The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “It was common for Sinatra and his various friends to ‘pass a girl around,’ that is, members of the clique were expected to introduce comrades to sexually satisfying young women of their acquaintance,” Otash told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. “He stated his belief that this was how Rosselli ‘planted’ Judith Exner on John F. Kennedy.”

  Sinatra had his mob connections too, and it is possible that he invited Exner to Las Vegas to compromise Jack. But the singer was devoted to Jack, considering it a high honor to be in his company. Moreover, if Sinatra had done so, he probably would have given Exner a room at the Sands Hotel, where he was performing. Instead, she stayed at the Tropicana Hotel for three nights.

  From this weekend on, Exner traveled for the next three years at the highest level of luxury, crisscrossing the country again and again. She invariably flew first-class, wearing high fashion and fur and apparently paying cash for tickets and accommodations. She had so much luggage that she paid for as much as one hundred pounds of overweight luggage. When she arrived at her destination, limousines took her to the finest hotels.

  Exner simply did not have the resources herself to travel this way. As generous as her gentlemen friends in Los Angeles may have been, they did not provide her with enough to support so extravagant a lifestyle during much of her time away from California. Clearly her journeys were bankrolled by individuals who had more in mind than simply bedding the beautiful young woman.

  When Jack invited Exner to meet him at the Plaza Hotel on March 7, 1960, she said that he offered to pay for her ticket. She claimed that she refused, yet flew first-class to New York City to stay at the exclusive hotel where Jack was also staying. Exner had just received a $6,000 final settlement from her former husband in lieu of further alimony. At this moment, then, she knew that she would no longer have that regular monthly stipend. The $6,000 was undoubtedly the most money she had ever had at one time, a golden nest egg that she could use to advance her fortunes in the world.

  Exner arrived in Jack’s room that evening looking like a privileged young woman of wealth and bearing. “It was a wonderful night of lovemaking,” Exner recalled. “Jack couldn’t have been more loving, more concerned about my feelings, more considerate, more gentle…. The next morning he sent me a dozen red roses with a card that said, ‘Thinking of you … J.’”

  A week later Exner flew to Miami, where she said Sinatra had invited her to attend his performance at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Although her host had supposedly viciously insulted her, that did not prevent her from attending the farewell party for the last evening of Sinatra’s show. It was there that she says Sinatra introduced her to “a good friend of mine, Sam Flood,” one of the many aliases of Sam Giancana, the leader of the Chicago mob. The next evening Exner said that she had dinner with a group that included Giancana, still, by her admission, knowing neither Flood’s real name nor his profession.

  Exner may have known far more about Giancana than she admitted. Jeanne Humphreys, the wife of Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, a leading mobster associated with Giancana, tells a different story in her unpublished memoirs. “Johnnie Rosselli [sic] who had been taken back into the fold was becoming a frequent visitor to Chicago bringing gossip about Mooney [Giancana] and his reveling with the ‘ratpack.’ He [Rosselli] said he had fixed [Giancana] up with a party girl that he’d taken to Florida when [his mistress] Phyllis [McGuire] wasn’t looking. I said the last girl I’d seen him [Giancana] with was named Judy and she was from Chicago. He said he meant Judy from California.”

  Giancana was attracted to Exner in part because he had a constant need for variety. The mobster could be as generous as a pasha to his amours, but there was always a price, even if it was not obvious at first. One of his lovers at the time was Marilyn Miller, a showgirl at Chicago’s Chez Paree. She bragged to her girlfriends that Giancana had spent over one hundred thousand dollars on her. A friend who had offended the mobster asked Miller to intercede with the syndicate chieftain. She tried to talk to Giancana, but he told her to be quiet. Soon after the nude body of the man was found in Chicago. Another woman Giancana was seeing at the time was Patricia Clarke, a Florida woman with four children. Although Giancana was generous to the single mother, Clarke made the mistake later that year of telling him that she was also seeing Angelo Fasel, a bank robber, and that she intended to marry him. Within a few weeks Fasel disappeared, and Clarke was told not to ask about him anymore.

