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.