The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (100 page)

Kennedy had few limits on whom he would proposition and where he would proposition her. At one dinner party, with Jackie present, he passed a note to a guest asking for her phone number. He called her later in the evening. “I’m sending a car for you,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your wife’s friend,” the woman replied, though to Kennedy that was apparently a non sequitur.

Another Washington woman who accepted the president’s invitation talked to Kennedy’s old friend John White afterward. “It all happened in such a hurry that she couldn’t analyze her emotions,” White recalled. “But the feeling of this power was like a hurricane, wham, you’re swept off and left lying on this beach. And she said, ‘That’s unique in my life. No man had ever done that to me before, and there was a weird, wild pleasure in it. It wasn’t an ordinary matter of affection.’ “

The most dangerous of Kennedy’s many liaisons was with Judith Campbell
Exner. She was shuttling between her occasional visits to Kennedy and her much more frequent sojourns in Chicago with her newfound friend Sam Giancana, as well as dating Johnny Rosselli and others in Los Angeles. She had not seen Kennedy for seven months from the summer of 1960 until she reconnected with him at the Ambassador East in April 1961. “A moment later we were in each other’s arms and it was like we had never been apart,” Exner recalled. There was hardly time for lengthy reminiscences since Kennedy had only twenty minutes before he had to leave for his next engagement.

In her later years, when her beauty was gone and she was sick with cancer, and she had no money, Exner made her living by telling and retelling the story of her life. She treated her life story like costuming that she would wear until no one was looking at her anymore; then she discarded it and tried on a new, more outrageous outfit that would bring her more attention and money. In 1988 she first realized what new versions of her life were worth, earning $50,000 doing interviews for
People
magazine in an article written by Kitty Kelley (“I lied when I said I was not a conduit between President Kennedy and the Mafia”). From then on journalists often gave her what were called “expenses,” a term of limitless elasticity, so that they could say they had not paid her.

In 1997, during a legal deposition in a libel suit, Exner recalled under oath that she had received an amount that “could have been in the $20,000” range for a television series with Anthony Summers, a British journalist. She said that he had paid her more money for a newspaper serial for the
London Sunday Times.
“I, Anthony Summers, have never paid Judith Exner a bean,” Summers asserted. German television purportedly paid Exner around $6,000 for an interview. She swore that
Frontline,
the public television series, paid her. Exner said that the Japanese paid her between $10,000 and $20,000. For an article by Gerri Hirshey in
Vanity Fair
in 1990, the journalist agrees with Exner that the magazine paid her $5,000 in “expenses.” For another piece seven years later in the same magazine, telling a different tale, she said in her sworn testimony that the gossip columnist Liz Smith personally paid her $10,000. “I did try to help her,” Smith said. “I was very concerned for her.” Exner said under oath that for a program featuring another dramatic new version of her life hosted by Peter Jennings on ABC in 1997, based on Seymour Hersh’s exposé, that she was scheduled to receive a total of $20,000; this is denied by both Mark Obenhaus, the producer, and Hersh. She said that Tribune Entertainment paid her $25,000 for an option on her life story, the BBC paid another $25,000, and Showtime paid $200,000 for rights.

Whatever Exner’s critics thought of her ever-evolving revelations, for a decade there was overwhelming sympathy for a woman who was suffering
from bone cancer that made her every move painful and who claimed to be standing at death’s half-open door during that time. In her sad last years, though she did have breast cancer, she apparently knowingly lied about the extent and nature of her illness, as she had lied about so much else in her life. Kim Margolin, her doctor and a partner in this deception, admitted in a 1998 deposition that she had a number of times made false statements when she said that Exner suffered “from extensive bone metastasis, including destruction of the spine,” and that she had “made an error several times trying to help this patient. I didn’t realize it was going to get us into trouble in a court of law.”

