White House Plumbers Episode 3 Throws Out JFK Assassination Theory Involving Cord Meyer

Let's take a brief trip through the looking glass (that is, Oliver Stone's "JFK"), shall we?

There is not a more tantalizing mystery in United States history than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Though the Warren Commission emphatically concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman and acted alone, many people believe their investigation was either flawed or a full-scale cover-up. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists alleged an alliance between the Fidel Castro-led Cuban government and mobsters in the States. Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison believed Kennedy's murder was orchestrated by New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw and anti-Castro Cubans (who were still raw over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion). Everyone from Lyndon B. Johnson to Frank Sinatra has been linked in some way or another to the assassination.

The myriad of theories, many of which clumsily intersect with competing theories, tend to discredit each other. But it's understandable why people need to believe there was more to it than Oswald. According to Gallup, JFK remains America's most popular post-WWII president. He was relatively young and hugely charismatic. He radiated strength and hope as the country jousted with the authoritarian Soviet Union. Given the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War upheaval that tore America apart soon after his death (and the subsequent assassinations of Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.), people were desperate to believe that nefarious, war-mongering forces had staged a coup d'état to thwart the crusade for equal rights and to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex.

Which brings us to this week's episode of HBO's Watergate farce "White House Plumbers," wherein the writers lightly brush the third rail of E. Howard Hunt's career as an intelligence operative. Hunt (Woody Harrelson) was privy to a good deal of shenanigans throughout the 1950s and '60s, so when G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) posits a theory to his colleague, we should watch Hunt's reaction very carefully.

While cooling their heels before what will be another failed infiltration of the Democratic National Committee's office in the Watergate complex, Liddy suggests that CIA agent Cord Meyer knew who killed JFK, and that the cabal responsible for the assassination murdered his ex-wife, Mary Pinchot, to keep him quiet.

It's worth pondering. People loosely connected to the CIA did have a habit of dying unexpectedly in the years following JFK's death. Pinchot was a particularly fascinating figure given her long-running affair with Kennedy. When she divorced Meyer in 1958, she moved to Georgetown and took up painting, but she was still very plugged into the Beltway scene. Along with her continued dalliance with Kennedy, her sister was married to Ben Bradlee, who would eventually become the executive editor of The Washington Post. She was significant.

Pinchot was out walking along a path adjacent to Georgetown's Chesapeake and Ohio Canal on October 12, 1964 when someone shot her in the head and back at close range. Washington D.C. police officers found an African-American man named Ray Crump less than a mile from the crime scene. According to Lance Morrow, a D.C journalist who beat the cops to the scene, Crump gave suspiciously conflicting statements to the authorities, which eventually resulted in his indictment. The case was buttressed by eyewitness testimony from a mechanic who heard Pinchot's cries for help and saw a man resembling Crump standing over her body. Another eyewitness said he'd seen a man matching Crump's description tailing her the day before.

Crump seemed to be the culprit. So why did a jury of his peers find him not guilty?

Crump had a criminal record and would go on to commit violent acts after he was cleared. But the absence of a murder weapon (which most people who covered the case believe was ditched in the river) and the apparent presence of another black man in the area (we just love racial profiling, don't we) was sufficient for reasonable doubt.

Pinchot's life and tragic death have been documented by multiple biographers, but for conspiracy nuts, the most enticing twist to her story arrived near the end of Meyer's life. According to biographer C. David Heymann, a dying Meyer told him Pinchot was offed by "the same sons of b****es that killed John F. Kennedy." It's worth noting that Random House had to pull Heymann's "Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton" from bookshelves in 1983 due to major inaccuracies.

Still, there are those who believe the forensic evidence points to a professional hit. They say Crump was, like Oswald, a patsy. I don't know what I don't know, but the trouble with conspiracy theories is that you have to buy that a wide swath of people will go against everything we know about human nature and keep their mouths shut.

The Beltway is a lot like Hollywood. When someone is in possession of an explosive piece of news, they just have to tell someone. And that someone will do the same. Some people know how to keep a secret, but the sheer number of people alleged to be involved in the plot to kill JFK is staggering. But what you'll find out as you watch the last two episodes of "White House Plumbers" is that history rhymes in alarming ways. As Ricky Jay confessed in the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia," "These strange things happen all the time."