"Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation."

Norman Mailer
"The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China--why then it will be spring."

"This new history of yours," said McPhee, "is a wee bit lacking in documents."

C.S. Lewis

Synchronicities this week

  • June 24 Midsummer/St. John’s Day
  • June 24, 1947 The first flying saucers are sighted over Mount Rainier by pilot Ken Arnold.
  • June 24, 1542 St. John of the Cross, Spanish Carmelite mystic and poet, is born.
  • June 24, 1938 500 ton meteorite lands near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
  • June 24, 1717 First Free Masons' grand lodge founded in London.
  • June 24, 1374 A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion.
  • June 24, 1314 Battle of Bannockburn; Scotland regains independence from England.
  • June 24, 843 Vikings destroy Nantes.
  • June 23 Midsummer’s Eve
  • June 23, 1972 Nixon & Haldeman agree to use CIA to cover up Watergate.
  • June 23, 1942 Germany's latest fighter, a Focke-Wulf FW190 is captured intact when it mistakenly lands at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
  • June 23, 1888 Frederick Douglass is 1st African-American nominated for president.
  • June 23, 1848 Workers’ insurrection in Paris.
  • June 23, 1713 The French residents of Acadia are given one year to declare allegiance to Britain or leave Nova Scotia, Canada. They choose the latter, migrate to Louisiana, and become Cajuns.
  • June 21 Summer Solstice (11:28 a.m.).
  • June 21, 1964 Three civil rights workers-Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James E. Chaney-are kidnapped and murdered by the Klan in Mississippi .
  • June 21, 1948 The 33 1/3 RPM LP record is introduced by Columbia Records.
  • June 21, 1944 Ray Davies of the Kinks born in London.
  • June 21, 1916 Mexican troops beat US expeditionary force under Gen Pershing.
  • June 21, 1877 The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrant labor activists, are hanged in Pennsylvania prisons.
  • June 20, 1947 Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, gangster, the “man who invented Las Vegas,” shot dead in Beverly Hills, Cal.
  • June 20, 1909 Errol Flynn, greatest of the swashbucklers, born in Hobart, Tasmania.
  • June 20, 1944 Congress charters Central Intelligence Agency.
  • June 20, 1943 Detroit race riot kills 35.
  • June 20, 1893 - Lizzie Borden acquitted in murder of parents in New Bedford Mass.
  • June 20, 1871 Ku Klux Klan trials began in federal court in Oxford Miss.
  • June 20, 1837 Queen Victoria at 18 ascends British throne ; rules for 63 years ending in 1901.
  • June 20, 1756 146 British soldiers imprisoned in the "Black Hole of Calcutta." Most die.
  • June 20, 1631 The Irish village of Baltimore is attacked by Algerian pirates.
  • June 20, 1214 The University of Oxford receives its charter.
  • June 20, 451 Germans & Romans beat Attila the Hun at Catalarinische Fields.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Tripping with JFK


Of all the women who passed into and out of JFK's life, the only one, by many accounts, that he ever showed more than the passing itch for (besides his wife) was Mary Pinchot Meyer, the aristocratic divorced wife of high level CIA agent Cord Meyer. Possibly it was because, out of all of them, she was his intellectual equal. After her marriage to CIA man Meyer fell apart in the wake of the death of their son, Mary took on the lifestyle of a proto-flower child--art, incense, peasant blouses, pacifist politics, dope, sheltered by her privileged Georgetown lifestyle. Apparently all this held some fascination for Kennedy. The really interesting thing that was going on here was her apparently simultaneous connection with JFK and Prof. Timoth Leary of Harvard who was in the middle of the acid experiments that would ultimately get him fired.

From Wikipedia:

"In 1983 [Leary] claimed that in the spring of 1962 Meyer, told him she was taking part in a plan to avert worldwide nuclear war by convincing powerful male members of the Washington establishment to take mind-altering drugs, which would presumably lead them to conclude the Cold War was meaningless. Meyer said she had shared in this plan with at least seven other Washington socialite friends who held similar political views and were trying to supply LSD to a small circle of high ranking government officials. Mary Meyer and John F Kennedy reportedly had "about 30 trysts" and at least one author has claimed she brought marijuana or LSD to almost all of these meetings, the acid mostly supplied by Leary who was intrigued by Meyer's project."

It was during this time that Kennedy biographer James W. Douglass, says that Kennedy was undergoing a "conversion process" triggered by his confrontation with the real horror of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a process that eventually resulted in his "American University Speech" where he in effect proposed the dismantling of the Cold War status quo.

Was some of this reinforced by Mary Meyer and her Leary-supplied acid?

Meyer's biographer speculates that, "Mary might actually have been a force for peace during some of the most frightening years of the cold war..."

In his biography Flashbacks Leary claimed he had a call from Mary soon after the Kennedy assassination during which she sobbed and said, "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much... They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm scared. I'm afraid."

Not long after, Mary Meyer was murdered in what some call "execution style" while walking along the Potomac Towpath in Georgetown. The man acused of the murder was acquitted and no-one else has ever been arrested for her murder. Immediately after her death high level officials of the CIA searched her apartment and apparently made off with her diary, which was never seen again.

For more on Mary Meyer, see her biography, A Very Private Woman, by Nina Burleigh.
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