There was the usual late-night telephone call from Kennedy. "Jack always wanted to know where I was at all times," Exner said. "He wanted to know who I was seeing, who I was having dinner with. He loved gossip, just thrived on gossip. I used to tell him, 'Go out and buy a movie magazine.' He always used to ask a lot about Frank, what Frank was doing, who Frank was seeing. I now think he may have been interested in some of the women he asked about." She told Kennedy about the odd encounter with "this man and how annoyed I was about what he said about my jewelry. It was just a little story to tell. And when I said, 'Frank introduced me to Sam Flood,' he said, 'Oh yes, I know. Sam Giancana.' And I said, 'Oh, is that his real name?' And he said, 'Yeah.' The name Giancana didn't mean any more to me than the name Flood would have meant to me. You have to remember that back in the sixties people were not familiar with the name of Giancana."
But the Kennedys were. Joseph Kennedy and Giancana had reached an extraordinary understanding months earlier about Mafia help in the 1960 presidential election.
On April 6, 1960, Exner was again intimate with Jack Kennedy, at the Georgetown house he shared in Washington with his wife and daughter. Jacqueline Kennedy, pregnant with their second child, had just left for Florida. The day before, Kennedy had defeated Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary. Victory had come at high cost, however; Kennedy won by a smaller plurality than expected, and would now have to take his campaign into West Virginia. The primary there would be won, Kennedy knew, not with speeches but with millions of dollars in cash. The problem was not getting the money but getting it to the right people without being observed. None of this was on Exner's mind. "You can't imagine how I felt," she told me. "I guess only a woman in my position would know what it feels like to be in his wife's home. There was another man there. That night, after dinner, they had been talking about the primaries and it was mostly political conversation the whole evening." Kennedy told the man of his desire to fire Hoover and also discussed "whether or not to keep Evelyn Lincoln." By this point, Exner noted, she and Kennedy's secretary had become "old telephone friends ... She never failed to give Jack my messages and Jack never failed to return my calls." She butted in on the conversation to tell her lover that she thought Lincoln "should stay on the job."
Judith Exner initially remembered only that the other guest was a large man named Bill who worked, so Kennedy told her, as a railroad lobbyist.
Bill Thompson's special relationship to Kennedy was kept carefully hidden from the White House press corps. The only known newspaper photographs of Kennedy and Thompson together were published by the Miami Herald in March 1962, when a photographer caught the vacationing president enjoying an obviously animated dockside conversation with Thompson, then president of the Florida East Coast Railway, and Senator George Smathers, who had introduced Kennedy to the tall, handsome Thompson in the mid-1950s. Kennedy served as best man when Thompson remarried in 1958, and the three men jokingly referred to themselves as "the Three Musketeers." Women were for the taking.* A few of Kennedy's close friends and aides knew about Thompson, who was a notorious ladies' man, and didn't like what they knew. "He was a pimp for Jack," Charles Bartlett, Kennedy's longtime friend, said in an interview for this book. "He was the dark side of Jack Kennedy," Jerry Bruno, who worked for Kennedy in the Senate, told me.
He was also a lot of fun, and unafraid to make a joke at Kennedy's expense. Hyman Raskin, the Kennedy campaign official, recalled the time in the late 1950s when Thompson prevailed on Evelyn Lincoln to slip him a book of blank bank checks from Kennedy's account. The senator was a notorious penny-pincher who never carried cash---a habit he would keep in the presidency---and, thus, was never able to pay his share of a restaurant or bar bill. When the bill came, Raskin told me, Thompson would "pull out a blank check and toss it to Jack, saying, 'Here. Sign it.'" Kennedy adored it.
Thompson also had fun with Kennedy, Raskin recounted, when he bought an exotic new car. When the car, shipped from Europe, arrived dockside in New Jersey, Thompson figured, he told Raskin, "What's the sense of having rich friends?" He telephoned Kennedy's Senate office and explained to Evelyn Lincoln that he needed a check for "thirty-five" to pay for the car. She telephoned later to say that the senator had left the check in his office. Thompson picked up the envelope, took the train to New Jersey, and once at the shipping company found out that the check was for $35,000---ten times more than he needed. It got worked out, Thompson told Raskin; he got his car and a check for $31,500 from the shipper to Kennedy. Raskin, laughing hard in the telling, said Thompson chided the senator about his mistake. Kennedy responded, "How the hell do I know what a foreign car costs?"