Unlike some once-beautiful women, Exner did not exaggerate her makeup and her clothes as she grew old, trying to maintain some vestiges of her youthful allure. It was her own life that she exaggerated. Her true life was theatrical, and her pain genuine, but she insisted on rouging up her life, each time spreading a thick coat of drama over the few rich moments of her days, treating her occasional sexual relationship with Kennedy as a treasure that could endlessly be exploited and exaggerating even the painful circumstances of her fatal disease.

Much of the truth of her life and her relationship with Kennedy probably lies somewhere among the discarded garments of her life. Giancana was unlikely to have fancied Exner’s regular company if he was not having a sexual relationship with her. “Whenever she’d come to Chicago, Mooney [Giancana] would fuck her,” recalled Robert J. McDonnell, an attorney who has defended mob figures and married and divorced Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette. “Mooney was one horny guy. And I don’t understand why she’d have money problems. Mooney always took care of her. Always.”

Giancana was fully aware that Exner was journeying from Chicago to be with Kennedy, using cash that probably came from his criminal ventures. He was content to share Exner with Kennedy, knowing that his knowledge of their affair might prove to be a free pass that he could use one day, perhaps avoiding prosecution. Some called that blackmail, but to a man of Giancana’s evil sentiments, it was merely trading one item of value for another.

Love was not cheap. For his occasional dalliance, the president was trafficking with a woman who journeyed between his arms and the darkest elements in American society. She was a woman with endless illusions about herself. She came and went like all the others, but she would share the pages of history with him more than she shared the moments of his life, sullying much of what he did, and much of what he hoped he would mean to future generations.

24
Bobby’s Game

B
obby vowed that he would not end up like Attorney General William Rogers, so cowed by the hatred he engendered in the South that he hid on the plane when traveling with candidate Nixon below the Mason-Dixon Line. Bobby was not a man to hide from his enemies, but on the day he first walked into his stately office in the Justice Department, he was already far more a target of hatred than Rogers ever had been.

Bobby knew that there was potential danger to himself and his family, but it was impossible to sort the real threats from the malicious gossip, the honest concerns from the pernicious rumors. During his first year as attorney general the governess was returning to Hickory Hill one evening with several of the children when, on a nearby road, she surprised a man in the bushes. The intruder jumped into his car and sped off without bothering to turn on his lights. After interviewing the governess, a Fairfax County police officer concluded that “on the basis of the man’s action at the time he apparently had gotten out of his car to urinate and on being surprised rapidly left the area.”

That was a matter for hearty laughter, but Bobby was hardly extreme in his fears. He had no entourage of Secret Service agents, no state-of-the-art security around Hickory Hill, and with every controversial step he took and every threatening letter he received, the drama of his life increased. His mother had her own secret anxieties. “The attorney general was fighting against Hoffa,” Rose recalled. “Dealing with criminals was tough. They said they would throw acid in the eyes of his children. Bobby kept all those dogs there and they were very apprehensive at times.”

Bobby was a brave man, but it diminishes the nature of courage itself to imagine that he was without self-doubt, fear, or anxiety. “My father, all of us
really, were always around brave men, great athletes, people who had done great things,” reflected Bobby’s son Christopher. “We had constantly to risk ourselves to feel that we could be with them. Risk was a way to feel God.”

When it came time to appoint the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harris Wofford was the obvious candidate, but Bobby did not trust him to subordinate his passionate convictions about civil rights to the president’s or the attorney general’s agenda. Wofford was an odd mixture—an attorney who graduated from both Yale University and Howard University Law Schools, spent several years at the prestigious Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, and taught at Notre Dame Law School. But his other side had drawn him to study Gandhi in India, to work closely with Martin Luther King Jr., and to advocate civil disobedience in the civil rights movement.

When Bobby first met Wofford, he was puzzled that the attorney had attended Howard as the first white male student. “I can understand going and teaching there, but why would you go to Howard Law School to learn law?” Bobby asked. “It’s not a great law school. Why would you go to a Negro law school as a student?”

