Peter Janney

Holy. Hell. That's (what felt like) a year of my reading life I'm never getting back. The subject was fascinating, although I think most people know that JFK slept around and accept that the CIA and not Lee Harvey Oswald really pulled the trigger back in 1963, but Peter Janney's writing was horrendously repetitive and padded out with what should have been footnotes and sources. The last two chapters, when he reports in great detail about his attempt to pin down the real killer of Mary Pinchot Meyer, were physically painful: 'If anything has been achieved in this chapter and the one before (Post Script), it has been the examination of William Lockwood Mitchell’s credibility and truthfulness,' Janney recaps, trying to stop 'the reader' from skipping to the end of the book (or at least that was my experience). And Janney's gimmick of talking to 'the reader' - 'as will be shown in the next chapter', 'as shown in the previous chapter' - got very old very fast. Just get on with it!

'It' being the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, John F Kennedy's lover in the last months of his life. The year after the President's assassination in Dallas, Meyer, divorced from a CIA agent and an acolyte of LSD guru Timothy Leary, was shot dead on a canal towpath near her home. The police botched an investigation - no surprise to anyone who has read about Kennedy's death or even the Manson murders six years later - and tried to frame an African American man named Ray Crump Jr for her death. Only through the determination of his lawyer, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, did Ray Crump escape the death penalty for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Crump's trial is really the highlight of the book - chapters about Meyer's mentally unstable husband and the mysterious witness at the towpath, who Janney believes was actually the CIA's hired killer, and even background into Kennedy's assassination, could have been summarised in a paragraph or two. We get a glimpse of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a beautiful, artistic free spirit and loving mother who believed in peace over war, and I have even ordered a copy of her tragic sister's biography, but in Janney's book she is sadly eclipsed by the men in her life.

'My journey—a rigorous, thorough research endeavor informed by my education as a Princeton undergraduate and later by my training as a clinical psychologist—began in 1976. It ended exactly thirty years later in shocking fashion,' Janney promises at the start of his intrepid investigation, and his research is certainly very thorough, but there is also a lot of hearsay and supposition. 'If some part of his transformation was catalyzed by a horizon-altering psychedelic excursion with Mary Meyer, then so be it', he shrugs off his lack of evidence that Meyer introduced Kennedy to LSD and marijuana. To be clear, I believe what Janney is theorising could really have happened, but much of the book is just that, a theory. And I don't care how many 'sources' he quotes, like Robert Dallek and Sally Bedell Smith, nobody knows what went on in Jack and Jackie's marriage or how they felt about each other.

Dear reader, I waded through Janney's turgid prose so you don't have to (or if you do, cut your losses after the trial)!… (altro)