The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  In the president's first year in office, Exner said, she arranged two more meetings for him with Sam Giancana.

  On April 28, 1961, less than two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy attended a political dinner at McCormick Place in Chicago to celebrate his election.* Exner had arrived in Chicago the day before, and took a room at the Ambassador East Hotel, about ten minutes away. A few hours before the speech, Exner told me, "Sam came to my room. And then, in a short while, Jack came." The president, Exner said, shook hands with Giancana, who called him Jack---and not Mr. President. "He was there for a very short period of time and I asked him, 'Do you want me to leave?' He said, 'No. Don't go out in the hall,'" where the Secret Service stood on guard. "So," Exner continued, "I went into the powder room and sat on the edge of the tub while they met for a few moments. And then [Kennedy] knocked on the door and I came out. He apologized. I knew that he wasn't going to be able to spend any time with me."

  The last Kennedy-Giancana meeting she knew of took place in Washington on August 8, 1961, Exner told me, as the issue of access to West Berlin was nearing the crisis stage. The White House log for that day shows nothing on the president's official schedule between one and four o'clock. In her 1977 memoir, Exner described a tense lunch with the president and Dave Powers, his longtime aide. Things began badly when Kennedy, perhaps unaware of the many hours it took Exner to get ready for their meeting, unsuccessfully tried to get her to join him in the pool for a swim. Over lunch, and in front of Powers, the president brought up an occasion when Exner had become upset, once again, when a man---this time it was Jack Kennedy---brought a second woman into the bedroom with them. Kennedy told Exner he knew she had been complaining to others about the unsuccessful ménage à trois. Exner denied it---a lie, she noted in her memoirs, one she justified by explaining that she was angered because Kennedy's phrasing and tone of voice "implied that I was lending credence to a malicious story someone had invented." She also was appalled, she said, that Kennedy would discuss such matters in front of Powers. That evening, Sam Giancana stopped by her hotel room in Washington and told her he had just come from a meeting with Kennedy. It is not known where the meeting took place, if it did, but Exner's recollection was buttressed by the discovery thirty years later that Giancana was in Washington on that date and applied for a passport at the passport office there. A copy of his application, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that Giancana described his occupation as the "motel business." On that date, too, according to government records, FBI agents broke into Giancana's main hangout, the Armory Lounge in suburban Forest Park, to install yet another listening device.

  Throughout her years with Jack Kennedy, Exner was under intense FBI surveillance. In her account, she learned of the federal scrutiny on November 4, 1960, four days before the presidential election, when two agents, from the FBI and Internal Revenue Service, came to her apartment in Los Angeles and interrogated her about Sam Giancana. "It was terrible," she said in an interview for this book. "They treated me with such disrespect. I gladly let them come into my home. And the way they were acting, I finally just told them to leave." In her memoir, she told how the agents had described Giancana to her in vivid terms and said, "He's not the kind of man a nice girl should be running around with." Had the FBI approached her earlier, Exner wrote, "the idea of associating with an underworld boss might have frightened me. But now that I knew Sam ... I wouldn't have told them anything about Sam if my life depended on it ... I kept thinking, 'So this is how they treat innocent people.' I thought of myself as innocent, which I suppose was open to debate." From then on, Exner wrote, she was aware of a steadily increasing FBI presence. "The FBI not only questioned all my friends, but I think they questioned anyone who had the misfortune of riding in an elevator with me. And they were such hypocrites." One of Johnny Rosselli's girlfriends responded to a question about her by telling the agent, "I know she just came back from the White House. Why don't you go ask the president?" The agent said nothing.

  The president wasn't much help. After the first FBI visit in the fall of 1960, Exner told me, "I, of course, called Jack right away. He always had the same pat answer for me. He'd always say, 'Don't worry about them.' Even after they were harassing me so terribly, following me everywhere, questioning all my friends, he would always say, 'You have nothing to be afraid of. You've never done anything wrong in your life. You know Sam works for us.'"

