Dick: A Vertival Elegy

DICK is about the Kennedy assassination and the machinations around that event. References to the latter are somewhat oblique: in fact, the whole work is, including most obdurately the integral deployment of Morse Code as text.

The story behind DICK lies in my family’s association with Kennedy's assassination. My mother, the visual artist Anne Truitt, was a close friend of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, founder of the World Federalists and subsequently a CIA official. Mary Meyer had an on-going affair with President Kennedy up to his death, about which she wrote in a diary. On our family leaving the States for Japan in 1963 (my father, a journalist, had been assigned the bureau chief of Newsweek in Japan), Mary Meyer told my mother that if anything happened to her she should find and safeguard the diary. Mary Meyer was assassinated in Washington in October 1964, and on this news my mother contacted James Angleton, the CIA’s head of Counter Intelligence and a family friend, to find the diary. He did so and having read the diary kept it in his safe at CIA. Subsequently the diary was given to my mother and to Mary Meyer’s sister, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, the wife of Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. They read and then burned it.

One reason why Mary Meyer is likely to have been assassinated, according to my mother, was that she had begun to talk about the assassination, relaying that she had and was collecting information regarding its perpetrators. My mother passed on this information to me.

Within the interstitial tracts of Morse Code I transmit this news, though "obliquely," burrowed within layers of cipher. (To note: DICK's epigraph is: "Who's there?" - spoken by Barnardo.) This actual information may be of inherent value, but its sealed condition also serves in the nature of this book as a device thematically relevant to the fact of the secrecy surrounding acts undertaken in our name by our government and its unofficial outlying agencies. That's taken up in DICK's overt text, among forays into fragmentary narrative, commentary on the text itself and poetic digressions.

To note: 20% of author royalties will be donated to Veterans of Foreign Wars.