  Exner flew from Miami to New York, where she apparently stayed with friends before traveling to Washington on April 6. That evening she took a taxi from the Park Sheraton Hotel to Jack’s house at 3307 N Street, N.W., in Georgetown. In Exner’s 1977 autobiography, she described the evening as another gloriously romantic encounter. A decade later, in a 1988 People magazine cover story for which she was paid $50,000, and subsequently in other books, magazine articles, and television interviews for which she was almost inevitably paid substantial fees, Exner told a dubious tale about Jack and the mob.

  Exner claims that Jack asked her to “quietly arrange a meeting with Sam for me” during their hours together because he thought he might “need his help in the campaign.” Jack allegedly asked Exner to set up a number of meetings with Giancana and gave her a satchel containing “as much as $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills” to deliver to the Mafia kingpin. Exner believed that Jack had chosen her because “I was the one person around him who didn’t need anything from him or want anything. He trusted me. I had money from my grandmother.”

  Exner’s story is an anomaly among the many unverified tales of mob influence on the 1960 presidential election; the others involve the gangsters using their own money to influence the outcome, not the Kennedys apparently attempting to pay off the mob. Exner’s whole life was a tissue of fabrication, from the story of her wealthy birth to the way she made her living. Even if she had enjoyed a reputation for veracity, her story would have been impossible to believe. Carnally was the only way that Exner knew Jack. By her own admission, Exner was seeing Jack that evening for only the third time in her life. As for Giancana, again, by her own admission, she had spent one evening with him in a large group and knew nothing about his role as a major figure in organized crime. So if Jack had made such a request, Exner would have found it a non sequitur.

  As tough and cynical as Jack could be, nothing in his previous political life suggests that he was so devoid of both scruples and common sense as personally to enlist the Mafia as his partner. Even if one wanted to imagine a Jack cynically subverting American democracy, it was unthinkable that either he or Giancana would use Exner as their go-between. Neither man had achieved his power through such monumental stupidity as picking up a woman in a nightclub and deputizing her a few weeks later to foster an unprecedented act of political corruption that, if discovered, would destroy both men. Giancana came from a mob culture that kept women in the bedroom or the kitchen; he neither confided in them nor for the most part involved them in criminal acts. Jack had an equally limited opinion of the role of women in the games of power.

  Giancana may have been willing to participate in corrupting the American presidential election, but he had not committed so many crimes with impunity by leaving his fingerprints on the bloody knives and the bags of loot. And even those ready to imagine a John F. Kennedy who would have attempted to subvert American democracy surely must realize that he would have kept his own clear distance from such an act.

  Exner took the overnight train to Chicago, where, she asserts, Giancana was waiting at the station for her in the morning. Giancana’s biographer tells a different tale of how she later made her connection with the mobster. “She came to Chicago for a week and wandered around the Ambassador West Hotel, making it plain that she was trying to get closer to Giancana and his Oak Park Home,” writes William Brashler. “Finally taking a room in the Oak Park Arms Hotel, she was seen coming and going from the hotel to the Giancana house for a few days after, then she left town.”

  T
hat was essentially the version that Giancana told Joe Shimon, a Washington, D.C., police officer who became associated with the accused murderer: “She found out about Sam and tried to find him in Oak Park,” Shimon recalled. “Everyone knew where he lived. She was hinting that she had great connections, that she could do a lot of good. Sam said, ‘Do you remember that strumpet? She was trying to get on the payroll?’”

