very frank with me about it."
Mary's brother-in-law was famed Washington Post editor Bill Bradlee. Bradlee, the husband of Mary's sister Toni, wrote that Mary was romantically involved with JFK and that they would frequently meet when Jackie was out of town. It is not surprising that Mary was a guest at the 46th birthday Jacqueline Kennedy held for her husband aboard the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, on May 29, 1963.
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| Meyer at JFK's 46th birthday party |
On October 12, 1964, almost a year after JFK's assassination, and less than three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report, Mary Pinchot Meyer was brutally murdered in broad daylight. On that day, she completed a painting and then took her usual daily walk in Georgetown, along the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath. She was shot to death and her body had two bullet wounds. She was 43 years old at the time of her passing.
An African-American man, Raymond Crump, Jr., was spotted in the area and arrested for her murder. However, there was not enough evidence to convict him, and he was acquitted. The murder weapon was never found and Mary's murder remains unsolved. Her close ties to the CIA and her affair with JFK have aroused suspicion that she was the victim of a hitman.
Mary kept a diary which is believed to have contained details of her affair with JFK. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who was godfather to two of Mary and Cord's children, quickly confiscated her journal Angleton claimed to have burned its contents. The contents of the diary have been been a subject dispute, and their disappearance certainly arouses suspicions that they may have contained links to the assassination of JFK.
In June 2016, a four-page handwritten letter, allegedly from JFK to Mary Pinchot Meyer, surfaced. The letter was never sent. It was auctioned off for $88,970, according to Boston-based RR Auction. According to R.R. Auction executive vice-president Robert Livingston, Kennedy "was going to send it to his mistress, Mary Meyer, and he never sent it." Evelyn Lincoln, JFK's secretary apparently saved the letter and passed in on to a Kennedy collector. The letter in undated, but Livingston stated that it was written in October 1963, about a month before Kennedy's assassination. "And it's on White House stationary," said Livingston, "but as you can see, they've cut the White House off the top of the letters."
The letter reads as follows:
Why don't you leave suburbia for once - - come and see me - - either here or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it -- on the other hand, you may not -- and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all these years, you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don't you just say yes.
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| Jim Koethe |
Over 62 years have passed since the 35th president of the United States was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The FBI and the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennnedy (popularly known as the Warren Commission after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren) both concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The Warrren Commission further determined that Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald, while Oswald was in police custody, was not part of a conspiracy. However, the American public is not satisfied with that conclusion. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 65 per cent of Americans do not believe that Oswald acted alone, that others were involved in the assassination. About 11 per cent believe the Mafia or other organized crime elements are responsible for the killing. 38 per cent of respondents believe that part of the United States federal government is responsible for JFK's death.
On March 8, 2025, the Trump administration released tens of thousands of unredacted pages of formerly classified records relating to the JFK assassination, mostly digitized information from the Warren Commission. The majority of the files are scans of documents. Some are blurred of difficult to to read due to the passage of time since Kennedy's assassination. There are also photographs and sound recordings.
The documents can be found on the website of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration website. The records certainly reveal more about the CIA's clandestine activities, especially in Cuba and Mexico. However, they do not appear to contradict the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
But why did it take over 60 years for the information to be made public, particularly the CIA's clandestine activities during the 1960a, Despite the release of the documents, questions still linger surrounding the CIA's role in JFK's assassination. An unredacted text of a June 1961 memo sent to to Kennedy from aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. strongly criticized the spy agency just months after the CIA's failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April of that year.
Although there is no conclusive proof that the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, it still feels as if the whole story has not been told, that something remains hidden. For example, why was the Warren Commission focused on "the single (magical) bullet theory" and "the lone shooter theory" that Lee Harvey Oswald alone fired a rifle from the 6th floor window of the Texas Book Depository? Why did it not take into account the fact that 21 witnesses claimed they heard shots fired from the direction of the grassy knoll? Furthermore, the Zapruder film of the assassination showed that at least one bullet shot at JFK was not fired from the window of the Book Depository.
SOURCES: Science Publishing Group (Sceince PG) abstract from International Journal of Law, Volume 8, Issue 4, "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Unanswered Questions," by Mykhaylo Krasnyanskyy, December 24, 2025; IrishCentral, "Read the letter JFK wrote to his alleged lover a month before he died," by IrishCentral staff, March 27, 2023; Mal Warwick On Books; "John F. Kennedy's lover kept a diary and it was explosive," by Mal Warwikd; USA Today, "Trump releases JFK files on assassination. Here's what they say." by Josh Meyer, March 19, 2025; CBS News, "JFK files related to assassination released by Trump administration," by Stefan Becket, March 19, 2025; The Harvard Gazette, "Declassified JFK files provide "enhanced clarity on CIA actions, historian says," by Christina Pazzanese, March 26, 2025; Wikipedia
- Joanne
