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insider speculated it was nepotism. Judge Howard Corcoran was the brother of the legendary Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, an influential lawyer and D.C. power broker who had drafted much of the New Deal legislation for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Judge Corcoran’s pedigree and education—Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton, and then Harvard Law—placed him in the social class of Mary and Cord Meyer, as well as that of U.S. Attorney David Acheson, signaling an easy access to power. Pedigree aside, many felt that Judge Corcoran was not ready for a case like this. Some even speculated that because of his lack of experience, he would rule according to the letter of the law to avoid being overturned on appeal. For Roundtree and her team, it was another bad break, something that might work against her.
    Judge Corcoran’s law clerk for the trial was a young, agile attorney fresh out of Harvard Law School’s prestigious Master of Laws program. Twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn-born Robert Stephen Bennett had graduated from Georgetown Law in 1964. He salivated at the prospect of being part of the action, and no place would be hotter than Washington in the summer of 1965. Thirty years later, having become one of Washington’s and the nation’s eminent criminal defense attorneys, he would find himself standing at the podium in the marbled United States Supreme Court representing President Bill Clinton in a sexual harassment lawsuit.
    In response to Roundtree’s wish to enter into evidence the fact of Mary Meyer’s divorce and two surviving sons, Corcoran refused. “I do not want this woman’s reputation dragged through the mud,” he said. It seemed an odd response to the request, since “lack of relevance” might have kept it out just as well. Could Corcoran have learned of the unconventionality of the dead woman’s lifestyle? The judge sustained Hantman’s objection, however, when Roundtree tried to establish for the jury that Ray Crump was the father of five children. “Anything you can do to humanize the defendant, you try to get in,” Roundtree said years later. “But it was clear that Corcoran intended to maintain a tight rein on the kind of evidence he was going to allow. Whetherit was because this was his first case, or he was nervous, I don’t know, but he was very strict.” 7
    Judge Corcoran also barred any testimony that referred to the Central Intelligence Agency. Could he have been privy to the rumors of a CIA conspiracy link that surrounded Mary Meyer’s death? That was unknown, but it appeared likely that as a first-timer on the bench, Corcoran sought to avoid any controversy whatsoever, and in that regard, any mention of the CIA would seem especially off-limits. The Warren Report’s lone gunman assertion was already beginning to be challenged. There were rumblings swirling all over Washington and elsewhere about CIA involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination, and Corcoran likely sought to steer clear of any mention of the Agency altogether.
    Prosecutor Hantman, for his part, knew he was involved in a high-profile case, but at the time of the trial, he was unaware how high profile the case might become. He didn’t know that Mary Meyer had kept a diary and that in it, she had written about her lover, the slain president. Nor did he know that Mary’s diary was now in the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton, and that Angleton’s wife would be in court every day, observing the trial.
    O n Monday, July 19, 1965, a three-hundred-person jury pool convened in Courtroom 8, where the laborious process of jury selection would take all day. Dovey Roundtree and her defense team scored a partial victory with a jury of eight blacks and four whites; seven of the twelve jurors were women. There were also four alternate jurors. Before retiring for the day, the jury selected their foreman: Edward O. Savwoir, a forty-four-year-old African American program specialist at the Job Corps in the Office of