After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedys

 In 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful, rebellious, and intelligent ex-wife of a top CIA official, was killed on a quiet Georgetown towpath near her home. Mary Meyer was a secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy, whom she had known since private school days, and after her death, reports that she had kept a diary set off a tense search by her brother-in-law, newsman Ben Bradlee, and CIA spymaster James Angleton. But the only suspect in her murder was acquitted, and today her life and death are still a source of intense speculation, as Nina Burleigh reveals in her widely praised book, the first to examine this haunting story. "Reads like a John Grisham thriller crossed with an Oliver Stone movie." —Boston Globe. "This is a must-read." —Jim Marrs, author of Rule by Secrecy. "A fascinating story." —Oliver Stone

The death of Mary Meyer left many Americans with questions. Who really killed her? Why did CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton rush to find and confiscate her diary? Had she discovered the plan to assassinate her lover, President Kennedy, with the trail of information ending at the steps of the CIA? Was it only coincidence that she was killed less than three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report? Fans of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2016), and JFK: A Vision for America (2018), will appreciate The Lost Diary of Mary Pinchot Meyer (2020) by Paul Wolfe. Building and relying on years of interviews and painstaking research, the author follows the key events and influences in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s life—her first meeting with Jack Kennedy; her support of President Kennedy, as he worked towards the pursuit of world peace and away from the Cold War; and her exploration of psychedelic drugs with JFK. Source: www.amazon.com

Did Robert Kennedy plan to reopen the investigation on his brother’s assassination? The question was positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert Kennedy had never believed in the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of his brother. When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but “privately he was dismissive of it,” as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers. To close friends who wondered why he wouldn’t voice his doubt, he said: “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.” In speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, ‘Kennedy assassinations’. Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassinations lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways. What JFK appreciated most in his brother Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks’ civil rights movement.  Shortly after JFK’s death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Timothy Naftali, Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy had been “the victim of a right-wing domestic conspiracy.” Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film, which shows that the fatal shot came from the “grassy knoll” well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from. Robert confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, “but I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.” In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother’s assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape the conspirators of JFK’s murder. They had no other option but to stop him. There is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA “Israel Office,” was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, “Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas came from the Mossad and he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.”

What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel. At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.

John F. Kennedy Jr. had long been portrayed as a spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young Hamlet’s in Shakespeare’s play. John Jr. had serious interest in mind, and, at age 38, he was just thinking about entering the political arena. In 1995 he had founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. might have become another target and eventually eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, having entered politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli Deep State. Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that. President John Kennedy and his brother Robert are almost sacred figures for many, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again. Source: www.unz.com

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.—the only son of the slain President Kennedy—broke the tradition of big family weddings with a more intimate affair when he married the lovely Carolyn Bessette in 1996. It was a surprise not only to the media but also to many of Kennedy’s friends and even family members. How he was ever able to pull it off remained a mystery to many, but John wed Carolyn privately on Cumberland Island, Georgia, with just a few close friends and relatives present. John Jr. had always been impulsive and unpredictable, but after the death of his mother in 1994, there seemed to be a great deal of pressure on John Kennedy Jr. to do something noteworthy with his life. Jackie’s passing caused some political pundits and Kennedy watchers to look to John Jr. as perhaps the next great Kennedy. It was as if Jackie’s death signified an end of the Camelot era. Adding to the pressure was that Jackie had also sometimes been critical of John’s lack of focus. A lot of others felt the same way, both in his private life as well as in the media. After all, he was JFK’s one and only son.

Few people knew that John Jr. contributed generously to several charities and spent a great deal of time working with inner-city children in Harlem and in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Moreover, he helped start Exodus House, a school for Harlem children. He also helped tutor students there. In 1995, he established Reaching Up, Inc., a nonprofit organization that trained caregivers for the mentally disabled, and a very personal undertaking for him in that it mirrored his aunt Eunice’s work. He also worked with the Robin Hood Foundation to help poor children and homeless people. These endeavors did not generate a lot of press for John—which was by design. He didn’t want the attention, he just wanted to make a difference. Thus most people weren’t aware of John’s personal philanthropy—even many of his cousins didn’t know about Exodus House, for example—while they insisted he should be doing something in the political arena. One of the greatest misconceptions about John Kennedy Jr. was that while he was a sincere and nice man, he wasn’t very bright. Doubtless, this was the result of the problems he had passing the law bar exam and all the bad publicity he had received.