Thompson remained close after Kennedy won the presidency. "He was flying wing for Jack," George Smathers told me in a 1994 interview for this book. "When we went on the Honey Fitz [the presidential yacht], Bill would go and get three or four girls and meet Jack twenty or so miles downriver." Thompson's daughter, Gail Laird, of Miami, his only surviving relative, recalled answering the telephone in the family's suburban Virginia home as a teenager and being greeted by the president, who placed the call himself. Her father, a skilled cook, often made dinner at home, put it in a huge pot of the kind used by railroad cooks, and drove it to the White House. During the Cuban missile crisis, in October 1962, Laird told me in interviews for this book, her father spent "days on end" at the White House as the president's guest. "He was over there all the time," Laird said. She understood one source of her father's appeal to the president: the two men "liked women. That was one of their common bonds." Her father, she added, "kept his mouth shut. He never talked about Kennedy---never. He always told me, 'You never kiss and tell.'"
Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's man in the Senate, depicted Thompson as a lobbyist who parlayed his personal relationship into the presidency of the Florida East Coast Railway, although "he didn't know a thing about railroads. He wasn't the classiest guy," Baker told me. "Thompson could fix things, and the main shareholder of the railroad was always in trouble in Washington." Thompson had one other asset that Jack Kennedy appreciated, Baker said: "He was one of the few guys who didn't have an enemy." Thompson was loyal to the end: he died in obscurity in 1970 without leaving a clue about his important relationship with the president---a relationship that never bored Jack Kennedy.
As her dinner with Kennedy and Thompson came to an end, Exner told me, "Jack asked, would I set up a meeting with Sam Giancana for him. I was a little surprised and I said, 'Well, yes. I'd be happy to. Why, or should I ask?' He said, 'Well, I think he can help me with the campaign.' And we talked about that. He said, 'When you leave here, call Sam.' He told me where he was going to be over the next five days and said, 'We'll arrange a convenient time for the both of us.' He had this large satchel and he asked would I mind taking this to Sam. I said, 'Not at all.' He said, 'But I want you to know what's in it.' He opened it and it was money."
Kennedy made it clear, she said, that she was free to say no. Exner, as Kennedy obviously sensed, was eager to help. "I assumed it was for the campaign," she said. "I didn't think there was anything strange going on. He was asking me to do something that I felt was very important to him. He was bringing me into his life, and that was very important to me." Exner told me that when she saw the money---perhaps as much as $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills---she asked if it would be safe. "He said, 'Yes, someone will be looking out for you on the train.'" Kennedy would not tell her more, explaining that "you're better off without knowing." At the time, she told me, she only knew that the money was "for the campaign." Exner was far more interested, she acknowledged, in showing off a new mink coat she had bought. Kennedy offered to pay for the coat. "I said, 'Absolutely not.' And he said, 'There isn't anything I can do for you. We can't go out. I can't take you to restaurants. Please let me do this for you.' I refused." Kennedy later gave her an envelope and urged her, she wrote in My Story, not to open it until he left. It contained two one-thousand dollar bills and a note urging her to use the money to buy "so
mething special." She decided to keep the money. "Everyone tries to make something so sinister out of it," Exner told me, "like I was being paid for setting up the meeting. He wanted to do something nice for me."