  The FBI's view of Exner was more than a little disrespectful. She was invariably described in FBI reports, made available to her under the Freedom of Information Act, as a "very good-looking blonde girl" who was "a friend of Rosselli and Giancana." One retired FBI agent, in a 1997 interview for this book, said that he and his colleagues considered Exner to be "a high-class whore" who was doing business with both mobsters. The former agent, William R. Carter, now a private investigator in Oklahoma City, worked undercover investigating Rosselli and Exner in Los Angeles. Exner was identified as a Giancana-Rosselli girl in early 1960, Carter told me. He and his colleagues "definitely thought she was selling her favors. We believed she was bedding both of them. Someone obviously was giving her big money." (Carter offered no proof for his assertion, and Exner's FBI file, released in its entirety under the Freedom of Information Act, contains no evidence linking Exner to prostitution, despite years of surveillance.) Giancana and Rosselli were both considered "bad news," Carter added. Giancana was "a degenerate, as bad as they came," and Rosselli was believed to be responsible for "as many as thirteen murders."

  The heavy surveillance of Exner led to a shocking discovery during the July 1960 Democratic convention, Carter said: Exner and John F. Kennedy, the newly nominated candidate, were found to be "having a tryst." That explosive information, Carter said, which may have come from a bug in Exner's apartment, was "very tightly held" by his superiors, though it undoubtedly was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover. "The agents wanted to throw up" after they discovered the Exner-Kennedy liaison, Carter said. "They could not understand that type of behavior of a top official of the United States. It's demoralizing, really." Much of the agents' anger was directed at Exner. "Here's a person who's no better than a common street slut" consorting with a presidential candidate, Carter told me, "when we're trying to do our job" by going after organized crime. "We considered Kennedy to be no better than Giancana or Rosselli."

  During the Kennedy years, Carter said, he and other agents in Los Angeles talked often about the apparent contradiction between what they knew and Bobby Kennedy's highly publicized campaign against organized crime. "We attributed it to political ambition," Carter told me. "Figured it was the way several people have become famous. Fighting crime means you're a good guy." There was little chance that J. Edgar Hoover or any other law enforcement official would publicly use the information about Kennedy and Exner, Carter said, because the source of some of it was electronic surveillance. The extent of the buggings, he added, if known to the public, would create "a furor" and damage the FBI's reputation, "so Hoover had no choice."

  By early 1962, however, the FBI's intensive monitoring of Giancana, Rosselli, and Exner had produced an impossible-to-refute link to the White House: Exner had repeatedly telephoned the White House office of Jack Kennedy. On February 27, 1962, Hoover, always the bureaucrat, sent a memorandum to Bobby Kennedy officially notifying him that Judith Campbell (Exner), known to be in contact with Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, had made two telephone calls within a week to Evelyn Lincoln. "The relationship between Campbell and Mrs. Lincoln or the purpose of these calls is not known," Hoover wrote. Copies of the memorandum were sent to Kenny O'Donnell, in the White House, and to two of Bobby Kennedy's aides in the Justice Department---Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, and Herbert J. Miller, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division.

  Bobby Kennedy, of course, knew of Exner and the role she was playing as his brother's lover and as a conduit to Giancana and Rosselli. He also had his own sources, in the FBI, on the
status of the inquiry into Exner. In a 1995 interview for this book, Jane Leahy, one of Kennedy's secretaries in the Justice Department, told of seeing a photograph of Exner among Kennedy's files. "I kept all of his personal papers," Leahy told me. When an unclassified envelope came over from the FBI, she didn't hesitate to look. "It was a picture of Judy Exner---just a picture, not with the president," Leahy said. "She was just walking on the street." The photograph clearly was one of the dozens of FBI surveillance photos taken of Exner in the early 1960s.

