Mary's Mosaic: Entering Peter Janney's World of Fantasy

[Tom Scully]

First of all, a caveat- Mary's Mosaic was published by Skyhorse, my publisher. That may be meaningless, seeing as how they also published Jim DiEugenio, but I wanted to mention it.

I read the book earlier this year. I thought it was well-written and overall a valuable contribution to the literature. I do think Janney significantly exaggerated Mary Meyer's influence over JFK. If they were having an affair, I'm pretty certain his primary attraction to her was physical. I doubt very seriously that they were some kind of co-warriors for peace.

When people like Mary Meyer, who ran in very prominent social circles, die unnaturally, it's usually because they were a threat to someone powerful. Throw in the involvement of James Jesus Angleton and Ben Bradlee, and the fact the victim was married to Cord Meyer, another CIA mainstay, and it becomes very hard to accept that she was murdered by a poor black man for non-political reasons.

Like Jim D., I am cognizant of the posthumous assassination of the Kennedys. I don't think this book is part of that campaign, and it does a pretty good job of detailing the crime and aftermath. I also don't trust the work of Nina Burleigh, whose biggest claim to fame is urging women to get down on their "presidential knee pads" and pay sexual homage to Bill Clinton.

Janney and Dovey Roundtree could not tell the same tale twice, but Janney's book is "well written" and you have a bigger problem with Nina Burleigh's credibility than you do with Janney's of Roundtree's? I am doomed, I guess, because
I actually read what it is that people write, and I have a sense of humor and appreciate people who are not taking themselves too seriously. There is also the problem that Janney and Roundtree are documented as divorced from the truth and Janney has "issues." He filed a desperate lawsuit pleading that his standing to sue was that Mary Meyer was his "surrogate mother". And he lied publicly about the status of that suit, at least twice. But Janney is a very serious person and Nina Burleigh is a proven....... you fill it in, Don.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/po...070698.htm
Going Weak in the Knees for Clinton

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 6, 1998; Page C01

A former White House correspondent says she was "quite willing to let myself be ravished" by President Clinton after she felt he had admired her legs on Air Force One.

Nina Burleigh, who covered the White House for Time, makes the confession in a Mirabella magazine essay on Clinton's attractiveness to women. It is a candid discussion of her feelings while playing hearts with the president and aide Bruce Lindsey in the plane's front cabin last year.

"The president's foot lightly, and presumably accidentally, brushed mine once under the table," Burleigh writes. "His hand touched my wrist while he was dealing the cards. When I got up and shook his hand at the end of the game, his eyes wandered over to my bike-wrecked, naked legs. And slowly it dawned on me as I walked away: He found me attractive."

She adds: "I probably wore the mesmerized look I have seen again and again in women after they have met him. The same silly hypnotized gleam was displayed on the cover of Time magazine in Monica Lewinsky's eyes."

In an interview, Burleigh, now a New York freelancer, said she in no way felt harassed or pressured by the president but that it was "not unusual for women" to swoon over him. What is unusual, for a journalist, is Burleigh's sexually charged declaration of support for Clinton. "I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal," she said.

But Burleigh says she was not "going easy on him" as a White House correspondent in 1993 and 1994, when she sometimes wrote about the Whitewater scandal, and never thought about his looks at the time. By last year she was a Time contract writer, filling in on the trip to Jasper, Ark.

"No doubt the president's lawyers and spin doctors would say I wishfully imagined that long, appreciative look," she writes. "But we all know when we're being ogled. . . . I felt incandescent. It was riveting to know that the president had appreciated my legs, scarred as they were. If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room at the Jasper Holiday Inn, I would have been happy to go there and see what happened."

http://www.ninaburleigh.com/journalism/k...earts.html
07/01/98
King of Hearts - Mirabella

.............
I have thought about my mothlike encounter with Clinton in the months since Monica Lewinsky became world famous. Distracting a powerful man from his business is one of the highest forms of flattery available to women. Vanity makes us weak. To feed it makes us feel strong. To be so distracting that a great man's career is on the line, even if you are despised afterward, is a tremendous show of power, when - still - too few women can acquire power any other way. The last lines of Yeats's poem suggest a kind of reward for the woman who submits. "Being so caught up, / So mastered by the brute blood of the air, / Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"

I still cling to the faith that there are women of good order who are immune to this stuff. They were sensible clothes and keep their legs well covered. I trust that Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, and Madeleine Albright are not rendered willing and pliant around Bill Clinton. They don't need to put on his knowledge with his power when they have their own. For the rest of us, a powerful man's admiring gaze is an intimation of all that is inaccessible, and that is the ultimate seduction.

November 22, 2013, author Peter Janney describes his lawsuit as active and ongoing, contrary to the court record indicating his own attorney filed a motion four days earlier to dismiss their own lawsuit, "with prejudice".:
https://www.dccourts.gov/cco/maincase.jsf

.............
Peter Janney on 22 November, 2013 told his Santa Barbara audience (podcast link) (at 1:47.38, Janney: ."and that case is still in adjudication...") of his "important" wrongful death lawsuit he had filed against Crump witness William L. Mitchell. Janney indicated to his audience that this lawsuit was active and its outcome would yield new information. it is troubling that Janney's attorney William Pepper had filed a motion in DC court on 18 November, four days before, to dismiss this same lawsuit WITH PREJUDICE. The image off thie court filings can be viewed: https://www.dccourts.gov/cco/maincase.jsf
...........