
 |
|
Nov. 24, 2009
JWisdom.com: You are a Philanthropist
with Aliza Bulow (5 minutes)
Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Nov. 19, 2009
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game
with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf
with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith
with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Nov. 12, 2009
JWisdom.com Does God get tired?
with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven
with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole
in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to
have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How
to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Nov. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking
Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker
With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater?
With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change
With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Feb. 27, 2009
/ 3 Adar 5769
A lively tale revives a capital mystery
By
Wesley Pruden
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
History is bunk, old Henry Ford famously said, and it's true that a lot of what we're told is history is certainly bunk. "Movie history" can be bunker than most. The history we think we remember can be the bunkest of all.
There's a buzz on the Internet about a new movie, "An American Affair," which opened Friday in Washington and New York. The movie doesn't pretend to be history, but an imagined tale of a precocious 13-year-old boy coming of age in Washington against the backdrop of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The boy becomes fascinated with the beautiful blonde divorcee next door, an abstract painter who often lies nude before her open bedroom window, and fascination becomes something else when she hires him to work in her Georgetown garden. The boy sees and hears things he doesn't understand. But he figures out a lot, particularly when he watches President Kennedy emerge from a limousine one night and slip into the neighbor lady's house.
The buzz about "An American Affair" is harsh and angry. People are protective of what they remember, particularly of the myth of Camelot. Reviewers who want a recitation of history as they remember it often forget that a storyteller is, after all, out to tell a good story. Archival newsreel footage conveys verisimilitude, not veracity, to a tale of fiction. (Full disclosure here: Alex Metcalf, who wrote the original screenplay, is the young man I have regarded as my son since I met his mother when he was 8 years old.) Alex grew up in Washington, surrounded 24/7 by politics, politicians, artists, editors, writers and all the players who make the snap, crackle and pop of the nation's capital such a fascinating - and often infuriating - place to watch, to listen, to absorb.
The buzz over his movie illustrates how quickly remembrance becomes telescoped and inevitably distorted. One reviewer is outraged by the "implicit suggestion" that the woman portrayed in the movie as JFK's mistress must be Marilyn Monroe: "We all know the film star had a special relationship with JFK, don't we? The role contains the perfume of Marilyn, which appears to be entirely intentional." Some of the younger moviegoers in the preview audience this week in Washington guessed the woman in the movie was either Marilyn or Judith Exner, the mistress JFK shared with Sam Giancana, the Chicago mafia figure.
Bemused older moviegoers said, "No, no, she was obviously Mary Meyer," described by The Washington Post as "a beautiful socialite who, like [the character portrayed by] Gretchen Mol lived in Georgetown, married and divorced a CIA agent, was the sister-in-law of former Post top editor Ben Bradlee, had high-level affairs, kept a detailed diary and died under mysterious circumstances."
Mary Pinchot Meyer was divorced from Cord Meyer, a high CIA official in the Kennedy administration, and became a painter of well-regarded abstract paintings in a garage studio at the home of her sister, Toni, and her husband Ben Bradlee. Nina Burleigh, her biographer, described her as "a well-bred ingénue out looking for fun and getting in trouble along the way." The late James Jesus Angleton, the longtime chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, was a friend who occasionally took her two sons fly-fishing.
Her friends understood that she conducted a long-running affair with JFK, who dropped in for occasional visits. She kept a diary and told friends that she and JFK had had "about 30" trysts. One day in October 1964, 11 months after the assassination and just after the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was the assassin, Mary Meyer took a walk on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath just below Georgetown. A passerby on M Street Northwest heard a woman cry for help, and said he saw "a black man" standing over the crumpled body of a white woman. She had been shot twice, once in the back of the head and once in the heart, at point-blank range. Though she was well known to editors at both The Washington Post and the old Evening Star, she was identified only as the former wife of a government official. A black man named Raymond Crump, a day laborer, was arrested and put on trial the following year for her murder, and quickly acquitted. The jurors heard little of who she was.
Mrs. Meyer kept a diary of her trysts and her sister Toni found it and turned it over to Jim Angleton. He later returned it to her, and she burned it before a witness. Speculation was rife with conspiracy and counter-conspiracy theories, some plausible and some not: The CIA killed her. No, the KGB did it. The murder remains officially unsolved.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
Wesley Pruden Archives
© 2007 Wesley Pruden
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Lewis Grossberger
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Jim Mullen
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Ed Stein
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Lori Borgman
The Savvy Consumer
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Every Monday Matters
Nutrition Myths
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|