Was the Woman Who Smoked Pot with JFK Murdered by the CIA?

Mary Pinchot Meyer

Even Secretary of State John Kerry has said he doesn't believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on November 22, 1963. Two women who died shortly thereafter—Mary Meyer and Dorothy Kilgallen—may have been collateral damage.

And Marilyn Monroe's death may have had a Kennedy/Kilgallen component.

The book John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, NYC 2006) describes briefly an affair JFK had with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the former wife of CIA agent Cord Meyer and sister of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's wife Tony. It says, "On the evening of July 16, 1962, according to [Washington Post executive] Jim Truitt, Kennedy and Mary Meyer smoked marijuana together." Truitt claimed he himself provided Mary with the pot.

O'Brien notes that during her affair with Kennedy, Meyer visited Timothy Leary, a fact confirmed in Robert Greenfield's comprehensive book, Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006, Harcourt), published on the 10th anniversary of Leary's death. Leary wrote in Flashbacks that Meyer told him she wanted to run an LSD session with a famous public figure, and after Meyer was found murdered, Leary theorized it was JFK and that she'd recorded the encounter in her diary.

Bradlee has confirmed that CIA agent James Angleton came to confiscate Mary's diary after she was shot in the head and heart while jogging in the park on October 12, 1964, two weeks after the publication of the Warren Commission Report. A young black man was arrested for the crime, and acquitted at trial for lack of evidence in July 1965. His defense attorney was Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, 1960

A few months later, Dorothy Kilgallen, the "What's My Line?" panelist and journalist who some allege was the source of the rumor that "Puff, The Magic Dragon" is about marijuana, was mysteriously found dead in her bed (on November 8, 1965). Kilgallen was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby, and she was telling people she would blow the lid off the assassination just before she died.

Days after a 1962 item in Kilgallen's gossip column had alluded to affairs between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, Marilyn was also found dead in a similar manner as Dorothy. Marc Shaw, author of The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, thinks Monroe's death was a practice run for Kilgallen's.

Candy Barr, the bodacious blonde Texas stripper who was imprisoned for marijuana possession in 1959, dated Ruby and had the same prosecutor and appellate lawyer (Melvin Belli) as Ruby. Around the time Monroe appeared in support of her husband Arthur Miller at the HUAC hearings, she reportedly smoked pot at a party in New Jersey.

Also died 50 years ago today: psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley, who asked for LSD in the end. Sheryl Crow sings about it in "Run Baby, Run."