Actually John Jr. was vastly intelligent in many areas. In fact, he lived and breathed politics, although the death of his father and uncle had left him psychologically scarred. Being of service to others was a code John Jr. had lived with all of his life. Back in 1988, when he met Al Gore for the first time at the Democratic convention in Atlanta (at which John was one of the speakers), Gore was annoyed by the demands of the pressing crowd and said to John, “Can you believe these people? What a pain in the ass! They are always wanting something from us.” John was stunned. From that moment on Al Gore was not a person for whom John had much respect. In fact, Gore’s sentiments were completely antithetical to everything John thought a public servant should aspire to be. “I was deeply offended by it,” he told Richard Bradley at George magazine when recounting the memory. “I thought, man, are you crazy? These people are why we’re in politics! They’re looking up at us. They believe in us. And your attitude is that they’re a pain in the ass?” In truth, the reality of John Kennedy Jr. was much more interesting than his public persona because—unlike what some thought of him—the real JFK Jr. was thoughtful and introspective. Richard Bradley said: “In fact, John was always fluid in his thinking and in his reactions. His thinking was never monolithic. He was also smart enough to know how simplistic his public persona was. He understood that JFK Jr., as a cultural figure, was completely disconnected from the reality of his true character and personality. In fact, he understood the culture and the mechanisms of culture better than most people because he had lived it all his life. He was attached to people’s memories, and that was okay with him, if a little frustrating.”

Carolyn Bessette was born in White Plains, New York, on January 7, 1966, the youngest child of William and Ann Marie Bessette. The couple also had twin daughters, Lauren and Lisa. When Carolyn was four, her parents separated and soon after divorced, her mother later marrying an orthopedic surgeon with three daughters of his own. The blended family then moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Carolyn went to elementary and high school. In 1983, she enrolled at her mother’s alma mater, Boston University, from which she graduated in January 1988 with a BA in elementary education. From all accounts, Carolyn was not only model beautiful with her long tresses and deep, penetrating eyes, but she was also funny and warm, the kind of young woman most men found irresistible. “Guys loved her,” said Stewart Price, who knew her after she graduated from college. “She was tall, flirty, fun, stunning. We’d laugh because I knew her motto with men was something like, ‘Get them. Train then. Drop them.’ She never made the first move. And she never reached for her wallet. She would always find guys to pay her way." Eventually, Carolyn ended up working in retail at a Calvin Klein boutique in Chestnut Hill, outside of Boston. That job eventually led to another in the corporate headquarters of Calvin Klein in New York. John actually first met Carolyn a year before he began to get serious about her. At the time, he was still dating Daryl Hannah. His friend John Perry Barlow—the American poet, essayist, and political activist—recalled, “It was a difficult time in his life. John wanted to do the right thing. We were at Tramps, a nightclub [in the fall of 1993]. He was in a sad mood. He told me, ‘I have met a woman and I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t want to act on this now because I want to be true to Daryl.’ He said, ‘Daryl and I are having some difficulties.’ I asked, ‘Who is she?’ He said, ‘She’s an employee of Calvin Klein. Somebody ordinary.’ I responded by saying, ‘John, if you can’t stop thinking about her, she must not be that ordinary.’ ”

One thing led to another and Daryl decided that she wanted to “take a break” in her relationship with John. It seemed to not be going anywhere. One of John’s close friends recalled that Daryl Hanah possessed “these self-absorbed neurotic qualities that she couldn’t see beyond. She was a movie star, she was a bombshell, and she was all about her most of the time.” John quickly started to notice the insular, narcissistic nature of her world. “She was on a little hamster track of her own stuff that she may not ever face and grow out of,” remembered Robert Littell. Despite some allusions Hannah made of domestic violence by Jackson Browne (which Hannah later retracted), Jackson Browne denied having attacked her: "I never assaulted Daryl Hannah, and this fact was confirmed by the investigation conducted at the time by the Santa Monica Police Department."

