* There is no evidence that McCone, a devout Catholic, knew---or wanted to know---about the long-standing assassination plotting against Castro. The murder attempts, prodded by Bobby Kennedy, probably went on behind his back. Sam Halpern, asked in a 1993 interview for this book whether McCone had a "need to know" about the assassination plotting, said scathingly: "Need to know? Who knew what he needed to know? McCone was an outsider and he didn't know and nobody would tell him." Halpern added that at the time he thought "McCone was a tough son of a bitch and I didn't want to work with him." Years later, Halpern said, he changed his mind and concluded that McCone, who died in 1991, was "one of the best [Directors of Central Intelligence] ever."
* Special Group (CI) had a broad mandate from the president to ensure that the U.S. armed forces and all U.S. agencies abroad were trained to combat subversion and "wars of liberation" around the world. Some members of the group were asked to leave when the discussion turned to covert operations in Cuba. The pared-down committee, including Taylor and the attorney general, then became Special Group (Augmented), responsible for Operation Mongoose.
* In a 1994 interview for this book, Szulc acknowledged that Goodwin told him after the meeting with Kennedy that the White House was "trying to put together some kind of a task force." There was a subsequent meeting with an official at the State Department, Szulc said, but nothing came of it: "I said, 'I'm really not interested.'" A year later, however, according to declassified CIA files, Szulc was the linchpin of a long-running CIA operation, code-named Operation Leonardo, that was aimed at an attempt to create dissent inside Castro's military. A CIA summary, released under the Freedom of Information Act, described the Leonardo plan as resulting from pressure "by Higher Authority [State Department and the White House] to consider a proposal for an on-island operation to split the Castro regime. The proposal was presented to Hurwitch, the State Department Cuban Coordinator, by Tad Szulc of the New York Times." Szulc was quoted as saying he "first thought of bringing the plan to the attention of President Kennedy, as he had had a standing invitation, since November 1961, for direct contact." The CIA document depicted Szulc as attending meetings at agency safe houses in Washington with a clandestine officer from Task Force W. In the interview with me, Szulc dismissed the meetings as the routine workings of a Washington newspaperman, and said he had cleared his participation in advance with the late Emanuel Freedman, then an assistant managing editor of the Times. In interviews for this book, James Reston, chief Washington correspondent in 1962, and Clifton Daniel, then assistant managing editor, told me that they had no knowledge of Szulc's contact with the CIA.
* One of Lansdale's early schemes, Hurwitch wrote, was to have someone write a stirring song to Cuban rhythms which would be smuggled into Cuba and adopted by the Cuban opposition. Hurwitch claimed that he "longed for a way" to "turn off Mongoose." In 1975 Tom Parrott, the CIA official, told the Church Committee of another bizarre Lansdale scheme: "He had a wonderful plan for getting rid of Castro. This plan consisted of spreading the word that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro [who] was anti-Christ. And you would spread this word around Cuba and then on whatever date it was, there would be a manifestation ... At that time---this is absolutely true---... just over the horizon there would be an American submarine which would surface off Cuba and send up some starshells. And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown ... Somebody dubbed this 'Elimination by Illumination.'" In a January 1976 letter to Frank Church, the committee chairman, Lansdale, who had been linked in the committee's published report to political assassination and sabotage, chose to heatedly deny only the Parrott allegation. "I never had such a plan nor proposed such a plan," he wrote. Lansdale added, however, that "it is possible that such a plan was submitted to me ... and was tabled by me. It is possible, also, that I mentioned the plan to Parrott as an example of unrealistic proposals given to me." Lansdale's letter is on file with his archived papers at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in Stanford, California.
