27 July 2007

None dare call it

R. U. Sirius interviews David Talbot about his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, and it's like James Ellroy's American Tabloid on acid. Literally, in parts.
Mary Meyer met JFK when they were both in prep school.... By the early 60s, Mary Meyer was kind of a pre-hippie hippie. She was an artist and a painter living in Georgetown. And she had divorced her husband and she was having an affair with the President. And I think it was quite a serious relationship—it wasn't one of these fiddle-and-faddle kind of flings that Kennedy would have.
....
And in this idyllic period in the early '60s, she was taken with the idea that peace, love and drugs could change the world. Specifically, she was out to turn on the world's leaders to the idea that they don't have to be in a constant state of war. So she went to Harvard, where Timothy Leary, of course, was still a respected professor in those days.
....
She was setting up these acid experiments involving some of the more prominent men in Washington. She was doing this through their mistresses and wives. Apparently, she has some of these sessions, and she thought they were succeeding quite well.
....
About a year after the assassination, he looked up Mary Meyer and found out to his horror that she had also died a violent death while walking on a towpath along a canal in Washington. In broad daylight, a man came up to her and killed her, execution style—shot her through the head and the heart. She wasn't sexually violated and nothing was stolen. It was just an execution-style murder that was never solved.
History is full of weird stuff.

In the interview, Mr Talbot also provides a lucid, un-zany overview of the Bay of Pigs misadventure, both Kennedy assassinations, and the Civil Rights Movement during the Kennedy administrations.

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