  Jack sat in front of the Dictaphone in his Senate office musing about his life. It is unclear whether he meant these remarks for the autobiography that he would one day write or for some other purpose. Whatever he intended, he would have little time for such recollections once the campaign began. He was in his early forties, but these were an old man’s words, reflecting back on the sweep of his days, seeking out the themes of his life. He was an immense puzzle of a man, his character so complex that no matter how one turned the pieces around and tried to put them together they never quite seemed to fit. There was the man Sorensen and Feldman observed, a brilliant tactician with a stunning quickness of mind and decision. There was another Jack whom Ben Bradlee, his journalist friend, and a few others saw, an American gentleman endlessly amused by the foibles of the human race. There was the man whom Smathers and some of his colleagues experienced, a Jack speaking the most vulgar argot of politicians, the language itself not nearly as low as the sentiments. There was a discolored piece of him, the sexual epicurean who let neither his marital vows nor ambition stand in the way of feasting at this sweet buffet. And there was the hidden sickly man, taking his regimen of pills and pretending he was something that he was not.

  As Jack spoke into the Dictaphone, he was displaying yet another piece, and one that did not fit easily among the others. As a political philosopher he stood apart from the practical man of power. This John F. Kennedy was a man of deep contemplation. There was a distance that Jack maintained from the rest of humanity, in part because of the natural isolation of power and its pursuit, but in equal part because of his very nature. And it was out of this distance, standing back from the shrill shouts, the pettiness, the rude exchanges, the duplicities, the preening ambitions of much of Washington life, that he observed what he thought to be the natural greatness of politics and a political life.

  Jack was a public man who could speak extemporaneously in perfectly ordered prose. On this occasion he welded his sentiments into an essay, stopping periodically to find the precise words, speaking with such subtlety and nuance, even pausing to signify commas, periods, and underlining, that he could have been reading from a script. Jack began by pondering the fact that politicians were held in such low regard.

  Politics has become one of our most abused and neglected professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the American [public?]…. Yet it is … these politicians who make the great decisions of war and peace, prosperity and recession, the decision whether we look to the future or the past. In a large sense everything now depends on what the government decides. Therefore, if you are interested, if you want to participate, if you feel strongly about any public question … it seems to me that governmental service is the way to translate this interest into action…. The natural place for the concerned citizen is to contribute part of his life to the national interest.

  When politicians are perceived as no more than a motley crew of corrupt careerists and cynical panderers, then the whole covenant of democracy is broken. Jack saw his colleagues at their most conniving and self-interested but he perceived an underlying nobility in the politician’s life. He saw himself as part of a tradition, as a scion of a race of Irish-Americans who had made politics the chosen avenue of their advance; he was the grandson of two politicians and the son of a man who had talked to him almost daily of politics and a mother who had put her little son on her knee and told him tales of American history. He had come late and hard to regarding the word “politician” as an honorable term, but he shouted the word loudly now and was proud to be called by that ancient name.

  I moved into the Bellevue Hotel with my grandfather [in 1946], and I began to run. I’ve been running ever since. Fascination began to grip me, and I realized how satisfactory a profession a political career could be. I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness. “A full use of your powers, along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.” … How can you compare in interest … [a] job with a life in Congress, where you are able to participate to some degree in determining which direction the nation will go.

  This was a Jack who celebrated a political life and saw it as a public man’s noblest pursuit. He may have fallen short in many ways, but that did not diminish the ideals he professed.

  In looking back, I would say that I’ve never regretted my choice of professions, even though I cannot know what the future will bring…. Particularly in these days where the watch fires of the enemy camp burn bright. I think all of us must be willing to give ourselves to this, some of ourselves to this most exacting, to the most exacting discipline of self-government. The magic of politics is not the panoply of office. The magic of politics is participation on all levels of national life in an affirmative way, of determining, of playing a small role in determining whether … in Mr. Faulkner’s words, freedom will not only endure, but also prevail.

  The first great contest of 1960 was the Wisconsin primary. This was a special challenge to Jack since it was adjacent to Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. Jack’s opponent may have been the kind of overwrought, weepy liberal whom Jack usually privately despised, but there was nary a mean bone in Humphrey’s ample frame, and Jack bore the man no personal animus.