The overnight train ride to Chicago was uneventful, Exner continued. She was met by Giancana, who "just took [the satchel] from my hand. Not a word was said. This was expected," she added; it was clear that "the plans all had been made without me, way ahead of time." The next few days were spent with Giancana, Exner recorded in her memoir, as he gave her a tour of his Chicago---including a visit to the Armory Lounge. "He conducted a lot of business at our booth in the bar right in front of me," Exner wrote. "But it was in Sicilian." Even then, she claimed, she wasn't sure "who he was ... Perhaps he always looked like a hoodlum to the police or to the public at large. All I can say is that he was different when he was with me ... That, I know, was terribly naive," Exner wrote. "There are times when I wonder who or what I was in those days." She and Giancana were not sexually involved at the time, Exner wrote: "It was almost a year and a half before we became intimate.* Being a normal male, Sam tried to change that situation, but after I told him about my feelings for Jack, he didn't push it beyond the teasing stage for at least a year. His patience so impressed me at the time that I actually felt guilty ... As I look back, it's possible that Sam got exactly what he wanted from our relationship"---leverage, or what he thought would be leverage, with Jack Kennedy.
Judith Exner's story about delivering money to Chicago was buttressed during research for this book by Martin E. Underwood, a political operative for Richard Daley, the Chicago mayor, who lent Underwood to the Kennedy campaign in 1960. Underwood worked closely with Kenny O'Donnell, who told him in April 1960 to take the overnight train from Washington to Chicago and keep an eye on Exner. Underwood dutifully spent the night on the train and, he told me in a 1997 interview for this book, watched Exner early the next morning give the satchel to the waiting Sam Giancana. Underwood assumed that Giancana "was going to take care of somebody," but he asked no questions of anyone. (Underwood also recalled that O'Donnell once told him that Teddy Kennedy had "picked out" Exner at their first meeting in Las Vegas, but Jack, who was always competitive with his brothers, "went out for her." Throughout their relationship, Exner wrote in her memoir, Kennedy joked about Teddy's early interest and gloated one time, while in bed with her, "Boy, if Teddy only knew, he'd be eating his heart out.")
Once in Chicago with Sam, Exner told me, she had no qualms about serving as the message carrier when Kennedy and Giancana agreed on the time and place for their secret meeting---probably the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach on April 12. Her goal was to keep her man happy. "I asked Jack," she said, "'Do you want me there?' He said, 'Yes. Absolutely.'" Exner insisted in her interviews with me that she did not know in April 1960 that Sam Giancana was a Mafia boss, only that "he was an important man. He was with Frank and he was at Frank's table. When you grow up around people who are of great importance," she told me, "you can gauge just how important they are by the way other people treat them. It wasn't that early that I found out exactly who Sam was, but I did know that he was someone of importance, someone with power."
By this time, too, she liked Sam Giancana. "I really thought he was a gentleman; he was funny," she said. "We started to become friends. I'm always amused when I read that someone characterized him as a 'dese, dem, and dose' kind of flashy dresser. Someone said he had a pink Cadillac or something like that. I've never met anyone who was so the opposite. He was well spoken. He was very conservative. I don't think we ever drove in anything more than a Ford. He was just a very charming friend."
Exner did not see Giancana and Kennedy together in Miami, and Kennedy, during a disappointingly short visit with her, said that the appointment with Giancana had gone well. Kennedy said nothing more about the meeting, but did talk, for the first time, Exner told me, about his marriage: "He told me that they had come to an agreement that if he didn't get the nomination, they were parting." He wanted Exner to know, she remembered him saying, that "this was a decision they had made before he ever met me. He didn't want me to think I was the reason for it."
In early August of 1960, a few weeks after his triumph at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy asked Exner to help him move a second satchel of money to Giancana. Exner had sublet an apartment in New York, and Kennedy was in and out of the city. On one visit, she said, he left the satchel, explaining that "this is for the campaign." Giancana stopped by later to pick it up. Exner said she asked no questions of either Kennedy or Giancana: "I have never been one to question people," she told me. "It has a great deal to do with my upbringing. I was taught that people will volunteer what they want you to know. And that it's very rude for you to pry." A few days later---as the Eisenhower administration was gearing up its assassination planning for Castro---Exner set up a meeting at her apartment for Kennedy and Giancana. "I went into the bedroom, into my bedroom," she told me, "and waited until they were finished talking."