* Halpern's recollection of conversations between Kennedy and Ford is supported in part by Robert Kennedy's telephone logs and appointment book for 1962, as made public by the Kennedy Library in 1994. They show that Kennedy met twice with Ford in September and also received a telephone call that month from Ford. In his 1993 memoir CIA and the Cold War, Scott D. Breckinridge, who was one of the authors of the CIA inspector general's 1967 report on assassination plotting, cryptically described the Ford assignment. As part of Mongoose, the CIA "was directed to provide an operations officer to meet with Mafia figures identified by Kennedy under circumstances over which CIA had no control." Breckinridge acknowledged in an interview for this book that he had been told the story by Halpern, and others, during the 1967 inquiry. Breckinridge did not identify Ford in his book, even after Ford's death, in keeping with the CIA practice of not naming previously unidentified clandestine agents. Halpern himself did not confirm Ford's involvement for this book until he was shown Ford's name and title on the attorney general's office logs.
† In a 1993 compilation, the Kennedy Library reported that its collection of RFK papers totaled 1,541 linear feet, of which 440 feet have been released for research. Few of Kennedy's working papers from his days as attorney general have been made available.
* William Harvey, in his 1975 testimony before the committee, said that Edwards's suggestion that the assassination plotting had ended "was not true, and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true." He explained that Edwards chose to "falsify" the record to insulate himself from any possible damage and from prosecution. "If this ever came up," Harvey said, "the file would show that on such and such a date ... he was no longer chargeable with this."
18
JUDY
Judith Campbell had never heard of John F. Kennedy until she was introduced to him by Frank Sinatra on February 7, 1960, at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She did not know he was a U.S. senator. She did not know he was a presidential candidate. She did not know he was married.
What she did know was that he was gorgeous. By the next day, she was falling in love. It was a relationship that ruined her life---and, she says sadly, a mistake she would make again.
Campbell burst onto the national scene when the Church Committee, in its November 1975 report on CIA assassination attempts, discreetly noted that it had received evidence that "a close friend of President Kennedy had frequent contact with the President from the end of 1960 through mid-1962. FBI reports and testimony indicate that the President's friend was also a close friend of John Rosselli and Sam Giancana and saw them often during this same period." Those two sentences created a firestorm. Reporters soon learned what the committee had tried to hide: the "close friend" of the president was a young woman named Judith Campbell Exner (she was then married to a professional golfer named Dan Exner), who had testified under subpoena two months earlier. Exner told the committee that her relationship with President Kennedy was only personal and that she had no knowledge of any relationship between Kennedy and Giancana.
Exner made the same denials in a December 1975 news conference in San Diego. She accused the press of "wild-eyed speculation" in suggesting that she was a go-between for the president and Giancana and was having simultaneous affairs with the two men. Two years later Exner published a memoir, My Story, written with Ovid Demaris, that listed the times and places of her many rendezvous with Kennedy. In a series of interviews for this book, Exner acknowledged that she did not tell the truth to the Church Committee or at her news conference about her service as a conduit between the president and the mob leader. Sam Giancana had been brutally murdered in his home on June 19, 1975, the night before he was to meet with a lawyer for the Church Committee, and she had been too frightened, Exner explained, to tell the whole story to the committee---or in her book. Furthermore, Exner told me, the committee lawyers made it easy for her to shade the truth by asking the wrong question during her depos
ition: whether she had been a conduit between Sam Giancana and the president. She very narrowly answered no. They did not ask whether the document flow originated with Jack Kennedy.
My Story contained many distortions and inconsistencies, especially about her relationship with Giancana, but it also included impossible-to-refute details about her meetings with Kennedy, including his private telephone numbers. After years of rumors about his liaisons, she was the first woman to come forward and admit to an affair with the president while he was in the White House. Kennedy's recklessness in the affair, once it was public knowledge, was a blow to his image and to the image of Camelot. And while the affair was taking place, it was also far more serious: a relationship that exposed the president to blackmail by the mob and friends of the mob.