  A presidential campaign usually begins with as much indifference as enthusiasm. Each moment of elation is paid for in the hard cash of tedium, exhaustion, bad meals, cold coffee, predawn alarms, and late-night flights. A man of Jack’s sensitivity, as much aesthetic as political, was especially vulnerable psychologically to the phlegmatic unconcern that he often encountered.

  The coldness of the Wisconsin winter was at times matched by the icy reserve of the Midwestern farmers and townspeople. In one of the nameless small towns Jack had given his speech to yet another undemonstrative crowd and tried afterward to grasp a few hands in the local restaurant. He strode to the back where a group of men sat around a table playing dominoes. No one stood or greeted the senator from Massachusetts, even as Jack paraded around the table shaking hands. “We planned to come to hear you speak,” one of the men said, looking up from the dominoes, “but we didn’t finish our game.” Jack smiled, shook hands, and left the room as if nothing gave him more pleasure than soliciting such taciturn men.

  If Jack had sat down with those farmers, losing a quick game of dominoes while talking about next year’s crop, he would probably have walked away with three or four certain votes. But that wasn’t Jack. He wasn’t a politician like Humphrey or Johnson, a toucher who thought that in the physical act of grasping a shoulder or pumping a hand he was making an indelible impression. He was as uncomfortable being touched emotionally as physically, and he still barely tolerated the gaudy sideshows of politics. If he had had his choice, he would have campaigned standing before audiences of intelligent citizens discussing with subtlety and nuance the issues of the day.

  On the worst of these days Jack enjoyed no stronger tonic than a call to his father. Joe had endowed his sons with a restless, unquenchable optimism. It was a spirit that they imbibed from their father whenever they talked to him. The more down they felt, the more they faced defeat, the more Joe bolstered them as if he could lift them up with his very hands.

  In the winter of the primaries, Joe spent much time in Florida going to the races at Hialeah and talking to influential people and reporters. Again and again he heard worrisome negative stories about Jack’s dubious prospects, and when he talked to Jack, as Rose recalled, he bolstered him with “something positive and enthusiastic, but not necessarily in line with his own experience.”

  Jack shared much of his father’s co
ldhearted political realism. He might stand on a platform mouthing idealistic paeans written by Sorensen, but he knew that the real business of power and politics often took place in private antechambers where no echo of the campaign rhetoric could be heard. On one of his early campaign jaunts, he chatted with an old-time political hand who told him of his father’s role in Roosevelt’s 1932 nomination. Despite Joe’s “very low estimate of Roosevelt’s ability,” he had backed FDR, trying to manipulate him into taking less liberal positions. In a crucial moment, Joe had helped to talk William Randolph Hearst into backing Roosevelt simply because the press magnate hated another contender. Joe’s conduct had been the most cynical of ripostes, and another son might have flared out at a man who would dare slander his father with such a tale. Jack was impressed enough by the story that he sent a copy of the letter to his father with a note stating, “It definitely shows the success you had in securing Hearst for Roosevelt.”

  A Jack campaigned on those endless cold days, there was an increasingly liberal glaze to his words. His primary speechwriters, Sorensen and Feldman, were far more to the left than the candidate they served, but it was hardly a matter of their promoting ideas that Jack would not have chosen on his own. Jack knew that to win he had to appear liberal, so as to gather in a reluctant labor movement, urban intellectuals, and social activists, despite his disdain for the priests of that particular faith. “He had real contempt … for the members of that group in the Senate,” reflected Joe Alsop, the conservative columnist. “What he disliked … was the sort of posturing, attitude-striking, never-getting-anything-done liberalism.”

  Jack did not like being around liberals such as Adlai Stevenson, whose very manhood he doubted. As for professional diplomats, they were little more than eunuchs. “I know how they are at the State Department,” he said. “They’re not queer, but, well, they’re sort of like Adlai.” Jack hated being grouped with liberals like Adlai. “I’d be very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he had declared in the Saturday Evening Post several years earlier in an unfortunate lapse into candor. “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) or the American Veterans Committee (AVC). I’m not comfortable with those people.”