So John took Carolyn away for a weekend, to the sleepy beach town of Emerald Isle on the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they stayed at a rental resort called Sea Song. They were accompanied on the trip by John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill and his wife, Carole, both of whom liked Carolyn a lot and in fact decided that she was much better for John than Daryl Hannah. However, as often happens in long, complicated relationships, John and Daryl reunited briefly when Daryl said she wanted to give it one more try, and John felt he owed it to her. Within days of his weekend getaway with Carolyn, John came clean with her, telling her that he was in an on-again/off-again relationship with Daryl, that it was troubled, that they had been “on a break” and now he was going to try finish it with her. Though Carolyn would say that she admired John’s honesty, he would one day live to regret ever having opened up to her about Daryl. Meanwhile, Calvin Klein’s wife at the time, Kelly Klein, invited John to a charity function and then to the showroom. It was Kelly Klein who reintroduced him to Carolyn. Upon meeting Carolyn again, John was, this time, conquered by her. He immediately ended whatever was left of his relationship with Daryl Hannah for good. “It was like one day we turned around and Carolyn Bessette was in the picture, and she stayed,” recalled Gayle Fee, who wrote for the Boston Herald. “The first time he was spotted with Carolyn was in Martha’s Vineyard. It was my scoop. They were out boating. A paparazzi got a photo of them and JFK Jr. was sort of helping her out of a black skirt, and she was quickly known as this mysterious girl. Since everyone thought he was still with Daryl, this was quite a big deal. If I recall, her hair was more brown at the time than it was blonde. Everyone wanted to know who this new girl was.” “The greatest power couple in our family has to be my aunt Eunice and uncle Sarge,” John told Jacques Lowe, the Kennedy family photographer. The two had met to go over photographs Lowe had taken in the 1960s, which he now wanted to donate to the JFK Library. “That’s what I’m looking for in my own life,” he said, holding a picture of Eunice and Sarge taken by Lowe. “A woman who will support me the way my aunt supports my uncle. That’s golden, what they have,” he said. “If I could find that kind of woman, I’d be a happy man.”

Publicist R. Couri Hay, a friend of the Kennedys, recalled, “Over time, a strange phenomenon began to occur where Carolyn’s image was concerned. John had his eye on the Senate one day, and, who knows? Maybe even the presidency. But if Carolyn couldn’t even handle Tribeca; how was she going to handle Washington?” Former classmate Stephen Styles recalled, “Friends would come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why is she so pissy? What does she have to be so unhappy about? She’s got JFK Jr. What’s wrong with her?’ And I would defend her, saying, ‘But you don’t know her, she’s nothing at all like those pictures you’ve seen, like those stories you’ve read.’ It didn’t matter. The perception was being engraved in stone that she was ungrateful and difficult.” There was a real cultural fascination about her, and a sense that if she was going to be the woman who landed the prince, the least she could do was be open about her life. This was expecting too much from her, because Carolyn Bessette was, at the end of the day, a very private person. Adding another layer to an already unhappy situation, some of the New York paparazzi began to dislike Carolyn because they felt she had poisoned John against them. He had always been very nice, but now, almost overnight, he was combative. Suddenly he was fighting the photographers, screaming at them to “get the hell out of the way,” and becoming confrontational. “He assumed the best about people and never became cynical about their motives,” his close friend Dave Eikenberry said, “and that’s amazing, given the amount of opportunists he had to deal with every day. It took enormous fortitude for him to stay well grounded in the face of his bizarre celebrity.”

Though obviously in love, John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were also two very passionate and expressive people who sometimes allowed their heated emotions to get the best of them. When they argued, it was as if they completely lost their minds, at least according to those who knew them best. “They definitely knew which buttons to push in each other, and they went nuts,” said one close friend. Carolyn was beautiful, charming, smart—the total package, if ever there was one. Yet the way some women reacted to being in John’s presence caused Carolyn's insecurity and made her second-guess his loyalty and fidelity to her. As far as John was concerned, he never gave her reason to be suspicious because he had never cheated on her. But Carolyn recriminated him that John had dated her for a weekend while he was still technically in a relationship with Daryl Hannah—and Carolyn would never let John forget it. “John was sorry he had ever told her about Daryl,” said Stephen Styles. “Carolyn had that on him and she was relentless with it. ‘If you cheated on Daryl with me, how do I know you’re not cheating on me with someone else?’ Of course, he and Daryl had been on a so-called break at the time, and it had been Daryl’s decision to call for the hiatus, but that didn’t matter to Carolyn. It became a part of the running narrative of their relationship that John had ‘cheated’ on Daryl with Carolyn. John could simply glance at a woman in a casual way and he would later be accused of becoming interested in her. From waitresses to celebrities, it didn’t matter—if she was an attractive female, a good fight with Carolyn was guaranteed.”