  Hoover's memorandum meant that the president's affair with Exner---and connection to Giancana---could soon be known to dozens of FBI agents and Justice Department officials. Like his brother, Bobby Kennedy needed cover: he had to isolate his role as the nation's leading law enforcement official from his involvement with the anti-Castro activities of the Chicago mob. Bobby turned to Joseph Dolan, an assistant attorney general and one of his closest associates. In a 1995 interview for this book, Dolan---still flattered by Kennedy's trust in his judgment---told of being summoned to the attorney general's office at the end of February 1962 and shown a copy of the Hoover memorandum and the FBI file on Exner. Exner's person-to-person calls to Evelyn Lincoln were beyond challenge; even more disconcerting were Exner's ties to Giancana and Rosselli. "An hour later I have to see him on something else," Dolan told me, "and Kennedy brought it up again. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, he's afraid to tell his brother.' Bobby asked me what do I think? I looked him right in the eye and said, 'Mrs. Lincoln shouldn't take calls from her.' He looked at me like I came from the moon. 'What would you do?' he asked." Dolan said he told the attorney general that he would "write a memo to Mrs. Lincoln saying that she shouldn't take the calls." Kennedy responded, "Do it." As Dolan walked out of the office, Kennedy added, in typical fashion, "Today." Dolan then made a visit to Mrs. Lincoln at the White House. "It's terrible," he quoted Mrs. Lincoln as saying. "I didn't know she was like that."

  John Kennedy was the president and it seemed clear to Dolan that no one, not even his brother, was eager to tell him that he had to stop seeing a woman who gave him pleasure. The official Justice Department records, made available in 1975 to the Church Committee, show that it was left to Hoover to give the president the bad news. On March 22, Hoover went to lunch at the White House with the president, for only the second time since Inauguration Day.

  Both men had hidden agendas. Hoover was going to tell the president about a dangerous sexual relationship, but not tell him that the FBI had known since the summer of 1960---before Kennedy got to the White House---of his affair with Exner and her ties to Giancana and Rosselli. Jack Kennedy knew from his brother what was on Hoover's mind, and how he was going to respond.

  The Kennedy-Hoover lunch became the basis for a good deal of fiction over the next three decades, much of it originating in the Church Committee. "According to White House logs," the Church Committee reported, "the last telephone contact between the White House and the President's friend occurred a few hours after the luncheon." (In fact, Exner told me that she and the president talked repeatedly in the next few months. White House logs uncovered in 1975 by committee investigators showed that as many as ten of the eighty calls from Exner to Kennedy's office took place after March 1962.) The committee accepted at face value Exner's lies about not knowing of the plotting against Castro and not serving as a conduit between Giancana and the president. Therefore, the committee concluded, the president's lunch with Hoover merely provided Hoover with a chance "to fulfill his duty" and tell the president that there was evidence that Giancana "had been involved in a CIA operation that included 'dirty business.'" In the committee's view, Judith Exner had nothing to do with such matters; the president's affair with her was seen as little more than a very indiscreet sexual romp.

  The committee's failure to closely quiz Exner on the Kennedy-Hoover lunch and its aftermath was its biggest mistake. The only account of the lunch is Exner's, as told to her by an angry Jack Kennedy. He telephoned Exner after the meeting. "I called him back," Exner told me, "and he said, 'Go to your mother's and call me.'" Exner did and Kennedy warned her that her home phone was not safe from an FBI wiretap. "He said he'd just had this meeting with Hoover and Hoover told Jack," Exner said, "that he knew, first of all, about Jack's relationship with me. And he also knew that I was carrying documents regarding the Castro assassination plot to Sam Giancana and John Rosselli for Jack. And he knew that they worked for the CIA." Hoover certainly knew that Giancana and Rosselli were working for the CIA---and thus for the White House---in their assassination efforts, and he, of course, knew of Exner's relationship with Kennedy. Some Church Committee investigators came to believe in 1975 that Hoover was aware of Exner's role as a conduit. But evidence of this, if any exists, was not available to the committee.

  The president was angered, Exner told me, over the fact that "Hoover would have the audacity to come into his office and confront him with this information. He called him an SOB and said, 'He tried to use, you know, this information as leverage.' [Kennedy's] attitude was 'the gall of the man' to try to intimidate him. He was absolutely livid." The president, Exner added, "was well aware that Hoover knew every move that he made, and he did not care. That's the reckless side of Jack---that he would allow himself to be in that position. I mean, he never should have been involved with me. They wanted to get rid of Hoover and they couldn't, because of the information that Hoover had on the Kennedys---not just Jack."