Wofford had been one of those responsible for helping to deliver about 70 percent of the black vote to Kennedy, a voting bloc that was as important as any one factor in his narrow victory. He deserved an important position in the administration, but Bobby considered Wofford “in some areas a slight madman.” Men who care injudiciously about human liberty are often thought crazy, and Wofford was slightly mad about injustice. It was acceptable to have an undersecretary of Commerce concerned solely with business interests, or an undersecretary of Agriculture pushing only farmers’ causes, but Bobby considered it imprudent to have an assistant attorney general for civil rights whose advice would be “in the interest of a Negro or a group of Negroes or a group of those who were interested in civil rights.” This domestic issue was the most volatile and dangerous to his brother’s presidency, and Bobby did not want an uncompromising activist as his chief civil rights advisor. Instead, Wofford went to the White House as the president’s special assistant for civil rights. At the Justice Department the new attorney general hired Burke Marshall, a reserved respected corporate lawyer who would see civil rights as a question of law, not of emotions.

Bobby agreed to make his first major speech as attorney general on May 6, 1961, at the law day exercises at the University of Georgia School of Law. Even if he had not been confrontational by nature, this would have been the time and the place for him to talk about civil rights. He knew that words themselves were action, and he and his aides spent five weeks working on the
address, weighing words and phrases, making sure he would say precisely what he wanted to say.

There had been racial rioting at the university in January to protest the admittance of two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, and they had been reinstated only through a federal court order. As Bobby prepared to fly down to Atlanta, the FBI learned that the Ku Klux Klan was vowing to picket him and to drive through Athens with a loudspeaker shouting, “Yankee go home!”

Bobby’s law school audience that day was full of young people who would soon help define how the South reacted to the federal government’s push for the integration of the region’s public institutions, whether there would be blood and burning crosses or accommodation and goodwill. A measure of the challenge was that in the audience of sixteen hundred people there was only one black, Charlayne Hunter, who was there because she had press credentials.

Today as Bobby began his speech, he had a feeling about the injustice shown to black Americans that was more than an attempt to commandeer their votes and their allegiance. The previous fall, during the campaign, Bobby had flown into Savannah, Georgia, to give a dinner speech. On the drive into the gracious city he had asked how many blacks would be in attendance. When he was told none would be there at the segregated hotel, he said, “Well, we’re not going to have the dinner unless you get some blacks there, okay?” He was being what some considered his hectoring, impossible self, but he got his way that evening, and for the first time blacks sat in that hotel like other citizens.

Bobby did not inherit a deep concern for racial justice from his father. Nor did it come from his brother, the president. He had not learned it from his professors at Harvard or at the University of Virginia Law School. He seems to have somehow extrapolated this deep feeling out of his own experience. Bobby’s life could scarcely compare with the lives of most blacks in America. Yet he had struggled against those who thought him second-rate, and he could empathize with blacks as most other wealthy white scions of his generation could not. Injustice rankled him, especially when it was directed against American citizens of a different color.

Bobby was a man who not only wore his emotions on his sleeve but also forced them on those he confronted. Political figures are usually brokers, trading among various interests and constituencies. There was little of this in Bobby. Nor did he love humankind only in the abstract, stepping back from the podium where he had expressed universal love to avoid the touch of a single person. He loved people, though he embraced certain groups more than
others and sometimes endowed them with qualities they did not always possess, but the man was no hypocrite. He respected ability, and by bringing aides into the Justice Department who were singular in their abilities, he infused much of the organization with a splendid new esprit.

Bobby was not some northern preacher come south to condemn only southern racists. Earlier than almost anyone in American public life, he understood the sheer hypocrisy of such racial moralizing. He saw that North and South, liberal and conservative, redneck and ascot-garbed, the whole nation bore the burden of racism. “The problem between the white and colored people is a problem for all sections of the United States,” he told his Georgia audience. “I believe there has been a great deal of hypocrisy in dealing with it. In fact, I found when I came to the Department of Justice that I need look no further to find evidence of this.”