The Judith Exner Story, The Life of the Mistress of John F. Kennedy
ISBN 0-923891-90-0

Judith Immoor Campbell Exner and her place in history

When I think of Judith Immoor Campbell Exner, in my mind I compare her
to Forest Gump. This may seem unlikely but I will explain. Forest Gump
is an entirely fictional character who was a mildly retarded man who
just happened to be there at every important junction in history. At
every event of major significance involving Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon
and so on, Forest Gump was there.

Forest Gump was not the only one who was there. Judith Immoor Campbell
Exner was there too. There was just one difference. Judith Immoor
Campbell Exner was a real person. She was like an extra in a movie who
appears in every scene, yet has no lines to speak. Every important
event of the 1960s and 1970s seems to have involved Judith Immoor
Campbell Exner in some way. She dated, was seen with or was on the arm
of many of the important men of that generation. She dated or at least
knew almost the entire A-list of Hollywood Movie Stars, yet she never
appeared in a movie. Everybody who ever saw her reported that she was
a spectacular beauty, one of the most beautiful women of all time, yet
few photographs survive of her.

She is also one of the most reviled and hated women. She has been
called every bad word in the book, "a common street slut", a whore, a
high-class hooker, a party girl, yet if you believe her biography, she
was a deeply conservative, prudish, Catholic woman who never slept
with more than one man at a time. How many women can say that
nowadays?

Judith Immoor Campbell Exner is still in the news constantly. Turn on
CNN news almost every night and there will likely be something
involving Judith Immoor Campbell Exner. Every news story involving
President John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, covert operations
by the CIA against Fidel Castro of Cuba and so on will probably in
some way involve Judith Immoor Campbell Exner.

However, two allegations involving Judith Immoor Campbell Exner must
be dealt with quickly.

The first is that she was involved in some way with the delivery of a
huge satchel of cash from John F. Kennedy to Mafia Don Sam Giancana to
insure that Kennedy would defeat Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 West
Virginia Presidential Primary.

According to biographer Kitty Kelly, "while JFK's lover, she had
served as a courier between the President and Giancana. According to
Exner, JFK wanted the mobster's help in nailing down votes in the 1960
West Virginia primary."

However, there is something wrong with this sentence. What is wrong is
that JFK was not the President at the time of the West Virginia
Primary. He was just a candidate for the nomination, one of many.

Seymour Hersch in his book "The Dark Side of Camelot", page 303, says
that Kennedy had Exner carry a bag containing $250,000 in cash to Sam
Giancana.

Sam Giancana was the Don of the Chicago Mafia, a successor to Al
Capone. It was well known in 1960 that the Mafia controlled most Las
Vegas Casino operations and had infiltrated into many labor unions,
including especially the United Mine Workers in West Virginia. Kennedy
wanted to be president. West Virginia, normally a relatively minor
state, was of utmost importance in the 1960 campaign because it was an
anti-Catholic state. Kennedy was a Catholic and the Catholic-Issue was
a big albatross for Kennedy in 1960.

I will give a personal example. My father was a liberal and always
voted Democratic. (This was back in the old days when the Democrats
were the tax-and-spend liberals and the Republicans were the fiscal
conservatives, unlike today when the opposite is the case.) There was
only one time in his life that my father ever voted Republican. That
was in 1960, and the reason was that my father feared that if Kennedy
was elected, he would fly over to the Vatican where the Pope would
tell him what to do.

Many voters felt that way. Therefore, Kennedy needed to win in West
Virginia to demonstrate that he could be elected president even in an
anti-Catholic jurisdiction.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. No doubt Kennedy legitimately
believed that mob influence was needed to win the West Virginia
primary. It became even more critical in the 1960 Presidential general
election, when most observers believe that mob influence was critical
in delivering to Kennedy the Illinois electoral votes by a razor-thin
margin. Thus, sending money to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was a
reasonable decision.

Life is like that. If you want to win an election, whether it be to
the Presidency of the United States or to the Executive Board of the
United States Chess Federation, you may have to pay off the right
people.

On the other hand, no evidence has emerged that Giancana actually did
anything to help Kennedy win in West Virginia or to carry Illinois in
the subsequent general election. Giancana probably just pocketed the
money. More pertinent to the issue here, it is difficult to see how
Judith Immoor Campbell Exner played a role in this. She had been
introduced to Senator Kennedy by her former lover Frank Sinatra on
February 7, 1960. Then, Sinatra had introduced her to Sam "Flood"
during a party at Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami, Florida on March 26,
1960. The West Virginia primary, was held on May 10, 1960. So, by the
time of the West Virginia Primary, she had only known Senator Kennedy
for three months. She writes that she first made love to the future
President Kennedy in the Plaza Hotel in New York City on March 7,
1960. More than that, she did not find out that the real name of "Sam
Flood" was actually Sam Giancana until four days before Kennedy had
actually been elected President, when the FBI informed her of this.

