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Sunday, November 15, 1998 By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
One of the games you can play in this job is to match up titles under categories, like "Teeny, Flimsy Books for Christmas Placed at the Register for Impulse Sales" or "Cheap, Easily Packaged Paperbacks Based on Old TV Shows" (i.e., "Hogan's Heroes" or "Gilligan's Island") or "Illustrated Versions of Best-Sellers: (i.e., "Into Thin Air" or "Longitude").
Here's one, though, that never grows old - "New Versions of Old Kennedy Stories." There are subdivisions of this theme, such as " 'New' Evidence in the Assassination" and "The Mysterious Deaths of JFK's Mistresses."
What's fueling the JFK cash machine are the periodic releases of government papers on the case under a 1993 law. Last week, the National Archives dumped 400,000 pages of JFK stuff on an eager conspiracy community.
For you assassination buffs out there, the most specialized title this year is "With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit" by Dale K. Myers from the curiously named Oak Cliff Press for $35. Oak Cliff was the Dallas neighborhood where Oswald lived.
Myers' conclusion - Oswald did it.
Now for mistresses -- I guess they just go with the Oval Office decor -- you have your choice of the niece of a former Pennsylvania governor or Marilyn Monroe.
I'll take Mary Pinchot Meyer, please. She was the niece of Gifford Pinchot, pioneer conservationist under Teddy Roosevelt and guv of our fair commonwealth in the early 1930s. I can remember old-timers talking about "Pinchot roads."
Mary and her younger sister, Tony, were New York debutantes whose marriages brought them to Washington, D.C., and Georgetown society of the '50s. The attractive and feisty Mary had a fling with John Kennedy; a year after his death, she was shot to death near her Georgetown home.
The man charged in the crime was acquitted, and no other suspects were identified. End of story?
Heck, no. Since JFK is involved, the killing of Mary Meyer took on huge proportions, involving the shenanigans of CIA spook and head case James Jesus Angleton and the Washington Post under the direction of Ben Bradlee, whose first wife was Tony Meyer.
Then, there's the diary. Meyer's journal was found by the Bradlees and turned over to Angleton, never to resurface.
The bizarre case has been feeding the conspiracy mill for years. Now, journalist Nina Burleigh gives it some order and insight in her book "A Very Private Woman" (Bantam, $23.95).
It's notable for its examination of that Georgetown society of hard-working government husbands and their upper-crust wives, women of education and talent whose private lives took some weird turns while hubby was away doing dirty work.
Mary Meyer's husband was a CIA counter-intelligence agent whose infrequent visits home were punctuated with booze and infidelity. Burleigh presents a vivid snapshot of this curious substrata of American society during the Cold War and the emotional forces that led Mary Meyer to White House trysts that included drugs.
White House logs confirm her frequent visits particularly during 1962 and usually at 7:30 p.m. By this time, she was divorced and working hard to make it as an artist.
Meyer would often take afternoon walks along the canal towpath near her Georgetown home, and that's where she was shot to death on Oct. 12, 1964.
Ray Crump, a 25-year-old smalltime criminal, was arrested on the towpath shortly after Meyer's body was found. Despite plenty of circumstantial evidence, he was acquitted in a jury trial.
Burleigh wisely refuses to speculate on the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of Mary Meyer, presenting the details in straightforward fashion. "A Very Private Woman" is a dispassionate account of another odd chapter in the Kennedy saga.
William Morrow and Company apparently couldn't resist the seductive combination of the Kennedys and Monroe by publishing "The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe" by Donald Wolfe ($25), a longtime Hollywood scriptwriter.
His conclusion after 464 pages about her 1962 suicide: "In the presence of Bobby Kennedy she was injected with enough barbiturate to kill fifteen people."
She was killed to silence her about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, Wolfe claims, and that story is repeated, with less conviction, by C. David Heymann in his biography of Robert Kennedy, "RFK" (Dutton, $27.95).
Further complicating matters is Barbara Leaming, Monroe's latest biographer. In her new book, "Marilyn Monroe" (Crown, $27.50), she finds no Kennedy connection.
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