JFK and Mary P. Meyer

 

Milford, Pennsylvania, September 24, 1963, President John F. Kennedy visits the family home of Mary Pinchot Meyer, where Grey Towers was donated to the U.S. Forest Service.

While at Milford, Kennedy met the staid, conservative, Republican mother of Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose political family went back generations and included a governor. Mary is seen here in the stripe dress. There are other pictues in this series, including one of them getting out of the helicopter.

David Talbot, in his book Brothers, described Mary P. Meyer as:

"...A free spirited blonde in her early forties, she was the product of the eccentric, blue-blooded Pinchot family. After divorcing the brainy, intense CIA propaganda master Cord Meyer, she had refashioned herself as a Georgetown bohemian, setting herself us pas a painter in a studio behind the Bradlee's N Street house."

"...They had met when they were both in prep school - the charming scrawny Choate senior had cut in on her while she was dancing with her date, William Atwood (who would later serve Kennedy on an important diplomatic mission), at a school dance in 1935. They met again in San Francisco after the war, when she accompanied her new husband to the United Nations founding conference, which Kennedy was covering for the Hearst papers. The two men took an instant dislike to each other, a mutual hostility that never faded away, even when the Meyers moved next door to Hickory Hill, which was first owned by Jack and his new bride before they sold it to Bobby and Ethel."

Cord Meyer had served in the US Marines and was wounded at Guam, his twin brother would die at Okinawa, and after the war he would form the American Veterans Committee, a liberal rival to the American Legion, and found the United World Federalists, which worked towards a world government.

Michael Paine's mother - Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Moscow reporter Priscilla Johnson and Walter Cronkite were also World Federalists.


The clock started clicking on this day, September 24, 1963, when things were set into motion that would lead to what happened at Dealey Plaza. From Milford, the President would fly to Wisconsin, the first part of his Conservation Tour, from where they would announce the President's trip to Texas in November, and Lee Harvey Oswald would leave New Orleans for Mexico City.

It was also the day that the CIA gave the "Valkyrie" briefing on Cuban covert actions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, temporarily under the chairmanship of Air Force General Curtis LeMay ( While Taylor was in Vietnam).

LeMay would assign General Krulak to provide the CIA maritime raiders with whatever they needed.

All the forces that would lead to the President's assassination were put into motion on this day - September 24, 1963.