What Judith Immoor Campbell Exner almost certainly did not know was
that Joseph Kennedy, the father of John F. Kennedy, had connections
with the Chicago mob dating back to the Roaring Twenties. It was
Joseph Kennedy, not John F. Kennedy, who frequently met with Sam
Giancana during the 1960 election campaign. The Kennedy family is
nowadays often thought of as one of the old-line Blue Blood families.
Not true. It is now well established that the Kennedy wealth comes
from a bootlegging operation in the 1920s. The grandfather of Joseph
Kennedy had been Patrick Kennedy, who had died at an early age leaving
his wife, Bridget Murphy, destitute with four small children. She had
survived by working as a domestic servant. Her son, Patrick Joseph
Kennedy (1858-1929), who had been less than one year old when his
father had died, grew up in poverty. However, he and his son, Joseph
Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969), became rich through illegal activities,
including bootlegging.

Even the marriage of John F. Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier was part of
a long-range plan to raise the social status and wealth of the Kennedy
clan. Jackie was of the upper crust. Her step-father was Hugh
Auchincloss, a wealthy man and principal of a Wall Street securities
firm, who gave away the bride. His uncle was the son-in-law of Sam
Sloan (1817-1907), the railroad tycoon, one of the richest men in
America, who built the railroad system that now services New York
City. The marriage of John F. Kennedy to Jackie had been part of a
plan to gain control of the fabulous wealth of the Sloan-Auchincloss
Family. The mother of Jackie, Janet Lee, had been concerned that her
daughter was marrying into a family of low social status like the
Kennedys, but was unable to dissuade her daughter from taking this
step.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy as the
First Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and somebody
asked Roosevelt why he had chosen Kennedy, Roosevelt replied, "It
Takes a Crook to Catch a Crook!"

Joseph Kennedy decided that the crowning achievement in raising the
status of his family from poverty to wealth would be to get his son
elected President of the United States. When John F. Kennedy was in
the final stages of his election campaign, President Truman said,
"It's not the Pope I'm afraid of, it's the Pop. Old Joe Kennedy is as
big a crook as we've got anywhere in this country."

Another allegation that must be addressed is that Judith Immoor
Campbell Exner carried documents between JFK and Sam Giancana,
regarding a decision by the CIA to hire the Chicago mob to kill Fidel
Castro, President of Cuba. However, this observation usually ignores
the fact that the mob operation to kill Castro started in 1960. In
1960, KENNEDY WAS NOT PRESIDENT YET!!!! Kennedy did not become
president until 1961. In 1960, Eisenhower was president. Obviously,
there is politics here. The Republicans want to blame the Democrats
for it. The Democrats want to blame the Republicans for it.

This is what I mean when I write that Judith Immoor Campbell Exner
seems to be like a movie extra who appears in every scene but has no
lines to speak. Here she was, a little 120 pound 26-year-old girl
taking the train back and forth between Chicago and Washington DC or
New York, receiving and delivering documents, and what did these
documents contain? Did it concern the Plot to Assassinate Castro, the
Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the eventual
Assassination of JFK? We would like to know.

But there is mo

Antionette Giancana, daughter of Mafia Don Sam Giancana, has a book
out about this. In her book, she names the actual killer of President
Kennedy and the motive, never previously suggested.

The motive concerns the Controversy Linking the F-111 to the Kennedy
Assassination.

The General Dynamics F-111 was a medium-range strategic bomber,
reconnaissance, and tactical strike aircraft designed in the 1960s.

Virtually every recent book about the Kennedy Assassination has
advanced the theory that Kennedy was assassinated because of the F-111
contract. Essentially, the conspiracy theorist say that the CIA and
the military were opposed to the development of the F-111, favoring a
competing aircraft by Boeing instead. When, after many warnings,
Kennedy insisted on proceeding with the development of the F-111
anyway, he was shot, they say. They justified the assassination of the
President on the belief that Kennedy had been bribed or blackmailed
into developing the inferior F-111 and therefore the assassination of
the president was justified.

If that was the reason, the assassination was a failure, because the
development of the F-111 went ahead anyway. After Kennedy was
assassinated, it became unthinkable to change or abandon any of the
initiatives the President had started. Had Kennedy lived, the pressure
on the President to abandon the F-111 project in favor of the superior
aircraft to be built by Boeing might have become unbearable. On the
other hand, General Dynamics was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Had the F-111 project been abandoned, General Dynamics might have gone
out of business. As things turned out, President Kennedy, a weak and
ineffective president in life, became an icon after his death and
nothing that he started could be stopped.

The development of the F-111 has since been linked to numerous Kennedy
Assassination Theories. General Dynamics was not favored to win the
contract under which the F-111 was ultimately built. Another aircraft
designed by Boeing was favored. It was a controversial last-minute
decision by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to overrule the
military and to build the F-111 instead. Assassination Theorists state
that actually President John F. Kennedy ordered that the contract be
awarded to General Dynamics. As this was the largest defense contract
ever awarded, this attracted the attention of the press. Kennedy was
asked about this repeatedly in press conferences. The United States
Senate started an investigation. However, the investigation was shut
down after Kennedy was Assassinated.

