Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. An anthology of back issues, Popular Alienation (Illuminet Press, 1995), is also available.

Deborah Davis wrote Katharine the Great, which documented the intelligence agency ties of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward and reported on Phil Graham "suiciding" just after publically revealing the liaison between JFK and his acid mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer. The late great Kate sued over the book and had its entire first print run shredded. Katharine Graham is being held up as a role model for women and journalists, but the real such person is Davis, who ultimately had two later editions done by small presses.

Q: Tim Leary suggested that your book was originally censored and pulped because of references to Mary Pinchot Meyer. Do you feel that way and can you tell us a little bit about Mary Meyer?

A: Mary Pinchot Meyer was the sister of Ben Bradlee's second wife, Tony Pinchot. She was a very beautiful, talented artist who was living in Washington in the early '65 and she was the lover, I would say the principal lover, of John Kennedy, who was President of the United States. He was supposedly very much in love with her and wanted to divorce Jackie and marry her.

The Timothy Leary connection is interesting because at that time in the early sixties there was a group of society-type women in Washington who thought that if they could get men in power involved in mind?altering drugs they could see the world in a different way and this would end the Cold War and end all warfare. It was a very ambitious plan and a lot of them got their marijuana and LSD from Timothy Leary, who at that time was a professor of psychology at Harvard and had access to these drugs. At that time were very experimental and they were going around in a lot of the elite circles. It didn't have the same connotation that it has today of the hard stuff, of the cocaine and the heroin. This was all very beautiful and mind-expanding type stuff. So she was involved with Kennedy and they used to supposedly smoke marijuana together in Kennedy's bedroom and I think Leary said that she also gave him LSD, although I couldn't swear to that.

Anyway, she got murdered. She was murdered a year after Kennedy died. Kennedy was killed in November '63 and Mary Meyer was killed in 1964. She was walking her dog in Georgetown through a wooded area and she was stabbed to death. And they never found the killer. Some young black man was put in jail for ten months, held over until his trial and then he was acquitted because there was no evidence. And they've never found the killer but people who have investigated the case say that it had all the earmarks of a professional assassination.

Q: She was, of course, married to Cord Meyer, who was an intelligence agent.

A: She had been. She was divorced from him at the time she was with Kennedy. She had been with Cord Meyer in Europe when they were living. He was involved in a lot of counter-espionage over in Europe and she was supposedly a security risk because she tended to fall in love and have affairs with handsome men. She had an affair with one Italian count who was supposedly an intelligence agent and this constituted a security risk. And I suppose that their divorce was partly caused by the gulf between them because he really just couldn't talk about his work. Anyway, she was a very talented painter and very charming and beautiful and Kennedy was in love with her.

Q: Let's talk a bit about what exactly happened to your book. The first edition came out in the late '70s, right?

A: 1979. November '79.

What happened was all part of one great big, giant society that these people in Washington have created for themselves where the most important thing to them is putting forward this myth about themselves that they are supremely moral, supremely powerful, all-knowing, all-caring. They'll take care of the rest of us and anything that they do that is questionable they try to cover it up. You might ask why they're so afraid of having these things found about them because after all nothing that anyone knows about them is going to take away their money, their power, their friends, their influence or anything else. It's a sense that they want to maintain this myth about themselves, because that's the only way that people will buy into everything else that they do. You know, the newspaper that they put out, the whole aura that they create, that they are the ones who are in charge--not only in charge of things, but should be in charge, and it's because they're morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us.

Q: The book was pulped before it was distributed?

A: No, it was distributed and they recalled it from the bookstores and shredded the entire print run of twenty five thousand copies. A few copies that had been sold out of the bookstores and had gotten into private hands in the six week period before it was recalled, those books are still around and they are very valuable. The last I heard they were going for sixty dollars in used bookstores.

But the book came out in November '79 and right away there was an orchestrated attack on it by the people that have reason to try to make common cause with the Post. The Post itself didn't attack me. They didn't need to. They had people do it for them. David Ignatius, who is now the foreign editor of the Washington Post, was a young, ambitious reporter at the Wall Street Journal at that time. He did a very, very nasty, damaging piece about my book.

If any of your audience have read the new paperback edition of Silent Coup, it describes the same process going on for that book. In the back there's an appendix that talks about the campaign against that book. And there so much alike, so much the same what happened to me. Because they start this thing about "errors" in the book. This is like the worst thing you can say about a book, right?

Q: Right.

A: "Errors" in the book. And then the authors: who are they? How do they know these things? They're outsiders. They weren't there the way we were. They're just speculating. Silent Coup is about a 400 page book. They named four errors. One of them is that it got somebody's name wrong. Of course, the people doing the accusing are lying, so they're not really errors to begin with. This is the same thing that happened with me. Errors in the book. Errors in the book. This was like a flag that was being waved. That David Ignatius did it in the Wall Street Journal piece and then Alexander Cockburn did it in the Village Voice. So they were attacking me from the left and the right, right?

Q: You were right in the middle.