In August 1962, with the FBI watching, Judith Campbell Exner's apartment in Los Angeles was broken into by two brothers whose getaway car was rented by their father---the chief of security of the General Dynamics Corporation, one of America's largest defense contractors. Three months later, General Dynamics---everyone's second choice---was awarded a $6.5 billion contract for the experimental TFX jet fighter. The controversial award, for what was then the largest U.S. military aircraft contract in history, was investigated for months by a Senate committee, which failed to find collusion between General Dynamics and any senior official in the government. But the committee was not told what the FBI knew. The Senate shut down its investigation after Jack Kennedy's assassination, and billions of the American taxpayers' dollars were spent on a navy version of the aircraft that became renowned as a failure.
Judith Exner, as she is now known, was born in 1934 and grew up in a strict Catholic family in Los Angeles, one of five children. There was money. Her father, Frederick Immoor, was an architect and an expert in hospital design; in the late 1930s the family lived in a four-story, twenty-four-room Mediterranean villa in Pacific Palisades, with a view of the ocean. The home was later bought by actor Joseph Cotten. Her parents often socialized with Hollywood celebrities, including the comedian Bob Hope. Judith's older sister Jacqueline, whose stage name was Susan Morrow, was a budding star. "I grew up thinking," Exner said in one of her interviews for this book, "that these people were no different than anyone else." Timid and unsure of herself, Judith had a troubled childhood---she was terrified of the dark and of loud noises, and too shy even to raise her hand in class. She was very close to her mother, Katherine, and was traumatized as a young teenager when Katherine was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her father decreed that Judith was to be taken out of a Catholic girls school, to her shame, and taught at home, by a tutor. There was no thought of her attending college.
At sixteen, her schooling ended, she sometimes spent afternoons at the office of her sister's publicist in Hollywood, answering the telephone and doing typing. Johnny Grant, a retired television broadcaster when interviewed for this book, worked in the office as an aspiring press agent in 1950. He recalled Exner as "one of the most beautiful young women I ever saw in my life, and one of the nicest. She came from a well-to-do family, was well dressed, had a wonderful smile and no desire to be a model or an actress. I used to sit and talk to her," Grant said. "I just liked her." She was a strict Catholic, Grant added, and "wide-eyed."
Men were captivated by her striking beauty. "I'd say she was in the Elizabeth Taylor category," the reporter James Bacon, who covered Hollywood for the Associated Press, told me in an interview for this book. "She was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl." While still sixteen, she met an actor named William Campbell; two years later, in 1952, over her parents' protests, she and Campbell got married. She was now a Los Angeles housewife.
Billy Campbell was never a box-office star but worked steadily in the 1950s, under contract to Warner Brothers, MGM, and Universal Studios. "When you were a contract player in those days," Exner told me, "you had to go to every premiere, every social event. You had to do movie magazine layouts; you were forced to be in the public eye as much as possible." More beautiful than ever as a young woman, Exner became the 1950s equivalent of a Valley Girl---preoccupied with clothes and her appearance. Bathing, putting on makeup, and picking out her wardrobe for another Hollywood party would take as long as four hours. Bill Campbell's career reached a high point when he starred in Cell 2455, Death Row, the life story of Caryl Chessman. But the marriage soured, Exner said, and they divorced in 1958.
She discovered that dating was fun, and her life began to revolve around men, and how they viewed her. "For the first time in my life," she wrote in My Story,
I began dating the way most girls date when they're in high school. Life became so good. I slept until nine, sometimes ten if I was up very late, and tried to paint at least two hours every morning. I lunched with friends or went to the studio and had lunch with Jackie [her sister]. I painted some more in the afternoon, or went shopping. I didn't have dinner at home one night a month. And I never went out to dinner in a restaurant alone or with just other women. To this day I don't like the picture [that not dining with a man] presents. When I travel alone on a train, I never leave my compartment. The same applies to hotels. When I'm alone, I live on room service.