Seymour Hersh in his book "The Dark Side of Camelot" suggests that
General Dynamics got the contract by blackmailing President Kennedy.
Hersh states that on August 7, 1962, Bobby and Billy Hale, twin sons
of the General Dynamics security chief I. B. Hale, broke into the
apartment of Kennedy's mistress Judith Exner and placed bugs and
wiretaps on her telephone. With these bugs, they were able to
establish proof that Kennedy was sleeping with Exner. When presented
with the evidence, Kennedy agreed to award the $6.5 billion contract
to General Dynamics, or so goes this theory.

There is a major problem with this theory, however. The major problem
is that Kennedy did not seem to be concerned about the fact that many
people knew that he had numerous mistresses, some of whom were even on
the White House staff and had no other duties but to sleep with him.
Two of those women were known to the Secret Service by their code
names "Fiddle" and "Faddle". An article in Time magazine for December
29, 1975 entitled "Jack Kennedy's Other Women" said that the
revelation that Judith Campbell had been his mistress only "confirmed
what had long been a matter of open speculation" concerning "a legend
of prodigious sexual activity" involving naked girls running around
the White House or swimming nude in the White House pool. (The White
House pool was covered over and sealed by subsequent presidents
because of this scandal.)

Antionette Giancana in her book "JFK and Sam" expresses the belief
that Kennedy was assassinated because of the F-111 contract. The CIA
too favored Boeing over General Dynamics and, dissatisfied with the
decision to build the F-111, hired her father, Sam Giancana, to carry
out the hit. The actual shooter was James Files, also known as James
Sutton, who worked for Charles Nicoletti, who worked for Sam Giancana,
according to Antionette Giancana.

The 2002 made for television movie "Power and Beauty" starring Natasha
Henstridge as Judy Exner, Kevin Anderson as John F. Kennedy, Peter
Friedman as Sam Giancana and John Ralston as Frank Sinatra recreates
many of the scenes from the Kitty Kelly interview and the book by
Seymour Hersh. The most controversial, and indeed the only really
controversial, remaining question is whether Exner actually arranged
face-to-face meetings between John F. Kennedy and Mafia Don Sam
Giancana while Kennedy was president.

Credibility Issues

The biggest issue and the issue with which must always be dealt is the
issue of credibility. Was Judith Immoor Campbell Exner really the
mistress of President John F. Kennedy? Or, was she just a high class
hooker, as detractors say she was, who tried to make a big score,
become famous and get paid a lot of money by claiming to have had an
affair with the president?

Or was she the American version of the Riding Instructor, or the
Telephone Partner or the Bodyguard of Princess Diana, who got the
benefit of the full enjoyment of sleeping with a beautiful woman, plus
on top of that received millions of pounds and became a celebrity by
writing about experiences in bed with the princess?

A second issue concerns differences between her 1977 book and the 1988
interview with Kitty Kelly published in the February 29, 1988 issue of
People Magazine.

On this last point, I fail to see the issue. I have not found any
actual significant discrepancies between the 1977 book "My Story" and
the 1988 interview published in "People" magazine. Rather, the 1988
interview added some more details. There was a good reason for the
additional details. In 1975, Judith Immoor Campbell Exner married
Professional Golfer Daniel Exner. Judith became the devoted wife she
always dreamed of becoming, accompanying her husband down to the golf
course every morning and watching him practice and play golf all day,
while sipping tea. Her affair with the late President was all but
forgotten. The FBI was no longer trailing her, stopping her at
embarrassing moments to ask her questions. It was all in the past, or
so she hoped.

However, by 1988, she no longer feared being assassinated. She was
separated from Dan Exner, who could no longer play golf because he had
had a brain tumor removed. A curious fact about Daniel Exner is that
no biographical information is available about him. One website states
that his birth date has been suppressed. He is known to have been born
in about 1946 and to have been 12 years younger than his wife. Since
he had a brain tumor removed in 1988, it would seem likely that he in
no longer alive, yet there is no record of his death or of his
existence after 1988.

Actually, the FBI had lost track of Judith in 1975 because she was now
living under her married name of Exner and living in a mobile home,
which they drove to golf tournaments. The FBI could not find her until
her sister, upon being questioned by the FBI, gave her up.

It was then that Judith was subpoenaed to testify before a Senate
Committee, the Church Committee. The Church Committee is the common
term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a
U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975.

The Church Committee subsequently decided, correctly of course, that
the question of with whom the President was sleeping was none of its
concern.

Needless to say, I have written a book about this:

The Judith Exner Story, The Life of the Mistress of John F. Kennedy by
Sam Sloan ISBN 0-923891-90-0

http://www.samsloan.com/exner.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...avesofthomasje

Sam Sloan