“Carolyn reminded me of Jackie,” John Perry Barlow said, “in the sense that her nature was complex, subtle. Carolyn was unconventional, charismatic, and she had so much compassion for others. Carolyn’s femininity was almost mystical. I never knew a woman who knew how to handle men so well. As for John, her love for him was tinged with ferocity.” July 4, 1998, John and Carolyn joined the Kennedys for a major family celebration of the Independence Day holiday at the Kennedy compound. The festivities started with a special Mass under a tent in Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy’s yard during which the sacrament of Communion was offered. Then there was a family cruise in Hyannis Harbor with at least thirty Kennedy relatives on board, including Rosemary Kennedy, who was visiting from St. Coletta’s. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy could roughhouse with them as if she’d been born into the family, chasing John’s cousins around the property, playing football with them, and dunking them. Meanwhile, Ethel Kennedy stood on the beach and admonished her, saying, “Carolyn, don’t do that. You’re going to hurt yourself!” John chuckled. “Don’t worry, Aunt Ethel,” John said, “she’s made of rubber. I think it’s all that yoga.” Ethel had to laugh. Later, John and Carolyn took a walk out onto the pier. A photographer appeared from nowhere. John walked over to a bucket, filled it with ocean water, walked over to the photographer—who was snapping pictures the whole time—and threw the bucket of water at him. “Just thought I’d cool you down,” John said, laughing. “It’s really hot out here!” It didn’t seem malicious, though. Rather, it was a light moment, so much so that the photographer started laughing too. At the buffet table, John and Carolyn joked about how John had only complex carbohydrates on his plate—macaroni and cheese, potatoes, and corn. “Now that’s what I call a meal, Kitty Cat,” he said, using his nickname for her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” Carolyn said, kissing him on the cheek. Ted Kennedy, witnessing the scene from his table, remarked: “God, those kids are so in love! It’s like watching Jack and Jackie again, all these years later.”

Most of John’s Kennedy family adored Carolyn. They knew that she fully supported John in everything he wanted to do, and she represented, in their view, a real anchor for him. She had quit her job at Calvin Klein and was now taking trips to Europe helping John on his George business. At this time, John was upset that circulation had begun to drop off and was even worried that Hachette might close it down. He was courting other possible investors and Carolyn was behind him all the way. “I think they were coming to grips with a lot of their problems by the summer of 1999,” said R. Couri Hay, “and were on their way to a serious rebuilding of their relationship. The fact that they were going to Rory Kennedy’s wedding was, I felt, a symbolic decision for them. I think they wanted to present themselves at the wedding as a united couple for the benefit of anyone who had lately heard otherwise of them. In the next year, I think they would have had a child.” “I know that they had been talking about having children,” confirmed John and Carolyn’s friend John Perry Barlow. Barlow says that John told him that he and Carolyn were trying to decide how to bring a child into the world knowing that the baby would be the subject of such intense scrutiny. “They were already in this unremitting klieg glare,” he said, “and they couldn’t imagine what it would be like with a child.” They searched for a new home as far north as Columbia County, where Sasha Chermayeff lived, near Albany. They also scouted out properties at historic Snedens Landing, a secluded town that sat along the Hudson River in the Palisades hamlet of Orangetown, New York. These were their main concerns, says Barlow.

Not long after John and Carolyn died, it was as if someone opened a floodgate to sensationalism and all sorts of stories began to be published alleging, among other things, that before their untimely deaths, Carolyn had been cheating on John with Michael Bergin (an unreliable ex-boyfriend) or John had been cheating on Carolyn with Julie Baker (Baker has denied the rumors), or that both of them were addicted to drugs. The list of unsavory allegations seemed to grow overnight. Who knows if any of these stories is true? That said, there’s no solid evidence to support any of those allegations. No credible sources have any real proof of any of these stories. As Jackie Kennedy once put it, “No one knows what goes on in a marriage except the two people in it.” “It was a difficult summer,” Carole Radziwill concedes, “I’m not going to say that it wasn’t. John’s magazine, George, was struggling and his cousin Anthony was dying, and we were not, any of us, really, in a good place. And there were reports that they were in marriage counseling, and that’s true. But I think what distorts everything in life is not understanding the difference between fact and truth. The fact was they were in marriage counseling. The truth is they loved each other. And I have no doubt that they would have been okay had they lived.” —"After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family" (2012) by J. Randy Taraborrelli