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Testimony at Mary Pinchot Meyer Murder Trial
Bradlee has drawn criticism from several quarters for his selective testimony at the trial of the man accused of murdering Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was shot to death on October 12, 1964 while walking on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. Attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense, along with authors Peter Janney and Nina Burleigh, have noted the significant difference between the limited information Bradlee divulged under oath at the 1965 trial, and what he revealed 30 years later in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life.

Bradlee states in his 1995 memoir that he and his wife received a phone call on the night of the murder from Pinchot Meyer’s friend Anne Truitt in Japan, who was looking for James Jesus Angleton at the Bradlee house. Truitt advised all of them, including Angleton, of the existence of the Pinchot Meyer diary and the urgent need to retrieve it, given its details of her affair with President Kennedy during the last two years of his life. A decision was then quickly made by Bradlee, his wife, James Angleton and his wife Cicely, and another friend present at the scene, to keep the diary’s existence from authorities. According to Bradlee’s 1995 account – one of at least four conflicting versions of the events surrounding the diary – the search at Pinchot Meyer’s art studio behind the Bradlee house began the day after the murder. Bradlee says he and his wife arrived at the studio with tools to obtain entry, since they had no key, and upon arriving they found Angleton in the process of picking the lock with special tools he had for that purpose. “The fact that the CIA’s most controversial counterintelligence specialist had been caught in the act of breaking and entering, and looking for her diary,” Bradlee said, was not something he considered appropriate for public disclosure. With respect to the diary itself, he added, he and his wife, upon reading it and seeing that it revealed Pinchot Meyer’s affair with the late President Kennedy, “concluded this was in no sense a public document, despite the braying of the knee jerks about some public right to know.”