In the fall of 1959, Exner began dating Frank Sinatra; the affair was brief. In her memoir she told of her horror when Sinatra invited a second woman to join them one night in bed. "I just absolutely froze," she wrote. "I went rigid; no one could have moved my arms or legs." Sinatra apologized. In an interview for this book, Exner did not deal with her naïveté and her ignorance of Sinatra's reputation as a swinger, but said only that Sinatra "really wasn't for me. You might say he wasn't the ideal escort." But, she added, "he was a very good friend to have."
She and Sinatra stayed in touch, and she readily accepted Sinatra's invitation to see him and other members of the famed Hollywood Rat Pack---including Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford---perform at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas on February 7, 1960. Jack Kennedy showed up at the hotel that night. There is no evidence that Kennedy's meeting with Exner was prearranged. He had been campaigning in New Mexico that morning and was en route in the family plane to another appearance in Oregon, with two reporters on board, when it was announced that there would be a stop in Las Vegas. The two reporters, Blair Clark of CBS Radio and Mary McGrory of the Washington Star, ended up, as did Kennedy, at the Sands. "The telephone rings," Clark recalled for this book. "Frank Sinatra's on the phone saying, 'Jack wants you and Mary to come down for a drink at five o'clock.' So we went down ... and there we met a famous character in Kennedy's life---Judith Exner."
In Exner's telling, Sinatra introduced her to Jack Kennedy and his brother Teddy, who was Jack's campaign manager for Nevada and the other Rocky Mountain states. It was Teddy who ended up walking her back to her room after a night of shows and partying. There was a moment of awkwardness, Exner told me, when she rebuffed the over-attentive Teddy. Then---early the next morning---Jack telephoned. They agreed to meet poolside for lunch. "When I arrived he was having a press conference," Exner told me, with a dozen or so reporters. "And he called over to me and said, 'Judith, I'll be right with you.'" The reporters turned to stare, but Kennedy "just went right on with the press conference," Exner said. "I didn't think about it then, because I didn't really know his situation---that he was running for the presidency. I was not politically inclined at all, and so it meant nothing to me. And also coming from California, a senator from Massachusetts just would not be high on my list of knowing."*
There was a long lunch. "He was very interested in the fact that I was from a large family and that I was Catholic," Exner told me. "We talked about everything---the same things that you'd talk about to anyone that you find attractive. He was an amazing man. When you talked to him, you felt you were the only person on the planet, much less just in the room. He never forgot anything you said---good or bad. He didn't just pretend to be listening to you---he listened to you. He absorbed everything." They had another date that evening, and another Rat Pack show
. By this time he was "very interested," Exner told me. "I didn't know he was married. It didn't even enter my mind to ask. Nobody said anything."
Kennedy went back on the campaign trail, but telephoned constantly. "He kept asking if I would fly up and meet him," Exner said. "That was all a little too soon for me. I was being a little cautious, as much as I wanted to see him. He was calling almost every day." It was during this period, she told me, that she learned Kennedy was married. "I knew this was something I should stay away from," she said, "but my heart started ruling my head. I can't make any excuses for it." She and Kennedy finally became lovers, she said, in her Plaza Hotel room in New York on March 7, the eve of Kennedy's lightly contested victory in the New Hampshire primary. Three weeks later, while Kennedy was campaigning in Wisconsin, Exner flew to Miami Beach for another Sinatra show, at the Fontainebleau Hotel. At the show's closing party, Sinatra called her over and said, "I want you to meet Sam Flood." It was Sam Giancana, who used as many as nineteen aliases in his career, according to the FBI. Exner said she had no idea who Sam Flood really was---many people in Hollywood used fake names when traveling. But the meeting stood out because Sam teased her about a favorite piece of costume jewelry on her dress. "'A woman like you should be wearing real jewels,' he said. He thought I'd take that as a compliment, and I was highly insulted, because I loved that piece of jewelry. I just looked at him and said, 'A woman like me often does.'" Sam Flood laughed.
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