American socialite, drug advocate, JFK mistress, and ambitious peacemaker. She came from an important Washington family and was known as a great beauty and a talented painter. She may have also been involved in some minor espionage for the CIA, though the spooks didn't entirely trust her because of her habit of indulging in impromptu love affairs. She eventually married Cord Meyer, a top CIA official.
In the early 1960s, after becoming one of John F. Kennedy's mistresses (some sources say JFK considered divorcing Jackie to marry her), Meyer came up with a plan to save the world from the spectre of nuclear war--get a lot of powerful men hooked on mind-altering drugs and convince them that the Cold War was uncool. She shared her plan with one of her occasional lovers--a professor of psychology at Harvard University named Timothy Leary--and he agreed to supply her with LSD.
As it turns out, Meyer's plan wasn't as hopelessly doomed as you might think. She quickly attracted a group of society-type women in Washington who shared her views, and they went to work trying to get as many government officials turned on to acid as they could. No one knows how much success (if any) that they had, but one report claims that Meyer and JFK had about 30 trysts--and she brought either marijuana or LSD to nearly all of them.
Meyer was shot twice in the head and killed on October 12, 1964. A black laborer was arrested, tried, and acquitted--her murder remains officially unsolved. James Jesus Angleton, director of counterintelligence for the CIA (and rumored JFK assassination conspirator), allegedly read and burned her diary--whatever secrets it contained are unknown.
Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups by Robert Anton Wilson, HarperCollins, 1998, pp. 299-300. |