By this point, Exner acknowledged in her book, she understood who Sam Giancana was: "the Godfather of the Chicago mafia." She somehow managed to rationalize the implications. "What difference did it make that his name was Giancana instead of Flood?" she wrote. "Both names meant absolutely nothing to me. Unless you're a celebrity, what's in a name? Outside of Chicago, in 1960 how many people had ever heard his name?"
Exner told me some of the techniques she used to arrange contacts between Kennedy and Giancana. "As a rule I would just call Sam," she said. "I learned to almost speak in a kind of code. I would usually say, 'Have him call the girl from the West.' And if something was happening in Florida, it was, 'Can you meet him in the South?' Sam always knew that 'him' was Jack. I really became very adept. I think that I was having a little bit of fun with this also. It was intriguing to have a conversation with someone and as far as anyone else was concerned, you didn't say anything, but you had just arranged a meeting between Sam Giancana and Jack Kennedy."
In one of her interviews for this book, Exner said she was convinced it was Kennedy, and not Giancana, who "made the decision that I was the perfect person" to be a conduit. "I was the one person around him who didn't need anything from him or want anything," she said. "He trusted me. I had money from my grandmother." The next stage in her deepening involvement came after the election, and before the inauguration. It dealt with murdering Fidel Castro.
Sometime just before the inauguration, Exner told me, Kennedy asked her "to take some information to Sam. We had a conversation much like the conversation regarding the money. He explained to me what it was about and he wanted me to be able to say no if I wasn't comfortable doing it." What the documents in the envelope were about, she was told, was getting rid of Castro. "I knew what they [the documents] dealt with. I knew they dealt with the 'elimination' of Castro and that Sam and Johnny [Rosselli] had been hired by the CIA. That's what Jack explained to me in the very beginning.
"I have to emphasize," Exner told me, "that he didn't say anything about assassination. I use that word now because I know more about it now than I did then. I was aware of 'elimination,' which in my mind just meant removing him from office. Had I realized it was assassination, I'd have been much more frightened."
Over the next year, as the Kennedy brothers settled in at the White House, Exner made ten or more trips to Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli with envelopes from Jack Kennedy. "I wasn't thinking it's high-level government activity," Exner said. "I was doing something for someone I loved dearly. It was as if my husband had asked me to do something for him, to carry some papers---if I had a lawyer for a husband and he wanted me to take some papers to a client. I never had the sense of just how serious all of it was. I was far too wrapped up in the fact that he trusted me. It just didn't register."
John F. Kennedy was, after all, the president of the United States. "Was I supposed to have better sense and more judgment," Exner asked rhetorically, "than the president?"
; At some point, too, after Kennedy was in the White House, Exner said, the attorney general also became "very much a part of all of this." After making love, she and the president usually had dinner in the second-floor Mansion. "Bobby would come in and bring the information in a manila envelope to Jack," she told me. "And they would discuss a little bit about it. And Bobby often would put his hand on my shoulder and ask, 'Are you still comfortable doing this? We want you to let us know if you don't want to.'"
The Kennedy brothers "were very smart in the way they handled this," Exner told me. "I was this little bauble." The brothers "seemed at ease" as they discussed the contents of the papers in front of her, she said, "almost like this was not a great coup. This was the way business was done."
"I remember one trip," Exner said, "where I left the White House and went to Chicago and just stayed at the airport for one hour. Sam looked at the documents, put them in the envelope, and gave them back to me. I flew to Las Vegas, gave them to Johnny Rosselli. I left them there and went to California. But very quickly I was back on a plane to Washington. Very often that's the way it was." Exner said she tried to be scrupulous about noting her comings and goings in her diary, her lifelong practice, and about keeping all travel receipts. There were occasions when she left the White House documents with Giancana or Rosselli; other times the men quickly scanned the papers and returned them to her, for delivery back to Kennedy.
The envelopes were not always sealed, but she never went through the documents, she told me. She did recall hearing names bandied about as the Kennedy brothers talked between themselves, but they meant nothing to her. She always understood, she said, that the papers handed her for delivery did not originate in the FBI and assumed that they came from the CIA. She delivered her final envelope, she said, sometime late in 1961.
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 36