  Exner was referring, perhaps, to another facet of her relationship with Kennedy, one that she discussed with great reluctance in our interviews: in 1962 she had begun serving as a conduit for payoffs to the president from a group of California businessmen interested in obtaining defense contracts. She became involved, Exner told me, through her close friendship with Richard Ellwood, a neighbor who was vice president of a small electronics company in Culver City. Through Ellwood, who died in 1966, Exner was introduced to two senior Pentagon procurement officials and began socializing with them on her many trips to Washington. The two officials are dead, but the widow of one, who knew little of her husband's business affairs, confirmed in an interview in 1996 for this book that she and her husband had shared a drink with Exner in the Mayflower Hotel during the Kennedy administration. She will never forget the meeting, the widow said, because "we were all over there having a drink and [Exner] told the group that 'If a White House car comes to pick me up, just go on and party.' Sure enough, the car came for her." Everyone understood, the widow said, that Exner was having an affair with the president.

  There was also much socializing with the two Pentagon officials when they visited California. At one point, Exner said, she discussed with the president her plan to make "a substantial investment"---more than $10,000, she acknowledged later---in one of Ellwood's research companies. "Jack advised me to invest," Exner said. "Jack said it'd be a good idea."

  Eventually, Exner told me, "what was going on was there were payoffs. I took payoffs" from the California businessmen to Kennedy in the White House. "I didn't want to go to Jack" with the payoff money, she told me. "I asked Jack about it and he thought it was a good idea." She recalled three contract proposals for which she took payoffs into the White House. "One envelope was for an unmanned vehicle on land," Exner said. "It was one of the first of its kind---unmanned robotics." She remembered, she said, that the vehicle was "massive. The size of a tank." The second project, she said, involved a new procedure for desalinization, an area that was being heavily researched by the government in the early 1960s. The final contract proposal dealt with avionics for a fighter plane. Asked who initiated the process of sending payoffs to the president, Exner told me, "It came from both sides. I know everybody was working together. I saw when there were transfers of cash. They were all in it." She personally delivered the money, Exner told me, along with envelopes containing technical data, to Kennedy.

  Exner said she had never before discussed her role in bringing bribes to the president because she had no receipts for t
he money or other evidence, and she was convinced no one would believe her account---just as few initially believed her testimony in 1975 about Kennedy's ties through her to Sam Giancana. But she did know, she said, that the FBI was aware of her relationship with Ellwood and knew that she had invested money in one of his businesses. The FBI, she told me, "used to go to Dick [Ellwood] when they were going to everybody, asking questions about me." Ellwood tried to "protect me," he said, by telling the agents that he loaned her the funds she used to invest in his company. Ellwood's apparent concern, Exner said, was that she might not have reported the money she invested to the Internal Revenue Service.

  Asked if Kennedy had perhaps been frightened of Hoover's knowledge, Exner told me, "I really don't think so, because Jack didn't alter his behavior one iota." She and Kennedy continued to meet, she said, although the once-passionate affair was fading fast. Over the winter of 1961--62, she wrote in My Story, "slowly I began to feel that he expected me to come into bed and just perform ... I understood about the position he had to assume in lovemaking when his back was troubling him, but slowly he began excluding all other positions, until finally our lovemaking was reduced to this one position ... The feeling that I was there to service him began to really trouble me." One of the problems, she wrote, was the presidency. "The weight of his office was getting heavier on his shoulders, and he was changing. He wasn't as happy-go-lucky, not as relaxed and cheerful ... By early 1962, I dreaded going to the White House. I wanted to see Jack, but not in that place."

  Jack Kennedy's womanizing had repeatedly put his career at risk, but until now the potential loss had always been his. The affair with Exner posed a much broader danger: to the well-being of the nation's security. The Kennedy-Exner relationship apparently became known in the late summer of 1962 to the General Dynamics Corporation, one of two defense firms intensely competing for the right to manufacture a new generation of air force and navy combat plane known as the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental). General Dynamics may have used that knowledge to win the contract and force the government to spend billions of dollars to build a navy version of TFX that many in the military knew would not work.